by Carol Miller
“D—Daisy—”
“Brenda?”
“Daisy!”
She instantly stopped moving. “What’s wrong, Brenda? Are you all right?”
Both Lucy and Aunt Emily turned to her with wide, anxious eyes.
“I—I think somebody’s here,” Brenda whispered in a terrified tone.
“At the bakery?” Daisy felt suddenly terrified too. “Where are you?”
“I’m in the kitchen.”
“Where are they?”
“Outside.” Brenda gulped. “I—I think they’re trying to get in. They rattled the back door.”
“Where’s Caesar?”
“I don’t know.”
“Brenda, you listen to me. Get the cleaver. It’s next to the work table in that box of utensils left over from the diner.”
She whimpered.
“Get the cleaver,” Daisy repeated, her voice rising. “You get it right now, and you go to the far corner of the kitchen. That’s the best spot. It’s the most protected. If anybody comes in who you don’t know or you don’t like, you hack off whatever you have to that will keep ’em away from you.”
“Go for the groin!” Aunt Emily shouted. “That’s the most bang for the buck.”
Daisy ignored her. “Brenda, I’m going to hang up now and call Deputy Johnson. Then I’m going to drive as fast as I can. Just hang on for a couple of minutes. That’s all it’ll take me to get to you.”
Still whimpering, Brenda began to reply, but she got out no more than a syllable before there was the sound of shattering glass and the connection went dead.
CHAPTER
13
Although Daisy had little confidence in how quickly Deputy Johnson would get to Sweetie Pies, she arrived there in record speed. Her tires threw up fistfuls of gravel as she swerved from the road into the parking lot. She had already shut off the engine, jumped out of the car, and was racing toward the building when she slammed on her internal brakes. Who was there? What was happening?
Nothing and nobody. That was what Daisy saw when she stopped and actually looked at the bakery. The front door was closed. It appeared entirely normal, neither battered nor ajar. The front row of windows was similarly undamaged. All the glass was in one piece. The frames were intact and unbent. Nothing seemed to have been jimmied or otherwise tampered with. Rick’s new locks had evidently worked very well.
She listened. Aside from two squirrels chattering back and forth between a pair of neighboring oaks, there was a peaceful silence. Nobody screaming, crying, fighting, or fleeing. Maybe the new locks hadn’t worked so well. Maybe they hadn’t worked at all, because there was no need for them to. Brenda was mistaken. Her nerves were simply playing tricks on her. There wasn’t anyone there. She had just imagined that they were trying to get in, rattling the back door. But what about the shattering glass? And the abruptly ended phone call?
With slow, cautious steps, Daisy circled around the building. The near side was fine, but she had assumed that it would be. With no doors or windows, it was relatively impenetrable—at least without a bulldozer or an assortment of explosives, neither of which Brenda had mentioned. Coming around the back, she saw Brenda’s car, which looked fine. And the back door, which also looked fine. If anyone had seriously tested it, they left no marks.
Daisy thought of Caesar. The prior two days he had been at the bakery much earlier than this. Where was he now? There wasn’t a vehicle for him, but he also hadn’t parked at Sweetie Pies previously. He said it was better for security. She wasn’t entirely sure why. Maybe because then people wouldn’t know when he was there and when he wasn’t. That obviously worked, considering that she didn’t know either. Or maybe Rick had recalled him. He might have been so annoyed with her for showing up at the nip joint yesterday uninvited that he decided to punish her by removing the guard from the premises. If that was the case, she couldn’t really complain about it. Rick had every right. He was the one paying Caesar’s wages, after all.
Pulling out her key, she was about to unlock the back door when it occurred to her that she hadn’t completed her loop around the building. There was no door on the far side, but there was one window, which led to a tiny interior storage room. Daisy took a few more steps and popped her head around the corner. She was no longer expecting to find anything out of the ordinary, so it startled her when she discovered that the lone window was broken.
She hurried over to it. Other than a couple of jagged pieces that were sticking out of the corners like shark’s teeth, the pane was gone. There were some shards of glass on the ground at her feet, but not enough of them. That meant the window had been broken from the outside. A gaping square was left, sufficiently large for someone to climb through.
Careful to avoid cutting herself on the shark’s teeth, Daisy leaned toward the opening, which was about shoulder high. “Brenda?” she called.
Brenda didn’t answer. The storage room was dark, but based on the rays of sunlight that were creeping inside, there was no visible disturbance.
Pulling back, Daisy ran to the front door and grabbed the handle. It moved. Either Brenda had already unlocked it for the day, or an intruder had. She threw open the door.
“Brenda!”
Still no answer. She took a hasty survey and to her considerable surprise saw nothing amiss. The cash register was shut. The large glass display case was full and unharmed. Both the floor and the counter were clean. And all the bags of sweet treats on the shelves along the wall were still organized in their neat rows.
Daisy squinted from one corner to the next. She was thrilled, of course, that her place of business hadn’t been ransacked and torn apart, but at the same time she was confused. The shattering glass that she had heard on the phone clearly came from the window to the storage room, except the perpetrator didn’t appear to have accompanied it. So if Sweetie Pies was safe, where in the world was Brenda?
Continuing to look for some sign of disorder and not finding any, Daisy walked to the end of the counter. Just beyond it was the door to the storage room. She tried the knob. It should have been locked, but like the front door it wasn’t. Her confusion grew. Had Brenda opened it, or had the person who broke the window opened it? In theory that person—or persons—could have gone through the storage room, out the storage room door, through the main portion of the bakery, and out the front door. That would explain why both doors were unlocked and unscathed, but it didn’t remotely begin to explain why someone would want to do it.
Not sure whether she should be more relieved or concerned, Daisy turned the knob and looked inside the storage room. Her eyes outside hadn’t deceived her. The contents of the room were indeed undisturbed. The brooms and mops were all standing where they had been left the day before. The buckets were still stacked politely together. Not even a package of extra napkins had been shifted out of place. The only thing that wasn’t as it should have been was the floor. Glittering shards of glass lay on the tile reflecting the strengthening sunlight that was flooding into the room in a rainbow of colors.
Some darker, less reflective glass caught Daisy’s attention, and she bent down for a closer inspection. It wasn’t from the window. There was no doubt about that. The glass from the window was clear and had broken into lots of thin fragments. This other glass was brown, and there were only a few, thick pieces of it. Daisy reached for one and promptly sliced open the skin on her hand. With a yelp of pain, she stuck the wounded finger in her mouth to slow the bleeding.
Standing back up, she was about to toss the offending shard into one of the nearby buckets so that she wouldn’t cut herself on it again later during the obligatory cleanup when she suddenly realized what it was—the chunky round bottom of a bottle. She examined the other brown pieces. The smooth side, the narrow neck. They were all pieces of a bottle. And not just any bottle. It was a beer bottle.
Daisy stared at it. Someone had smashed in one of the bakery’s windows with a beer bottle, just like someone had smashed in one of the
windows at the historical society. Maybe Deputy Johnson was right after all. Maybe the two thefts were related. First the cheese, then the maps—and now this. But what was this? Breaking a window to come in, unlocking a pair of doors, and then leaving again without apparently taking anything or doing anything else? That made even less sense than stealing perishable cream cheese or trivial county maps.
Regardless of how little sense it made, there had to be a connection. Daisy’s instinct told her that. If not a connection between the two thefts, then at least between the two broken windows. They couldn’t just be a coincidence. The timing was too close, and the beer bottles were too much of a matching modus operandi. Of course it could have been merely hooligans, as Aunt Emily had so eloquently put it. Except hooligans tended to wreak havoc, and in neither instance with the broken windows had any sort of havoc been wreaked. Maps aside, the historical society had been left essentially untouched, as had Sweetie Pies. But if it wasn’t hooligans, then who else would do something so ridiculously illogical, without the slightest benefit?
That was a question which Daisy’s instinct couldn’t answer. She did reach one conclusion, however. No locks—no matter how new, or fancy, or expensive—did a lick of good in keeping a window from getting smashed in or a door from being opened from the inside. That was an excellent reason to have a security guard. Unfortunately, her security guard had vanished, along with Brenda.
Brow furrowed, Daisy turned away from the storage room and headed toward the kitchen. It was the only area that she hadn’t checked yet. With uneasy anticipation, she pushed through the swinging door. Unlike the rest of the place, the kitchen was well lit and messy. But the jumble wasn’t from someone breaking in and pillaging. It was the normal morning chaos in a bakery. Dirty bowls and sticky spoons. Crowded baking sheets lined up in wait for the oven like ants marching to a picnic. Flour and sugar strewn everywhere.
Something was burning. It hadn’t progressed far enough to send out billows of smoke and trigger the fire alarm, but Daisy could distinctly smell the first stage of overbrowning. Hurriedly switching off all the appliances, she threw open the oven doors. It was the biscuits, and they were well past overbrowning. They were as black and shriveled as lumps of charcoal. Too worried about Brenda, she left them where they were. They had to cool off before she could discard them anyway. Brenda had clearly disappeared in a rush. Although she could be a bit scatterbrained on occasion, it was never so much as to let the biscuits burn, especially not to the state of briquettes.
Daisy’s sharp gaze traveled around the room. She was looking for a clue to tell her where Brenda had gone. Thankfully, there was no evidence of a struggle or any form of violence. Her eyes paused at the work table. There was a large box next to it on the floor, flipped on its side. It was the box of utensils left over from the diner, the one from which she had told Brenda to get the cleaver.
Kneeling down next to it, she rummaged around inside: warped spatulas, rusty meat tenderizers, and crooked tongs. All had seen much better days and were now generally useless, hence the box. The cleaver—also somewhat warped and rusty—was no longer there. Brenda had obviously taken it, as per her suggestion. But where had she taken it? Not the far corner of the kitchen, as Daisy had also suggested. It really was the best spot, the most protected if someone threatening came in.
Although Brenda wasn’t in the far corner, her phone was. Daisy went over and picked it up. It was a bit dinged from the fall to the floor, but it still worked. The last number dialed was hers. Brenda hadn’t called Deputy Johnson. She felt as though she should be comforted by that fact somehow. Except maybe Brenda had been counting on her to make the call, which she had indeed done while leaving the inn. Not that either of them could rely on the law getting to the bakery swiftly. Even with the best of intentions, the distances in Pittsylvania County were just too great. It was like that old saying—when seconds count, the police will be there in minutes.
Anxiously searching for something that would lead her to her missing friend, Daisy’s eyes circled around again, and this time they stopped at the refrigerator. It reminded her of the crates that were still sitting in her trunk waiting to be delivered to Deputy Johnson, and she suddenly wondered if they could be the reason why the person—or persons—broke the window in the storage room. It was a fairly easy way to get in to the bakery and find the crates, if they had been there. Nothing had been rummaged, but that was precisely the point. Nothing would need to be rummaged if someone was looking for the crates. They were too big to hide effectively, especially in a little place like Sweetie Pies, where there were few cupboards and no secret compartments. The crates would stand out just the same as the vinyl-topped stools or electric mixers.
But why would someone look for the crates? They were even more worthless than the cream cheese they had once contained. The only possibility that Daisy could come up with was a desire to wipe them clean of fingerprints. Except that seemed a stretch, because if someone was so concerned about fingerprints, then they would have wiped the crates clean before depositing them outside the nip joint. Furthermore, why would anybody even think that the crates were at the bakery? There were only two people who knew that she had taken them from the nip joint—Rick and Chris—but neither one knew she had brought them back to Sweetie Pies.
The more Daisy turned it over in her mind, the more perplexed she became. It was a crazy, convoluted puzzle—none of the pieces matched or fit together in any sort of rational manner. There was nothing about it that she understood. But she also had a nagging, growing, irrepressible feeling that the pieces actually did fit together somehow and there was something rational behind it all. Only she couldn’t find the right piece to slide into the puzzle the right way to make it coherent and whole.
Off in the distance, she heard the wail of a siren. Deputy Johnson was finally coming. Agitated over the crates and frightened for Brenda, Daisy hurried through the kitchen and out the back door to meet him. She heaved a frustrated sigh toward Brenda’s car in the parking lot, dearly wishing that it could tell her what had happened to its owner. With the car still there, Brenda couldn’t have gone very far. Not unless she had been kidnapped, and then she surely would have put up one heck of a fight in the process. She would have given somebody’s fingers a good whack with the cleaver, or at an absolute minimum, there would be scuff marks on the ground from wrestling and dragging.
Daisy studied the gravel for the tiniest hint, straining to find a drop of blood, a telltale track in the stones, or a scrap of torn clothing. But she hadn’t missed anything the first time through. There was nothing and nobody at the bakery. The two squirrels had even ceased their chattering. They had been replaced by the wail of the siren—and a low voice.
The voice hadn’t been there before. Daisy was certain of that. She could barely make it out now. It was ineffably soft, like the whisper of blowing sand. She could only catch a trace of it beneath the siren. Where was it coming from? She looked around the rear of the property. The Dumpster was latched to keep out animals, the shed was chained, and the gravel ended in a thick row of raspberry vines. Nobody was hanging out in those thorns, either voluntarily or forcibly. At the far side of Sweetie Pies—the side where the window had been broken—there was an old dirt farm road. It was still used occasionally during planting and harvesting, but there was no traffic on it this morning.
Focusing as hard as she could, Daisy blocked out every noise other than the voice. It was talking. Not a whimper or a hum, but actual words. It didn’t sound like anybody was responding to it, however. She tried to pinpoint the direction. Although it didn’t seem to be near to her, it also didn’t seem far away. Maybe that was because she couldn’t hear it well enough. The siren was getting louder, and Daisy knew that soon she wouldn’t be able to hear the voice at all.
Perhaps someone was walking along the edge of the dirt road, and she just couldn’t see them. There were a lot of tall weeds and camouflaging brush that hadn’t been cut down since midsummer. The
person could be farther down the road, and their voice could be echoing back to her. That wasn’t particularly unusual. All of southwestern Virginia echoed in one way or another—either you were on the top of a mountain or at the bottom of a valley.
Daisy followed the sound. She took several steps toward the dirt road. The voice seemed a tad louder. She took several more steps, and it became distinctly clearer. It was asking for something, or possibly pleading for something. Daisy quickened her pace. What if it was Brenda pleading? What if she was in trouble and begging for help? The voice was light enough to belong to Brenda. And the closer Daisy got to the road, the more it sounded like Brenda.
Then she saw her. At the spot where the gravel from the bakery met the dirt from the road. The grasses were thick, browned, and at least four feet high. Brenda was crouched on the ground in the middle of them. She looked almost the same as she had when Daisy found her in front of the refrigerator in the kitchen with the dead cream cheese thief at her feet. Brenda’s apron was falling from one shoulder. The tortoiseshell clip that ordinarily held back her hair was sagging at her neck. And there was red on her hands—bright crimson blood. The only difference was that she wasn’t holding a chef’s knife.
She wasn’t holding a cleaver either. It sat on the soil by her knees. The marred blade was gray, not scarlet. But the person lying next to her was coated in scarlet. It covered his chest, and his stomach, and his shoulders. With stiff elbows and outstretched palms, Brenda pressed down on him hard—near his heart—obviously in an effort to keep the scarlet from spreading further. She was speaking to him, telling him that it would be all right, promising him that help was on its way, imploring him to live.
“My God,” Daisy exhaled in horror. “Is that Caesar?”
With blanched cheeks and tearstained eyes, Brenda looked over at her.