Kneaded to Death

by Winnie Archer

  For the time being, more photos of Buck Masterson were out of the question. He’d shrunk into the shadows and all but disappeared.

  After a moment, I made a decision. If they had anything to do with Jackie Makers’s death, then keeping their illicit actions quiet was a mistake. I would alert someone who’d actually know what to do. With one eye still on the house, I picked up my cell phone, went to favorites, and dialed Emmaline.

  “About time,” she said by way of answer.

  “Hello to you, too.”

  She ignored my sarcasm. “Thanks for the heads-up,” she said. “I was not prepared for that.”

  In the distance, Buck Masterson appeared under the security light beside the fence, cell phone at his ear. I snapped another picture. It wouldn’t give me any additional information, but I took it, anyway. “Prepared for what?”

  “Playing dumb does not become you, Ivy Culpepper. Next time you send Billy on an errand for you, give me fair warning.”

  “Oh, shoot. Sorry, Em.” I played contrite, but inside I was smiling. So Billy hadn’t dropped the envelope of letters off with the receptionist at the sheriff’s office. He’d opted to pay a personal visit to his soul mate. Explaining to Emmaline that he hadn’t wanted or planned to see her, but that he’d apparently changed his mind didn’t seem like the right response. Instead I repeated, “Sorry.”

  Mrs. Branford waved her craggy hand in front of my face. “To whom are you speaking?” she said dramatically.

  Emmaline, ever the detective, promptly asked, “To whom are you speaking, indeed? Please tell me, pray tell, with whom are you spending your time, Ivy?”

  I answered Mrs. Branford first. “To the deputy sheriff. Her name’s Emmaline Davis.”

  “My question next,” Emmaline said into my ear.

  “I’m sitting with Mrs. Penelope Branford on Maple Street. We just observed Nanette Masterson entering Jackie Makers’s house. Her husband, Buck, is standing guard at the side gate leading to the backyard.”

  Emmaline didn’t miss a beat. “Number one, how is it that you and Mrs. Branford were able to observe this alleged breaking and entering at this time of night and in the dark? Number two, why are you so interested in Jackie Makers’s death? And number three, how did you come by these letters Billy delivered for you today?”

  I answered in reverse order. “Olaya Solis and I were cleaning out some of Ms. Makers’s things, and Mrs. Branford stopped by. Jackie had left the envelope with the letters at Mrs. Branford’s house a few weeks ago.”

  “Don’t you dare tell her I found them in my freezer,” Mrs. Branford said, still leaning forward and peering through the windshield at the Tudor house.

  Emmaline cleared her throat. “You might tell her that I can actually hear her.”

  I ignored them both, moving on to Em’s second question. “I’m interested in Jackie Makers’s death because she was good friends with Olaya Solis and Mrs. Branford. That makes me a friend—”

  “Or acquaintance—”

  “By association. Plus, I guess I have a curious side.”

  Mrs. Branford leaned back and gave me a pointed look. “And you’ve got that investigative gene your mother had.”

  I answered Emmaline’s final question. “And lastly, we are on a stakeout on Maple Street.”

  Emmaline interrupted me with an indignant “What? You’re on a what?”

  “A stakeout. Buck Masterson, as those letters Billy brought you explain, is in everybody’s business on this street. Mrs. Branford has seen him sneaking into houses. He’s threatened her and others on the street. So we’ve been sitting here, seeing if we could catch him in the act. Which, I might add, we did.”

  She covered the receiver of her phone, and I heard her say something to someone. When she came back, she let out a heavy sigh. “I have some problems with this whole thing, Ivy. I can look into the letters, of course. I’ll need to talk to Mrs. Branford and Ms. Solis. So that’s all fine. But you should know that curiosity killed the cat. You’re staking out someone who, by all intents and purposes, appears to have had a motive to kill Jackie Makers. I’m not saying this Buck Masterson or his wife is guilty of murder, but if, by chance, they are, you’re getting in their way. Whoever killed Jackie did it for a reason. He, she, they won’t hesitate to do it again. And finally . . . and most importantly . . .”

  Sirens blared in the distance. She’d reported the breaking and entering, I realized. The sirens, though, had also reached Buck Masterson’s ears. The cell phone was glued to his face again, and a moment later Nanette joined him at the gate. Together they raced down the street, back the way they’d come. Just as a police cruiser appeared on Maple Street, Buck and Nanette Masterson disappeared into the darkness in the distance, and presumably into their own house.

  “All you’ve done by staking out Maple Street is alert the Mastersons that we’re on to them. Which makes my job that much harder.”

  I let out my own exasperated sigh. “But you wouldn’t be on to them if we hadn’t staked out Maple Street,” I said. “And actually,” I added, bringing her down off her sheriff’s high horse, “I think you alerted them with the sirens. A little stealth can go a long way.”

  Another heavy exhale. She couldn’t argue with me. We’d had this conversation so many times. I had never understood why the police always announced themselves with their lights and sirens when it seemed to me that they could catch bad guys in the act if they were more subtle about their approach.

  “The house is secure,” Emmaline said. “You should leave the stakeouts to the professionals, Ivy.”

  “Tell that to Mrs. Branford.”

  Mrs. Branford stirred beside me when she heard her name mentioned. “Tell me what?”

  “Deputy Sheriff Davis says we should hang up our private-eye hats.”

  Mrs. Branford, bless her, blew a raspberry through her pursed lips. “Why would we go and do a thing like that when we clearly excel at it?”

  I grinned, silently agreeing with her. We’d caught the Mastersons in the act of breaking and entering, we’d gotten photographs, although I didn’t really know what good they’d do anyone, and we’d put the fear of God in them. If they had killed Jackie Makers, hopefully they wouldn’t target anyone else, and if they hadn’t killed her, at the very least, maybe they’d think twice before continuing their Maple Street shenanigans.

  Chapter Eleven

  Before dawn the next morning, I took Agatha for a long walk at Wayside Beach, my favorite stretch of sand in Santa Sofia. I yawned, struggling to get energized at that early hour. I must have been crazy to agree to meet Olaya at such an ungodly time. “What was I thinking?” I asked Agatha.

  Agatha looked up at me from her lazy stride beside me. I could tell she agreed that it was far too early, even if we were walking on the beach, something that had become her very favorite thing to do since we’d moved back home. She’d been born and bred in Texas’s Hill Country, so sand and ocean had been foreign concepts to her. She’d adjusted like a champ.

  After our walk, I left her crated at my dad’s house, then met Olaya at Yeast of Eden. The sun was barely peeking over the horizon.

  “How do you do this every day?” I asked her, stifling my tenth yawn of the morning.

  “Early to bed, early to rise . . . Is that not how the saying goes?”

  “It is how the saying goes. But still . . .”

  “I run a bakery. It is how the business works.”

  Photography wasn’t much different. The best photographs happened in the wee hours of the morning, usually just after sunrise, when the light was soft, warm, and dimensional. It was, in short, magical. Shadows were long and fluid, and everything seemed more dynamic.

  Which was why I was at Yeast of Eden so early. I was shooting the pictures for a new brochure for the bakery, and I wanted the best shot possible of the front facade. The striped awning, the colorful Mexican garlands strung in the windows, the old-fashioned tables and chairs, the potted plants with geraniums and
pansies all added to the quaint ambiance of the bakery. Waiting until midday would have made the whole shot harsh and bright, but the magical hour after sunrise meant the colors would be warm and welcoming: exactly what we wanted to make the place look its most inviting.

  Olaya and her staff had filled the window racks with the day’s offerings of fresh bread, the aroma drifting out to the sidewalk and even across the street, where I stood. I’d switched out the lens from the night before, going with a 24–70mm zoom lens, all that was necessary given the short distance from across the street to the bakery. Since the sun was up, I set the ISO to 100 and the f-stop to f/5 so I had enough depth of field to keep everything in focus. I didn’t want my camera to home in on any one element of the storefront; instead, I wanted to capture the whole thing in its entirety.

  I walked up and down, shooting from different angles to see what would work best. I’d brought my laptop with me to upload the shots so Olaya could look at them when I was finished and I joined her inside Yeast of Eden. At that point we could decide in which direction to go and if more shots were needed.

  “Wanna take some of my place?”

  I jumped, spooked by the voice behind me, and then remembered Olaya’s comment about my startle factor. I hadn’t heard anyone approach, which meant my situational awareness was not very good at the moment. I turned to see a bald man with skin the color of dark-roast coffee. He had a fair share of wrinkles lining his face, but they didn’t age him. Instead, he was rugged and good-looking. I pegged him to be somewhere in his fifties.

  “Oh!” I stumbled back, widening the area between us.

  He guffawed, his infectious smile reaching to his penetrating brown eyes. “Didn’t mean to startle you, young lady.”

  I resisted correcting him on that point. Thirty-six meant I wasn’t quite a young lady anymore. “It’s okay.”

  He offered his knobby hand. “Gus Makers.”

  Gus Makers. As in Augustus. As in Jackie Makers’s ex-husband.

  “I own the antique mini-mall down the street.”

  Right. And he was partners with the crazy man, Randy Russell.

  “Ivy Culpepper,” I said. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Makers.”

  “Mr. Makers was my pop,” he said, “and he’s long gone. Call me Gus.”

  I smiled at how normal and pleasant he seemed. Much different from the sketchy business partner he had. “Well, nice to meet you, Gus.”

  “Tell me what you’re up to over here. Does Olaya know you’re snapping pictures of her place?”

  “She does,” I answered, thinking how nice it was, despite the divorce he’d been through with her best friend, that Gus was watching out for Olaya. It was the neighborly thing to do, but people didn’t always act in a neighborly fashion, as Buck Masterson had so aptly proved to the people of Maple Street. “She asked me to, in fact.”

  “Why’s that?” he asked.

  He was also blatantly nosy, but I didn’t mind. Turn around was fair play, after all. “She’s creating a new brochure for Yeast of Eden. I’m shooting photos for the front of it.”

  Traffic had started to pick up on the Pacific coastal road, and the parking spaces in front of Yeast of Eden were now filled. The bread shop sold only bread, but that didn’t stop people from indulging or making two stops if they also wanted doughnuts or cookies or some other bakery delicacy. “Unadulterated bread is what I offer,” Olaya had told me that first day. “And it’s what people want. If they wanted the tasteless stuff, they could simply get it at the supermarket. Yeast of Eden is for the connoisseurs. It’s for the people who really care about their bread and what they put in their mouths.”

  Personally, I was a convert.

  “Good for her,” Gus said, nodding his approval. “We compete with the beach, and with Broadway, where all the historic downtown shops are. Olaya’s reputation brings a lot of folks to our neck of the woods, though.”

  So, Gus liked and respected Olaya, while his partner, Randy Russell, had waved a billy club around, threatening to shoot her because she no longer referred people to the mini-mall. Randy might be a hothead, but at least he was honest about it. A little part of me wondered if Gus Makers had the same anger toward Olaya and just hid it, or if he really was as pleasant and innocuous as he seemed. Had his divorce from Jackie Makers been amicable, or did he have animosity that had spilled over onto Olaya because of her friendship with Jackie?

  I figured there was no harm in digging a little to find out. After all, I didn’t relish Randy Russell appearing again, and if Gus here was anything like Randy, I wanted to know.

  “Doesn’t Randy Russell own the mini-mall, too?” I asked innocently.

  Gus’s smile never dropped, but I sensed a change in him nonetheless. A slight tightening of the jaw? Or maybe it was a dulling in the eyes. “Do you know Randy?”

  I shrugged and did my best to look sheepish. “I was taking a bread-making class at Yeast of Eden when the, uh, incident happened.”

  “Aha.”

  He didn’t offer any more than that quick utterance, but I pressed. After all, if Randy Russell had spotted Olaya and attacked, things could have gotten really bad really fast. Or worse, if he’d had a gun instead of a club, I could well have been caught in the cross fire. “We were all pretty unsettled.”

  Finally, his smile faded into a grimace. “I bet you were.”

  “What was that about, anyway, with the stick?”

  Gus Makers shrugged. “He was having a bad day.”

  I tried to stop my jaw from dropping, but I didn’t succeed. Having a bad day, for me, meant I was grumbly, snappy, and didn’t much want to be around people. It didn’t mean I went around waving a weapon and threatening people. With all the shootings in the country, the idea that this unhinged anger was okay as a response to having a bad day left me with a sour taste in my mouth. “Really? And so he came to threaten Olaya?”

  Gus’s whole demeanor had changed. He was deadly serious, and his anger seemed almost to ooze from his pores. “Randy’s not the nicest man anymore. I admit it. That’s why I try to look out for the people around here. He’s basically harmless.”

  “Basically harmless” was not a soaring recommendation, but I let it go. The sun had risen over the buildings now, that soft morning light giving way to the more severe light of the day. I shaded my eyes. “Do you think he’ll try it again?”

  It took him a few moments, but he finally answered, “I can’t say. I hope not.”

  That was not a ringing endorsement of our safety. “You think he should have been arrested?”

  Gus contemplated this question. “I don’t know how to answer that. We’ve been business partners for a long time, and friends for even longer.”

  “Sounds like he has some secrets, though.” Randy’s anger that night in the back parking lot of Yeast of Eden, and again at Jackie’s funeral, was almost palpable. He had been out for blood, but who knew why? And what if he still was?

  Gus grimaced, his lips twisting into an angry frown. “Doesn’t everyone, Ms. Culpepper? Doesn’t everyone?”

  Chapter Twelve

  Everywhere I went, it seemed that Miguel Baptista lurked nearby. Okay, maybe lurked wasn’t the best word to describe his presence. Santa Sofia was a smallish town, after all. It wasn’t surprising that I’d see him around. But I felt as if I were newly pregnant, and suddenly, around every corner was a woman with a baby in utero.

  Of course, I saw pregnant women everywhere, too, and I was not even close to having a baby. Divorced. No boyfriend. No prospects. That meant motherhood was not in my near future, yet my biological clock was ticking. It was Murphy’s Law . . . or something.

  This time, it wasn’t a baby bump that struck me. It was Miguel. Gus Makers had gone back toward the antiques mini-mall, and I had packed up my camera bag, my back to the street and to Yeast of Eden. I jumped at the sound of three short horn blasts, then whipped around instinctively and just barely in time to see Miguel, his hand raised in a stationary greeting, d
riving past.

  “As if a honk and a wave wipe away you being . . . you,” I muttered. I couldn’t quite call him a name. It didn’t fit. He’d graduated high school and left to pursue his own dreams. I couldn’t really fault him for that. We had been teenagers, after all, and that had been nearly twenty years ago.

  But despite the logic of my argument not to hold him leaving me against him, I held fast to my anger. And I didn’t plan on letting go of it anytime soon. Miguel Baptista maintained a special place in my heart, right smack in the middle of the fissure he’d created when he broke it for the very first time.

  Olaya walked up to me at that moment. “Let it go, m’ija.”

  “I’m trying to, believe me,” I said. I gathered my things and followed her across the street and into Yeast of Eden. She had a little office just off the kitchen. Off-white faux blinds covered the two large windows, which were currently pulled up. The activity in the kitchen was hectic, yet organized. The staff worked quickly, jogging from one station to another, but together they operated like a well-oiled machine.

  We spent the better part of ninety minutes arranging and shooting all the different bread choices Yeast of Eden had. “What did Gus want?” Olaya asked as we set up the last shot. At my direction, she placed a single rustic sourdough round on a worn teak cutting board lightly dusted with flour.

  I adjusted the aperture and shot, moving around to get some different angles. “He was looking out for you, actually. Wondering why I was taking pictures of the bread shop.”

  “Hmm,” she said, and it sounded like a mixture of surprise and approval.

  “He was telling me a little about Randy Russell. I’m still worried about him. That he might come back.”