Wedding Cake

by Josi S. Kilpack

  Sadie paused, then shook her head. “No one. In fact, no one but you and I knew all of that information. Even Shawn didn’t know about the cake, and you didn’t know what time Shawn came home last night.” She frowned. “But she knows all those details. How?”

  As soon as she said it she looked around her kitchen again, noting that everything she’d just mentioned were things she’d discussed here. The cake, the phone, Maggie, Shawn leaving for the bachelor party, his return when he’d thought he was being so amusing.

  She glanced at Pete and put a finger to her lips as she hurried to the computer desk and pulled a paper from the printer tray and a pen from the cup holder. In Boston, Mrs. Wapple had been tormented by a neighbor with an audio device that made the already unstable woman agitated and confused. Was it so far-fetched to think a reverse situation could be involved here?

  Sadie placed the paper on the kitchen counter and wrote a single sentence. She showed it to Pete. Shawn seemed to notice their silence and turned to look at them. After Pete had read the sentence, Sadie moved the paper close enough for Shawn to read it too.

  What if my kitchen is bugged?

  Chapter 13

  For a lot of people the idea that their house had been bugged would be a ridiculous consideration, but Sadie, Pete, and Shawn had faced enough ridiculous situations to know that it wasn’t so far-fetched. Instead, Sadie was kicking herself for not having thought about it sooner.

  Shawn stood from his seat in front of the computer and exchanged a look with Pete that seemed to say “Now what?”

  “I think that shortbread dough is ready for me to roll out,” Sadie said, a bit louder than she usually would. She cleared her throat; it was imperative that she act normal since, if she were right, Jane could be listening right now. She didn’t want Jane to know their suspicions. “I’m probably being silly. It’s all just getting to me you know?”

  She didn’t head toward the refrigerator, though. She stayed right where she was and raised her eyebrows at Pete and Shawn. Surely they understood what she was doing. She was surprised at how violated the idea of an electronic bug in her kitchen made her feel. There was no safer place for Sadie than her home, and a good portion of her life took place in the kitchen. It was her happy place, her safe haven. To think that Jane had intruded on that was both frightening and infuriating.

  “Right,” Shawn said after another moment, also too loud.

  Sadie made a face and shook her head. He shrugged as though to say “What?” She scribbled on the paper.

  Act normal.

  Shawn nodded. Pete was already walking around the kitchen, looking around cautiously. Sadie scribbled another note and held it up for him.

  Would the police have checked for a bug when they inspected the house last night?

  Pete shook his head and mouthed the words “Not automatically.”

  “So, what can I help you with?” Shawn asked, then clapped and rubbed his hands together.

  “Um,” Sadie said, thinking fast about the items on her to-do list that she could give Shawn to do as they played out this charade. “I need to polish Grandma’s silver platter, could you help me with that?”

  Shawn scowled; he hated that kind of thing. He preferred the more active tasks like carrying heavy objects and fixing stuff. Sadie wasn’t really going to have him polish anything; he was far too inattentive to detail to be trusted with a task like that.

  Pete took the paper out of her hand and picked up the pen. He wrote something down on the opposite side and turned it toward her. Shawn read it too.

  Do you have a portable radio?

  Sadie was confused. Did he want the radio because music would cover up their conversation? Shawn, however, seemed instantly excited about the question and grabbed the paper.

  RF Transmitter?

  Pete nodded.

  Sadie looked back and forth between them. What’s an RF transmitter?

  “Don’t you keep that silver platter in the garage?” Shawn said, already heading toward the back door.

  “No,” Sadie said. The platter had always been kept above the fridge; only an idiot would store silver in a detached garage. Shawn gave her a play-along look over his shoulder. “I mean, yes?” She hadn’t meant to make it sound like a question.

  Shawn smiled as though to say “that’s better” and a few seconds later the back door opened and shut again.

  “And now I have you all to myself,” Pete said, putting an arm around Sadie’s waist and pulling her close.

  “This is not the time, Pete,” Sadie said, pushing at his arms. She was so not in the mood for stealing kisses right now, but his lips were already at her ear.

  “A portable radio will pick up the relay if the bug is a radio frequency transmitter,” he whispered. “That’s the easiest kind of listening device a civilian can buy.”

  Even though he wasn’t saying anything the least bit seductive, Sadie shivered all the same. She put her arms around his neck and nuzzled until she could whisper in his ear. “I changed the cake delivery time almost a week ago,” she said quietly. “Could she have bugged my house that long ago?”

  “Are you sure you didn’t mention it another time since?”

  “Who else would I tell but you? But how could she have access to the house? I’m so diligent about setting the alarm.”

  Pete was thoughtful for a moment before nuzzling her ear again. “The only thing I can think of is the open house two weeks ago. The realtor said two dozen people came and went. Maybe Jane was one of them.”

  The back door opened, and Pete and Sadie pulled apart, but not fast enough for Shawn, who rolled his eyes with unnecessary drama.

  “Found it,” he said. “Where’s the polishing stuff?” He started turning the hand crank on the radio. It made a whirring sound, which caused Shawn to stop and head down the hallway. Without saying as much, the men had tapped into Sadie’s assumption that the bug was in the kitchen. It’s where Sadie spent 85 percent of her time and where 100 percent of the information she feared was overheard had been shared.

  Sadie hurried to close the kitchen blinds, just in case, then banged some cupboards as though looking for the tarnish remover. She removed the platter from the cabinet above the refrigerator and set it on the counter.

  Shawn came back in, the white noise of the radio turned to a low volume. Pete pointed toward the ceiling and then the floor, then made a swishing motion with his hand. Shawn followed Pete’s instructions perfectly and lifted the radio high above his head—almost touching the ceiling—then low, just barely above the floor. He moved forward a few inches at a time, lifting and lowering as he went.

  Pete began a visual inspection of the nooks and crannies in the room, then motioned Sadie toward the fridge.

  “How are the cookies coming?” he asked, making a talking motion with his hand.

  She nodded to tell him she understood his silent instruction even though she realized that if Jane were listening she would have to know something was up due to the sudden awkwardness of their conversation. Still, it was better than not talking at all.

  “So,” she said, removing the plastic-wrapped dough from the fridge. She pulled open a drawer to get her rolling pin, the one without handles that she’d used for nearly two decades. Nothing stuck to that baby after so many years of oil being absorbed into the wood. “Did you know that shortbread was originally made with only flour, butter, and sugar?” She unwrapped the dough and sprinkled some flour on the counter before shaping the dough into a disk. “It was three parts, two parts, one part, respectively, mixed only until combined and then shaped and baked. Short meant crumbly—in Scotland of course, which is where the recipe originated—and so it was short-bread, meaning crumbly bread, though I don’t know why it’s bread and not biscuit, since that’s what a cookie is called in the UK.”

  She rolled the dough out in every direction, expanding the circle a little at a time, all the while watching Shawn and Pete make slow progress around the kitchen. She was ab
out to go into the difference between shortbread and shortcake—leavening agents and liquid ratios mostly—when Shawn suddenly paused.

  He crouched down and held the radio close to the floor at the end of the island. The white noise of the radio was cutting out, as though something were interfering with the signal. Shawn looked at Pete, who instantly went to his knees, making Sadie cringe; his bursitis did not like it when he put weight on his left knee.

  Pete put his head low to the ground and looked under the edge of the island, that four-inch gap between the cabinet and the floor. He motioned to Shawn, who quickly joined him.

  After a few seconds they popped up in unison and waved Sadie over. She quickly wiped her hands on the front of her pants even though she knew she’d regret it later, and joined them. She attempted a more ladylike position, but there was no way to avoid it entirely if she wanted to peer at the underside of the cabinet lip. Once she was in the right position, she could just barely make out a black box about half an inch thick and the size of a credit card attached to the underside of the cabinet overhang.

  Shawn cleared his throat and a little green light lit up, then went black. “I don’t really care about the history of shortbread,” he said, “I just want to eat it.” The green light turned on again.

  Voice activated? Her house was bugged with a voice-activated device! Sadie scrambled to her feet and wrote another sentence on the paper, her handwriting choppy and her emotions churning.

  She was in my house!!!

  Pete pointed toward his phone and then pointed at the back door. He was going to call Malloy and it annoyed her. She wanted to talk about this. To rant and rave and find a way to use this latest discovery to their advantage. “I’m going to call Malloy and check on things. I wonder if they ever figured out whose phone she used to call the bakery this morning.”

  For an instant Sadie was confused. They already knew Jane had stolen Brian’s phone from Pep Boys and used it to call Rachel. But a moment later she realized that Pete was trying not to give away additional information.

  Shawn headed back to the computer. “I need to look something up.”

  “Okay,” Sadie said to Pete. “Ask Malloy about that weird letter too, see if they’ve figured something out. I’m sure it’s got to be involved in this.”

  Pete looked confused this time, and Sadie grabbed the pen and wrote another note:

  Might as well mislead her.

  Pete nodded but didn’t seem all that supportive of her idea. He let himself out the back door, and Sadie returned to rolling out the dough with harsh, angry motions. She pictured Jane in her house, looking around, touching things.

  Sadie kept her personal files in a locked cabinet, which might be why she hadn’t suffered the same financial losses that Shawn had, but there were so many other things Jane could have interfered with if she had access to the house. Her feelings of vulnerability increased tenfold.

  “Uh, Mom?”

  Sadie looked at Shawn, who waved her over to the computer. She complied, bracing herself. She didn’t like the tone in his voice. When she stood behind him she scanned the e-mail program on the screen. It was not her e-mail though, it was Shawn’s. When she looked back to his in-box, she saw that his most recently received e-mail was from her e-mail address and titled “What I’m planning to do on my honeymoon.”

  Sadie’s stomach dropped as she remembered telling Shawn her e-mail password so he could access the picture Ray Meyers had e-mailed. That meant Jane had overheard it too. How many times had Sadie heard never to say those things out loud or write them down? She kept all her passwords in a locked program on her phone, but she hadn’t thought twice of saying her password out loud in her own house.

  What have I done?

  Sadie hit Shawn on the arm and indicated for him to get out of the chair. He didn’t argue and even walked into the kitchen, which seemed to confirm that he had the same fear she did of what was contained in this e-mail. She clicked on the message and felt her cheeks flame as a pornographic picture came up on the screen. She closed the e-mail immediately before realizing that Shawn might not be the only person Jane sent this to. She took a breath and opened the e-mail again, looking only at the “to” field. She clicked the button to show all the recipients and felt the room spin as she realized that this image had been sent to every single person on her contact list. Hundreds of people. Friends, family, church members, customer service representatives.

  “How bad is it?” Shawn asked from the kitchen.

  “Really bad,” Sadie said, closing and deleting the message. She swallowed and logged out of Shawn’s in-box. She needed to change her password as quickly as possible to keep Jane from sending anything else. Her face and neck were on fire with humiliation as she thought of more and more people who could even now be pulling up that horrible picture on their computers.

  When she typed in her password on the log-in page, a pop-up informed her that the password she’d used was inaccurate. Panicked, she typed it in again, and once again she got an error message. Jane must have changed it, she realized. There had to be something she could do to fix this. Her phone rang in the kitchen, and she swiveled in her chair to see Shawn pick up her phone, look at the screen, and then answer the call.

  “Hey, Uncle Jack.” He paused, then met Sadie’s eyes. “You got it, too?”

  The back door opened and Pete came in, walking fast. He held his phone out to Sadie. “What the heck is this?”

  Chapter 14

  Malloy said he would send someone over to track the bug in Sadie’s kitchen and search the rest of the house, but in the meantime, he wanted Pete to come down to the police station. Malloy wasn’t happy that the Facebook post had gone up without his knowing about it.

  Normally, Sadie would have been annoyed with Malloy’s attitude and the fact that he wanted Pete to come in instead of her—it was such an overt rejection of Sadie’s position in this case—but she was far too overwhelmed by Jane’s latest trick to care. She wished Pete luck and gave him carte blanche for whatever agreements he wanted to make with Malloy, then she tried to change her password only to learn that the “Password Update” capabilities on her e-mail account—limited to four a day—had been maxed out. She couldn’t make any additional changes until tomorrow.

  Since Shawn was talking to Jack on Sadie’s phone, she used Shawn’s phone to call the hosting company, which led her through automated messages for ten minutes before she got an actual person on the phone. By then she was frantic—two more e-mails had been sent, as reported to Shawn by Jack and a dozen of Sadie’s friends who’d texted or called. She hoped they knew her character well enough to know she wouldn’t have sent such obscenities.

  “I can freeze your account while we investigate the situation,” the woman on the phone said after Sadie explained what was happening. “But it will disable all access.”

  “That’s fine,” Sadie said. “Freeze it. Cancel it all together if you have to, but I can’t keep it accessible. This woman is spamming all my contacts with pornography!”

  Sadie nearly lost her mind when the woman put her on hold in order to discuss the situation with her supervisor. Pat Benatar’s song “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” was playing as the hold music. Sadie was not amused.

  “Are the new e-mails as bad as the first one?” Sadie asked Shawn, still manning her phone.

  “They’re pretty bad,” Shawn said. “You don’t want the details.”

  No, Sadie didn’t want the details, and she didn’t want to know how Shawn knew the details either. Had she ever been so humiliated in her whole life?

  The woman she’d been talking to with the e-mail company came back onto the line. “Okay, Mrs. Hoffmiller, your account has been frozen for seventy-two hours in order for us to complete the review. I’ll need you to go to the following website to file an official report so we can best resolve your concern.”

  Concern was not nearly a strong enough word in Sadie’s opinion, but she thanked the woman all the sa
me, hung up, and then went to the website so she could get the report filed and the review started. She was keenly aware that Jane’s bug was still in the house. Jane was surely enjoying every minute of this and yet there was no time to plan a better course.

  Shawn’s phone rang, and he crossed the room to pick it up from the desk. He looked at the screen. “My fraud investigator, I think,” he said. “I’ll take it outside.” He headed out the back door.

  It took a few minutes for Sadie to fill out the computer form, and though she wanted an instant response, all she got was a pop-up informing her that she would be notified when they had a chance to review her case. They’d contact her through the phone number she’d provided on the form, not her e-mail, right?

  Sadie kept thinking of specific people in her contact list, like her aunt Judy in Edmonton who set up her own e-mail for the first time a few months ago and loved instant access to her nieces and nephews but typed in all caps. And then there was Sister Nelson from church who talked often about her husband’s pornography problem and how porn seemed to be everywhere these days, interfering with her husband’s ability to feel God’s light and healing power. Fabulous.

  Sadie stood up from the computer and saw the cookie dough drying out on the counter. It was a small aside to consider that Jane may have managed to ruin the cookies too, but it was also reflective of how intricate Jane’s interference had become. Sadie returned to the kitchen and lifted a corner of the dough to see if it seemed salvageable. She couldn’t be certain, but regardless, the dough needed to be chilled again. She gathered it back into a ball and wrapped it in plastic before returning it to the fridge.

  Every moment had a surreal quality about it, creating a feeling of distracted focus that Sadie struggled to break free of. She felt more foolish than ever for having thought that drawing Jane out would be easy and painless. It had been hours, they’d been all over town, and yet Jane was still finding new ways to twist the knife. It was a relief when her feelings of detachment and disbelief hardened into anger.