by Susan Wiggs
Now Jenny was the bakery’s sole owner. She dressed hurriedly, layering on fleece long underwear, checked chef pants and a thick wool sweater, tall warm boots, a ski jacket and hat. No way was she driving, not before the snowplow had made its rounds. Besides, getting the car out of the garage would entail shoveling the driveway, something she was heartily sick of doing. The bakery was just six blocks away, on the main square in the center of town. She’d be there in minutes. Maybe the exertion would stave off the panic attack, too.
Just in case, she found her bottle of pills and stuffed it in her pocket.
Grabbing her purse, she walked through frozen silence. The snow had stopped, and the clouds made way for the stars. New snow squeaked beneath her feet as she followed a route she’d walked since she was a tiny girl. She’d grown up in the bakery, surrounded by the heady fragrance of bread and spices, the busy sounds of the mixers and sheeters, timers going off, rolling racks clattering out to the transport bay.
A single light burned over the back entrance. She let herself in, stomping the snow from her boots. Outside the spotless prep area, she took them off and slipped on her baker’s clogs, which were parked on a rack by the door.
“It’s me,” she called, her gaze tracking around the work area. It was immaculate as always, with fifty-pound sacks of freshly milled flour stacked precisely against one wall, honey in 155-gallon drums lying on their sides nearby. Specialty ingredients displayed in clear containers lined the shelves from floor to ceiling—millet, pine nuts, olives, raisins, pecans. The stainless-steel refrigerators, ovens and countertops shimmered under the pendant lights, and the rich scent of yeast and cinnamon filled the air. Three 6 Mafia was blaring from the radio, indicating that Zach was on tonight, and between the beats of the hip-hop music, she could hear the hum of the spiral mixer.
“Yo, Zach,” she called out, craning her neck to find the boy.
He emerged from the mixing area, pushing a rolling cart filled with raw dough. Now a senior in high school, Zach Alger had worked at the bakery for two years. He didn’t seem to mind the early-morning hours, always heading to school with a bag of fresh pastries. He had distinctly Nordic features—pale blue eyes, white-blond hair—and lanky, earnest good looks. “Is anything wrong?” he asked.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said, feeling a bit sheepish. “Is Laura around?”
“Specialty loaves,” he said, gesturing as he wheeled the tub of dough toward the six-foot-tall proofing cabinet.
Laura Tuttle had worked at the bakery for thirty years, as master baker for twenty-five. She knew the business even better than Jenny did. She claimed to love the early hours, that the schedule was perfectly suited to her circadian clock. “Well, look who’s here,” she said, yet she didn’t glance up as she spoke.
“I had a craving for a kolache.” Jenny swished through the rubber-rimmed swinging doors to the café, where she helped herself to a cup of coffee and a day-old pastry from the case. Then she returned to the prep area, welcoming the familiar taste but feeling no calmer. Out of habit, she grabbed an apron from a hook.
Jenny rarely did the hands-on work; as owner and general manager, she stayed busy in a supervisory and administrative capacity. She had an office upstairs with a view of the town square, and a security monitor gave her a glimpse of the café counter. She spent most days juggling the needs of employees, suppliers, customers and regulatory agencies with a phone glued to her ear and her eyes glued to the computer screen. But sometimes, she reflected, you just had to roll up your sleeves and dive in. There was no sensation quite like plunging one’s hands into a warm mass of silky dough. It felt like something half-alive, squishing through her fingers.
Now she slipped the apron over her head and joined Laura at a worktable. The specialty breads were done in smaller batches and shaped by hand. Today’s selections would be a traditional Polish bread made with eggs, orange peel and currants, and a savory herb loaf of Laura’s invention. She and Laura worked side by side, weighing portions of dough on a one-pound scale, although both knew the size by feel alone.
Across the room, Jenny could see the refrigerated pie case, filled with her grandmother’s pies. Technically speaking, these were not Helen Majesky’s pies. But the original recipes for the lofty lemon meringue, the glossy three-berry tarts with the lattice tops, the creamy buttermilk chess pie and all the others came from Helen herself, decades ago. Her techniques had been passed on from one master baker to the next, and now, even after her death, she haunted the bakery as gently and sweetly as she had lived.
Jenny felt curiously detached from herself as she braided the dough into fat, rounded loaves. She looked at her white, floury hands and could see her grandmother’s hands, lifting and turning the dough with a patient rhythm that seemed to come from a place Jenny didn’t recognize in herself. The reality of Gram’s passing settled in Jenny’s bones. It had been three weeks, two days and fourteen hours. Jenny hated that she knew, practically down to the precise moment, exactly how long she had been alone.
Laura kept working, setting each oiled loaf in a pan, one by one. She bobbed her head along with the hip-hop rhythm coming from the radio. She actually liked Zach’s music, though Jenny suspected Laura didn’t listen too closely to the lyrics.
“You miss her a lot, don’t you, doll?” Laura asked. She was the kind of person who knew things, like a mind reader.
“So much,” Jenny admitted. “And here I thought I was prepared. I don’t know why I feel shell-shocked. I’m not good at this. In fact, I’m terrible at it. Terrible at mourning the dead and at living alone.” She squared her shoulders, tried to shake off the mingling of panic and melancholy. The scary thing was, she couldn’t do it. She had somehow lost control, and even as she felt herself falling apart, she couldn’t do anything to make it stop.
Somewhere outside in the dark, a siren wailed. The noise crescendoed, sounding frantic, like a scream. A couple of dogs howled in response. Automatically, Jenny turned to peer through the double doors to the window of the darkened coffee shop. The town of Avalon, New York, was small enough that the sound of whooping sirens at night attracted notice. In fact, the last time she remembered hearing a siren was when she had called the paramedics.
They had not let her ride with her grandmother. She had driven her car in the wake of the ambulance to Benedictine Hospital in Kingston. Once there, she begged her grandmother to rescind the DNR order she’d signed after her first stroke, but Gram wouldn’t hear of it. So then, with her grandmother’s life force ebbing, there was nothing left for Jenny to do but say goodbye.
She felt a fresh wave of the panic attack trying to push its way to the surface. She stuck with the kneading rhythm her grandmother had taught her, working the dough with steady assuredness. Anyone watching her would see a competent baker, because she knew that on the outside, she appeared no different. The gathering steam inside was invisible.
“I’m going to step out back, grab a breath of fresh air,” she told Laura.
“I just heard sirens. Maybe Loverboy will show up.”
Loverboy was Laura’s nickname for Rourke McKnight, Avalon’s chief of police. He had a reputation that did not go unnoticed in a town this size. Jenny, of course, avoided calling him anything at all. There had been a time when she and Rourke had not been strangers. In fact, they’d known each other with searing intimacy, but that was long ago. They hadn’t willingly exchanged a word in years. Rourke dropped by the bakery for his morning coffee every day, but since Jenny worked in the office upstairs, they never crossed paths. They actually both worked hard at not crossing paths.
Avoiding him required that she memorize his routine. During the week, he kept office hours like any chief of police, but, thanks to a tight municipal budget, he had to make do with substandard pay and a force that was small even by small-town standards. He often took the third watch on weekends, driving patrol like any beat cop
. Sometimes he even drove a snowplow for the city. Jenny pretended she didn’t know any of this, pretended to take no interest in the life of Rourke McKnight, and he returned the favor by ignoring her. He had sent flowers to her grandmother’s funeral, though. The message on the card had been typically taciturn: “I’m sorry.” It had accompanied a bouquet the size of a Volkswagen.
As she slipped on her parka and ducked through the back door of the bakery, Jenny felt the now-predictable pattern of the attack. There was the terrible tingling of her scalp, an army of invisible ants marching up her spine and over her head. Her chest tightened and her throat seemed to close. Despite the freezing temperatures, she broke out in a sweat. Then came the eerie pulsations of light, flickering in her peripheral vision.
Stepping into the alleyway behind the bakery, she sucked in air. Then she choked it back out immediately, tasting the acrid burn of Newport cigarettes.
“God, Zach,” she said to the kid leaning against the building. “Those things will kill you.”
“Naw,” he said, flicking his ashes into the Dumpster, “I’ll quit before that happens.”
“Huh.” She cleared her throat. “That’s what they all say.” She hated it when kids smoked. Sure, her grandfather had smoked, rolling his own cigarettes out of Velvet Tobacco. But back in his day, the dangers of the habit were unknown. Nowadays, there was simply no excuse. Grabbing a handful of snow, she tossed it at the cigarette, killing the red ash.
“Hey,” he said.
“You’re a smart boy, Zach. I heard you’re an honor student. So how come you’re so stupid about smoking?”
He shrugged and had the grace to look sheepish. “Ask my dad, I’m stupid about a lot of things. He wants me to spend next year working up at the racetrack in Saratoga to earn my own money for college.”
She knew, by the chintzy tips Matthew Alger left at the bakery’s coffee shop, that Alger—who worked as the city administrator—carried his stinginess into his personal life. Apparently, he applied it to his son’s as well. Jenny had grown up without a father and had yearned for one more times than she could count. Matthew Alger was proof that the longed-for relationship might sometimes be overrated.
“I’ve heard that quitting smoking saves the average smoker five bucks a day,” she said. She wondered if her voice sounded strange to him, if he could tell she had to force each word past the tightness in her throat.
“Yeah, I’ve heard that, too.” He flicked the damp cigarette into the Dumpster. “Don’t worry,” he said before she could scold him, “I’ll wash my hands before I go back to work.”
He didn’t seem to be in a hurry, though. She wondered if he wanted to talk. “Does your dad want you to work for a year before college?” she asked.
“He wants me working, period. Keeps telling me how he put himself through college with no help from his family, pulled himself up by his bootstraps and all that.” He said it with no admiration.
She wondered about Zach’s mother, who had remarried and moved to Seattle long ago. Zach never talked about her. “What do you want, Zach?” Jenny asked.
He looked startled, as though he hadn’t been asked that in a while. “To go far away to college,” he said. “Live somewhere different.”
Jenny could relate to that. At his age, she’d been certain an exciting life awaited her somewhere far away. She’d never even made it out the door, though. “Then that’s what you should do,” she said emphatically.
He shrugged. “I’ll give it a shot, I guess. I need to get back to work.”
He headed inside. Jenny lingered outside, blowing fake smoke rings with the frozen air. Although the conversation had distracted her briefly, it had done nothing to banish the churning panic. She was alone with the feeling now; it screamed through her like the sirens in the quiet of the night. And like the sirens, the feeling intensified, closing in on her. The ceiling of stars pressed down, an insurmountable weight on her shoulders.
I surrender, she thought and plunged her hand into the pocket of her chef pants, groping for the brown plastic prescription bottle. The pill wasn’t much bigger than a lead BB. She swallowed it without water, knowing it would take effect in a few minutes. It was kind of amazing, she thought, how a tiny pill could quiet the terrified knocking of her heart in her rib cage, and cool the frantic sizzle of her brain.
“Only when you need it,” the doctor had cautioned her. “This medication can be highly addictive, and it has a particularly nasty detox.”
Despite the warning, she already felt calmer as she tucked the bottle away. She smoothed her hand over her pants pocket.
Still thinking about Zach, she scanned the familiar neighborhood, a downtown of vintage brick buildings that housed businesses, shops and restaurants. Years ago, if someone had told Jenny she’d still be in Avalon, working at the bakery, she would have laughed all the way to the train station. She had big plans. She was leaving the small, insular place where she’d grown up. She was headed for the big city, an education, a career.
It probably wasn’t fair to let Zach in on an ugly little secret—life had a way of kicking the support out from under the best-laid plans. At the age of eighteen, Jenny had discovered the terrifying inadequacies of the health-care system, especially when it came to the self-employed. By twenty-one, she was familiar with the process of declaring personal bankruptcy, and just barely managed to hang on to the house on Maple Street. There was no question of her leaving Gram, widowed and disabled from a massive stroke.
The pill kicked in, covering the sharp edges of her nerves like a blanket of snow over a jagged landscape. She took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, watching the cloud of mist until it disappeared.
The sky to the north, in the direction of Maple Street, seemed to flicker and glow with unnatural light. She blinked. Probably just the strange aftermath of the panic attack. She should be used to this by now.
Chapter Two
When the monitor in Rourke McKnight’s squad car sent out an urgent tone alert and “any unit about clear” for 472 Maple Street, it flash-froze his heart.
That was Jenny’s house.
He had been on the far side of town, but the moment the call came, he grabbed the handheld mike, gave his location and ETA to dispatch and fired the sedan into action. His tires spewing snow and sand, he peeled out, the back end fishtailing on the slippery road. At the same time, he put in a call to the dispatcher. “I’m en route. I’ll let you know when I’m code eleven.” His voice was curiously flat, considering the emotions now roaring through him.
A general page had gone out that the structure—God, Jenny’s house—was on fire and “fully involved.” Besides that, Jenny hadn’t been spotted.
By the time he reached the house on Maple Street, the entire home was wrapped in bright ribbons of flame, with curls of fire leaping out of every window and licking along the eaves.
He parked with one headlamp buried in a snowbank and exited his vehicle, not bothering to close the door behind him, and did a visual scan of the premises. The firefighters, their trucks and equipment, were bathed in flickering orange light. Two pumper hoses attacked the blaze; men struggled to excavate a hydrant from the snow. The scene was surprisingly quiet, not chaotic at all. Yet the wall of flame was impenetrable and unsafe for the firefighters—even fully equipped and clad in bunker gear—to enter.
“Where is she?” Rourke demanded of a firefighter who was relaying messages on a shoulder-mounted radio. “Where the hell is she?”
“Haven’t found the resident,” the guy said, flicking a glance at another emergency vehicle parked in the road—an ambulance, its crew standing ready. “We’re thinking she’s away. Except...her car’s in the garage.”
Rourke strode toward the flaming house, bellowing Jenny’s name. The place burned like a pile of tinder. A window burst, and hot glass rained down on him. Aut
omatically his hand came up to shield his eyes. “Jenny!” he yelled again.
In one instant, all the years of silence fell away and regrets flooded in. As if he could fix anything by avoiding her. I’m an idiot, he thought. And then he bargained with anyone or anything that might be listening. Let her be okay. Please just let her be okay and I’ll keep her safe forever and never ask another thing.
He had to get inside. The front steps were gone. He raced around back, slipping in the snow, righting himself. Someone was shouting at him, but he kept going. The back of the house was in flames, too, but the door was gone, having been hacked through by a firefighter’s ax. More shouting, more guys in bunker gear running at him, waving their arms. Shit, thought Rourke. It was stupid, but it wasn’t the dumbest thing he’d ever done, not by a long shot. Pulling his parka up over his nose and mouth, he went inside.
He’d been in this kitchen many times, yet it resembled a yellow vortex, all but unrecognizable. And there was nothing to breathe. He felt the fire sucking the air out of his lungs. He tried to yell for Jenny but couldn’t make a sound. The linoleum floor bubbled and melted under his feet. The doorway leading to the stairs was a tall rectangle of fire, but he headed toward it anyway.
A strong hand on his shoulder hauled him back. Rourke tried to fight him off, but a second later, something—a railing from upstairs, maybe—came crashing down, raining fire and plaster. The firefighter shoved him out the back door. “What the hell are you doing?” he yelled. “Chief, you need to get back. It’s not safe here.”
Rourke’s throat burned as he gulped in air, then coughed. “No shit. If you won’t send anyone in, I’m going myself.”
The firefighter—a deputy chief Rourke vaguely recognized—planted himself in the way. “I can’t let you do that.”