Flour in the Attic

by Winnie Archer

  It was. It had been handblown in a local glass shop on the pier and was a housewarming gift from Miguel. I moved into the long living area, heading toward Agatha’s crate. She greeted me with three quick barks, then just looked up at me expectantly, her little tail curled up happily.

  I opened the crate’s door and out she popped, instantly spinning in joyful circles at my feet. She scrabbled toward the French doors, her paws struggling to make purchase against the hardwood floor, ready to be released to the backyard, but she stopped short when she heard footsteps followed by Luke’s voice. “Aggie!”

  She turned, saw him, and immediately backed up, spun in a new circle, threw her black and tan head back, and yelped ferociously.

  Luke laughed, crouching down in front of her. “Same old Aggie,” he said, scratching her head.

  “She’s so much better now,” I said. She’d been the last dog surrendered by a backyard breeder and had been petrified of people when I’d first gotten her. That first year had been rough. It had taken a lot of patience and love, but she’d finally come around. After she’d accepted me, she’d become my little shadow.

  Agatha plopped her backside down, her lip caught on her teeth in a little Elvis grimace, and let Luke scratch her head. She’d only ever tolerated him, which had worked out just fine given that she’d come with me after the divorce.

  I opened the French door and called to her. “Come on, outside, Agatha.” She hopped up, spun in another circle, and trotted outside.

  Luke had always been one to operate at his own pace and under his own terms. I could ask him why he was here, but he wouldn’t tell me until he was ready. So instead I offered him something to drink.

  “I’ll take a beer,” he said, following me into the rustic kitchen.

  My shoulders rose in a shrug. I’d been thinking iced tea or water. “Sorry, no beer.”

  He spotted a piece of furniture that I’d turned into a makeshift liquor cabinet. It was from Mexico, was made from reclaimed unfinished wood, and had slats on the lower cupboards with blue and red and white paint. “Wine,” he said, striding over to it and taking a bottle and two stemless wineglasses from behind the glass doors on top.

  I sighed, torn between the idea of having a glass of wine with my former husband, which was not how I wanted to spend the early evening, and curiosity as to why, exactly, he was here.

  “Your hair’s longer.”

  I absently touched my ginger curls. They’d grown from shoulder length when I’d seen him last to midway down my back. What could I say? “Yeah.”

  “You look good,” he said appreciatively. “California seems to suit you.”

  I’d pulled the front strands of my hair back and clipped them at the back of my head, allowing my silver hoop earrings to be more visible. With my peasant blouse and jeans, I looked a bit more free-spirit than I had when I’d been with Luke. I felt more like me. “It does.”

  He found a corkscrew in the cabinet and opened the bottle. “Aggie seems to like it, too.”

  I leaned back against the island, giving him time to work up to his reason for being here. “She does. She loves my dad, too.”

  Luke splashed wine into one of the glasses, swirled it, sniffed it, then took a sip. “How is your dad?” he asked after he filled the glasses and handed one to me.

  I took a sip of the Malbec he’d chosen, before answering. “He’s doing pretty well. Keeping busy with work.”

  “And your brother?”

  I sighed. Next we’d be talking about his family. “Yeah, Billy’s good, too.”

  “Good. Glad to hear it,” Luke said.

  We continued with small talk for another few minutes, but just as I was about to ask him what he was doing here, the doorbell rang. “You get that,” he said. “I’ll wait here.”

  I rubbed my eyes as I left him to answer the door. What in the world did Luke Holden want? I made it partway down the hall, stopping short at the sight of Mrs. Branford already standing in the entryway. I’d given her a key for emergencies. Apparently a strange car parked out front qualified in her book. “I just saw you at the credit union and you didn’t mention company, so, of course, I had to be sure you were quite all right.”

  “It’s my ex-husband,” I whispered as we walked back into the kitchen, my eyebrows raised to communicate my surprise at his presence.

  Our two glasses of wine sat on the counter next to the open bottle of red, but Luke was nowhere to be seen. Mrs. Branford marched around the center island before turning to face me, arms spread, hands gripping the butcher block. “Well, where is he?”

  That was a very good question. “I don’t know.” He hadn’t passed us in the hallway, so he hadn’t gone out the front door. Which left the entire rest of the house, or the backyard. I peered through the window, but other than Agatha, who lay casually on a strip of sunlit grass, the yard was unoccupied.

  “He’s gone exploring,” Mrs. Branford said knowingly.

  “Or just to the bathroom,” I said, but I suspected she was more on the money than I was. “I’ll be right back,” I told her, and then given the fact that he’d seen the living room when he’d arrived, I headed left out of the kitchen and down the back hallway toward the bedrooms.

  “Luke?” I called. “Where are you?”

  Silence.

  “Luke?” I checked the two small bedrooms as I passed. My office was sparse, with only a desk with my desktop computer, and an external hard drive that I used to store my photographs. I’d had a few of my photos blown up and framed so I could hang them in the house, but it was something I hadn’t gotten to yet and they leaned against the wall.

  The other room was for guests, complete with a queen-size bed, a night stand, and a lamp. Luke was not there.

  Next was the bathroom. The door was wide open and vacant.

  I called his name again, and this time I got a response. “In here,” he said, his voice coming from the last room at the end of the hall. The master bedroom. I’d shared a room with Luke for far too many years, but when it was over, it was over, and I didn’t relish the idea of him in my bedroom—in any capacity—again.

  I stopped in the doorway, ready to grab him by the scruff of his neck and drag him back to the kitchen, but then I saw him sitting on the side of my bed, his back hunched, his head in his hands, and I couldn’t berate him for invading my private space. Instead, I went into the room and sat next to him, placing my hand on his back in a comforting gesture. “Is everything okay?”

  He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. His shoulders and back lifted, then fell as he breathed heavily. “Luke? Are you okay?” I asked again.

  “I messed us up, Ivy,” he finally said, his gaze directed to the floor. “We were good together, and I messed it up.”

  I hadn’t even spoken to Luke in years, so I couldn’t fathom where this was coming from. Before I could say as much, he looked up at me. “I think it was a mistake, us splitting up.”

  I stared at him, trying not to look as flabbergasted as I felt. I shook my head. “It wasn’t a mistake.”

  “What if we were meant to be together—you know, soul mates—and we blew it?”

  “Luke, we weren’t soul mates,” I said slowly, taking my hand from his back and scooting away from him to create more space between us. I could start ticking off all the reasons it wasn’t a mistake that we split up, but I didn’t. Instead, I simply asked, “Do you really want to rehash all of this?”

  He turned his body to face me, taking one of my hands in his. “I want you back, Ivy. I’m just—things aren’t—I miss you,” he finally said.

  Mrs. Branford’s voice from the kitchen reminded me that she was here. She must be talking to Agatha. Looking for a treat to feed her, no doubt.

  “Luke, I don’t know what’s going on, but us splitting up was not a mistake. Remember Heather?”

  Heather was the woman Luke had cheated on me with. I’d sleuthed, discovering a contact on his computer under the name Mike, and that, as they sa
y, was all she wrote. Like Marisol Ruiz, I was not the type of woman to give a cheating husband a second chance.

  “She’s a psycho,” he said. “Like seriously Glenn Close crazy. If I had a rabbit, I’d be scared for it.”

  Now we were getting to the nitty-gritty. Luke and Heather had gotten married after my divorce from him was final. As far as I’d known, they’d turned their affair into something that had lasted. But now, apparently, things had gone off the rails “Did you cheat on her?” I asked, resisting adding the word too at the end of the question.

  “I guess it depends on how you define cheating.” He leaned toward me, still holding my hand. “I miss you, Ivy. I still love you.”

  Oh God, I thought as I registered a sound—the thump thump thump of Mrs. Branford’s cane—from the hallway. It drew my attention and I turned, but it wasn’t Mrs. Branford standing in the doorframe. It was Miguel. It took all of one second to read his body language with his arms by his sides, his hands fisted, his jaw tight, and I wondered how long he’d been standing there. What he’d heard Luke say. He looked at me, at Luke, and then his gaze dropped to our clasped hands.

  His voice, when he spoke, was strained with barely controlled anger. “What the hell is this?”

  Instinctively, I jerked my hand free and stood. The irony of my last thoughts—that I would never tolerate a cheating partner, were not lost on me. Miguel had spent the better part of his adult life believing I’d cheated on him back in high school. It had been a mistake. A misunderstanding. And finally, he’d accepted that fact. I’d come to terms with what I’d believed had been his abandonment of me, and I didn’t want even one iota of doubt to creep into his mind. We were at a good place together, and I wanted it to stay that way.

  Except the look in his eyes, dark and molten from whatever he thought was happening here, didn’t reflect that good place. “Miguel, this is Luke,” I said, and then added, “my ex-husband. Luke, this is . . .” I hesitated, unsure of how to introduce Miguel. Was he my boyfriend? My partner? We were more than friends, and he’d told me he was all in, but how did we define our relationship at this point?

  “Miguel Baptista,” he said tightly, finishing the sentence for me.

  Luke stood, facing Miguel and sizing him up. Miguel had a few inches on Luke and was broader. Fitter. He’d spent ten years in the military, which had raised his level of fitness beyond what Luke’s had ever been—or would ever be. Standing in the doorway, with Mrs. Branford’s much smaller body beside him, he looked intimidating.

  Luke had always been a charmer. He’d been distraught a moment ago, but now he threw on an affable smile and surged forward with his arm outstretched. “Wait, the Miguel? The one that broke her—” He stopped abruptly, then looked at me, notching his thumb back toward Miguel. “This is the guy who broke your heart back in high school?”

  I nodded. “One and the same.”

  Just like that, Luke’s demeanor shifted from charmer to defender. He turned back to face Miguel, puffing his chest out and throwing his shoulders back. “You,” he said, jabbing his finger in the air, “should not be here.”

  Miguel let out a wry laugh. “I shouldn’t be here? Last time I checked, you and Ivy were divorced. To my mind, that means you’re the one with no right to be here.”

  Luke was impulsive and his statement that us splitting up had been a mistake showed me that he wasn’t thinking clearly. His nostrils flared, like a bull ready to charge a matador. In this case, the matador was Miguel.

  “Luke,” I said, intervening before he could say something he’d regret, “why are you here? What do you want?”

  “For us to be together again,” he said, taking my hands again and spinning me slightly so that my back was to Miguel. “I want you, Ivy.”

  Not being able to see Miguel didn’t mean I couldn’t sense his anger. His jealousy. “Too bad you can’t always get what you want,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “So Mick Jagger says, but I don’t agree,” Luke said. “Ivy and me, we were good together. We made mistakes, but we gave up too soon.”

  My hackles went up at that. “We made mistakes? I’m not the one who had a little something on the side, so I have to disagree with you there, Luke. We didn’t make mistakes. You made the mistakes.”

  “Maybe you didn’t have an affair, but you never forgot about this guy,” he said, pointing over my shoulder at Miguel. “He was in our relationship as much as Heather was.”

  I cupped my hand over my forehead. He was right. I’d never gotten over Miguel, and Luke had been one long, unsuccessful rebound, but the idea that we’d been good together, or that we somehow belonged together just made me wonder what alternate reality my ex-husband was living in.

  “You should go,” Miguel said to him.

  “I have just as much right to be here as you,” Luke retorted, looking again like he was ready to face off with Miguel in a WWF match, right here, right now.

  “Actually, you don’t,” I said, and I gestured toward the doorway. “Miguel and I are together now, and you need to go.”

  I could see Luke’s mind working as he processed through what my words meant. He shook his head, looking at me like I’d lost my mind. “This guy messed with you, Ivy. You’re really with him now?”

  “It’s really none of your business,” I said. I moved past Miguel, who followed me to the kitchen, Mrs. Branford on his heels. She wasn’t relying on her cane, and her step had a definite zip to it. She was the Gladys Kravitz of the neighborhood: She liked to know everything that was going on, and she owned up to her curiosity. This encounter with my ex-husband would fuel her gossip circle for a good while to come.

  Luke hemmed and hawed, but finally he seemed to understand that whatever he’d wanted when he’d shown up on my doorstep was not going to turn out the way he’d hoped. “We still need to talk,” he said to me when I ushered him out. “I need you—”

  But I chose to ignore him, turning the lock once he was outside and I’d shut the door. I returned to the kitchen, taking my wineglass from the counter before sinking down on a chair at the table. Mrs. Branford had already drunk half of Luke’s wine.

  Miguel leaned back against the island, arms folded over his chest. The bottom of a tattoo peeked out from under the sleeve of his shirt. I’d yet to see it in its entirety. He revealed himself to me a little at a time, and the tattoo was something he didn’t talk about, and didn’t flaunt. One day soon, I thought.

  “What the hell was that about?” he asked, his voice still tense.

  I propped my elbow on the table and rested my head on my hand. “Best guess? I think his current wife is freaking out over something he did and he’s running away.”

  “So he ran here? From Texas? To you?” Miguel shook his head. “Why?”

  I didn’t have the answer to that, but Mrs. Branford ventured a guess. “People rewrite their history,” she said. “What actually happened is reworked and reworked and reworked in their mind until the new version becomes the truth. It’s revisionist. If things are bad with his current wife, he’s compared that to how he remembers them being with Ivy, and of course the grass is always greener. He has let his mind focus on the good things in their marriage, burying the bad things. The truth of his affair and their incompatibility is all pushed aside. Instead, he remembers a fairy-tale version, which allows him to villainize his wife, and gives him the courage to come here and want to rekindle what he thinks was a better relationship.”

  We stared at her. How had she come up with such a thoughtful psychoanalytic response on the fly? I was just about to ask her, but she offered us a sly smile and her eyes twinkled. “Before you ask, no, I didn’t take psychology classes, and no, I didn’t miss my calling. I’ve just read enough literature, and seen enough relationships over the years, that I understand human nature. And your former spouse, Luke Holden, is rather an open book, I might add.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. At the time I’d discovered it, I’d wondered how in the world he’d
managed to hide his infidelity for so long.

  “Is he staying in Santa Sofia?” Miguel asked, still worked up over the encounter.

  This time I shrugged. “He didn’t say, so I don’t know.” I looked at him, wondering what had brought him here. “Is everything okay?”

  His shoulders relaxed, but just slightly, because even if Luke was gone—at least for the moment—Marisol had still been murdered. “I went to see Emmaline,” he said. “I was there when you called her—after meeting with Johnny.”

  That was rather shocking. Emmaline had orchestrated quite a few “chance” meetings between Miguel and me since we’d both returned to Santa Sofia. She was among the cadre of women, including Mrs. Branford and Olaya, who were certain that Miguel and I belonged together. She had to have been utterly focused on Marisol’s case to neglect mentioning that he’d been standing right next to her when we’d talked on the phone, which was to her credit. Crime-solving before matchmaking. As far as I knew, she still hadn’t gotten down on one knee to propose to Billy. She was single-minded and couldn’t think about her own love life when a murderer prowled the streets of Santa Sofia.

  Before I could ask him why he’d been at the sheriff’s office, he offered up the information. “I had lockers installed in the staff break room when we remodeled. Everyone has their own. Some people use them, some don’t. Marisol did.”

  “Did you find something?”

  “Marisol kept it locked, so no, not yet.”

  “Lisette is meeting us back there in”—he flipped his wrist to look at his watch—“half an hour.”

  “And you came by here in case I wanted to come with you?” I asked, a small smile playing on my lips. He could have simply told me what they found after the fact, but Miguel knew that I’d want to be there. We were in this investigation together.

  “Do you want to?” he asked. He still hadn’t smiled, but his hands had unclenched.

  “Do I want to?” I repeated. “Uh, do fish swim in the sea?”

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said.