The Baker's Wife (14 page)

“Is that . . . a warning?”

Audrey felt overcome by exhaustion. “Of course not. You're a smart girl. Think about it.” She was surprised that her irritation brought Leslie to the brink of tears.

“I would do
anything
to help Mrs. Mansfield. Anything. I owe her
so much
.”

“I know, honey.”

“No. You can't know what I . . . It's impossible.”

Audrey sighed and scratched the skin behind her collar, her fingertips brushing fine, tiny bumps. She felt the slightest bit woozy. “I'll speak to Jack today, find out if it's true that the blood is Julie's. But you should let it go, okay? The best thing you can do for her is stay focused on your schoolwork.”

“Will you tell me what you find out? I'll drop by every day and buy—”

“That won't be necessary. If I were your mom I'd have a fit if you—”

“No, I want to. I need to. I'll come back tomorrow.” Then Leslie threw back her espresso and slammed her textbook closed and lifted her backpack to her shoulder without zipping it. She rushed for the door. Audrey twisted her body to watch Leslie leave and saw what had caused her to move like a bird in a snake's presence.

At the entrance, Jack's eyes locked on Audrey's clammy face. He approached the table, the entire bakery focused on him. He leaned down toward Audrey and said, for her ears only, “A word with you?”

Audrey stood. “Of course. Anything you need.”

“Not here,” Jack said.

The necklace was not where she had left it. Diane fretted. She scrubbed Estrella's bowls in the hot water until the stainless steel became a mirror and the fair skin of her hands turned lobster red. Of course, she should have expected something to happen to the jewelry in the two and a half decades since she'd hidden it.

Geoff and Ed had made space for her in the apartment bedroom by stacking boxes deeper and higher in the living room, so that after an evening of their “help” she was forced to spend several long hours clearing a new path wide enough for her to reach the window seat. And then, sweating and huffing and wielding one of Geoff's flashlights, which weighed about as much as her arm, she'd managed to clear more boxes off the seat and remove the faded green cushion. The hinged lid squealed when she lifted it.

Inside, a wooden brace set parallel to the floor helped to support the wide lid. When she was seventeen, Diane had slipped the pendant into a tiny plastic bag that once held spare buttons. Then she emptied the seat's storage area, wedged herself into the space, and stapled the packet to the underside of one brace, near the front joint where it couldn't be seen from above.

She had gained too much weight to climb into the empty box today, but her fingers should have been able to find the necklace easily enough. Instead, all she found was a jagged scrap of plastic held in place by a bent staple. It pricked her skin and drew blood.

What now? What next? A day after the discovery, Diane still had no answer to that question. She'd stared out the upstairs corner window through the evening and cried through the night and took out her desperation on pots and pans through the morning. If she couldn't complete this penance, she'd be better off dead.

She already was dead to most everyone who mattered: her mother, her father, what childhood friends she once had. Not one of them had made an appearance since her return to this building where they'd once come for Pop Rocks and Red Vines after school.

Maybe all their lives had been altered as dramatically as hers.

Diane put away the dry shiny bowls and hung up her apron and stomped upstairs, not caring who heard her. It was time for her to make another decision, and this one had better not take her another twenty-five years. As grateful as she was for a roof over her head, the spirits that haunted this forsaken home would drive her out in a matter of days. And then she might find herself in an asylum rather than a prison.

The Bofingers had put her in the bedroom where the window was still in one piece. Her parents' old room. To begin her decision-making process, Diane entered the apartment and went directly to the room that had belonged to her and her twin sister, the room where she had shattered the window and, once upon a time, her family. She opened the door and saw, behind the cramp of rearranged boxes, the plywood over the broken pane, and beneath it, the place where there had once been a nightstand between two twin beds.

She wondered where the nightstand had gone. For a whole week after Donna first stole the necklace from their grandmother, the diamond had remained in the table's tiny drawer.

According to the family lore, both the diamond and its crude silver setting had come from King's Riches, a valley in the Sierra Nevada that rose behind Cornucopia. King's Riches was a misnamed location if ever there was one. Miners, including Diane and Donna's great-great-grandfather, had tried and failed to make their fortunes in silver in the place that was now annexed to the national park, a destination for nature lovers. Fortunes were spent and lost in efforts to extract the precious metal from its ore, and winter avalanches routinely demolished the mines. In time, the prince was proven to be a pauper.

As for the diamond, well, no appraiser had ever believed the uncut stone had actually come from King's Riches, because so few of the gems had ever been documented there.

But the family myth persisted, mainly because it couldn't be refuted. Great-Great-Grandpa Hall, it was said, found the two-carat rock in the rubble of the avalanche that destroyed the Ransom Mine. When he found it, he abandoned his duties at the neighboring Dynasty Mine and ran home to his wife, full of secret plans to stake his own claim as a diamond seeker. The day after his unauthorized departure, another avalanche crushed Dynasty.

Though no other diamond ever presented itself to Grandpa Hall and he died an underweight, working-class man, he believed the stone to be a talisman and refused to sell it. Until Donna, his descendants respected his thinking. And until Diane, no one feared that the pendant might cause far more trouble than good.

Donna had been less interested in the history of the piece than in its potential to bring in enough money for the prom dress and accompanying “night to remember” that she wanted: that is, the kind that no one else in Cornucopia could afford.

Diane's discovery of the pilfered jewelry prompted an immediate fight, the twins head-to-head in the triangular light of the nightstand's tiny lamp. Diane's best friend, Juliet Steen, sat next to her on the bed, lending courage. Diane dangled the necklace between them, and Donna snatched it away.

“You
stole
it?” Diane accused.

“No, I said, ‘Grammie, I need to buy a dress. May I pawn the family heirloom?' You're such a retard, Diane.”

Juliet. “That's an immature and inaccurate accusation.”

Donna scoffed.

Diane. “I can't believe you stole it. From Grandma!”

“Of course you can't. You have no imagination.”

“Do too.”

“Ugh.”

Juliet. “Diane has enough brains to avoid a life of crime. But you'll go to jail, Donna. Be careful.”

Loyalty was one of Juliet's many stellar qualities. What she lacked in intuition she made up for in unflagging faith. Also, she was prettier than Donna and also got better grades, which gave Diane much needed clout with her popular sister.

Donna. “Even if I'm found out, the worst I'll get is a lecture.”

Diane. “If I were you I'd at least feel guilty about it.”

“Big surprise there. You feel guilty about eating cookies. What good is this thing for besides a few boring stories around the Christmas dinner table? We don't even need it anymore. We have pictures of the thing. We've heard the tale a gazillion times. You and I both could tell it in our sleep.”

“It has sentimental value to Grammie. And maybe even . . .

good luck.”

“Tell me you're not superstitious.”

Juliet. “Of course she's not. She's compassionate.”

Diane frowned, angry at her sister's complete lack of common sense and respect. “It wasn't yours to take.”

“Please. Miss Holier Than Thou.”

“You're being selfish, Donna.”

“Hardly. Do you know how much this thing is insured for? Grammie will report it stolen and the insurance company will pay her at least as much as the pawn shop will pay me for it. I've just doubled its value! Grammie will still have her pictures and stories and I'll have my dress and we'll all be happy. All of us but you.”

“I can be happy. Buy me a dress too.”

Juliet. “Diane! No!”

Diane ignored her. “You'll still get enough money for what you want.”

“What do you need a dress for? You're not going to prom.”

“I haven't decided yet.”

“You don't have to, fortunately, because if you
had
a choice, you wouldn't be able to make up your mind in time, I'm sure.”

Juliet. “That's just mean.”

Diane. “I do too have a choice!”

“Between what? Staying home or going stag? No one's going to ask you. And if you ask anyone . . .” Donna rolled her eyes.

It was no difficult choice at all back then to bring her sister off her high horse by hiding the diamond until after prom night.

That incident, however, was not what gave Diane pause as she stood in the bedroom today. The memory opening up in her mind was that Juliet knew everything. Telling Juliet of her plans to hide the diamond had resulted in Juliet's court-ordered testimony against Diane when the time came. Juliet had spoken to the jury with tears and compassion in her voice, clearly torn over whether honesty or friendship was the greater value. She'd lied about one thing, though: no one ever did find the necklace buried in the park across the street, where she suggested Diane had hidden it.

This caused Diane to wonder. Had Juliet intervened? She knew Diane had put the diamond in this window seat, and she had access to it, and she seemed to believe back then that Diane was as much a victim as an instigator in the tragedy of Donna's death. Was it possible that she had exercised her own justice by taking the necklace away from the Halls?

There were other possible explanations, of course. Even so, Diane's next decision was to find Juliet Steen.

CHAPTER 13

“Let me buy you a cup of coffee,” Jack said to Audrey, pointing down Main to the Honey Bee as they exited Rise and Shine.

“Coffee's free at our place,” Audrey said. “We could drag a table into the back—”

“I think some neutral ground is in order, don't you?”

She neither answered nor refused to follow him down the block. Her complexion was pale, though; her forehead shiny with perspiration on this crisp fall morning that had managed to stay clear of fog.

Neither God nor the criminal justice system always operated as reasonably as Jack expected them to. The criminal justice system he could forgive. It was an operation designed by men and run by men and as such was prone to inefficiencies, red tape, politicking, and garden-variety sinful-nature flaws.

God, however, had no excuse. There was no reason for him not to reveal the location of Jack's wife, to save her from evildoers, to redeem this disaster and rescue her spiritual self from an eternity of damnation. Jack had earned such an outcome for her and for himself. He was a righteous, religious man who obeyed God and repented of all his mistakes. Since his wife's disappearance he had examined his heart and found no darkness in it, no cause for corrective spiritual discipline of this magnitude. Still, there was no sign of Julie.

Heaven's silence on this matter had begun to rankle, and Jack's mind turned to alternative explanations for the woman's disappearance. The most obvious was that someone else had sinned, and he and his wife were victims.

Jack believed he knew that someone's name, but he couldn't satisfy the legal requirement of probable cause. His superior, Captain Wilson, had barred Jack from the case because of his personal connections to it. Standard procedure. Though Jack understood this, he was the city's ranking detective, and removing him from the case was like tying the right hand of the department behind its back.