The Baker's Wife (8 page)

The door was nearly closed. Through the inch-wide crack he saw the unmade bed. His fingertips pushed the door open, and it swung freely, silent onto a room deathly still.

The nightstands labeled which side was whose: by the walk-in closet, his Bible, his reading glasses, his alarm clock. He opened the small drawer. His personal firearm was still there. On the other side of the bed, by the window that overlooked the backyard, Julie's table was nearly hidden by notes, earrings, and lotions. Miralee, frozen in a rare smile, looked out at him from a small glittering frame. A tower of novels on the floor leaned toward the wall. Three bottles of pills—antibiotics taken as a precaution to ward off the postoperative infection, a painkiller, and what Julie had said was an anti-inflammatory—stood capped next to a glass of water. Jack thought this third bottle was an antidepressant, though his wife denied it. He ought to finally look it up.

All her clothes and shoes, except for her favorite pair of walking shoes, which she wore almost daily, seemed to be in the walk-in closet. The suitcase stood in the corner. The dresser was full of pants and T-shirts.

Her makeup was spread out on the bathroom counter. The shower stall held droplets of water.

Jack returned to Julie's nightstand, because something about it seemed off. He studied it the way he used to play memory games, which he always won, when he was a kid. It took a minute, but then he figured out what was missing: an ugly old necklace that looked like it had been made by a child, a yellowish rock surrounded by a silver donut.

A neighbor, an aging man whose wife had died recently, gave Julie the piece just a few months ago. The couple had a soft spot for her. She had claimed it was an uncut diamond, to which Jack had said if it was she should trade it up for something more attractive. Instead, she hung it from her lampshade, where the sight of it would rankle him. He understood perfectly: the necklace wasn't even worth its sentimental value.

In the face of its absence, however, his confidence faltered. Could the rock have been a diamond after all?

There was no other sign of anything amiss except his wife's decision—at age forty-two, after twentysome years of responsible, if unspiritual, living—to abandon responsibility and common courtesy for a day.

But this simple possibility failed to explain the scooter accident and the blood and the absence of a body. Jack rubbed his eyes and sat on the edge of the rumpled bed. There would be no rest for him yet, not until he made contact with Julie.

Where to look next?

He glanced at his Bible, the only book he had never been able to convince Julie to read. It was his sorest complaint about her: a close-mindedness to the things of God, and he prayed daily that God would confront her sins head-on. If she could understand the way the world worked, she would be less depressed from time to time. God said it plain as day: live one way and your life will be rewarded, live another way and reap the consequences. It was simple. They lived in a world governed by spiritual rules and regulations that yielded good or bad outcomes, depending on whether one was a follower or a rebel.

Because Jack had chosen the right way to live, he had great faith that one day Julie would come to church with him, sit next to him, and redeem this one mark against him as an elder of the church, namely, that his wife was stubbornly agnostic. Then they would be complete, the way a husband and wife were meant to be, and their lives would be better, because the half of it that was her responsibility would improve.

Jack stood, because if he stayed seated on the mattress a second longer he would sink into it and not wake for a day, or until Julie leaned over him, shaking him by the shoulder because the precinct needed him.

The landline rang again. The closest receiver was in Jack's den. Neither he nor Julie saw the point of a phone in the only place they could protect their sleep. He returned to the den and answered.

“Yeah.”

“Jack, this is Ellen Stone again.”

“Hi, Ellen. She still not at school?”

“She's not. I thought I'd check one more time before I get a substitute in.”

Jack noticed that the office window was open a few inches. His eyes lingered on the gap while he wondered if Julie would have opened this window—she preferred to work on her laptop at the dining room table, not in here—and if she had, whether she would have left it open.

He said, “I'd go ahead and do it if I were you. I'm just home from work, and all her school stuff is still here at the house.”

“Oh dear.”

“No, no, I'm sure it's nothing. I was just about to call her doctor, see if maybe something came up suddenly, you know, with the surgery and all.”

“Of course.”

“I'll let you know as soon as I learn something.”

“There's a rumor going around that she was in an accident downtown—”

“Just a rumor. Someone stole her scooter, got in a mess with it in the fog. But she wasn't involved.”

“What a relief. For Julie, I mean.”

“Thanks, Ellen.” There was nothing to be thanked, but it was a good technique for getting out of a conversation while making the other person think they'd contributed something important.

He hung up and reached for his computer's power button.

The machine was already turned on, though he always turned it off before shifts. Julie had her own laptop. The monitor came alive after he jiggled the mouse.

A document was open on the screen, untitled and unsaved, a sheet of electronic paper, blank except for one sentence:
Some
crimes never see justice
.

Jack lowered himself onto the chair. The proclamation was caffeine on his brain. Only a few months ago these words had come from his very own mouth. He spoke them of Geoff Bofinger, on the day he convinced the elder board that their pastor had violated his promise to be their spiritual leader and should be sent away.

The crime: the taking of a human life. When that predator Ed took advantage of Miralee and got her pregnant, it was Geoff who had given her the money for an abortion. The arrogant man abused his power, thought he could save his son's face, avoid a scandal, send Miralee away. But those spiritual laws that governed the universe could not be denied, and Jack learned the truth the day he found Miralee sobbing on the bed in her room, days before she left Cornucopia.

Some crimes never see justice
, he had said to the elders. The seduction of his only child and the murder of his grandbaby would never be prosecuted in this world's courts. He had pointed to Geoff at the head of the table where they had gathered and said,
But that doesn't free us from our moral responsibilities
.

The Bofingers were released from their duties at the church within the week.

The cursor blinked at the end of the line.

Jack reached for his keyboard, then hesitated. Whoever had typed this might have left prints. He glanced at the open window. He would dust that too. Out in the garage he had the powders and brushes he needed from an old kit.

He got up to retrieve these items, then stopped in the doorway. Procedure. What was the best way to close all the loopholes on the monster who had broken into his home and done something to his wife? Sitting here dusting his own keyboard was not it. Someone else could do that for him. He pulled out a phone and placed a call to Rutgers. Jack needed to be out there looking for Julie. Who better than he to bring her back into the safety of his leadership and spiritual shelter?

He had a pretty good idea where to start the search.

CHAPTER 7

Diane had been on her way to liking Geoff, because of his strange decency toward her, but when he told her she would have to give that cell phone to the police officer in charge of the investigation, she wondered if that was his way of telling her he regretted his kindness. Couldn't he see the problem? Couldn't he understand how a police officer would view her, a killer in possession of a missing woman's phone?

She had found her way back to this heartbreak home of hers for only one reason, and that was not so she could return directly to jail.
Do not pass Go, because you are so pathetic you can't even
make it one time around the block without getting into trouble. Do not
collect two hundred dollars, because you are worthless and undeserving
of everything, including your measly hope
.

Though true and familiar, the thoughts angered her as she sat at her little table in the warm corner of the bakery while customers came in and out, gossiping about the accident and finding excuses to linger. Then she decided that her anger was actually about the prospect that she would have to leave this place sooner than she wanted, while what she needed was directly upstairs. So close.

She wondered when the policeman might come inside. Geoff said he would come in to speak to them again before he left, but it seemed the man had already gone. It was after eight o'clock now, and still she had not worked up her nerve to run.

Would
anyone
believe her story, that she had seen the phone fall off the scooter and slide toward the street gutter several blocks away from the accident? Would a detective believe that she had picked it up thinking she could give it back? Would he believe that she didn't even know how to use it?

Of course not.

Diane watched Geoff move back and forth between the kitchen and bakery, filling baskets and slicing loaves of bread. A cute little Mexican grandma ruled the kitchen as if it were her castle. Geoff's son, a handsome athletic type, worked the register, and the wife Audrey made coffee, still wearing Diane's bulky clothes.

Diane wondered about the wife, who had done something to the phone after realizing whose it was but then failed to wipe it off. Bright-shiny device like that was a fingerprint database! Her own prints were visible to the naked eye on the edges where she'd so gingerly handled it. Even Diane knew what to do about
that
. Geoff hadn't touched the thing, then made the mistake of trusting that she would turn it over to the detective on her own.

When was the last time someone had trusted her?

Audrey had seemed startled by the discovery of the phone, and Geoff seemed to be anticipating a disaster he could not prevent. Whatever catastrophe those two were headed toward, she couldn't afford to become entangled.

The detective's failure to appear became a sign to her that she could choose her next steps of her own free will. She'd given him a fair amount of time to show up.

At eight fifteen there were half a dozen customers in the store. When she believed she could leave unnoticed, Diane picked up the phone and used the cotton T-shirt under her sweater to wipe down the edges where she'd handled it. She put her uneaten baguette into her backpack. The tissue liner in her basket was a tiny bit greasy. She shook out the crumbs and wrapped the phone in it, then set the bundle in the pack next to the baguette.

Without the clothes, her burden was light. She left the bakery quickly and slipped into the fog, which was less dense now. The moist air would do what it wished, and though science could explain some of it, no one could control it. She moved away from the scene of the accident. She had planned not even to look at it, but then she thought that ignoring it so totally might be more suspicious than a quick glance.

She looked without seeing. Counted
one, two, three
, then returned to her straight-ahead march.

Five doors down from the bakery storefront there was an alley access through a parking lot on the other side of the watch repair shop. At least it had been a watch repair shop when she and Donna last used the shortcut. Diane had no idea what it was now and didn't care enough to look when she passed it. Her breathing and her pace were too fast. She needed to concentrate on measuring both, even if the fog did shield her somewhat from anyone who happened to be looking.

It was longer for her to go this way, but safer, farther away from the accident that the baker's wife had caused.

Diane passed through the shadowy parking lot and made her way to the back of the buildings, where she emerged into the alley. In the center of the passage, halfway between where she was and the bakery, was a storm drain with a grate on it that had swallowed many of her precious quarters and Super Balls over the years. Once Donna had even crammed her sister's ice-cream sandwich down the drain, petty revenge for Diane's failure to return a favorite pair of jeans. A bully had ruined them when he ambushed her with a paint gun.

The grate was plenty airy enough to accept a cell phone that was smaller than a deck of cards.

The risen sun still hadn't found its way over the tops of the buildings that shared the alley. But the light was gray enough and her memory vivid enough to allow her to proceed.

Her foot left asphalt and landed on metal exactly where she expected. She knelt, lowered her pack, and unzipped it before she realized that the sieve-like grate had been replaced sometime in the past two and a half decades by a solid manhole cover.

Diane swore.

The cover would not come up. Of course it wouldn't. Not without a hook or a magnet or whatever newfangled thing they used these days to pry metal disks out of the street.