Chapter 8
“I’m being followed.”
California is a hands-free state, so I turned up the volume on my car’s stereo and spoke aloud in my car thinking maybe I’d heard wrong. “What did you say?”
Miguel’s voice boomed through the Fiat’s speaker system. “York is having me watched. I’m being followed.”
I reacted without thinking; my right foot moved from the gas pedal to the brake pedal. The car jerked. A horn blared behind me.
“Ivy?” Miguel’s voice again. “Are you okay?”
He was being targeted for murder, but he was worried about me. I hit the gas and straightened out the car, glancing in the rearview mirror and throwing up my hand in apology to the driver behind me. “I’m fine,” I said. “How do you know?”
“A guy was parked across the street from my house all night. Now same car is in the parking lot at the restaurant. They’re not being very stealthy. It’s like they want me to know they’re there. York really thinks I did this.”
An icy hand squeezed my heart. “I’m going to call Emmaline.”
“I already did,” he said. “I left her a message.”
She and Billy were probably out snorkeling or traipsing through a rain forest, which was exactly what they should be doing. Still, I wanted to hear her reassurance that York could be reined in.
I told Miguel about Nessa’s potential donor visitor. “I’m going to look into it,” I said.
“You think you can figure out who it was?”
“I’m going to try.” I’d made up my mind that a visit to Nessa’s husband was in order. “I’m going to go see her husband, Cliff.”
“I’m going with you, Ivy.”
“But the restaur—”
“I’ll put Mateo in charge. I can’t sit back while York tries to condemn me for a murder I didn’t commit.”
I’d have felt the same way. “I’m going to help Olaya for a while. Meet me at the bread shop at three?”
“Yep. I’ll get things squared away here and I’ll find out where Vanessa’s husband works.”
Not that it meant anything, but I noted that he’d called her Vanessa rather than Nessa. “Sounds good,” I said.
My knuckles turned white as I clenched my fists around the steering wheel. I tried not to think about the tail York had on Miguel as I drove to Yeast of Eden. It didn’t really work. Em wasn’t here to keep him in line. That meant it was up to Miguel and me to figure out what had happened to Nessa. Failure wasn’t an option.
I mulled over McLaine’s big reveal that Nessa Renchrik had met with a potential donor the day she’d died. Cliff Renchrik might be able to answer the question of who that donor was. I thought through the list of suspects I had so far, murmuring them to myself as I parked the car in the lot behind the bread shop. I walked to the back entrance. Not even the flower beds Olaya kept with vibrant hydrangea blooms, bursts of lavender, or the array of columbine, coral bells, bellflowers, and daisies could distract me. Any one of the people I’d written in my notebook was a more realistic suspect than Miguel Baptista.
And if it was true and Nessa met with a donor, that was yet another person to add to the potential suspect list—and someone else to pull Captain York’s attention away from Miguel.
By the afternoon, all the day’s normal baking was finished. These were the hours Olaya devoted to her other baking projects. She was contracted to make rolls for Sofia’s Steakhouse, the newest restaurant in town. She baked for Baptista’s three times a week. And she had several other regular customers. None of this included special activities. Catering, funerals, the annual Art Car show and ball. The list went on and on.
When I walked in the back door, Olaya stood at her baking station with a melamine cutting board, a chef’s knife, and a mound of vegetables. This was not an everyday sight at the bread shop. It was all for the van Dough focaccias. I looked around the kitchen Not a single loaf of bread remained on any of the bakery racks, I noted. Olaya’s bread was known for its healing properties. I’d have taken almost anything in hopes that a bite might relieve some of the worry clawing its way through my insides.
She glanced up at the mirror above her station, smiled, and started to say, “You are just in time,” but her smile faded and the words froze on her lips. She dropped her knife and turned to face me. “What is it?”
I hadn’t realized I wore every single emotion I was currently experiencing on my face to be read by her. “It’s Miguel.”
She wiped her hands on her apron, then swept her arm wide, gesturing to a stool. “Sit. Tell me. Miguel, is he all right?”
I perched on the stool, trying to school my expression. “For now,” I said. I filled her in on the tail Captain York had on him, ending with, “I’m worried. What if York doesn’t consider anyone else for the murder? What if he’s got Miguel in his sights and that’s that?”
“Then you will find the truth. There is nothing else to be done. You will find the truth.”
I drew in a deep inhalation. “I’ll find the truth,” I said, as if saying it aloud would make it so.
“Help me, Ivy,” she said, pointing to the stack of aprons.
Baking had become a soothing activity for me. I washed my hands and donned an apron with the Yeast of Eden logo. The logo was a simple oval. “Yeast of Eden” was written in a typed font with “Artisan Bread Shop” just below in an easy cursive. Clean and classic.
At the baking station next to Olaya, I shaped two focaccias while Olaya finished preparing the vegetables for the van Dough art. We each worked on one. Piece by piece, we pressed the greens from scallions into the dough to create flower stems. Basil leaves and thin bell pepper rounds with slices of olives in the center created the rest of the flowers. Slices of cherry tomatoes looked like bunches of berries. We used thin strands of red onion, slices of garlic cloves, and Kalamata olives to round out the design. For a while there, while I was designing, my mind stilled. The dilemma was still present, but things didn’t look quite so dire.
“Perfecto,” Olaya proclaimed. Before she slid the trays of focaccias into one of the preheated ovens, she spritzed them each with clean water from a spray bottle she kept in the kitchen.
Just as the oven door closed, a knock came on the back door. It opened and Miguel poked his head in before stepping inside. Olaya made a beeline for him. Miguel was six feet tall. Next to him, she looked tiny. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and he bent to accept her embrace. Finally, she patted his back and let him go. “M’ijo. It will all be okay.”
I smiled at her use of the word m’ijo, the endearment meaning “my son.” She hadn’t known Miguel well before I returned to Santa Sofia. Now, though, she thought of him as family.
I untied my apron and lifted it over my head, then washed my hands. “Go,” Olaya said, shooing us out of the bread shop’s kitchen and back into the parking lot. “Go find the truth.”