Chapter 17
The next morning, I was back at Yeast of Eden. Business was still slow, but a tiny bit better than it had been before the funeral. People had short memories. They also had other things to spend their time worrying about.
It also helped that the Santa Sofia Daily had written an article about the women Josh Prentiss had bamboozled. That went a long way toward discrediting the idea that the bread shop had anything to do with his death.
We’d adjusted our bakes, so by mid-afternoon, we were close to sold out. The bells tinkled as the door opened. A woman appeared. The sunlight backlit her, obscuring her face for a moment, but as she stepped inside, I immediately recognized her. Tracy Prentiss, Josh’s widow.
She scanned the shop. When her eyes landed on me, they stayed put. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi.” I didn’t think she was here to buy bread, but it seemed easiest to act like I did. “What can I get for you? Stock’s a little low at this time of day, but—”
“I don’t want any bread,” she said.
“Oh.” I blinked. So much for feigning happenstance.
“You’re Ivy Culpepper?”
“Yes,” I said, wary. What could Josh Prentiss’s widow want with me?
“You were at my husb—” She stopped. Started again. “At Jo—” She closed her eyes for a long second, then finally said, “You were at the funeral.”
“I was. Jo—er, he came in here almost every day to work.”
She scoffed. “To work. That’s a riot.”
I tried to school my expression so I wouldn’t show my surprise at her bluntness. This woman was hurt and angry. The notion that she was a murderer flitted through my mind. She’d been betrayed by her husband, not just with an affair, but with a series of affairs. Very intentional affairs. And from what I’d gathered from Sharon and the other women at the funeral, there had been fraud, too. So Tracy’s husband had been both a cheat and a thief. And a cougar hunter, as Mrs. Branford and I had discovered.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Prentiss, can I help you—”
“Don’t call me that.” she said.
“Oh. Um, of course.”
“I can’t . . . I told my kids I can’t keep the name. I’m going back to McCall. I know conventional wisdom says you should keep the same name your kids have, but Brendan and Beth are old enough to understand. Their father betrayed me. He betrayed them, too.”
“Of course,” I said again.
“Go,” Zula said, pushing me out from behind the counter. “Go sit.”
It was the end of the workday for the front of the bakery. Olaya and her small afternoon team were finishing up the afternoon bakes. Olaya had several contracts with restaurants in town, including Baptista’s Cantina & Grill and the brand-new Sofia’s Chophouse. Business was better, but Zula could easily handle the customers who might trickle in.
I led Tracy Prentiss, née McCall, to one of the tables. At the last second, I realized it was where Josh had always sat. I did an abrupt turn and maneuvered to an open spot by the window. She didn’t seem to notice the about-face and just followed me. We sat facing each other, and I waited for her to tell me what she wanted to talk to me about.
“I recognized you, but I couldn’t figure out from where. And then in the middle of the night, it came to me. I saw your name and photo in the newspaper when that murder at Eliza Fox’s house happened over the holidays. I found one of the articles online about it and tracked you to here.”
A little amateur sleuthing on Tracy’s part. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who’d missed her calling.
“Mmm hmm,” I said, hoping to encourage her to continue. I couldn’t fathom why she had sought me out.
She propped her forearms on the table, leaned in, and peered at me. “Did you . . . were you one of Josh’s—?”
Her meaning was instantly clear, even though she didn’t finish the question. I drew back sharply, waving my hands in front of me. “No. I wasn’t. I hardly knew him. He worked from here most mornings, that’s all.”
“Why here?” she asked, letting her gaze drift from one end of the bread shop to the other.
“The bread is excellent,” I said. Obviously. The bread was more than enough of a reason for someone to set up shop here.
Of course, there could have been more to it. He’d met Martina here. Maybe she hadn’t been the only “in real life” pickup. Maybe Yeast of Eden was the perfect hunting ground for a man seeking vulnerable women. Women like Kristin Spelling, I thought randomly. Women who didn’t have someone at home. Women who needed someone to bolster them up. Women who had time on their hands and no one to spend it with.
“He never liked to be holed up in an office or cubicle. Even when we first met, he liked to work from home, from the dining room table. I think he felt like he might get trapped, like his father left his family trapped.”
“His dad left them?”
She nodded. “He was a showman. In theater or something. He left his family. Such a cliché. Fell in love with the woman he worked with. It tore the family apart. Then Josh’s mom died. Josh went away to college and didn’t come back till we bought our house here. Inheritance and his early earnings. I never thought we should come back here, but it was like he needed to make new memories. Then again he was always gone, as if he was trying to escape his memories.”
“A bit of a conundrum,” I said. “Maybe he wanted one thing, all the while wanting something else at the same time.”
“Maybe,” she said. “All that time, I thought he was traveling. But no, he was off screwing other women and stealing their money. He was playing a risky game.”
Everyone had their baggage. Sounded like Josh had had a deadbeat dad. Maybe that had set him off on a self-destructive path.
“Was he always in . . . investments?” I asked.
“He was a financial planner,” she said. “He started as an accountant, but after he got his MBA, he moved into investments. He landed with Beacon. Lucky for him, because they didn’t make him stay in the office. As long as he brought in the clients. And he did. Josh grew up here—in Santa Sofia, but we met in LA. He was determined to get back here. To paradise, he always said.”
I thought about all the money those women had lost to Josh. There were probably others. Where was all that money now? Tied up in the Prentiss’s house in the hills? Bernie Madoff came to mind. I remembered the story, although the amount of money reportedly lost was so far beyond the scope of anything I could even comprehend. Sixty-five billion, from what I recalled. That made Josh Prentiss small potatoes, but Peggy’s fifty thousand and Sharon’s eleven weren’t peanuts to them. Jeanne P.’s retirement was most likely gone. Would Emmaline and York be able to follow the money trail and get it all back for them? Would Tracy Prentiss keep her house in the hills? I studied her now, wondering just how much she knew about her husband’s business dealings.
“Can I help you with something?” I asked, wondering what in the world she wanted.
Her upper lip curled with disgust. “Did he meet them here? Any of those women? Did he make a fool of me every single day?”
Ah. Now I understood. She’d already been humiliated by the discovery of her husband’s schemes. She didn’t want salt in the wound by finding out he’d met his marks in public. “Not that I ever saw,” I said, grateful that it was true. I didn’t want to lie to this woman, but I also didn’t want to make her feel worse than she already did.
“Small favors.” She frowned. “People are saying he was poisoned by something he ate here. Ironic, if this was also his safe place,” she remarked, making air quotes around the word safe. “We were going to reconcile, you know, but there was one woman . . .”
“Yes?” I prompted, trying to come across as nonchalant. She was talking about someone specific, not just one of the many her husband had wronged.
“I’m sure he screwed her over just like the others, but he took it too far with her. She fell in love, poor poor girl. Of course, the feeling wasn’t reciprocated.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Because she called me. She would sit there on the other end of the line and not say anything. Or she’d hang up. She harassed me.”
“Maybe she found out what he was doing,” I suggested.
She scoffed. “I think it was more than that. That woman called and called and called. She told me she loved him, and that he loved her. Now I’m not even sure if he was capable of love.”
“But he loved you and his kids.”
“Did he, though?”
“At one time, he must have.” I hoped he had, especially for the kids’ sake.
“If he did, could he have done this to me? To them? They’re going to be saddled with his stories. His women and his thieving.”
“They have you,” I said, hoping she wasn’t involved, so that her children wouldn’t become parentless.
“I found his burner phone. One of them anyway. He messed up and dropped it when he was playing catch with Brendan a few weeks ago. I heard it buzzing in the grass. Incoming texts that grew more and more frantic. By the time he realized and came back for it, I’d read all the texts between them. I broke that thing into a thousand little pieces. Oh, he was mad.” She cracked an almost maniacal smile. “Almost saw steam pouring from his ears.”
For a second, I thought of the weighted look that had passed between Josh and Martina when they’d crossed paths the morning of his death. Just as quickly as it had surfaced, it was gone. “Do you know the woman’s name?” I asked, holding my breath. Maybe she was Josh’s killer.
Another scoff. “Unfortunately, no. I just call her the home wrecker. One of many.”
I didn’t correct her by saying that, actually, Josh was the home wrecker—a bunch of times over. The women he swindled had had no idea he was married. Tracy was mad at the world, and nothing I said was going to change that.