The apartment over the bakery was small and predictable. Two bedrooms shared a wall and backed up to the alley. The hallway in front of these led to a tiny bathroom at one end and the door to the bakery’s back stairs at the other. Through the passage opposite the bedrooms was an eat-in kitchen that shared plumbing with the bathroom, and a square living space with the apartment’s only real feature: a wide corner window with a padded bench seat.
The view looked down onto the intersection of Main and Sunflower and all the simple lives that passed through it every day. Diane’s parents had been married fifty years ago in the well-kept park across the street, kitty-corner from the bakery. Many, many couples had been married at that park across the years.
Diane estimated that she had spent at least half of her childhood sitting in that window, and then she spent more than half her life in a windowless cell. Even so, she didn’t realize until she entered the room how much she had longed to see that view again. She came in from the hall, stepping lightly to avoid being heard below, and saw the curtains drawn and the space in front of them stacked to her chin with cardboard boxes four or five deep. Reaching for the wall switch, she flipped on an overhead bulb. Boxes, plastic storage tubs, empty flour sacks, and outdated kitchen equipment filled every inch except for a foot-wide path through everything and into the kitchen.
The shut-down view was no less disappointing to her than her shut-down life. Even if she could get through this wall of heavy boxes and pull the curtains back off the view again, she feared the exercise would be pointless.
No view, only a silver mirror of fog.
No new life.
No diamond pendant.
It was the pendant that she needed most of all. It was more important than the view or her life, because it was the pendant that was responsible for everything that had happened and was about to happen. Recovering it and returning it to its rightful owners was the only solution that had endured these twenty-five years, though she feared the rock would be long gone by now. For that matter, she didn’t even know if the people it belonged to were still alive.
What did she know at all, really? In that moment, her own stupidity smacked her into awareness. She might have kicked in that window over a baby’s bassinet, or dropped into the crib of a drug gang armed to the teeth. She might have frightened an old lady into her grave.
She might have come face-to-face with her own parents, and what then?
Diane sank onto a red plastic tub between the kitchen and the living room. She was not thinking far enough ahead to keep herself out of jail for very long. The Bofingers would find that broken window and the police would find the phone, and they’d all march up those stairs, cuff her up and cart her off just like last time, only now with a breaking-and-entering charge attached to yet another death. Because the person who had dropped the phone was most certainly dead; Diane’s bad luck dictated it.
She sat there, a dumb lump, within ten feet of what she’d come for. Even if she had time to move all those boxes, where would she put them?
She rested her cheek on her fist, weary and indecisive.
Diane had a vision of Geoff and Audrey Bofinger standing in the apartment’s open doorway, arms crossed, scowling at her as she sat in the mouth of the dark kitchen.
“I’m sorry for breaking your window,” she said to the illusion.
“Why didn’t you use the stairs?” Geoff said, and Diane shrieked at the sound of his voice. The couple were truly standing in front of her! Not scowling, but—she didn’t know how to read the serious expressions. Anger? Acceptance? Audrey propped the door open with a smaller cardboard box. Maybe she was afraid of being shut in with Diane.
“Please don’t call the cops,” Diane said.
The corner of Geoff’s mouth twitched, but she thought it was friendly rather than mocking. “I think the police will be in and out of here long after we wish they were gone.”
Diane stood. “They’re coming up here?”
“I was referring to their being in the bakery.”
“It was locked,” Diane said.
“The bakery?”
“The front door. Downstairs I mean. You asked me why I didn’t use the stairs.”
“Ah. That’s right. But why were you so desperate to get in?”
“I’ll pay for the window. As soon as I can.”
The kitchen counter formed a prop for Geoff’s backside as he crossed his ankles. “I’m not too worried about the window for now. Why didn’t you tell me what you needed the first time you tried to come up here?”
“I told you I just got out of prison.”
Audrey looked alarmed. “You didn’t tell me that,” she said to her husband.
“I didn’t think it was important. But I’m sorry.”
Both Diane and Audrey stood there blinking at him. Diane waited for one of them to ask what she had been in for, and for how long.
When they didn’t say anything, Diane filled the silence. “Sort of ‘just.’ It was two months ago, actually.”
Geoff said, “I’d like to hear the story sometime. But for now, why don’t you tell us what it is you need. Maybe we can help.”
Audrey said, “Geoff, she has a record and Julie’s phone. We can’t—”
“I don’t have that phone. Anymore.”
“But you didn’t give it to the detective like you said you were going to,” Geoff observed, and Diane wondered why his remark didn’t put her on the defensive in the same way that Audrey’s body language did.
“I’m trying to get back on track. I told you, I found the phone in the street, and I picked it up. I was curious. But no one will believe that. They’ll think I did something that I did not do. It’s always that way.”
Audrey said, “Were you trying to hide the phone up here?”
Diane decided that she would only talk to Geoff from this point on. She looked at him. “No! Not up here. But it fell out of my backpack and into the trash can, right before they picked it up. It’s just as well, right?”
“Not exactly,” Audrey muttered. At a glance from her husband, however, the woman softened.
“I needed a place to stay,” Diane said. “It looked like there might be rooms up here, someplace I could . . . get out of the cold.”
“It was an apartment at one time,” Geoff said. “But you can see we use it for storage now.”
“I can pay rent. Work a little? Wash your bathrooms, your dishes?”
“We really can’t afford—”Audrey started.
“No money, just a trade. Just for a little while. Until I can . . . move on.”
Geoff said to Audrey, “Maybe we can clean out the back bedroom. Make enough space for her to use the bathroom and the kitchen.”
“I really don’t think that’s wise.”
“I won’t steal from you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Audrey’s eyebrows went up. “That wasn’t top on my list of concerns.”
“Let’s give it a week,” Geoff said. “It won’t hurt us to help her out.”
“She’s already hurt us! Jack thinks we took that phone and killed his wife.”
“He hasn’t said that.”
“Geoff!”
He laid a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “This bakery is a place for second chances,” he said. “And not just for us.”
“We’re being fools,” Audrey said, glancing at Diane.
Shame flushed Diane’s cheeks. She had to agree.
“For all we know she had something to do with what happened to Julie.”
“I didn’t do anything. I don’t even know who Julie is!”
“Her name is Julie Mansfield,” Audrey said, and her teeth bit the words at the ends. “And she’s the detective’s wife. Jack Mansfield.”
Julie. And Jack. A good couple-name. Still, she didn’t know them.
“I’m really sorry,” Diane said. “But I didn’t have anything to do with it. I’ll . . . If you let me stay—just for a week?—I’ll talk with the detective and try to clear this up for you.” With any luck, she’d find the necklace and be gone before she had to do that. But if not, she would tell the truth. Maybe this one time, the truth would work in her favor.
Diane doubted her own thoughts and Audrey seemed to know it.
“I think you need to talk with Jack about whether you can stay.”
“But if you stay”—Diane believed Geoff emphasized the words for Audrey’s benefit—“it seems we might all be able to help each other out.”
Audrey licked her lips and backed off. She looked at her feet and nodded.
“I’m reliable,” Diane said, not sure why she picked that particular word.
“Good. Now, come on down with us and I’ll show you around, and tonight Ed and I will clear out the back room. I think we have some spare sheets for the bed that’s still back there, don’t we, Audrey?”
Audrey nodded again and, maybe because of her husband’s insistence that Diane was deserving, seemed to have a change of heart. Audrey took a step toward Diane and held out her hand.
“I’ll bring towels too, and I’ll wash your clothes.” Audrey indicated the shirt whose tails hung almost to her knees. “Please forgive my . . . reservations. This hasn’t been a typical morning for me by any stretch of the imagination.”
Diane matched Audrey’s firm squeeze, though she worried about how icy cold her own fingers were in Audrey’s warm grip.
“I understand,” she said. “If I were you I’d feel the same way.”