Within hours of Julie Mansfield’s disappearance, business at the bakery was noticeably up. As the trend stretched out into Friday morning, it was hard for Ed Bofinger to avoid thinking cynically about why. People who before had bought only a loaf of bread now purchased a pastry and a cup of coffee too, then bombarded Ed with repetitious questions and suspicious gazes.
“Just keep doing what we set out to do,” his dad instructed Ed when he grew impatient with a girl who asked for a spare paper cup with the Rise and Shine logo. “It doesn’t matter why they’re here, only that we’re good servants while they’re our guests.”
Come on, Ed thought. The girl wanted the cup for a souvenir “in case the owners did it after all.”
Groups of gossipers gathered, speculating like nosy small-town bloggers. A few people took pictures of the view of the intersection from inside the window, or the view into the window from the intersection, and sometimes of his parents working behind the counter. Sometimes his parents even dared to smile and pose with their guests, then offered to post prints on their wall, as if the place were a celebrity hangout.
Someone started a rumor that the upstairs apartment was haunted, that someone had been murdered up there, and that perhaps it was the place where Julie Mansfield was tied up and being starved to death. Or worse. Even though Detective Mansfield and other investigators had been upstairs for a look at least twice, the Bofingers and that new employee—well, volunteer—Diane, had to be vigilant about keeping the door to the rear stairs locked.
Diane was a hard worker and washed the cups until they were spotless, but she didn’t say much and never looked Ed in the eye.
But perhaps the worst rumor, and the shortest lived, because it proved to be terribly true, was delivered to the bakery on the quiet lips of Leslie Wood, one of Julie’s calculus students at Mazy High.
Ed was behind the counter putting a loaf of honey-wheat through the slicer midmorning when he noticed the high school senior at a table at the edge of the room. She sat like a resting moth, silent and inconspicuous, preferring no attention. She’d come in every Saturday since the bakery opened and always took the same table. After placing an order for a croissant and espresso, she’d eat, drink, read, and leave, all without saying another word.
He noticed her today because it was Friday, and because she’d settled in without ordering anything. He supposed the disappearance of her teacher might have disrupted her routine. Her gaze rested on him while he worked, as it had often in the year before his graduation. Her studious attention had always suggested to him that she thought she was invisible. She stared flagrantly, innocent and childlike, mainly because he ignored her. No senior basketball star would give her the time of day, especially not one like Ed, who was dating someone like Miralee. This is what Ed thought Leslie thought, anyway. So he pretended not to notice the brainiac’s crush, even though it did feed his ego.
Today her admiration made him uncomfortable. Her relative innocence was superior in most ways to his life experience. A girl like that needed to be protected from a guy like him.
A heavy textbook lay open on the table in front of her.
Ed’s mother came out of the kitchen and noticed Leslie immediately. “Good morning!” Audrey called out. His mom was a little more cheerful than average, Ed thought, which was usually only the case when she was feeling under the weather. He looked at her face. It did seem strained, but days of trouble this complicated could do worse to a person.
Leslie took Audrey’s cheer as an invitation to approach the counter. She scooted her chair back and tried to avoid the woman who had ordered the loaf Ed was bagging. “It isn’t really,” she whispered. “Not for Mrs. Mansfield anyway, wherever she is. I thought you needed to know. Hi, Ed.”
“Hey, Les.”
“The team really stinks without you this year.”
He thanked her by smiling. He knew that the team was already 3 and 0, which was a better start than they’d had last season. Ed sealed the sliced and bagged bread with a twist tie. His mother wiped down the espresso steamer with a wet rag.
“Know about what?” Audrey asked. “Is there news about Julie?”
“I think she’s dead,” Leslie said in such a low voice that Audrey left the coffee machine to stand closer.
“What did you say, honey?”
“All that blood was hers.”
Ed’s customer took the bread, laid it on the counter, returned her wallet to her purse and then slowly zipped it closed. The women at the table in the center of the room were silently examining the crumbs in their baskets. Talking to each other would have drowned out Leslie’s voice.
“Bit early for lunch break, isn’t it?” Ed said lightly.
“It’s a teachers’ in-service day.”
The conversation stalled until the woman at the counter ran out of things to do to cloak her eavesdropping. She departed slowly while Ed scooped a croissant onto a plate for Leslie.
“I love those,” she said.
“I remember,” he answered, which was a dumb thing to say because it struck the poor girl speechless.
“Who’s saying Mrs. Mansfield is dead?” Audrey finally asked, freeing Leslie’s tongue.
“Oh”—she tore her eyes away from Ed—“Casey Wilson, who you probably don’t know because he was a freshman last year, well, he’s a sophomore now and he’s also the son of Captain Wilson, who’s Sergeant Mansfield’s boss at the police station. He put a rush on the forensics because it affects one of their own— you know how they are about that kind of thing. Well, Casey said that his dad said that the blood they found in the street Wednesday is most definitely Mrs. Mansfield’s, they matched her DNA and everything, and Dr. Wheeler, who consults for the force sometimes and was out here last week when they needed a reliable measurement of how much blood there was, he said there’s no way someone could have lost that much blood and lived.”
“That’s terrible news,” his mother said, and she looked even more pale than she had a second ago. “I really hope it’s not . . . the whole story. I’m Audrey Bofinger.” She leaned out over the counter, extending her hand to Leslie.
“This is Leslie Wood,” Ed said. “Senior at Mazy. Math whiz.”
“I’ve seen you around,” Audrey said. “Nice to finally meet you.”
The girl seemed to shake his mother’s hand without actually touching her fingers.
“I’m very sorry about your teacher,” Audrey said. “This must be a really rough time for all her students, the whole school.”
“But your family hates her! How can you be sorry?”
“We don’t hate her, Leslie,” Ed said.
“I thought—”
“You can’t believe everything everyone says.”
His mom said, “Leslie, do you want an espresso? Then maybe you and I can sit down and talk.”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea.” She turned to Ed. “Can you sit with us?”
“Can’t. Customers.”
Audrey picked up a demitasse cup.
Leslie leaned toward Ed and lowered her voice. “They’re saying your parents plotted to kill Mrs. Mansfield.”
“They didn’t.”
“What can you say to such an awful accusation? But I can see why people believe it. After the whole saga of you and Miralee, and the church and all.”
“That’ll be $4.48,” Ed said.
Leslie pulled a five out of the pocket of her hoodie. “I mean, she’s the reason why you’re not at college right now, isn’t it? Because you couldn’t keep your grades up after it came out that Miralee was pregnant, that the whole academic probation thing was killer, and Davis reneged its acceptance of you.”
Ed put her change on the counter and pushed it at her. He let his eyes convey annoyance that would’ve been rude to put into words.
“Oh no. I’m sorry, Ed. I’m a terrible person, the most insensitive in the world.”
Her embarrassment was so genuine that he gave her the benefit of the doubt. “No, you’re not. You’re just supersmart.”
“About facts, maybe, but I’m always forgetting how people must feel.”
“It’s okay.”
“I’m so, so sorry.”
His mother carried the espresso around the end of the counter. She gave Leslie the tiny ceramic cup and started speaking out of Ed’s earshot as well as everyone else’s. Leslie glanced over her shoulder at Ed. Her eyebrows formed a peak of regret that wrinkled her high forehead.
Ed turned away and went into the rear of the kitchen. His father was carrying a sack of flour from the receiving door into the pantry. Their eyes passed over each other’s in that way of people who are pretending not to know, or not to have seen, or not to have heard. Ed had noticed but never understood that look before Miralee’s pregnancy. Now he saw it in everyone, and most frequently in his father. Most days he believed his dad hadn’t paid for her abortion. His father had never lied to him. And he thought his dad believed Ed didn’t know about the pregnancy before it was too late. But Ed had lied to his father once or twice, and that might have affected Geoff’s opinion of him.
Ed went back to help heft in more of the fifty-pound sacks, which Estrella’s husband would have delivered sometime during the morning rush.
Ed had nearly become a father himself. Or was a father, based on his own belief that life began at conception. And, having become a father, what did that change in his relationship with his own dad? Everything, it seemed. The more difficult question that plagued Ed was this one: was he still a father, now that the baby was dead?
It was a question God wouldn’t answer, and Ed saw that as part of his deserved punishment. God was holy, and his expectations were high, and his grace wasn’t a license to get through life scot-free. Ed accepted this; he was mature enough to own up to his mistakes, even if he still didn’t understand how or why loving Miralee Mansfield had turned out to be such a beast of an error.
Leslie was right about that much, at least. If everyone else was thinking the way she was, his mother’s simple traffic accident would soon become a twisted melodrama.
With a sack on his shoulder, Ed passed his father, this time not making eye contact. In the pantry he dropped the heavy load of flour onto the floor so that it stood on end in its own little cloud of fine dust. He returned to the kitchen.
“She ees a good girl, mijo,” Estrella said as he passed her where she stood forming white dough into loaves shaped like rugby balls.
“What?”
“She say all the wrong words, but she come here for the right reasons, no?”
“Who, Leslie?”
“Who else would fit thees description?”
Ed covered up his anxieties with a weak smile. “And what makes Leslie Wood so perfect?”
“What I say about being perfect? Nada. I said your mama needs right now to know some things before the police know she knows. Thees what I said.”
“Wow. Okay. I think I know what you just said.”
“Ees a nice thing for a girl to do for you.”
“I thought you said it was for my mama.” Ed elbowed her arm.
“What’s for mama ees for the whole family. You should know thees at your age!”
He laughed. “Yeah, I know. But things are about to get complicated.”
“Sí, I hear thees word a lot lately, comp-lee-cate-ed.”
“You say it like it tastes bad.”
“Ah no. What can I say? People would feel better if they eat more bread. Like thees one.” Estrella waived a flour-coated hand toward Leslie. “Should she ever turn down a warm croissant on a plate, I would know her character immediately. Her heart ees less complicated than most.”
Diane stopped at the table to pull the dirty stainless-steel bowls off the lower shelf for washing.
Estrella set aside another formed loaf and said to her, “Thees ees correct, yes, Diane? You agree? One should never turn down warm bread.”
From Ed’s point of view, Diane seemed to be a mere blink away from tears at all times, though he’d never actually seen her cry. She gave them both a panicked glance as if acknowledging she’d heard the question might oblige her to answer it. She ducked her chin to her chest and marched the pans back to the sink.
“See? She agrees.”
“Leslie just has a crush on me, Estrella, that’s all.”
“Aha! Proof that I am right. And that ees all I have to say about that for now. Do you hear me?” Ed opened his mouth, and Estrella said, “Because if I think you are not hearing me I can talk for longer than I can bake bread.”
“I hear you.”
“That girl ees worth your attention. Don’t pretend she ees not.”
“Okay! Okay!”
“So I am done with you now. Go. I am busy, and you have customer.” Estrella nodded toward the register.
“And you have a cat,” Ed said, pointing at the stray, who had come in with his father’s last load of flour. That animal was always looking for an in.
“Breakfast time!” she said. “Here, kitty. Let me wash off thees dough.”
The man standing at the counter was tall and trim and completely familiar to Ed. “Coach,” Ed said, unspeakably embarrassed to be standing in front of Nolan Henderson in a flour-dusted apron instead of a basketball uniform.
“Ed, how are you?”
“Been better.”
“It’s been awhile.”
“Yeah.” Of course, Ed had gone out of his way to avoid anyone he knew since losing his scholarship. That had proven harder than usual this week.
“I’m sorry to hear what your family’s going through.”
Ed nodded, a little offended that Coach was fishing for information. The man should speak to Leslie. “It can’t be easy for all of you at Mazy right now either,” Ed said.
“No, true. Everyone likes Julie. We’re all worried, of course.”
In the silence that followed, Ed could not summon the courage to say We’re hoping for a good ending to this story or I’d rather be anywhere but standing here in front of you right now or I’m so sorry I let you down.
“What can I get you?”
“Large black coffee and one of those onion bagels. Cream cheese on the side.”
Ed cleared his throat. “You want that toasted?”
“Please.”
Coach put his cash on the counter while Ed went through the motions of pulling things together.
“You playing any ball these days?”
“Not much.” Ed kept his back to the man while the bagel went through the toaster belt. The glowing conveyor warmed his face. “Heard it was an in-service day for all of you.”
“Well, the boss doesn’t mind if some of us do our service out. But listen, Ed, there’s a men’s basketball league that meets Saturday nights at the community center. You ought to come play with us sometime.”
“Okay. I’ll think about it.” But he decided right away that he’d never show up. He placed the items on the counter in front of his former mentor.
The man took them in hands large enough to palm a beach ball. Ed thought they shook slightly. But that was only his imagination, wasn’t it? Everyone knew Coach was a recovering alcoholic, and it was low of Ed to wish that someone had bigger problems than his own right now—problems that would divert some unwanted attention. Nolan Henderson was admired by all of Cornucopia for overcoming, for doing good by the kids he trained, and for winning two state championships in the years he’d been at Mazy.
“We all hit tough times now and then,” Coach said. “It’s easier if you don’t go it alone. Speaking from experience.”
Ed nodded once. He watched his former coach walk across the room to an empty table and eat his breakfast in solitude. Quite alone.