The Baker's Wife (11 page)

Estrella saw no point in postponing the work when there was little else for Audrey to do.

“Thees will take your mind off things,” Estrella said, pushing a wheeled bin full of oak wood to the far side of the kitchen where the oven stood. “A hundred thirty pounds of fuel for our oven, no more, no less.”

“I feel like I should be helping outside,” Audrey said, hiking up Diane's pants, unwilling to leave the bakery for something as unimportant as a change of clothes. Her husband and son were here. Jack was out there. It was warm in this bakery kitchen, and safe.

“They haven't found the person who was riding the scooter,” Audrey rambled. “It's been hours. I should help look.”

“And what can you do,
mija
? Are you better than police? Are you police dog?”

“No, but—”

“No! You are not—you are
baker
. Or will be when you learn thees oven. Your Geoff ees already good at it. So here.” Estrella gathered twigs the size of breadsticks and handed them to Audrey. “You stay with us, watch over your family until police tell you what else you can do. If you don't, they will be angry.”

Audrey couldn't disagree.

The jazzy choreography of wood-fired baking was quite different from the breezy waltzing that the Bofingers did around their little ovens at home. The wide brick structure with the small mouth was a complement to the bakery's industrial ovens, but because of its demanding nature, they used it only a couple of times a week. To run the oven, someone had to rise in the dead of night, build the fire, wait three hours for it to heat the bricks to 800° and then burn to ash, and then have the right dough ready at the right time for baking while the residual heat dissipated across the hours.

“We build fire today just for example,” she said to Audrey, “and then later I teach you the rhythm of getting the doughs ready at the right time. That ees much harder than building a fire.”

“It's complicated,” Audrey murmured.

“You only
think
ees complicated. Really, bread is simple— water, flour, salt, yeast. But you say, ‘How many ways can four ingredients go wrong?' Too many! Even so, we make them work, and when we do, we see that nothing in life ees really so complicated after all. Ees a matter of paying attention.”

“Paying attention to what?” Audrey said, noting Estrella's choice of words.

“What you mean, ‘what?' What you think? Time and temperature, technique, good ingredients—”

“You were talking about life.”

“No, I was talking about bread.”

“You said
life
gets less complicated.”

Estrella raised her eyebrows as if her friend had dared confuse the conversation on purpose, and this made Audrey laugh.

“Okay, let's play with fire,” she said.

“Sí.”
Estrella ignored the log she'd given to Audrey and fished a handful of dry tinder, pine fire starter, and sticks out of the side of the bin. She piled these together in the mouth of the oven and then lit the crude haystack with a match. “You no build it all at one time, like ees your fireplace at home, right? We start small, like Rise and Shine. We do just a few things, and we do them better than anyone else, and then we grow.”

She blew gently until the tinder had shriveled into glowing red curlicues, and flames tickled the twigs. With the patience of an artist, and while moving bread in and out of the conventional ovens, Estrella allowed the fire to swell and burn down into a bed of glowing charcoal. Then she grabbed a rod like a poker, but with a rectangular plate welded to the end, and pushed the burning pile into the center of the oven.

“Now bigger,” Estrella instructed, motioning for Audrey's collection of logs that were about two to three inches in diameter. Estrella stacked these atop the coals and fed the fire until Audrey could see it was ready for the baguette-sized logs in the bin, and then the ones as large as torpedo loaves.

The flames licked the higher bricks and made them sooty. Soon the other bricks closer to the floor began to turn white-hot.

“We let thees burn down,” she instructed. “And when that ees done we will sweep out the ash and seal in the heat.” Estrella pointed to a removable wood door that was soaked in water. The temperature of the oven would be measured up high at the flue. It would be a hundred degrees hotter there than on the floor of the oven. When the logs burned to ashes and were ready to be cleared out for the bread, that floor would be around 600°. This fire was the most satisfying source of the bakery's warmth.

Ed passed them, hauling a bag of trash out to the Dumpster in the alley.

“You just missed them,” Audrey said. “I heard the truck a few minutes ago.”

“I'm sure it'll keep until next week.”

He placed his backside against the crash bar on the rear door and pushed it open. Audrey saw Jack Mansfield standing outside before Ed did.

“Geoff,” she called in the direction of the register, where her husband was taking a customer's order. She caught his eye and motioned to the door. Then to Ed, “Go take the counter.”

By the time Geoff reached her at the back, she was holding Ed's trash bag and evaluating Jack's expression. Jack was hard to read even before their families had clashed. Afterward, he'd become downright hard-boiled, in Audrey's opinion. Now it appeared he was one degree away from boiling over.

A black-and-gray striped cat darted through Audrey's legs before she could move to stop it. The stray had been showing up regularly since Estrella started putting down bowls of cream for it.

“Estrella, your cat,” she called into the kitchen as she passed Jack to throw away the trash. Geoff caught the door as it drifted closed behind her. Glass under her sneakers made a grinding sound. She tossed the bag into the hollow Dumpster. The boom of it landing resounded in the alley.

Geoff said, “Front door's open to you. No need to lurk back here.”

“No one's lurking.” Jack pointed upward. “Saw that on my way in. Came back to have a peek.”

Audrey craned her neck. The window in the upstairs apartments, which they used for storage at present, was missing one of its panes.

“That must have happened recently,” she said.

Estrella appeared at the kitchen door and tossed the cat outside. He rushed back in, eluding her outstretched hands.

“When was the last time you were up there?” Jack asked.

Audrey looked at Geoff. “This morning, first thing,” he said.

“I'll have a look around, see if anything's missing, damaged.”

Jack made a move as if to walk into the bakery, but Geoff stepped out and let the door behind him close before Jack reached it.

“No need. You've got more important things to do right now. We'll take a look when things slow down in here.”

Jack crossed his arms, still looking upward. “I'd hate to see you two be the victims of a crime, after all you've already lost.”

Audrey held her tongue. If someone had turned her husband's car into an oil spot on the road and
he
were missing, she'd be a little cranky too.

“Because some crimes never see justice, do they, Geoff?”

“So you've said,” Geoff answered. Audrey cringed.

“It's a catchy truth,” Jack said. “Thought you might have picked it up and claimed it as your own.”

“What?”

“Throwing my words back at me now, are you?” Jack asked.

Geoff cleared his throat. “I'm not sure what you're saying.”

“I think we understand each other.”

“No, I'm afraid we don't.”

“‘The Lord is known by his acts of justice; the wicked are ensnared by the work of their hands.' ”

Audrey shivered at the sound of scripture coming from Jack's mouth. The words were right, but they sounded backward. A threat to her husband instead of a thanks to God.

Geoff said, “I can imagine how concerned you are for your wife—”

“No, you can't. Don't suggest that you know what's on my mind while this conniving, reckless woman stands right next to you.”

“Don't talk about my wife that way, Jack.”

“Don't talk about
my
wife then, unless it's to tell me where she is.”

“How could we possibly know?”

Jack turned his face to the sky and opened his arms. “ ‘Lord, who may dwell in your sanctuary? Who may live on your holy hill? He whose walk is blameless and who does what is righteous, who speaks the truth from his heart, who does his neighbor no wrong, and despises a vile man.' ” He pointed a finger at Geoff. “You, Plain Geoff, are a vile man. And I have never spoken anything but the truth.”

Geoff shook his head at Jack's pointed insult.

Audrey stepped closer to Jack and laid a hand on his arm. “Tell us what we can do, Jack. How can we help? You came by here for a reason.”

“Which of your prints am I going to find on the keyboard in my home office? Yours?” He shook off her hand. “Or yours, Geoff?”

“We've never been inside your home,” Audrey said, and a vision of the day she had walked across the Mansfield lawn popped into her mind's eye.

“Come back inside, Audrey. When he has something more substantive to talk about, he'll be back, I'm sure.”

It seemed impossible that she could feel sorry for this man who had made their family suffer so much, but at the moment she believed he was only acting out of his own anxiety. The gray smudges under his eyes seemed dark and drooping today, like his mouth. She credited Geoff's graciousness for preventing her from speaking to Jack's mean delusions with devastating retorts, because plenty were stockpiling in the back of her mind. Geoff opened the door, and she stepped across the threshold.

A phone rang with music like drums. Audrey spun toward the sound.

Jack was walking briskly to the Dumpster as if he expected Geoff or her to intercept him.

He hefted himself up over the lip, enough to lean into the nearly empty can and retrieve the bag Audrey had dumped. The phone stopped ringing. Jack threw the sack on the ground, leaned over it, and pulled the sides apart.

Trash scattered in the alleyway as Jack shook the mess out.

He kicked around in it with his shoe, and when he didn't see what he was looking for, he returned to the bin, looked inside again, then leaned against the outside until it shifted on its rusty wheels and rolled a foot or so away from its original position.

An object wrapped in paper lay on the ground. One long side had been torn, peeled back just enough to reveal a glossy black phone. Audrey recognized it as the one Diane had pulled out of her backpack. She looked at Geoff, questioning, and he shook his head.

Estrella appeared at the door holding a bowl of cream. The cat, tucked under her opposite arm, was already lapping at it. She set them both down in the alley and glanced at Audrey, then at Jack, before slipping back inside.

Jack withdrew his own phone and placed a call requesting someone with a camera. After he hung up, he pulled a paper-thin glove from his pocket and slipped his right hand into it. The material snapped at his wrist. He crossed an arm across his midsection and propped his elbow on it, striking a pose of thoughtful curiosity.

He mocked them, Audrey thought. They should tell him about Diane.

“What's your explanation for this?” Jack said.

Audrey's lips parted, but Geoff spoke first. “We don't have one,” he said, and he gently pulled Audrey back into the bakery and shut the door firmly on Jack's self-satisfied grin.

CHAPTER 10

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.