The Baker's Wife (17 page)

“Was she acting out of character lately? Withdrawn? Distracted?”

“I am telling you, she did not run off with some Don Juan. Think about it.” Jack faced off with his commanding officer. “If your wife was doing someone else, would she bother with a big stage production? How does a person pull something like that? Get up every morning waiting for thick enough fog to pull a fast one on a woman with close connections to her family? And where would the blood come from? Who wouldn't just leave?”

Wilson seemed to assess Jack's irritation silently, the way they evaluated persons of interest. He finally said, “Her colleagues at the school seemed to think she wasn't herself. She was late to class a couple of times the week before she vanished, didn't follow her usual routines.”

“She's been recovering from a surgery. It took a lot out of her.”

“Is that all?”

If Jack had been one to take the good Lord's name in vain, he might have done it then. “She loves her job, she loves those kids more than our own.”

“Really?”

“From where I sit.”

“Would she confide in your daughter if something were wrong between you?”

“No sooner than I would.”

“What do you mean?”

“Miralee's gone.”

“Freshman at UC Davis, right?”

“She might be in Arkansas for all I care. She makes her own way now, doesn't need us for anything.”

“You want to tell me what happened?”

“No, Captain, I want to end this conversation and
do
whatever it is you think can't be done. She would have left me a note. I'm talking about Julie. About your wild ideas. She would have sent an e-mail if she ran off, left a voice mail. She needs to have the last word that way. When she's angry.”

Jack interpreted Wilson's nod as an effort to appease the offense rather than an agreement. He exited the building and crossed the parking lot. Wilson followed.

“Had you been arguing? We've put you through some long hours lately—that last case—”

Jack swore. “Look, the only thing your theory explains is the missing body. That's all. It doesn't explain the blood, the threat left on my computer, all the evidence pointing to those imposters who can't decide whether they're going to run a church or a
bakery
. I'll believe they killed her and cut her to pieces on the spot and threw her into that medieval oven in the back of their kitchen before I'll believe some jerk made a fool out of me.”

“Most people who lose their jobs don't also lose their minds.”

“You want case histories on the few who do?”

“Our station is within blocks of the accident. There wouldn't have been time—”

“We don't know how much time actually transpired between the collision and their call.” Jack was yelling now. “It could have been a half hour, an hour. Whatever they wanted it to be.”

Wilson crossed his arms. “I understand how hard it is to think about your wife in these terms—”

“You underestimate me. I am the best detective you have. I know the victim better than anyone in this building.”

“The victim?”

“Yes,
the victim
. It's what we'd call her if she wasn't mine, isn't that right? Why do all of you assume I've left my brains on the side of the road and jumped off a cliff? Is that what you do when a crisis is fanning flames up your nose? I can work this case. You need fresh eyes. Let me do what I'm good at.”

“No.”

Jack kicked a tire before he yanked open the car door and slipped behind the steering wheel. Wilson prevented him from closing the door. He leaned in over Jack's left shoulder.

“You are my best, Jack. But it's impossible for you to do your best work in this moment. I put you on this, and we run the risk of screwing up the most important case of your life. You'd tell me the same thing.”

Jack put his key in the ignition and cranked it.

Wilson continued. “Also, you're locked onto only one possibility, and the evidence just doesn't support it.”

“Your evidence is even thinner than mine.”

“I'm not making a case, I'm just asking questions.”

“You're making a mistake not to let me in on this.”

“I'm protecting you.”

“From what?”

Wilson eyed him carefully, gauging his response.

“You think
I
had something to do with her disappearance?”

“I don't think anything. The best investigators pursue all the angles.”

“Well, then let's just ask if she was abducted by aliens, or sucked into the space-time continuum, or sliced and diced by a jealous avatar who escaped the high school computer lab!”

Wilson's face was unreadable. “I want you to trust us. No one in the world will work harder to get to the truth for you than we will.”

“Says the man who keeps one corner of his mind for believing I did it.”

Jack pulled the door out from under his boss's hand. His professional reputation and his spiritual confidence were on the line. He would prove every liar wrong.

CHAPTER 15

The fifty-five mile trek into the mountains took almost two hours. Audrey let her son drive for the first thirty minutes; she took over against his protests at the Old Gauntlet Road, a one-car lane twisted as an old telephone cord. She didn't make Ed surrender the driver's seat because he couldn't handle it, but because the five-hundred-plus turns on the twenty-five-mile stretch required her full attention. Applying that kind of focus to a task had a way of bringing new clarity and direction to her thoughts.

“I think God likes hanging out up here better than in town,” Ed said, looking out at the slender lodgepole pines, stately sequoias, and frilly red and white firs. Their flat, agricultural hometown had its own beauty, but it was unremarkable compared to these sloping mountainsides.

“Maybe. It's probably no contest to say that he creates prettier stuff than we do. But I think he likes to be where we are.”

“That can't be true of everyone,” Ed said.

“What do you mean?”

Ed shrugged one shoulder. “I just think some of us are disappointing.”

“Disappointing to God?”

“Not only to him. But if he's holy, and holiness can't tolerate sin, then logically speaking, he can't stand some of us.”

“Those are much stronger words than
disappointing
.”

“I'm just saying that we might live on a sliding scale of approval. Puffed-up proud on one side, disgusted on the other.”

“You think God's disgusted with you?”

Her son didn't answer.

“Ed, God hates sin, but he loves us. He's rooting for us to succeed, giving us the tools and the people and the grace we need to do that. You remember the story of the prodigal son. The guy's father spent every day at the window, waiting for him to return so they could all celebrate, not so he could punish his son.”

“Do you ever wonder if the son left again?”

They moved off the paved road and onto dirt that was loud under the tires. “Until now, that thought never crossed my mind.”

“That part of the story isn't in the Bible, I noticed. How we redeemed prodigals are always leaving again.”

“You think you're a prodigal because of what happened with Miralee?”

“Call it what you want.”

Ed's grief was an ache in Audrey's heart. Her son was no rebel.

He was a good young man who was sorting out life and wasn't going to get it all right the first time. Or even the second time. Who could?

Audrey said, “You ever ask your dad what he thinks about that? About the prodigal leaving again?”

“We don't talk much these days.”

It was her opinion that the distance between the men in her life had more to do with each one's sense of personal failure than with disappointment in each other, but such thoughts had to wait for the right time for sharing, or else they'd be rejected.

“Well, I'd have to say that the father's character probably didn't change in the long run. If his son left more than once, he probably kept waiting by the window. Kept throwing parties.”

This made Ed laugh, a bittersweet sound. “Today, shrinks call that enabling.”

“Also, there's a difference between leaving and falling down, even though God forgives both.”

“I don't know.”

“You're so hard on yourself. Much harder than you think your dad is.”

“If we told ourselves the truth, Mom, we'd have to say that none of this would have happened if I hadn't slept with her—Dad wouldn't have lost his church, I wouldn't have lost my scholarship. Jack wouldn't be looking at you for his wife's vanishing act.” He shook his head. “The baby wouldn't have lost his life.”

“As bad as you feel, and as noble it is of you to take responsibility, life is too big to think we understand it all. Some things don't happen the way we want them to, and we don't have anything to do with it.”

Ed dropped the conversation then, so Audrey didn't press.

“Maybe we'll hike Silver Gap today?” she said, offering him another conversation. “A good midrange hike?”

“Fine,” was all he said.

They encountered no other cars on the winding way. Even in ideal conditions, the road was treacherous enough to prevent King's Riches from being heavily trafficked. Occasional autumn rains had been falling for weeks, and the snows were imminent. Soon enough, maybe even tomorrow, the road would be shut down. But today the skies were clear and the air crisp, a pale gray-blue.

Silver Gap, one of the shorter trails at the end of the Old Gauntlet Road, followed an old wagon road and ended with views of the Great Forked River to the north and the tall Snaggletooth Peak to the east, pointy like a drill's spade bit. The trail led toward the ruins of the Dynasty Mine, though one would have to go off trail with a compass and quite a bit of experience to find the ruins themselves.

Four miles before they reached the end of the Old Gauntlet Road, Audrey and Ed passed through Miners Rest, a multicabin resort that had once been a real home to silver miners in the late nineteen hundreds. The cabins here were updated and refurbished, still rustic but transformed into an organized, romantic notion of life clustered around a small general store.

They passed the turnoff, and Audrey's body was overcome by a chill that made her shudder. A cold sweat broke out on her forehead. The unexpected rush was so startling that she stomped on the brake. Ed braced himself on the dash.

“You don't look so good.”

“I'm okay.” In seconds, the chill waned and was replaced by a low-grade headache that started between her shoulder blades and moved upward like a rising sun, hot and glaring, up the muscles of her neck and into the base of her skull.

“Want me to drive?”

“No, I'm good.” A matching ache the size of a golf ball blossomed behind her belly button and pulsed there in time with her heart. Audrey took the wheel in both hands and lifted her foot off the brake, allowing the car to creep forward. “We should talk your dad into renting one of the chalets there sometime.”

Ed was turned in his seat as if he expected her to lose control of the car; he looked ready to pounce on the wheel and twist it out of her hands. “You mean at Miners Rest?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Expensive for a place that doesn't have electricity.”

“Some of the cabins are wired. You pay for the experience of the place.”

“Miralee stayed there once. Said it was nice. A high compliment, considering the source.”

“Miralee doesn't know her mom's missing,” Audrey said. Her headache inched its way toward nausea. She couldn't remember if she'd packed any candied ginger or peppermints, which would help to settle her stomach.

“How do you know that?” Ed asked.

“Jack told me.”

“Miralee isn't really interested in anyone's reality but her own. Jack probably knows that better than anyone.”

“What makes you say that?”

“About Miralee, or about Jack?”

Audrey rolled her window down an inch and took a deep breath of clear air. “I meant what's the rift between her and her parents? Jack won't tell her what's going on, and he said she and Julie hadn't been getting along either.”

“I don't think Miralee gets along with very many people. It was one of the reasons I . . . I was just being nice to her at first. She has a thing against Christians, church, you know. Like her mom. I thought I could convince her we're not all . . . like her dad.”

“Like her dad how?”

“Uptight. Rigid.” His laugh was sad. “I guess my behavior was so completely at the other extreme that it only proved her point.”