The Baker's Wife (38 page)

The wrong conclusion
, Ed thought.

Jack was reasoning like any man who had lost his life's playbook. It was the way Ed had reasoned after losing Miralee and their baby and his college acceptance and, for all he could figure, the smile of God—a frantic mental search for any explanation that made a smidgen of sense. Ed suddenly felt lucky his desperation hadn't hurt many bystanders.

“That's the first true thing you've said yet,” Jack said loudly. “The system will do what it does best. It'll punish me, but not the person who stole my wife. Maybe I should save the taxpayers a few dollars.” The anger was gone, replaced by bitterness. His eyes went to the device he held.

There was a scrambling in the front room.

“Jack, don't,” Rutgers said. “Think twice. Your wife's alive. I'm not lying to you.”

The bell on the door jangled. They must have got the explosives off it. Air was moving through the closed-up bakery again, through a cross breeze allowed by broken windows and the open door, and the oxygen felt clear to Ed. Weightless and free of the heavy fog. From the floor where he lay, the natural light seemed more yellow than gray.

“Well, you're not telling me the truth about
something
,” Jack said. “Have you seen her yet? Have you seen my wife?”

A brief silence was followed by, “Not with my own eyes.” A new voice. Ed's father.

Jack cursed. Relief killed Ed's every pain; his muscles relaxed. His heart thanked God.

“I wasn't asking you,” Jack said. “Why did they let you in?”

“Because I'm not going to tell you what you want to hear.”

“Is that so? What do I want to hear?”

“That your wife loves you and was taken from you against her will. That you have someone besides yourself to blame.”

Jack's lips became a pinched wad of muscle, then he smoothed them out again and set the ball of explosive down by the upended stainless table in the center of the kitchen.

“That kind of talk isn't going to get your son out of here alive,” Jack said, fiddling with the detonator. Ed couldn't guess whether the plastics would take out the entire bakery, including the apartment upstairs, or only the little table in front of Jack, or something in between. Like him.

As discreetly as possible, Ed used his legs and good arm to drag himself inches farther out of the kitchen.

“I think we'll all get out fine,” Geoff said. “We know you, Jack. You're a good man who just wants to get it right. And you know that killing yourself, or my son, or me, or any other person within your reach isn't right. That's something both God and the world can agree on.”

Jack licked his lips. “God let me down.”

“Julie refused to come,” Geoff said. “She's getting medical attention right now. But she's going to pull through this. Either she cares for the life of my boy as little as she cares for her own, or she doesn't believe you're capable of killing anyone. What do you think?”

“I think I'm capable of killing whoever I want.”

“I was wondering what Julie's thinking.”

“Ask her.”

All of Ed but his feet were out of the kitchen.

“You've never killed anyone,” Geoff said.

“I don't believe anymore that God cares one way or the other.”

“There's a million reasons why he asks us to do the right thing,” Geoff said. “I know maybe ten of those reasons. The rest is a mystery, but I have faith.”

Jack wandered a few paces away from the little bomb. “I never had an exit strategy,” Jack said. “I was so sure this scenario would end exactly the way I wanted it to.”

“Most of us think that too.”

“It can't end like this,” Jack said.

Like what?
Ed wondered. He pulled his knees up under his belly and hoped his blood wouldn't rush out of his head when he jumped up to run.

Jack continued, “Julie's not coming because your wife killed her.”

“I brought something to prove she didn't. Julie's necklace.”

“You took it off her dead body.”

“I'm giving you truth, Jack. That's all I've ever given you. Here it comes.”

Geoff tossed the necklace over the counter and Ed heard the pendant hit the floor first, followed by a silky pouring of the chain. The piece slid to rest near his feet.

And from his crouch he saw Jack behind the wall, staring at the silver, alone in the world with it. He bent to scoop it up with his free hand.

Ed burst out of his position then, not knowing how Jack would react to anything. He didn't attempt to jump the pastry cases this time, being too close to them to get the momentum he needed. His head came up over the top of the glass and he saw two of the three officers in the room swing their guns toward him.

Geoff shouted, “No! That's Ed,” at the same time that a bullet hit the chalkboard menu on the wall. Ed heard the initial shot after all this and thought it might have been Jack's detonator. A second shot chased it.

The grip of his dad's strong arms caught Ed at the end of the counter and swung him around, channeling his momentum toward the open front door. Geoff's body was a shield across Ed's back. Someone shouted, “Secure!” He sensed the slipperiness of his own blood smearing all over his dad's shirt. He anticipated an explosion before they reached the exit.

None came except father and son bursting through the front door of the bakery, their bodies knocking against each other out onto the sidewalk, where they propelled themselves across the evacuated intersection and into the outstretched arms of the woman who loved them both.

When Geoff and Ed stumbled out of her childhood home bloody but very alive, Diane stepped away from Audrey. She didn't need Diane or Estrella to hold her up just then, the way she had during the waiting—through those ominous gunshots. When Audrey let go of her hand, Diane felt the pleasure of having done something good for another human being. Its warmth soaked into her like sunshine.

The crowd burst into cheers and applause at the sight of the family reunion. Diane laughed and joined them, her eyes sweeping the moment, taking everything in. Her sight snagged on a pair of familiar eyes focused on her.

Harlan Hall stepped out of the gathering of spectators and crossed Sunflower without letting go of her gaze. She couldn't decide whether to go meet him or run away, and so she did neither. By the time he reached her, the warmth on her head had reached her toes and rooted her feet to the ground. Nerves quivered just under her skin.

“You were on the radio,” he said. It took a few seconds for Diane to understand what he meant. “Dimwit,” he explained. “Though I usually go by a different handle.”

“Oh.” Diane nodded. She was flushed and off balance, the way she'd been once when Donna coaxed her into drinking a few bottles of beer. “That was Miralee. With the name-calling.”

“I wanted to contact you, to tell you all was forgiven.”

“But Mom . . .”

“She had trouble letting go.” Harlan cleared his throat. “I should have done it anyway.”

“I'm so sorry, Dad.”

Her father clasped his hands behind his back and said, “I thought I'd lost you all. Donna, you, your mother, little Juliet. That last bit was my fault, you know. I don't think I ever said real clear how much I liked her coming around. How much we needed her all those years. And when Cora Jean left me, I . . . But then there you were, like an angel out of heaven, your voice bringing two of you back to me at once. Usually it's only bad news on the airwaves anymore. The stuff I hear . . .” He stopped himself, shook his head. Harlan let one of his hands loose, palm up, to gesture in her direction. “There's no medicine like this to heal a man who's sick at heart.”

Diane caught hold of his hand with hers and squeezed.

“Forgive me?” he whispered.

“You forgave me first,” she said. “I wish I'd known.”

Relief and gratitude played together in a bright field of his green eyes. “Am I as old as you look?” he asked. “The years go by.”

She smiled at him. “We still have time.”

CHAPTER 37

Audrey and Geoff gave Estrella the week off and started working again the next day, the moment the crime scene was cleared. None of the damage made baking bread impossible. Even more simply, making bread and feeding it to hungry people was what they did—what they would continue to do as a couple.

With one bandaged arm in a sling, Ed helped his parents nail sheets of plywood into the frames that awaited new picture windows. He cleaned up the bloodstains in the storage room left behind by Coach Henderson's wounds, and Geoff scrubbed up the small pool that had gathered under Jack's shoulder after his own man's gunshot caught him on the collarbone, inches away from a deadly hit. Jack dropped the detonator, which didn't go off, but he kept his wife's silver necklace locked in his closed fist, even while they carried him out to the ambulance.

Audrey pulled Geoff away from the pastry case that bore the evidence of Ed's injuries after Geoff stood staring at it for several minutes, unable to shake off how close his son had come to dying. She cleaned up that horror and sent the guys for a carryout dinner.

At five the next morning, Geoff turned on the lights in the dining room as it began to fill with the scents of rising grains and toasted herbs. Diane rose early from the guest room at her father's house and drove the cruise ship to the bakery to help take over some of Estrella's tasks. Her father followed at six, unannounced, and sat himself down at the same table where Geoff had once pulled out her chair. After a moment's surprise, Diane took him a hot carrot muffin and told him it was on the house. When she rang it up at the register and tried to slip her own cash into the drawer, Geoff shut it and said it was time for her break.

Audrey watched all this from the worktable in the center of the kitchen, where she could see into the dining room while she shaped round loaves of rosemary-potato bread with flour-coated hands and then slashed the tops with a razor to form a slightly lopsided cross.

“You're better at this than I am,” she said when Geoff came back in. “Mine always look like I used a chain saw.”

“It's your special flair. They're perfect.” He kissed her temple and she patted the side of his face, placing a clownish flour print there on purpose. He grinned and pretended not to know what she'd done, then began scooping up the loaves and sliding them onto the oven's hot platform.

They worked in a comfortable cycle through the morning while Ed and Diane took care of people. Audrey and Geoff kneaded, proofed, and shaped, loaded and unloaded the ovens, scraped down the tables and spread them with fresh flour, and filled the dented industrial mixer with the same four basic ingredients of bread many times over.

While Audrey worked, a tiny pressure like a dull drill pressed down on her sternum. She tried to ignore this sensation, insisting to herself that it was only in her mind even when Geoff saw her place her palm over her heart and asked her if she needed to go home and rest. Of course she refused. She wanted today to look and feel and operate just like any other day before Jack's and Julie's breakdowns. She wanted it to be this way, as normal as normal could be—in spite of the plywood boards in the window gaps and the uncharacteristic sunshine on the other side of them.

The sunshine should be enough,
she thought. Why wasn't it enough to restore her sense of peace?

The drill probed the bony protection around her heart, and she kept thinking of Julie, inconsolable Julie who had rejected her sympathy twice. What more was there for Audrey to do?

She worked pensively through the day. Two o'clock, and the delivery of the last French and Italian loaves from the ovens, seemed to come hours early. By three, the baskets, shelves, and cases were nearly empty, and Ed loaded the few leftovers into bags for the soup kitchen down the street.

Audrey set aside a loaf of rosemary-potato bread without thinking too hard about why she did it. Rosemary for remembrance, the saying went. What was she trying to remember? She wasn't planning to cook supper that night.