Chapter 3
The baking order from the McAllister wedding had grown by fifty percent since Tuesday and the wedding was the day after tomorrow.
It had only just dawned on the bride that several of her guests were gluten intolerant and needed a gluten-free option in lieu of the main wedding cake.
Never mind that Grace had suggested adding a dozen-gluten-free cupcakes to the order months ago when the bride and her mother placed the original order.
At least Buns ’N’ Roses wasn’t catering the sit-down dinner that was being served Saturday evening. She would hate to be that caterer trying to scramble to get ingredients and prepare a hundred extra plates on such short notice.
Thankfully, she’d already baked and frosted the cake with its initial layer of fondant and had finished making the dozens of sugar flowers that would adorn the cake in elaborate sprays.
Thursday morning found Grace braiding loaves of cardamom brioche that the panicked caterer had asked if she could take over making for the McAllister wedding.
The sleeves of her pale blue chambray shirt were pushed up past her elbows and her ivory apron was liberally dusted with flour as she rolled dough into long strips and twisted them into intricate six-strand braids.
Mary came downstairs from the storeroom on the second floor with an armload of cardboard pastry box flats. She set them at the other end of the prep table and began folding and assembling several dozen of them to store under the front counter for large or delicate orders that couldn’t go in a bag.
While they worked Grace’s assistant baker said casually, “We had a guy stop by earlier while you were at the store getting more eggs.”
Her heart leaped. Had Reno come in? Disappointment at missing him coursed through her, startling her. She wasn’t in the habit of missing any man these days.
“What kind of guy?” Grace asked by way of keeping the conversation going.
“Some sort of utility guy. Said he needed to go in the back to check the meter.”
Okay. Not what she’d expected Mary to say. She tried and failed to ignore the relief that flooded her at not having missed Reno stopping by. Belatedly, she asked Mary, “Which utility was he from?”
“He didn’t say. I assume it was the water company since it still uses meters.”
“Did you let him go through the kitchen?”
“No.”
She frowned. “Why not?”
Mary stopped folding the box she was working on and frowned.
“He wasn’t wearing a uniform, which seemed, well, odd.
He did have on a jacket and was carrying a clipboard, but his van was parked right out front, and it had no markings from the county on it.
I told him the meter was out back and he could walk around the block to the alley and read it out there.
Then I came into the kitchen to get more pastry bags.
Wasn’t gone more than thirty seconds. But when I went back into the front room, his van was gone. ”
Grace stopped braiding brioche dough. “What did he look like?”
“Mid-forties, maybe. Average height and build. Light brown hair going thin on top. And he had a bushy mustache that was a lot darker than his hair.”
“Did he read the water meter?”
Mary shrugged. “I don’t see how he had time to go out the front door, walk around block, and go down the alley to the back of the store, let alone read the meter, walk all the way back, get in his truck, and drive away.
Not in time it took me to step just inside the kitchen door, grab some pastry bags off the shelf, and step back out.
It couldn’t have taken me more than thirty seconds, and that’s being generous. It was probably more like ten seconds.
“Keep an eye on the front room for a minute, will you?” Grace murmured.
“You’ve got it.” Mary picked up the stack of assembled boxes she’d nested inside one another and carried them out front.
Grace went the other direction and stepped out the kitchen door into the narrow alley that ran behind the whole block of storefronts.
The door was heavy metal that theoretically remained locked at all times, but Mary had been propping it open with a brick for years during the day because the kitchen got hot and the heat sometimes bothered Mary’s asthma.
Grace examined the water meter without really knowing what she was looking at. The glass cover wasn’t broken, and there were no marks on the grey steel box, and nobody appeared to have tampered with it, at any rate.
The words of the gorgeous, enigmatic cowboy, advising her to get a security camera and tell the police if anything else strange happened, popped into her head. He had a point. An ounce of caution was better than a pound of sorrow.
She pulled out her cell phone and looked up the number for the county water department. She hit the call button and asked the nice lady at the other end what day each month her water meter in Cobbler Cove got read.
The gal put her on hold and was gone long enough that Grace felt good and silly about being so suspicious by the time the woman came back and said, “Cobbler Cove’s meters get read on the last Friday of each month, Ma’am.”
Today was the third Thursday of April.
“So nobody was over here today in Cobbler Cove reading water meters?”
“No, Ma’am. Our meter reader would’ve spent all day yesterday over on the Blackfoot Reservation reading water meters, He was nowhere near Cobbler Cove, yesterday, let alone on that side of the lake.”
“Do you know if any businesses in Cobbler Cove have reported problems with their water service in the past few days?”
“No, Ma’am, well, yes Ma’am. I mean, I’m the person who takes those calls, too, and we haven’t received any reports of outages or service problems in Cobbler Cove for the past month or more.”
“Thank you,” Grace mumbled, growing a little more alarmed.
She went back inside. Along the way she picked up the brick holding the door open. It swung shut with a loud click, but she checked anyway to make sure it had latched and locked behind her. She carried the brick out to the front room. “From now on, Mary, we’re not going to prop open the back door.”
“But it gets hot when both ovens are going, and . . ."
“I’ll get a fan.”
“. . . I have asthma,” Mary finished stubbornly. She was a hard worker and a terrific baker in her own right, but she could be set in her ways.
Grace sighed. “I know. I’ll get us a big fan. As soon as I get off work today.”
Mary stared at her. “That guy wasn’t from the water company, was he?”
“I don’t think so.” She knew so, but she didn’t want to alarm her assistant, who was prone to drama and an inveterate gossip.
“Charlotte called me,” Mary said. “She told me you found some rosemary hidden in the kitchen day before yesterday.”
Grace sighed. “Charlotte has a big mouth sometimes.”
“She’s worried,” Mary continued, undeterred.
“Charlotte worries about everything. Always has.”
“But Grace., What if . . .”
She cut off her employee, but in a gentle voice that she hoped took the sting out of it. “I’m getting us a fan, and the door stays shut.”
Mary looked at her doubtfully for several seconds more. Then all at once she nodded and disappeared into the kitchen to continue braiding bread. The morning routine resumed, and they spoke no more of the strange man claiming at the bakery to read a utility meter.
They finished braiding brioches and slid the trays into the refrigerator to cold-proof overnight. Brioche dough’s very high butter content made proofing the dough in a warming drawer tricky since butter started to melt at about eighty degrees Fahrenheit.
Mary handled the lunch rush while Grace went to work making butter cream frosting for the McAllister gluten-free cupcakes. As she measured powdered sugar, butter, cream, vanilla, and salt, Grace thought more about what Reno had said. Should she get a security camera after all?
For that matter, should she follow his other piece of advice and call the sheriff? Except . . . how ridiculous would she sound reporting a strange man showing up at her shop casually claiming to be someone he wasn’t, doing nothing wrong, and then leaving?
She sighed. Was it a little weird? Yes. Had he harmed anyone or anything? No.
It made more sense to chalk it up to the guy being a bit on the quirky side and let it be.
She’d never been prone to overreacting and she didn’t plan to start now.
Silently, she wished the fellow health and happiness wherever he might be right now and sent up a little prayer that he would never darken the bakery’s doorstep again.
And in the meantime, she would get a fan for the kitchen and keep the back door locked.
Lily ran into to the bakery at three, bursting through the front door with her usual explosion of energetic joy that lit up every room she entered.
“There’s my girl!” Grace exclaimed, dropping to her knees and holding out her arms. Her four-year-old daughter raced into them, nearly knocking them both over in her enthusiasm.
Grace gave her a big hug and buried her nose in Lily’s blond curls that were so pale they almost looked white.
They also smelled like the drop of vanilla Grace had always mixed into her daughter’s bottles of baby shampoo.
“You smell so good I could eat you all up,” Grace declared.
“Don’t eat me, Mommy!” Lily exclaimed, giggling.
Grace pretended to nibble at her neck and Lily wriggled away, laughing. She ran over to the flower coolers, studied at the contents for a moment, then opened one and pulled out a flower. She was allowed to have one stem of her choosing every day.
Today she went for a daisy with clean white petals around a bright yellow center.
“It matches my new dress, Mommy.”
Grace looked up at Tessa Lawrence, who’d brought Lily to the bakery, questioningly. Grace’s usual babysitter was sick with the flu, and Tessa had volunteered to pick up Lily from preschool at noon and had taken her to the Lawrence farm for the afternoon so Lily could visit the animals.