9. Bianca
BIANCA
The morning rush is in full swing when Jasper Jenkins walks through my door.
Oh. Him.
Every baker in the city knows Jasper Jenkins. Cynical food blogger. The man who tanked a local café with a hit piece two summers ago and laughed about it on a podcast.
He rarely gives good reviews because he thrives on negativity.
I keep my hands moving. I keep my smile bright.
My cinnamon rolls are extraordinary. My case is full of things people drive across town for.
He can write whatever cranky little blurb he wants.
The worst he is going to do is call my brown butter cookies adequate, and then four hundred of his followers will buy one to disagree with him.
“Welcome to Sugar Bloom,” I call from behind the case. “Be with you in a second.”
He half-lifts the phone in answer and keeps drifting.
The line is six deep. Mornings are always busy with regulars and the post-viral tourists. Eliza is on the espresso machine. Jamie is boxing baked goods so fast her hands blur.
Luis is restocking the case from the back. I’m running the register and the case at the same time, which is something I’ve been doing since I was a teenager.
Jasper takes a picture of my chalkboard menu. Fine. Plenty of people do.
He takes a picture of the wildflowers in the mason jar on the counter. Fine.
He drifts toward the corner near the kitchen pass-through, where a couple is finishing a cinnamon roll and a coffee. He leans against the wall.
Maybe he’s waiting for a friend. I stop paying attention to him.
A minute or two later, he comes up to the case.
“Honey lavender cupcake, please.” He doesn’t look at me. He’s typing.
“For here or to go?”
“To go.”
I box one cupcake. Tie the twine. Slide it across. “That’ll be?—”
“On the house?” Finally, he looks up. His eyes are a flat blue. “Given the line, you can spare it.”
I laugh, pretending that I think he’s joking. He’s not joking. But I keep my smile bright, then I give him the total.
He pays, then he takes his cupcake and goes.
I watch him through the front window until he turns the corner.
That’s that.
Cynic blogger walks in, cynic blogger orders a cupcake, and cynic blogger walks out.
I exhale. Eliza catches my eye across the espresso machine and lifts one eyebrow, and I lift one back, and we go back to work.
Five minutes later, the screaming starts.
It’s a woman at the corner table. Same corner where the cinnamon-roll couple had been sitting before they left. She’s standing on her chair. She has her phone out. She is pointing at the floor, and her mouth is open in a shape I have never had a human being make in my bakery before.
The whole room turns.
I’m around the counter in three steps. “Ma’am, what’s wrong?”
She points. I look down.
A mouse.
A small brown mouse, sitting in the middle of the floor near the baseboard, washing its face with tiny pink hands.
I have worked in food service my entire adult life. You don’t scream. You contain the area, calm your guests, and call the right people in the right order.
The mouse runs.
Another mouse comes out from under the same baseboard.
Then a third, from somewhere near the bakery case.
Phones go up. All of them. Every single phone in the room.
Eliza is at my elbow. Her hand finds my forearm and squeezes once. “Send everyone home. I’ll get the broom.”
“Are you sure?” I ask, grateful for her guidance at this moment.
“Send them home,” she reiterates.
I send them home.
I refund everyone who wants a refund. I hand out vouchers to people in line, hoping they’ll come back.
I apologize to the woman who screamed, who keeps saying she has a phobia and is so sorry and didn’t mean to make a scene. I tell her she’s not at fault.
I tell her to come back next week. I tell her we will absolutely take care of this.
The last customer leaves. I lock the door behind them and flip the sign.
Then I turn around and look at my bakery.
There are three mice somewhere in here. Maybe more. And dozens of people watched it happen.
My phone has been buzzing in my apron pocket the entire time.
I take it out.
My bakery is tagged in a post that is going viral.
The post is from Jasper Jenkins, and it reads: Saw a thing this morning you don’t want in a bakery.
Then, of course, there is a picture of a mouse, and he tagged my bakery.
There are more than two thousand likes in eighteen minutes, and the number is climbing.
I sit down on the floor behind the counter, my back against the cool tile wall, and I press my thumb into the heart-shaped birthmark on my wrist until it hurts.
Then I get up. Sitting down is not what my mother raised me to do.
I’m back at the bakery with humane traps within the hour. And by two in the afternoon, we have caught three mice.
They sit in the traps in my office.
They’re not rats. They’re mice.
And darn it, they’re kind of cute.
“Well.” Eliza joins me in the office. “Those little fellas caused quite a bit of trouble today, didn’t they?”
“They look pretty calm, don’t they? They should be terrified. They’ve been chased around a kitchen by four humans with brooms.”
“Mm-hmm.” Eliza leans down beside me, her glasses sliding to the end of her nose. She studies them. Her mouth pulls to one side. “Look at how plump they are.”
I look.
She’s right. Their coats are clean. Their tails pink and undamaged. Their eyes clear. They have well-fed bellies and the sort of soft, even fur that doesn’t come from living behind a baseboard.
“These are not wild mice,” I say.
“No, they’re not.”
We crouch there a moment longer. This is awfully suspicious.
“I’m going to bring these little guys upstairs. I have an old fish tank in my apartment. I’ll clean it out and get them some food and water until I figure out what to do with them,” I say. “And then I’m going to check the camera footage.”
The footage runs from six in the morning until the moment the woman started screaming.
I scrub through it at four times speed, sitting at the desk in the back office with a mug of coffee.
There he is. Jasper Jenkins. The outside cameras show him leaning against a parking meter. He has a small canvas bag over one shoulder. The bag is moving.
I pull up the footage from inside from the time he walks through the doors. I watch him move through the bakery, and when he leans against the wall, he is on his phone. He is also reaching down to the canvas bag at his hip with his other hand.
He opens the bag, and he tips it sideways against the floor.
Three small brown shapes scurry out of it.
He straightens, takes a picture, and buys a cupcake. He leaves.
I rewind and run it again.
Downloading the footage, I make sure to save it, then I back it up, just in case.
Then I sit there with my hands flat on the desk and breathe through my nose for a full minute.
The triplets are behind this.
Jasper wasn’t acting alone. He would have no reason to do this.
I can’t prove it, but I can prove that Jasper did something illegal.
I’m not exactly sure what he can be charged with. Maybe animal cruelty or criminal mischief. I’ll have to consult Daphne.
But before I pursue that, I’ll post a very strong response to Jasper.
The post goes up within minutes.
I don’t accuse the triplets of anything. What I do is post the camera footage, and tag Jasper Jenkins. And then I post a picture of the three mice to let people know they’ve been caught and are safe.
I don’t even post a caption. The video does all the work for me.
I close my laptop and forget about it.
By the next morning, the video has eight million views. Jasper has locked his accounts.
I don’t respond to requests for comments from different media outlets.
Jasper dug his own grave. What happens next is out of my hands.
I won’t even press charges because I don’t want to waste the energy.
The bakery is full again. Customers are coming in to tell me, in person, that they saw the video. That they’re sorry.
I smile. I thank people. I bag cinnamon rolls. I refill the coffee.
But the continuous comments are starting to wear me down, and I’m angry. Not at Jasper, necessarily. Although I will never have a kind thought about that man.
I’m mad at the triplets.
Why can’t they leave me alone? The question runs through my mind all day, and when the lunchtime crowd dissipates, I decide I’m going to do something about it.
I take my apron off at four.
Eliza is making a latte and doesn’t look up. “Where are you going?”
“Out. To handle something. Can you close up?”
“Yes,” she responds. “But be careful, sweet girl.”
I nod.
And then I walk out the front door.
Sawyer Holdings occupies an entire building downtown. I’ve walked past it a hundred times and never gone inside.
The lobby is all marble and brass with a giant fountain in the center. I keep my head high and walk to the elevators like I know where I’m going. And surprisingly, security doesn’t think I’m a problem, so they don’t stop me when I enter the elevator.
The twenty-third floor is marked as the executive floor, so that’s what I press.
The elevator opens into an opulent reception area, where a pretty blonde woman sits behind an exceptionally clean desk.
“Welcome to Sawyer Holdings,” she singsongs. She’s likely said this exact sentence at least eleven thousand times. “Do you have an appointment?”
“No.”
She blinks, as if someone would be audacious enough to show up without an appointment. “May I ask who you’re here to see?”
“Theodore Sawyer.”
The blink takes longer this time. “Mr. Sawyer doesn’t take walk-ins. If you’d like to leave your contact information?—”
“Thanks.” I walk past her desk.
“Ma’am, you can’t go into his office without an appointment.”
I keep walking. The hallway is long and gray. There are doors on both sides, all closed.
But they all have nameplates. The third one is at the end of the hall. It’s bigger than the others, and on it in clean steel letters is: THEODORE SAWYER, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER.
A second assistant has materialized in front of the door. She is older, sleek, and faster than the one at reception.
“You can’t go in there.”
“I can, though.” My hand is on the handle.