Page 18

From my attic desk, the sound of Jean Paul’s drill grinding through wood rose through the floors and snaked right up my spine. Normally noise and chaos didn’t bother me, but lately they drove me mad. At my desk I buried my face in my hands, wishing I could call Gordon. “I’m going insane.”

I’d worked with an older woman years ago. She’d been a secretary, and I’d been an analyst on the rise. When life got tough and I thought I’d go crazy, she’d always smile and say, “This too shall pass.”

I’m not sure what had made me think of her. But I repeated the words “This too shall pass.”

I breathed in and out, hoping the feeling passed before I grabbed the hammer from Jean Paul’s toolbox and hit him with it.

Instead of using a hammer on Jean Paul, I picked up the phone and dialed the Holder Brothers. Three rings and I got their receptionist’s perky “Holder Brothers.”

“Sandy, this is Daisy McCrae. How are you doing today?” I’d start with nice.

“Ms. McCrae. How are the renovations going?”

“Well, thanks. Look, I’ve got a problem. Your man, Jeb, showed up here yesterday with a delivery. You and I agreed, no deliveries this week.”

“We sure did.”

“I don’t mind the mistake as much as Jeb. He was rude to my sister.”

A heavy silence followed. “I’ll let the boss know. I’d put you through, but he’s in the warehouse now.”

“No worries, Sandy. But if Jeb gives us trouble, especially Rachel, I’m firing Holder Brothers.” The bakery wasn’t a huge client, but in this economy every penny counted.

“It won’t happen again, Ms. McCrae.”

“Thanks, Sandy.”

I hung up, sighing as I stood, and my gaze settled on Jenna’s recipe box.

Hadn’t I left that with Rachel? She must have brought it back up last night.

Lately I slept like the dead, so I could easily have missed her.

I picked up the box and thumbed through the cards.

Rachel had mentioned Dad had old bakery records.

As much as I didn’t want to think about Jenna, she kept creeping back into my thoughts.

“So much work to be done, and I want to play history detective.” But then what could it hurt to carve out a half hour? I’d peek at the records and return to work.

Downstairs, I checked in with Jean Paul, waving my cell as a signal I could be reached by phone. He held up his finger as he drove the drill deeper into a stud, halting when he’d punched through the wood.

He removed his finger from the trigger and strained as the drill went silent. “My friend Gus has wine.”

“Wine?”

Jean Paul pushed back a thick lock of sun-kissed hair in his typical must-I-explain-again glance. “Gus. He owns a restaurant that’s not to be. He has lots of wine. We can buy it from him, and we can sell the wine at the bakery.”

Right. Gus. “I don’t have much cash.”

“He’ll sell the wine to us for three dollars a bottle. We can sell it for fifteen dollars a bottle.”

“Nice profit margin. How many bottles does he have?”

“One thousand.”

“Three thousand dollars.” A sum once insignificant was now a fortune.

“He will take half now and half in a month.”

“He’s that desperate?”

Jean Paul reached in his back pocket and removed a cigarette pack.

“ Oui . ”

“And the basement could be a wine cellar?”

“ Oui . ”

“I’ll need shelves.” My mind played with the possibilities as it added and rearranged numbers.

He shrugged. “Of course. Wine must be stored on its side.”

If I bought the shelves, I could do them on the cheap. And a wine cellar would set us apart. Bread, wine, and maybe cheese. It was a risk, but a risk with a high payout. “I’ll do it. But it’ll have to be half now and half in sixty days. It’ll take me time to get a liquor license.”

He nodded. “I’ll tell him.”

“And he delivers?”

“I’ll ask.”

“Okay.” A little deeper in debt, I headed out the front door to my parents’ house.

“Have you seen Rachel?”

“She went for a walk.”

“Where?”

“I’m not in charge of her.”

No doubt she needed a break, a day to breathe and regain her footing. Fair enough.

My folks’ town house was across the street from the bakery.

Real estate in Old Town Alexandria had remained high despite the economy, but my father had been in the neighborhood seventy years, and six years in this house.

When Dad pitched the idea of buying the house, it had been cheap, but it had been a real reach for my folks.

Dad had had to do some fast talking to get Mom to agree to the purchase.

Because of his risk, they were sitting on some very pricey real estate.

I hoped Gus’s wine would do the same for me.

I climbed the front steps of their narrow brick townhome, outfitted with wrought iron window baskets filled with red geraniums. The house had been built in the 1820s by a sea captain who’d made his money trading spices and slaves.

The windows, original to the house, had a beveled wavy look that added a misty, watery quality.

I dug my keys out of my pocket and opened the front door.

Quickly, I moved to the alarm and punched in the year of Margaret’s birth—my parents’ universal security code.

I’d tried to get them to vary the code, but the times we’d tried they’d forgotten the code and had to call me to help them reset it.

I’d given up and reset them all back to Margaret’s birth year.

The entryway was long and narrow and cut through the center of the house.

Immediately in front of the door a slender, tall staircase climbed to the second and third floors.

The walls, trimmed with waist-high wainscoting, were painted a creamy white and extended a good twelve feet.

Pocket doors separated the hall from the first parlor.

With an eye always on resale, Dad and Mom had chosen simple classic colors and finishes.

However, when it came to furniture, they chose what they liked.

So the fireplace had been restored with a sleek marble and the floors were a light pine, but the furniture was a couple of decades-old La-Z-Boys, end tables piled high with magazines, and a very wide-screen television.

I climbed the stairs to the second floor and glanced into my parents’ room.

Mom and Dad slept in a four-poster bed that had belonged to my dad’s parents.

Mom rarely made her bed, the exception being when they had company or she was on vacation.

Mom had a fear of dying on the road, and everyone tromping through her house and seeing an unmade bed was too much for her.

She wanted her last impression to be a good one.

I moved to the end of the hallway and opened the door leading to the attic. Thankfully it was a walk-up attic, so no rickety pull-down stairs. I switched on the light and climbed the rough-hewn steps.

Dad had relocated the old bakery files to his attic about twenty years ago so that he had more room in his bakery office, which I was now having removed so we could add freezer space.

Halloween and Christmas decorations crowded the right side of the attic. My mother’s favorite holiday adornments included a light-up snowman (with a bad right arm), a dozen worn wreaths with red bows, assorted lights, and electric white candles for each of the town house’s windows.

Dad had commandeered the left side of the attic, arranging his bakery files neatly in metal file cabinets.

Dad had always been a good record keeper/historian of the Union Street Bakery, and as he’d gotten older, the past drew him more and more.

He’d talked about writing a book about the bakery’s history but so far had not been able to sit still long enough to write the first page.

This early in the day, the attic temperatures were bearable, but by noon, the July heat would be unmanageable. And if I’d waited into July, heat plus the kid would have made this outing impossible.

Head bowed so I didn’t bump into the rafters, I moved past the file cabinets designated for the 2000s and past the nineties and eighties, and then skipped quickly to the forties.

The deeper I traveled back in time, the less space was dedicated to files.

I knew if Dad had been alive one hundred years ago, he’d have saved every scrap of paper connected to the bakery.

He grumbled often enough that his ancestors hadn’t been the best archivists.

Like me, Dad favored organization because it gave him a sense of control.

My birth mother had abandoned me at age three, and his father had died suddenly when he was fourteen.

Both of us suffered a loss that ran so deep, we’d convinced ourselves if we were organized and orderly, we could control the universe.

Of course, neither of us had been widely successful.

Dad had a heart that wouldn’t tick much longer, and I was underemployed and pregnant.

I found the drawer marked 1940s in the very back row.

My grandfather would have kept these records.

After this file cabinet there were only two more.

The first one hundred years of the bakery garnered three cabinets, whereas the subsequent fifty had twelve.

I glanced back toward the front to the five empty cabinets Dad had delivered weeks ago.

These were going to be my cabinets. He’d anticipated I would be as dedicated a recorder as he.

And honestly, he was right. I’d amassed more files in the last two months than Rachel and Mike did in their seven years of running the bakery.

With a hard tug, I pulled open the top file drawer. A marker read January–December 1940 . I wasn’t sure when Jenna came to work at the bakery, but her last recipe card was dated 1944.

These files, kept by my grandfather, were dusty and brittle. The handwriting on the tabs was bold, thick, and impatient. I understood impatient. Seemed a baker was always stealing time. Time at the desk keeping records was time away from production, and no production meant no money.