Erin enjoyed her day off from Auntie Clem’s Bakery but, after a day, she was ready to go back to work. She really did love her work, and it was paying the bills. What more could she ask? Maybe there were things going on in other parts of her life that were difficult, but she still loved baking at Auntie Clem’s and talking to her customers.

  Willie dropped them off in the parking lot behind the bakery and Erin strode up to the door, her key out, to let them in. It wasn’t until she was right up to the door that she could see that the door was hanging open an inch in the dim lighting from the streetlights. It had been forced, Erin could immediately see by the marks on the doorframe and the edge of the door. A pry bar and a good yank, and out it had popped.

  Vic ran into Erin from behind because she had stopped so abruptly.

  “What’s going on—” Vic saw the door and turned back toward Willie’s truck. He was pulling away, but she managed to bang on the side of the truck and stop him before he got out of the parking lot. Erin could hear Vic talking to Willie in urgent tones, but they seemed like they were far away or underwater. She used one finger to push the door open wider. No movement on the other side. Not a sound.

  Erin’s heart was pounding and her legs were so weak she had to hold on to the doorframe for support. Who would have done such a thing? She thought that she was well-liked and respected in Bald Eagle Falls. That no one would ever do anything like this.

  But that hadn’t always been the case. And she was afraid that there might be more than one person still harboring a grudge against her for her hand in exposing the students in the burglary ring at the school, or for someone else who had been put behind bars at the penitentiary. She had been in too many cases to really believe that no one resented her for what she had done.

  And then there was Vic. It could be a hate crime. There might be all kinds of slurs against trans people painted on the walls of the kitchen or even the public space out front. She didn’t smell any paint but, if there was something like that, she needed to see it first and keep Vic from seeing it.

  She had to know. The bakery was dark and she needed to find the light switch, which didn’t seem to fall right under her hand like it usually did as she walked in the door. She inched her way along, one hand on the wall, her eyes wide open and searching, her heart pounding in her chest as if it would jump right out of her body.

  “Erin!” Willie’s sharp whisper behind her made her jump. “You shouldn’t go in there. Someone could still be inside. You stay out here until the cops get here.”

  “I have to see,” Erin insisted. “There isn’t anyone here.”

  She finally touched the light switch and flicked it on.

  Erin squinted in the sudden brightness, blinded for a moment. She forced her eyes open, though tears started to run down her cheeks from the light. There wasn’t a mark on the walls. No vandalism was apparent. No damage. No one was there. The appliances gleamed. The long counters were clear and clean, waiting for them to begin their morning work. She would have thought she was being paranoid and that the shop had been left unlocked, rather than being broken into. But she couldn’t ignore the pry marks on the door.

  “Erin.” Willie was tugging her from behind. “Come on. Wait outside until the police get here.”

  Erin let herself be pulled back out of the kitchen into the parking lot. Vic was there, pale and anxious.

  “It was broken into? Who would break into the bakery? It isn’t like we leave money in the till overnight.”

  “Maybe they heard there was a lot of dough there,” Willie offered, deadpan.

  Vic stared at him for a moment without smiling. Then she shook her head, the corners of her mouth twitching. “Do you really think this is an appropriate time to joke around?”

  “Well, you asked. I can’t help that. The joke is going to be pretty lame if I use it on a day when the bakery hasn’t been broken into.”

  They could hear an approaching siren.

  “If someone was looking for a lot of bread…” Willie tried again. Erin turned her head to glare at him. He grinned and shut up.

  “Did everything look okay?” Vic wanted to know. “I mean… it isn’t all smashed up or anything, is it? We’ll still be able to open today?”

  Erin nodded. “It looked fine… didn’t look like anything had been touched.”

  Vic let out a breath. “Good. Glad to hear it. We’ll just wait for the boys in blue to clear it and confirm that there isn’t anyone else still around, and then we can get to work.”

  Erin remembered having the police check out the first iteration of Auntie Clem’s Bakery, which had been across the street from her current location. Looking for the “ghost” that had moved things around in her office and smashed a coffee mug that had been left on the counter. And the burglar who had pried open a cabinet in the basement. Because there had been a murder in her basement, her reports were taken seriously.

  The ghost, it turned out, had been Vic. Sleeping in the bakery overnight. Somewhere safe and warm and sheltered. Though she hadn’t been the one to pry open the cabinet. Erin smiled at Vic, remembering her discovery of the slim young woman in her shop.

  Vic raised her brows questioningly, probably wondering if Erin was in shock. Why would she be smiling like that after a break-in? She didn’t see the parallel like Erin did. She had been on the other side of the equation, the burglar who was trying to avoid detection.

  A police car pulled into the parking lot. Not Terry’s truck. Stayner stepped out, releasing his sidearm as he strode across the parking lot toward the door. “Have you been inside?”

  “Just into the kitchen,” Erin said. “No one in there.”

  “Stay out here. Don’t come in behind me unless you want to get shot.”

  It seemed like a good idea to do what he said. Erin and the others waited after he disappeared into the bakery, waiting for him to clear the building and confirm that it was safe to go in. Erin felt a little silly about the police being called to the scene when there had apparently not been a theft or vandalism. Someone had pried the door. Maybe kids thinking that they could get something out of the till, not realizing that they cleared it out and made a bank deposit every night.

  Or maybe on a dare. Kids did stupid stuff.

  Erin had always been a goody-two-shoes, according to Reg. She had tried to follow all of the rules in order to stay out of trouble and have the best possible chance of achieving success when she finished school and was out on her own.

  Some kids ended up with foster families that agreed to keep them on after they aged out of foster care, helping them to get through college or getting them to pay rent to contribute to the household expenses. But Erin had not ended up with one of those families. When she aged out of foster care, that was the end of anyone taking care of her. She had to take care of herself, and she wasn’t always able to do that.

  Kids did stupid things. So did young adults like Brandon had been when she knew him. She wondered what he had written in his memoir. Had he really “told all” about the stupid things he had done while they had been together? The drinking and doping and partying? The abuse, dishonesty, stealing, bar fights, and everything else? Had he ever broken into a bakery on a dare? The record store down the block from them? One of the other little businesses run by hardworking folks trying to make ends meet?

  Stayner walked back out of the bakery at a relaxed pace, his sidearm properly secured in the holster. He nodded to Erin. “All clear, Miss Price. No one in there. Would you like to take a walk-through and point out anything that might have been damaged or stolen?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  Her knees were still a little shaky, but it felt better to be walking than standing still. Erin led the way back into the bakery, followed by Stayner, with Willie and Vic behind them. Nothing appeared to have been touched in the kitchen. Everything was as clean and pristine as it should have been. Erin was really glad that they hadn’t painted slurs all over the walls. Glad that it wasn’t a hate crime.

  She went out to the front. The register did not appear to have been touched. Erin pressed a few buttons to pop open the drawer, which was empty, as expected. The mechanism still worked, which she assumed meant it had not been pried open with the crowbar. Everything appeared to be functioning. There was no sign that the burglar had even gone out to the front of the store.

  Erin was beginning to think she was right and that it had just been some kids on a dare. She walked back through the kitchen to the stairs and went down to the storage room to see if anything appeared to have been touched or stolen. For a moment, she flashed back to descending the stairs at The Book Nook and finding Brandon in the basement, dead. Having found his body twice already, she half-expected to find it lying in the basement of the bakery. But of course Stayner had already been down there and would have noticed if there were a body. And he certainly hadn’t dragged one in there to plant it there himself.

  The basement was well-lit, not spooky and shadowy. All modern and bright, with finished walls and floor and gleaming shelves to hold all of their bulk goods. Erin glanced over the goods on the shelves but couldn’t see anything that was missing initially. She would have to go through the inventory sheet to be sure, but nothing appeared to have been touched. She shrugged at Stayner, who had stopped partway down the stairs to wait for her response.

  “Everything looks fine.”

  She climbed back up the stairs and returned to the kitchen.

  “Your office,” Vic prompted, nodding to the tiny room off the kitchen where Erin kept her files and the computer. It was barely big enough for a desk with an integrated file cabinet and had probably been a closet in its previous life, but it was large enough for Erin to get done what she needed to.

  She glanced around the room and nodded. Again, nothing appeared to have been broken or messed with. The keyboard and monitor were exactly where they always were. Pencil jar. In box. Writing pad.

  Except… taking a closer look, she saw that the computer CPU itself, which sat in the kneehole under the desk, was missing.

  CHAPTER 28

  The sheriff had arrived to help with the investigation of the burglary. Stayner had agreed that Erin and Vic could begin work on the day’s baking as long as they stayed out of the office, which was just fine. They weren’t normally in there during their morning baking session anyway. Other than to drop off their purses where they were a little more secure.

  Stayner took a cursory look around the tiny room, then guarded the door to prevent anyone from entering until Wilmot arrived.

  “The computer was the only thing stolen?” Wilmot demanded.

  He looked at the office and took a walk through the rest of the bakery and basement, as if Stayner and Erin might have missed something of importance.

  “Well, that’s convenient, isn’t it?” he asked, brows drawn down in a scowl. “You knew I was getting a warrant for your computer, so it conveniently disappeared.”

  “Are you kidding?” Vic demanded. “You think that Erin set this all up? She wouldn’t damage the door so that she could make it look like a burglary. Who do you think has to fix that door? Who has to work here and worry about whether it is secure until it gets fixed? Erin didn’t do this to keep you from looking at her computer.”

  “Miss Victoria,” Wilmot said gravely, “I don’t think I was addressing you.”

  “Well, I still heard and I still had something to say about it. I can’t believe you would throw around accusations like that. Erin could sue the department for slander.”

  Erin wasn’t going to sue anyone, and Wilmot would know that. Erin wasn’t the type of person who would make waves over something like that being said. It would be far more trouble than it was worth.

  “No, it isn’t convenient,” Erin told him. “That computer has all of my bookkeeping on it. All of my promotional graphics and files for the next few months. Recipes that I’ve been collecting or developing. This is…” She shook her head hopelessly, her eyes filling with tears. “This is terrible. I don’t know how I’m going to replace it.”

  “Computers aren’t that expensive anymore,” Wilmot assured her. “You have a backup, right?”

  Erin kneaded her forehead. When was the last time she had made a backup? It was always one of the last things on her list. Something she knew she had to get to sooner or later. The backup drives were in the desk, but she worried they would not be much help. She walked into the office, ignoring Wilmot’s grunt of protest. He was too far across the kitchen to stop her. She opened the top drawer of the desk to look at the dates written on notes stuck to the backup drives. How much work would she have to redo because she hadn’t been doing her backups as often as she should?

  But there were no backup drives in the drawer. Erin stared at the odds and ends for several long seconds. She even opened the next drawer, a file drawer, and looked through it as if she might have accidentally filed the backup drives in one of her folders. She swallowed hard and looked at Wilmot.

  “My backups are gone too.”

  “Well, that’s conven—” He cut himself off before finishing the statement. “Don’t you have any offsite backup? A cloud drive? Safety deposit box? Safe at home?”

  Erin wiped at the corners of her eyes. “No.”

  She fell into her desk chair, helpless to stop the tears. She put both of her hands over her face. Vic moved in, pushing past Sheriff Wilmot in the doorway, to rub Erin’s back and murmur comforting words to her.

  “Your accountant has last year’s financial files. You can start with that. You have all of the paper files. You can hire someone to enter the bookkeeping for the first half of the year. Email is all online.”

  That helped a little. It was a lot of work, but it was manageable if she could hire someone to do all of the inputting instead of doing it herself.

  “The promos,” she said, swallowing. “All of my swipe files and graphics and plans for holiday promotions this year.”

  Vic stroked her hair and rubbed her back soothingly. “The newspaper office and printer will have all the graphics for what you’ve done over the last couple of years. We can reuse them. And the paper will have all of your copy for what you’ve advertised in the weekly. And your promos, we talked about stuff and you wrote notes in your planner. We can reconstruct from there.”

  The tears started to slow. Vic was right. Erin had been worried that the business would collapse without everything she had on her computer. But they could start with what they had done in the last two years. No one would notice if the promotion graphics were reused. And there was time to start rebuilding her plans for upcoming holiday promotions.

  “What about… employee paychecks and shifts, and our client list?”

  “Uh… you use a human resources company for the paychecks and withholdings. There won’t be any break in that. We’ll reconstruct what we remember of the shifts and ask everyone what they remember for hours worked last week and shifts in the next couple of weeks. No one is going to abandon you because your computer got stolen. They know you’ll treat them fairly.”

  Erin nodded. She grabbed a tissue from the box on her desk, blotted her eyes, and blew her nose. “And the client list is online.”

  “That’s right, it is,” Vic agreed. “In your CRM manager. You haven’t lost that.”

  “I’ll have to reset passwords.” Erin sniffled. “I never could remember all of them.”

  “Resetting passwords is easy.”

  “Yeah. But my recipes?” Erin tried to avert another flood of tears, but was not successful. She swore. “What is a bakery without recipes?”

  “All of the ones that we use are in the binder.” Vic referred to the reference binder they kept in the kitchen, with all the recipes in plastic page protectors in case they got spattered with batters. “We can scan them so you have them on your new computer. The ones that you haven’t used or are still experimenting with…” She shrugged. “You can start over. You got most of them online to start with. So find them again. We’ll try to remember what we can for the ones you’ve been experimenting with. But everything we make regularly, we’ve got. You’re not going to go under because you don’t have any recipes.”

  “Okay.” Erin swallowed and nodded. “Okay, we can do this. We can recover.”

  “Right now, it’s time to get to work,” Vic said sternly, looking at the clock on the wall. “We open in half an hour.”

  That was exactly what Erin needed to galvanize herself and throw herself back into the morning’s work. There was no time to cry over spilled milk. She could recover from the lost computer. In the meantime, she needed to get back to work.

  CHAPTER 29

  “Uh, Miss Price…?” Wilmot was standing outside Erin’s office door when she exited, intent on getting the morning’s baking done and everything ready to open for the day. “We still need to talk.”

  “I don’t have time right now. I have a bakery to get open.”

  “The sooner we can get onto this, the better the chances are that we’ll be able to recover your stolen property. Can you talk while you get ready?”

  “Uh… I guess I can try.” Erin went back to the muffin batter she had been in the midst of and started pouring it into cups.

  “Do you have any idea who would have broken in here to do this?”

  “No. I guess someone wanted a computer.”

  “I think this was targeted. I don’t think it was just ‘a computer.’ I think it was your computer.”

  She glanced over at him. “Does that mean you don’t think that I did it myself? I didn’t just ditch my computer so you couldn’t find whatever incriminating evidence I have saved on it?”

  “Well, there’s no need to be snippy about it,” he grumbled. “Yes, I’m coming around to your way of thinking. But I still need your cooperation if we’re going to figure out who it was and recover it. If you aren’t going to help me out, then I have to wonder why.”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t help.”

 

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