Chapter 6 - Ashes and Receipts
The bakery was burning when we reached the next block.
Firefighters had broken through the front shutter and were dragging hose through the doorway.
The window where Matteo had sat each morning was a jagged black hole.
I started toward the building until a firefighter stopped me with one extended arm.
"Owner?"
"Yes. Is anyone inside?"
"Clear so far. Stay back."
That was the only good news I received that morning.
The dough I'd prepared before dawn was ash.
The lemon cake display had melted into the counter.
Photographs of Grandma Rose and generations of customers were gone.
A small crowd watched from the sidewalk, murmuring as Matteo moved beside me.
People recognized him.
I could feel the rumors forming before anyone spoke them.
A woman next to us whispered that my bakery had drawn the wrong man's attention.
I wanted to tell her she wasn't entirely wrong.
But I would not let fear rewrite the story as though I had chosen this.
A fire investigator asked if I'd recently argued with anyone.
I gave him Dominic's name, the supposed city inspectors, and the suspicious vehicle.
His pen slowed at the family name.
He glanced toward Matteo.
"That'll complicate things," he said.
"Only if you make it complicated," I answered.
I asked for the incident number and his supervisor's contact information.
He wrote both down.
Matteo offered to rebuild everything.
"You can't pay your way out of this," I said.
"I'm trying to help."
"Then don't ask me to be grateful for a building your uncle destroyed."
He absorbed the blow without defending himself.
Sofia stood between us holding the rescued walnut frame.
She had returned it to me after we left the church.
There was soot on the glass now.
A speck of ash had settled across Rose's face.
"I ruined it," Sofia whispered.
"No," I said, and knelt beside her. "The people who set the fire did."
For the first time she met my eyes without looking away.
"Grandma Lucia said the bread was a code."
I felt a flash of recognition.
The ledger from the tailor shop listed weekly loaf deliveries alongside the monthly payments to Eleanor Vale.
Each entry had an unusual notation: W, E, or N, followed by two numbers.
I had taken them for delivery routes.
Now they looked like coordinates or a cipher.
Dana arrived in a rental car just after sunrise, wearing jeans and a dark raincoat.
She had aged since our last meeting, but her eyes were just as sharp.
She looked at the ruins before speaking.
"This isn't a family feud anymore," she said.
"It never was," I replied.
At a nearby diner she examined my photographs of the ledger.
"These are page and line references," she said. "Rose had a reference text."
"What text?"
Sofia answered before I could speculate.
"The recipe book."
Everyone turned toward her.
"Grandma Lucia said Rose kept two copies. The one everyone could see and the one no one could read."
I remembered a fat blue cookbook that had always rested above Grandma's ovens.
It had burned with everything else.
Then I remembered the duplicate recipe binder stored in a sealed tin under the tailor shop stairs.
Rose had called it the disaster copy.
I had laughed when she showed me.
I wasn't laughing now.
My phone vibrated with a message from the fire investigator.
He had found an accelerant trace near the rear gas line.
The preliminary cause would not be accidental.
Before I could reply, a second message came from an unknown number.
It was a photograph of Dana arriving at the diner.
May you like
Someone had followed her too.
