“Of course you did not.” Beyla’s expression was icy. Without another word, she turned and walked away.
I breathed a sigh of relief, and Eve grinned. “Thought you weren’t suspicious of her?”
I shrugged my answer. “I don’t know what to think anymore. It’s crazy to think she would try to poison me in front of the whole class. But-”
“But…” Eve watched Beyla get settled back at her own station.
“But maybe now that you’ve made another mess…”
Jim had a funny way of sneaking up on me. He was back from break, too, and I turned to find him surveying the flecks of tomato sauce that dotted the floor. He didn’t look angry or even exasperated. He put his hands on his hips and shook his head.
“I need to talk to you,” he said, turning his gaze from Eve to me. “To both of you. I’d really like to do it tonight, but I’ve got a committment. Tomorrow night? After class?”
Before either of us could answer, he returned to the front of the classroom. Eve and I exchanged looks, but we didn’t say a thing.
We didn’t have to-I could tell we were thinking the same thing.
We didn’t know if we should be excited about the prospect of getting together with Jim.
Or really worried.
Nine
IN MY HEART OF HEARTS, I DIDN’T WANT JIM TO BE A bad guy.
He was too nice to be involved in a life of crime, and besides, I’d always been a big believer in lawbreakers getting their just due. Nice aside, Jim was way too cute for prison pinstripes.
But if Jim wasn’t angling for information to suit his own nefarious purposes, it meant that he wanted to talk to Eve and me after class that night for some other reason.
I suspected I knew what that reason was. Jim was using this “let’s all get together” excuse so that he could get to know Eve better.
Call me petty, but I was thinking I’d rather see him behind bars.
“You don’t need to manhandle the dough.” Speaking of Jim, he was walking by just as I gave my bread dough an extrawhap. It was Saturday and because we were doing Scrumptious Breads, and breads (scrumptious or not) needed more time to prepare and bake, we were at Très Bonne Cuisine early in the afternoon.
“You’re trying to integrate the wet and dry ingredients,” he reminded me. “Not beat them into submission. Funny, I never thought of you as an aggressive sort of person,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.
He’d thought of me?
Now he was being cruel.
Maybe I did want to see him in a striped jumpsuit.
I gave the bread another slap. “I’m not aggressive, I’m thorough.”
“Thorough’s one thing. Obsessive is something else. Here, step aside.” He was already reaching into the bowl of flour I had out on the counter and dusting his hands with it, so he nudged me aside with a bump of his hip. “You’re worrying too much about the right way to do this. You’re so tensed up, you’re not even breathing, and because your muscles are strained, you’re working too hard. Think of this as Zen baking. Relax. Loosen up. Take a deep breath.”
He turned to me, and I realized he wasn’t just offering advice. He actually wanted me to do it, and he was going to stand there and wait until I did. Stand there, wait, and stare.
I didn’t know how long I could keep my cool with him looking right at me. What’s a girl to do? I inhaled.
He cocked his head.
I breathed a little deeper.
He narrowed his eyes.
I gave up and sucked in a good, long breath.
“That’s it. Now let it go. Slowly. There.” He inhaled and let the breath out slowly, too. I have to say, as the last of our mingled breaths faded away, I did feel a little calmer.
“Your own nature determines your style,” Jim said, rolling thoser’ s like there was no tomorrow. “Don’t worry about what you read in a cookbook or what I tell you up there at the front of the class. Do your own thing. Decide what feels good to you. Which way do you like it, Annie, hard or soft?”
He was talking dough kneading. And I was thinking about…
Well, no use getting into that.
Suffice it to say that I gave myself a mental slap.
“I’ve never made bread before,” I said, deciding it was better to stick to the truth than give in to the fiction playing out in my head. “I don’t know if I’m a hard kneader or a soft kneader. Maybe I’m not a kneader at all. Maybe bread isn’t my thing.”
Jim’s smile was understanding-either that, or he just felt sorry for me. “Bread is everyone’s thing. What do they say it is? The staff of life? Look.” He buried his hands into the soft mound of dough on the counter in front of us. “You want to work this shaggy mass until it’s a nice, smooth ball. See, like this.” He used the heels of his hands to push the dough away, then gently brought the far edge of it forward and folded it over itself. “Lightly. Carefully. There’s yeast in here, and don’t forget, yeast is a living thing.”
“A living thing that we’re going to kill when we put it in the oven.” I don’t know what was wrong with me. I wasn’t usually this cranky. I apologized with a quick smile. “I guess I’m just feeling a little inadequate,” I confessed.
That much was true. In a black-and-white wraparound skirt and a tiny black top that showed off her store-bought tan and a whole lot more, Eve looked like a million bucks this afternoon. And even though I’d made the extra effort to look nice because I knew we’d be meeting with Jim after class, in my khakis and green tank, I felt like loose change.
Because I didn’t want to think about it, I glanced around the room. My fellow classmates were all busy kneading away, their movements as graceful as if they’d been choreographed.
“Beyla and John aren’t here.” I don’t know why it hadn’t registered before but now I noticed that their workstation was empty. I threw out the comment to Eve, who was busy working her own dough on the counter beside Jim. “They’ve never missed class before.”
Jim commented before Eve could. “They called. Each of them. John said he had to work. Some unexpected meeting. And Beyla said she wasn’t feeling well.”
“I’ll bet.” Eve pursed her lips and blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. Her hands were deep inside her dough, and she pushed it, folded it, and flipped it as expertly as if she’d been a bread baker in some past life. “I hear that killing people makes you feel not so good.”
I shot her a warning glance at the same time Jim turned to her with a glimmer of interest in his eyes. “You think so?” he asked.
I knew I had to intervene before she did any more damage to our investigation. I dipped my hands in the bowl of flour. “Better get going on this,” I said, my voice as sprightly as anyone’s can be who isn’t actually looking forward to what needs to be done. I sank my hands into the dough. “We don’t have all the time in the world, and…”
And I forgot that Jim was already kneading the dough.
We met in a silky, glutinous sort of grasp. Our hands slid across each other’s, then stuck.
Zen or no Zen, I forgot to breathe.
Jim was apparently not having the same problem. He settled his hands a little more comfortably under mine and smiled. “You finally seem to be getting the hang of this! Now decide. Hard or soft?”
“Soft.” The word came out of me on the end of a little gasp, and when I felt Jim’s hands twitch like he was going to pull away, I automatically held on a little tighter. “No, hard,” I said. “Definitely hard.”
“Hard it is then.” He gave me a wink and slid his hands out from under mine. “You go ahead and give it a try while I see how everyone else is doing.”
Except that even after he walked away, I couldn’t move a muscle. I was frozen there, my hands in the goo that I knew would never be decent-tasting bread, my breath trapped behind a knot in my throat, my heart ramming against my ribs like the bass line in a heavy metal rock song.