The trip to Ringwood wasn’t overly long, just a dash down the A31 with the wind blowing in through the windows and her affirmation tape playing at high volume. A voice was intoning, “I am and I can, I am and I can,” and Meredith concentrated on this mantra. She didn’t actually believe this sort of thing really worked, but she was determined to leave no stone unturned in the pursuit of her career.
A tailback at the Ringwood exit reminded her it was market day. The town centre was going to be jammed, with shoppers surging towards the market square where once each week stalls spread out colourfully beneath the neo-Norman tower of St. Peter and Paul parish church. In addition to the shoppers there would be the tourists, for at this time of year the New Forest was teeming with them like crows on roadkill, campers, walkers, cyclists, amateur photographers, and all other forms of outdoor enthusiasts.
Meredith gave a glance at her chocolate cake. It had been a mistake to place it on the seat and not on the floor. The sun was blasting fully upon it, and the chocolate frosting wasn’t benefiting from the experience.
Meredith had to admit that her mother had been right: What on earth was she thinking, bringing Jemima a cake? Well, it was too late now to change her plans. Perhaps they could laugh about it together when she finally managed to get herself and her cake to Jemima’s shop. This was the Cupcake Queen, located in Hightown Road, and Meredith herself had been instrumental in Jemima’s finding the vacant space.
Hightown Road was a bit of a mixed bag, which made it perfect for the Cupcake Queen. On one side of the street, redbrick residences took the form of terraces and semis that curved along in a pleasant bow of arched porches, bay windows, and dormer windows with white gingerbread woodwork forming their lacy peaks. An old inn called the Railway Hotel stood farther along this side of the street, with plants tumbling from wrought-iron containers that hung above its windows, spilling colour towards the pavement below. On the other side, things automotive offered services from car repair to four-by-four sales. A hair salon occupied space next to a launderette, and when Meredith had first seen, adjacent to this, an empty establishment with a dusty TO LET sign in the window, she’d thought at once of Jemima’s cupcake business, which had been going great guns from her cottage near Sway but was in need of expansion. She’d said to her, “Jem, it’ll be grand. I can walk over in my lunch hour and we can have a sandwich or something.” Besides, it was time, she’d told her friend. Did she want to operate her fledgling business out of a cottage kitchen forever or did she want to take the leap? “You can do this, Jem. I have faith in you.” Faith with regard to business matters, was what she didn’t add. When it came to personal matters, she had no faith in Jemima at all.
It hadn’t taken much convincing, and Jemima’s brother had provided part of the cash, as Meredith had known he would. But soon after Jemima had signed the lease, Meredith and she had parted ways in their friendship because of a hot and frankly stupid discussion about what Meredith saw as Jemima’s eternal need for a man. “You’ll love anyone who’ll love you back,” had been the way Meredith had concluded her passionate denunciation of Jemima’s most recent partner, one in a long line of men who’d come into and gone out of her life. “Come on, Jem. Anyone with eyes and half a brain can see there’s something off about him.” Not the best way to assess a man whom one’s best friend declares she’s determined to marry. Living with him was bad enough, as far as Meredith was concerned. Hooking up permanently was another matter.
So it had been a double insult, both to Jemima and to the man she ostensibly loved. Thus Meredith had never seen the fruits of Jemima’s labours when it came to launching the Cupcake Queen.
Unfortunately, she didn’t see the fruits of those labours now either. When Meredith parked, scooped up the chocolate cake-it was looking ever more as if the chocolate itself were actually perspiring, she thought, which could not have been a very good sign-and carried her offering to the door of the Cupcake Queen, she found the shop locked tightly, its windowsills grimy, and its interior speaking of a business failed. Meredith could see an empty display case, along with a dusty selling counter and an old-fashioned baker’s étagère showing off neither utensils nor baked goods. And this was…what? Ten months after she’d opened? Six months after? Eight? Meredith couldn’t remember exactly, but she certainly didn’t like what she saw, and she had difficulty believing that Jemima’s business could have gone under so quickly. She’d had more than a score of regular customers she had served from her cottage alone, and they would have followed her to Ringwood. So what had happened?
Meredith decided she would seek out the one person who could probably explain. She had her own, immediate theory about matters, but she wanted to be forearmed when she finally saw Jemima herself.
ULTIMATELY, MEREDITH FOUND Lexie Streener at Jean Michel’s Hair Styling, in the High Street. She went first to the teenager’s home where the girl’s mother stopped what she was doing-typing a lengthy tract on the third beatitude-to expound in some tedious detail what it truly meant to be among the meek. When pressed for information, she revealed that Lexie was washing hair at Jean Michel’s. (“There’s no Jean Michel,” she pointed out sharply. “That’s a lie, that is, which is against God’s law.”)
At Jean Michel’s Hair Styling, Meredith had to wait for Lexie Streener to finish scrubbing energetically at the scalp of a heavyset lady who’d already had more than enough summer sun and was currently showing far too much flesh as an illustration of this troubling fact. Meredith wondered if Lexie was planning on a career of styling hair. She hoped not, for if the girl’s own head was any indication of her talents in this area, no one with any sense would allow her near them as long as she had either scissors or dye in hand. Her locks were pink, blond, and blue. They’d either been cropped to a punitive length-one thought at once of head lice-or they’d broken off, incapable of anything else after repeated exposures to bleach and to colour.
“She just phoned up one day,” Lexie said when Meredith had the girl to herself. She’d had to wait for Lexie’s break and it had cost her a Coke, but that was fine by her if the minimal expense provided her with maximum details. “I reckoned I’d been doing a good job wif ever’thing, but all’s of a sudden, she phones me up and she says not to come to work tomorrow. I aksed her was it summick I done, like smoke a fag too close to the door like I might of done, you know, or what have you, but all she says is…like…, ‘No, it’s not you.’ So I reckon it’s my mum or dad with all their Bible stuff and I reckon they been preaching at her or leaving, you know, those tracks Mum writes? Like under her windscreen wipers? But she says, ‘It’s me. It’s not you. It’s not them. Things’s changed.’ I say what things but she won’t tell me. She says she’s sorry and not to aks her nuffink else.”
“Did the business go bad?” Meredith asked.
“Don’t think so. There was always people there, buying stuff. You aks me, it was weird she wanted to close up, and I knew that, innit. So I rang her ’bout a week after she talked to me. Maybe more. Dunno exactly. I ring her on her mobile to find out what’s what, but all’s I get is just her voice mail. I leave a message. At least twice, this was. But she never rang me back and when I tried another time, the phone was…There was nothing. Like she lost it or summick.”
“Did you phone her at home?”
Lexie shook her head. She picked at a healing cut on her arm. It was what she did-cutting herself-and Meredith knew this, for Lexie’s aunt owned the graphic design company where Meredith worked while she waited to break into what she really wanted to do, which was fabric design, and as Meredith greatly admired Lexie’s aunt and as Lexie’s aunt worried about the girl and talked about her and wondered wasn’t there something that could get her out of the house and away from her half-mad parents for a few hours each day…Meredith had suggested Lexie to Jemima as the Cupcake Queen’s first employee. The plan had been for her to help Jemima in setting up the shop first and then behind the counter second. Jemima couldn’t do everything herself and Lexie needed the job and Meredith wanted to score points with her employer. It had all seemed perfect.