Emmaline Davis and I stood side by side, awed by the choices before us. “So, it’s happening tonight?” I asked.
She nodded, her expression a becoming compilation of nervous excitement. “At the beach.”
I cocked an eyebrow at Em, my best friend and sheriff of Santa Sofia, a small coastal destination spot in California, and my hometown. “He’s pretty perceptive. He doesn’t suspect?”
The twenty-something young woman helping Em had introduced herself as Kristiann. She was listening intently as we talked, all the while trying to look like she wasn’t. Emmaline tapped her finger against the glass top of the display case. “Can I see that one?” she asked Kristiann. To me, she said, “Not a clue. I just said we should meet there to go for a walk. Beautiful day, and all, so it’ll be an equally beautiful evening.”
It would be indeed, I thought as Kristiann stretched the coil keychain on her wrist out of the way so she could open the sliding door of the case. “This one?” she clarified. Em nodded, and Kristiann straightened back up and placed the silver band in a black velvet jewelry tray. “Nice choice.”
It was. The polished outer rings shone like white gold, but a brushed gunmetal-gray strip ran around the ring. Kristiann launched into a spiel about the unusual wedding band. “It’s made of tungsten carbide,” she said, as if that were as common as silver and gold. “It’s one of the strongest metals on Earth. It won’t scratch. It won’t get misshapen. It’s practically indestructible.”
“So, good for a man who works on cars and on construction sites?” I asked.
She looked at Em, a touch of envy on her face. “Is the what your guy does?” As Em nodded, Kristiann fake fanned herself with her hand, looking eerily similar to Lea Thompson in Back to the Future. “He sounds dreamy.”
I did a double take. She sounded like Lea, too.
But Emmaline didn’t register the sappiness of the moment. Her satisfied smile showed just how dreamy she thought her guy was. “He definitely is.”
Em picked up the ring from the velvet tray. Slipped it on her finger. Looked at me. “What do you think, Ivy? Will he like it?”
The “he” she referred to was my brother, Billy. “I think it’s perfect. He’ll love it.”
“Birthday or anniversary?” Kristiann asked.
“Proposal,” Emmaline answered.
Kristiann’s bright eyes popped open wide. “Wait, you’re proposing to your boyfriend? Tonight at the beach?”
Em smiled sheepishly. She was the head of law enforcement—and tough as nails—but when it came to love, she was a romantic at heart. She and Billy had been ships passing in the night for so long, but had secretly (and not so secretly) loved each other since they were kids. They’d finally gotten together and now Emmaline Davis was ready to pop the question. Gender roles be damned.
“Wow,” Kristiann said. “That’s so cool. Usually couples come in together, or the guy comes in and doesn’t know what kind of jewelry his girlfriend likes. Pretty nice for the tables to be turned.”
“Equality. That’s what we’re all about,” Em joked, but it was actually true. She had broken the glass ceiling in Santa Sofia by becoming the town’s first female sheriff. Being a woman in that position was significant; being a black woman was even more so.
Emmaline Davis was a role model. She was powerful, independent, self-assured, and driven—all things I’d felt as if I’d lost for a while, but had been reestablishing since being back in Santa Sofia. She was my role model, too, come to think of it.
I’d done a reset with my life when my mother had unexpectedly died. I’d left Austin behind, along with my photography business, my ex-husband, and the heavy Texas heat. Finding Yeast of Eden and Olaya Solis had been my first saving grace. Being back with my father and brother and Emmaline had been another.
Discovering Olaya’s bread-making classes and the passion for baking that ensued had been a huge part of finding my place in Santa Sofia again. Getting back to photography had also helped. And meeting octogenarian Penelope Branford and becoming a de facto crime solver was the proverbial icing on the cake. Life was pretty good at the moment.
Em bought the ring, her expression giddy as she left with a little velvet jewelry box in hand. “Tonight Billy and I get engaged,” she said, and then with a wink, she added, “You and Miguel are next.”
“One happily-ever-after at a time, sister,” I said. Reconnecting with Miguel Baptista, my boyfriend from high school, had been my final saving grace. We had a complicated history, but were giving each other a solid second chance, and it felt right. But marriage? We weren’t anywhere near that life milestone. I’d done that once; infidelity on my first husband’s part had ripped it apart. If and when I tied the knot again, it would be for keeps.
“Just saying, sister,” she said, and then she laughed. “We really are going to be sisters! Officially.”
I put my arm around her shoulders, and pulled her close. “We don’t need a marriage for that, but I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be family with, Em. Truly.”
My life seemed to revolve around baking bread and photography. Since I’d been back in Santa Sofia, I’d spent untold hours at Yeast of Eden, absorbing every bit of bread-making expertise I could from owner Olaya Solis. I’d stocked my own kitchen with every imaginable baking tool, from a heavy-duty stand mixer with a dough hook to proofing baskets in a variety of sizes to a Danish dough whisk. The process of mixing the flour, yeast, and water together, digging my hands into a mound of dough, and immersing myself in creating something life-sustaining from just a few ingredients fed my soul.
Photography did the same thing, only it fed my creative mind. Working with light and images let me freeze a moment in time. Finding something extraordinary in the ordinary was the greatest challenge. It was emotion . . . love . . . foreverness. When I wasn’t baking, I was observing, trying to capture the humanity around me through the lens of my camera.
I’d been messing around with cameras since I was nine years old. My mother had given me my first one more as a means to keep me busy and out of her hair than for any other reason. Little did she know, she’d set me on an artistic path. I’d long since archived the photography blog I’d started back in high school, but had gone on to earn my bachelor’s degree in design and photography. The business I’d had after college in Austin had collapsed when I moved back to my hometown, but now I was at it again, speaking not with words, as a writer did, or with clay, which a sculptor used, but with the images I captured from behind my lens.
Building a website was on my list of things to do now that I’d decided to rebuild my business. I had to start from scratch, given that I’d been in a different state for the last decade and a half, but I was up for a challenge. If I could spend every waking minute either baking bread with Olaya or exploring the world with my camera, I’d be utterly content.
After leaving Emmaline at the jewelry shop, I came home to work on my website, Ivy Culpepper Photography. Over the last several weeks, I’d been creating galleries—Business and Senior Portraits, Children, Maternity, Babies, Pets, Weddings, and Commercial—and loading images to complete the site, creating private Client Galleries so my future clients could view their portfolio of photographs from the comfort of their own homes.
At my feet, Agatha, my little fawn pug, stretched, squeaking contentedly. I leaned down to scratch her head. She looked up at me with her bulbous eyes, her lip caught on her teeth. “I’ll be ready to launch next week,” I told her. I’d been doing enough freelance, most recently photographing Baptista’s Cantina and Grill for their new marketing material, to supplement what I made working for Olaya at Yeast of Eden. I’d saved enough over the years to buy my house on Maple Street, but I lived frugally. It was time to build my business again.
By eleven o’clock, I couldn’t look at the computer for another second. My vision blurred, my eyes tired of staring at the screen. I’ll continue tomorrow, I thought, shutting my system down for the night and putting my camera away.
By the time I’d gotten myself ready for bed, Agatha was already sprawled out on the comforter beside me. The phone call came just as I was slipping under my quilt, dead tired.
The screen showed Emmaline’s name. I instantly perked up, answering with a blunt, “Tell me!”
“It didn’t go quite as planned,” she said.
Her voice carried a heavy note of forlorn exhaustion. I sat up, accidentally knocking Agatha with my knee. The dog gave a snort, looked up at me with her bulging eyes, and then settled back into slumber. “What do you mean? What happened?” I asked.
She sighed. “It started out just like I’d planned. I’d packed a little picnic. Cheese. Crackers. Strawberries. Wine. We parked over by Baptista’s, walked to the shore, spread out a blanket.”
“Sounds perfect,” I said slowly. What could have happened?
“Right? I thought so, too. But—”
My heart dropped. “He didn’t—you’re not saying—oh my God, Em, did he turn you down?”
She gave a pregnant pause before she heaved another sigh. “He didn’t have a chance to.”
I started breathing again. “You didn’t ask him?”
I sensed her shaking her head. “I didn’t ask him.”
My breath caught in my throat. “Why?” Surely she hadn’t changed her mind.
“The thing about being the sheriff, I’ve discovered, is that it’s a twenty-four-seven job.”
I exhaled again, relieved. “So you didn’t change your mind?”
“God, no,” she said, “but I had no choice but to postpone. Duty called.”
“What happened? Car crash? Beached whale? Cat stuck in a tree?”
“No, no, and I wish. There was a dead body, Ivy.”
She couldn’t be serious. “Come again?”
“A dead woman, to be precise, discovered floating just offshore. A fisherman called it in. Billy was sweet. Of course, he understood that a corpse means I go to work.”
“God, that’s horrible. She drowned?”
“Looks that way. Working theory is that she went out for a swim, got too far and either got a cramp, or was pulled out farther by the tide. As happens with drowning victims, the body resurfaced after being submerged. The ME thinks she was in the water a good twelve hours. Maybe more.”
We were silent for a moment out of respect for the dead woman. “Any idea who it was?” I finally asked.
“We found a bag with clothes on the beach about half a mile from her location. No official ID, but there was a name tag clipped to it.” I could hear the quiet rustle of pages turning as Emmaline flipped through a notebook. “Marisol Ruiz. I have an officer trying to confirm the ID—”
I stopped her cold. “Did you say Marisol Ruiz?”
“That’s right. Mid, or maybe late fifties. You know her?” Em asked.
I ran my hand over my face, covering my mouth as I closed my eyes to process. “Yes,” I said after a breath. “You do, too.”
Em hesitated. “The bloating and the—like I said, the body wasn’t recognizable—”
“Em, Marisol Ruiz has been a waitress at Baptista’s since we were kids. Remember? She used to give us free guacamole if we helped her wipe down the tables?”
There was a brief pause before Em drew in a sharp breath. “Oh my God, that Marisol? I thought her name was Montoya or something like that.”
“Morales. She got divorced, and then remarried. One of the chefs at the restaurant. Mmm, David, I think.”
Tears pricked the insides of my eyelids. I only knew Marisol from my memories, and from seeing her occasionally at Baptista’s when I’d been recently. But Miguel had probably known her his entire life.
Em seemed to read my mind. “I’m going to confirm the identity before we tell Miguel.”
I hoped the initial ID of the victim was wrong. Miguel had recently lost his longtime produce man, Mustache Hank. That had been hard. Losing Marisol, who had been a fixture at Baptista’s for as long as I could remember, would be devastating. “Let me know,” I said to Em before we said our goodbyes.
Every bit of sleepiness was wiped clear out of my body. I tossed and turned for a good hour before finally hauling myself out of bed and trudging down the hall to the little room I’d made into my office. I booted up my desktop computer, and then loaded up the Lightroom gallery I’d created for the Baptista’s Cantina and Grill photo shoots. Miguel had chosen a total of seven photographs from the two hundred or so I’d taken, including a low-light shot of the outdoor patio with the streak of the boardwalk lights in the distant background. The night shot was one of my favorites; it captured the juxtaposition of the romantic ambience of the restaurant and the frenetic energy of the boardwalk.
But there were many more photos, including candids of the employees. When I took portraits, I tried to capture not just what people looked like, but rather who they were. I scrolled through the collection, lifting my finger from the arrow key when I came across one of Marisol and her husband, David. She had her arm threaded through his, and while he looked straight into the camera, she had her head turned and tilted back, looking up at him. She wasn’t exactly smiling, but if I had to pick a word to describe her in that frozen moment, it would be content.
She was trim and fit. She had a vibrant olive complexion, although the sun-kissed color didn’t hide the wrinkles around her eyes and skin damage that living on the coast had caused.
David was older than Marisol and stood several inches taller. While his gaze was directed at the camera, the tilt of his head toward his wife, the slight lift of one side of his mouth in the faintest smile, and the softness in his eyes told the story. He loved the woman next to him. My heart instantly ached for him. Once he got a call from Emmaline, assuming they confirmed the identity of the dead body, the ease in his expression would be gone forever.
I’d finally been able to fall asleep, but the fitful night had left me groggy and unrested. I kept envisioning the animated and always cheerful Marisol I’d known as a child, washed up on the beach. I hoped against hope that Emmaline would call me to say it was some other poor soul she’d found. Instead I got an early morning call from Miguel. “I have some bad news,” he said, launching right into it.
“I talked to Emmaline last night,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t wonder why I hadn’t called him with the news.
“So you know.” His voice sounded weighted with disbelief.
“I’m so sorry.”
“I can’t think of a time when she wasn’t”—he broke off, swallowing the sadness that was on the surface—“when she wasn’t in my life,” he finished hoarsely.
I pressed the speaker button on my phone, laid it down beside me, and hugged my arms around my knees, burying my face into them.
“It’s a tragic irony, you know?” he said after he swallowed his emotions.
“What do you mean?”
“Mari was a swimmer. She did triathlons, for chrissakes. She swam in the Pacific all the time. To drown in the ocean . . . it doesn’t seem right.”
I hadn’t remembered that about her. Or maybe I’d never known. No wonder she was so healthy and fit-looking. “It doesn’t,” I agreed.
“I remember her telling me about the first time she competed,” Miguel continued. “It was in Northern California somewhere. The swimming portion of the race was in a lake. It was only a half mile or so, compared to nine miles on a bike and three miles running, but she said she didn’t make it past the first leg. Fighting the current and constant waves did her in. That’s when she started training in the ocean. She said she would conquer that lake if it was the last thing she did.”
“Did she?” I asked.
“The next year. Went back and competed like a boss.” I heard the smile in his voice, but it vanished as quickly as it had materialized. “How could she have died out there?”
“Maybe she got a cramp. Or maybe the tide took her too far out.”
Miguel let out a sorrowful sigh. “Her father just died, you know. She was having a really hard time dealing with that. She couldn’t have—”
He stopped, but I knew right away what he’d been thinking. I’d lost my mother not long ago, and only recently had I begun to find a new normal. Death wasn’t something you just got over. No, you learned to cope and eventually, like yeast proofing in water, you realize that you’ve changed, but that you’re alive.
Only sometimes people didn’t overcome. Sometimes depression set in and the dark hole became too deep to climb out of. “Didn’t she have kids? And grandkids?” I asked, because even if she was wrought with grief over losing her father, children or grandchildren of her own might have given her perspective and purpose.
“Yeah. Sergio, Laura’s husband,” he said, referring to his sister.
Laura and I had recently made amends. She’d been less than happy that I’d come back to Santa Sofia—and into her brother’s life—because she’d spent years blaming me for the fact that Miguel had left his hometown to join the military. We were on good terms now, and I was besotted with her children. Eighteen-month-old Mateo, and Andrea, his two-and-a-half-year-old sister, were adorable. To think that the dead woman was their grandmother felt like a sucker punch to the gut.
And Sergio Morales. I’d met him briefly not that long ago, but I hadn’t made the connection between him and Marisol. I put my hand over my mouth.
Miguel continued. “Then there’s Ruben, the oldest, and Lisette. She’s the baby. Christ.” I could picture Miguel running a ragged hand over his face. This was all too close to home for him, and the people around him—his people—were hurting.
“I’m so sorry, Miguel. Can I do anything?”
“They’re all coming to the restaurant at five,” he said. “Lisette, Ruben, Sergio, Laura. If you want . . .”
He trailed off. We’d found our way back to each other after what felt like a lifetime apart, but at the same time, we were still new. Did he think he was asking too much of me to come be a shoulder for him?
“I’ll be there,” I said, and I would. Always.
Baptista’s Cantina and Grill was Santa Sofia’s answer to high-end Mexican seafood. It sat on the pier overlooking a rocky inlet, had the best brisket queso this side of—anywhere, and was owned and operated by Miguel. He’d recently renovated, a project he’d sunk his heart and soul into. The restaurant had been his father’s brainchild, and Miguel and Laura had spent their youth learning every aspect of it. Miguel’s mother still worked there, mostly manning the hostess station from her perch atop a cushioned stool, and Laura filled in when she was needed, but since Miguel’s father had passed and Miguel had come back to Santa Sofia, the restaurant had, for all intents and purposes, become his.
He’d started by shutting off the back room, starting the remodel there. It had gone more quickly than he’d planned, and with my brother Billy on board as the contractor, the entire restaurant had gotten an interior facelift in no time. Gone were the Naugahyde booths and ancient tables. Now the look of the restaurant fit the menu. Aztec-patterned tile graced the floors. An open fireplace with bold and graphic—but not folksy—tile stretched up to the tall ceiling. The walls were wood planked, huge windows overlooked the pier and ocean, and blown glass fixtures illuminated the space. I’d chronicled the renovation for him, and had taken pictures of the finished spaces for new promotions he’d put in place, and I’d done extensive food photography (and tasting) for the menu.
A long, sleek bar stretched along one side of the restaurant, to the left of the entrance and waiting room. “We’ve got a hundred tequilas and mezcals,” he’d told me, “and Jorge is our new mezcal concierge. He. . .
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