Bridgette
It was late enough in the evening that the street in front of her bakery was clear. There was never that much traffic in the sleepy little town, but Bridgette usually made sure to park in the far lot just in case customers would be put out by having to search for street parking.
She pulled into a parallel parking spot and jumped out of the car. Being out in front of the storefront in the fading light of dusk, the same spot where she’d been assaulted not once but twice, didn’t leave her with a good feeling. She started to have second thoughts, but she reasoned that she was just letting her own paranoia get the best of her.
She’d thought this through. In and out. It would take her a few minutes at the most. She wasn’t going to let fear rule her life, that was for sure.
She headed into the bakery, fumbling a little more than usual with the lock at the front entrance. She nearly dropped her keys in her nervousness. But she eventually managed to get the door open.
She took a moment to take stock of the place. As she suspected, it was a complete mess. The guys had moved upstairs, going through all the cases and tearing out most of the walls, even though they’d gotten it out of the guy who’d assaulted her that whatever Martin was looking for was almost certainly in the basement.
Most of the walls had been gutted and the wiring exposed. The space behind the counter had been left in a disarray, too. Half of the cabinets were open and empty, and their contents—pens, her ledger, recipe books—left scattered on the floor.
The thought of all the work that she had ahead of her threatened to overwhelm her. Looking at the destruction in her shop felt to her like peering into an open casket, like coming to terms with something that was now gone. The frustration was quickly turning to a strange kind of mourning.
Kyle wasn’t going to fix any of this. She’d been kidding herself when she let herself believe that. He’d wanted two things—to sleep with her and get his revenge. The two had just so happened to tie together neatly. And now he wanted to be a father to Gabby?
He hadn’t grown up over these past six years. Maybe he’d changed, become a little harder, a little crueler. But that didn’t mean that she could believe he’d matured. He’d been running around with those leering, drug-running bikers. He hadn’t made one modicum of effort to accommodate her needs—particularly, her business. What was to stop him from leaving her with this mess to clean up?
Maybe it was just the emotional shock of seeing the place she’d built from a foreclosed building into a nearly-thriving staple of the town torn up this way. Maybe that was driving the flood of anger and pessimism.
But looking around, it was hard for her to believe they hadn’t found whatever they were looking for, if it even existed. Maybe it really wasn’t here. Maybe this was some ruse, as she’d first suspected, to scare her back into his arms. Maybe every one of the guys who’d come after her was really in league with Kyle and his goons.
It was an awfully crazy, elaborate scheme he’d set up, if that were the case. So then again, maybe her emotions were twisting and distorting her thinking.
It didn’t matter. Now was not the time to pass judgment. She was going to give him a few more days. After that, she could file a police report and an insurance claim for the damages if she had to. Just because she couldn’t fix anything right now didn’t mean it would never be rectified.
Bridgette searched for a pen and spare piece of paper in the wreckage. She spied exactly what she was looking for in front of the register, buried underneath a small pile of binders which held her business reports and expenses.
They’d just left her most important documents lying on the floor in a heap. Her nails dug into her palms as her hands clenched into instinctive fists. No. She would be angry later. Right now she needed to get her sign up and get out. Then…then she could drive to the park or something, take a little time to cry this all out, then pull herself together to go pick up Gabby.
She leaned over the counter and scrawled out her explanation for the bakery being closed—a “family emergency.” She thanked all her long-gone customers for their patronage, and wrote that she hoped to be back up and running soon. She signed her name with a flourish, then hunted up her tape dispenser from the catastrophe sprawled over the floor.
She affixed the sign to the glass of the front door and read it over one more time.
She hated to do this. But there was no other sound option.
She was about to leave, but a thought struck her. What if those idiots had missed something in the basement? Something obvious? It had, after all, been days since they’d first started looking, and their search hadn’t been casual by any standards. If they’d continued as they had, her whole basement had to have been completely gutted by now.
Either they were hopelessly incompetent or the stuff wasn’t there. And in the case of the former, she thought, she’d best go down and look over their work, maybe save them further trouble. The worst that could happen was that she came to the same conclusion as them—that there were no hiding spots left.
She hated to waste more time here, but part of her still craved distraction. And looking for drugs in her basement offered just that.
She made her way down the steps, feeling along the wall for the light switch. She flipped it on as soon as her hand brushed over it.
The sight of her storage room knocked the air out of her lungs, even though she’d done her best to prepare herself for what she was facing.
She’d been right. The whole place was gutted. Everything they could have pulled out had been pulled out. The drywall, the insulation, the plywood that separated the finished walls from the concrete foundation.
Wires hung everywhere in what was likely an intricate entanglement of code violations. There were even portions of the exposed foundation where it looked as if someone had used the mini jackhammer she’d seen earlier to gouge out chunks of solid concrete.
Had they really thought that whoever had stashed the drugs had somehow gotten through the finished wall to the concrete, penetrated into the cinderblock and hidden the drugs there, then perfectly restored everything so there was no sign of smashing through the wall in the first place?
But given the state of the room, she guessed they’d been getting desperate, and any theory, even as far-fetched as that, would have been believable.
So she was wrong. There was nowhere left to look.
Except the ceiling. She craned her neck up immediately to see if they’d even touched that part of the basement. She almost laughed to herself when she saw that the expanse of grimy white wallpaper was entirely untouched.
Of course, she thought bitterly. It had gone over their heads, literally. She scanned the room for a stepladder or anything that she could use to boost herself up. Luckily someone had brought a folding chair she could use.
She scanned along the ceiling, searching for any sign of irregularity. Her blood was pumping hard in her veins. Maybe she’d come up empty handed, too, but it was exciting to think she might actually find the stash and put an end to this whole nightmare. Or, put an end to the worst part of it, at least.
There were no lumps or obvious patches, but she did notice that the farthest edge of the wallpaper had begun to curl in at the corner. It might have been nothing, just a sure sign of the dilapidation that had almost consumed the place before she’d bought it.
Or it could have been hiding something crucial.
Bridgette moved the chair over the corner and climbed up so she could peel the paper back and see what was underneath. A hole in the ceiling should have produced some kind of wrinkle or shape, and she hadn’t seen one, but maybe it was hiding something else.
When she’d managed to pull the paper back a foot, what she saw underneath caused her heart to skip a beat. Tiles. The wallpaper had been covering ceiling tiles. The space between the tiles and the floor above would have been perfect for stashing drugs.
Propelled by her encouraging discovery, Bridgette moved to investigate the initial tile she’d uncovered. It looks just askew, she thought. Maybe….
She pushed on it, only to find an unnatural weight pressing down on it that made it difficult to budge it. After carefully tilting it back and forth for a few seconds, she managed to wiggle the tile forward, exposing a heavy plastic bag filled with a white powder that she knew immediately had to be cocaine.
Shit. She’d actually done it. It felt as if the stone that had been sitting in her stomach since Kyle had first shown up had dissolved.
He hadn’t been lying to her. Everything he’d said about Martin, about the reason behind the strange men hanging around, coming after her—it had all been true. That was an immense relief too, though it came with a flood of shame for having ever doubted him.
What did she do now? Bridgette stared up at the bag, hesitating. There had to be at least ten pounds of coke there, if not more. There was no way in hell she was chancing trying to get that out to her car. She didn’t even like the fact that it would have to stay in the bakery.
She’d have to go find Kyle and tell him right away. She could call him to come over…but she didn’t like hanging out here alone any longer than she had to. Besides, if he was still pissed at her, he probably wouldn’t even pick up.
It might be better to try to reconcile with him right away, too, she decided. There was no reason to let things fester overnight.
Now that she’d found the drugs, things seemed a lot less uncertain. And in retrospect, there were plenty of things she’d said to him that had come across a lot harsher than she’d meant them to be.
It would be good to drive over and apologize in person. So she shifted the drugs over so they were once again secured in the ceiling and replaced the tile. Just in case, she told herself.
As she was climbing down from the chair, she heard the bell from the front door jingle.
So Kyle had followed her, she thought, a wry smile forming on her lips. Well, it had worked out for the better. She headed up the stairs.
“Kyle,” she called, “I know what you’re going to say, but you’ve got to hear me out.”
She reached the top of the stairs. To her surprise, the front room was empty. Had she been imagining things?
“Kyle?” she called, her voice starting to quaver a little. She glanced to her left and right, but there was no one there.
She crept into the kitchen, scanning ahead of her for the slightest sign of movement.
But she didn’t look to her side in time. So she didn’t see the blow coming. She only felt the force of the impact before succumbing to the rising black curtain of unconsciousness.