CHAPTER 28
Zoe
Working at the bakery the next day seemed like a page from someone else’s life. Rolling the dough, mixing batter, sprinkling cinnamon sugar — none of it felt like it was happening to me. It was as though I were a character in a comic book who’d stepped into the wrong panel. The colors were too dull, the lines too thin, the dialogue didn’t fit.
Because while yesterday I may have been Zoe, of Zoe’s Cakes and Bakes, today, I couldn’t figure out who to be. I was no longer the owner of a quaint bakery on Main Street in the heart of Fallow Springs, Wisconsin. But I also wasn’t the big city girl from NYC who’d moved here after getting her heart broken by some tool. Did that make me the girl who wore all black and followed her lover into an illegal speakeasy? Only to escape the bad guys with him, and get the best oral sex of her life?
Could I be that girl?
I shook my head. Nothing seemed right, nothing was as it ought to be. Then again, neither was I.
But I felt right, and as I ought to be, when I was with Dylan. In between his burly arms, the world was safe and secure. I had only to look into those blue eyes to know that I was good enough, not a girl alone in a foreign city with piles of debt and only one friend, but a strong, independent woman who’d moved here to make her way, and was doing just that. Even if the road was rather bumpy.
And when we kissed, I knew I could spend the rest of my life pressed against those lips. It was a daunting realization. I thought it would take me years to get over my cheating ex. Instead, all it had required was a drastic move across the country and one fated arrest.
I was lost in thought throughout the day, musing over Dylan and last night, wondering at how I’d kind of enjoyed the rush of adrenaline the Black Dog had given me. That wasn’t usually my idea of a good time, but I found that my previously held ideas on a variety of topics were shifting rapidly.
By closing time, I’d managed to make solid progress on the cakes. The cakes, too, felt like they were from somebody else’s life. But looking at the looming calendar of orders that hung in my office, I knew full well that the damn cakes were from my life. And while I did enjoy baking them, it was hard going at it alone, never mind being pretty monotonous.
“You go girl,” I’d taken to saying to myself at some point during the day, like a bad nineties ‘girl power’ cartoon. “You’re gonna make these cakes your bitch.” Okay, you might not see that part on the average animated kids’ show.
And sure enough, once I’d put my head down, it did indeed look as though I would finish the fucking cakes. It was a mid-winter miracle.
I’d just finished cleaning my station when I heard a knock at the door. I assumed it was Mina, and called out, “One minute, I’m coming.” She probably just wanted to chat about the day, maybe give me some fresh gossip.
A voice returned, “Could you please make your way to the front door?”
I froze. Was it the Black Dog boys, back to finish what they’d started? I grabbed a pan that was hanging from a nearby tool rack and hefted it in my hands. This will do nicely, I thought to myself as I side-stepped to the door.
“What’s your business?” I shouted. I had been aiming for more of a polite query, but it emerged as a full-blown shout.
“Here to see a Zoe.”
“That’s me, what’d ya want?”
“Please open the door, Miss.”
I couldn’t look out the window, as it was still boarded up, and if this was one of the goons from last night, it’d be better to whack him over the head so as to send a message to the rest of the group — a message that read something like, ‘Don’t fuck with me.’
“Fine,” I returned, an uneasy warble in my voice. I locked it down, and continued, “I’m opening it.”
Good to my word, I put a hand on the doorknob and slowly turned it, as though I expected Freddy Krueger, glove and all, to greet me on the other side.
What I found was not Freddy Krueger, but what appeared to be some guy who got lost walking from his IT job to his nightly Dungeons and Dragons meetup. He had a pencil mustache, thinning hair and wire-rim glasses, which he pushed up his nose as he sniffed.
“Zoe Reynolds?” he asked in a nasally pitch.
I lowered my pan slowly, confident I could take this dude with my bare hands, maybe even just my pinky finger. “Yes, why?”
He removed one arm from behind his back, to reveal a stack of documents he was holding. “You’ve been served.”
I breathed a sigh of relief and took the papers. “Great, thanks,” I replied.
He furrowed his eyebrow and scratched at his mustache, as though surprised by my gratitude. I shut the door on his quizzical face before he could initiate further conversation.
And here I was, thinking he was a Black Dog come to get me. As it turned out, he was just some nebbish little office schlub, with unimportant office papers. Dylan had already warned me, on the day of my arrest, that I’d have to go to court over the broken brake light and expired license debacle. Getting a summons for that seemed weird, but having never been in it, I didn’t know much about the justice system.
The court date was really more of an inconvenience than anything else. I sighed, and opened the file to find out when, exactly, I was expected to appear to argue this absurd case.
My stomach flew up to my throat, and I choked.
This couldn’t be right.
No.
There was no way.
Because the paper read that I was to appear, as a defendant, in the robbery.
A defendant.
I shook my head, and muttered, “No, no that’s gotta be wrong, it couldn’t be—”
My hands trembled as I read further through the pages, where they detailed the exact nature of the accusations. My eyes slipped over the letters, as the sentences ran together.
“Evidentiary suggestion of complicit actions…”
“Defendant had told friends and casual acquaintances that she was struggling to pay off her loans, issued to her by…”
“Missing items in the amount of…”
Tears, uncalled for, sprung to my eyes, and I began to sob. I fell onto the chair, letting the documents fly all over the room and sift to the floor in a light shower of paper. Once more, I found myself crying in my bakery. Could this place ever be happy for me again?
I grabbed a floating document and tried to read it. I quickly crumpled it up and threw it across the room.
I guess they did things differently here in Fallow Springs. This is not how other places handled cases. This was just too much for me.
What more was there to read? I understood the argument, almost as soon as I’d pieced together they were labeling me the defendant. The elements came together too easily, so easily I worried that I might really be locked up for something I didn’t do.
The open cash register. The disabled alarm. The systemic selection of goods to steal.
The evidence all pointed to me. How else could it be explained?
And my mind stopped altogether.
Had Dylan known about this?
I fumbled inside my jacket pocket and pulled out my cell phone. I needed answers, and I needed them now. There was no time to act demure and polite — my bakery, and by extension, my life, was on the line.
So, I did the only thing that seemed reasonable. I called Dylan.
I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted him to answer. If he answered, I’d have to face the cold, hard truth that my lover was building a case against me.
The phone rang several times, and with each ring my heart pounded harder, until I worried that I was in cardiac arrest. A small part of me willed him not to answer.
But apparently my telepathic message didn’t go through. On the fourth ring, he picked up.
“Hey, Zoe,” he said. He sounded so normal, so nonchalant, as though I often called him at night just to chitchat. Maybe in another life, I would have. We could have talked for hours about our days, about our families, about our dreams. But that was before I found out he was working to prosecute me.
Meanwhile, based on the tone of his voice, if he knew anything, he was hiding it well. The notion only made me angrier.
“How could you?” I sputtered.
Silence.
I pressed, “Are you gonna pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about? Because I’ll go apeshit if—”
“You got the summons.” It wasn’t a question, it was a statement.
I laughed, a dark, twisted chortle. “Damn fucking right I got the summons.”
Beat. “I’m sorry, Zoe—”
“No! Don’t ‘I’m sorry’ me. You played me. I thought we were something real, that all this was maybe leading to a future together. But no, you’re just like every other man. You want me when it’s convenient, but the minute it serves you better to screw me over, I’m toast. God, I should have known. You were too good to be true.”
“That’s just not true, and if you would listen—”
“Be honest, did you do this?”
“Did I do what?”
“Did you,” I asked in a rasp, “orchestrate this? How long have you been planning it for? The entire time we were together?” New tears fell down my face at this last thought.
“No, Zoe. I didn’t orchestrate it. This was above my pay grade.”
That didn’t really answer the question. “That’s not what I’m asking, I’m trying — I mean, what I’m getting at… did you know that I was gonna be labeled as a defendant?”
A pause. A very, very long pause. One that told me all I needed to know.
At last, he replied, “Yes. I knew.”
A sob burst out of my mouth, and through it, I managed to cry, “Go fuck yourself.”
“Listen, Zoe, this is the truth. My partner, Tom, believes that you did it. He’s not trying to fill a quota or anything, and this isn’t personal. But the district attorney has taken a look at all the evidence and the circumstances, and she thinks there’s grounds to take you to court. That’s the truth.”
I had to ask. I didn’t want to, but for my own peace of mind, I needed to. I felt like I was marching myself in front of a firing squad.
“Do you think I did it?” I whispered into the phone. I’d lost the energy to shout, the wind had gone out of my sails.
“Well, I’m not sure it’s that cut and dry—”
“Cut the crap. Tell me, Dylan,” I interjected. “Tell me if you think there’s even a shadow of a possibility that I staged the robbery to recoup my losses.”
The silence lasted so long this time that I thought the phone might have gone dead. I pulled the screen away from my face, and saw that no, the timer on the call was still running. Which meant that Dylan was still there.
Minutes later — or what passed as minutes in my rage-addled brain — he finally responded.
“Yes,” he said. “I think it’s possible. I’m not saying I believe it but… I can’t rule it out.”
Pause.
“Okay,” I replied, with an eerie calm that I didn’t feel. “Lose this number. Forget everything we had.”
“But Zoe—”
“There’s nothing else you can say. We’re done here. You’ve broken my heart, Dylan, in ways I didn’t even know it could break. It was my fault, really. I should’ve known better than to trust you.”
I waited for his deep voice to burn back through the phone line, but he remained silent.
“What we are,” I continued, “is professional. Nothing more. You aren’t my lover, you’re the officer who is trying to hang me out to dry. I’ll see you in fucking court.”
With that I hung up on him, and threw the phone down. I didn’t check to see if the screen cracked. I didn’t much care. Who was there left to contact me? I was alone, more alone than I’d ever been.
I tried to stand up and get my bearings, but I was inexplicably woozy. I stumbled, and tried to grab hold of the table, but my hands no longer felt connected to my body. The room was spinning, and the blood rushed from my head.
There was just enough time for me to wonder if I should eat a cookie to raise my blood pressure before I fainted to the floor in a heap.