“Can I help you with anything?” She asked, toeing off her shoes and following me into my home, looking around as we passed through the foyer and dining room to the kitchen in the back.
“Would you like to open that wine for me?” I asked. “It will pair fantastically.”
“Hmm.” She smiled proudly, “I took a guess.”
We moved around my large kitchen like two lovers doing a synchronized dance they’d perfected years ago. It was comfortable and easy as we got our food to the dining room table.
It wasn’t fancy, pasta tossed with garlic herb sauce, fresh bread, and lemon-roasted vegetables. Yet she ate with such passion, as if she hadn’t eaten all day long, which wouldn’t have surprised me. Firehouse food was functional, but not made with love.
Halfway through our meal, she grew quiet, no longer making small talk about nonsense things like we had been doing. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she said, setting her fork down.
I wiped my mouth with a napkin and gave her my full attention.
“I took a closer look at the pipe from the sprinkler system in Honey & Hearth. I showed a piece of it to Elliot Hayes, he’s a fire investigator, and I trust him and his opinion with my life.”
“And?” I asked, already clutching my wine glass tighter.
“He agreed with my original suspicion. It wasn’t age or a malfunction. Someone weakened it from the inside. It was intentional, Goldie.”
My heart dropped. “So, it was sabotage.” I sputtered, “Someone wanted to ruin me.”
“Yeah,” she said softly. “And that’s not all. Today’s fire at Miller’s Hardware? It was electrical, but not an accident. Someone lit their storage barn on purpose.”
“Jesus.” I stared down at my plate, my appetite gone.
“Has anything else weird happened? Has anyone caused problems for you?”
I hesitated, then nodded. “When I bought the building a few days later, I was served with papers from a law firm claiming to be representing someone leasing the building from the old owners. It said that I had to honor the lease and could not take possession of the building.”
“Seriously?” Rhea’s eyebrows pulled together.
“It was terrifying. I thought I’d made the worst financial mistake of my life. I dropped everything into a building I couldn’t even use.”
“What happened?”
“I cried. And panicked,” I joked, and she smiled softly at me. “Then I got a lawyer, and they looked into it. There was no proof of a lease with anyone, the old owners swore up and down they’d never leased the space to anyone either. So, my lawyer said the person who sent it was trying to scam me, but we couldn’t figure out what for.”
“To intimidate you into selling it for less,” she said, her voice dark. “Out of fear.”
I blinked, “I thought it was over. But now with everything else going on?—”
“It feels like a pattern.”
“Lately,” I chewed on my lip. “I’ve had more and more business-type people coming into the bakery. Out of towners. All in suits with cell phones glued to their ears. They never seem as if they belong. They rush everyone, get rude, make a mess. Jasper calls them ‘the vibe killers’.”
She smirked, “He’s not wrong. But I think they’re there for something else entirely.”
“What?” I whispered.
“They’re trying to make it seem like there’s a need for a corporate-style bakery or coffee shop in town. Something cookie-cutter and fast.”
“Which isn’t what Honey & Hearth is at all.” I sighed, leaning back in my chair. “Someone is trying to rattle me.”
“Probably. And they’re doing the same thing to the Millers now too.”
We sat for a beat, the flicker of candlelight between us. After a while, the anxiety building in my chest erupted, and I stood up in a rush, clearing the table. “Okay, enough fire talk,” I called over my shoulder as she followed me into the kitchen with her plate. “Are you ready for dessert?”
“I thought the fire talk was dessert,” she joked.