The Sourdough Alibi

• Chapter 1 Starter Troubles
• Chapter 2 Flour on the Floor
• Chapter 3 The Midnight Knead
• Chapter 4 Half-Baked Memories
• Chapter 5 Proofing the Scene
• Chapter 6 A Bitter Taste
• Chapter 7 Rise and Fall
• Chapter 8 Whispers by the Oven
• Chapter 9 Missing Ingredients
• Chapter 10 The Rolling Pin Clue
• Chapter 11 Foggy Reflections
• Chapter 12 Fermentation and Fear
• Chapter 13 Scratched Timers
• Chapter 14 The Crust Breaks
• Chapter 15 A Recipe for Suspicion
• Chapter 16 Second Rise
• Chapter 17 Burnt Edges
• Chapter 18 Sifting Through Lies
• Chapter 19 Flashes in the Dark
• Chapter 20 Under Proofed
• Chapter 21 The Scoring Blade
• Chapter 22 Heat in the Kitchen
• Chapter 23 Piecing the Dough
• Chapter 24 The Final Batch
• Chapter 25 Golden Brown Truth
• Chapter 26 Fresh Out of the Oven

The flour was supposed to be in the bin beside the kneader, but it wasn't.

Cleo Wood stood in the center of the kitchen at four in the morning, the harsh glow of the overhead fluorescent lights humming softly against the silence of Wildwood Harbor. She blinked, pressing the heels of her palms against her eyes until bright pinpricks of light danced behind her eyelids. When she lowered her hands, the fifty-pound bag of unbleached bread flour was still sitting five feet away on the steel prep table, wide open, with a wooden scoop resting halfway inside it.

She hadn't moved it. Or had she?

Cleo reached into the pocket of her faded denim apron and pulled out a small, leather-bound notebook. The pages were worn at the corners, filled with her own sharp, left-leaning handwriting. She flipped to today’s date, October fourteenth.

03:45 AM – Arrive at bakery. Unlock back alley door. Turn on convection ovens. 03:50 AM – Measure out flour for sourdough first build.

Cleo looked at the wall clock. It was four-fifteen. Half an hour had slipped away, smooth and grease-slicked, leaving no trail behind in her mind.

She took a deep breath, inhaling the familiar smells of dried yeast, cold stainless steel, and the faint, sweet perfume of vanilla sugar left over from yesterday’s pastry run. The memory gaps were getting worse, or perhaps they were just becoming more stubborn. Ever since the bicycle accident on the coastal road eighteen months ago—the one that had cracked her helmet and left her with a hairline skull fracture—her brain had treated recent events like loose wet sand. Some things stuck, like how to stretch and fold a high-hydration dough until the gluten developed a shiny, translucent windowpane. Other things, like what she had done thirty minutes ago or where she had left her car keys, floated off into the fog.

"Stick to the ledger," she whispered to herself. That was what Dr. Evans had told her. If you can't trust the hard drive in your head, Cleo, build an external one.

She grabbed a black gel pen from her apron pocket and crossed off the second item on her list, adding a neat checkmark beside it. Then she walked over to the cooling rack where her prized sourdough starter lived.

The starter was named Bartholomew. He was a seventy-year-old mother culture passed down from her grandmother, a bubbly, aromatic mix of wild yeasts and lactobacilli that smelled like fermented apples and warm, tangy milk. Bartholomew was the backbone of The Crust & Crumb, the small bakery Cleo had managed to buy with her inheritance and an uncomfortably large bank loan. Without Bartholomew, there were no signature boules, no sourdough cinnamon rolls, and no business.

Cleo reached out to lift the heavy glass crock off the shelf, but her fingers stopped an inch from the ceramic lid.

The lid was crooked.

Cleo was meticulous about Bartholomew. She always sealed the rubber gasket with a firm double-snap to keep out the stray fruit flies that drifted in from the alley. But right now, the lid sat tilted at an odd angle, resting loosely atop the jar’s glass rim.

Worse than the lid was the smell.

Usually, pulling the top off Bartholomew released a rich, comforting wave of yeasty acidity. But even standing a foot away, Cleo caught a sharp, acrid twinge that made her nose wrinkle. It didn't smell like wild yeast. It smelled like vinegar mixed with something metallic, like copper coins left out in the rain.

"What did I do to you?" she murmured, pulling the glass lid off completely.

The surface of the dough was dead. The thick, pale creamy foam that usually rose up to greet the morning had collapsed into a grayish, watery sludge. A thin layer of dark liquid—what bakers called hooch— sat suspended over a dull, lifeless mass. There were no bubbles bursting at the surface. No gentle puff of gas.

Cleo felt a cold tight knot twist in her stomach. She grabbed a wooden spoon from the utensil crock and gently prodded the mixture. It was stiff, separated, and entirely inert.

"No, no, no," she breathed, leaning closer.

How could a healthy starter drop dead overnight? She had fed it yesterday at five in the afternoon before locking up. She remembered doing it—or rather, she remembered writing down that she had done it. She snatched her notebook from her pocket again, flipping back a page.

• yesterday, 05:00 PM – Feed Bartholomew. 500g rye flour, 500g room temp water. Lock main entrance. Check deadbolt on alley door. Home by five-thirty.*

The ink was there, plain as day. But as Cleo stared at the handwriting, a strange chill prickled down the back of her neck.

The entry for five o'clock was written in blue ink. Cleo only ever used black gel pens. Her kitchen was stocked with black pens, her apron pocket held three black pens, and she kept a box of twenty black pens in the small desk drawer in her office. She hadn't owned a blue ballpoint pen in years.

She touched the page, running her thumb over the blue letters. The handwriting looked like hers—the exaggerated loops on the g's, the flat, straight crossbars on the t's—but it was slightly larger, looser, as if her hand had been trembling when she wrote it. Or as if someone else had tried very hard to copy her style.

Cleo stood frozen in the middle of the dark bakery kitchen, the sound of the refrigerator compressors humming a low, monotonous tune.

Did she borrow a blue pen yesterday? Had she met someone after hours? She tried to drag up the memory of five o'clock yesterday evening, but the wall in her mind was solid and blank. She remembered turning off the display case lights. She remembered the bell above the door ringing as her last customer left—Mrs. Gable, buying her usual half-loaf of caraway rye. After that, there was only dark water.

A sudden, sharp knock at the back door made her jump, her wooden spoon clattering against the stainless-steel table.

Cleo whirled around, her heart pounding against her ribs like a trapped bird. Through the frosted glass window of the alley door, she could see a broad, dark shadow silhouetted against the amber glow of the streetlamp outside.

"Cleo? You in there?" a voice boomed through the thick wood.

Cleo let out a long breath, her shoulders dropping three inches. It was Marcus, the morning delivery driver from the local dairy coop.

She slid the heavy iron deadbolt back and pulled the door open. Cold October air swept into the warm kitchen, carrying the scent of salt water from the harbor three blocks away and the sharp tang of dying leaves.

Marcus stood on the threshold holding two heavy plastic crates filled with glass bottles of whole milk and tubs of cultured butter. He was a thick-set man in his mid-fifties with a bushy gray beard and a high-visibility orange vest thrown over a flannel shirt.

"Morning, kiddo," Marcus said, stepping inside and letting the heavy door swing shut behind him. He set the crates down near the walk-in refrigerator with a loud plastic thud. "You look like you just saw a ghost. Or worse, burnt a batch of scones."

"Neither," Cleo said, trying to force a natural smile, though her jaw felt tight. "Just... lost in thought. Early morning brain."

"Tell me about it," Marcus grunted, leaning back against the steel counter and wiping his brow with the back of his sleeve. "The harbor bridge was blocked off by police cruisers when I came in from the highway. Looks like some big shot’s yacht got loose and drifted into the marina slips. Town's going to be buzzing today."

"Police?" Cleo asked, glancing toward the front of the shop.

"Yeah. Chief Miller was down there himself, looking like he hadn't slept a wink. Probably just paperwork, but you know how folks around here get whenever a patrol car turns its lights on." Marcus paused, sniffing the air. He frowned, his eyes scanning the bakery kitchen. "Hey, what's that smell? Did somebody spill cleaning fluid?"

Cleo quickly stepped between Marcus and the counter where the ruined starter sat. "I was just doing a deep clean on the drains before starting the prep," she lied smoothly, her hand instinctively hovering near her apron pocket. "Bleach and hot water."

"Ah. Right," Marcus said, though he didn't look entirely convinced. He tapped the top of the butter crate. "Anyway, invoice is on the clip. I’ve got to head over to the cafe on Fifth before the morning rush hits. Oh, by the way—did you get things straightened out with Vance last night?"

Cleo’s chest tightened. "Vance?"

Jasper Vance was the town’s premier real estate developer and, unfortunately for Cleo, the owner of the building The Crust & Crumb occupied. He was a slick, sharp-featured man in his sixties who wore three-piece suits to local town hall meetings and had spent the last six months trying to force Cleo out so he could tear down the brick building and put up luxury boutique condos.

"Yeah, Jasper Vance," Marcus said, looking at her with a hint of confusion. "I saw his silver Mercedes parked in the alley behind your place around six yesterday evening when I was finishing my route. Figure he came by to badger you about the lease renewal again."

Cleo felt a cold sensation creep up the back of her neck. "Six o'clock?"

"Yeah. Left his car right by the dumpsters, blocking half the lane like he owns the whole alley. Well, I guess technically he does." Marcus chuckled, though the sound was dry. "I thought about laying on my horn to make him move, but I didn't want to get pulled into whatever argument you two were having. Did he give you more trouble?"

Cleo stared at Marcus, her mind racing. Six o'clock yesterday. She had written down that she left at five-thirty.

Did Vance come here? Did I talk to him?

"No," Cleo said, her voice barely louder than a whisper. "No real trouble. Just... the usual lease talk."

"Right. Well, don't let him push you around," Marcus said, throwing open the back door again. "Your sourdough is the only good thing happening in this town on a Tuesday morning. See you tomorrow, Cleo."

"Bye, Marcus," she said auto-pilotly.

The back door clicked shut, the deadbolt engaging automatically.

Cleo stood alone in the bright, sterilizing light of the kitchen. She looked from the blank back alley door to the blue ink in her notebook, and finally to the jar of dead, chemical-tainted sourdough starter sitting on her prep table.

She reached out and lifted the jar of starter. As she tilted it to catch the light, she noticed something she had missed before.

On the stainless-steel table, right where the glass jar had been sitting, was a faint, powdery outline in the shape of a footprint. It wasn't flour. It was fine, gray construction dust—the kind from the renovation site Vance was running down on the waterfront.

And tucked beneath the edge of the cooling rack, half-hidden by a stack of clean linen proofing cloths, lay a single blue ballpoint pen.

The blue pen seemed to burn against the stainless-steel table, though it was merely cheap, click-top plastic with a hotel logo stamped in fading gold along the barrel. The Harborside Grand. That was Vance’s flagship renovation, the crumbling Victorian resort down near the south jetty that he was busy turning into condominiums for summer millionaires.

Cleo did not pick it up. She had watched enough late-night crime dramas with her grandmother to know that poking evidence with your bare fingers was an excellent way to confuse the authorities, though the thought of calling the authorities made her mouth taste like iron filings. What would she tell Chief Miller? Someone entered my kitchen, killed my sourdough culture with floor cleaner, and left a ballpoint pen, but I can’t be sure if they were breaking and entering or if I invited them in for chamomile tea because my brain drops every twelve hours of memory down a laundry chute.

She took two steps back and pressed the small of her back against the cool lip of the double-basin sink.

The kitchen felt enormous and hostile. Usually, at four in the morning, the bakery was an island of dependable routine. The hum of the refrigeration was an old friend; the dry, papery whisper of flour bags sliding across pine skids was music; the heat blooming from the stones of the deck oven was a wall against the damp Maine night. Now, every shadow cast by the hanging wire baskets looked elongated, like fingers reaching down from the tin-tiled ceiling.

Cleo drew her notebook from her apron. She opened it to the five-o'clock entry again. The blue ink stared up at her, insolent and looping. She set her black gel pen beside it on the page. The contrast was ridiculous. The black was precise, written with the sharp, deliberate strokes of someone who desperately needed to trust her own records. The blue was loose, sloppy, and slanted backward, as if the writer had been leaning over a counter with their weight shifted awkwardly on one hip.

Think, she commanded herself.

She stared hard at the corner of the prep table, trying to peel back the gray curtain that draped over the previous evening. She remembered Mrs. Gable. She remembered Mrs. Gable complaining about her hip, about the price of butter, and about the noise from the piling drivers down at Vance’s construction site. Cleo remembered handing her a brown paper bag, the crust still warm enough to fog the clear cellophane window. Then she remembered the brass chime over the front door tinkling.

After that? A void. Just a black, cold puddle.

"Focus on what is in front of you," she muttered aloud, quoting Dr. Evans again. The neurologist had a soothing, measured voice that Cleo often tried to summon when the dizziness and panic took the wheel. The world is what it is right now, Cleo. Work from the edges inward.

All right. The edges.

First edge: the starter was ruined. Bartholomew, who had survived three moves, two power outages during the blizzard of ’08, and Cleo’s early, disastrous attempts at panettone, was dead. The smell was stronger now, a vinegary, chemical assault that made her eyes water. Whatever had been dumped into the crock had curdled the yeast into gray rubber.

Second edge: Marcus had seen Vance’s car parked in the alley at six. Cleo’s log claimed she had left at five-thirty, but if the log was forged—or if she had written it in a fugue state after Vance arrived—she might have stayed much later.

Third edge: the gray dust.

Cleo walked carefully around the prep island, flicking on the under-cabinet spotlights to illuminate the floor. The bakery floor was covered in heavy-duty commercial linoleum, a speckled terracotta pattern designed to hide scuffs. But bread bakeries have an inherent advantage when it comes to tracking movement: everything is dusted with a microscopic layer of organic matter. A fine haze of white flour, semolina, and cornmeal coated every inch that hadn't seen a broom in the last six hours.

There, just beside the cooling rack, was the footprint.

It was not hers. Cleo wore heavy, non-skid clogs with wide, rounded toes and a distinct crosshatch tread. This print was long, narrow, and sharp at the edges—the sole of a leather dress shoe, size eleven at least. The heel had struck hard into the dusting of bench flour, leaving a distinct semi-circular gouge where a rubber tap had caught the linoleum.

She followed the path of the shoes.

The prints led away from the rack, moving toward the small corridor that led to the walk-in cooler, the dry storage closet, and the heavy metal door that opened into the alley. But halfway down the narrow hall, the prints became messy. The stride had lengthened. There was a smear where someone had slid, their foot kicking against the baseboard and dislodging a small heap of rolled oats that Cleo had missed with the broom yesterday morning.

Beside the smear, the wall bore a dirty smudge at shoulder height, right on the clean white semigloss paint.

Cleo approached it, her hand hovering an inch from the wall. It was a gray-white smudge of pulverized drywall, mingled with a greasy, dark brown streak. She sniffed it cautiously. Machine oil.

The walk-in cooler was at the end of the short hallway. Its heavy chrome handle was dogged down securely, the padlock hanging open on its hasp. Cleo always kept the padlock in the hasp during working hours so she didn't lose the key, but she distinctly remembered snapping it shut before going home. Or did she?

Don't start second-guessing the padlocks, she warned herself. Look at the floor.

The floor in front of the dry storage closet was covered in an uneven white drift.

At first glance, it looked as though someone had dropped a five-pound bag of pastry flour. But as Cleo stepped into the hallway, the light from the kitchen caught the surface of the pile at an angle. The flour hadn't fallen from a bag; it had been scattered. It was spread in wide, sweeping arcs, like an awkward fan, as if someone had used a scoop to sling it across the floor in a deliberate, panicky hurry.

And underneath that blanket of white, poking out from beneath the bottom louvered slat of the dry storage door, was the toe of a polished black oxford shoe.

Cleo stopped. Her heart didn't leap; it dropped straight down into her boots, leaving her ribcage completely empty of air. The silence of the bakery, usually so peaceful, turned deafening. The compressor in the walk-in cooler clicked, groaned, and kicked into its high-pitched cycle with a rattle that made her jump two inches off the tile.

She didn't scream. Screaming was for people who had their wits about them, people who could quickly summarize the situation and demand assistance. Cleo felt only a dull, terrible weight behind her eyes, the familiar sensation of her brain struggling to assemble a puzzle whose pieces were made of smoke.

"Hello?" she whispered.

The word was tiny. It died immediately against the bags of sugar and boxes of parchment paper.

No answer came. The shoe didn't twitch.

Cleo forced herself forward, one foot dragging after the other until she reached the door of the dry storage closet. The door was slightly ajar, caught against something heavy on the other side. Through the wooden slats, she could see a dark shape crumpled on the floor between the fifty-pound sacks of King Arthur Special Patent flour and the drums of dark molasses.

She reached out with her trembling left hand, caught the brass knob, and pulled.

The door resisted for a second, scraping over the flour-dusted floor, before swinging back.

Jasper Vance lay on his side, his long legs tangled among three torn bags of cracked wheat. His bespoke charcoal wool coat was ruined, covered in streaks of flour and what looked like dark, dried syrup. His silver hair, usually combed back with pomade until it looked like a helmet of spun metal, was matted against the side of his temple.

A large, heavy brass dough scale—the antique one Cleo kept on the top shelf as a decorative nod to her grandmother—sat on the floor eighteen inches away from his head. One of its polished counterweights was missing. The corner of the brass beam was dark and sticky.

Vance wasn't moving. His eyes were half-open, staring unblinkingly at the bottom shelf where Cleo kept her extra bins of sourdough crocks and sea salt.

Cleo fell back against the opposite wall, her shoulder hitting the doorframe with a dull thud. Her hands flew to her mouth, stifling a dry sob.

"No, no, no, no," she breathed.

Vance was dead. Even without touching him, the awful slackness of his jaw and the gray, waxy cast of his skin told her everything she needed to know. The man who had spent the last six months threatening her with eviction notices, building code violations, and legal writs was lying in her pantry like a sack of rejected grain.

She looked down at her hands. They were white with flour.

She turned them over. Her palms were clean, but on the knuckle of her right index finger was a small, neat scab, about half an inch long, with the reddish-purple fringe of a fresh bruise surrounding it.

When did I do that?

The question hit her like a bucket of freezing harbor water. She stared at the bruise, racking her memory, straining until her temples throbbed with a rhythmic, sharp pain that brought tears to her eyes. She remembered slicing lemons for the poppy seed loaves yesterday morning. She remembered burning her forearm on the oven rack three weeks ago—there was the faint pink line near her wrist. But this? A scrape across the knuckles?

It looked like the kind of mark you got when you hit something hard. Or someone.

Cleo staggered back toward the kitchen, her breath coming in short, ragged gasps. The walls seemed to tilt inward, the bright stainless steel reflecting distorted, monstrous versions of her own wide-eyed face.

She had been alone with him. Marcus had seen Vance’s car at six o’clock. The forged note in her log was at five o’clock. If she hadn't left at five-thirty, what had happened between six and whatever time she had finally stumbled back to her cottage on Shore Road?

She ran to the steel table and grabbed her leather notebook, flipping pages with frantic, flour-dusted fingers. She checked yesterday morning.

04:00 AM – Sourdough mix. 20 loaves. 06:00 AM – First bake. Croissants in. 08:00 AM – Open doors. High tide at 10:14. 11:30 AM – Delivery from mill: 10 bags unbleached, 5 rye. Check invoices against delivery slip.

Everything was normal. Everything was boring. Everything was in black gel pen.

Then came the five-o'clock entry in blue:

Feed Bartholomew. 500g rye flour, 500g room temp water. Lock main entrance. Check deadbolt on alley door. Home by five-thirty.

Cleo stared at the last line. Home by five-thirty.

If she was home by five-thirty, why did she wake up this morning with her boots still laced to her feet?

She remembered waking up at three-fifteen when her alarm went off. She had been lying on top of her duvet, fully dressed in her dark jeans and a gray wool sweater, with her coat thrown across the foot of the bed. She had assumed she had simply been exhausted—bakers lived in a perpetual state of sleep deprivation, and it wasn't the first time she had collapsed without changing. But now, the realization felt sinister, like an open door in an empty house.

She reached for the landline phone mounted on the wall beside the grease board. Her hand hovered over the receiver.

She needed to call Chief Miller. Wildwood Harbor was small; Miller would be at the back door in four minutes. He would walk in, his heavy boots tracking through the flour, and he would see Vance. Then he would see the antique brass scale with Vance’s blood on it—a scale that had Cleo’s fingerprints baked into every millimeter of its polished surface. He would see the blue pen on the counter. He would ask her what happened at six o’clock yesterday evening.

And she would have to look him in the eye and say: I don't know.

"He’ll arrest me," she whispered to the empty room. "He’ll have to."

Miller wasn't an evil man, but he was practical, stubborn, and under intense pressure from the town council to keep Wildwood Harbor safe for the tourists who flooded the boutiques every summer. Jasper Vance was the nephew of a state senator. You didn't find Jasper Vance with his skull cracked open in the dry storage room of an eccentric baker with a head injury and simply accept a shrug and an empty memory.

Cleo put the phone down without lifting it from the cradle.

She took a slow, deep breath, counting to four on the inhale, holding it for four, and exhaling for four. Dr. Evans’ box-breathing technique. It didn't bring back the memories, but it stopped the room from spinning.

She walked back to the dry storage door, keeping her feet carefully in her own previous footprints to avoid disturbing the floor any further. She leaned against the jamb, looking down at Vance’s body with a clinical, detached focus that surprised her.

The brass dough scale had been moved from the high shelf near the doorway to the floor beside his head. But the scale was heavy—nearly twenty-five pounds of solid metal. If Cleo had struck him with it, she would have had to lift it down with both hands. Her right knuckle was bruised, but her wrists felt fine.

Then she saw the pockets.

Vance’s charcoal coat was unbuttoned, pulled back slightly to reveal the interior silk lining. The left interior pocket had been pulled completely inside-out. A white silk handkerchief lay on the floor near his knee, stamped with the monogram JV. Beside it lay a small leather card case, its contents spilled across the floor: three platinum credit cards, a membership card to the yacht club, and a folded piece of heavy cream cardstock.

Cleo knelt down, careful not to let her knees touch the flour-covered linoleum. She leaned forward, squinting at the folded cardstock.

It wasn't a business document. It was a letter, written on heavy rag paper with an embossed crest at the top: The Harbor Conservancy.

The text was short, typed on a typewriter with a slightly misaligned capital E:

Jasper, The survey results from the lower lot came back from Augusta this morning. You were right about the foundation lines. If this goes before the zoning board on Thursday, the whole harbor parcel is worthless to you. Meet me at the bakery after closing. We settle this before the council gets the copies.

There was no signature. Only a single initial at the bottom, scrawled in thick, black grease pencil:

M.

Cleo stared at the letter.

Meet me at the bakery after closing.

Her kitchen wasn't just a bakery; it was the ground floor of an eighteenth-century brick warehouse that had once served as a ship chandlery. It was centrally located, tucked into the narrow alley between the high street and the working docks. It was also, evidently, a convenient place for two people to meet when they didn't want to be seen at the town hall or the country club.

M.

Marcus? Marcus drove a milk truck, but he had worked the docks for twenty years before his knees gave out. He had seen Vance’s car. He had mentioned the police down at the marina.

Or could it be Mayor Miller? The Chief of Police’s older brother was named Matthew.

Or Margaret Gable? The sweet old woman who bought caraway rye and spent forty years on the historical society board?

Cleo stood up slowly, her knees cracking in the quiet room.

The starter.

She turned and looked back into the kitchen toward the jar of ruined Bartholomew. Why kill the culture? Why dump industrial cleaner into a crock of wild yeast?

Unless it wasn't industrial cleaner.

Cleo walked briskly back to the prep island, ignoring the chill in her spine. She pulled open the lower cupboard where she kept her cleaning supplies. There were three bottles: white vinegar for the stainless steel, baking soda for the sinks, and a large gallon jug of unscented liquid castile soap. She didn't keep bleach in the bakery; she hated the smell, and it lingered on the wooden bannetons used for proofing dough.

She looked at the starter crock again. The dark, oily liquid pooling over the gray sludge had that distinct, copper-vinegar stench.

She took a clean stainless-steel measuring spoon from the rack and dipped the tip of the handle into the dark liquid, lifting a single drop toward the fluorescent light.

It wasn't vinegar. It wasn't soap.

It was photographic stop bath.

Cleo knew that smell. In college, before the flour took over her life and before the bicycle accident scrambled her hard drive, she had spent two years in the basement of the art building developing silver gelatin prints. Stop bath was dilute acetic acid, but commercial stop baths used an indicator dye—bromocresol purple—that turned yellow in acid and deep purple-black when exhausted. This liquid was dark, with an unmistakable faint sweetness hidden beneath the vinegar tang.

Who in Wildwood Harbor still had a wet darkroom?

Nobody used film anymore, except the eccentric old photographer who lived above the hardware store, and—

Cleo’s breath caught.

Jasper Vance had spent forty years running the harbor’s title and deed archive before he became a developer. He was famous for keeping microfiche and original plate-film copies of every property line from the Canadian border down to Boothbay Harbor. He had a private darkroom in the basement of the Harborside Grand, which he used to duplicate historical plats.

The pen on the counter had come from the Harborside Grand.

The killer hadn't brought floor cleaner to ruin her sourdough. The killer had arrived with something already in hand, or Vance had brought it with him. And in the struggle, or perhaps in a deliberate attempt to destroy something else, it had ended up in the crock.

A sudden, sharp mechanical whir startled her so badly she dropped the measuring spoon. It clattered loudly against the floor, bouncing twice before coming to rest near the footprint.

The kitchen timer was going off.

Cleo glanced at the magnetic digital clock stuck to the side of the deck oven. It read 05:00 AM.

In sixty minutes, the front doors of The Crust & Crumb were scheduled to open. In thirty minutes, the street outside would begin to wake up. The commercial fishing boats had already left their moorings an hour ago, but the early joggers, the dog walkers, and the workers heading to the fish processing plant down the coast would be passing the front windows.

And at six o'clock, her assistant, Penny, would arrive on her vintage yellow moped, singing whatever terrible pop song was stuck in her head and demanding half a loaf of brioche.

Penny was nineteen, possessed zero filter, and had a panic threshold so low that a burnt sheet of parchment paper could reduce her to tears. If Penny walked into the bakery and found Jasper Vance’s corpse among the flour sacks, the entire county would know before the grease pencil on the dry-erase board was dry.

Cleo’s mind worked with a sudden, icy clarity that she hadn't felt since the accident.

When the fog was thick, you couldn't run. You couldn't even walk fast. You had to feel for the handrails and take one deliberate step at a time.

Step one: The body.

She couldn't move Vance. She couldn't touch him, couldn't drag him, and couldn't hide him. He was sixty years old and weighed at least one hundred and ninety pounds. But she could close the dry storage door.

She walked back to the hallway, stepped over the white flour scatter, and pushed the louvered door shut until the latch clicked. It wouldn't stop someone who was looking, but it would hide him from anyone glancing down the hall toward the cooler.

Step two: The evidence in the kitchen.

Cleo looked at the blue pen. She pulled a clean sheet of greaseproof bakery paper from the dispenser, picked up the pen using the paper as a barrier, and wrapped it carefully into a small, neat packet. She slipped the packet into the pocket of her jeans, beneath her apron.

She took the dead starter crock, set the ceramic lid back in place, and moved it from the prep table to the bottom shelf of the secondary pastry rack, behind three bags of chocolate batons. It smelled terrible, but tucked away down there, the draft from the oven exhaust would carry the odor up the chimney.

Step three: The floor.

She couldn't sweep up the flour without destroying the footprint, but if she left the footprint sitting in the middle of the hallway like a museum exhibit, the first person through the door would see it.

Cleo hesitated, her broom in hand.

Dr. Evans had told her that when she lost time, she should never try to guess what had happened; she should wait for external evidence to verify her actions. Never fill the hole with assumptions, Cleo. That's how false memories take root.

If she swept the floor, she was destroying the only proof that someone else had been in the bakery last night. The narrow dress shoe with the rubber tap on the heel wasn't hers. It was Vance's, or it was the killer’s.

She leaned down and looked closely at the print.

The print was pointed toward the dry storage room. It was an entry print. Beside it, partially obscured by the sweep of flour, was another mark—a broader, flat sole, slightly smaller, moving away from the storage room toward the back door.

The second print was faint, but the pattern was clear: a fine, diamond-mesh rubber tread.

Cleo looked down at her own clogs. They had a crosshatch tread, like a waffle iron.

She didn't own any shoes with a diamond mesh.

A cold rush of relief, so strong it made her lightheaded, washed over her. She hadn't made that second set of prints. There had been three people in this kitchen yesterday evening: Vance, the person with the diamond soles, and—theoretically—herself.

"I didn't do it," she whispered.

The words didn't solve the problem of the dead man in the dry goods room, nor did they explain why her notebook was written in blue ink or why her knuckle was bruised. But they gave her a foothold. A small, dry rock in the middle of the dark water.

From the alley outside, the low rumble of a car engine broke the early morning silence.

The sound was distinct: a rhythmic, muffled throbbing that Cleo knew by heart. It wasn't Marcus’s lumbering diesel delivery truck. It was a smaller, older four-cylinder engine with a loose fan belt that squeaked every three seconds.

Chief Miller’s Crown Victoria.

The headlights swept across the frosted glass of the back alley door, casting the shadows of the heavy iron bars across the kitchen wall like the ribs of an open cage.

The engine cut out. A car door slammed shut with a heavy, metallic clunk that echoed down the alleyway.

Cleo stood frozen by the prep table, the broom still clutched in her flour-dusted fingers.

The gravel in the alley crunched under heavy boots. Two paces. Three. Then the shadow appeared on the frosted glass, broad and square-shouldered, silhouetted against the pinkish-gray dawn beginning to bleed across the harbor sky.

A fist pounded against the wood.

"Cleo?" Chief Miller’s voice was muffled through the heavy fir door, but the authority in it was unmistakable. "Cleo, you open up in there? We’ve got an issue with Jasper Vance’s car out on the pier road, and I need to check your back lot."

Cleo looked down at the broom in her hand, then toward the closed louvered door of the dry storage room where Vance lay among the cracked wheat, and finally at the digital clock on the wall.

05:08 AM.

She set the broom against the steel table, smoothed her apron with both hands, and walked toward the alley door.