The Sourdough Wars

your word—that held her and Peter together. But the difference was that she never saw it in retrospect either. So she thought she could influence Peter. However, when she called up in hysterics, he heard not the woman he loved begging him to take her back, but a crazy lady who admitted trying to stop his auction with threatening phone calls. So we think he not only told her he wouldn’t stop the auction but also forbade her to participate in it. He finally agreed to see her the next day to get her off his back. Incidentally, the fact that he met his visitor in his robe argues it was someone he knew well.
    “I think Sally brought the gun—your gun—to scare him, as a last resort. I don’t think she came there intending to kill him. I think she tried to seduce him. And when that failed, I think she tried cajoling, hysterics again, anything to get him to change his mind. And in the end, I think she did threaten him with the gun and he tried to take it away from her—his apartment was a mess, you know. Anyway, she ended up killing him and hiding the gun in your bathroom.”
    “I don’t even use Stay-Safe Maxi-Pads,” said Anita. Chris giggled at the non sequitur. I think I must have looked confused. “If I’d thought about it,” Anita explained, “I would have seen they didn’t belong there. But I don’t see why she put the gun there. Why
my
bathroom?”
    “As insurance,” I said. “She told us she had a backer, and we leaped to the conclusion that it was a man. But I tried to find out from her kid who her boyfriend was, and he laughed. He’s a very smart kid. He said his mom was likely to say she had a boyfriend even if she hadn’t. Later, I realized that even if she didn’t have a boyfriend, she still might have a backer. So I called Bobby and asked him why he laughed. And he said, ‘Because the backer was Auntie Anita.’ ”
    Anita looked betrayed. “But, Rebecca, that was no secret. If you’d asked, I’d have told you that.”
    “Unfortunately, I wasn’t smart enough to ask until now. Peter wouldn’t sell you the starter, so you were going to get it with Sally’s help. You were her backer. But there was a catch—you’d be stuck with Sally. She’d gotten you to agree to invest in her bakery if she got the starter, and you weren’t really going to have your own bakery, which was what you wanted.”
    “Rebecca, you sound so accusing. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it was the best deal I could make, and I was willing to go through with it. Why are you coming at me this way?”
    I pulled back a little. “I’m sorry. I guess I was coming at you. But Sally saw, too late, that with Peter dead, you wouldn’t need her. You’d inherit the starter and you could simply dump her. So that was why she hid the gun in your bathroom. As insurance. If you tried to back out, she’d accuse you of the murder and threaten to tell the cops the gun was in your house.”
    “It wouldn’t have worked. I had a perfect alibi.”
    “But Sally didn’t
know
that. That’s how I know you weren’t her accomplice in the murder.”
    “How pathetic of Sally.”
    “Yes. It was. But she was a very determined woman. She wanted revenge on Bob Tosi for what she considered years of mistreatment. In fact, I think he was just an average Joe from a macho Italian family who didn’t realize what was going on with Sally.”
    “She told him all the time.”
    “Like so many men of that generation who got their ideas about what the world was like from adoring parents, he was practically in a coma. He literally couldn’t hear her. I think he’s changing now, but it took a divorce and a couple of murders to jolt him out of his complacency. The point is, Sally was deeply hurt by him and she wanted to prove she was as good as he was in business, or better, no matter what the cost. I expect you can identify with that. You had a similar situation in your own life.”
    Anita nodded. “I can, yes.”
    “Sally wanted that starter no matter what. She saw it as her ticket to being a person of value. It was literally about that primitive. So she stole it from the cryogenics firm. She heard about the control starter, and it never occurred to her to look for it anywhere but the main warehouse. She didn’t have a subtle mind, but sometimes that worked in her favor. You don’t know this yet, but Tony Tosi stole the original starter—it’s been in his bread for two years.”
    Anita nearly jumped out of her chair. “That