Dressed and ready to go forth and bake cakes, I got in my car thinking that was the best morning of my whole…

Fucking…

Life.

CHAPTER NINE

Dinner at Brock’s

I WAS SITTING in my car looking up at the apartment building, scanning the numbers on the doors, looking for number sixteen.

Brock’s apartment.

I was trying really hard not to make a judgment about the state of his apartment complex, if one could call it that.

It was off the one-way section of Lincoln just up from Speer and perpendicular to the road. There was a small spread of tarmac in front of a very deep, long, two-story building, eight apartments on bottom, eight on top. The doors faced an exposed walkway. The stairs leading up to the top level on the ends of either side were iron, rusting, and looked more than a little scary. And the two padlocked sheds off the parking lot, one smaller one with the stenciled word “Laundry” and the other one bigger and maybe not too intelligently having the stenciled word “Storage” on it did nothing for the feel of the place.

Sometime in the summer, someone clearly made an effort. However, they also just as clearly got sidetracked. In Denver, if you planted flowers, in the arid climate you needed to tend them and this tending mostly had to do with adding copious amounts of water but it also didn’t hurt to pull weeds. Now it was a still warm mid-October and in the two half barrels that flanked the short entry from Lincoln to the building and the four that “decorated” the top and foot of both stairwells had a riot of a green, healthy weeds. An equal riot of brown, dead bits. And some straggly, weak petunia blossoms that had obviously struggled valiantly against the odds but clearly should be put out of their misery and not only because autumn had settled on the Rocky Mountains.

Oh well, whatever. He was a man. A single man. A single man with a Harley Fat Boy and a beat-up pickup truck that Martha was right about; it needed to be traded up and that trade-up should have happened around a decade ago. This wasn’t a big surprise and, truthfully, I might be concerned if he had a picture-perfect house in a suburb that looked like Ada haunted the place.

That would be bad.

I was turning to gather my overnight case, purse, and the white bag with the robin’s-egg-blue ink stamp of hummingbirds and hibiscus blossoms around the words “Tessa’s Cakes” when my phone rang.