“Did you let him go through the kitchen?”
“No.”
She frowned. “Why not?”
Mary stopped folding the box she was working on and frowned. “He wasn’t wearing a uniform, which seemed, well, odd. He did have on a jacket and was carrying a clipboard, but his van was parked right out front, and it had no markings from the county on it. I told him the meter was out back and he could walk around the block to the alley and read it out there. Then I came into the kitchen to get more pastry bags. Wasn’t gone more than thirty seconds. But when I went back into the front room, his van was gone.”
Grace stopped braiding brioche dough. “What did he look like?”
“Mid-forties, maybe. Average height and build. Light brown hair going thin on top. And he had a bushy mustache that was a lot darker than his hair.”
“Did he read the water meter?”
Mary shrugged. “I don’t see how he had time to go out the front door, walk around block, and go down the alley to the back of the store, let alone read the meter, walk all the way back, get in his truck, and drive away. Not in time it took me to step just inside the kitchen door, grab some pastry bags off the shelf, and step back out. It couldn’t have taken me more than thirty seconds, and that’s being generous. It was probably more like ten seconds.
“Keep an eye on the front room for a minute, will you?” Grace murmured.
“You’ve got it.” Mary picked up the stack of assembled boxes she’d nested inside one another and carried them out front.
Grace went the other direction and stepped out the kitchen door into the narrow alley that ran behind the whole block of storefronts. The door was heavy metal that theoretically remained locked at all times, but Mary had been propping it open with a brick for years during the day because the kitchen got hot and the heat sometimes bothered Mary’s asthma.
Grace examined the water meter without really knowing what she was looking at. The glass cover wasn’t broken, and there were no marks on the grey steel box, and nobody appeared to have tampered with it, at any rate.
The words of the gorgeous, enigmatic cowboy, advising her to get a security camera and tell the police if anything else strange happened, popped into her head. He had a point. An ounce of caution was better than a pound of sorrow.
She pulled out her cell phone and looked up the number for the county water department. She hit the call button and asked the nice lady at the other end what day each month her water meter in Cobbler Cove got read.
The gal put her on hold and was gone long enough that Grace felt good and silly about being so suspicious by the time the woman came back and said, “Cobbler Cove’s meters get read on the last Friday of each month, Ma’am.”
Today was the third Thursday of April.
“So nobody was over here today in Cobbler Cove reading water meters?”
“No, Ma’am. Our meter reader would’ve spent all day yesterday over on the Blackfoot Reservation reading water meters, He was nowhere near Cobbler Cove, yesterday, let alone on that side of the lake.”
“Do you know if any businesses in Cobbler Cove have reported problems with their water service in the past few days?”
“No, Ma’am, well, yes Ma’am. I mean, I’m the person who takes those calls, too, and we haven’t received any reports of outages or service problems in Cobbler Cove for the past month or more.”
“Thank you,” Grace mumbled, growing a little more alarmed.
She went back inside. Along the way she picked up the brick holding the door open. It swung shut with a loud click, but she checked anyway to make sure it had latched and locked behind her. She carried the brick out to the front room. “From now on, Mary, we’re not going to prop open the back door.”
“But it gets hot when both ovens are going, and . . ."
“I’ll get a fan.”
“. . . I have asthma,” Mary finished stubbornly. She was a hard worker and a terrific baker in her own right, but she could be set in her ways.
Grace sighed. “I know. I’ll get us a big fan. As soon as I get off work today.”
Mary stared at her. “That guy wasn’t from the water company, was he?”
“I don’t think so.” She knew so, but she didn’t want to alarm her assistant, who was prone to drama and an inveterate gossip.
“Charlotte called me,” Mary said. “She told me you found some rosemary hidden in the kitchen day before yesterday.”
Grace sighed. “Charlotte has a big mouth sometimes.”
