Flour Felony – Leighann Dobbs (1)

Helen asked. “You never know.” The sun was already low when they merged onto the highway, painting the sky in shades of copper and ash. Ruth drove at exactly the speed limit. Nans sat behind her, watching the mile markers pass, her mind running through scenarios the way it always did before an operation — because that’s what this was now, whether they called it that or not.

They were four elderly women, a baker with a head injury, and a purse full of emergency supplies, driving to a storage facility to retrieve a recipe card from a criminal’s duffel bag. It was, by any reasonable measure, a terrible idea. Nans had never let that stop her before.

The exit came up at four-forty-seven. Ruth took it without hesitation, and the highway gave way to surface roads — industrial parks, chain-link fences, the flat gray architecture of a city’s working edge. The storage facility was six minutes from the exit, according to Ruth’s iPad. Six minutes.

Nans straightened her coat and said, “All right, ladies. Let’s go get that recipe.” OceanofPDF.com The storage facility looked exactly like the kind of place where criminals kept things they didn’t want found. It sat on an industrial road between a tire warehouse and a vacant lot, surrounded by chain-link fence topped with barbed wire that sagged in places like it had given up trying.

The building itself was long and low, concrete block painted a gray that had once been white, with rows of orange roll-up doors stretching down both sides. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting everything in a sickly yellow tone. A sign near the entrance read “EZ-Store Self Storage — 24-Hour Access — Climate Controlled Units Available.” Someone had spray-painted something unkind beneath it that had been half-heartedly scrubbed away. Ruth pulled into the lot and parked near the entrance. The lot was mostly empty — a pickup truck near the far end, a sedan with a tarp over it that looked like it hadn’t moved in months, and nothing else.

The facility office was a small glass-fronted room attached to the main building, lit from within by the pale blue glow of a television screen. They sat in the car for a moment, the engine ticking as it cooled. “Unit forty-seven,” Nans said. “How do we get in?” Helen asked. “We ask,” Nans said. “And if asking doesn’t work?” Ida patted her purse. “Then we ask more creatively,” Nans said. “But let’s start with asking.” The office was warm and smelled like microwave popcorn. A young man sat behind the counter — early twenties, thin, wearing a hoodie with the EZ-Store logo and an expression that suggested he’d rather be anywhere else.

The Cup and Cake was quiet at four in the morning. The ovens were warm, ticking softly as they held temperature. The display cases stood empty and gleaming, waiting to be filled. Outside, Main Street was dark and still, the waterfall across the road murmuring to itself in the cool pre- dawn air. Lexy stood at the prep table in the kitchen, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, an apron already dusted with flour. She’d been up since three- thirty, an hour even she considered unreasonable, but the New England Regional Baking Championship was three days away, and she needed this practice run to be perfect.

The recipe card sat propped against the stand mixer, and every time Lexy looked at it, she felt something tighten in her chest. It was cream- colored and slightly yellowed, with a faded border. The handwriting was small and precise, the kind of penmanship they don’t teach anymore, and it belonged to her great-grandmother, Rose. Rose had been a baker too, not professionally, not for money, but for the kind of reasons that mattered more.

She baked for neighbors who were grieving. She baked for new mothers who couldn’t find the energy to feed themselves. She baked for church suppers and school fairs and Tuesday afternoons when the light was good and the kitchen was warm. The Lavender Honey Crème Brûlée Tart was Rose’s masterpiece. She’d developed the recipe over years, tweaking proportions by instinct, scribbling adjustments in the margins of the card until the margins were full.

Lexy had been refining the recipe for the competition—adjusting the lavender steeping time, experimenting with different honeys, finding the exact moment to pull the custard from the oven so it set with a barely there wobble. Her adjustments were written in pencil beneath Rose’s ink, two generations of bakers on one small card.

This was the only copy. There were no backups, no photos, no scans. Just this card, this handwriting, these notes. Lexy set out her ingredients with the careful precision of someone who’d done this a thousand times: butter, eggs, sugar, vanilla, dried lavender from the farm stand out on Route 4, a jar of wildflower honey from the same place. For the tart crust, she needed something specific.

A high-protein French T55 flour, finely milled, the kind that gave pastry a delicate structure you couldn’t get with anything else. She’d special-ordered a ten-pound bag from a specialty store two weeks ago. Hopefully it had arrived overnight. She wiped her hands on her apron and walked to the back door. The delivery area was a small concrete step, sheltered by an overhang, where suppliers left packages in the early hours.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 1ba2c609f8762cc1
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 973,087 bytes (0.928 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 58
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 68.07 minutes
• Total Words: 13,614
• Total Characters: 77,895
• Average Words per Page: 234.72
• Average Characters per Page: 1343.02

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