"You're late," Vera sat in a booth doodling on the blank sheets of her order pad.
"Sorry, I lost track of time. Got caught up reading the newspaper."
Vera shrugged indifferently. "Ready then?" She stood up in anticipation without waiting for a response.
Tannehill nodded. "the place isn't too far from here. We could take a bus but it would only save us about a half mile and would probably take twice the time to get there. Do you mind walking?"
"And ruin my good shoes?" They both looked down at her feet at this comment. She was wearing the same monk straps with scuffed heels from their excursion at The Tritone a few nights prior.
"Don't you ever give a straight answer?"
"Perhaps."
"Keep this up and I'll rethink bringing you along."
"Keep that up and I'll rethink helping you along on this case."
Tannehill paused sullenly. "What are you doodling?" he responded quietly.
"A few sketches for my folks back home. I try to send them some sign that I'm alive every few days."
"That's the first time I've heard you mention anything about your past."
"That makes one of us. Other than the fact that I know you had a partner, you're a veritable man of mystery"
"Touché."
They stood in silence for a beat. "Shall we?" Vera gestured toward the door.
They walked along a gray stretch of industrial melancholy under a light mist. Both of them excited by the prospect of discovery and lost in their own worlds.
Loving's Bakery originally had been an oddity in the neighborhood it inhabited. Where the other buildings around it housed the typical distribution warehouses and processing plants that went fallow with the Great Depression, Loving's was a small standalone structure with large windows on its front exterior - not all that different from the diner they'd just departed from. The establishment's name called out prominently in large, generic, cherry red script above the front door.
At least, that's how the building would've appeared several years prior. Recent neglect helped it establish equity with its neighbors. The white façade had faded to a dull gray. The large front windows had their pick of being cracked, shattered, or boarded-up. The sign's 'g' had dropped to the ground, so now the script simply read "Lovin 's" in some representation of an actor's poor attempt at an antebellum accent.
They walked toward the storefront. Vera peered through one of the cracked windows. "Hard to tell, but there doesn't appear to be anything of value here."
"Of course it's hard to tell if you're peering through a cracked window," Tannehill responded, half his torso jutting over one of the shattered windows.
"True, but I'm no fan of French methods of execution. One misstep and you'll be fleetingly living through your own Reign of Terror, Robespierre" she pointed to the jagged plate glass edge sitting precariously below his extended body.
Tannehill carefully glanced down at the shards below him, backed away, and flashed an accepting grimace. He pulled the key out of his pocket and walked toward the front door. "Shall we?"
He placed the key in the lock and turned. Or tried to. The latch didn't move. Perplexed, he pushed against the door frame and tried again. The latch still didn't move. "What now?"
Vera looked around and found a tin garbage can nearby. She grabbed the lid, walked over to the window guillotine and dispensed with the larger shards. "We improvise." She tossed the lid aside with a clatter and gestured at Tannehill with an extended hand. "C'mon. Help me up."
He held her hand as she hopped on the sill and over the shattered window remains. She proffered her own hand in return once she was inside the bakery.
"Doesn't look like much of a gold mine does it?" he exclaimed in concert with the glass crunching beneath his feet. Overturn bakery trays, paper, sawdust, and a thick coating of dust plastered the interior. As with any abandoned building, flotsam and jetsam unassociated with the building's prior tenants also presided. In one near corner, a naked doll stared up at them pleadingly. In another, empty tins of baked beans crowded the floor.
"Unless we're looking for a Goldmine of Creepy, I don't think your partner's treasure is in here."
"Let's check the back room." They moved to the back of the building when a 6-inch rat scuttled past. Vera shoved Tannehill into the wall and squealed while dancing gracelessly away from the rodent.
"Really?" he rubbed his shoulder, "that's what scares you?"
"Rats killed 1/3 of the world population. I think it's completely reasonable to show them some respect," she sniffed indignantly.
He darted his eyes toward her briefly in response and then back into the shadows of the kitchen. There were two lighter shades of paint against a wall of caked-on dough that indicated the former position of two long evacuated industrial ovens. The overturned bakery trays and sundry items that littered the customer area multiplied copiously in the dark recesses of the kitchen. A singular cheap, splintered, laminated wood panel door faced them near the outline of the ovens. Tannehill walked over to the door, shot the bolt, and opened it.
The door opened onto a dingy alley tinged with the standing pools of the morning's rain.
"What now?" Vera asked.
"Now we go back to the diner and do a bit more thinking."
"That's an anticlimactic answer."
Tannehill could do nothing but shrug in response, "We're in an anticlimactic moment. It can't be too complicated. We're trying to out-think Richard Snell, not Professor Moriarity."
The return trip to the diner was equally as silent as the originating trip. Both of them trading the isolation of their own worlds for solitude over solving Snell's puzzle.
Their goodbyes at the door of the restaurant were brief and distracted.
As a result, both of them failed to notice the blonde woman with the funny accident sitting across the street staring at them.
[Author's Note: I was beginning to miss Vera and Tannehill, so I took advantage of our social distancing measures to get reacquainted with them. With any luck, the curve of my entries will trend up while the curve of the virus flattens. Today's edition was 1001 words and the running total, if you've lost count over the ensuing weeks, is 28,367. ]
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