My brother’s wife ordered nine cakes for her mother’s 90th and told my clerk she wasn’t paying a cent, because the burnt sugar cake I’d sold for twenty years was her dead aunt’s. “You owe this family $640,000, you thief.” She knew I was the detective who found her aunt. She didn’t know what was on the back of the card.
Shayla had her on speaker at the register, and Mindy was already way past the cakes.
She wanted forty percent of the bakery, signed, before Saturday.
Or she’d put it all online. Every church group, every school order, every customer I’d had since 2005.
Shayla held the phone out to me with two fingers.
I took it.
“Mindy. It’s Bert.”
“Good, then you can hear it yourself,” she said. “Aunt Carmen’s cake. Twenty years you’ve sold it, and my mother never saw a dime.”
“It was my mother’s recipe.”
“Roberto says you’ve got her card, Bert. Her ACTUAL card. In her handwriting.”
I didn’t answer.
“That’s what I figured,” she said. “Nine cakes. Two hundred of the lemon bars. Noon on Saturday. And you bring that card.”
She hung up before I could.
Shayla was staring at me.
“Is that true?” she said.
“Some of it,” I said.
Then I went in the back and stood in the walk-in for a while, which is where I do my thinking now.
I worked homicide and unattended deaths in Toledo for twenty-six years before I ever sold anybody a cake.
In March of 1995 I caught a call to a little brick house with the porch light still on at ten in the morning.
A woman of fifty-two at the bottom of her basement stairs, a laundry basket upside down beside her.
Carmen Sikes. Freda’s younger sister.
I didn’t know any of them then. Roberto had been taking Mindy out for maybe five weeks.
Carmen had an index card in her right hand, held so hard the corner had folded over.
On the front, a lemon cake, in blue pen.
On the back, four lines in the same pen, and a name.
Mindy’s.
The coroner said she fell. She did fall. I’d put my life on that part.
But I knew what those four lines would do to a twenty-four-year-old in a town where everybody talks, and to my little brother, who already had a ring in his glovebox.
So the card went into my jacket and never into a report.
That October I gave the toast at their wedding.
I told Roberto exactly one thing about it, on a dock in 2009, after five beers and a cooler full of somebody else’s crawfish. That I’d kept something of Carmen’s. Not what.
He’d told her. Of course he had.
And in Mindy’s head, somewhere along the way, that turned into the cake.
I baked all nine anyway.
“You’re giving her eleven hundred and eighty dollars of product,” Shayla said. “For FREE. After that call.”
“I’m delivering it,” I said. “That’s all I’m doing.”
Saturday the hall behind Freda’s church had a hundred and twenty people in it and a 9 and a 0 in gold balloons over the head table.
Freda sat in the middle in a lavender cardigan, as sharp as she was at sixty.
She squeezed my hand and told me I’d gotten fat. I had.
Mindy waited until the burnt sugar cake was set down in front of her mother.
Then she tapped a fork on her wineglass.
“Before Mom cuts this, everybody should know whose cake it really is,” she said.
She told them all of it. Her version.
The aunt. The stairs. The detective who walked out of that house with her aunt’s recipe in his pocket and opened a bakery on it.
She had the number up on her phone. $640,000, she said, and she read it twice.
Roberto looked at his plate and didn’t look up.
Two of Freda’s church friends had their phones out.
“HE WAS A COP,” Mindy said, and she pointed right at my chest. “HE TOOK IT OFF HER.”
Somebody’s grandson said “Jesus” into his napkin.
I didn’t argue.
I’ve watched a lot of people talk themselves into a corner, and the trick is you let them.
Freda put her palm flat on the tablecloth.
“Bertram,” she said. “Do you have my sister’s card?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then give it to my daughter.”
Mindy grinned at me with every tooth she had and held out her hand.
“Right HERE, Bert.”
I took out my wallet.
Thirty-one years in the same slot, behind my license, in a sandwich bag gone soft and cloudy.
I didn’t put it in Mindy’s hand.
I laid it in front of Freda, lemon cake side down.
Mindy’s hand stayed out in the air.
Freda reached into her cardigan for her reading glasses.
And Mindy said, very quietly, “Mom. DON’T.”
The lemon cake side
Freda put the glasses on anyway.
She didn’t pick the card up. She bent over it the way she bends over the church bulletin, and she read it out loud in the voice she uses for hymn numbers.
“Mindy,” she read.
Then the four lines.
“I saw the checks at the bank. Eleven of them, your mother’s name in your hand.”
“Twenty-six hundred dollars. Put it back by the first and this card goes in the stove.”
“If it isn’t back, I tell her Sunday.”
“And I tell the boyfriend.”
Nobody at the head table moved. One of the church friends still had her phone up, and it was pointed at Freda now, not at me.
Freda turned the card over with one finger. She looked at the lemon cake side for a long time.
“That’s Carmen’s lemon cake,” she said. “That’s not this one.”
She tapped the plate in front of her.
“This one’s your mother’s, Bertram. I ate it at your father’s funeral.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mindy took her hand back. She put it in her lap like it belonged to somebody else.
“Mom, that’s from 1995,” she said. “I was twenty-four. I was a waitress. I don’t even remember it.”
“You remember it,” Freda said.
“It was a loan. Aunt Carmen made it into a whole federal case. And HE has had it in his wallet for thirty years like some kind of creep, and you want to look at ME?”
Roberto was still looking at his plate. His ears had gone red. He never could hold a face, and he got that from our dad.
Freda folded her glasses and set them on top of the card.
“The first never came for Carmen,” she said. “She was gone on the twenty-eighth. So I’d guess nobody ever put it back.”
Mindy opened her mouth.
Freda held up one finger. The same finger she’d turned the card with.
“I have one more question, and then we’re going to cut this cake.”
She turned in her chair to face her daughter.
“Is this why you keep my checkbook?”
March of 1995
I’ll tell you what I did with that card the first night, because I’ve had thirty-one years to stop being proud of it.
I sat at my kitchen table with it under the light. I read the back maybe twenty times.
I’d done that house the way you do a house. The back door was bolted from inside. The bulb at the bottom of the basement stairs was burned out, and the stairs were the steep kind they built in the twenties.
The basket went first. Then her.
There was nothing else in it. I’ve been wrong about people, but I was never wrong about stairs.
In that basket, under the towels, was a brown diner apron with a plastic name tag pinned on it. MINDY.
The neighbor said the niece dropped her wash off on Mondays because her apartment didn’t have a machine.
So I knew the Mindy on the card was a real girl with a real shift. That was all I knew.
Two weeks later Roberto brought his new girlfriend to Sunday dinner at our mother’s house.
She came in straight from work, still wearing the apron’s twin, the tag on her chest.
I put my fork down and picked it back up.
My mother made the burnt sugar cake that night. She made it every Sunday there was company. You cook the sugar black in the iron pan until the kitchen smells like a fire you should worry about, and then you pour it into the batter and pray.
Mindy had two pieces and asked for the recipe.
“It’s in my hands, honey,” my mother said. “It’s never been on paper.”
That was true. My mother never wrote a recipe down in her life. When she died in 2004 I had to bake that cake eleven times before I got the color of the syrup right, and Roberto ate every failure.
So Mindy had sat at our table and heard where the cake came from. She was the one person in the hall Saturday who had.
After dinner Roberto walked me out to my car and opened his glovebox and showed me the ring.
“Too fast?” he said.
“No,” I said.
I had the card in my jacket the whole time we talked.
What I told myself was simple. Carmen was dead. The girl was twenty-four. The money was twenty-six hundred dollars, and my brother was happy for the first time since he’d come back from Germany.
I told myself a cop who took a dead woman’s last note and handed it to a family at a funeral would be doing it for himself, not for her.
I don’t know anymore if that was true. I know it was convenient.
In 2005 I took the buyout and sold our mother’s house and put all of it into a corner building with a storefront and two apartments upstairs.
I paid for it outright. I have never owed anybody one dime on that building.
The burnt sugar cake went in the case the first week. It’s been in the case every week since.
And Carmen’s card stayed behind my license.
Back in the hall, Freda didn’t wait for Mindy to answer the checkbook question.
She picked up the knife and cut the cake.
People started talking again, too loud, the way they do after an ambulance goes by.
Freda put a slice on a plate for me and leaned over while she did it.
“I don’t get mail anymore,” she said. “Did you know that? Nothing but the bulletin. She has it all sent to her since my hip.”
I looked down the table.
By the time Freda cut the second slice, Mindy’s chair was empty and the side door was still swinging.
Sunday night, 9:40
Mindy posted it Sunday night at 9:40.
A friend of Shayla’s sent it to her, and Shayla sent it to me, and I read it standing at my sink.
It was long. She’d used my picture off the bakery’s page, the one where I’m holding a sheet cake for the Catholic school’s sixtieth.
Retired Toledo detective took evidence off my aunt’s body and kept it for 31 years. He admitted it in front of 120 people at my mother’s 90th birthday. Then he made my 90-year-old mother read it. Ask yourself what kind of man does that. Ask yourself what else he took.
There was nothing in it about what the card said.
There was nothing in it about the cake, either. She’d dropped the cake.
The worst part was that the first sentence was true.
By Monday noon it had been shared four hundred times. By Monday afternoon the Lutheran women’s group called and canceled their Advent bake sale order. Then a fourth-grade teacher I’d done birthday cupcakes for since her own fourth grade.
Shayla kept a sheet on the clipboard by the register. She’d write the order, and when somebody canceled she’d draw a line through it.
By closing Monday the clipboard was mostly lines.
I did the thing I’d told myself I wouldn’t do. I called Mindy.
She picked up on the first ring.
“Take it down,” I said.
“Saturday the price was forty percent,” she said. “You made me look like a thief in front of my mother’s entire church. It’s fifty now, Bert. Fifty, signed, and it comes down, and I tell people I was upset about my aunt and I got confused.”
“You were a thief in front of your mother’s church.”
“Thirty years ago. You’re still one. You’ve still got her card in your pocket, or you did till yesterday. Fifty.” She hung up.
Twenty minutes later Roberto called. He doesn’t call. He texts a thumbs-up on my birthday.
“What the hell, Bert,” he said.
“I know.”
“You couldn’t have just handed it to her? In the parking lot? You had to lay it down in front of Freda?”
“Freda asked me for it.”
“You know what Min’s been doing for that woman? Since the hip? Every bill. Every doctor. She drives out there three times a week. She does the checkbook because Freda can’t see the little numbers anymore. And you stand up and make her look like some kind of crook in front of everybody.”
“Robbie. She asked me for fifty percent of the bakery tonight.”
He went quiet on that.
“She’s upset,” he said finally. “She’ll come down off it.”
“What does she sign for Freda?”
“What?”
“You said she does the checkbook. Does she sign Freda’s checks?”
“She doesn’t have to sign Freda’s name, Bert, Jesus. Freda gave her power of attorney in the hospital. Last fall. It’s all legal. She can sign anything.”
Lina’s printout
Freda called the bakery Tuesday at ten after six in the morning. Shayla wasn’t in yet, so I answered with flour on the phone.
“I’d like a ride to my credit union,” Freda said. “I’d like it to be you and not my daughter. I’ll be on the porch at nine.”
She was on the porch at 8:45 with her coat buttoned to the neck and her purse on her knees.
That house is a little yellow Cape Cod on the east side. She and her husband bought it in 1965 and paid it off in 1979, and she likes to tell people that, the date and all.
She didn’t say anything in the car until the second red light.
“I didn’t know about the checks,” she said. “I want you to know I didn’t know.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“Carmen did my books when my husband passed. She was better with numbers than me.” She looked out her window. “She’d have told me on Sunday. I believe that.”
“So do I.”
“And you didn’t.”
There wasn’t anything to say to that, so I drove.
The credit union was the one on the corner by the old Sears. A young woman named Lina had the desk by the window. Freda put her license down and said she wanted to see every statement since last October, printed, and she wanted to sit there while they printed.
Lina looked at me.
“He’s my driver,” Freda said. “He can stay.”
It took Lina twenty minutes. The printer behind her ran and ran.
When she brought the stack over she’d put sticky notes on some pages. She didn’t say why. She laid it in front of Freda and stepped back and stood there.
Freda had a savings account she’d been putting money in since her husband was alive. Fifty-eight thousand, four hundred dollars last October.
This October it had eleven thousand and change.
Every withdrawal had the same line next to it. POA – M. Wojcik.
Some of it was checks to Mindy. Some of it was cash. A transfer in March for thirty-one hundred to a roofing company. Fourteen hundred in September to Freda’s own church, for the hall.
Freda ran her finger down the column the same way she’d turned the card over. Slow.
“I paid for my own party,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She kept going. Near the bottom of the last page she stopped.
August. Sixty-five hundred dollars, by check, to a place out in Sylvania. The name had Senior Living at the end of it.
Freda looked up at Lina.
“What is that?” she said. “I don’t know anybody in a home.”
The county’s website
Wednesday night after close, I sat at the little table in the back with Shayla and her laptop.
I could have done it myself. It just would have taken me an hour to find the button that she found in four seconds.
When you work deaths, you learn to run the house. Who owns it, who owes on it, who’s been in court over it. Half the time the answer to why somebody’s at the bottom of the stairs is sitting in the county’s computer with a date on it.
I’d never once thought to run Freda’s.
“Address,” Shayla said. I gave it to her.
The auditor’s page came up with a little photo of the yellow Cape Cod, taken from the street on some summer day, the hostas big along the walk.
Owner. WOJCIK MINDY.
Shayla didn’t say anything. She just scrolled down.
Transfers. Last November. Sale price zero. Instrument type, quitclaim deed.
“Can she do that?” Shayla said. “Give herself her mom’s house?”
“No,” I said. “She can sign it, though. Nobody at the counter checks.”
Shayla clicked over to the recorder. She pulled up the deed itself, a scan, a little crooked.
It said the grantor was Freda Sikes, by Mindy Wojcik, her attorney-in-fact. It said the grantee was Mindy Wojcik.
Mindy had signed it on both lines. One for her mother. One for herself.
Below it there was another instrument, recorded three weeks later. A mortgage. Ninety-two thousand dollars, to a lender out of Columbus I’d never heard of, on a house that had been paid off since 1979.
Shayla had her hand over her mouth.
“Keep going,” I said.
She went to the clerk of courts. Typed Mindy’s name. One case came up, filed in July.
Foreclosure.
The lender’s lawyer had filed it. Nobody had answered it. There was a judgment in September, and below that a line that took me a second to read because my reading glasses were on my head instead of my face.
Sheriff’s sale scheduled.
Shayla shut the laptop halfway and looked at me over the top of it. She’s twenty-four. Mindy’s age on the card.
Shayla does the notary stamps for the church ladies at the register, two dollars, for their car titles and their permission slips. She keeps the stamp in the cash drawer under the twenties. She’s careful with it. She reads everything before she stamps it.
“Bert,” she said. “Somebody stamped that deed.”
“Somebody did.”
“You have to tell Freda. Tonight.”
“Tomorrow. In daylight. Not on the phone.”
She opened the laptop again and turned it around so I could see the date.
“The sale’s December ninth, Bert. Three Wednesdays from now.”
The drawer by Freda’s stove
I brought Freda a lemon bar Thursday, out of the leftover tray, which she said was the worst bribe she’d ever been offered.
I sat down at her kitchen table. It’s the same table that’s been there since I’ve known her, the yellow one with the chrome legs.
I put the printouts in front of her one at a time. The auditor’s page. The deed. The mortgage. The case.
I didn’t explain them. She’d been a payroll clerk at the glass plant for thirty years. She could read a deed.
She read all of it. She turned each page face down when she was done with it.
When she got to the sheriff’s sale she put her hand flat on the table, the way she had at the hall.
“Sixty-one years,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And the place in Sylvania?”
“I don’t know yet.”
She looked at the drawer to the left of the stove. It’s the drawer every kitchen has, the one with the batteries and the twist ties and the takeout menus.
“That’s Mindy’s drawer now,” she said. “She keeps my papers in it. She told me there’s nothing in it I need to worry about.”
She didn’t get up. She just looked at me.
So I got up and opened it.
On top was a stack of mail rubber-banded together. Forwarded mail, the yellow sticker on every piece, sent to Mindy’s address and then brought back here and put in a drawer. Statements from the Columbus lender, three of them stamped SECOND NOTICE.
Under that was a folder from the place in Sylvania.
It was an admission agreement. Seven pages. A one-bedroom, memory care wing.
Memory care. For a woman who’d caught a forty-year-old misprint in the church directory in September.
The move-in date was typed on the first page. Monday, the sixteenth of November.
Two days after her ninetieth birthday.
On the last page there was a line for the resident’s signature, and somebody had signed it. Freda Sikes. A big looped F, the kind they taught girls in the seventies.
I put it down in front of her.
Freda took her glasses off her cardigan and looked at the signature for a long time.
“That’s not my F,” she said. “I’ve never made an F like that in my life.”
There was one more thing in the folder, tucked in the back pocket. A yellow page torn off a legal pad.
Mindy’s handwriting. The same big loops.
Payoff 97,400 by 12/9.
House sells after Mom moves = clean.
Under that, underlined twice, with the corner of the page bent over the way Carmen’s card had been bent:
Bert – 40% of bldg. Covers it.
Shayla’s stamp
Freda called her daughter from the wall phone while I was still standing there. She didn’t sit down to do it.
“Saturday, two o’clock, my kitchen,” she said. “Bring Roberto. Bertram will be here. Don’t bring anything.”
Then she hung up on her, which I’d never seen her do to anybody.
Friday morning I went to my own bank. I was there an hour and a half. I came out with a loan against the building I’d never owed a dime on, and a cashier’s check for ninety-seven thousand, four hundred dollars made out to the lender in Columbus.
I didn’t tell Freda. I didn’t tell Shayla until I needed her to come with me.
Saturday Shayla sat at the end of Freda’s yellow table with her notary stamp in her lap and two forms I’d printed off the county’s site. A quitclaim deed, Mindy Wojcik to Freda Sikes. A revocation of power of attorney.
Mindy came in first. She saw Shayla and her face changed.
Roberto came in behind her with his hands in his jacket pockets. He wouldn’t look at me.
The card was in the middle of the table, back side up, where Freda had put it.
Next to it was the folder from the drawer.
Mindy didn’t sit down.
“Oh, so this is a meeting,” she said. “This is a little tribunal. You brought the girl from the register to watch.”
“Sit down, Mindy,” Freda said.
“I’m good standing. What is all this?” She flipped the folder open with one nail and closed it again just as fast. “You went in my drawer. That’s my private business, Mom, those are my private papers.”
“They’re my papers. In my kitchen.”
“I’ve been carrying you for a year! Who drives you to the eye doctor? Who sat in that hospital with you for nine days while HIS Royal Highness was frosting cupcakes? You don’t even know how much your prescriptions cost, Mom. You have no idea.”
“I know what the roof cost,” Freda said.
Mindy laughed. It came out high.
“Fine. Yes. I borrowed against the house. Everybody does it. It’s called a home equity loan, it’s not a crime, and it was going to get handled.”
“By the ninth,” I said.
She turned on me.
“You. You don’t get to talk. You took a dead woman’s card off her and hid it for thirty years and never told a soul. You sat at my WEDDING with it. You want to talk about crimes, Detective? Let’s call somebody right now and talk about yours.”
“Okay,” I said.
That stopped her for about a second.
I took one sheet out of my shirt pocket and put it on the table. It was a list, in my handwriting. The card. The bank printouts. The deed. The admission agreement with Freda’s name on it. The page off the legal pad.
“Monday at nine I take all of it downtown,” I said. “The prosecutor’s office has people who do this. I’ll tell them where I kept the card and how long.”
“You’d lose your pension. You’d lose that bakery.”
“Probably.”
“You’re bluffing.”
I didn’t say anything. I let her look at me.
She looked at Freda instead. And her voice changed. It went soft and reasonable, the way she sounds when she calls in an order.
“Mom. Listen to me. You’re ninety years old. Who did you think all this was going to go to? It was always coming to me. Carmen knew that too, she just couldn’t stand that I needed it before she was gone. I didn’t take anything from you. I took it early.”
Nobody said anything.
“And memory care is just the name of the wing, they put everybody there first, it’s how they do intake—”
“With my signature,” Freda said.
“I signed for you because you’d have made a fuss!”
Roberto had his eyes on the legal pad page. He reached out and turned it toward himself.
“Min,” he said. “The roof was my overtime.”
“Your overtime.” She laughed again. “Robbie, your overtime made the truck payment in March and that’s it. Where’d you think the boat motor came from? Christmas? You never once asked. You never ask anything. That’s what you’re good at.”
His ears went red again. He put the page down.
Freda slid the quitclaim across the yellow table to her daughter. Then the revocation. Then a pen out of the cup by the phone.
“Sign these,” she said, “and Bertram doesn’t go downtown Monday. Don’t sign them and he goes.”
“And then what? The house is still in foreclosure, Mom. Signing it back to you doesn’t make the loan go away. It just makes it YOUR problem. You don’t have ninety-seven thousand dollars.”
I took the cashier’s check out of my jacket and laid it face up next to the card.
Mindy read the amount. Then she read the name of my bank on the top of it.
“Oh, you’re kidding me,” she said. “You mortgaged it. You put a loan on that building to pay off MY loan.”
“Sign it, Mindy,” Freda said.
She stood there for a long time with the pen.
Then she signed both. Hard enough to go through the second sheet. She wrote her own name with the same big loops.
Shayla stood up and stamped them and signed under the stamp and wrote the date. Her hand was steady. I’d never seen her stamp anything that fast.
“Take it off the internet,” Freda said. “Now. While I’m watching.”
Mindy took her phone out and did it in front of her mother with her thumb, and turned the screen around to show her it was gone.
Then she picked up her purse.
Roberto got up too. He went to the door behind her and stopped there with his hand on the frame.
He looked at me for the first time all afternoon.
“You stood up at my wedding,” he said. “With that in your jacket. You held a glass up.”
“I did.”
“Twenty-six hundred dollars, Bert. I’d have paid it back myself. I’d have paid it back that week.”
He went out after her, and the screen door banged twice on its spring.
December ninth
December ninth was a Wednesday. Nobody sold Freda’s house on the courthouse steps.
The lender’s lawyer called the bakery on the fourth to tell me the payoff had posted and the sale was off the docket. He sounded disappointed, like a man who’d already ordered lunch.
Freda’s deed was recorded the same week. Shayla ran it on the laptop at the back table and turned the screen around without a word. SIKES FREDA.
The loan payment for the building comes on the fifteenth. I keep the envelope on the corkboard over the desk, next to the health inspection.
The Lutheran women didn’t come back. The fourth-grade teacher did. So did eleven of the nineteen Thanksgiving orders, which is about what I’d have bet.
Roberto usually orders three dozen paczki in February for his shop. I don’t expect him to.
That afternoon the phone rang at the register while I was boxing a sheet cake. Shayla put it on speaker.
“Bertram’s,” she said.
“It’s Freda Sikes. Put him on, honey.”
Shayla held the phone out to me with two fingers.
I took it.
“I’m sending my sister’s card over with Aisha from church,” Freda said. “I want her lemon cake for Sunday. The real one. You make it off the card.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And then you bring it back to me. It lives here now.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Aisha came in at four with the card in a new sandwich bag, a clean one, the zipper kind.
I took it in the back. I propped it against the flour bin, lemon cake side out, and cracked the first egg.
If this one stayed with you, pass it on to somebody who’s ever kept a secret for the wrong person’s sake.
Family disputes have a way of turning money into a weapon – see how one boyfriend’s mother made a startling offer in “My Boyfriend’s Mom Slid Me $280,000 Across a Table on My Grandfather’s Pier” and how cousins handled a family home in “My Cousins Split Great-Uncle’s $468,000 House and Booked Him a $7,900-a-Month Bed”. For a very different family story, read “I Was Thirteen on a Kitchen Floor the Last Time the Captain Saw Me”.
