The Bake-Off Read online

  “Honey!” Hawaiian Shirt howled after her. “Wait! Come back and I’ll give you a tip you’ll never forget!”

  Please. As if she’d ever look twice at a man who hit on seventeen when the dealer was showing a four. There wasn’t enough alcohol in the world to excuse that level of dumb-assery.

  After working at the blackjack tables for several months, Linnie knew she should be accustomed to reckless bets, but she never ceased to be shocked by how poorly most people understood the natural order of the universe. Many casino games, like craps, blackjack, poker, and baccarat, were not games of chance at all. If you had even a rudimentary grasp of probability and statistics, you could beat the house, provided you were patient and rational in your approach.

  But people didn’t want a clean, calculated formula for winning. They wanted “luck.”

  Well, Linnie didn’t believe in luck. She believed in logic.

  As she strode toward the employee locker room, her heel caught on a loose flap of rug, and she stumbled into a young couple watching the action at a craps table.

  “Sorry.” She steadied herself, then leaned down to adjust the ankle strap of her shoe.

  The male half of the couple did a double take when she straightened up. “Hey. Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

  “I don’t think so.” Linnie studied the couple’s features, trying to place them. He was short and pudgy, but his charcoal gray suit was obviously expensive, cut to camouflage an imperfect physique. His companion was a willowy redhead clad in a Grecian-inspired white minidress that looked fresh off the rack from one of the Strip’s couture shops.

  “I know I know you,” the guy went on. “What’s your name? It’s Russian, right? Kind of weird and unpronounceable?”

  The longer she stared at him, the more familiar he looked. Linnie lowered her gaze. “I think you have me confused with someone else.”

  “I’m Sam Janowitz,” he said.

  She shrugged one shoulder. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

  Sam snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it. Science enrichment camp. Palo Alto, late nineties. You’re the girl who whupped all the boys at chess, right?”

  “No.” Not anymore.

  “Vaseline! Your name sounds like Vaseline.”

  “Vasylina,” Linnie corrected faintly. She ducked her head so she wouldn’t have to watch his expression, which vacillated between disbelief and pity. “And it’s Polish, not Russian.”

  There was a long pause; then he coughed. “So you, gosh, you work here now, huh?” Sam opened and closed his mouth a few times before finally saying, “I went to school for aerospace engineering, but then I sold out and joined up with a hedge fund firm in Manhattan.” He fiddled with his cuff links. “I’m out here for a corporate retreat. This is my wife, Mia.”

  “Nice to meet you.” Linnie nodded at the redhead but didn’t extend her hand.

  Mia gave her a quick once-over, took in the polyester corset and the cleavage, and managed a trace of a smile. “I like your ears. Very frisky.”

  “We’re late for our dinner reservations. We’d better get going.” Sam tugged his wife forward and stole one last glance back over his shoulder. “Great seeing you. Good luck with everything.”

  “You, too.” Linnie remained rooted to the carpet.

  As Sam turned away, she heard him exclaim to his wife, “That girl is like Doogie Howser trapped in Barbie’s body. No exaggeration. She started college when she was fourteen.”

  Mia sniffed. “Then why is she dressed like a day-shift call girl?”

  “Beats me. But I’m telling you, back then, she was Little Miss Priss with an ego the size of a particle accelerator. She told everyone she was going to finish her MD before she was old enough to drink. I wonder what the hell happened to her.”

  “Don’t freak out about the smell. I can explain.” Linnie froze in her apartment doorway, keys in hand. She had been looking forward to curling up in her pajamas and unwinding with an iced coffee and a DVD of the Met’s production of Manon Lescaut. By herself.

  But her roommate, Kyle, was sprawled out across the sofa, peering up at her through shaggy blond bangs with a sheepish smile on his face and a bottle of Febreze in his hand. He looked like a puppy who’d spent the afternoon shredding a box of Kleenex and scattering the wreckage all over the house.

  “What happened in here?” She stepped into the living room, surveying the splintered coffee table, crumpled cans of beer, and mysterious new stains on the carpet.

  “A bunch of the guys came over. It was my turn to host the VGOs.”

  “VGOs?”

  “Video Game Olympics. We do it every year. My brother, Derek, even drove in from SoCal.” Kyle struggled up into a sitting position to get a better look at her new work uniform. “Why are you dressed like a slutty cat?”

  She instinctively tried to cover herself from his stare, but between the exposed cleavage, the exposed thighs, and the semi-exposed bottom, she didn’t have enough hands. “I started my new job today, remember?”

  Kyle let out a whistle of appreciation. “Well, you look fiiine. I had no idea you had an ass like that.”

  She pinned him with a glacial glare. “Don’t you ever look at my ass again.”

  He looked away, muttering, “Someone needs to lighten up.”

  She stalked across the living room to the apartment’s tiny kitchen, perused the nearly empty cupboard shelves, and tossed a bag of artificially flavored butter popcorn in the microwave for dinner. “How long have we known each other? Ten years? Twelve? If I were going to lighten up, it would have happened by now.”

  Linnie had first met Kyle when she responded to a classified ad for an economics tutor. At sixteen, she’d just dropped out of a top-rated university, and at nineteen, he’d just enrolled in community college. On the surface, the two of them couldn’t have been more different. Kyle had enjoyed a brief bout of fame and fortune when he was seven years old, hamming it up in a series of national potato chip commercials. Though he’d never landed another major role after that, his parents had yanked him out of public school to appear at an endless series of casting calls and auditions. He and Linnie had both missed out on a huge, formative piece of their childhoods, and their student-tutor dynamic had evolved into an unlikely camaraderie. Two years ago, after finally being dropped by his Manhattan talent agency, Kyle had relocated to Vegas to take a role in a murder mystery dinner theater, and he’d persuaded Linnie to join him (he’d claimed he valued her companionship, but she suspected he just needed help making rent).

  But camaraderie went only so far. While Linnie had been pathetically grateful for any scrap of social acceptance ten years ago, her tolerance for Kyle and his perpetual adolescence had worn thin now that they shared living space. She had applied for the promotion to the Kitty Korner specifically so that she could earn higher tips and afford her own apartment.

  Kyle resumed his explanation of the trashed apartment. “So, yeah, a bunch of the guys came over for our Video Game Olympics—it’s awesome; the winner gets to wear a yellow jersey like Lance Armstrong—and you earn points by getting the highest scores in the games, but you also get bonus points for drinking.”

  Linnie handed him a coaster as she sat down on a clean patch of sofa. “I assume ‘the guys’ will all be chipping in to purchase a new coffee table.”

  He glanced at the fractured wood as if noticing it for the first time. “Oh. I guess so. Anyway, we decided that since the winner got a yellow jersey, the loser should have to wear a pink one. But I don’t have any pink shirts, so Matt said we should check your room.”

  Linnie lunged off the couch and bolted for her bedroom.

  “What did you do?” She froze in her doorway, stricken by the sight of the contents of her closet strewn across the floor.

  Next to her, Kyle forced a chuckle. “Turns out you don’t have a pink shirt, either. I told Derek to clean up in here before he went home, but I guess he didn’t have time to finish.”

  Linnie
knelt down, gathered up an armful of sweatshirts, and was mentally composing the overture to her symphony of vitriol when she noticed the books stacked on her nightstand: a biography of Carl Sagan, The Joy of Cooking, and a dog-eared paperback edition of The Iliad.

  Her breath caught. “Who touched my books?”

  Kyle scratched the stubble on his chin. “What books?”

  “The Joy of Cooking.” She pointed. “It was on the bottom of that pile, and now it’s in the middle.”

  He shrugged. “The guys must’ve knocked it over, but, like I said, we tried to clean up a little bit. Why are you all emotional? It’s not like you ever cook.”

  The backs of her arms went hot and prickly. “Point A: I’m not emotional. Point B: It’s not about the cookbook; it’s about what’s inside the cookbook.”

  She grabbed the book and flipped through the first few pages to show him how she’d hollowed out the appetizer and main-course chapters with a razor blade to create a hiding place for the only material object that had any real value to her.

  Kyle’s eyes widened when he spied the rectangular blue velvet box nestled in a berth of black-and-white text. “That’s so James Bond. What’s in there?”

  Linnie skimmed the pads of her fingers across the cool, smooth page and the warm, soft velvet. This cookbook had been a bit of wishful thinking on her grandmother’s part. On the morning Linnie started college, Grammy Syl had presented her with two beautifully wrapped packages, along with a note: Congratulations to my brilliant granddaughter. I hope this gift will provide a connection to your past as you embark on your bright future. P.S. Don’t forget to eat. I recommend starting with the hard-boiled eggs and working your way up to the main courses.

  The first gift had been this cookbook.

  The second was an antique brooch crafted over a century ago by a master silversmith who’d designed jewelry for Russian royalty.

  She pried out the jewelry box and opened the lid, instructing, “You may look, but you may not touch.”

  But the box was empty.

  For a moment, her mind went completely blank.

  “Linnie?” Kyle’s voice sounded tinny and distant. “Hey, are you okay?”

  Her panic returned in full force, along with a sickening sense of vertigo. The room seemed to sway around her, and she braced one hand against the wall for support as she gazed down at the slotted blue velvet padding.

  “Maybe it fell out onto the floor,” Kyle was saying. “It’s probably hiding under a shirt somewhere.”

  Linnie forced herself to wait until she regained her balance before responding. “My grandmother’s brooch is not hiding. One of your Neanderthal friends lost it while you were pawing through my personal effects in a blatant violation of my trust.”

  He edged toward the doorway. “Listen, seriously, I know you’re upset, but your voice is all growly and your face isn’t moving, and you’re kind of scaring me.”

  She continued to glare at him, and he stammered, “If you kill me, you won’t have anyone to help you look.” He paused. “What am I looking for, anyway?”

  “A one-of-a-kind platinum brooch studded with rare cognac diamonds.”

  He blinked a few times.

  “Silver metal and brown stones.” She pointed imperiously at the carpet. “Stop standing around and start searching. Move!”

  But a careful excavation of the debris on the bedroom floor yielded nothing. Linnie scoured every centimeter of every article of clothing that had been displaced; Kyle lifted the bed frame and the bureau so she could check beneath them, but all to no avail.

  Grammy Syl’s brooch had vanished.

  “You are going to call every person who was in this apartment last night, we are going to corral them in this room, and I am going to grill them until I get my brooch back.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll start with Derek. Maybe he put it somewhere for safekeeping when he was cleaning up. Maybe he—” Kyle’s expression flickered. “Uh-oh.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  She took a single step toward him. “Out with it. Now.”

  Kyle fidgeted with the belt loops on his baggy cargo shorts. “It’s just . . . you know how every family has a screwup?”

  Linnie flinched, painfully aware that she herself filled that role in the Bialek clan. “Go on.”

  “Well, Derek doesn’t have the best track record, and he’s been having some pretty heavy problems lately with his house and his wife.”

  “And?” she prompted.

  “I’m sure it’s just lost. I’m sure it’s around here somewhere.”

  She took off her shoe and imagined wedging it down his throat. “Find a phone and start dialing.”

  Kyle retreated to the living room while Linnie started yet another inch-by-inch search of the floor and the closet. When he returned, his sheepish smile had been replaced with a dazed expression of dawning horror.

  “Derek knows where your brooch is.”

  Linnie nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

  “It’s in a pawnshop.” Kyle stared at his bare feet. “Someplace out by the Strip called Longbourne Jewelry and Loan.”

  She nodded again. “So he stole it.”

  When Kyle started to plead with her, she got a glimpse of the winsome little boy who had sold millions of bags of potato chips with his earnest charm. “He knows he shouldn’t have done it, okay? He knows that. And as pissed as you are right now, I’m just as mad. But you have to believe me when I tell you that the guy has, like, an avalanche of financial problems. He lost his job; he’s losing his house; his wife just found out she’s pregnant.”

  Linnie pressed her fingers against her temples and inhaled deeply through her nose. “We are going to the pawnshop right now, and we are going to get the brooch back. Where’s the claim ticket?”

  “Derek’s going to send it to me.”

  “Incorrect. He’s going to give it to me when he meets me at the pawnshop.”

  “He’s already on the road to California.”

  “Tell him to turn around and get back here with his ill-gotten money.”

  “Well, here’s the thing. He went to the bank as soon as it opened. Tomorrow is the first of the month, Linnie. He’s out of time. He’s been putting off foreclosure for months already.”

  The pounding of her pulse began to amplify in her ears. “Exactly how much money did he get for the brooch?”

  “Thirty-five grand.”

  She clamped her lips together and bit down so hard she tasted blood. If a pawnshop had paid thirty-five thousand, the actual value of the piece had to be at least twice that amount. Grammy Syl could never find out about this. Linnie had disappointed too many people already.

  “Derek says we have thirty days to pay it back, plus a bunch of interest and fees,” Kyle was saying. “Grand total should be around forty or forty-five thousand.”

  “Who is this ‘we’ you keep referencing?”

  “Us—Derek and me.” Kyle hunched over, his hands in his pockets. “Try to calm down and get a little perspective. He’s got a family to support.”

  “That doesn’t justify stealing. Kyle, what do you suggest I do here? I don’t have forty-five thousand dollars. I don’t have anywhere near that, and neither do you.”

  “We’ll pay you back, I promise.” Kyle lifted his hand in a throwback to the Boy Scout oath. “It might take us ten years, but we’ll pay you back.”

  She shook her head. “Ten years is unacceptable. I have thirty days before the pawnshop can resell it, with interest and penalties accruing by the minute.”

  “I’ll straighten everything out—I promise.” Kyle sounded like he was trying to convince himself. “I’m going to land a big role any day now; I can feel it. A TV role, maybe a movie.”

  Linnie started toward the kitchen. “I’m calling the police.”

  He raced ahead of her, snatching up the cordless phone by the entryway. “Don’t do that. Please. Please. There has to be another way to work th
is out.”

  “How? The pawnshop’s not going to return that piece to me without a police report.”

  Kyle finally realized she was implacable. His whole body slumped and he dropped the receiver onto the counter with a clatter. “I guess you have to do what you have to do. But tell them I did it, okay?”

  Linnie froze, her fingers poised over the phone’s keypad. “What?”

  “Tell them I was the one who took the jewelry without your permission and pawned it. They can arrest me instead of Derek.”

  “Absolutely not. Your brother needs to take responsibility for his actions. Why would you—”

  “He’s got a family and a life and everything, and I don’t.” Kyle swallowed audibly. “He wouldn’t have done this unless he was really at the end of his rope.”

  Linnie put down the phone, torn between blinding rage and helpless despair. “And you’re willing to take the blame for something you didn’t even do?”

  Kyle scuffed the carpet with his toe. “Yeah.”

  “You can’t do that. I won’t let you.”

  “What do you care? You’ll still get your jewelry back.”

  “But letting him take advantage of you like this isn’t doing him any favors in the long run. Trust me. It’s . . .” Linnie looked away and dug her fingernails into her palms. “It’s wrong. Not to mention extremely dysfunctional.”

  “It’s not dysfunctional.” Kyle stuck out his chin, suddenly defiant. “It’s love. It’s family.”

  “You’re putting me in an impossible situation here.”

  “Well, I don’t see any other way to get your thing back.” Kyle’s eyes lit up. “Unless . . .”

  Linnie folded her arms. “Unless what?”

  “Unless you go gambling.”

  “No.”

  “Yes! You could hit the high rollers’ table tonight and win fifty grand, easy. I know you could.”

  She almost laughed at the absurdity of this suggestion. “No, no, a thousand times no. I don’t gamble.”

  “Why not? Just ’cause you’re a casino dealer doesn’t mean you can’t play.”