Free The Baker's Wife by Erin Healy Page A

evidence while police were still scrutinizing a scene, and she had no idea when trash pickup was.
    She hated the idea of carrying the phone with her longer than she already had. She hated the idea of walking any farther with it and risking being seen, stopped, questioned.
    When Geoff noticed she was gone, would he send the detective looking for her? Would he give the officer a description? Fat chick, dull red hair, middle-aged, ate all my bread and took off without paying me . . .
    An idea came to Diane. A smart idea. She dropped the phone into her backpack and then proceeded down the alley, approaching the rear entrance of the shop adjacent to the bakery. It had something that the bakery did not: a flight of fixed metal stairs that led to its upstairs rooms.
    When Diane and Donna were about fourteen, Donna started using that fire escape to sneak out of the apartment when it was necessary for her to be somewhere without their parents’ permission. Their own “balcony” had a rusted ladder that was too noisy for a rebel teen who needed to go undetected, but the gap between balcony to neighboring landing was only about five feet—easy enough for an agile teenager to bridge.
    Donna was the agile one. Diane, fifty pounds heavier than her twin sister even then, had tried the route only once and nearly broke her neck. Today, in the gray morning light of neediness, a much older and heavier Diane thought the gap looked smaller than she remembered.
    The exterior metal stairs were shaded with an orange hue from years of sitting in moist air. They complained about her weight, and her shoes made clumsy noises on the metal steps. Diane feared she’d be heard before she made it even halfway up.
    And yet she reached the landing without anyone shouting at her, demanding to know who she was and what she was doing— the same demands bouncing around in her own head.
    The moisture that had accumulated on the railing was more dangerous than her foolish ideas. She wiped it off with the sleeve of her sweater, then centered the backpack between her shoulder blades and climbed up on the skinny piece of metal, first one knee, then one slippery tennis shoe at a time. This would have been impossible without the rain gutter that ran down the side of the building. She held on to the hollow tube for balance and managed to get to her feet.
    Her weight was hard to center. She had visions of herself slipping off the banana-peel rail and plummeting, or of managing to jump but slamming into the outside of the other balcony. Five feet was suddenly five miles.
    Think about it, girl. You’re five six. All you have to do, really, is tilt .
    She envisioned taking a hit to her midsection, which would be unpleasant regardless of her fleshy padding, or to her jaw, which would likely knock her unconscious. She imagined actually making it into the center of the balcony and then cracking her skull open when she toppled into the rail on the opposite side.
    She never had been very good at the positive-thinking, motivational stuff.
    Diane jumped without slipping but didn’t have enough vertical height to make it to safety inside the other rail. Her knees clipped the outside on her way down, and she felt her toes grab the rim and then pop off as she fell. Eyes closing, head snapping sideways, belly scraping, fingers clawing at air. One elbow hit the side of the building and then her armpits stopped her fall, a jarring emergency brake that brought her teeth down on her tongue. The reverberating noise was ridiculous. She hung there, the pain in her shoulder muscles oozing down her torso and her arms. She smelled the damp metal of the rusty rail. The chill of it stabbed through her clothes in time with her gasping.
    Any second now, the spotlight of discovery would cut through the mist and shine on her incompetence.
    After a few seconds of frantic jerks, her dangling feet found the balcony’s lip and her quivering legs received enough adrenaline