The brass bell above the door of Cosgrove Pye's bakery gave a single, tuneless peal as Iris Thistleberry pushed it open with her shoulder. Early morning light slanted through the front windows, catching motes of flour suspended in the air. The scent of yeast and caramelized sugar usually welcomed her, sharp and familiar, a perfume that had perfumed their rivalry for the better part of two decades. This morning the air held only stillness.
She set the wicker basket on the counter, the weight of six dozen quail eggs shifting against her hip. The eggs were a peace offering of sorts, delivered under the thinnest pretence of professional courtesy. Cosgrove had taken to boasting, again, about his sourdough at the Wednesday traders' meeting. Iris had meant to set him straight, gently, with eggs in hand and a cutting remark loaded behind her teeth. Old habits. Friendly fire.
"Cosgrove." She rapped her knuckles against the counter. "I know you're hiding in the back. I brought eggs. Yours have been sitting on the shelf since Tuesday."
No answer.
She tried the service bell instead, a polished brass dome mounted near the register. The ring it produced was thin and spiteful, nothing like the rich gong of the bell on her own counter at Thistleberry's Custard Emporium. She smiled, pleased with the comparison, and waited.
Still no answer.
The kitchen door stood ajar. Beyond it, a corridor stretched toward the back of the building, dim and cool. She could hear the tick of the old wall clock behind the counter, marking seconds with wooden patience. She stepped around the counter and moved toward the pantry at the end of the hall.
Cosgrove Pye lay on the slate floor, his arms arranged at his sides with a neatness that did not belong to sleep. A stainless steel whisk rested in his right hand, the wires bent slightly where they pressed against his palm. His eyes were closed. His apron, white that morning, had gone the color of old parchment. A fine dusting of something, flour, perhaps, or powdered sugar, clung to his eyebrows and the soft fringe of his hair. He looked like a marionette whose strings had been cut, then placed carefully back in his box.
Iris stopped breathing too. Then she remembered, and let the air out in a rush that tasted of copper and old dread.
"Cosgrove." Her voice came out smaller than she intended. She set her basket down on the floor. The eggs shifted, and one cracked, a thin wet sound that made her flinch. She knelt beside him, ignoring the cold that seeped through her stockings, and pressed two fingers to the soft hollow beneath his jaw. Nothing. No flutter, no warmth, no complaint beneath her touch. His skin held the waxy pallor of candle tallow, and the chill that radiated from him pressed back against her fingertips like a wall.
She sat there for longer than she could account for. The clock behind the counter marked the time. Somewhere outside, a seagull screamed, the sound threading down through the skylight and breaking against the tile. The flour motes continued their lazy drift, indifferent.
Finally, Iris rose. Her knees protested. She brushed at her skirt and looked at the whisk in Cosgrove's hand.
It was his favorite, the one he used for his meringue work. She had seen him wield it a hundred times across market stalls and judging tables, the wires singing against the bowl as he folded air into egg whites. Now the bowl was missing. The wires were still. And Cosgrove would never wield another anything, ever again.
She felt for her mobile, then remembered, and felt instead for the landline mounted on the wall beside the pantry door. The receiver was heavy and smelled faintly of disinfectant. She dialed the number she had avoided dialing for years, the one taped to the wall above the till at the Emporium, next to the fire certificate and the food hygiene inspection.
The line rang twice.
"Emergency services. Which service do you require?" A young voice, clipped and bored.
"Police," Iris said. "Ambulance. Both. There has been a death at Pye's Bakery on Harbour Street."
"Name?"
"Iris Thistleberry. The deceased is Cosgrove Pye. He is the owner."
"Stay on the line, madam. Do not touch anything."
"I have not touched anything," she said, with more sharpness than the occasion warranted. "I touched his neck to check for a pulse. Is that touching anything?"
A pause. The young voice returned, softer now. "That is quite all right, madam. Help is on its way. Please remain where you are."
Iris set the receiver back in its cradle and looked again at Cosgrove Pye. The whisk. The apron. The flour on his brow. She catalogued each detail, filing them away in the orderly cabinet of her memory where she kept recipes and grudges, in roughly equal measure.
She did not weep. She had not wept since the day her mother died, six years gone, and the muscle of it had gone slack in her. Instead she stood very straight, and listened to the clock tick, and waited for the sound of a siren on the harbour wind.
When the constabulary arrived, they came not with wailing but with a measured tread. Two officers, both young, both smelling faintly of carbolic soap and last night's chips. The taller of the pair had a notebook out before he had crossed the threshold. He introduced himself as Constable Whitstable, and then, having seen Cosgrove, introduced himself again, more quietly.
"Miss Thistleberry. You found the body."
"I did."
"And the deceased is Cosgrove Pye."
"He is. He was. He will not be appearing at the Wednesday meeting to boast about his sourdough."
The constable looked at her. Iris looked back, her face arranged into the careful neutrality she had perfected at her mother's funeral, the expression that said: I am managing. Do not manage me.
"Was the door locked when you arrived?" he asked.
"It was not. The front door opened when I pushed it. I assumed he was in the back. He often is. He hides when he knows I have come to scold him about his pricing."
"Pricing?"
"He charges too much for a loaf of brown. This has been a problem between us for years. It is not relevant to his death, I expect."
The constable's partner had moved to the pantry doorway. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, the posture of a man trying very hard not to touch anything. He looked at Iris with the sympathetic concern of one who has not yet seen a corpse and intends to keep it that way for as long as possible.
"Did Mr. Pye have any enemies, Miss Thistleberry?"
Iris considered the question. She considered it at length, turning it over as one turns over a problem loaf, feeling for the soft spots. Cosgrove Pye had enemies in abundance. He had cultivated them with the same care he brought to his croissants, nurturing grievances with a delicate hand and a heavy hand by turns. He had insulted the harbourmaster's wife. He had refused to bake the mayor's birthday cake. He had once, memorably, accused the vicar of watering down the communion wine.
But enemies were not the same as killers, and Iris had enough wisdom left to know the difference.
"Every baker in the district," she said finally. "And half the customers. And his brother-in-law, if half the rumours are true. I could not begin to narrow it down for you."
She watched the constable write this down, word for word, his pencil scratching softly against the page. She felt a curious relief in the scratch, a sense that something was being recorded, something was being held in trust.
The second constable had moved into the pantry now. She heard him cough, once, the sound muffled by the small space. Then she heard him speak, very quietly, into his radio.
The first constable looked up from his notebook. "Miss Thistleberry. I must ask you to step outside. The inspector will want to speak with you, but for now, we need to secure the scene."
She stepped outside. The morning air hit her face, salt and weed and the faintest thread of woodsmoke from the harbour. She stood on the pavement and looked at the bakery's front window, where the day's offerings were chalked onto a slate in Cosgrove's careful copperplate. Today's special: walnut and rye. Tomorrow's special: fig and fennel. A small note at the bottom, almost apologetic: closed for a private function.
Iris smoothed her skirt, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and waited. The eggs in her basket had settled, their weight redistributed, the cracked one weeping faintly through the wicker. She would have to throw them out when she got home.
She would have to tell her father. Hollis Thistleberry, patriarch of the family, custodian of the original custard recipe until his memory had begun to fold in upon itself like wet cardboard, would have to be told that Cosgrove Pye was dead. Hollis had never liked Cosgrove. Hollis had liked him even less since Cosgrove had begun winning the blue ribbon at the autumn fête, a ribbon Hollis had held for forty years and now regarded as his by natural right.
Hollis would take the news poorly. He would take it with the theatrical grief of an old man who has outlived his rivals and resents the fact. He would also, Iris suspected, feel something closer to genuine sorrow. Cosgrove had been, beneath the boasting and the price hikes, a decent sort. He had never once spoken ill of Hollis's custard. He had once, memorably, called it the only honest thing in Halfmoon Cove.
The inspector's car pulled up at the kerb. The door opened, and a tall woman in a grey coat stepped out. She had the face of someone who had seen too many pantries and too many whisks and too many bodies arranged on slate floors. She introduced herself as Detective Whitstable, no relation to the constable, a coincidence she acknowledged with the weary humour of the overworked.
"Miss Thistleberry." The detective took her hand and held it a beat too firmly. "I understand you are the finder."
"I am."
"And you knew the deceased."
"We were rivals. We were not friends. We were friendly rivals, which is a different thing."
"Different how?"
"Friendly rivals deliver eggs to each other and scold each other about pricing. Friends do not scold each other about pricing. Or if they do, they do it with a softer hand."
The detective looked at her. Iris looked back. The wind off the harbour tugged at her hair and brought the salt smell closer.
"Walk me through it," the detective said. "From the beginning. The door, the bell, the moment you knew something was wrong."
So Iris told her. She told her about the bell, the silence, the call she had meant to make and the call she had made instead. She told her about the whisk. She told her about the flour on Cosgrove's brow. She did not tell her about the egg that cracked in the basket, because that was hers, a private grief for a wasted offering.
The detective wrote it all down. Then she closed her notebook and looked at Iris with the steady gaze of a woman who has heard a hundred versions of a hundred stories and learned to weigh the teller's breath as much as their words.
"Where were you last night, Miss Thistleberry?"
"At home. In bed. With my cat."
"Can anyone confirm that?"
"My cat. She is a poor witness but a reliable one. She sleeps on my feet and never moves."
The detective almost smiled. Almost. Then the weight of the pantry and the whisk settled back across her features, and the smile retreated.
"Stay in town, Miss Thistleberry. We may have further questions."
Iris nodded. She watched the detective step past her and into the bakery, into the cool dim corridor, toward the pantry at the back where Cosgrove Pye lay with his whisk and his flour and his silence. She watched the door swing shut behind her, the brass bell giving one last, lonely note.
Then she picked up her basket, adjusted her grip on the handle, and began the walk back toward the Emporium and the news she did not yet know how to deliver.
The walk back to the Emporium took Iris Thistleberry along cobbles still damp from the morning's early rain, past the chemist's where the blue bottles stood in their window like rows of small attentive eyes, past the post office with its flag hanging limp in the windless air. She carried her basket against her hip the way she had carried it since she was a girl tall enough to see over its rim, and she did not hurry.
She had learned, in twenty-eight years of being a Thistleberry, that hurrying through Millbrook only made the town notice you more. The slower you walked, the less anyone remarked upon where you had been. The slower you walked, the less anyone asked what you carried in your basket, and why your knuckles were white around the handle, and why your gaze kept sliding sideways to the lane that led toward Cosgrove Pye's bakery.
She did not look at that lane. She looked at the chemist's bottles, the post office flag, the brass numbers on the doors she passed. She looked at the cracks between the cobbles where a thread of green was beginning to push up, stubborn as any Thistleberry.
At the corner of Wren Street and High, she stopped.
The Emporium stood ahead of her across the square, its bow front painted the particular shade of custard yellow her grandfather had chosen sixty years ago and no one in the family had dared alter since. The windows were dressed with bunting from the spring fair. The door, she could see even at this distance, stood slightly ajar, the way it always stood when her father was inside and wanted the morning air. Beyond the glass, shadows moved. Someone was in the shop.
She drew a breath that tasted of wet stone and the faintest ghost of yeast from Pye's ovens, drifting.
Then she crossed the square.
The bell above the Emporium door gave its usual silvery two-note chime as she entered, and the interior received her the way it always did, with the dim amber of the pendant lamps and the cool marble of the counter and the long glass case where the day's custards sat in their porcelain dishes, each one a small pale planet waiting to be chosen. The air held the perfume of vanilla and scorched milk and the faintest breath of nutmeg, a scent so familiar to her that she had stopped noticing it years ago, the way one stops noticing the sound of one's own breathing.
Her father stood behind the counter. Hollis Thistleberry was a tall man who had grown narrower with age, his shoulders folding inward as though to make room for the years settling on his frame. He wore his apron as he had always worn it, knotted twice at the waist, the strings trailing. His hands rested on the counter, and his eyes, when they found Iris, had the particular quality of a man who had been waiting without admitting to himself that he was waiting.
"You've been out," he said.
"I went to buy eggs," Iris said. She set the basket down. The eggs were not in it. She had left them on Pye's floor, scattered like small white surrenders.
"You've been gone an hour."
"The queue at Henshaw's was longer than I expected."
Hollis studied her. The gaze of an old man who has known you since before you knew yourself is a peculiar instrument; it weighs not only the words you say but the breath beneath them, the posture of your shoulders, the way your hands move. Iris had been measured by that gaze her whole life. She had never quite learned to stand easy beneath it.
"Queue," Hollis repeated.
"Queue," Iris said, and lifted the basket as evidence of its emptiness.
Her father said nothing more. He turned his attention to the glass case, adjusting a dish by a fraction of an inch with the careful fingers of a man who has spent six decades arranging custards on porcelain. Iris watched his hands and felt, as she always felt, a pang of tenderness so sharp it was nearly indistinguishable from grief.
He was forgetting things now. Small things, mostly. Where he had set his spectacles. Which of the three teaspoons belonged to the silver. Whether it was Tuesday or Wednesday. He had always been a man who kept the whole architecture of the Emporium in his head, every recipe, every customer, every anniversary, and to watch that architecture gently come loose at the seams was a thing Iris did not know how to bear, so she bore it the way she bore most things, by carrying on.
"I am going to make the custard for the tarts," she said.
Hollis nodded. He did not ask which custard. There was only one custard for the tarts, and it had been the same custard since her grandmother's day, the original Thistleberry recipe, the one her father had once kept entire in his memory and now kept only in fragments, the way a man might keep a torn letter, smoothing it flat to read the parts that remained.
Iris went through to the kitchen. The kitchen of the Emporium was a long low room with copper pots hanging from a rack and a range that took up most of one wall and a window above the sink that looked out onto the herb garden her father had planted the year she was born. The light through that window fell across the worktable in a slant she had known since childhood, and she moved through it now with the ease of long practice, setting a pan on the hob, measuring milk, cracking eggs into a bowl with one hand the way her mother had taught her and her mother had been taught in turn.
She cracked two eggs, then stopped.
Her hands were not behaving. The second egg had cracked unevenly, a ragged tear in the shell rather than the clean break she aimed for, and the yolk had slid into the bowl trailing a filament of white. She stood for a moment looking at it, the way she had stood in Pye's pantry looking at the flour on the dead man's brow, and she thought, absurdly, that eggs had no business being so fragile, that so much of what mattered in the world was contained in such brittle shells.
She set the bowl aside and pressed her palms flat against the cool wood of the table.
The detective's question had lodged in her like a splinter. Where were you last night. At home. In bed. With my cat. She had answered smoothly enough, with the dryness that was her armor and her inheritance both, but the question had a weight behind it that did not lift with the answering. She had a public feud with Cosgrove Pye. She had called his tarts vulgar in the Millbrook Recorder last spring, and he had called hers pretentious in the same paper the week after, and the two columns had been pinned up in the tearoom for months afterward, side by side, like two prize fighters squaring off. Half the town knew about that feud. The other half had heard about it secondhand and formed opinions regardless.
She had told the detective none of this. She had told her about the bell and the flour and the whisk. She had not told her about the columns, the letters to the editor, the Christmas pudding Cosgrove had sent to the Emporium with a card reading "In the spirit of friendly competition" and the single word "Ha!" written beneath his signature, which she had kept in the desk drawer in the back office because her father had laughed at it once, a rare sound, and she could not bring herself to throw it away.
She had not told her about the feud because the feud was, she realized, a thing she had built out of pride and stubbornness and the particular defensiveness of a family that had held a recipe for three generations and feared, always feared, that someone would come along and make a better custard and the whole edifice would come down.
She had not killed Cosgrove Pye. She was certain of this. She was so certain of it that the certainty sat in her chest like a stone, heavy and immovable, and she could not understand why the certainty did not make her feel lighter.
A knock at the back door.
Iris wiped her hands on her apron and went to answer it, and found Fern Briarby on the step with a posy of violas in one hand and a covered dish in the other.
Fern was a tall woman, taller than Iris by a head, with the sort of slow grace that suggested she had grown up among things that did not hurry. Her hair was the color of wheat in late summer, pulled back in a single braid that hung over one shoulder like a rope of pale silk. Her eyes were the particular grey-green of a sky that cannot quite decide whether to clear. She wore a coat the colour of moss, and beneath it a dress the colour of cream, and around her neck a scarf that smelled, even from the step, faintly of the garden.
"I brought you the candied violets," Fern said, and held up the posy. "And a tart."
"You brought me a tart."
"An almond one. I thought you might not have had breakfast."
Iris looked at the tart, golden in its ceramic dish, its crust neatly crimped, a sprinkle of sliced almonds across its pale surface arranged with the care of a woman who treats even a tart as a small composition. She looked at Fern, who stood on the step with the patience of a woman accustomed to waiting for things to grow and therefore patient about most other matters as well.
"Come in," Iris said.
Fern came in. She set the posy on the table beside the bowl of cracked eggs and the covered tart beside the pan on the hob, and then she turned and looked at Iris with the quiet, unhurried attention that was her particular gift.
"You have not slept," Fern said.
"I have not slept."
"I saw the detective on the square."
"You saw the detective on the square."
"I saw her go into Pye's. I saw her come out. I saw her speak to you. I saw you walk back here carrying a basket of nothing."
Iris sat down on the stool by the worktable. The stool was the one her mother had used when she was alive, and it creaked under her in the way it always creaked, a familiar small complaint.
"Fern," Iris said. "Cosgrove Pye is dead."
Fern did not startle. She did not gasp. She took the news the way a gardener takes a late frost, with a slow intake of breath and the immediate beginning of an assessment of damage.
"How," Fern said.
"I do not know. The detective did not say. He was in his pantry, on the floor, with a whisk in his hand. There was flour on his brow."
"Flour on his brow."
"As though he had been reaching for something on a high shelf and it had fallen on him. Or as though he had been kneading and had sat back suddenly. The detective asked questions. I answered them. She told me to stay in town."
Fern was quiet for a moment. She moved to the window and looked out at the herb garden, at the neat rows of chives and thyme and the unruly sprawl of mint at the far end, and her hands, which had been folded loosely in front of her, unfolded and folded again, the only sign of the small disturbance moving through her.
"She will ask everyone," Fern said. "She will ask about the feud."
"I know she will ask about the feud."
"The Recorder columns. The pudding he sent. The tarts at the summer fair, side by side, and the judges split the prize and you both said the other had cheated."
"I know what I said, Fern."
"I am not saying you should not have said it. I am saying she will hear about it. From other people, if not from you. Millbrook is not a town that forgets a quarrel."
Iris said nothing. She looked at the bowl of eggs, at the ragged tear in the second shell she had not yet fished out, at the yolk trailing its filament of white into the bowl.
"She will ask about the feud," Fern said again, more gently. "And when she asks, you must answer. Not the way you answered me just now, with the bones of it. The whole of it. The pride in it. The pleasure in it. Because if you do not give her the whole of it, she will find someone who will, and that someone's version will be uglier than yours."
"You think I should have told her."
"I think you should have told her before you left the bakery. I think the longer you wait, the worse it looks. The longer you wait, the more it looks like the thing you did not tell her was the thing that mattered."
Iris lifted her head. Fern was still at the window, the light falling across her shoulders, her braid catching a glint of pale gold.
"I did not kill Cosgrove Pye, Fern."
"I know you did not."
"Then why are you talking to me as though I did."
Fern turned from the window. She crossed the kitchen in three unhurried steps and set her hand on Iris's shoulder, the way she had set her hand on it a hundred times before, in gardens, in doorways, in the long quiet afternoons they had spent together since they were girls.
"Because I have known you since we were nine years old," Fern said. "And I know the way your mind works. And I know that you are already constructing a version of events in which you had no part, and that version will not survive the questions the detective is going to ask, because the detective does not care about the version in your head. She cares about the version in the heads of fifty people who have been watching you and Cosgrove Pye circle each other for years like two dogs tied to the same fence."
Iris let out a breath she had not realized she was holding.
"She will come here," Fern said. "Today, probably. She will sit at that counter out there, and she will ask you about the feud, and she will ask you what you said in the Recorder, and she will ask you whether you meant it. And you must answer her, Iris. You must answer her straight."
"I always answer straight."
"You answer the way your family answers. Which is to say, you answer with half the truth and trust the other half to stay hidden. That is how the Thistleberrys have survived three generations. It is also how they have made enemies of half the town."
Iris opened her mouth to protest, and then closed it, because Fern was not wrong, and they both knew it, and the knowing sat between them like a third presence in the kitchen.
"The candied violets," Fern said, and her voice changed, became lighter, became the voice she used when she was handing Iris something she could hold onto. "For the tarts. They will not last until tomorrow. You should use them today."
Iris looked at the posy. The violas were a deep velvet purple, their faces tilted upward, and among them she could see the smaller stars of the cornflowers she had asked for last week, blue as a summer sky at the moment before it decides whether to rain.
"They are beautiful," Iris said.
"They are edible," Fern said. "Which is better."
She picked up the tart she had brought and set it in front of Iris.
"Eat," she said. "Whatever has happened in that bakery, you are still standing in this one, and there is custard to be made."
Iris took the tart. She bit into it. The almond was warm and fine, the crust gave way in a soft crumble against her tongue, and the taste of it was so ordinary, so domestic, so entirely of Millbrook on an ordinary morning, that for a moment she forgot the flour on Cosgrove Pye's brow, the detective's steady gaze, the splinter lodged beneath her ribs.
Then she finished the bite, set the tart down, and went back to the bowl of eggs.
"Help me fish out the shell," she said.
Fern came and stood beside her, and they bent over the bowl together in the slant of morning light, two women with steady hands, looking for the small broken thing.
The shell was smaller than Iris had expected, a pale crescent no bigger than a fingernail clipping, and it took both of them three careful passes with the tip of a spoon before Fern hooked it free and set it on the rim of the bowl with a small clink.
"There," Fern said. "That is the last of the wreckage."
Iris poured the custard into its pan and set it over the gentlest flame the copper-bottomed range could offer. The vanilla went in last, a long scrape of the pod against the back of a spoon, and the smell of it bloomed through the kitchen in a slow, sweet cloud that seemed to push back the shadows that had been gathering in the corners since yesterday.
Fern washed her hands at the basin, dried them on the roller towel, and then turned and leaned against the counter with the patient stillness that was her particular kind of presence.
"Hollis rang me this morning," she said. "Before he rang you, I think. He wanted to know whether I had seen Cosgrove yesterday. I said I had not. I said I had spent the afternoon staking the delphiniums."
Iris nodded without turning from the pan. "Did he say anything else?"
"He said he was coming to see you."
Iris stirred the custard in long, slow figures of eight. "He is always coming to see someone. It is what he does. It is what he has always done."
"He sounded," Fern said, and then she paused, and the pause was unusual enough that Iris looked up.
"Sounded how?"
"Upset," Fern said. "In a way I have not heard him in a long time. Not angry. Not imperious. Upset."
The custard caught gently at the bottom of the pan, a thin skin forming across the surface, and Iris drew the spoon through it in a long, careful curve to release the heat. "Hollis does not get upset," she said. "Hollis gets opinions."
"Ordinarily, yes," Fern said. "But I have known him since I was nineteen and I sold him his first edible pansies, and I know the difference."
Iris set the spoon down. She turned the flame to its lowest mark, so the custard would hold, and she looked at Fern across the warm, vanilla-scented air of her own kitchen.
"What are you trying to tell me?"
Fern folded her hands in front of her. "I think you should hear it from him. I do not think it is my news to carry."
The bell over the front door of the Emporium rang just then, the brass note clear and long in the empty shop, and Iris heard the particular rhythm of her uncle's walking stick upon the floorboards before she saw him. Two sharp taps, a pause, a third. The signature of a man who had been announcing himself into rooms since before she was born.
"Stay," she said to Fern. "Please."
"I am not going anywhere," Fern said.
Iris went through the baize door and into the shop. Hollis Thistleberry was standing just inside the entrance, his stick in his right hand, his left hand resting on the glass of the display case as if he needed the counter to confirm that the world was still where he had left it. He was wearing the old tweed jacket he kept for important visits, the one with the leather patches at the elbows, and his tie was knotted with the care of a man who had taken longer than usual over it.
"Uncle," Iris said.
He looked up at her, and she saw at once what Fern had meant. The color was wrong in his face, a greyish undertone beneath the pink that usually sat in his cheeks, and his eyes, which were famously sharp, had a softness in them she did not recognize.
"Come through," she said. "There is custard on."
"There is always custard on," Hollis said, but he said it without any of the usual pleasure in the line, and he let her take his arm and guide him through the baize door as if he had forgotten the way.
Fern stepped back to give him room, and he inclined his head to her with a formality that was almost courtly.
"Miss Briarby."
"Mr. Thistleberry," Fern said.
Iris settled him into the stool at the prep counter, the one with the cushion she had bought for his back, and she poured him a small cup of the warm custard in a plain white bowl and set it in front of him with a silver spoon.
"Eat first," she said. "Talk after."
He looked at the bowl. He looked at her. He picked up the spoon.
He ate in the careful, deliberate way he did everything, three small spoonfuls, the bowl tipped precisely to catch the last of it, and then he set the spoon across the rim and folded his hands.
"The custard is right," he said, and his voice was the rough voice he always had, but quieter, as if the volume knob had been turned down by some hand other than his own.
"It should be," Iris said. "I made it this morning."
"I know," he said. "I can tell."
Fern moved quietly to the far end of the counter and began wiping down the copper pans she had already cleaned, a task that required no real attention and gave Hollis the appearance of privacy. Iris pulled the other stool around and sat facing him, her hands loose in her lap, and waited.
"Cosgrove changed his will," Hollis said.
Iris heard the words arrive. She felt them land.
"Changed it how?" she said.
"He came to see me a fortnight ago," Hollis said. "He came to the house. He brought a bottle of the elderflower he makes in his back garden, the cloudy one, and we sat in the conservatory and he told me he had been thinking about the future."
Hollis paused, and his thumb moved across the knuckle of his other hand in the small, repetitive gesture Iris remembered from his talks with her father, the one that meant he was choosing his next sentence with the same care a watchmaker chooses his tools.
"He said he had no children," Hollis went on. "He said he had no one who would care for the rack as it ought to be cared for. He said he had been watching you."
"Watching me do what?"
"Watching you work," Hollis said. "He had been into the shop three times last month. He did not buy anything. He watched you through the glass. He told me he had never seen anyone handle a vanilla pod with that kind of attention. He said it reminded him of his mother."
Iris felt the splinter under her ribs shift, not deeper, but sideways, into a place she had not known was tender.
"He named me," Iris said. "He named me in his will."
"Sole beneficiary," Hollis said. "Of the rack and its contents. He was very specific about that. He said, and I am quoting, 'Iris will know what to do with them.'"
The kitchen was very quiet. The range ticked as the steel cooled. Somewhere in the shop, the bell over the door moved in a draft and gave a single, soft chime of its own.
"Did he say anything else?" Iris asked. "About why now? About whether he was unwell?"
"He said he was not unwell," Hollis said. "He said he was of sound mind, which was the phrase he used, very deliberately, as if he knew I would wonder. He said he had simply come to a decision. He said he had been thinking about legacies."
Hollis looked down at his hands. The thumb moved again across the knuckle.
"I did not think much of it at the time," he said. "Cosgrove has always been a man of strong opinions about who should inherit what. I thought he would change his mind again by the end of the week."
"And now he is dead," Iris said.
Hollis looked up. The softness in his eyes was not softness at all, she saw now. It was the look of a man who had been carrying a weight he had not expected to be asked to put down.
"And now he is dead," Hollis agreed, "and the will is to be read on Monday, and the rack is to be transferred to you, and I am sitting in your kitchen eating your custard and trying to remember whether I missed something I ought to have seen."
He set down the spoon he had been holding without remembering he was holding it, and the small clatter of it against the bowl was the loudest sound in the room.
"Did you tell the detective?" Iris asked.
"I rang him from the car," Hollis said. "I rang him while Iris, that is, while I was driving here. I told him I had information about the deceased's recent affairs. He said he would come to the Emporium at ten."
He looked at the clock above the door. It was quarter to.
"Then we have fifteen minutes," Iris said.
Hollis straightened on his stool. The volume knob turned itself up again, almost, though not quite, to its usual setting.
"I am not a fool," he said. "I know what this looks like. I know what the detective will think. A man changes his will, names a young woman he has been watching through a shop window, and then he is dead in her neighbor's bakery twelve days later. I know how that reads."
"It reads exactly as you think it reads," Iris said.
"And yet," Hollis said, "I am telling you anyway. I am telling you because Cosgrove trusted me with the information, and because the information is now relevant, and because if I sit on it and it comes out later I will not be able to live with myself, and I have not got the time left to learn how."
Fern set down the copper pan she had been polishing and came and stood beside Iris, and she did not say anything, but the warmth of her at Iris's shoulder was a kind of saying.
"Thank you," Iris said, to both of them, to neither of them, to the small bright kitchen and the ordinary morning inside it. "Thank you for telling me."
"You will need to tell the detective yourself," Hollis said. "I will be here when he arrives, and I will confirm what I have said, but you are the one who must say it. You are the one who must look him in the eye."
"Yes," Iris said.
"And Iris," Hollis said, and the roughness in his voice cracked, just once, along a fault line she had not known was there.
"Yes, Uncle?"
"Do not let him make you small," Hollis said. "Whatever else happens, do not let him make you small."
The bell over the front door rang, sharp and clear, and Iris heard the steady footfall of a man who did not trouble to announce himself, and she set her shoulders, and she set her hands flat on the counter, and she went through the baize door to let him in.