The Sweet Smell of Arsenic and Apple Pie: Poisoned Pies And Petty Grudges

The bell above the diner door gave a weak little ring, the sound of tired metal that had announced arrivals for decades without ever getting repaired. Cordelia Pruitt stepped inside and let the blast of warm, greasy air hit her face. It smelled the way all small-town diners smelled at this hour, a thick perfume of hot grease, burnt coffee, and pancake syrup that had caramelized onto the same griddle since her grandmother's day.

She nodded at the empty stool at the counter, a silent ritual between her and the woman behind it.

"Well, look what the wind blew in," Tammy-Lynn Sprocket sang out, already reaching for a mug before Cordelia had fully sat down. The peroxide-blond waitress wore her hair piled high in a swirl that defied both gravity and good sense, and her apron strings were tied in a bow so elaborate it looked like origami. "You're earlier than usual. Let me guess: you woke up, you looked out the window at those sad, sad trees, you sighed a great big sigh, and now you're here to steal my coffee and my patience."

"Coffee, definitely," Cordelia said. "Patience, I'll buy. How's the morning rush?"

Tammy-Lynn flipped the mug under the spout and poured with the ease of long practice. "Morning rush is three truckers, two retired schoolteachers, and a salesman who thinks he's fooling everyone with that toupee." She set the mug down with a flourish. "Now. What are you eating? And don't say nothing. I will follow you home and stand in your orchard until you confess."

Cordelia glanced at the specials board, hand-painted in Tammy-Lynn's looping cursive. It offered the usual lineup: eggs, hash, biscuits the size of softballs. But at the bottom, in fresh pink paint, was the announcement she'd been waiting for.

"Peach pie," she said. "I saw your sign. New batch?"

"New batch, new filling, new attitude." Tammy-Lynn reached under the counter and produced a plate with theatrical flair. The slice she set down was beautiful, golden crust, peaches glistening like stained glass, a lattice top so precise it could have graced a magazine cover. Cordelia's mouth watered in spite of herself. "First one of the season. I have been working on this recipe since Easter, and I will not lie to you, Cordelia Pruitt, I think I have finally achieved pie perfection."

Cordelia leaned in. The steam rose up, sweet and buttery at first, but underneath there was something else. A faint, sharp note, like the smell after a match has been struck and then snuffed out. She tilted her head, curious.

"You smell that?" she asked.

Tammy-Lynn sniffed. "Smell what? Pie? Glory? My own inevitable victory in the county bake-off?"

"Something a little off. Almost chemical."

The waitress's smile faltered, just for a heartbeat, then came back twice as bright. "That is the secret ingredient, and I am not telling. Eat your pie before it gets cold, or I will take it as a personal insult."

Cordelia picked up her fork, but she didn't cut into the slice. She studied it instead, tilting the plate so the light caught the filling. The peaches had an unusual sheen, slightly too glossy, and there were tiny bubbles clinging to the crust where the juice had bubbled up during baking. Bubbles that should have popped and left a smooth surface. These looked suspended.

"You know what," she said slowly, "I think I'll pass on the pie today."

Tammy-Lynn's face went through several stages of disappointment in rapid succession. "Pass? On pie? On my pie? On the pie that I have been dreaming about, that I got up at four in the morning to bake, that I decorated with my own two hands?"

"I promise it's not the pie. It's the baker. Something about the filling smells off."

"Off how? Off like bad, or off like interesting?"

"Off like I want a second opinion before I put it in my mouth."

Tammy-Lynn planted both palms on the counter and leaned in, her expression a complicated mixture of hurt and pride. "Cordelia Marie Pruitt, I have been baking in this town since I was sixteen years old. I have catered every funeral, every wedding, every church potluck, and one extremely memorable bar mitzvah. Nobody, and I mean nobody, questions my pie."

"This one has a chemical smell."

"That is the vanilla extract. Imported. Expensive. You wouldn't understand."

Cordelia held up a hand. "Tammy-Lynn, I love you, but vanilla extract does not smell like a struck match."

The waitress opened her mouth to argue, then paused. Her eyebrows drew together in the first sign of genuine concern. She sniffed the pie again, more carefully this time, and Cordelia watched her face change as the same strange note registered. The cheerful mask slipped, and underneath was a woman who took her work seriously.

"Huh," Tammy-Lynn said softly. "Huh. That is not vanilla."

"No."

"That is not cinnamon, either, and I used plenty of cinnamon."

"No."

"So what is it?"

"I was hoping you could tell me."

Tammy-Lynn reached under the counter and came up with a small notepad, the kind she used to track orders during the lunch rush. She tore off a sheet, sniffed the pie, then held the paper a few inches from her nose and waved it slowly to disperse the aroma. After a moment she scribbled something, frowned, and tore off another sheet. The process was methodical, almost scientific, very unlike her usual bubbly demeanor.

"I have a nose for this stuff," she murmured, half to herself. "My mama used to say I could smell a bad egg from three counties away. Once I sniffed out spoiled milk in a shipment that the distributor swore was fine, and I was right." She straightened up and looked at Cordelia. "This smells like the time I accidentally used ammonia to clean the counter and then baked anyway. But I didn't use ammonia. I used my regular cleaner, which is just soap and vinegar and a little bit of lemon oil."

Cordelia's stomach turned. "Is there anyone else who had access to the kitchen before the pie went in?"

"Just me, and I have been here since four. Nobody else has a key."

"Did anyone come to the back door?"

"Nobody." Then Tammy-Lynn stopped, her hand freezing in mid-gesture. "Wait. There was the delivery boy. The new one, from the wholesale place. He came at five to drop off the flour and sugar."

"What was his name?"

"Name? Honey, I didn't catch his name. He was new, and he was in a hurry, and he left the boxes by the walk-in and vanished before I could even ask about the weather." She fanned herself with the notepad. "Is it hot in here, or is it just my imagination?"

"It's the same temperature it's been all morning."

"Then why am I sweating?"

Cordelia reached across the counter and gently took the notepad from her friend's hand. "Tammy-Lynn. I need you to sit down."

"I am perfectly fine."

"You look like you're about to faint."

"I have never fainted in my life. Fainting is for people who don't drink enough water and skip breakfast, and I drink a gallon of water a day and I have eaten three bites of crust already this morning."

Cordelia glanced at the pie, then back at her friend. "Three bites of crust from this batch?"

"From the test batch. The one I made yesterday. The same recipe, same filling, same everything." Tammy-Lynn's voice had gone very small. "The test batch was perfect. I tasted it, my assistant tasted it, we both pronounced it fit for human consumption and possibly for the gods. Then I made the real batch this morning, and now you come in here and say it smells like chemicals, and I am standing here thinking, what if the flour was bad?"

Cordelia pulled the plate toward her carefully, avoiding the slice itself. "Where do you keep your flour?"

"In the walk-in, in the back, on the bottom shelf, right where it always is. The boxes from this morning are stacked next to the old ones."

"Show me."

The two women walked through the kitchen, past the row of ovens and the giant stand mixer that looked like something out of a steampunk fantasy, to the walk-in cooler. The door opened with a hiss of cold air, and the smell of butter and cream washed over them. Tammy-Lynn pointed to a stack of white paper sacks on the lowest shelf, each one stamped with the familiar blue logo of the Honeybell Hollow Wholesale Supply Company.

Cordelia crouched down. The bags were sealed, the stitching intact, nothing visibly amiss. She ran a finger along the seam of the top bag and brought it to her nose. There was the same faint, sharp note, sharper now and unmistakable. Like the ghost of something burned.

"This bag is open," she said. "Look at the stitching here. It's been pulled apart and then pressed back together. You can see where the paper's been disturbed."

Tammy-Lynn bent down next to her, her earlier panic replaced by the focused energy of a woman whose reputation was at stake. "Show me."

Cordelia pointed. "Right here. The fibers are broken, and there's a faint residue. Flour doesn't do that. Flour is powdery and inert. This looks more like something was poured in and then the bag was resealed."

"Someone tampered with my flour?"

"It looks that way."

"With what?"

"I don't know yet. But it's the same smell as the pie."

Tammy-Lynn straightened up, and Cordelia could see her mind racing behind those too-blue eyes. "If someone messed with my flour, and I used that flour to bake my prize peach pies for the festival, then I have a problem that is bigger than one slice of pie."

"Yes."

"A problem that is the size of the entire Honeybell Hollow Apple Harvest Festival, where I am the official pie vendor and the winner of the best pie contest is going to be on the front page of the Gazette."

"Yes."

"A problem where people might get sick."

Cordelia didn't answer right away. She took a breath and chose her words with the care she used when arranging sympathy bouquets for grieving families. "We don't know that anyone got sick yet. We don't even know for certain that the bag was tampered with. But we do know that you don't bake with anything that smells like a chemistry experiment, and you certainly don't sell it."

Tammy-Lynn sank onto an overturned milk crate and put her head in her hands. "This is a disaster. This is a four-alarm, call-the-mayor, cancel-the-festival disaster. I have been baking for this contest since I was a little girl. My grandmother won it in 1962. My mother won it in 1985. I have been planning my victory speech for thirty years."

Cordelia sat down next to her. "Then we figure out what was done and who did it, and we make sure it doesn't happen again. But first, we need to know what we're dealing with."

"Do we have to?"

"We do."

"Because I'd rather not know, and then I could go on baking in blissful ignorance, and maybe nothing would happen, and I could win the contest, and everyone would clap."

"And maybe something would happen, and someone would get hurt, and you would never forgive yourself."

Tammy-Lynn was quiet for a long moment. When she looked up, her eyes were red but her jaw was set. "Fine. We do this your way. But if we have to involve the authorities, I am not talking to anyone until I have had a chance to put on lipstick."

Cordelia pulled out her phone. "I'm not calling the sheriff. I'm calling Dr. Tuckle."

"The doctor? Why the doctor?"

"Because if someone put something in your flour, the doctor is the one who might be able to tell us what it is. And because the doctor is about the only person in this town who owes me a favor and won't blab to the gossip mill before we've had a chance to think."

Tammy-Lynn nodded slowly. "Okay. Call the doctor. But you have to tell him that if he says anything mean about my pie crust, I will remember it at his next birthday party."

Cordelia stood up and dialed. The phone rang twice before a dry, slightly raspy voice answered, sounding as though it had been dragged from a deep well of scholarly distraction.

"Tuckle."

"Phineas, it's Cordelia. I need your help with something."

"Cordelia. Yes. The orchid woman. Do you have an orchid emergency?"

"No, I have a pie emergency."

"A what?"

"A pie emergency. I'm at Tammy-Lynn's diner. Someone may have tampered with her baking supplies. I need you to look at a sample."

There was a long pause, during which Cordelia could hear the faint clinking of glassware and what sounded like a kettle whistling in the background. When the doctor spoke again, his voice had sharpened from absent-minded to alert.

"I am putting on my coat. Do not let anyone eat the pie. Do not let anyone touch the flour. And do not, under any circumstances, let Tammy-Lynn attempt to fix this with baking soda and positive thinking."

"Understood."

"And Cordelia?"

"Yes?"

"Bring me a slice of the pie. A small slice. I have not had lunch."

Cordelia hung up and looked at her friend. "He's on his way."

"Of course he is," Tammy-Lynn muttered. "Free pie is the one thing that man cannot resist."

Cordelia helped her to her feet. "Come on. Let's get you a glass of water and a chair. You've had a shock."

"I have had worse shocks. Once a raccoon got into the bakery the night before a wedding and destroyed six hundred dollars' worth of fondant decorations." Tammy-Lynn took a shaky breath. "But this one feels different. This one feels personal."

Cordelia guided Tammy-Lynn behind the counter, easing her onto a stool near the industrial mixer. The fluorescent light above hummed with a faint electrical whine, casting a pale glow across the flour-dusted surfaces and the row of glass display cases that stretched along the back wall. The smell of the kitchen hit them both at once: yeast, caramelized sugar, the lingering ghost of bacon fat from the morning rush, and now something else, something metallic and wrong that neither of them could quite name.

Tammy-Lynn wrapped her hands around the water glass Cordelia pressed into them, but she did not drink. Her fingers left prints in the condensation.

"Beatrice," she said finally, her voice steadier now, anchored by the familiar act of discussing a customer. "She comes in every Tuesday. Orders the apple pie. Same booth by the window, same slice, same glass of sweet tea. I've had her routine memorized since before you came back to town."

Cordelia pulled a second stool around and sat facing her. "Tell me about last Tuesday."

"She didn't come."

Cordelia waited. The mixer clicked off as its timer cycled down, leaving a heavier silence in its wake. Somewhere in the back of the kitchen, a refrigerator compressor rumbled to life.

"She sent Bud Pickett instead. Deputy Pickett's boy, you know, the one with the ears that stick out like a bonnet on a clothespin. He came in with a twenty and said his mama wanted her pie to go." Tammy-Lynn frowned at the memory. "I told him I needed twenty minutes to box it proper. He said his mama was in a mood and I should hurry. So I hurried. I packaged it in the white box with the blue ribbon, the one I save for her. I always save it for her."

"And then?"

"Then Bud came back. Maybe forty minutes later. He came through the door looking like someone had run over his dog in front of him, and he said his mama wanted to speak to me. That she was not satisfied with the product. That she wanted me to come out to the Bellweather place and explain myself."

Cordelia leaned forward. "Did you go?"

"I called her, first. I thought maybe the pie got jostled or something. Maybe Bud took a corner too fast on the truck road." Tammy-Lynn set down the glass. Her fingers had stopped trembling, but they had taken up a different occupation, drumming against the countertop in a nervous rhythm. "She didn't answer. Bud came back a third time. By then I was worried, so I went."

"What happened when you got there?"

Tammy-Lynn laughed, a small brittle sound. "She had the pie on the table, still in the white box. She asked me what I put in it. I told her the same thing I always put in it: Granny Smiths from your place, brown sugar, butter, a whisper of cinnamon, and a crust my grandmother taught me when I was eight years old. She asked me if I was sure. I said I was sure. She asked me if I was trying to finish the job."

The words hung between them, heavier than they should have been. Outside, a car door slammed. A dog barked once and then went quiet.

"Finish the job," Cordelia repeated slowly. "She said that?"

"She said that. Word for word. 'Are you trying to finish the job, Tammy-Lynn? Are you trying to finish what you started?'" Tammy-Lynn's voice cracked on the last word. "I told her I didn't know what she was talking about. She said she figured I didn't, and that I should go home and think about it."

Cordelia thought about the phrase. Finish the job. It was an odd construction. Not finish me off. Not do me in. Someone trying to finish a job was someone with a duty, an obligation, a commission. It implied a hired hand. It implied that Beatrice Bellweather believed someone had set this in motion, and that the pie was not the first attempt.

"Did you change anything in your recipe?" Cordelia asked. "Any new supplier? Any new ingredient?"

"No."

"Any new equipment? A new pan, a new thermometer?"

"No."

"Did Beatrice say anything else? Anything at all?"

Tammy-Lynn closed her eyes. "She said my mother used to send her pies, too. Before my mother got sick. Before my mother died. She said my mother was the only person in this town who understood her, and that I was not my mother, and that I had never been my mother, and that I should stop pretending."

The compressor rumbled off. In the silence, Cordelia could hear the bakery's front bell chime softly as the door eased open an inch, then closed again. A draft slid across the floorboards.

"Did you send the pie back?"

"I took it home. I tasted it myself. I tasted three slices. I made Bud Pickett's little brother taste it. I fed a corner to the dog." Tammy-Lynn opened her eyes. They were dry now, but bright with the particular fury of a woman who had been accused of something she could not name. "It tasted fine. It tasted exactly like it always tasted. I have made that pie ten thousand times and I will make it ten thousand more and it will taste the same every single time."

Cordelia reached across the counter and took her friend's hand. The skin was cold, papery, dusted with flour that had worked its way into the creases of her knuckles.

"Then someone is playing a very strange game," she said. "And we are going to find out who."

The bell chimed again, properly this time, and the door swung wide. Dr. Tuckle stood on the threshold, silhouetted against the late morning sun, a leather satchel in one hand and his coat hooked over his arm. He surveyed the bakery with the air of a man stepping into a contaminated zone, his eyes moving from the display case to the kitchen doorway to the row of cooling racks with their sad, orphaned pastries.

"Well," he said. "It is even worse than I imagined."

"Phineas." Tammy-Lynn's voice lifted, some of the color returning to her cheeks. "Thank you for coming."

"I came for the pie." He crossed the room in three long strides and laid his satchel on the counter. "The thank you is appreciated but unnecessary. Where is the suspect material?"

Cordelia indicated the pie tin on the prep table. "Undisturbed. I haven't touched it."

"Good. Excellent. Praise be to the goddess of restraint." He opened the satchel and began extracting instruments: a small magnifying glass, a folding knife, several glass vials with cork stoppers, a leather-bound notebook, and a stub of pencil. "Tammy-Lynn, fetch me a clean plate. Cordelia, fetch me a spoon. And someone fetch me a slice before I lose my mind."

Tammy-Lynn hopped off the stool and moved toward the kitchen. Cordelia handed the doctor a spoon from the dispenser by the register. He took it without looking and held the magnifying glass over the pie's surface, tilting his head to catch the light.

"What are we looking for?" Cordelia asked.

"We are looking for anything that does not belong." His voice had shifted into the particular cadence of a man lecturing to an audience of one. "An unusual sediment. A discoloration. A crystalline formation that suggests an inorganic compound has been introduced into the organic matrix. We are also looking for the absence of something. If a toxin has been used, it is often the case that the toxin destroys a particular flavor note. The pie will taste less than it should."

"Less how?"

"Less like apple. Less like cinnamon. Less like Tammy-Lynn." He lowered the magnifying glass. "I would know her pie in the dark."

Tammy-Lynn returned with a small white plate and a slice of the pie arranged neatly in the center. The crust was golden, the apples visible through the lattice in pale, glistening crescents. Steam still rose faintly from the cut edge. Dr. Tuckle regarded it with the reverence of a man greeting an old friend.

"A small slice," Cordelia reminded him.

"I heard you the first time." He picked up the fork. He cut a piece the size of a thumbnail. He placed it on his tongue. He closed his eyes.

The three of them watched him. The refrigerator rumbled. A car passed on the street outside. The bell over the door tinkled faintly in the draft.

"Hmm," said Dr. Tuckle.

"Hmm what?" Tammy-Lynn demanded.

"Hmm as in, I require another data point." He cut a second piece, larger this time, and ate it slowly. He chewed. He swallowed. He opened his eyes. "There is something bitter on the finish. A metallic bitterness, like old pennies left in a rain barrel. It is faint. It is beneath the sugar. But it is there."

Cordelia felt her stomach drop, a sensation like stepping off a curb that wasn't there. "What kind of something?"

"There are several possibilities. Most of them are unpleasant. Some of them are extremely unpleasant." He closed his knife and slid it back into the satchel. "I will need to take samples. The crust. The filling. The dish on which it was baked. The utensils used to serve it. And I will need to speak with Mrs. Bellweather."

"She's not speaking to me," Tammy-Lynn said. "She made that very clear."

"Then I will speak with her. Erasmus and I have known each other for forty years. I attended his second wedding. I delivered his third child." Dr. Tuckle's mouth twitched, the closest he ever came to a smile. "Beatrice cannot refuse me. She does not have the social constitution for it."

He began his work in silence, moving around the prep table with the practiced economy of a man who had spent a lifetime handling small, important things. He scraped a thin layer of filling into a vial. He crumbled a piece of crust into another. He labeled each one in his tight, precise hand, and arranged them in the satchel like sleeping birds.

Cordelia watched him work. The sight steadied her, as it always did. There was comfort in method, in the slow accumulation of evidence, in the patient rituals of inquiry.

"Penny Pickett," she said, without quite knowing why she said it. "Deputy Penny Pickett. She mentioned Erasmus yesterday. Said he'd been dead seven years. Is that right?"

Dr. Tuckle's hands paused over a vial. "Seven years, four months, and eleven days. I signed the death certificate. Heart, as it happens, despite the rumors."

"What rumors?"

"There are always rumors." He resumed his work. "Erasmus was a complicated man. He had enemies. He had friends who became enemies. He had business partners who did not survive the experience. He had a wife who has been waiting a very long time for something to finish."

Cordelia glanced at Tammy-Lynn. Tammy-Lynn was very still, watching the doctor with the wide eyes of a woman realizing that the conversation had outgrown her kitchen.

"Finish?" Cordelia asked.

"Finish." Dr. Tuckle corked the final vial and snapped the satchel shut. "A poor choice of words, perhaps. But not an inaccurate one."

The silence in Tammy-Lynn's kitchen had grown teeth.

Cordelia found herself studying the doctor with new attention. His hands, she noticed, were trembling slightly as he secured the clasp on his satchel. The tremor was faint, controlled, the kind of tremor that belonged to either age or fear, and she could not tell which.

"Seven years is a long time to wait," she said, "for something to finish."

"It is." Dr. Tuckle did not look at her. "And it is not. Time is peculiar, Miss Pruitt. Some things take seven years. Some things take a single afternoon. The difficulty is knowing which is which until afterward."

He picked up his satchel and tucked it under his arm, and for a moment Cordelia thought he would simply leave, that he would walk out the back door and into the afternoon without another word. But he paused at the threshold, one hand on the frame, and turned back to look at her with those small, bright, bird-like eyes.

"Deputy Pickett is a good woman," he said. "She is also a careful one. If she has questions about the orchard, they are not idle ones. Cooperate with her."

And then he was gone, the screen door swinging shut behind him with a soft and final sound.

Cordelia stood in the middle of Tammy-Lynn's prep kitchen, holding a fork she had picked up from the dish rack without quite remembering picking it up, and tried to think. The past forty-eight hours had been a slow accumulation of oddities. Erasmus Quill's letter. The sudden appearance of two powerful lawyers, one of whom was now dead. The pie that might have been poisoned. The stories about Erasmus, stories that seemed to multiply the more she asked about them. And now Dr. Tuckle, speaking in riddles that resolved into nothing, warning her to cooperate with a deputy who had been circling her orchard like a worried gull.

"Cordelia." Tammy-Lynn's voice was small. "What did he mean by that?"

"I don't know."

"You're lying."

Cordelia looked at her friend. Tammy-Lynn stood with her arms crossed over her flour-dusted apron, her ponytail coming undone in wisps around her face, her lower lip caught between her teeth. She looked younger than her years, and more frightened than Cordelia had seen her since they were twelve and a stray dog had bitten Cordelia on the ankle and Tammy-Lynn had thrown a cinnamon roll at it.

"I'm not lying," Cordelia said, more gently. "I'm guessing. There's a difference."

"Tell me what you're guessing."

Cordelia set the fork down on the prep table. She looked at the doorway. She looked at the window. She looked at her friend.

"I think," she said slowly, "that my grandmother's land is more valuable than she ever let on. I think Erasmus Quill knew that, and made some kind of arrangement about it before he died. I think the people who've been arriving in town this week know that too. And I think one of them decided to remove the other before they could do whatever they came here to do."

Tammy-Lynn absorbed this. "Fierce Fabien," she said.

"Maybe."

"And Beatrice Bellweather."

"Maybe."

"And the pie."

"Maybe."

Tammy-Lynn was quiet for a long moment. Then she reached up and pulled the rest of her hair free, letting it fall around her shoulders in a tangled curtain. When she spoke again, her voice was different. Steadier. Older.

"Mama always said that old quarrels are like buried pipes," she said. "They leak for years before anyone notices. Then one day the floor caves in."

"Your mama was a wise woman."

"My mama was terrified of plumbers." A ghost of a smile crossed Tammy-Lynn's face. "But yes. Wise too."

Cordelia picked up the fork. She did not know why she had picked it up, and she did not know why she was holding it now, but her hand seemed to have made the decision without consulting her. She turned it over in her fingers, looking at the tines, at the small nick in the handle where some long-ago diner patron had tested it against a plate.

And then she saw the counter.

She had walked past it a hundred times. It was the old pie counter, the one that ran along the wall of the kitchen, scarred with decades of knife marks and rolling pin impacts and the small disasters of a working bakery. She had never thought to look at its underside.

But the fork, turning in her hand, had caught the light at a particular angle, and the angle had shown her something scratched into the wood beneath the counter's overhang. She crouched down, ignoring Tammy-Lynn's startled question, and peered into the dim space between the counter's bottom and the floor.

Symbols. A whole series of them, scratched into the wood with what looked like the point of a knife, deliberate and careful. Some she recognized. The apple. The hive. The open eye. But two of them she did not recognize, and those two were newer than the others, the scratches sharper, the wood still pale where the blade had bitten in.

"Cordelia, what on earth are you doing?"

"Hand me my bag."

"Your bag is by the door."

"Then hand me my bag by the door."

Tammy-Lynn fetched it, grumbling, and Cordelia took out the small notebook she had started keeping since this whole affair began. She sketched the symbols as best she could, labeling each one, marking which were old and which were new. Her hands were steady. Her breath was slow. She had the peculiar calm of a woman who has just discovered she is standing in the right place at the right time, and who knows enough not to waste it.

When she straightened up, her knees protesting, she found Tammy-Lynn staring at her with an expression that was half fascination and half alarm.

"You're going to solve this, aren't you," Tammy-Lynn said. It was not a question.

"I'm going to try."

"And if you solve it, you might find out something you don't want to know."

"That's usually how solving things works."

"Cordelia." Tammy-Lynn caught her arm as she moved toward the door. "The deputy. Dr. Tuckle. They're both warning you off. That means there's something worth warning you off from."

"I know."

"And you're going to walk toward it anyway."

Cordelia looked at her friend. Tammy-Lynn's grip on her arm was stronger than it looked, the strong grip of a woman who had spent twenty years lifting sheet pans and sacks of flour. Her eyes were wet, but her jaw was set.

"I have to," Cordelia said. "Grandmother left me that orchard. Whatever is buried under it, whatever Erasmus Quill was involved in, whatever made two lawyers fly out here from cities that have no business caring about a place like ours, I have to know. I owe her that."

"You owe her being alive."

"I owe her being honest. She was the most honest woman I ever knew. She'd sooner have lost a finger than a secret she had promised to keep. And now someone is dead, and someone else may have tried to kill me, and I am not going to stand in your kitchen eating pie and pretending that the world is what it was last Tuesday."

Tammy-Lynn released her. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, leaving a streak of flour across her cheekbone.

"Take the fork," she said.

"What?"

"The fork. You keep looking at it. Take it."

Cordelia looked down at the fork in her hand. She had forgotten she was holding it.

"I stole a fork."

"I know. I saw you. Take it anyway. Maybe you'll need it."

Cordelia slipped the fork into her bag, beside the notebook and the letter from Erasmus Quill that she had been carrying since yesterday. The weight of the bag shifted, and with it the weight of something inside her, some long-held breath finally released.

"I'll call you," she said.

"You'd better." Tammy-Lynn hugged her, hard and brief, the hug of a woman who had learned long ago that the people she loved were going to walk out of her kitchen and into trouble, and that the best she could do was make sure they had something warm in their bellies on the way. "I've got a batch of blackberry kolaches going. I'll save you one."

"Save me three."

"Greedy."

"Grateful."

She stepped out into the alley behind the bakery. The afternoon light was golden and slanting, the kind of light that made even a town's ugliest corners look almost bearable. She could see the square from here, the fountain, the courthouse, the modest bustle of a Friday in a place where Friday meant nothing more exciting than the early shift at the feed store.

Deputy Penny Pickett was leaning against the bumper of the patrol car, eating an apple.

Cordelia walked toward her.

The deputy looked at her approach with the careful expression of a woman who had been waiting for this moment all morning and was determined not to show it.

"Miss Pruitt," she said.

"Deputy Pickett."

They regarded each other across the small distance of the square. Behind Cordelia, the bakery door closed. In front of her, the deputy polished the apple on her uniform sleeve and took another bite, chewing with the unhurried patience of a woman who had all afternoon.

"I have questions," the deputy said.

"So do I."

"I go first."

"I doubt that."

The deputy almost smiled. Almost. She tossed the apple core into the planter beside the fountain, where it landed with a soft thud among the marigolds, and pulled out her notebook.

"Tell me about Erasmus Quill," she said.

Cordelia took a breath. She thought about her grandmother. She thought about the orchard. She thought about the symbols scratched into the underside of a pie counter, and the letter in her bag, and the fork she had stolen from her best friend without quite intending to.

She opened her mouth.

And the courthouse bell began to ring, the slow measured tolling that the town used for emergencies, the sound that Cordelia had not heard since the year the river flooded and took half of Main Street with it. Across the square, people were stopping in the street, looking up, shading their eyes.

The deputy closed her notebook.

"That," she said grimly, "is for me."

She was already moving toward the courthouse, her hand on her belt, her stride lengthening into the longer stride of a woman who had heard that bell too many times to ask questions first.

Cordelia stood alone in the square, the afternoon light falling warm across her shoulders, the bell tolling its slow count into the still September air. She did not know what the emergency was. She did not know whether to follow or to run.

She followed.

Of course she followed.

She had been following this story since the moment she opened the letter, and she was not going to stop now, not with the bell still ringing, not with the deputy's questions still hanging in the air between them like smoke, not with her grandmother's orchard waiting for her at the edge of town and all its buried secrets waiting underneath.

Cordelia Pruitt, former city florist, current apple farmer, reluctant amateur sleuth, walked across the square toward the courthouse with a stolen fork in her bag and a notebook full of symbols in her pocket and the clear, cold certainty that whatever she was about to learn, she was going to learn it the hard way.

She had never been particularly good at the easy way.