The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

She snatched her false teeth from a tumbler and rammed them into her mouth, then vanished for a moment, and as I leaped to the ground I heard the sound of the bolt being shot back. The door opened inwards to reveal her standing there—like a trapped badger—in a housedress, her hand clutching and opening in nervous spasms at her throat.

"What on earth.?" she repeated. "What's the matter?"

"The front door's locked," I said. "I couldn't get in."

"Of course it's locked," she said. "It's always locked on Sundays. I was having a nap."

She rubbed at her little black eyes, which were still squinting at the light.

Slowly it dawned on me that she was right. It was Sunday. Although it seemed aeons ago, it was only this morning that I had been sitting in St. Tancred's with my family.

I must have looked crushed.

"What is it, dear?" Miss Cool said. "That horrid business up at Buckshaw?"

So she knew about it.

"I hope you've had the good sense to keep away from the actual scene of the—"

"Yes, of course, Miss Cool," I said with a regretful smile. "But I've been asked not to talk about that. I'm sure you'll understand."

This was a lie, but a first-rate one.

"What a good child you are," she said, with a glance up at the curtained windows of an adjoining row of houses that overlooked her yard. "This is no place to talk. You'd better come inside."

She led me through a narrow hallway, on one side of it her tiny bedroom, and on the other, a miniature sitting room. And suddenly we were in the shop, behind the counter that served as the village post office. Besides being Bishop's Lacey's only confectioner, Miss Cool was also its postmistress and, as such, knew everything worth knowing—except chemistry, of course.

She watched me carefully as I looked round with interest at the tiers of shelves, each one lined with glass jars of horehound sticks, bull's-eyes, and hundreds-and-thousands.

"I'm sorry. I can't do business on a Sunday. They'd have me up before the magistrates. It's the law, you know."

I shook my head sadly.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I forgot what day it was. I didn't mean to frighten you."

"Well, no real harm done," she said, suddenly recovering her usual garrulous powers as she bustled about the shop, aimlessly touching this and that.

"Tell your father there's a new set of stamps coming out soon, but nothing to go into raptures about, at least to my way of thinking, anyways. Same old picture of King George's head, God bless 'im, but tarted up in new colors."

"Thank you, Miss Cool," I said. "I'll be sure to let him know."

"I'm sure that lot at the General Post Office up in London could come up with something better than that," she went on, "but I've heard as how they're saving up their brains for next year to celebrate the Festival of Britain."

"I wonder if you could tell me where Miss Mountjoy lives," I blurted.

"Tilda Mountjoy?" Her eyes narrowed. "Whatever could you want with her?"

"She was most helpful to me at the library, and I thought it might be nice to take her some sweets."

I gave a sweet smile to match the sentiment.

This was a shameless lie. I hadn't given the matter a moment's thought until now, when I saw that I could kill two birds with one stone.

"Ah, yes," Miss Cool said. "Margaret Pickery off to tend the sister in Nether-Wolsey: the Singer, the needle, the finger, the twins, the wayward husband, the bottle, the bills. a moment of unexpected and rewarding usefulness for Tilda Mountjoy.

"Acid drops," she said suddenly. "Sunday or no, acid drops would be the perfect choice."

"I'll have sixpence worth," I said.

". and a shilling's worth of the horehound sticks," I added. Horehound was my secret passion.

Miss Cool tiptoed to the front of the shop and pulled down the blinds.

"Just between you and me and the gatepost," she said in a conspiratorial voice.

She scooped the acid drops into a purple paper bag of such a funereal color that it simply cried out to be filled with a scoop or two of arsenic or mix vómica.

"That will be one-and-six," she said, wrapping the hore hound sticks in paper. I handed her two shillings and while she was still digging in her pockets I said, "That's all right, Miss Cool, I don't require change."

"What a sweet child you are." She beamed, slipping an extra horehound stick into the wrappings. "If I had children of my own, I couldn't hope to see them half so thoughtful or so generous."

I gave her a partial smile and kept the rest of it for myself as she directed me to Miss Mountjoy's house.

"Willow Villa," she said. "You can't miss it. It's orange."