“I guess so,” the Baker’s Man said with a shrug.
“You guess so? And would it kill you to wear a hairnet? I’ll bet one of your sponge cakes has more hair than a French poodle.”
“So?” said the Baker’s Man.
“So? So you better start singing like four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie or I’ll have the health department shut you down faster than you can say rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub. Do I make myself clear?”
“Uh . . . yeah, pretty much,” said the Baker’s Man. “Well, except for the part about the three guys in the tub. That kind of threw me a little. Otherwise, I think I get it.”
“Good,” said the Cheese. “Now start spilling it like peas porridge in the pot nine days old before I lose my temper.”
“Okay. I’ll tell you everything I remember,” said the Baker’s Man. “It was about six o’clock, and I was baking a cake as fast as I could. Rush order. Wedding cake for the Dish and the Spoon. The bakery down the street refused to serve them, but I don’t discriminate here. Anyway, I had the cake all mixed, and I was just about to pat it and prick it and mark it with a B and put it in the oven for a reasonable fee, when all of a sudden I heard a loud argument coming from Larry’s place next door.”
“Argument?” said the Cheese, trying to remain focused despite the wonderful confluence of smells. “What about?”
“It was all kind of garbled,” said the Baker’s Man. He folded the dough round in quarters, then placed it into a pie dish and unfolded it once more. “I heard this voice say something like, ‘How dare you help a man like Krool. He’s a murderer, and you are a traitor to the king.’ Guy was pretty upset.”
“Then what happened?”
“I heard a scream and then nothing, so I figured the argument was over.” The Baker’s Man walked to the sink and began washing some plums. “But when I went out to the alley to take out the trash, I saw a guy running out the Muffin Man’s back door.”
“And this guy?” said the Cheese. “Can you describe him?”
“Don’t have to describe him,” said the Baker’s Man. “I know exactly who it was. It was Jack.”
“Jack?” repeated the Cheese with a quizzical frown. “You mean Jack B. Nimble?”
“No, no. The other one.”
“Little Jack Horner?”
“No, the other Jack.”
“Jack Sprat?”
“No, no.” The Baker’s Man was becoming increasingly frustrated. “You know who I’m talking about. Jack.”
The Cheese thought long and hard. There was only one other Jack in all of Banbury Cross, but he was definitely not someone who would be involved in a murder. “You mean Jill’s husband?”
“Yes,” said the Baker’s Man, snapping his fingers. “That’s the guy.”
“Are you sure?”
“Never been more sure about anything in my life,” said the Baker’s Man as he carried the plums to a cutting board. “Ran right by me.”
Despite the certainty of the witness, the Cheese insisted on a full description, and the Baker’s Man provided a detailed account of how the suspect looked, sounded, and even smelled.
“Oh. And one more thing,” he added. “I’m not sure if this will be helpful or not, but when he ran by, I noticed that his clothes were covered in muffin batter.”
The Cheese just stared at the man with a look of incredulity. If he’d had a head he would surely have been shaking it in disbelief. “What do you mean, you don’t know if it’ll be helpful?” he said. “Somebody drowns a guy in muffin mix, then you see a man running from the scene of the crime covered in the stuff and you’re not sure whether that little bit of information might be helpful? Seriously?”
In addition to the Baker’s Man’s account, the Cheese canvassed the neighborhood and found others who told a story eerily similar in detail. One of those people was Carol Sprat, a large woman with an insatiable appetite for baked goods.
At first the woman was reluctant to admit she had been in the area because it was in direct defiance of orders from her doctor, who had cautioned Carol to cut back on simple carbohydrates. But when Detective Cheese pressed her, she revealed that she had been on the corner of Fifty-Fourth and Mulberry at the time of the murder to pick up a dozen day-old crullers, a bag of biscuits, and a double-fudge chocolate cake.
“And a few assorted Danishes,” she added. “And some butter tarts.”
Her husband, Jack, sat quietly at the kitchen table of their Lower East Side apartment eating a watercress salad while Carol attacked a canned ham with ferocity. The Cheese listened intently to her account of that evening’s events, taking mental notes, only because he lacked the hands necessary to take actual notes.
“As I was walking back I heard a loud argument coming from inside the muffin shop,” Carol mumbled. She knew it was rude for one to talk and eat at the same time, but the problem was that, at that moment, she didn’t really want to stop doing either of those things. “Then I almost dropped my biscuits when I saw a man running out of the shop. He nearly bumped right into me.”
“And did you recognize the man?”
Carol nodded yes, having just taken a bite of cured meat so large that it made speaking entirely impossible. “It was Jack,” she said finally, with a gulp. “Not my husband, of course. The other one.”
Jack Sprat nodded and smiled but said nothing and continued nibbling at his salad.
“You mean Jill’s husband,” confirmed the Cheese.
“Yes,” said Carol, who then went on to describe the man she saw in the exact way that the Baker’s Man had.
“I see,” said the Cheese. “Anything else?”
“Well,” said Carol, chewing and thinking with equal effort. “There is one more thing. I’m not sure if this will be of any use to you, but as he ran away, I noticed his clothes were covered in muffin batter.”
The Cheese sighed heavily. “I swear this job is gonna kill the Cheese.”
The weary detective left the Sprats’ apartment and the Lower East Side behind and returned to the station to begin filling out a report with a heavy heart, for Jack was his friend and the father of Lady Elspeth the Conqueror. But it was beginning to look more and more that he was also a murderer.
Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, Baker’s Man,
Give your account the best that you can.
Share it and swear it and mark it with a B,
And put it on record for the BCPD.
Chapter
12
Elspeth and the others had been on the road to St. Ives approaching two hours, and though the mood remained somber, it had grown less tense as the group had yet to fall victim to an ambush and Krool had made no attempt at escape. In fact, up to this point, the mission had gone exactly according to plan, which was either a very good sign or too good to be true.
The road was not nearly so wide out here in the grasslands and would allow the horses to travel only two abreast. None of them but Krool knew exactly where they were heading, so he naturally took the point with Cory riding to his right while his two equally muscle-bound brothers followed closely behind, their hands no longer on the grips of their swords as they had been at the start of the journey.
They rode silently except to lean toward one another on occasion and whisper and nod surreptitiously. Beyond having grown up in a shoe and their obsession with bodybuilding, Elspeth knew very little about the brothers, who often seemed sullen and brooding.
Riding behind them was Winkie, his head bobbing forward, his eyes closed. Stress-related insomnia in recent nights and the gentle swaying of the horse had finally induced sleep, and he snored as softly as you would expect of a man who was no bigger than a sack of flour. By comparison, Bo-Peep rode at the king’s side, her eyes in keen and constant movement along the horizon, looking for danger of any kind. Years of tending sheep, watching for wolves and coyotes, had served to sharpen her senses.
Bringing up the rear were Dumpty, Elspeth, and, of course, Gene, who, in direct cont
rast to Bo-Peep’s stoic Shaolin fighting stick, had been filling the air with noise fairly nonstop for the better part of an hour, most of it directly related to the mistreatment of sticks and trees.
“You know, they say you can tell how old a tree is by counting its rings,” he griped. “Of course you can’t do that without cutting the tree down. How ridiculous is that? I mean, they don’t do that with people. ‘Hey, how old is Grandpa? I don’t know, let’s chop him in half and find out.’ It’s barbaric.”
Gene huffed when he received not so much as a grunt in response. “What, am I talking to myself here?”
“Sorry, Gene,” said Elspeth. “I’ve got a few other things on my mind, as I’m sure you can appreciate. I’m worried sick about Farrah.”
“So am I,” said Gene. “And I tend to get a little chatty when I’m stressed out.”
“You don’t say,” said Dumpty.
“I just wish I knew more about this Mary Mary person,” said Elspeth. “It would be helpful to have some idea as to what makes her tick.”
“What makes her tick,” said Dumpty, “is pure evil.”
“Yes, but why?” said Elspeth. “What makes people like her and Krool choose to be that way?”
“Most likely, they were born evil,” offered Dumpty.
“No,” said Elspeth. “I’m sorry, but I have to disagree with you on that. After all, I should know. I used to be a little bit evil myself. For me, I think it was due to unhappiness. Before I came here I was a miserable person, and I worked hard to make sure everyone around me was just as miserable.”
“Come now, you’re exaggerating,” said Dumpty. “When you first came to us you were unhappy to be sure. And a bit of a jackanapes perhaps, but not evil.”
“That’s what you think,” said Gene. “The first time I met her she tossed me into a patch of weeds, which I did not appreciate. Neither did the weeds, as I recall.”
“Just a reminder,” said Elspeth, “that there are plenty of weeds around here too.”
Gene chuckled nervously. “She’s joking, of course.”
“I am joking,” she reassured the stick. “Now, that would be evil.”
“So am I to understand, Elspeth,” said Dumpty, “that you take the position that Mary Mary’s evil tendencies are a result of some level of unhappiness?”
“I don’t know,” said Elspeth. “I think it may have something to do with it. Anyway, I guess it doesn’t really matter. The more important question is, what gives her the power to carry out such evil?”
“What gives her the power,” said Dumpty, “is the golden pear.”
“What golden pear?” asked Elspeth.
Dumpty explained that years ago, when he was still a young half man, half egg, there stood in the town square a little nut tree given to the people of Banbury Cross as a gift from King William the Umpteenth’s predecessor, King William the Bajillionth.
And though it seemed like an odd gift at the time, it turned out to be just the thing to bring the townspeople together. As years passed it became a ritual that every fall they would gather around the tree and harvest its bounty in a spirit of true community.
“It was a grand old party,” said Dumpty. “With nuts everywhere.
“But more and more, as the years went by, people began to quarrel over the nuts, and there were those who took far more than their fair share, resulting in verbal and physical altercations.”
“People fought over nuts?” asked Elspeth skeptically. After all, there were so many kids in her school with nut allergies that she could more easily imagine people fighting with them, as weapons, rather than about them.
“People will fight over rusty nails if they think someone is getting more than they are,” said Dumpty. “And the more the people fought over the nuts, the more nuts the tree produced, until the harvest was no longer a grand old party but a scourge upon the village. And so the king ordered the tree chopped down and burned for firewood.”
“Well, isn’t that just the way,” said Gene. “The people can’t stop fighting over the tree, so what do they do? Do they get rid of the people? No, they chop down the tree. Hey, at least they could count the rings and find out how many years they’d been acting like complete jerks.”
“I agree it was an absurd and entirely unfair solution to the problem,” said Dumpty. “But in its place the king planted a second nut tree and ordered that its fruit must never be harvested. Anyone attempting to do so would meet a horrible fate. For years this was not an issue because the tree bore no fruit at all and served only to beautify the town square and provide shade in the summer months.
“Then one day, a crowd had gathered around the tree to witness a miracle. Hanging from its branches were a silver nutmeg and a pear made of solid gold. That a nut tree would spawn a pear and a nutmeg was, in and of itself, quite astonishing. That they were made of silver and gold was almost beyond belief. Now immediately the townspeople began to argue about whether the pear and the nutmeg should be plucked from the tree and used to enrich the village in some way.
“Ultimately none of them were willing to tempt fate. However, everyone knows that whatever is not harvested from a fruit-bearing tree will eventually fall to the ground on its own, so the townspeople crowded around the tree and waited. They slept beneath the tree and fought over the space closest to its trunk, each hoping to be the one to catch its bounty when it would finally succumb to gravity.
“One morning, they woke to find that the pear was missing, which set each and every villager against the other. The fighting and backbiting continued until it was discovered that, in addition to the pear being missing, so was one of the villagers.”
“Let me guess,” said Elspeth. “Mary Mary?”
“Exactly,” said Dumpty.
Just then a flock of blackbirds took flight all at once from the branches of a nearby maple tree, and the concert of flapping wings jolted Winkie from his catnap on horseback.
“What? Are we there?” he mumbled while smacking his dry lips together. “Have we gotten to the money?”
“Not yet,” said Bo-Peep. “But we must be getting close by now. Assuming, that is, that the money actually exists.”
“It had better exist,” said Elspeth. “Or we’ll drag Krool back to the village and let the mob deal with him.”
“It exists, I assure you,” said Krool, speaking over his shoulder.
As they crested a small hill, the tiny town of St. Ives came into view in the distance, and Elspeth drew in a deep breath. Her nostrils twitched at the smell of the cool sea air, which instantly reminded her of home. She closed her eyes and imagined sitting wharfside with her father, eating fish and chips while anticipating the ice cream in a waffle cone that always followed. It wasn’t something they did often. Or at least not often enough. It was a special treat for when Sheldon had a particularly good month of sales.
And on those occasions when things had gone really well, they would walk down to Pike Place Market and explore the warren of ramps and corridors, stopping to marvel at the size of the Alaskan king crab legs or to duck into the vintage poster shop where Elspeth was allowed to pick out something that her mother would invariably find tasteless and inappropriate.
So there were some good things about the Deadlands, Elspeth decided. Things she missed and hoped to have a chance to experience again if she were able to make it out of this situation alive.
She inhaled once more and was amazed that the smell of one thing could summon the memories of so many others. And with equal efficiency, the sound of one thing quickly pushed those memories aside. That one thing was Gene, who had decided he’d been quiet for long enough.
“You know I’ve been considering a career change,” he blurted into the near silence. “I think I’d make a really good scrub brush handle. I’m long, sturdy, and hardworking. All I need is a brush. Friend of mine did that. You know how much money he makes working from home now?”
“No idea,” said Elspeth.
“Me neither,”
said Gene. “But I’ll bet it’s a lot.”
“Speaking of money,” said Winkie. “Where is it, Krool? I think we’ve gone far enough.”
“If we’d gone far enough,” Krool replied, “we’d be there by now, wouldn’t we? I swear, you’re as short on patience as you are on height.”
Winkie seethed, staring daggers at the back of Krool’s head, covered in thick, black hair. The only thing the king disliked more than bald jokes were short jokes, especially those delivered by someone so smug and so insufferably handsome.
“It’s right up here,” said Krool. “And I trust I don’t have to remind you that we have an agreement in writing that is ironclad.”
“You don’t have to remind me,” said Winkie. “That is one thing I will never forget as long as I live.”
“Good,” said Krool. “See that tree over there?”
Krool pointed ahead and off to the left where, standing next to a white, speckled boulder, there was something that looked as though it used to be a tree. Gray from the near constant barrage of salt and water, it was completely bare of bark, free of branches, and devoid of life. What remained of it extended only about ten feet from the ground. Erosion had exposed its roots to the point that daylight could be seen beneath them in places.
Krool turned off the road, and his horse trotted across the grass toward the tree and the rest of the group followed. Krool alit from his mount. The horse shuddered and seemed glad to be rid of him as the former prisoner walked closer to the tree. “Would you mind if I borrowed your little stick?” he said, extending a hand in Bo-Peep’s direction. “Always a good idea to test for the presence of snakes before plunging your hand into a hole in the ground.”
Slowly and reluctantly, Bo-Peep handed Krool her staff, the very one that had been used in battle against him. “Well, look at this,” he said, slapping the stick forcefully into his palm. “In the right hands, a deadly weapon.”
Then he abruptly turned toward the tree and repeatedly thrust the stick into the hole beneath its weathered roots. With each stabbing motion his jaw tightened and his face reddened. Finally, he finished, satisfied that if there were any snakes in the hole, they were now sufficiently tenderized.
Long Live the Queen Page 8