like dumb-bells.
“Why are you doing that?”
“I’m getting strong – like Ty,” he puffed, his face turning beetroot red. “Ty and I are going to be pro athletes. There’s no way I’m going to stay here and bake for the rest of my life.”
Rose grabbed the butternut squashes from Sage’s outstretched arms and put them back where they belonged. “But we help people,” Rose whispered to Sage. “We’re like good baker wizards.”
“If we’re wizards, then where are our wands and our owls and magic hats? And where is our arch-nemesis?” Sage said. “Face it, Sis – we’re just bakers. While you’re stuck here making cakes, me and Ty will be modelling sneakers in France.”
Sage pedalled off and Rose was left holding the apples, her arms trembling under the weight.
4. Mr Kline’s Key Shop. You know what to do.
In a rusty shack on the outskirts of town, Rose handed Mr Kline the delicate whisk-shaped key. He examined it through glasses as thick as English muffins.
The key shop was windowless, and everything in it was covered in a fine layer of grey dust, like Mr Kline had just come back from a very long vacation. Rose breathed in through her mouth. The air tasted like metal.
“This’ll take me at least an hour,” he said. “You’ll have to come back.”
Sage let out a ridiculously loud groan, but Rose was happy. Kline’s just happened to sit at the base of Sparrow Hill, and Stetson’s just happened to sit at the top.
“Hey, buddy,” she said. “Let’s walk up Sparrow Hill.”
“No way!” Sage said. “That hill is way too high and it’s way too hot. I’m gonna see if they have any new jelly bean flavours at Calamity Confections.”
“Come on,” said Rose, catching him by the shoulder. “It’ll be nice. We can stand on the fence at the lookout point and find our house. And I’ll buy you a doughnut.”
“Fine. But,” he said, raising one finger high above his head, “I get to pick the doughnut!”
5. Stetson’s Doughnuts and Automotive Repair
Rose was panting by the time they reached the top of the hill. Stetson’s was an unimpressive concrete hut adorned with the parts of old cars. Pansies grew out of tyres on the ground, and a DOUGHNUTS sign hung from an old fender fixed above the doorframe.
Rose trembled as she scooped her black hair, now goopy with sweat, away from her forehead. She was the kind of girl who was unafraid of spiders, dirt bikes, or burning her fingers in a hot oven – and she’d had plenty of encounters with each. But walking into the same room as a boy she liked? Now that was frightening.
Just as she gathered the courage to walk down the drive and enter the store, Devin Stetson breezed by on his moped, blond fringe flapping in the wind, and sped down the hill. Apparently his father had given him the morning off.
Rose’s stomach turned. It was the same sensation as when you fly higher than you should on a swing and you can feel your stomach a beat behind, flopping around inside you like a fish on the deck of a boat.
As she watched him go, she could swear he turned for a second and glanced back at her.
Sage had already ambled up to the lookout point and climbed to the second rail of the fence. “Whoa. Rose. Look.”
Rose shook herself and jogged over to see what Sage was talking about: a caravan of police cars was driving along the winding road that cut through town. Calamity Falls looked like a painting from the top of Sparrow Hill, and the cars looked like a blue and white knife slashing through it.
“Where are they going?” asked Sage, uncharacteristically quiet.
“Oh boy,” Rose said, squinting. “I think they’re going to the bakery.”
“MAYBE TY WAS arrested,” said Rose.
She and Sage threw their bikes down in the Bliss bakery backyard and ran towards the back door. Three police cruisers formed a fence outside the house, and a white Hummer with tinted windows squatted in the driveway like a fat pit bull.
Through the open driver’s-side window of the Hummer, Rose and Sage could see a man wearing a crisp police uniform and sunglasses. He was speaking into a walkie-talkie. “They’re still in there,” he was saying. “I know them – they won’t come out empty-handed.”
Rose stepped on a breeze block and peered through the open shutters of one of the kitchen windows. Her parents were standing on one side of the great wooden chopping block that Purdy rolled around like a shopping cart. A woman in a stern navy trouser suit stood on the other side. Purdy and Albert looked at each other nervously while Purdy kept a hand on the Bliss Cookery Booke, which sat closed on the chopping block. When the book was open, it looked like a fat white bird spreading its wings; closed, it looked vulnerable, like a little loaf of brown bread.
This is it,Rose thought. Someone has come for the book.
Every Tuesday evening, Albert and Purdy went to two-for-one night at the Calamity Falls Movie Theatre and left their neighbour Mrs Carlson in charge. As Albert left, he’d always say, “Don’t let anyone in! It might be the government coming to steal our recipes!”
The kids always laughed, but Rose knew that her father wasn’t really joking. She’d glimpsed pages in the book with medieval drawings of storms, fire, a wall of thorns, a man bleeding – recipes you wouldn’t want to fall into the hands of someone who might actually use them.
Sage climbed up on the breeze block, but couldn’t see through the window. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“They’re going to take the cookbook,” she said, struggling to push the words past a massive lump in her throat. She looked in at the strange cast-iron stove that sat like a dark beehive against one wall of the kitchen, at the row of glistening cherrywood cabinets that lined the other, at the tangle of racks and metal hooks that hung in a cluster from the centre of the ceiling and held at their ends every conceivable size of metal spatula and spoon, at the giant silver stand mixer that sat in the back corner, with a bowl so big that Leigh could (and sometimes did) climb inside, and a twirling dough hook the size of a rowing boat’s oar. She stared at everything her parents had built, shabby as it was, and stifled a sob.
She imagined her parents locked in a dirty jail cell, her brothers begging on the streets, the country ruled by a mob of tyrannical bakers who used muffins and pies as their weapons of mass destruction.
“I’ll stop them,” Sage muttered, and rushed around to the back door. He threw it open and shouted, “My parents didn’t do anything!”
Albert and Purdy spun round inside the kitchen and tried to shush Sage, but it was too late. The woman in the navy trouser suit stared out of the back door and motioned for Sage and Rose to come inside.
“My name is Janice ‘The Hammer’ Hammer,” she said. “I’m the mayor of Humbleton.” She flashed a strained smile, and Rose realised that though this wasn’t the friendliest woman she’d ever met, she wasn’t there to steal their book, either.
“Why are the police here?” said Rose.
“Those are cars that I had painted to look like police cars so that I’d look more intimidating whenever I went on a trip. The men inside are my colleagues on the Humbleton Board of Trustees. One is a florist, one is a lawyer and the third is a plumber who fills in when he doesn’t have any toilets to unclog.”
“Isn’t it illegal to dress up like a police officer?” Sage prodded.
Mayor Hammer just glared at him. “I came to ask your parents for help in fighting a summer flu in Humbleton. I’ve never seen one this bad