“She accepted,” said Rose.
“She’ll do the contest?” asked Purdy.
Rose nodded.
“And you’ll lose on purpose, and she’ll give back the cookbook?” Purdy asked.
“No,” said Rose.
Albert paused nervously. “What do you mean, no? Wasn’t that the plan?” Since losing the Cookery Booke, he had stopped shaving, as well as exercising. His cheeks had filled out considerably, and a thick beard the texture of steel wool had enveloped the lower half of his face.
Rose gulped. “She said she’ll give back the Booke if we beat her fair and square. And if we lose, we have to promise never to go looking for it again. It’s lost forever.”
“Oh,” said Purdy quietly. “That’s another matter entirely, isn’t it.”
“Yup!” Albert shouted, beginning to hyperventilate. “Oh boy!”
Rose hung her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how it went wrong. I was sure she’d give the Booke back if I offered to throw the contest! But now I actually have to beat her! And we ate a No-Renege Rugelach, so there’s no backing down now.”
Purdy cupped Rose’s cheek in her hand. “Well, you know what this means.”
“What?”
“You’re going to have to win the Gala des Gâteaux Grands.”
Rose hung her head.
“Oh boy,” Albert repeated, pacing around the concrete sidewalk, scratching at his sweaty, round head.
“Albert, love, you’re not helping,” Purdy said. “Don’t worry, Rose. You don’t have to do it alone. We’re all going to beat Lily together. We’ll be with you every step of the way.”
Leigh called out to Rose from her car seat in the back of the van. “Foolish, simple Rose!” She chuckled. “Daring to duel with the mistress of muffins!”
“You have to win,” Purdy continued, “if only so that we can get our hands on the recipe for Turn-Back Trifle and fix our little Lily-loving monster here. I’m assuming the effects of Lily’s Magic Ingredient wear off shortly if you just eat a little bit of it, but Leigh ate a whole pound cake. She could be stuck like this forever if we don’t get the Booke back.”
Leigh folded her arms across her dirty 101 Dalmatians T-shirt. “Oh, Purdy!” she called. “My bladder is. . . replete. If we don’t get to a bathroom soon, we’re going to have a situation on our hands!”
Purdy rolled her eyes. “Come on,” she said, loading Rose and Ty into the van. “We only have five days before we have to fly to Paris for the competition.”
“Good,” said Sage. “I forgot my blue pyjama trousers at home. I have to get them.”
“Sorry, Sage, but we’re not going back to Calamity Falls,” said Purdy. “We are going to Mexico. We need to pick up your great-great-great-grandfather Balthazar Bliss.”
Albert settled in the driver’s seat and turned the key while the van sputtered into gear.
“We have a great-great-great-grandfather?” Sage asked, brandishing his tape recorder. “Is he a mummy?”
“No, not yet,” Purdy replied. “He’s very spry. We need to see him because he has a second copy of the Booke. Unfortunately, Balthazar’s copy is written in another language, and he’s the only one left in the world who speaks it. He’s been working on a translation, but he’s slow. When last we checked, he’d only managed to translate six of the seven hundred and thirty-two recipes.”
“We need him to hurry it up,” said Ty.
“No time for that. We’re going to need his help.” Purdy grimaced. “Unfortunately.”
“Why ‘unfortunately’?” Rose asked.
Purdy sighed. “You’ll see.”
THE DUSTY MAIN road of the village of Llano Grande cut through a lush green mountain. As the Bliss van rumbled over the dirt, Ty and Sage dozed in the backseat, while Leigh muttered long sentences to herself that no one but she understood.
They’d driven for two days straight, all to get a copy of the Booke. Suddenly an obvious solution occurred to Rose. “Mum,” she asked, “why didn’t you guys ever make a photocopy of the Booke? Just so you’d have an extra?”
“The Booke can’t be photocopied,” Albert replied, turning the wheel with one hand and fanning his face with the other. “You put it on a copy machine, the pages come out blank. It’s an odd trick of the Booke. Can’t be photographed, either. Remember that picture in the newspaper of your mum baking Love Muffins?”
When the photo was taken, the Booke had been sitting open on the chopping block, where it often sat. But in the picture, there was no Booke – only an empty countertop.
“The Booke knows how to protect itself. The only way to duplicate it is to copy it by hand,” he said. “And your mother and I were always too busy. Plus, that would have meant one more copy of the Booke floating around that we had to protect. Bad enough a copy fell into Lily’s hands.” Albert hushed his voice and turned to Purdy. “Imagine if another copy got to. . . you-know-who?”
“Who?” Rose cried.
“Let’s just say,” said Purdy, “that there are far worse bakers in the world than Lily Le Fay.”
“Anyway,” Albert went on, “you can’t even take the Booke apart. Once you remove a page, the recipe goes haywire. There is magic in the Cookery Booke binding that keeps everything in working order. That’s why there are only two copies in the world.”
A minute later, Albert pulled off the main road and rolled to a stop near a brick hut with an overhanging tin roof. Leather saddles and empty canteens dangled from the sides of the roof, and the front porch was littered with sacks of corn and stacks of firewood. A sign hung from the tin roof: LA PANADERÍA BLISS.
“We’re here!” said Purdy, swallowing hard. “Everybody just be nice to him and we’ll all make it out alive.”
Rose touched her finger to the screen door of La Panadería Bliss, and it creaked open. Albert and Purdy stood behind her, with Sage and Ty and Leigh heading up the rear.
It was dusty and dark inside. An empty hostess stand sat next to the door.
Ty glanced back up at the sign. “What’s a panadería?” he whispered.
“A bakery,” Albert whispered back.
“This doesn’t look like a bakery,” Ty said.
He’s right, thought Rose. There were no tables, no chairs, no glass counter top, and no baked goods. It was a tiny, stuffy, windowless room with a damp floor and a toppled stack of chairs in the corner.
“Oh dear,” Purdy mumbled. “He’s probably gone off to a nursing home. I can’t blame him – I mean, he is one hundred and twenty-seven years old.”
Rose noticed a little silver bell sitting on top of the hostess stand. She reached out and pressed her palm against it.
Leigh balled her tiny hands into fists and crossed her arms. “And I suppose it would have killed you to call ahead? Lily, the empress of empanadas, would have called ahead.”
“Well, Lily isn’t your mother, now is she?” Purdy said.
Just then a tall man with a thick chest and shrivelled, spindly limbs hustled through a doorway in the back of the dingy room. His head