“Hello?” she hollered again. “Where am I?”
Neither of the men so much as turned to acknowledge her – they kept chatting at the water cooler, sipping from little paper cones.
“What is this?” said the bald man, gesturing at Rose, so that water splashed from his little paper cone onto the floor. “You were supposed to get the BOOK.”
“It was a no-go on the book, boss,” the man wearing the track suit answered. “The bakery is closed. I couldn’t get in there. So I brought the cook instead.”
Rose gasped. These two had been after the Bliss Family Cookery Booke – but what could they possibly want with it? It was bad enough when Aunt Lily had gotten her hands on the Booke, but when she’d given it back, Rose had thought that she – and her family – were safe.
The wiry bald man refilled his cone of water. “No, not the cook, the book. What we need is the book.”
The bulky man let out a long huff. “But, sir, the cook is the next best thing to the book. She won that French baking contest. She can do it.”
The bald man goggled his eyes at Rose. “But she’s so young!” he said in a sharp, quiet voice. “So scrawny! And she has a cat in her backpack, with broken ears!”
“I can hear you, you know,” Rose fumed. “I’m right here. And if you don’t tell me where I am, I will set my cat on you.”
Gus jumped out of the backpack and sat back on his hind legs, hissing and swiping, with his front legs extended and his claws bared. He looked like a praying mantis.
“And his ears are not malformed,” Rose added. “They are a distinctive feature of the breed.”
“Don’t worry, little lady,” said the thin man. “We’ll explain everything, just calm that old cat down.”
Rose gave Gus a stern look. He shrugged and retracted his claws. “Good kitty,” she said, pulling Gus into her lap and petting him until he was purring. “There,” Rose said. “Now, I repeat: where am I?”
The two men inched along the perimeter of the room toward the desk, keeping as far away from Gus as they could.
The bald man sat in the chair behind the desk, while the man in the velour track suit settled in behind him, leaning against the row of rusted metal filing cabinets.
“Where you aaaaaare,” said the thin man, “is the finest bakery in the universe: the Mostess Snack Cake Corporation.” He tapped his long index fingers together and stared at Rose through his spectacles. He had no lips to speak of – it was as if the skin beneath his nose and above his chin just decided, at a certain point, to stop. “I am Mr Butter, and my muscular associate, whom you’ve already had the pleasure of meeting, is Mr Kerr.”
“Mostess, huh,” Rose said. She had heard of Mostess Snack Cakes, of course. Everyone had. They were the ones with the little white cow in the corner of the package.
At school, Rose’s friends sometimes pulled out packages of Mostess Snack Cakes at the lunch table – little chocolate cakes stuffed with marshmallow, black cupcakes covered in white dots, vanilla cakes stuffed with chocolate cream – each with different names that bore no resemblance to the cake itself, like Dinky Cakes, Moony Pyes, and King Things. Rose never thought to try a bite of her friends’ Dinky Cakes or King Things, because her mother always packed her a delicious homemade treat, and anyway, the snack cakes were gobbled and gone in two bites.
“Misters Butter and Kerr, of the Mostess Snack Cake Company,” Rose repeated. “Got it. Now I can tell the police who kidnapped me.”
Mr Butter opened his non-lips and let out a crisp ha-ha. “Kidnapped! Do you hear that, Mr Kerr? The poor thing thinks that we kidnapped her!”
Mr Kerr stared nervously at Rose. “Ha,” he replied.
“You carried me here in a flour sack,” Rose said. “Against my will.”
“Oh, you’ve misinterpreted the day’s events, Miss Bliss,” Mr Butter went on smoothly. “We haven’t kidnapped you, we’ve brought you here to offer you a job!”
Rose furrowed her brow. “A job? What kind of job?”
“We need help with our recipes,” Mr Kerr said bluntly, rubbing his hands over the smooth velour of his track suit.
Mr Butter glared at Mr Kerr a moment, then turned back to Rose, all smiles. “Yes, that’s the gist of it,” he said, tapping his fingers on the desk. “You see, Rose, we here at the Mostess Snack Cake Corporation were just as horrified as you were by the passage of the Big Bakery Discrimination Act. Of course, the law does happen to benefit our bakery, as we employ well over a thousand people. So we wanted to help a newly unemployed small-town baker like yourself by putting you to work for us.”
Gus fidgeted on her lap. It suddenly dawned on Rose that neither of them had seen a bathroom for hours.
“Think of it as an exchange programme,” Mr Kerr added matter-of-factly. His voice was so deep that it sounded like his throat was trying to swallow the words before they escaped. “Like you kids do in school.”
“Exactly,” said Mr Butter. “You see, Rose, we have something wonderful to offer each other.”
“We do?” Rose said.
“Mostess has the finest baking facilities in the world, thousands of square feet of floor space, the most cutting-edge machinery, and a staff of thousands of qualified baking professionals.” Mr Butter paused a moment to savour the thought of it. “That is what you lack. You, Rosemary Bliss, are a baker without a bakery.”
Rose hung her head. Mr Butter was wrong. The Bliss family had a bakery; they just weren’t legally allowed to operate it. She thought of last night, how cramped and hot the tiny kitchen had been, and how little they could really afford to support the town’s baked-goods needs. How exhausted she and her parents were. They couldn’t go on like that.
“What we lack is the kind of attention that you small-town bakers can afford to lavish on each loaf of bread, each crumpet, each swirl of cupcake frosting, each—”
“I understand,” Rose interrupted.
Mr Butter bristled. “You know as well as I do that a perfect dessert sweetens life like nothing else. People in every town, students at every school, from every walk of life, they all depend upon that little bit of goodness that they can find within, say, a Bliss tart. Or slice of cake.”
“Or a muffin,” Mr Kerr continued. “Or a croissant. Or clafouti. Or—”
“I get it,” Rose snapped.
Mr Butter cleared his throat and ran his fingers along the bald arches where his eyebrows should have been. “At the Mostess Snack Cake Corporation, we believe our snack cakes are nearly perfect, but our recent sales record has not reflected this. Our snack cakes can’t compete with the love and the … how do I describe it … the magic that you small bakeries provide.”
Rose eyed Mr Butter suspiciously and felt something flutter nervously in her stomach. Magic? she thought. He couldn’t possibly know about the magic.
“And shouldn’t every town have what Calamity Falls has? Readily available, forever fresh, fabulous, delicious gourmet treats?” Mr Butter went on. “Before your fortuitous arrival, we had—”
“You kidnapped me,” Rose said again. On her lap, Gus growled.
“—we had the assistance of a master baker who had very nearly perfected our recipes. Sadly, she competed in a baking contest in Paris, and after events there never returned.” Rose immediately knew there was only one person he could be talking about – her devious aunt Lily. “And that’s why we need you,” Mr