She thrust various parcels at her parents and let Mr. Tibbles loose on the pristine counter-top and stuck out her hand for me to shake.
She was pretty. Ten years my junior, as tall as my shoulders, with pale yellow hair and soft brown eyes that I’d have described as impish had they not been shadowed with worry. She was dressed in what Darla calls City Smart-slim knee-length brown skirt, narrow black belt tight at the waist, white blouse with pearl buttons set off with a short tan jacket.
See, I do listen when Darla talks.
My smile was suddenly far less difficult to force.
“The gentleman was just leaving, Tamar,” said Mr. Fields. “Get Mr. Tibbles off my counter and help your mother in the back, won’t you?”
“This is Mr. Markhat, dear,” said Mrs. Fields. “He’s come about the wedding.”
Defeated, Mr. Fields scooped Mr. Tibbles up and darted for the back. Tamar grabbed my hand with both of hers and held on as if she were falling down.
“You’re Darla’s Markhat. The finder. Oh, you’re just as dashing as she said, even with crumbs on your chin. Did you have the cinnamon bun, or the cheese? I think we’re putting too much cinnamon in the glaze, but Mum wants more. Darla’s Markhat himself.”
She finally let go of my hand.
“That’s me. Darla’s Markhat, in the flesh.”
She smiled.
“Is Darla here too?”
“No. She’s not. But she asked me to come and see you.” I paused, waiting for the implications of a finder showing up on your doorstep when you’ve just lost a fiance to surface. In my experience, people want to discuss such things in private, well away from Mum and Dad and even the excitable Mr. Tibbles.
“Is she coming, then?”
Mrs. Fields sighed.
“It’s all right, dear. He knows. It’s what he does.”
Tamar deflated, just a bit.
“Darla told you?”
“She’s hired me on your behalf,” I spoke as quietly as I could. “That’s why you and I need to talk. Privately.”
Mum squeezed her daughter’s hand and glided away. Tamar didn’t look up at me at once but when she did she was smiling again.
“Carris loves me,” she said. “Whatever else people say, Mr. Markhat, you can believe that. He loves me, and I love him, and we’re going to be married, and there’s nothing anyone anywhere can do to change that. Mr. Tibbles. Come here.”
She spoke the last just loud enough to reach her father in the kitchen. There was a crash of pans, and a skittering of little clawed dog feet, and Mr. Tibbles darted through the swinging doors and leaped into Tamar’s arms.
“Shall we go, Mr. Markhat?”
Mrs. Fields was gone, and I could hear voices, not happy ones, in the kitchen.
I dropped another coin on the counter. It was the least I could do, after spreading such joy.
“Let’s,” I said. “I saw a nice little park with benches not too far off. Does that meet with Mr. Tibbles’s approval?”
The little beast looked up and me and snarled, its beady eyes mad with barely controlled rage.
Tamar laughed and closed the basket. “Don’t mind him, Mr. Markhat. The park will be fine.”
I opened the door to the merry tinkling of the bell and out we went.
Mr. Tibbles peeked out of his basket and growled at me the whole way there.
The park was tiny. It was really just a square patch of grass worn sparse and brown by people’s feet that had refused to stay on the cobblestone sidewalks despite the clearly lettered sign admonishing them to spare the grass. Four freshly painted white wooden benches had been provided, one at each corner of the square. There were so many smokestick butts on the ground Tamar refused to let Mr. Tibbles out of his basket, claiming he ate the wretched things.
This didn’t suit Mr. Tibbles at all, so we conducted our entire conversation over his indignant yips and attempts to escape from his basket.
“So, Darla has hired you to work for me?”
Mr. Tibbles poked his head out. Tamar pushed it back in.
“I’m to find your fiance, Miss Fields. Working with you seems to be the best way to accomplish that.”
She nodded, still wrestling with her diminutive canine terror. “Well. The first thing you need to know is that my father hates Carris. Why I don’t know. Carris has been nothing but courteous since we met. Mother adores him, of course. Carris, that is, not Father, although she loves him too, naturally.”
I was glad I wasn’t trying to write this down.
“How long have you two been walking out?”
“Two years last Yule.” Mr. Tibbles launched a furious assault on the basket lid, causing Tamar to hold it down tight with both hands. A pair of kids passing by stopped and pointed and laughed. “We met at a bakery, of all places. Not one of ours. Isn’t that odd? It makes Father furious, but sometimes I just need to taste something new. And it’s good for business, otherwise, how would we know what the other bakers were doing? We’d never have known about the apple fritters, for instance, had I not wandered into Gorman’s that day.”
“How indeed? Tell me about Carris. About his family. You say your father doesn’t like him. Well, how do his folks feel about you?”
“I’m not sure they’d know me if I walked into their parlor. Which isn’t to say they have any objections to me, Mr. Markhat. They just never seemed to care much either way what Carris did, or who he planned to marry. Have you met them yet? They’re…haughty. Yes. Haughty. Old money haughty. Carris’s father was a Colonel during the War. They still act as if people ought to be throwing them parades every afternoon just for being who they are. Mr. Tibbles, stop that!”
She gave the basket lid a good thump. To my amazement, the creature within stopped struggling.
I seized the silence and lowered my voice.
“You’re not going to like my next few questions, Miss Fields. But I have to ask them anyway. I hope you understand that.”
“I’m not pregnant. We didn’t fight over money. I haven’t cheated on Carris, and he isn’t cheating on me. The wedding was as much his idea as it was mine. I know my father isn’t thrilled about me marrying Carris, but he’d never hurt a fly. Does that cover most of what have to ask?”
I lifted an eyebrow. Tamar grinned and did the same.
“I’m not as dumb as people think, you know,” she said. “I talk a lot, yes, but that’s because other people talk so little. Carris talks as much as I do, did you know that? Not to everyone, but to me. Getting married at Wherthmore was his idea. ‘We’ll kiss just as the Broken Bell sounds,’ he said. That’s how he proposed. Do you know about the Broken Bell, Mr. Markhat?”
I may not be a good churchgoing Wherthmore man, but I know about the Broken Bell and the age-old tradition that says couples who marry as it peals out on Wrack Day are twice-blessed by the Angel Fury. Why an Angel of Matrimony would be named Fury is not something I ponder much.
I nodded. “I’ll do everything I can to have him under the Bell for you, Miss. So. When was the last time you saw him? Details. Everything you can remember.”
Tamar took a deep breath and launched into it. Mr. Tibbles listened in silence, and then began to snore.
I sat on that park bench so long my backside bore the imprint of the slats. Most of the time, I have to wrestle people to the ground and pull on their tongues in a search for pertinent details. With Tamar, the problem wasn’t a lack of information, but a veritable flood of it. Trying to latch onto the useful bits was akin to snatching gnats out of a windstorm.
But I knew more than I did before I’d ruined the opening of the Fields’s new bakery.
