As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(83)

Fillings, I had read, had been found in the teeth of some of the skulls in the Roman catacombs, although it was believed that most of the ancient mouths had been plundered by grave robbers who had pried out the gold. The Etruscans and Egyptians also had tinkered with teeth, and it was believed that even our earliest ancestors had stuffed their cavities with beeswax.

I’m no expert in the art of filling teeth, but I’ve spent enough time hog-tied in the chair, having barbed wire strung from tooth to tooth, to have studied in great detail the large colored posters that illustrate in dripping color the perils of not brushing after every meal. As I’ve said elsewhere, I adore rot, but not in my mouth and, more to the point, not in the mouths of strangers to whom I have not been introduced.

The fact remained that a skull from antiquity was hardly likely to contain a tidy modern filling, much less three of them, which looked to me as bright and fresh as if they had been installed last Friday morning.

I’d bet my tongue, tonsils, and toenails that these fillings had not been done in any Stone Age cave.

In my mind, a few more pieces of the puzzle snapped into position: click! click! click! If this were a jigsaw, I’d now have the border complete.

I reached into my pocket and my fingers closed around my wadded handkerchief.

Of course! I’d wrapped the Saint Michael medallion to protect it from further contamination, which was odd when you stopped to reflect that it was usually the other way round: that while others begged Saint Michael to protect them, I was protecting Saint Michael from others.

Flavia de Luce, Protector of Archangels.

It had a nice ring to it.

My heart was a little lighter for the thought as I descended the stairs.

Today was Monday, and I remembered that I was due for my regular meeting with Miss Fawlthorne. What would she have in store? I wondered, and what kind of mood would she be in?

One could never tell.

Was I early or late? I’d forgotten the time she told me to report this week, but better late than never—or as I had learned as an investigator, better early than late.

But I needn’t have worried. No one answered my several knocks at the door.

I opened it gently and peeked into an empty room.

Tiptoeing—tor some odd reason which I didn’t quite understand—I took a piece of scrap paper from the wastebasket.

Dear Miss Fawlthorne, I wrote. I was here but you were not.

Perfect! Brief but informative, with just a pinch of accusation.

Now then, how should I sign it? Your obedient servant? Yours faithfully? Yours respectfully? Sincerely?

In the end, I simply put Flavia de Luce, and left it on her desk.

The library was probably the only room at Miss Bodycote’s where one could be alone without being accused of being up to no good. I could see through the many-paned glass doors that no one was inside.

As I let myself in, my nostrils were filled with musty but pleasant air, as if the books themselves were breathing in their sleep in the unventilated room. I made for the small fiction section and began scanning the shelves.

Anne of Green Gables was cuddled up next to Huckleberry Finn; The Hunchback of Notre Dame was wedged tightly between Heidi and Little Women; and Nicholas Nickleby leaned in a familiar way against A Girl of the Limberlost.

None of the books were in alphabetical order, which made it necessary to cock my head sideways to read each one of the spines. By the end of the third shelf I had begun to realize why librarians are sometimes able to achieve such pinnacles of crankiness: It’s because they’re in agony.

If only publishers could be persuaded, I thought, to stamp all book titles horizontally instead of vertically, a great deal of unpleasantness could be avoided all round. Chiropractors and opticians would be out of business, librarians cheerier, and the world would be a better place. I must remember to discuss this theory with Dogger.

Here, on a shelf near the bottom, was Ben Hur, and over there was Angela Thirkell: They were what Daffy called “nice novels,” with that look on her face. Except for a couple of blue-covered novels about a person named Nancy Drew, which had been read to ribbons, most of the books appeared seldom to have been opened.

Ha! Just as I had hoped: Tales of Edgar Allan Poe.

I slid it from the shelf. The illustrations were horrific—so horrific that I felt as if a moist snail were crawling across the back of my neck, especially when I turned to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” where a gigantic Ourang-Outang, its shoulders scraping the ceiling, hunched over the body of a woman with a cutthroat razor in its hand.

I tucked the book under my arm for bedtime reading.

A shelf marked Geography caught my eye. Here were a handful of lonely-looking books: China, Africa, Europe, and so on. And here was Canada: a history of the maritime provinces, a biography of someone named Timothy Eaton, a cookbook by someone named Kate Aitken, an autobiography called No Star to Guide Me by Helen Murchison Trammell signed by the author—an old girl of Miss Bodycote’s, who, according to her biography on the dust jacket, had married an oilman from Calgary and never looked back—and a Gray Goose Street Guide of Greater Toronto, which I pocketed.

A quick trip to the telephone directory told me that the Rainsmiths lived in a neighborhood called Rosedale.

Rosedale was considerably farther from Miss Bodycote’s than I had imagined. The streets were laid out among a series of hills and ravines, some of them little more than horseback trails. Estates lay behind elaborate iron gates, with flowerbeds and lawns which looked as though gardeners on hands and knees had trimmed them with manicure scissors and tweezers. A couple of Rolls-Royces and Bentleys were parked in driveways in front of half-timbered houses. It was all very grand: a reflection of England but ever so much less grubby: more new and somehow unreal, as if it were a backdrop freshly painted.