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gray cat, itself too lazy to do anything other than lie with its face against the warm stone, its paws dropped down the pillar. All dreaming of roses.
    “Good morning, Miss Broadstairs, Miss Vine,” said Melrose.
    The two rose-enthusiasts turned their deadly frowns on him, and then realized they were not looking at each other. They smiled brightly as Melrose introduced them to Jury, who commented on the marvel of the Broadstairs garden to the displeasure of Lavinia, who immediately invited the superintendent to take tea with her in her garden.
    Jury thanked her, and then remarked on the several roses Miss Broadstairs had cut that now lay in her woven basket.
    “ Souvenier d’un Ami, ” said Miss Broadstairs, proudly, holding out a glowing copper-colored rose.
    Lavinia looked at them with disdain. “Coals to Newcastle, if you sent those to Watermeadows,” said Lavinia, immediatelyshifting the subject to her own Blue Moon rosebush, and a lengthy discourse on aphids.
    Plant flicked a crimson petal from his shoe with the cosher he had taken to carrying about and wished them a good morning, adding a good-bye for Desperado, the gray cat, still with his nose mashed on the stone, and still sleeping.
    “That’s an appropriate name,” said Jury, yawning out the last word.
    “ Desperado is just another specie of rose.” They had turned the corner and were nearing the tiny village park (if one bench beneath a willow and a pond could be called that). It lay lush and green under the eye of the Church of St. Rules, situated on a rise of ground behind Betty Ball’s bakery. The ducks were motionless as decoys, wings folded, hemmed in by sleep.
    Melrose yawned and checked his watch. “In another moment you’ll find me on the pavement with Miss Crisp’s terrier. The pub’s not open yet.” Melrose thought for a moment. “Speaking of falling asleep, why not get your obligatory visit to Agatha over with?”
     • • • 
    Plague Alley lay at the other end of the High Street, a twisting little lane among a jumble of little lanes that spread off, vinelike, from the Sidbury Road. Cubes of white-daubed and dark-windowed cottages seemed to have landed among these narrow paths like tossed dice, with no particular plan or scheme to their arrangement. If Long Piddleton could be said to have social strata, this particular stratum was somewhere in the middle of the ladder, although Agatha was constantly upping it a rung or two.
    Indeed, the only one who seemed concerned with Long Piddleton’s high and low society was Agatha herself. The lines she drew were constantly changing and shifting as she went about laying them out like someone making an ordnance map. Her line of demarcation was the PiddleRiver. When Diane Demorney, and then Theo Wrenn Brown, had come to the village, she was actually less concerned with the contents of the removal vans than with deciding whether they were on the right or the wrong side of the river. Since the Piddle River was an extraordinarily egalitarian body of water that narrowed in some spots to a trickle, had a way of actually stopping midstream and then springing up again virtually at one’s feet, and another way of turning itself to mud and marsh (near Agatha’s cottage), she had her work cut out for her. Which was, of course, the way Agatha liked her work. Her study of the ebb and flow of the Piddle added nothing to her knowledge of its vegetable or marine life, but did assist her in putting people in their social places. Since the river disappeared after it shot the rapids under the humpbacked bridge, that more or less left the shopowners along the High Street out of the social swim. It also had an annoying way of twining in and around the Withersby enclave (of which Mrs. Withersby was materfamilias), all of whom lived in a little row of derelict cottages several hundred feet to the rear of Miss Crisp’s secondhand shop and Jurvis, the butcher’s. These were once almshouses (and still were, if