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while he watched them prepare bread and a bean-and-bacon soup for that night's supper. But apart from the setting, they couldn't have fussed more over him or spoken more solicitously if he had been the prince himself. Don couldn't decipher their game, other than his certainty that they still hadn't given up hope of him abandoning his renovation of the Bellamy house.

"The secret," Miz Evelyn was saying, "is to use only a dash of seasoning, just the faintest hint of it. That way you don't smother the natural flavors of the stock and the vegetables."

"Miss Evvie," said Miz Judea, up to her elbows in bread dough, "will you be a dear and put away the flour and sugar bins for me so I have room to lay out the loaves?"

Miz Evelyn stepped away from the stove and picked up the two bins from the table. As she headed for the pantry, she went on with her commentary. "If I let Miss Judy here make the soup, she'd drown everything in garlic and peppers."

While Miz Evelyn was out of sight, Miz Judea rushed to the spice rack, grabbed a jar of garlic powder, popped off the shaker top and poured about a third of it into the soup. Then she replaced the top, set it back in its place on the rack, and returned to her bread before Miz Evelyn came back in from the pantry.

"Miss Judy's a wonderful cook," said Miz Evelyn, "but she has no subtlety."

Miz Evelyn stirred the soup pot, then lifted the wooden spoon to take a taste. "There," said Miz Evelyn. "Just the right amount of garlic. You can only just barely taste it."

"That's why Gladys likes Miss Evvie to make the soup," said Miz Judea. "Garlic makes her fart, the poor dear." She looked at Don with a steady gaze - did not so much as wink.

There is no untangling the complicated webs they weave in this house, he thought. Maybe it was time to get down to business. "You ladies told me that if I have any questions about that house..."

"Oh, we'll know the answer," said Miz Judea. "Or Gladys will, anyway."

"Well I was down in the cellar with the heating and plumbing contractor, and we noticed there was a break in the foundation behind the old coal furnace. It's all plugged up with rubble, but I wondered if maybe it was a root cellar or - "

"He found it!" crowed Miz Evelyn with delight.

"Took you long enough," said Miz Judea.

"Well I wasn't looking for it," said Don. "What is it?"

Miz Evelyn's voice got low and conspiratorial. "A rum runner's tunnel."

"That house was a speakeasy during Prohibition," said Miz Judea. "They'd sneak the booze up the tunnel from that gully out back."

"And whenever the cops raided the place," said Miz Evelyn, "they'd sneak the city council out through the tunnel."

The two of them broke up laughing at the memory.

"Oh, those were the days, those were the days," said Miz Judea.

"You were here then?"

Miz Evelyn answered him. "Both of us came here in '28. Shared a room upstairs."

"The one you been tearing apart," said Miz Judea. "Feels so good."

"You lived in a speakeasy?" asked Don.

"We weren't in the speakeasy part," said Miz Judea.

"We were in the bordello part," said Miz Evelyn.

Don couldn't think of a thing to say about that. But his silence was an answer all the same. Miz Judea laughed and hooted, while Miz Evelyn clucked her tongue and shook her head.

"What's so shocking?" said Miz Judea. "We were ladies of the night. It got me out of a sharecropper's cabin and it got Miz Evvie down from the mountain."

"Sorry," said Don. "I... you just don't look like..."

"He can't imagine us being young and pretty enough," said Miz Evelyn.

Judea slapped another loaf into shape and dropped it into a well-oiled pan. And another - slap slap slap slap slop and she slid the breadpan aside and pulled over the next.

"It was fun at first," said Miz Judea. "An adventure. All those men with money, clean-smelling. You got to remember where we were from. But when we got tired of it, lo and behold, the house wouldn't let us go. Prohibition ended and it became just an old whorehouse and the men got worse and worse and we were stuck. Then my young cousin Gladys came looking for me."

"It was Gladys who got us out," said Miz Evelyn.

"The house still holds onto us, though," said Miz Judea. "We could never get farther than this