The Baker's Missing Hour

At six on Tuesday morning, Tomas found a warm loaf on the counter of his locked bakery. It was made with caraway, which he disliked and never stocked. His wall clock showed five.

The back door was bolted. The flour sacks were untouched. Only the small spare key was missing from its hook.

He called his apprentice, Ada, who arrived carrying a newspaper and a perfectly reasonable desire to be asleep.

“Someone means to frighten me,” Tomas said.

Ada cut the loaf. Its centre was cooked unevenly; the visitor had been unfamiliar with the old oven. Under the counter she found a grain of dark rye and a wet footprint, broader at the toe than the heel.

“Your uncle?” she suggested.

“He moved away twenty years ago.”

“Your landlord?”

“Would have left a bill.”

The clock had not stopped. Someone had wound it and set it back an hour. Tomas could offer no reason for that beyond malice.

Ada went outside. The pavement was dry except beneath the public water pump. A man was washing a pair of oversized boots there. He wore Tomas’s old school scarf, though school had ended forty-three years earlier.

The man introduced himself as Rudi. His sister had once rented the room above the bakery. He had come to retrieve a tin she had left behind.

“Then why the loaf?” Ada asked.

“She taught me to bake. It seemed proper.”

“And the clock?”

Rudi stared at her. “It was slow. I corrected it.”

Ada looked towards the church tower. Its hands showed half past seven. Rudi’s wristwatch showed half past six.

He had travelled through the night from a country that had not yet changed its clocks. The strange visitor had carefully made every clock he encountered wrong.

Tomas arrived just as Rudi produced the missing key. The landlord had lent it to him years ago, when Tomas was recovering from surgery and his sister helped in the shop. He had forgotten to return it.

The tin contained recipes, a photograph and a note addressed to Tomas. Rudi’s sister had died in February. Tomas sat on the pump’s stone rim to read her handwriting.

Ada did not ask what the note said. She went back to the bakery, reset the clock and put the kettle on. When the two men returned, she served the mysterious loaf with butter.

Tomas ate two slices. “Too much caraway,” he said, and asked Rudi to leave the recipe.