By Sunday afternoon, Gosie had reached Pin Mill and was forced to admit two things almost immediately.
First:
Brains had been absolutely right about the place.
Second:
Fuzzypuffling was not there.
Pin Mill turned out to be exactly the kind of riverside settlement the network would love:
- old boats
- tidal mud
- quiet moorings
- people carrying mysterious objects while carefully minding their own business
A battered tractor with a marina permit would indeed vanish into the scenery completely.
And yet there was no sign of Fuzzypuffling.
No one admitted to knowing her.
Several people definitely knew her.
One elderly sailmaker laughed so hard at Gosie’s description that he had to sit down.
Which, in itself, felt informative.
Still, Gosie’s journey hadn’t been wasted.
Because while investigating the marina stores and chandlery sheds, she found something odd:
- a stack of seed shipping manifests tied with blue string, all perfectly ordinary except for one recurring destination marker.
Not a company.
Not a warehouse.
A handwritten star.
Small. Precise. Always in silver ink.
Gosie recognised it immediately.
Not because she knew what it meant.
Because she’d seen the same tiny silver stars years ago on imported seed tins in Zurich — the very expensive ones kept behind glass.
And suddenly she remembered something else:
a quiet remark from an old broker that “the star consignments always pass through the Fens first.”
That was enough.
By dusk, Gosie had left Pin Mill behind and was heading inland once again.
Toward the edge of the Fens.
Toward @ChristmasStars.
And somewhere behind her, in a riverside pub near the moorings, somebody finally unfolded the local newspaper and discovered that a tiny gerbil had spent most of Sunday asking extremely detailed questions about sunflower seeds, marina permits, and the tidal habits of people named Fuzzy.
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/8464f2cc-6c8a-41af-a543-0214f7a0bb77