Free The Pickled Piper by Mary Ellen Hughes

trust his work. Or maybe it’s just that he works cheap. I don’t know.”
    â€œIf he’s worked for a lot of people in town maybe someone can tell us where he was Friday night. We can ask around. Who’s next?”
    Piper’s shop door opened and a woman about Aunt Judy’s age walked in. “Good morning,” she said with a dimpling smile. “I’m hoping you have more of those delicious sweet-and-sour zucchini pickles. My family loves them.”
    â€œHi, Mrs. Peterson,” Amy said. She pulled a jar of zucchini pickles off the shelf and handed it to Piper.
    â€œWonderful!” Mrs. Peterson cried. “You know, I did canning and pickling a few years ago but got away from it, what with one thing or another. But these reminded me how good ‘homemade’ can taste—so much better than store-bought. Though I never did anything this exotic.”
    â€œThis recipe’s as easy as anything you’ve done,” Piper assured her. She opened the cookbook that had her sweet-and-sour zucchini pickle recipe in it and let Mrs. Peterson look through it awhile.
    â€œYou know, I’m going to take this book, too, and study it at home. I just may talk myself into doing this again. I’m sure I still have my canning things. Wouldn’t some of these relishes be wonderful to serve when I have the whole family over for Thanksgiving?”
    â€œDefinitely,” Piper said, bagging up the pickle jar and cookbook. “And if you need anything new in canning equipment, we have that, too.”
    Mrs. Peterson beamed, her interest in pickling again obviously revived, and handed over her credit card. “I went to your booth yesterday,” she said, as Piper totaled up the sale, “for these pickles. That’s when I found out about Alan Rosemont. Terrible thing.”
    Piper nodded but could see that the woman wasn’t too broken up about it. As she slid over the receipt for Mrs. Peterson to sign, she asked, “Did you know him?”
    â€œOh, I went into his antique shop once or twice.” Mrs. Peterson scribbled her name on the dotted line. “He carried a nice collection of carnival glass for a while.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “But then I heard what he did to poor Mrs. Taylor.”
    The way she said it, Piper was almost afraid to ask, but this wasn’t the time to get squeamish. “What was that?”
    â€œAh!” Mrs. Peterson lifted her chin and straightened her shoulders, looking about as indignant as a cat in a bath. “The Taylors have been in this county for generations, you know, and scads of their things have been passed down through the family. Most of it ended up in Dorothy Taylor’s big attic. It was a real jumble, and she’s getting old and grew awfully tired of dealing with the mess. Alan Rosemont got wind of that and offered to look through her attic and see if there was anything of value.”
    Uh-oh.
Piper could guess what was coming.
    â€œWell!” Mrs. Peterson exclaimed, then went on to describe how Alan had convinced Dorothy Taylor that the contents of her attic was more trash than treasure but out of the goodness of his heart he was willing to pay her a modest sum and take it all off her hands. She agreed, believing she’d at least saved the cost of hiring someone to haul it away. “I remember her telling me how glad she was her son wouldn’t have a mess of a house to deal with after she passed on, poor soul. Her son, Robby, lives in Poughkeepsie, you know.”
    Mrs. Peterson dropped her receipt into her purse before continuing. “When Robby came to visit and learned what she did, he was terribly upset. Poor Dorothy didn’t realize there were things he cared about in her attic. But children do that, don’t they? They think of their parents’ house as their personal museum and their parents as caretakers.”
    Did they? Piper thought guiltily of the