Free French Polished Murder by Elise Hyatt

my concern or legal responsibility any longer.”
    I cringed, in fact, on behalf of the unknown Almeria. What would it be like to have this splashed all over your hometown newspaper? What could you do? Hide? Change your looks?
    It depended, I guessed, on how well known you were. If you were just someone in the town and your picture had never been published, you could change your name and start being Mrs. Smith, or Mrs. Jones and no one the wiser.
    Mrs. Jones. I looked above. Almeria had disappeared on the same date as Jacinth Jones.
    My neck prickled, at the back, just under the hair, and I sighed. Of course. The Almeria who was forever his. So, what had it been? A hired carriage at midnight? Horse-back, headed East?
    I realized I was thinking in terms of cowboy movies, and of two horses headed into the sunset (or sunrise if they were going back East). It wouldn’t have been like that, particularly since Almeria had said she was bringing “baby.” Besides, I had some vague idea that horses really couldn’t travel that far without having to stop and rest. That seemed like a very inefficient way to run away from a husband.
    No. She’d probably taken the train to . . . wherever. With Mr. Jones. Perhaps back East, if that was really where he came from. I wondered if she’d been happy.
    I set the papers aside, and considered the French-polishing sheets, but was in no mood to concentrate.
    Instead, I turned my attention to the piano, once more. I had to be very careful stripping it over any area that might drip into the inside, since Cas would be dealing with that later. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that it would have been easier to remove the mechanism from the case and work on them separately.
    But having spent the last several months looking for and at pianos with Cas, I knew my brilliant idea was not as easy as it sounded. Apparently it took more than a bit of effort to unbolt frames and remove the innards of pianos. And while it was being done, it was all too easy to crack the soundboard, which seemed more fragile than an addled egg, considering the number of them that we’d found.
    So I sighed—put on my protective suit: chemical resistant—or at least thick enough not to let chemicals through—fabric, heavy gloves, and goggles. The goggles were important because splattering some of the chemicals I was using in my eye would mean at the very least an emergency trip to the hospital and at worst blindness. I didn’t put on the ear protectors because I was not going to use the heavy sander. Also because should Ben scream for help and tell me Pythagoras was eating the rats, or that E had run over Pythagoras, I wouldn’t hear him with the ear protectors on.
    My hair was already tied back, and I thought I could avoid splashing the paint remover around wildly enough to splatter it.
    I grabbed one of those expensive refinishers I rarely used and spread it, carefully, in a corner of the keyboard cover. It was the sort of refinisher that was thickened with starch, so that it clung to nearly vertical surfaces and didn’t run. The not-running being the important part in this case.
    I waited till the paint started bubbling and scraped it with my five-point painter’s tool, being careful to throw the shavings into a can, so that they wouldn’t fall inside.
    Because I had to work in little, no-more-than-palm-sized patches, it was deadly slow, and not exactly cerebrally engaging, so I let my mind wander as I scraped. Right. So, there it was—my mystery letter resolved. And it was nothing as exciting as a long-ago murder.
    Just a tawdry romance between the wife of Mr. Abihu Martin—whose descendants, I remembered, had donated the historical wing of the library—and the disreputable Mr. Jones from down the road. I wondered again if she’d been happy with him. So many women seemed to suffer a fatal attraction to bad boys. And so often the attraction turned out to be fatal in the most literal of senses.
    But