Free French Polished Murder by Elise Hyatt Page A

wasn’t it weird that Mr. Jones had left, without trying to get money from his assets? Almeria had said she’d meet him at the fruit stand. I’d actually heard of this, growing up in Goldport. There were half a dozen attractions that our teachers would take us to, when spring was in full force and our little butts wouldn’t stay still on the desk chairs.
    There was the old jail in what had been the center of town, complete with the very large tree where people used to be hanged.
    I think I felt the frisson and horror of death once. Maybe. Considering the first time I’d seen that tree was kindergarten, it’s unlikely I realized it was the same tree. But I could still recite—with my eyes closed, and in the exact same voice as my teacher in third grade had used, how people were brought to the tree mounted on horses, and then horse shooed away, so they dropped. She always lowered her voice on the last part, and tried to make it sound spooky, while we stood around in the little park and enjoyed the grass and the trees and tried not to yawn too obviously.
    The other place they took us to was the house that was all that remained of the fruit stand. It was now a small blue and white bungalow with nothing special about it. It just shows how desperate our teachers were for something of supposedly redeeming educational value they could do outside the classroom, that they’d take us there, and stand outside the neat picket fence, telling us it used to be a fruit stand, and that behind it, the building that was now a hardware store, had been the terminus station for trains headed from the East into Goldport. These trains often brought consumptives West, to clear their lungs or whatever, and the fruit stand was their first chance to buy food in probably a day.
    So if Almeria and Jacinth had met at the fruit stand, I was probably right: they’d meant to go somewhere by train.
    But that meant, didn’t it, that Jacinth had had some time to prepare. He’d have gotten her letter . . . what? A week before? I vaguely remembered a date somewhere around the fourteenth, and tried to imagine an elopement in slow motion. Nowadays she’d e-mail him and they’d be on their way the same day.
    But that was the whole point, wasn’t it? Nowadays he would also be able to handle his affairs through representatives, or long distance, over the Net. In those days . . .
    I was almost sure he would have had time to talk to his lawyers, and leave instructions. I remembered the paper said the law firm of Fenris, Fenris, and Nefer had been in charge of the dissolution of his property and satisfying his creditors. So, why hadn’t he left instructions? And why hadn’t he written letters, afterward—even if he sent them from some city other than where he was—giving instructions on how to dispose of property? Surely it was not that hard? Even if he and Almeria were hiding from her husband, surely good ol’ Jacinth was smart enough to send the letter to a friend of his to mail from across the country. There was just no reason whatsoever to let the business go, like that, as it would.
    I set the five-point painter’s tool down. I’d cleaned off all of the keyboard cover, and now had only the final, fine sanding to do, before I had to figure out how to do French polish.
    And meanwhile, I found, I wasn’t at all happy with the solution to the little mystery started by the letter.
    Which meant that I would have to do some more poking around. I didn’t even know why, but the story needled at me. Perhaps it was the parallels between Almeria leaving with “ baby ” just as I had left in the middle of the night, with E only one year old. These days, it was easier, but all the same . . . And then there was that credit thing. And the feeling something just wasn’t right.
    When I was about to be born, my parents had had the worst—possibly the only—big argument of their marriage, over what they should name me. Dad wanted to name me Sherlockia. Mother