Free French Polished Murder by Elise Hyatt Page B

wanted to name me Agatha.
    Unable to reconcile their differences, they had separated for months. Mom had taken a job somewhere—no one ever said exactly where—and lived in a boarding house.
    My father’s mother, who would live to raise me, had felt her son was distraught over this. I won’t even guess how she detected this, since my father was not known to talk much at the best of times, unless he talked to his books, which he often did. To Father, at least left to his own devices, not eating, not bathing, and walking around in a bathrobe all day with his nose in a book weren’t symptoms of clinical depression. They were what he called normal life, unless Mom was around to make him act like a functioning adult human.
    But either Grandma had seen or imagined signs of depression in my father, or perhaps she had simply seen the store closed day after day—since my father hated selling books. Grandma knew that the prospect of my father becoming a mad recluse loomed, a prospect Mom had banished by molding him into a merely eccentric bookseller. (The difference was small, but the recluse might die under an avalanche of books and not be found for months, while the eccentric bookseller would live to a ripe old age, admittedly getting more and more eccentric.)
    Besides which, no doubt Grandma had some understandable interest in knowing her grandchild. At any rate, she’d searched high and low till she found where my mother was staying, and she’d convinced Mother and Father to meet in the neutral ground of a candy shop.
    By then, so much time had gone by that Mom was ready to pop. Which she did. Right in the candy store. Which was why my name was Candyce Chocolat. Mom had wanted to make it Candy, but Dad had mercifully added the two extra letters.
    Now, as I finished cleaning my tools, and hung up my protective clothing, I considered the possibility that both my parents had been right to begin with. Given how much the old mystery the letter hinted at wouldn’t let me quit it, perhaps I should have been called Sherlockia Agatha. Or Agatha Sherlock.

CHAPTER 6
    A Cheating Heart

    By the time I got into the house, I had my entire story prepared, and was moving too fast for Ben to ask too much about it. As it was, it might have been unnecessary effort, since Ben was deep in a book, his brow furrowed in confusion. Judging by the title the book was about surviving depression, and he had a notebook open and was making notes.
    I would have been worried and imagined he was on the verge of wandering about in a robe, reading books and not bathing, only I could see dollar signs on the cover, too, so I guessed the depression they were talking about wasn’t psychological. And since Ben was a financial planner, it made perfect sense.
    “Working?” I asked him.
    He had the aquarium with the rats, a supply of kitchen towels, the dropper, a thermos I’d bet would contain formula, and a wad of cotton balls all on one side of him, and Pythagoras on the other. From the sounds of wood blocks being tossed around his bedroom, E was doing what passed for quiet play for him. Ben had given him a set of Thomas the Tank Engine wooden tracks and trains, and E delighted in creating and destroying railroads. Over and over again.
    Ben looked up. “What? Not exactly. But yeah . . . some of our clients have left, and I didn’t get nearly the bonuses I expected. Not that I’m not doing what I should, but . . .”
    “Yeah, times are tough all over,” I said. I didn’t add that it might be the right time to shack up with a good man with a steady income because, despite all appearances to the contrary, I do not, in fact, have a death wish. “I need to buy some supplies for the French polishing,” I added, before he could do more than nod assent to my platitude. “I’ll be gone about an hour, maybe two. Is that okay?”
    “Oh, sure,” he said. “I’ll just stay here with the animals.”
    I didn’t ask about E. I had a feeling he had been included