French Polished Murder (8 page)

“Yes?” I said.

“Well . . . He asked me if I wanted to go out to dinner, and I didn’t want to be rude again, so . . .”

“Oh, very good. About time you had a date.”

“It’s not a date! We’re only going to dinner. He wants to talk about the animal killings. He thinks I have a good mind.”

Ben had, of course, an excellent mind. And I was absolutely sure that was not what Nick was interested in. Oh, perhaps that, too, but I thought his interests were more . . . material. I didn’t say anything. Look, Ben is quite capable of cutting off his nose to spite his face, and if he thought I was hoping he’d actually get in a relationship with a guy who—for once—seemed to be decent, then he would go out of his way to avoid and snub Nick.

“Okay,” I said. Then I added, since I was feeling a little guilty, “You know you don’t need to stay here with the rats. I mean at night. I can manage, I think. I mean Pythagoras is a really good cat.”

“Yeah, but, Dyce, I’d never forgive myself if something happened to them. I’ll stay. At least a couple more days. They should start walking around by then.”

“All right,” I told him. “And of course I’ll look after them tonight.”

While we talked, he was picking up stuff from the table. He’s always much better than I about washing up after meals. I said, “I’ll help.”

He said, “No, go work on the piano. I’ll keep an eye on E and the animals. That way, tonight, you don’t have to worry about not having done anything.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. I grabbed the printouts from my purse, and went to my shed. But it wasn’t the French-polishing instructions I was most interested in.

Out in the workshop, I separated the sheets on French polishing from the printouts of the old newspaper. There were far more than three sheets of printouts, because the librarian had printed all three articles and the things around them, too.

I remembered going to restaurants, when I was in high school, where they reprinted old-time ads as decoration on the tables and paper place mats. Ads for corsets and indoor plumbing and such. They were entertaining, though there had been only a dozen or so of them printed over and over again.

These ads—or rather, the half ads you could read around some of the articles—were just as interesting. A lot of them, given the difference in technology and culture were the same as today’s: feel younger, buy this patent tonic; enrich yourself by reading this book; visit our store for amazing bargains.

The articles themselves . . . I put them in order and started reading, gathering facts as I went. To begin with, apparently, a house of ill repute was not a brothel, which, of course, was what I had initially thought. It seemed that Mr. Jacinth Jones had come from parts unknown—heavily hinted to be back East, in that undertone that my grandmother would use to say that no good will come of this
.
Apparently no good
had
come of it. He’d first lodged in a boarding house, then he’d bought premises on Fairfax—about three blocks from where I lived and one of the city’s largest east-west arteries, which he’d turned into the White Horse Saloon.

There were complaints associated with these premises. In fact, despite the newspaper’s restrained tone, I got the strong impression that there were at least three a night and that, had there been telephones, they would have rung off the hook with complaints about the goings on at the White Horse.

The paper hinted darkly at drunk and disorderly, brawls, dancing, loud music. It said that there had been rumors of gambling and even stories of adulterated liquor.

It was hard to tell at this distance whether Mr. Jacinth Jones had been a good man doing the best he could to provide a service that, obviously, would be needed—or at least wanted—by the hard-drinking miners and rootless settlers who filled the city in those days, or whether he’d been a shady character, profiting from vice and ruined lives. If people were the way they’d always been, I imagined he had been a little of both.

The article said that he had been seen with the wife of a well-known local politician but—and I supposed that was the difference between the press then and now—the woman was not named.

But most of all what the articles detailed was Mr. Jones’s sudden and inexplicable disappearance. Oh, sure his saloon had been under scrutiny because of the many complaints. But Mr. Jones had stayed on, managing to save his business, if not his reputation.

Then one night, between nightfall and morning, he’d vanished, never to be seen again. The first article detailed his disappearance, the second and third dealt with the fallout—the White Horse going into bankruptcy, then being purchased by a consortium of locals. I wondered what the White Horse was now—what stood at the site of its erstwhile premises.

But two other things captured my interest. One was a picture of Mr. Jones. It caught my attention because his features were at once familiar and attractive. If the bad printout of a sepia photograph meant anything, he’d been a broad-shouldered man, with curly hair and light eyes. More important, though, in a time when a person had to sit perfectly still for a photo, a time in which most people stared out at the camera with all the ebullient animation of a zombie, Mr. Jones looked at the camera as if he were sizing up a potential friend, or perhaps a potential date. And his lips were set in just the slightest hint of a smile.

I felt that, if I had met him, we’d have gotten along. Even if he were—and, of course, there was no way to know he wasn’t—an operator, taking advantage of lawless times. I guessed there would be humor there, and perhaps warmth.

The other item, missing the end, was one of those odd notices that people put (or used to put. I wasn’t sure how it was done now. Maybe through a posting or perhaps Craig’s List) in the paper about no longer being responsible for other people’s debts.

I remembered first seeing a batch of those on the back of the Sunday paper when I was hanging out at Grandma’s and asking her what they were. She’d explained they were notices people published when they got divorced or dissolved a partnership or perhaps when a child was emancipated before his or her majority.

Nowadays, I supposed, credit companies took care of it and all that happened was that a person had one of those embarrassing moments when a card did not go through and everyone stared. I’d had my share of those after the divorce with All-ex, when instead of paying the credit cards the court had allotted to him, he’d chosen to either max them out or cancel them. Which was why he was All-ex. Because he might not care about me—and no one would blame him if he didn’t. Our marriage had been mutually unpleasant—but he also didn’t seem to care if I had money to buy diapers and baby food for his only child. I’d survived, but I still had cringing memories of those times at the cashier.

Back in the Old West, of course, credit cards didn’t exist. I’m sure they had notes of credit or whatever, but they weren’t commonplace, and they didn’t have any history with them. Instead, in the small communities people lived in, credit and worthiness were judged by what people knew about you, which could be that you were married to someone rich, in partnership with someone with bottomless pockets, or else the child of someone who could cover any debt.

Which made these announcements necessary. Also, I thought as I read the one that had been captured at the bottom of the article, probably a great deal more cringe-worthy than my embarrassing moments at the cash register.

This one started with, “To Whom It May Concern,” and went on to charmingly declare that, “I, Abihu Martin, of 1523 North Waterfall Street, am no longer responsible for the debts incurred by my wife, Almeria Martin, nee Almeria Richards. She has left our domicile on the night of the twenty-fourth of June, and neither her whereabouts nor her financial welfare are of 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 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 . . .