Elise Hyatt Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER 1 - The Fast and the Electrically Furious

  CHAPTER 2 - Of Rats and Pianos

  CHAPTER 3 - Wildlife and Secrets

  CHAPTER 4 - Policemen in the Night

  CHAPTER 5 - Old News

  CHAPTER 6 - A Cheating Heart

  CHAPTER 7 - The Weird Get Pro

  CHAPTER 8 - Of Rats and Dates

  CHAPTER 9 - A Minor Rebellion

  CHAPTER 10 - Sandwiches and Violin Cases

  CHAPTER 11 - The Other Half

  CHAPTER 12 - Please Open Up

  CHAPTER 13 - The Top of the World

  CHAPTER 14 - Uneasy Morning

  CHAPTER 15 - Curiouser and Curiouser

  CHAPTER 16 - A Voice from the Past

  CHAPTER 17 - Breaking the Shell

  CHAPTER 18 - It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Car Chase

  CHAPTER 19 - Horticulture Is Your Friend

  CHAPTER 20 - Of Rats and Men

  CHAPTER 21 - Rats, Raspberry, and Polish

  CHAPTER 22 - Pianissimo

  CHAPTER 23 - Something Wicked This Way Comes

  CHAPTER 24 - The Prodigal and Her Animals

  CHAPTER 25 - Wild, Wild Hypothesis

  CHAPTER 26 - Hide and Book

  CHAPTER 27 - Start

  How to French a Piano and Other Things You Probably Shouldn’t Be Doing

  Yours, Always

  I sat at the table and opened the letter, pulling out the paper gingerly, so it wouldn’t fall apart. It took me forever to manage to get the sheet open without tearing it.

  The writing inside was more faded than it had been on the outside, just a sepia tracery on the yellow page. I had to turn the light on over the kitchen table to be able to read what it said.

  Dear Jacinth, it said. I had hoped things would never come to this pass. Pass was underlined five times. But I’m afraid my husband knows. Or at least, he has enough reason to suspect. Sometimes he looks at me in such a way that I’m not sure I can stand it (far less survive it). I will meet you next week, at seven thirty, at the fruit stand. I will bring the baby. I am afraid the time has come to take you up on your offer and leave as soon as possible. Yours, always, Almeria.

  I looked at it, and I confess I felt shocked. Victorian people—and I was almost sure that the letter was at least a hundred years old—weren’t supposed to have complications like a husband, while being someone else’s “always.”

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Elise Hyatt

  DIPPED, STRIPPED, AND DEAD

  FRENCH POLISHED MURDER

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: Neither the publisher nor the author is engaged in rendering professional advice or services to the individual reader. The ideas, projects, and suggestions contained in this book are not intended as a substitute for consulting with a professional. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss or damage allegedly arising from any information or suggestion in this book.

  FRENCH POLISHED MURDER

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / May 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Sarah Hoyt.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-18744-9

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Doctor Tedd Roberts for assistance with pharmacology research.

  Thank you to my editor, Ginjer Buchanan, for work beyond the call of duty on this one.

  And as always, thank you to my family and my critique group for putting up with the insanity.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Fast and the Electrically Furious

  We were thirty years old—and, in his case, thirty plus a little more than six months—when I came to the sad conclusion that I would have to murder my friend Benedict Colm.

  This was as sad as it was necessary, but there was no escaping the fact as my son, Enoch—whom I call E in an attempt to save him therapy bills as he gets older—came speeding into the living room, atop Ben’s Christmas gift to him.

  The gift was a toy electric motorcycle with a top speed of ten miles per hour, an acceleration that might seem impossible for a small boy to achieve in a home that was less than seventy feet in either direction, but that E managed, quite often.

  I heard the horn blare a moment before E came riding in and, with the practice born of two weeks of terror, dove behind the sofa, while Ben, who stood square in the middle of the living room, his arms crossed on his chest, became an impromptu traffic circle.

  E sped around him once, twice, then headed the other way, at increased velocity.

  “What do you mean you’ll have to kill me?” Ben asked obtusely, looking at me. “And what are you doing behind the sofa?”

  I crept out and up to stand on the sofa itself, having learned that a large piece of furniture was the best defense against the toddler version of the fast and the furious. “Isn’t it obvious?” I said as, from the kitchen, there came a now-familiar series of sounds indicating that E was either rearranging the kitchen chairs to use as slalom cones or simply hitting them and dragging them along with sweet disregard for what it might do to chair legs and seats.

  I dropped to sit on the sofa, shaking slightly, with what I figured was a form of post-traumatic stress disorder only not particularly post, since the stress had started just over two weeks ago when E had first unwrapped the fully charg
ed electric motorcycle.

  “If you were likely to have children,” I told Ben darkly, “I’d already have started payments on the realistic drum set with electronic amplification.”

  “You are making no sense at all,” Ben said, in that even tone that made me want to strangle him with my bare hands—even though I was aware that would be one of the stupidest ways to kill him, as I would be immediately discovered. “What can the possibility of my having children have to do with this? Besides, surely you remember I used to have a garage band. In the unlikely event I ever have a child, I’d be happy if you gave him or her a drum set.”

  I think that was when I picked up the nearest object— a collection of mystery short stories, leather bound, weighing in at about three pounds, a Christmas gift from my parents—and flung it at his head. I missed, of course, just as E came back through the door from the dining room, in time to ride over the book and break its spine.

  “Well, you shouldn’t have thrown it at me,” Ben said, looking baffled when I howled in outrage. He picked up the book and tried to smooth the broken spine.

  Ben stood six-three in his stocking feet, with reddish-blond hair and the sort of face that is pleasant to look at rather than handsome. Because this was the weekend and also still part of his Christmas vacation, he was in what he considered his relaxed attire: dark green pants, with a broadcloth shirt, a cashmere pullover just a shade darker than his pants, and the sort of tie he considered playful and holiday-like—in this case green, with a barely discernable red dot. I would bet that were I to lift his sweater I would find his tie had been precisely arranged to fall just over the top half of his belt.

  I thought, not for the first time, that it was a very good thing that Ben was gay because any woman worth her salt, forced into a romantic relationship with someone so unflappable, exact, and unemotional-seeming would have done the sensible thing and put a steak knife through his heart.

  “Not your steak knives,” he said, when I communicated this sentiment. “They’d never get past the rib cage. You never sharpen them.” He set the abused book on my coffee table, which is thirdhand and made mostly—I think—of spit and cardboard. The legs bowed under the weight of the book, which wasn’t exactly a surprise, since they bowed under the weight of a coffee cup.

  Ben and I had been best friends since middle school, when I was Lancelot, Galahad, and La Belle Dame sans Merci rolled into one—or actually, considering that my parents were the owners of the largest used/new mystery bookstore west of Kansas, Miss Marple, Poirot, Perry Mason, and Nero Wolfe—forever running off in defense of those younger than I or those in peril of some sort. Or again, perhaps not, since the only small, young, or shy teenagers that those four were likely to rise in defense of would be those who had been unjustly accused of murder, while I ran to the defense of any smaller person who was being bullied or otherwise abused or ganged up on by people bigger than them.

  At five foot five—which was to be my adult height—and weighing less than a hundred pounds, soaking wet and with lead in my pockets, I’d been constitutionally incapable of sleeping at night if I thought that someone, somewhere, was getting away with committing blatant injustice against his fellow man or woman, or snively, pimply middle school kid.

  Ben had first come to my rescue when I’d taken on three bullies—each of whom were twice my weight—at once and had insisted on helping me despite my outraged howls that I had them surrounded.

  We’d been best friends ever since and cooperated in an unusual way—I charged in and got way over my head, and he jumped after me to rescue me and incidentally finish off whatever dragon I’d been fighting. But now, I thought, staring at him, my eyes misting with tears, I would simply have to kill him.

  “Why on earth are you crying?” Ben asked, as E came back in and whirled around him three more times, before speeding back out to the dining room, causing a hollow sound in his wake that I was afraid was the knocking down and breaking of the potted plant my boyfriend’s mother had given me for Christmas.

  “Because I really am going to hate having to kill you. And then, you know, at your size and in the middle of winter, with the ground frozen solid, there is no way that I can dig a hole large enough to bury you in. And that means that either you’ll be found right away, and I’ll have to figure out a system of misdirection so they think someone else is the culprit, or I’ll have to figure out a way to dissolve your body, so I can flush it down the drain or something.” I thought a moment. “Given how dirty that bathtub was when I moved in, do you think there would be any noticeable difference if I used it as a container to dissolve you in muriatic acid?”

  He sighed heavily. “Don’t you think that buying enough muriatic acid for that purpose would call attention in and of itself? Besides, from what I’ve read, it doesn’t dissolve the body completely. You’d end up with clogged drains, and they’d find pieces of me in the plumbing.” He had to shout the last part because E had come back for a whirl around the living room and, this time, was blaring the horn continuously, which created a sort of siren effect. “Besides, your neighbors upstairs would probably complain about the smell.”

  “Why not?” I said, as the siren receded toward the kitchen, followed by a series of thuds that meant that E was trying to open the door to the bathroom by dint of knocking on it with the front wheel. “They have already complained about the noise. Which means I’ll get evicted before the month is out and I have no idea if the security deposit will cover impact marks on the bathroom door.” I brightened up, as the noise indicated that E had hopped directly from the motorcycle onto the toilet, which was, at least, an improvement over the last time, when he’d brightly informed me that the bike was plastic and washable. “Where did you say your ex lives now? I wonder if I might simply make it seem like he did you in. I mean, the police already know he set fire to the inside of your condo when you broke up.”

  “Only that part of the police force that is currently dating you,” Ben said tartly, and then in the tone of one defeated, “Fine, fine, fine, fine. Do you want me to take the boy out for a spin on the sidewalk, to tire him out, so he can stop terrorizing you?”

  “Would you?” I asked, as the horn/siren started up again. “That is ever so sweet of you.”

  Ben rolled his eyes as he reached to the toppled coat tree and grabbed E’s little, black leather jacket, which was the other part of Ben’s Christmas gift. “Why is this coat tree brok—oh, never mind,” he said, as E rode the electric motorcycle straight into his leg and stopped with a thud. In Ben’s defense, he didn’t even flinch. Calves of steel. Clearly his daily workout was doing something.

  He got the jacket on E in a single movement, reminiscent of a matador’s wrangling a bull in full charge, and then took advantage of E’s momentarily puzzled state to say, “Come on, E, we’re going for a ride outside.”

  “Outside!” E said. He had just recently started talking in front of people who were not his mother—that is to say, most of the world—but he seemed to think the function of his vocal cords was to enable him to become part play-back machine and part question generator.

  Ben handled this with more aplomb than I managed. He said, “That’s right, outside.” And with a bright and horrible smile, he reached over and flung the front door open, which allowed E to dart out of it on his electric motorcycle at top speed.

  I heard the sound of the motorcycle going down the front cement steps, and then E’s battle cry. Ben darted out the front door. “Wait!” I heard him scream, shortly followed by, “Not on the street. Not on the street.”

  I closed the front door and relished the relative quiet of a toddler-free apartment. I wasn’t in the least worried that Ben would let E play in traffic. I had long ago laid down the rules for their outings together without my supervision and that was that, if Ben broke E he would give birth to the replacement, and I would make sure that this happened, no matter what the physical impossibilities.

  Able to hear myself think for the first time
in more than a week, I thought I would go out back to my work shed and make room for the piano I was going to refinish for my boyfriend’s birthday.

  Which is why I was alone when I found the letter.

  CHAPTER 2

  Of Rats and Pianos

  I was picking up the plant in its miraculously unbroken pot and setting it back atop the windowsill when the phone rang. Since the plant wasn’t long for this world from the moment it had entered my house, I sort of patted at the dirt, shoved the pot into a corner of the sill, and rushed off to track down the phone.

  It’s not that I put the phone in weird places. It’s more like it gets tired of waiting for someone to call and starts roaming around the house, finding ever more inventive places to hide. This time I got it on the third ring because it was only behind the toaster. “You should have known I’d catch you!” I said. “You were only two feet from the base.”

  “Dyce?” the voice on the other side said.

  Fortunately I’d lived with my nickname long enough that I knew this wasn’t a plea from Gamblers Anonymous. “Were you talking to the phone again?”

  The voice was Cas—Castor—Wolfe’s. He was my first boyfriend after two years of being divorced, and we’d been dating six months. Which didn’t give him the right to know that much about me.

  “Never mind,” he said in the sort of tone that implied that other, normal women didn’t chase their phones all over the house. Which, frankly, either meant their phones were far better behaved than mine, or that they were phone-whipped. But Cas didn’t give me a chance to reply. Instead he said, “The guys will be there to deliver the piano any minute now. I told them to come through the backyard gate.”