Repair to Her Grave Read Free Page A

up in a corner of the attic, forgotten.”
    They were champagne brocade and we’d run them through the washer and the dryer. They’d survived, and hung beautifully.
    “Because”—I held up an index finger—“how would an isolated small-town fiddler and minor-league musical composer like Hayes ever get enough money to buy a Stradivarius in the first place?”
    That was the old story, told and retold over the years until it had begun sounding like the truth: that Jared Hayes had bought one of the famous instruments and hidden it, and then he had vanished.
    And that it was still here.
    There had been a few hopefuls who had wanted me to let them look again—just before Raines phoned, a charming fellow with an Australian accent had called three times and very nearly managed to persuade me— but I had been able to turn them all down with one excuse or another. The idea of the thing appearing someday, however, just wouldn’t die.
    And now out of the blue came a guy from Boston with a cock-and-bull story about a Ph.D. project.
    Yeah, right. Ellie nibbled her cupcake delicately. “He had,” she pointed out, meaning Hayes, “enough money to buy this house.”
    “If he bought it,” I came back. We’d been over all this before. “Some say he won the house gambling in a saloon.”
    “And some say Hayes had enough money to buy the whole town,” Ellie countered, “if he wanted to. Surely he had cash enough for some pretty fancy furnishings. You’ve seen the receipts.”
    Hayes's household account books still existed, and despite some irregularity in them—the way, for instance, the Grand Canyon forms an irregularity in Arizona—the expense sides of the ledger columns were clear enough for anyone to read. In the fine old copperplate hand of the classically educated man of his day, they listed furniture enough to outfit a castle, along with rugs from the far East, English china, and French crystal.
    A harpsichord, originally crafted for the court of Frederick the Great, had been shipped here and reassembled in my dining room not far from where my attempt at a plaster job was crumbling right this minute. A Chinese lacquered cabinet so large and heavy no ship's captain would load it for the perilous journey around the Horn—at the time, of course, there was not yet any Panama Canal—had been hauled by a team of elephants over the Alps to Spain, where the shippers were more adventurous or perhaps only greedier; at any rate, it got here.
    “Whether it was gambling money, though,” Ellie added, “is another question.”
    “You can bet he wasn’t earning it by playing the fiddle,” I said. “Or not all of it, anyway. But…” I could already see which way her thoughts were headed. “But Ellie, we wanted a nice, quiet summer.”
    My son had at last made firm college plans for the fall. My ex-husband, Victor, had moved here to Eastport but had also stopped devoting himself— full-time, anyway—to driving me nuts. And my main squeeze, Wade Sorenson, had proven as fine and durable a romantic choice as I had known he must be back when I fell in love with him at first sight. In fact we had decided—in theory, anyway; in practice we were both still shying at the gate—to get married.
    This for me was like thinking I might stick my hand in the fire again, and Wade was of the “if it ain’t broke, let's not fix it” persuasion, constitutionally. Still, the idea kept recurring and gradually we were getting to feel easier with it, the way two people will when they are happy and comfortable with one another.
    And Ellie knew all this, but now she brushed it impatiently aside.
    “Nice, quiet summer,” she scoffed. “If you don’t get this place straightened out, you’ll be in a nice, quiet asylum soon.”
    At which I nodded sadly because, as usual, she was correct. Lately I couldn’t even go to sleep in the house without worrying whether something was going to sneak up in the dark and pull the covers off me and I