A Lady Never Trifles with Thieves Read Online Free PDF

talking that goes on over the back fence. I’m telling you, if we’re real careful, it can be done.”
    She crossed her arms at her chest. “First, do what you was hired for—prove that man is laying with other women.” She snorted. “Shouldn’t take more’n an hour.”
    “All right. Then what?”
    “Tell Shulteis that Mr. Rendal’s fixin’ to spirit Miz Penny away and steal her money. Being a lawyer, he’s liable to know how to kibosh that notion. There’s a fat fee in it for him, too, if he keeps his mouth shut and does a little sidewinding in our favor.”
    “But—”
    “Will you hush up and listen?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “You can also tell him that I’ll be seventy-three year old, come October, and I’d sooner hang for killing a lawyer as to die in my sleep.”
    I grinned. Devil take the agency’s percentage. The look on Fulton’s face when I delivered Abelia’s message would be payment enough.
    “What about the legal notice?” I asked. “Any suit filed with the court is public record and must be published in the newspaper.”
    “Nobody ever told me that.” Scowling, Abelia tilted her head to one side. “Are you for certain-sure? No insult meant, but the hem of your skirts ain’t been let down to the ground for too many years.”
    “Oh, I’m certain, all right. Because Denver is the county seat, it must be published here.”
    Abelia clucked her tongue. “It’d be foolish to disbelieve you, but that’s a sprag in the wagon wheel.”
    More like a sinkhole. Legend had it, a fire back in ’63 and the Cherry Creek flood a year later almost wiped Denver City off the map, but neither stilled William Byers’s printing press for long. Special editions of the Rocky Mountain News hit the streets within hours of those disasters.
    “I’ll pray on it real hard,” Abelia said. “If faith can move a mountain, I reckon it can show us the road around one, too.” The bong of the grandfather clock echoed from the foyer. Abelia gasped and tugged at my sleeve. “Lawsy mercy, if you’re still here when that man gets home, our goose is cooked, girl.”
    She hustled me through the front kitchen and into the back. The sunny, whitewashed room was filled with racks of drying linens and unmentionables that smelled of soap and unslaked lime. Flat-and fluting irons of myriad sizes and weights rested on a tin-plated shelf above a small woodstove.
    “Now don’t you come back here again,” Abelia said.
    “Miz Penny, she ain’t allowed no company. Ain’t allowed out of the house neither, unless Mr. Rendal’s with her.”
    I started. “Then how did she make and keep an appointment with J. Fulton Shulteis?”
    “The doctor treatin’ Miz Penny for barrenness is two doors down and a floor up from the lawyer. That’s ’bout the onliest place she can go without that man doggin’ her heels.”
    My fist throttled my reticule’s drawstring neck. Some people wouldn’t recognize a blessing if it tapped a shoulder and said “Howdy-do.” Babies aren’t splints or breathing pots of bee balm. Bearing one to heal a fractured marriage was an abomination.
    Abelia’s palm at my back hastened my exodus out onto a planked stoop. “I shop every other morning ’tween nine and ten at Cheesman’s Drug Store whilst His Nibs gets duded up to do nothing the livelong day.”
    The screen door patted shut against the jamb. “Meet me there come Thursday. I expect to hear something besides ‘Good mornin’, Abelia’ when you do.”
    I was through the back gate and striding down the alleyway before I realized Abelia never had asked my name.

Three
    I t is a fact of life that the greater hurry one is in to go somewhere, the less likely a means of transportation other than shoe leather will avail itself.
    On the off-chance Fulton might still be in his office, I headed for Larimer Street as fast as my tired limbs would take me. Holding my reticule like a shield, I wove around hoards of lollygaggers with naught better to do