Sticks & Scones Read Online Free PDF Page B

in town knew that Sukie was a cleaning and organizing whiz. And good old Eliot Hyde must have thanked his lucky stars, rabbit’s feet, and four-leafed clovers when Sukie’s reputation had proved true.
    When Sukie first arrived in Aspen Meadow, the story went, she was bored. Her husband, Carl Rourke, had owned a successful roofing company that many local high-school students, including Julian, had worked for. Sadly, Carl had died on the job, in a freak electrical accident. After a year of widowhood, Sukie’s loneliness had made her restless. Figuring her obsessive tidiness ought to be worth something, she’d advertised to work as a personal organizer.
    Her first and last client was Eliot Hyde. Never married, virtually penniless, Eliot was a former academic who had retreated to the castle he’d inherited after being denied tenure at an East Coast college. The castle itself, built in Sussex, had been bought by Eliot’s grandfather, silver baron Theodore Hyde, on a trip to England in the twenties. Belonging to a line of earls, the castle had been uninhabited since the time of Cromwell. Like the parvenus making social splashes with their enormous palaces in Newport, Rhode Island, silver-baron Theodore had apparently hoped his castle would give him the social cachet of
an actual baron.
He had the castle disassembled in England, then he hired a team to reassemble the royal residence in Aspen Meadow. He dammed up Fox Creek that flowed down the hill to the castle, to make a moat. He hired a fleet of servants to keep the place sparkling. Among his employees were a Russian fencing-master to teach him historic martial arts, and a butler to bring him tea and scones each day at four o’clock.
    Unfortunately, Theodore and his wife Millicent had disliked tea and found fencing exhausting. The butler quit; the fencing-master, Michaela Kirovsky’s grandfather, became the castle caretaker. The Hydes, meanwhile, decided that what they really liked was collecting old European buildings. Once the castle was in place, they purchased a thirteenth-century French chapel thatwas a mini-version of Chartres. That Gothic jewel had been painstakingly reconstructed not far from the castle, on the Hydes’ sloping forty acres below Fox Creek and above Cottonwood Creek, the wide body of water that runs through Aspen Meadow. Then, before their dreams of purchasing a ruined abbey could be realized, Theodore and Millicent had both been killed in a railroad accident.
    Their only son, Edwin—facing a Depression economy, played-out silver mines, and no financial assets aside from his parents’ estate—had tried to turn the castle into a hotel. This failed, as did mounting Aspen Meadow’s first and last circus on the castle grounds. After hiring ranchers to cart away mountains of elephant manure, Edwin and his wife had been reduced to charging for tours of the castle.
    Their
son, Eliot, had returned to the castle almost nine years ago, after his parents’ death and his own failure in academia. At thirty-nine, he hadn’t accumulated much in the way of savings, and those had drained swiftly away as he, too, struggled to make a living from giving tours and renting out the French chapel by Cottonwood Creek, now christened Hyde Chapel. By the time Eliot hired Sukie to organize the place, he’d stopped the tours and sunk into a depression. Income from renting the chapel was down, and stories in town had him living like a hermit in one room of his castle.
    The family of the fencing-master, meanwhile, had been offered one whole wing of the castle rent-free, as long as they remained the caretakers. It was in their palatial fencing loft that young Michaela Kirovsky’s grandfather and father had taught her to fence, a skill that subsequently provided income for her, when she became the fencing coach at Elk Park Prep.
    Beside me, Arch was fast asleep.
    There was more to the tale of Eliot Hyde and SukieRourke. In fact, the months-old series of events were now