SISTER (ALTON RHODE MYSTERIES Book 4) by Lawrence de Maria

and he snowed me.”
    “They must have come after you.”
    “They tried. ‘The Jew lawyer must have been behind it.’ But it was pretty obvious I hadn’t done anything but be stupid. Harry’s fingerprints were all over the clients’ funds. Besides, he ran, and I stayed behind. I didn’t have much of a bank account.” He paused and gave me a look. “Like now. The clients got new lawyers but didn’t have all that much money to pay them, so you know how that goes.”
    “But they could recover the money, couldn’t they?”
    “Sure. Theoretically. If they found Harry. But most of the clients were kind of down on lawyers by that time. Can’t say I blame them. They knew their legal fees would eat up anything they recovered.”
    “But it was still a crime.”
    “Yeah, So is jaywalking. When was the last time a lawyer on Staten Island got indicted for bilking his clients?”
    “So, he got away with it.”
    “A crying shame. All that money and I hardly saw a dime.”

CHAPTER 11 - BETA
     
    I got up early Saturday morning, packed and headed to Massachusetts. I didn’t know how long I’d be gone, so I probably took too many clothes. But that’s the beauty of traveling in one’s car. You don’t have to pay extra baggage fees. I also put an extra gun and ammunition in a lock box in my trunk. I never know how many bullets to pack, so I erred on the side of World War III. 
    The drive to Worcester brought back memories not related to the case at hand. When I was nine, my parents rented a place called Red Rock Farm just outside Sturbridge for two weeks in the summer. It was a real farm and I hadn’t gone 20 feet from our station wagon when I stepped in cow flop. In additions to a small herd of bovines, which regularly broke out of their ancient corral and wandered down the road, there were also chickens and ducks, a small stream with little darting trout and 10 acres of wooded wonderland.
    We went to Old Sturbridge Village, which was set up to recreate a rural New England town of the 1830s. People walked around the meetinghouses, school, country store, working gristmills and the like in period costumes. There was even another working farm, although I managed to avoid stepping in anything. I remembered being fascinated by how basic life was early in the 19th Century. I thought I had been roughing it because Red Rock Farm didn’t have air-conditioning! We ate regularly at the nearby Publick House, where I discovered Indian pudding topped with vanilla ice cream. I had a wonderful time.
    I drove around now but wasn’t able to find Red Rock Farm. I thought about asking someone but decided against that. The farm had probably been turned into a housing development full of McMansions. But the Publick House was still standing as it has, according to the plaque next to the front entrance, since 1771. The property was a lot grander than I remembered. There was now a conference center attached to the original building, and what looked like a motel was just down the path.
    I had timed my drive to hit Sturbridge at lunchtime, with my fingers crossed, hoping that Ebenezer's Tavern was still operating in the Publick House. It was, and didn’t look much different than I recalled. I went in happy, but knowing that I’d be melancholy coming out. That’s a certainty when memories involving parents are involved. Most of the tables were occupied with parents and children. The melancholy index spiked.
    Even the Tavern menu looked much the same, although I didn’t remember anything called an “Ebenezer Burger.” It didn’t matter. I ordered a half bottle of Bordeaux and an open-faced turkey sandwich with all the trimmings. Except for the wine, that was the meal I ordered every time we went to the Publick House, lunch or dinner. My eyes naturally drifted to the bottom of the menu, where the desserts were listed. My luck held.
    “There’s no chance you will run out of Indian pudding, is there,” I asked the waitress, who looked