The Fall Of White City (Gilded Age Mysteries Book 1) by N. S. Wikarski

managed to shrink down below her teacher’s height as she dawdled her way to the front desk.
    “Mary, can I talk to you in confidence about something?”
      Still too tense to speak, the girl nodded.
    “You must promise not to tell anyone. Is that agreed?”
    “Yes, miss.” The girl bobbed a curtsy as a sign of assent.
    “Very well then, please sit down.” Evangeline gestured toward a student desk in the front row facing her chair.
    Mary compressed her tall frame into the seat and waited.
    Evangeline drew her chair up closer to the girl. “You were a good friend of Elsa’s, weren’t you?”
    “Lord, yes. We were true friends, and that’s a fact. I’m going to miss her something terrible now.” Mary’s eyes filled with tears as she fumbled for a handkerchief in her pocket.
    “It’s all right, my dear.” Evangeline patted her hand. “I was very fond of her myself. That’s why I’m trying to find out everything I can about her habits and her acquaintances to see if they lead to her murderer.”
    “Good gracious, miss!” Mary’s hand flew to her mouth in a gesture that mixed alarm and curiosity. “But they’ve already arrested Franz. Everybody knows that.”
    “Just because he’s been arrested doesn’t mean he’s guilty.”
    “Oh! You think maybe somebody else could have done it? Who do you think it was?”
    “Right now, I have no idea.” Evangeline chose to conceal her theories for the time being. “But I need to know anything you can tell me about the time she spent here. For instance, who was she friendly with?”
    “Miss LeClair! You don’t think anyone here had a hand in it, do you?” Mary’s eyes, which were abnormally large, flew open wider still. She was breathing very rapidly.
    “Mary, please calm down! You needn’t distress yourself this way. I’m merely asking the question in order to know who her friends were. Maybe one of them might be able to put me on the trail of something. Do you recall anyone else she was close to?”
    Mary took a deep breath, trying to recollect any details. “Well, I’ve seen her talk to lots of people here, but not in any particular way. Nothing that I thought was odd. She was always quizzing everybody about everything. You know how she was...”
    “Curious, you mean.”
    “Yes, curious—about everything. I used to see her in the nursery room talking to the matrons. I saw her in the workshop looking at how the clay pots get fired in that big kiln they have. She’d talk to the girls at reception and said maybe she’d like a job like that, as a volunteer greeting visitors and such. One time, I even saw her asking Miss Jane how she put together the daily schedule.”
    “Yes, she did have a variety of interests, didn’t she.” Evangeline tried to assess the potential for Elsa’s contact with someone violent. “Did you ever see her with a young man?—possibly one of the other students?”
    Mary thought for a moment. “No, I can’t recollect that. Not anything special anyway. She was shy around boys, you know. I’d put her up to meeting one by dropping a book or some such thing, but she’d have none of it. Always hung back when I’d tease one of the fellows. As a matter of fact, the only one I ever saw her talk to was that Mr. Sidley who does the books.”
    “You mean the accountant?” Evangeline was puzzled.
    “Yes, that’s the one. Like you said, she was interested in everything—numbers, too. So one day she walks past the door of his office and sees him adding up these rows of numbers on a big white sheet of paper and asks him what he was doing and why.”
    “And how did they get along?”
    Mary shrugged. “Oh, fine I expect. She talked to him once in a while, and he always smiled at us when we’d see him in the hallway, but nothing odd about that, is there?”
    “No, not really.”
    “Besides,” Mary giggled nervously, “he’s not the sort a girl would look at twice, is he?”
    An image of the accountant’s gawky