He Looked to the Leaf of A Tree
an excerpt

He Looked to the Leaf of A Tree
or the mystery that suddenly turned into a screwball comedy! Sort of.

You probably are not believing me very much at this moment, are you?
You’re probably going away now, shelving this book back into that little hole in the wall, just between E.F. Benson and E.C. Gaskell . Stop it, will you?
Don’t put it thither, behind the latest book by the oh-so-cool Anne Radcliffe, the Castle of Udolpho. Why? Can’t you just hear the delicious sound of bones rattling?

I mean it must look ancient to you. No loud or cool picture on the front. Just black leather.
White pages with a lot of words In them-including two confusing ones called taffeta and muslin... respectively.
Oh my... It’s one of those books by that Austen lady. That lady.
The one Mark twain said he would like to hit with her shin bone.
No. Not nearly as romantic. Our Mr. Wickham is old and he dies on the first page.
Except his name is Mr. Weekham, instead.

Then you see the flower pressed between the pages and the drawing of it and you think- Oohhh. A prologue about someone who turned out to be a painter of something.
Monet’s biography is already done-sorry to disappoint.
It’s a mystery about the murder.
Very formulaic. The kind with a dog-like detective and a murder on the first page.
It is a murder, maybe? Sort of a murder, not exactly the kind you would take home to meet your police chief.
The detective is clueless-sort of. But she has an imagination!
And she’s a chronic liar, too. Does that make it a little bit more interesting?

Well at least stick around for the butterfly lady and the three legged dog.

I could be lying about them being real.
You might not believe me when it's all done.
But then....that wasn't why you started reading, was it?