“You are almost an orphan?”

“Indeed.”

“How can you be almost an orphan?”

“Why couldn’t I be?” I demanded.  “If anyone can be, I could be.”

“What I mean is…”  He took a deep breath.  “How can one be almost an orphan?”

“Oh.  Well, it’s only that my parents aren’t dead.”

“I see,” said he.

“But they were kidnapped,” I confided.

“Are you sure they didn’t just run away?” he asked.

“It was a stormy night and I had been away from my parents’ home, which is to say my former home, which is to say Cor Cottage just outside Dewberry Hills, and I was returning for a visit.  As I approached I heard a disturbance, though at first I attributed it to the sounds of the storm.  Then I looked up at the cottage window to see figures silhouetted on the shade, locked in a grim struggle.”

“What did you do?”

“Why, I rushed forward to aid my poor old mother, who as I recall smells of warm pie, and my poor old father, and my sister Celia, and my aunt Oregana, and my cousin Gervil, and my other cousin Tuki, who is a girl cousin, which is to say a cousin who is a girl, which makes sense, because whoever heard of a boy named Tuki.”

“They were all struggling by the window?”

“They may all have been struggling by the window, or some of them may have been, or perhaps only one of them was struggling by the window.  I don’t know, because when I burst in through the front door, they were all gone.  The back door was open wide and the rain was splashing in.”

“What happened to them?”

“I know not.”

“Were there any clues?”

“Indeed there were.”

“What were they?”

“The table had been set for nine, which was two places too many.”

“Three places!” said the orphan triumphantly.  “You thought I wasn’t paying attention.  There was your father, mother, sister, aunt, and two cousins.  That makes six.”

“They would also have set a place for Geneva.”

“Of course they would have.  Who is she?”

“She’s my other cousin, which is to say Gervil’s sister, only she’s imaginary, but she wasn’t always imaginary, which is to say she died, but Gervil still sees her, so Aunt Oregana always sets a place for her.”

“What other clues?”

I listed them off.  “There was a knife stuck in Gervil’s bed.  Floorboards had been loosened in several rooms.  There were drops of purple liquid leading out the back door.  And someone had hung bunches of onions from the rafters of the dining room.  Most mysterious of all was the fact that the tracks led away from the house only fifty feet and then disappeared entirely.”

The orphan gripped me around the waist and squeezed.  “How terrible,” he said, in a tiny voice.

Spoiler Alert

What this shows is that I am terrible at writing mysteries.  My inspiration for this little bit was Lemony Snicket in a Series of Unfortunate Events, who has his own mystery inside the mystery of the orphans in the story.  I originally thought that I might slowly reveal more about the mystery of Eaglethorpe’s family, but as it turns out, Eaglethorpe was lying about the whole thing.