A Fatal Stain (10 page)

Peter looked at Ben, who was looming behind my sofa, teacup in hand. “Frankly, it wasn’t Dyce running to the police that worried me as much as…How are things with Nick, Ben?”

I glanced back. Was that a slight straightening of Ben’s spine, as though in offended hauteur? Why, yes, I thought it was. “Fine, thank you so much.”

“Well…” Peter said. “Here’s the thing. Some couples talk about everything, some don’t, and you two are new enough that I barely know him, and I don’t know what kind of couple you are.”

“I tell him things that are mine to tell,” Ben said. “I don’t think he needs to know anything pertaining to other people’s lives…” He frowned a little. “Frankly, I don’t think he’d have any interest. I mean, unless you’ve seen the woman murdered or something like that, I presume, as responsible people, you’d already have talked. But…” He looked at E, who was looking like a little cherub sans wings again, soulfully eating his cookies. “Considering what some people are capable of repeating,” he said, looking intently at my son, “it is neither here nor there whether I can be trusted. Come on, Monkey. Peter has a doggie who shakes hands and fetches. I think you should meet him.”

Peter looked confused for a moment, then smiled. “Thank you, Ben. Chopin is out back. His toys are by the back door. He’s very fond of the red ball.”

I was fairly sure that my son had heard enough to know we were going to talk behind his back and that he’d like, more than anything, to hear what we were going to say. But I also knew that E was at that age when he’d be unable to resist a friendly animal: cat, rat, or dog.

So, after minimal hesitation, he gave Ben his hand, and Ben led him out back, obviously familiar enough with the house not to ask for directions.

Peter turned to Collin, who sat down beside him, and they looked at each other for a moment before Collin nod ded. Considering that I’d seen Nick and Ben do that also, I wondered if there was some sort of gay-telepathy club, and why hetero couples didn’t have it. I wanted my dose of telepathy.

Then I thought of how worried Cas would be if he knew half the trouble I got into or threatened to get into, and I decided it wasn’t a gift. Or at least not one I wanted.

Collin sighed. “If it helps,” he said, “I don’t think anything bad happened to her. I’m not saying that there aren’t bloodstains on the table, but surely you know how that stuff can happen—nosebleeds or just…hamburger portioning or something, and then they didn’t know how to remove the stains, so they threw some varnish and stuff at it. It could be as simple as that.”

“Yeah, it could,” I said, half convinced. “But if you don’t think it was anything bad, then why…”

Collin shook his head. “Well, see, we think she has a boyfriend. We suspect she left with him. But the thing is, as far as we can tell, her husband doesn’t know, and he’s a nice guy. We haven’t been able to decide whether he’d feel better knowing that she’s away and okay or if he’d feel hurt because she never let him know there was someone else.”

“And to make things weirder,” Peter said, “the boyfriend is still visiting, so maybe, if the husband needs to be told, he will tell him. I mean, it’s clear they’re friends.”

“Or maybe she ran away because she couldn’t take the situation with both of them, in which case, by telling Jason, we’re removing his support system for no good purpose,” Collin said. “And we’re friendly. I mean, I’m not going to say we’re best friends, but we had a barbecue together in the summer, and they come over when they need something, and we leave the keys with them and ask them to feed Chopin when we’re away.”

“Boxer,” Collin said. “In the backyard right now.” He grinned. “Thought he might scare Ccelly. You know what…invisible llamas are like.”

“But how do you know there was a boyfriend?” I asked. It is deductive reasoning and bulldog-like tenacity like this that have, for the longest time, made my parents sure I should be a private investigator.

“Because we saw them. I mean, he might just have been a friend of the family who comes over to babysit. He seems to be that, but…” Peter set his teacup down on the polished coffee table and motioned for me to follow him to the window. He raised the shade on it. “See that window?”

There was a window directly facing this one, across a tiny strip of garden filled with leaf-bare rosebushes. “When the light is on, you can see in there. We don’t try to, you know, but if you happen to be in here, and come to the window to lower or raise the blind or something, you can’t help seeing. That’s a bathroom window, and one day I saw their friend, Sebastian, in there, with Maria, helping her get out of the tub, completely naked.”

“And he gasped in such a way that I went to look, too.
So I saw it, too,” Collin said. “And I know that we sometimes…I mean, I don’t know what to make of it other than the idea that he was her boyfriend. We started noticing other little things after that, like how he came to visit almost every day while Jason was at work. It started bothering us.”

“And then she disappeared,” Peter said. “And you see why we’d assume it was voluntary.”

“Yeah,” I said. And maybe it was. Yeah, the friend still coming to visit after she disappeared was a very odd thing, but then maybe she had got tired of both of them. Maybe she could not cope with the emotional entanglement of having two men in her life. Maybe that was why she had left. “What is he like? The husband. Was he very upset?”

“When she disappeared? Yeah, he was. He looked like death for a few days and asked us if we’d seen anything, if she’d told us anything before he reported her missing. But we hadn’t. I mean, other than the stuff we didn’t want to tell him because we didn’t want to hurt him. He’s a nice guy,” Peter said. “Works down at the lumberyard, takes classes at night at CUG. Young kid—you know, late twenties. Maria used to take classes at CUG, too, but she also dropped out of sight there. No transfer, nothing. Collin looked.” He hesitated. “In a way, boyfriend or not, it seemed like a very odd thing to happen. I mean, they seemed like such a nice couple, very attached.”

Collin cleared his throat. “The only thing that surprised me,” he said, “is that Maria didn’t make any effort to take the kids. They have three: five, three, and one. And she always seemed very attached to them. Nice kids.”

“And what is Sebastian like?” I asked. “Is he nice, also?”

“Well…” Again the traded look, this time with a chuckle. Collin mumbled something, and Pete smiled. “His nickname around here is Sex-on-Two Legs. Just on looks, mind you. I don’t think he’s ever even noticed us.”

I must have looked confused, because he said, “Well, if you want a factual description, he’s…not very tall. A little taller than Collin. Dark haired, dark eyed. I believe he’s a handyman, and he spends a lot of time outside—so he’s tanned and has an…outdoor look.”

“And his name is Sebastian?”

“Sebastian Dimas,” Collin said.

“And he’s still coming by?”

“Yeah. In fact he was here just yesterday, staying with the kids while Jason went to work,” Peter said. “Of course the kids know him, and I suppose although they are shocked about their mother’s disappearance, it’s better to have a babysitter who knows them.”

“Yeah,” I said.

At that moment, Ben and E came back in, with E saying, loudly, “Ccelly likes Chopin. Chopin is a good dog.”

Ben was saying something about how llamas were especially fond of dogs. Then he said, “Do you know everything you need to know?”

I nodded, though what I’d learned opened more questions than it answered.

“Oh, good,” Ben said. “Then there’s a dress I’d like you to look at.”

It started with the name of the store. It was called
The Pink Rose, and the only sign over the door was a drawing of a bright-pink rose—from which I deduced it was a wedding-dress shop for illiterates.

“No, don’t start deciding you hate it already,” Ben said. “It’s wonderful, really. When I came home last night, they were still open, and I went in and explained that you were tired of all the standard options around town, and—”

The second thing about the store was that it was on the bottom floor of Ben’s loft building. In the last year, this bottom floor had housed a Realtor’s office, a deli, and a florist. The recession had bit downtown business hard, but still, this location, amid offices and lofts, seemed singularly inappropriate for a wedding shop. My anxiety was not made any easier by the fact that nothing
at all showed in the two shop windows. Instead, there were tall pink curtains, closed against the light, hiding the shop. I wondered if it meant they were that ashamed of the dresses, but the look Ben gave me meant I might die for saying it.

Inside the shop, holding E by the hand, I found myself in diffused pink light and surrounded by mirrors. If I’d known that Ben intended to drag me to a shop where I’d be exposed to multiple images of myself, I’d have done my hair and makeup and lost twenty pounds.

But mostly the shop smelled and looked expensive, the type of place where you expect to have to pay a door price just for walking in. The lady who walked toward me was clearly the refugee from some Victorian manor. Tall and spare, her gray hair pulled tightly back into a bun. She wore a gray dress that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a dowager in a BBC production of
Pride and Prejudice
. And the way she approached us clearly implied that we were low born mongrels of poor parentage.

I looked at Ben to see how he was taking this and hoped E didn’t find it necessary to give vent to Ccelly’s opinion of the moment. But even E must have felt awed because he didn’t say anything. And Ben looked cowed enough as he approached the woman, his head slightly lowered, and whispered to her.

She gave me the once-over, very slowly, as though she didn’t think I was quite worth all that. For a moment, as her cool gray eyes surveyed me, it all seemed to hang in the balance, and then she nodded, slowly, and clapped her hands.

After a while, two women came from the back room
and motioned for me to follow them. At this point, I had horror movies running through my mind, and at the back of my brain a little voice was yelling, “Don’t go into the back room.”

But I looked back at Ben, who only smiled and nodded—encouragingly—at me, and then at E, who could have saved me with a single sharp wail about Ccelly but who didn’t. You bring a son into the world, and he fails to rescue you when you need it the most.

I followed despondently, knowing in my heart that back there a tentacled monster was waiting to devour my brain. That’s why there were no words on that window. Even the dumbest of brides wouldn’t go into a shop called The Pink Rose, Dresses by Cthulhu.

But the back room failed to disclose any tentacles. It wasn’t nearly that exciting. Instead, the British manor house theme continued—there was a room with the wallpaper all in tiny pink roses and a settee upholstered in pink-rose fabric. One of the women motioned for me to sit down; the other brought me a cup of Earl Grey tea and a ginger biscuit.

The second woman went out through yet another door and came back with a bundle wrapped in white cotton. It was laid out on a narrow, library-type table and unwrapped.

It was gray. Absolutely and unrelievedly gray.

“Mr. Colm said you didn’t want a traditional wedding dress,” the first woman said.

“This is very elegant, very unique.”

I wanted to tell them gray might be unique for a wedding, but it wasn’t elegant. But I didn’t. I knew Ben very well, and if I went out there and told him that I hadn’t
even tried the dress on, he would tell me I wasn’t giving it a chance. So I let the two women dress me in the gray dress and then lead me to the front, where I looked at myself in the mirrors.

An excess of gray greeted me. The dress was gray and unadorned, except for a row of gray roses around the waist. I heard Ben say, “Oh,” in a tone that meant that this didn’t look quite as he’d expected. E didn’t say anything, which was terrifying in itself.

I looked at the mirrors again, and realized I looked…wilted. Somehow the gray dress made even my hair and my skin look gray. In fact, if I wore this it would look like
Wedding of the Living Dead
.
We just woke up and ate the gravedigger’s brain and came here in search of someone to marry us till bullets do us part.

I realized in time that saying this would probably be unforgivable. So instead I said, “You know…I…er…don’t think this is quite what I was looking for.”

Before I could make a fast getaway, I was ushered back to the room again, and another cup of tea was pressed on me. It seemed rude to leave after they gave me tea and all, so instead I waited. Minutes later, they brought out a dress. It was black. Glossy, unrelieved black.

As they were dressing me in it, before I could tell them this was not exactly what I had in mind, I found myself attired in black and brought back out in front of the mirrors.

And then I was faced with a terrible dilemma. I liked the dress. I really did. It was glossy and gorgeous, and it made me look taller and svelte. But for a wedding?
Well, it would have been appropriate for my first wedding,
I
thought.
And Dad would like it, anyway, since he thinks there’s always a murder at a wedding. I’ll be all ready for the funeral.