A Fatal Stain (11 page)

I bit my lip. The two women who’d been helping me dress had locked in a holding pattern around me, telling me how elegant and beautiful I looked and adjusting my skirt this way and that.

“It’s very beautiful,” I said. “But…”

“She’ll have to think about it,” Ben said, hurriedly, as though trying to prevent me from saying something appalling.

As though I would. And just as I thought about it, I found my mouth had a mind of its own and had gone into automatic—and there was nothing I could do to control it. “It’s a lovely funeral dress,” I heard myself saying and bit my lower lip hard, then tried to fix it by saying, “I mean, I know how wonderful this would be for the murder. I mean…My parents own the mystery bookstore and…”

I think if Ben could have, he would have physically dragged me out of there. As it was, I almost ran into the back room, before my mouth could think of anything else to say. Inside the room, the two women helped me out of the dress, probably because they were afraid I would hurt myself or it trying to wriggle out of the funereal fabric.

In no time at all, I was sitting in the passenger seat of Ben’s car, looking straight ahead.

“You have your sweater on inside out,” he said.

I didn’t say anything. Ben drove for a little while in silence. Lights were coming on all over, and a cold wind was blowing. Ben hummed a couple of inharmonious
notes between his teeth. “Well,” he said, in a tone of great heartiness. “Didn’t that go well?”

Which was when E burst into tears. It was so sudden that Ben headed for the side of the road and slammed on the brakes. And then we both turned around to find the child doing his best impression of a watering can.

The corollary of “My son looks like a cherub” was that when he cried, I felt truly guilty. His lip was trembling; there were tears chasing each other down his face.

“Why are you crying?”

“I don’t want Mo-mo-mommy to die.”

Although I completely understood this, I knew there was no way I could tell him that I’d never die. On the other hand, he was three, and this was hardly the time for the we-were-born-to-die speech. So instead, I said, “I’m not going to die anytime soon, sweetie,” and hoped very much that it was true.

“Why do you think Mommy is going to die?” Ben asked, baffled.

“When she wears those dresses, she looks like the ladies in the books in Grandma’s store. And they all have knives and ’tuff in them. And Grandma says it’s because they’re dead and someone wrote a book about them being dead.” He started crying again.

It took us five minutes to convince him that I wasn’t going to be killed. It seemed easier to tell him that I’d not buy the dress, since he seemed to think the two were linked. Once E’s tears were dry, Ben looked ahead again. “So,” he said. “I was thinking we could go to the George…”

“I can’t,” I told him. “Cas is bringing pizza.”

And then Ben looked guilty.

“What?” I asked.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you. Nick called while you were getting into the dress. Or perhaps getting out of it. Yeah, okay, it’s not important. There was another case of arson, down by the castle. A row of condos. They went over there, both of them, and they don’t know when they’ll be done.”

“Oh, lovely,” I said, because it wasn’t, and suddenly, thinking of having to get E out of the backyard and the Amber Alert and everything else that had happened today, I felt as if I could burst out crying just like E. This seemed like the perfect conclusion to the perfect day—not.

“Come on,” Ben said. “Let’s go to the George.”

“You only like going to the George because you like to look at the owner,” I said, which was unworthy. The George diner had the best Greek food at a decent price anywhere in the Rocky Mountains.

“Nah, that’s just a side benefit,” he said. “It’s the souvlaki salad and the rice pudding calling me. Come on.”

“I don’t have money.”

“It’s okay, Dyce, I’ll pay the fifteen dollars. Surely I owe you that much for the gray dress. It looked better before it was on you, I swear.”

“Yeah, what I like about you is that you say the sweetest things.”

He grinned and slow mock-punched my shoulder. “I’ll even get a milkshake for the little monkey,” he said.

It was hard to resist a man who offered to buy my son a milkshake, particularly when said man had been my best friend ever since he’d saved me from a half-dozen bullies I had surrounded back in sixth grade. And when
he really didn’t want anything from me, except to listen to the gossip his friends had shared.

But when we were ensconced in the back booth of the George and Ben was attentively watching Tom, the co-owner of the diner, walk away after taking our order, I realized we couldn’t talk. Not in front of E, not until E was asleep.

Which was too bad, because today of all days I felt like I needed to access my exobrain, which often seemed to be held in Ben’s head.

Instead, both of us very conscious of E listening to everything and feeding Ccelly his imaginary oats, we watched Tom walk back with our order. He was quite worth watching. Not very tall but with the muscular chest of a weight lifter narrowing to a small waist and, proportionately speaking, very long legs. He wore his hair long, though he tied it back with a scarf, to fulfill food-service regulations. And his face was so cute it was almost pretty.

I was shocked by Ben asking, “So when is the wedding?” until I realized it was to Tom, not me.

Tom grinned. “Next summer, we think. We need to line up someone to look after the diner for a day or two. You’ll be coming, of course. We’ve invited all of the Goldport police and their significant others.”

Which for some reason caused Ben to blush and mumble.

As soon as Tom walked away, I asked him, “Ben—how are things between you and Nick?”

“What?” Ben asked, as soon as Tom was out of
earshot.

“How are things between you and Nick?”

There was just a moment of hesitation before Ben said, “Fine. Why?”

Right. Okay, until very recently Ben and I had had a pact in which each of us stayed out of the other’s love affairs. But I didn’t think that was possible now, when we were dating cousins who had been raised as brothers. “It’s just that Peter seemed to wonder if you were still together and—”

“Oh, Peter,” Ben said, derisively, as if his friend’s name were a swearword. “Peter! He’s known me since I was in high school, and he has this bug in his brain about how I’m only dating Nick because I’m on the rebound, and Nick isn’t my type at all.”

I thought of Ben’s ex—small and blond and, let’s face it, somewhat effete. I thought of the guys I was almost sure Ben had dated before that, at least the ones I knew. They’d all been smaller than Ben, and they’d all trended somewhere between blond and very blond. “Well?” I said.

Ben shrugged. “He’s my type. Or rather…he’s a type I didn’t know I had.” He looked up at me for a moment, then looked at E, who seemed totally absorbed in his burger and fries and a conversation with Ccelly, who, apparently, was sitting next to him on the booth. “It’s just that he’s so damn…Greek.”

I blinked. The last thing I expected from Ben was any type of ethnic bigotry. “Beg your pardon?” I said. “Do you mean he eats too much souvlaki? Or he wears a toga around the house? Holds Olympics in the living room?”

Ben shook his head. “No, look, the thing is that it’s not that…I mean, just because someone is gay, if he comes from a very traditional culture, it doesn’t mean he has severed his every tie to his culture or every one of the culture’s claims on him.”

“You’re saying he’s conflicted about being gay?” I asked.

Ben shook his head vehemently. “No. That was all solved long before I came on the scene. I mean, Dyce, we’re in our thirties…And no,” he said, anticipating my next question, “it isn’t even that his parents disap prove. Perhaps they do, but not from what Nick says. I think that battle was fought before we met, too. I mean, he’d bought a house with his ex. And his parents seem to like me. They are impressed with my having an MBA and being an investment planner. Even if I’m not exactly
an accountant, I think I can help his parents with the taxes, you know…”

“But then… ?”

“Oh, it’s just that Nick expects to be…the man of the house. I mean, he was raised to…”

I was out of my depth. In fact, I was out of my depth even if I had had a snorkel available. “You’re both the man of the house!” I said. I needed a submarine.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “And that’s the other thing—the house. Nick has bought back his ex’s half, and the lease on his house is coming to an end, and he wants us to…He wants me to move into his house.”

“Oh?”

Ben loved his loft. He’d bought it with the money left to him by his grandma Elly, and he’d decorated it just so, all white upholstery, dark wood, and vases and things. I’d have gone nuts living in any place where the only colors allowed were white, dark wood, and red. But for Ben, with his color coordinated, subtly different array of beige ties, the condo was like paradise on Earth. Heck, when he and Nick had adopted the baby rats I’d rescued from inside the piano, Ben had picked ones that color-coordinated with his condo. And he’d refused to adopt Pythagoras when he rescued the cat, because Pythagoras was black.

“Uh,” I said. “I suppose it’s difficult with both of you owning places. I mean…It’s not even easy for me, and neither Cas nor I own a place. It’s just he wants to buy one, and I—”

“And you?” Ben looked concerned.

“I’m afraid of what will happen if it all goes bad,” I said. “As difficult as it is to sell a house right now, you know…”

“Oh,” Ben said. “But you can’t live your whole life on the expectation that something will go wrong, can you? Sometimes you have to let go of your fears and try to make something wonderful of it, don’t you?”

I was trying to think how to explain to him all my confused, overlapping feelings—how I really couldn’t just leap in, how, yeah, I understood what he was saying, but at the same time, with E’s happiness on the line, I couldn’t just jump into the first relationship that offered itself, because what would I do if it all exploded? I didn’t think I could share custody with two men, and what if I had more children, and—

Only I didn’t ever manage to mention it, because E looked up from feeding imaginary fries to the imaginary llama and said, “Cas!”

I looked behind me. Cas and Nick were coming toward us, dodging amid the packed tables. We reshuffled the seating, so they were sitting next to Ben and me, who, in turn, had E between us.

In no time at all, the policemen were eating burgers and fries. Tom, who was clearly familiar with both Nick and Cas—not a big surprise, since most of the Goldport police ate here for at least one meal a day—asked how the arson cases were going, and Cas said, “Bad. Really, really bad. You know those condos behind the castle?”

The pride and joy of Goldport was an eighteenth-century French castle, transported here stone by stone and rebuilt on-site by a dispossessed French aristocrat.

The way I had heard it, the aristocrat had been escaping the French Revolution and meant to re-create the home that his dear old mama had left, so as to keep her homesickness to a minimum. But that was surely too
early? Unless the castle was there before the area was part of the United States.

But in the last year, some company had built a complex of condos behind it. I hadn’t given it more than one look, except for thinking that using that adobe type of construction right behind something that might have graced the banks of the Loire looked incongruous.

The condos, when completed, had been on offer at a pretty high price for this city. They’d had all the energy-saving innovations and radiant heat and all sorts of goodies. I remember seeing them advertised on the nearest street corner.

“Yeah,” Tom said. “We considered buying one of those, but all we could afford was the studio, which is hardly the sort of place for when you’re married. I mean they were really nice. I heard they were on fire. Anything left?”

Cas shook his head. “No. But it’s worse than that. We found a body in one of the condos.”

“Oh, no,” Tom said. “Someone was caught in there when the place caught fire?”

“I don’t think that was that,” Cas said. “We…think it was deliberate. Probably. Don’t quote me on it, of course.”

“Who would I quote you to?” Tom asked. “It’s not like we’d talk to reporters, even if they wanted to talk to us.” He added, “But it sounds like bad business. I wish you guys all the luck in the world.”

It was amazing how Nick and Cas could tuck into their grilled burgers after coming back from a place where they’d found a burned human body. Worse, I knew if I gave them an opening, there would be jokes about long
pig. That was part of the way policemen coped with the more unpleasant aspects of their profession.

Afterward, as we were walking out, Kyrie, Tom’s better half, stopped Nick and asked him something that sounded like “Did they see anything flying over the area?”

Nick shook his head but was frowning when we got up front. I wondered if Kyrie was a believer in black helicopters.