A Fatal Stain (16 page)

“I am not wearing the cat,” I said. “That’s final.” I had no clue if Mom meant for me to wear her alive or dead, but in any case, I wanted no part of the psycho kitty.

“Of course not.” Mom looked offended. “It’s not like I have the time to train her, though I submit to you that last year she was in the habit of sitting on top of your
dad’s head while he worked. It was very warming, of course, but also looked rather stylish, like an exotic hat. But with the wedding, and the music and guests,” she said and sighed. “Well, the poor dear would probably get scared and jump off, and we wouldn’t want her to get lost. No, what I’m thinking of is far more appropriate. I thought, you know, you don’t have a sister.”

Which was one of those things for which I was forever grateful. Oh, I’d probably have loved a sister. At least, when I was a kid, I was always jealous of Ben’s large family and how busy and happy their household always was. He was the oldest of seven, which was probably where he got all his naturally protective and supervising attitude. And I liked staying at their house and talking to everyone.

But if Mom and Dad had another child, they would have had even more problems getting our names straight, and one of us would probably be forever forgotten. Alternately, they’d try to get us to behave in unison so as to better keep track of us. Synchronized upbringing!

“No,” I said. “I don’t have a brother, either.”

Mom hesitated. In the past, she’d variously claimed that Ben was almost a brother to me and tried to get me to marry Ben. I could see her weighing these options in her mind, right now, but instead, she said, “Well…you know…the thing is…the thing is, Ben can’t be your maid of honor.”

No, but I would double dare Mom to suggest it in front of Ben, whom Cas had already tapped for his attendant. And the idea of Ben in a pinkish dress with a flower behind his ear was…untenable. Even his mental image glowered at me with such intensity that it would burn holes through my thoughts if it went on. “Yeah,” I said.

“So I was thinking,” Mom said. “Who could possibly be your maid of honor?”

“Uh…no idea,” I said.

Mom waved Fluffy around again, lifting her a little and pushing her at me. I was smart enough, this time, to step back and plaster myself against a bookcase. Mom, clearly, had a loaded cat and wasn’t afraid to use her. “Fluffy!” she said, as if I was completely stupid.

“Yes, I see, that’s Fluffy, but what does that have to do with a bridesmaid?”

“Fluffy can be your maid of honor,” Mom said. “We’ll put a little wisp of silk around her neck, instead of the collar. And we’ll put a little crown of flowers on her.”

I stared. There are moments when one has to ask oneself if one has gone completely insane or the world has.

In this case, it wasn’t even a competition. I might have my moments when I jumped to conclusions, forgot myself, or did some pretty odd things. But compared to the mental space Mom was inhabiting right now, I stood in the polar center of sanity. In fact, my mental state was the opposite of unstable. I was that fulcrum against which the lever that moved reality might rest.

“Mom,” I said, aware that this little fact might have escaped her. “Fluffy is…How do I put this? A cat.”

“Oh, I know that,” Mom said.

“But you know what you said. She might get scared. The music, the crowds. And Ben and Nick will probably smell like rats, because, you know, they have pet rats, and—”

“Yes, of course,” Mom said. Then, promptly negating this hopeful sign, “That’s why we must get a cat harness that color coordinates what your wedding theme color
will be. Have you decided on one? Ben said gray, but I was thinking something more…joyous, like cerise.”

Which was when I happened to look toward the little sitting area, by the fireplace, and noticed that E wasn’t there.

“E!” I yelled, and, shoving past Mom and Fluffy—who waved an ineffective paw (all claws out) in my direction—I ran out the front door and down the steps to the street.

Dad and Mom’s store is set in what had once been a residential street surrounded by stately Victorians. It was now mostly a commercial neighborhood, the bottom half devoted to the sort of shop that people who lived within walking distance liked to frequent. There was the bookstore, a vegetarian restaurant, two art galleries, the sort of dress-making establishment that specializes in dresses made primarily—or at least designed while under the influence—of hemp, a furniture store specializing in antique rugs and lamps, and a doll’s hospital that restored antique and hard-to-find dolls.

At this time of the morning on a Monday, the streets weren’t exactly crowded, so E should have been easy to see, the more so since I’d put on his little red jacket before we left the house. The problem, of course, was E’s height. Although there were only a dozen or so people in the street, they were all taller than E. If he stood in front of one of them, I’d never see him.

Add to that that there were a lot of cross streets and that if he walked down one of the cross streets, he could get so lost I’d never find him. Cursing myself for not having had him chipped when I’d had Pythagoras chipped, and wondering why no one put tracking devices on the
ears of little boys at birth, I stood on the sidewalk and said, “E? Ccelly?”

From the recessed entrance of the doll hospital, next door, a small figure emerged, pulling away from the wall in the best style of spy movies.

He looked over my shoulder to the door of the store, then threw himself in my arms. “Sorry, Mommy,” he said. “Ccelly wanted to walk.”

“Er…”

He looked into my eyes and did his best to make his eyes seem honest. They didn’t seem to stay that way, but instead a bit of laughter kept lurking at the corners. “Oh, Mom,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s just…”

“Yes?”

“I don’t like Fluffy. I was afraid she’d claw me.”

“Yeah. I often am, too.”

“And then I thought if I left, they’d have to let you go so you could find me.”

“You,” I said, “are a very bad boy.” But I couldn’t keep the laughter from my voice.

E sighed. “I know. Can we go to the Chinese restaurant buffet?”

Well, no. Technically we could not, since I hadn’t sold a piece in a long time, and I was edging close to broke. On the other hand, I wanted to. And besides, we could always eat pancakes for a week.

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s.” At any rate, the Chinese restaurant was near the police station, which would leave me very well situated for my date with Cas. We were going to look at a house together. That idea was a fear I’d face when I came to it.

I was about halfway through looking at the house when
I realized I was in trouble. No, I mean, real trouble. At some point this had gone from my looking politely interested as Cas and an annoyingly perfect-looking real estate agent led me and a strangely quiet E from room to room around the house to my starting to envision the house if I lived there. No, much worse. I was envisioning the house as it would be if Cas and I and E and at least a couple more kids lived there.

To begin with, Cas had tricked me. Instead of taking me—as I expected from his description—to a house somewhere in the suburbs, all sterile neighborhood covenants and neighbors wondering why Mrs. Wolfe was using dangerous chemicals in her backyard, he’d driven me less than six blocks from my current home.

Here I have to explain how Goldport works. You see, it’s not so much a city as a bunch of neighborhoods
jammed together. Oh, sure, we have a downtown and a token few skyscrapers, most of them office buildings. But they are token, and that’s the point. If you go in one direction from there, you come across the area of little shops, diners, coffee shops, and—survivors of the sixties—a lot of head shops and such.

But extending in each direction from those areas are pockets of neighborhoods. One of them was the area I lived in, which used to be stately Victorians but had been subdivided to become student and young couple housing. Another way from there were neighborhoods like my parents’, inhabited mostly by middle-aged and older artsy people employed in intellectual professions. The small shops in those areas catered to a better category of customers, or at least charged more.

And then there were the more exclusive areas, some of which had once been like mine—subdivided, inhabited by people starting out—but had since become more exclusive and expensive, recovering some of their Victorian middle-class appearance. This house was one of those, painted white and set within a garden, surrounded by an iron fence. It had been recently restored, as had most of the houses around it. It was a step up from Ashton’s neighborhood, as a whole, but not such a great step. It was not like the massive patrician houses that took up the streets a few blocks away. There I would have been in as much trouble as in the suburbs. No, worse. Not only would the dowagers wonder why I was playing with chemicals and wood in the backyard, but they would wonder why I never wore a nice dress; went out dressed in ratty jeans; never gave teas or parties. As for E, there was no amount of curbing that would make E fit in such a neighborhood.

But this house…well, the neighbors were likely to be as nonconventional as I was. I started by noting that I could still walk all the places I liked to walk with E, including the diner and the little coffee shop around the corner. And it was within walking distance of the neighborhood elementary school—one of the nicest schools in the city. Which meant that I had a better chance of having him go to this school than the school in All-ex’s area. And that E would eventually need to go to school was one of those necessities of life I might not like but was growing used to.

But I withstood the appeal of the front yard, the flower beds, the roses—now bare and pruned back, growing around the porch. I even withstood the front hall, with the little bench, where E, covertly, tied Ccelly to the stair banister as soon as Cas and the real estate agent turned their backs.

It was far harder to withstand the sunny family room with the built-in bookcases. Though I’m not as devoted to mystery as my parents, I did grow up in a home filled with books, and I do love reading. These were spacious polished oak bookcases in a room with windows all along its longest side. The bookcases glowed, and I could imagine my books on them. And Cas’s books, which tended to be science fiction and fantasy, since he dealt with mystery all day, every day. And E’s books, down at the bottom, all the young adult science books he liked to have read to him. I could imagine nice, comfortable sofas with plain blue cotton slipcovers—for easy washing—and E and Pythagoras nestled in one of the sofas, with a book. I could imagine some nice oak coffee tables, coated with polyurethane so they could withstand glasses of lemonade and milk. I could imagine summer afternoons, with the windows open and the breeze washing in, bringing the smell of the rosebushes.

After that point I was lost. I might as well forget telling myself that I would not, under any circumstances, consider moving and give up the apartment lease. I might as well stop telling myself that I didn’t want the pretty house and playing happy family with Cas, either.

By the time we reached the spacious kitchen, I could see myself cooking on the built-in stove, and I could imagine the kids gathered around the beautiful table I’d inherited from my grandmother: E, and Junior, and the little girl. All waiting for their pancakes. I had no idea where they’d come from—and Cas would probably kill me before letting me call a kid Junior—but they were as clear and present as the image of the table in the bay-windowed breakfast nook. Junior had my eyes and Cas’s chin, and the little girl looked like a replica of myself at her age. Which meant I’d better make sure if we did buy this house that I had a fire extinguisher for each room.

I couldn’t stop thinking of the arson we were supposedly investigating then, but it left my mind again as we went upstairs to the bedroom area. One of the rooms was just perfect for E. I could imagine him growing up in it, with posters of cartoon characters being replaced by musician posters on his wall, and the books on the desk progressing from young adult books to whatever his interest turned out to be. I could imagine him at eighteen, sprawled on the bed and talking on the phone. It was so vivid I almost told him to move his feet off the bedspread.

Then I realized he was only three and was, in fact, by my side, his hand in mine. I looked down at him, and he looked up and nodded “E’s room.” Which meant, I don’t know what, except that perhaps it was a shared dream.

The bedroom right next to the master’s would be the
nursery, of course. Which is when I realized I was utterly lost and tried to concentrate on the conversation Cas was having with the nice real estate agent.

But I couldn’t really, because they were talking about how the people who had initially renovated this had been making a business of it until recently, when the real estate market had stopped dead. Now they were left with this house—and, I understood, others as well—on their hands.

The back building was the best part of it. Not only did it have a garage, which was not a given in this part of Colorado, but it was adjacent to what had once been a carriage house, which was wide enough—and floored in practical concrete—for both my refinishing needs and for Cas and Nick’s playing with cars. In fact, it already had a lifting platform or whatever it was called, so the guys could get under the cars with minimal effort. I imagined the carriage house divided by plastic, and my side kept dust free, lined with shelves of chemicals, and…