A Fatal Stain (22 page)

Cas’s eyebrows went up. “Maybe he likes crazy. Let me tell you about his ex sometime.”

But it was a mystery that was destined not to be solved, because Nick came into the room before Cas had time to reveal his deep, dark secrets, or even his somewhat shallow, vaguely shady secrets.

With E joining us shortly after, we ended up in a complete confusion, as all three guys tried to eat, shower, and dress in less time than it normally took Cas alone to get ready for work. The confusion was so great that I swear Ben’s tie was slightly askew as he left. This meant that his colleagues would view it as a sign of the apocalypse and make critical financial decisions for their clients based on this fact. This in turn meant the market would collapse, and by late afternoon, there would be brokers dropping like flies from their office windows, all because Ben had insisted on playing mummy on my sofa.

For lack of some common sense, the market was lost.

They managed to get out, though, even if at times the whole process resembled a Chinese fire drill.

I was left washing breakfast dishes as E took a bath. And then the phone rang.

I picked up the phone with my hand slippery from dish
soap, dropped it, and picked it up again. Which just goes to show you that phones are things that conspire against me.

When I finally got it to my ear, a man wasn’t exactly yelling but saying rather insistently on the other side, “Hello? Hello?”

“Hi. Yes?”

“I don’t know if this is the right number. I looked in the phone book. Dyce Dare? Of Daring Finds?”

I’d recognized his voice. “Jason Ashton?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sorry. I lost your card.”

No, he hadn’t. He’d folded it up until it had become so crumpled that it was unreadable, a process he’d started while I was still there. But, of course, I wasn’t going to say that. “Yeah. It is Dyce. How can I help you?”

“That table that you…You said you had the table Maria took.”

I felt a sudden disappointment. If, in the middle of all this, the man I’d thought heartbroken over his wife’s disappearance was obsessing over the lost table, I washed my hands of humanity.

It’s not that I particularly wanted to keep the table. Actually, if the table had evidence of a crime, I not only didn’t want to keep it, but I wouldn’t keep it. The police got a mite touchy over stuff like that.

It’s more that it seemed like a petty and stupid concern for him to have when his wife was missing.

My voice could probably have created glaciers as I said, “Yes?”

“Well, how do you know it is the table my wife took?” he said.

“The man from the garage—” I stopped.

“Yes, but he also says that it was me who sold it to him, which I can tell you it wasn’t. So…”

“No, the description doesn’t fit you,” I said.

“So can I come over and see it this evening? If it is Maria’s table, then the police can start tracing where she might be, right? Given the lack of her going to see her doctor, I’m afraid something happened to her, like…someone kidnapped her or something.”

I thought of the bloodstains on the table. “Uh. I’ll be home after about…four, I think,” I said, and thought maybe I should uncover a bit more of the blood while I still had the table in my possession. Of course, the problem with that is that I would have to find someone to watch E, which right then wasn’t likely.

“I won’t be home till five, anyway, between school and work. I’ve given notice, but I’m still working.”

“So, five thirty?” I said.

“Yes,” he said, after a pause. “That would work. Have you…talked to anyone about it?”

“Not really. I meant to tell my fianc, who is an investigator with the department, but he’s investigating murder and arson, and there were other complications.” I’d be cursed if I was going to sit here and explain to him that my best friend’s very complex love life had kept me from discussing something far more important with Cas. “So I didn’t have time to tell him.”

“Oh. Just as well,” Jason said. “That way, if it’s important, I can tell him, and that will be far more serious, and they can start investigating in earnest.”

I agreed and hung up, to find E looking up at me with a betrayed expression. “You didn’t ask him how Ccelly was doing?”

“Oh,” I said. E was washed and trailing a towel. Since the towel had been given to him by Ben, who seemed to acquire a serious case of the either deeply weird or terminally cute when it came to dressing anyone else—I suspected because he kept such a tight rein on his own tendency to any sartorial splendor—it had a little hood with cat eyes and nose. He had the hood on and looked even more like he was impersonating an angel child than ever. Not that it was convincing. I knew what evil—or at least sheer mischief—hid in the heart of E. “Tell you what, the dad is coming here this evening, and you can ask him then.”

E didn’t seem particularly convinced, but he is my son
and always operates on the principle that a half—or even a quarter—loaf is better than none.

He allowed me to shower without setting fire to the house while I was in the bathroom. In fact, the angel child impression continued. When I came out, he was on the sofa, reading to Pythagoras. I left the bedroom door partly open, so I could keep an ear out for what was going on, and was putting clothes on when I realized my son was having serious difficulties with one word. Which puzzled me a little, as he knew by heart every word in the little picture books that Ben and I read to him, to the point where his lips would move along with our reading as he recited the words.

I focused on his voice and realized he was saying, “Inkssst, inkset, inssssseeeeet.”

Right. Probably a new book on bugs that he hadn’t had time to memorize yet, and he didn’t precisely remember the word that Ben—must have been Ben because I don’t read books about insects to my son; I draw the line at rats—had pronounced. I combed my hair, tied it firmly back with a scrunchy, and hurried out to the living room to find the book that E had on his knees was not a picture book. And I hoped to heaven that no one had been reading that book to him, since it looked like a dictionary, or perhaps a particularly fat volume in an old encyclopedia.

“What are you reading, baby doll?”

“A bisgraphy. Mom, what’s inseshts?”

“Bugs.”

“No.”

“Yes. You know, little critters, like spiders and stuff. Remember that tarantula you wanted at the pet shop, and
Ben was going to buy it for you, but I said that it would get eaten by Pythagoras?”

“No. That’s a bug. Maybe. But not an
I-N-S-E-C-T
. Spiders are arcsenids.” He spoke so intently and—my realizing belatedly I’d spoken without thinking—so close to right I didn’t bother explaining that he’d mispronounced
arachnids
. Also, he could spell
insect
, so that wasn’t the word he was gagging on.

He got out of the sofa, carrying the book, open in his hands, and pointed me at the line. I choked. “Uh…incest…uh…how…er…uh.”

“What’s an incest, Mommy?”

“Oh…uh…something I’ll tell you about when you’re thirty, if you don’t figure it out before then.” I took the book from his hand before he could hold on tighter and looked at the cover. A biography of Julius Caesar. A flip to the overleaf revealed the inscription “S. Nikopoulous.” Right. Stravos Nikopoulous. Nick. Nick, who was a policeman and for the love of heaven repaired vintage cars on the weekend. Why was he reading a biography of Julius Caesar, where more than half of it was annotations—as a quick flip through the pages revealed?

I’m not, at least I hope not, one of those people who assume one is stupid because one doesn’t have a graduate degree. At least I hoped I wasn’t, because the closest I’d come to any kind of degree was two years here and a year there and then a failed marriage. And my dad had a high-school education, though Mom had managed a bachelor’s in English literature. But, in the name of all that was holy, what could Nick’s profession or hobby have to do with…a biography of Caesar?

And, more importantly, what was my three-year-old
doing reading it to the cat? It could scar the cat for life. Cats had run away from home for less than that. “Why…Where…Why were you reading this? It’s Nick’s.”

“It was on the coffee table,” E said, looking guilty. “And I like Rome.”

“Uh…and you can read.”

He nodded. “I didn’t mean to,” he said, defensively, and blushed. “I just…I found out last month I could read. I don’t know how.” He twisted his hands together. “Honest, I really didn’t mean to.”

“I don’t think it’s a hanging offense,” I told him. It might in fact curb some of his more enthusiastic attempts at self-entertainment. I grabbed the book under one arm, grabbed my purse with my other hand, sort of shoved the handle up my arm, then grabbed E with the suddenly free hand. My next body I want three hands. At least if I’m supposed to manage anything more challenging than a hamster.

I managed to open the door with the book-hand and my foot, then close it with my elbow, all the while keeping Pythagoras in the house with careful deployment of my other foot. The idiot cat is convinced he’d love to go roam the neighborhood and be a wild cat. I’ll point out that the one time he got out, he tried to claw his way back in through the door. Of course, it probably wasn’t his fault, as he was scared by a squirrel that jumped up on the front stoop next to him. You can’t expect a wild cat to face squirrels like that, because squirrels are, as everyone knows, the source of all evil. However, since he had the capacity for memory of cream cheese, he still kept trying to get out. And I didn’t want him trying to claw through the front door while I was gone. He might
actually get all the way through on sheer desperation. I mean, two squirrels might gang up on him.

Once the door was closed, I tested the handle and marched my prisoners—boy and book—to the car. The book, thrown on the backseat, would go to the police station when I went to sign the offer—if I went to sign the offer. First on the route, though, there was a trip to the library, where maybe E could find some more books on Rome, and then a trip to my parents’ bookstore, because after all, now that he read, my parents would want to get him mysteries.

Okay, this last was totally and completely self-serving and probably unworthy of me. I mean, the child hadn’t actually, as such, done anything to me. Well, not on purpose. The ravages of birth and all that were not his fault. The ravages of melting crayons on the radiator were, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Besides, I’d done worse. No, when it came right down to it, I was very much trying to throw the baby from the sleigh in order to slow down the wolves. If my parents—okay, they were odd wolves, with glasses and dentures—were busy covering E in books, I would get fewer armloads handed to me with the demand that I read them now, and maybe even—with luck—fewer handed to me with the guarantee that this book would change my life.

I had to say that though I’d loved one or two mysteries in my life, and though a few—particularly some chick’s (I was lousy with writer names) musketeer mysteries—had become regular rereads, I had yet to meet a mystery that would change my life. I mean, what would this book do? Come in, do the dishes, bathe E, give him civility lessons? Perhaps fill my bank account in the process? I’d
be more than eager for a book like that, but so far, no luck. I suspected we’d need much better technology. Or something.

The library was nearly deserted on this Tuesday morning. It was not story-time morning, but all the same, I dragged E to the children’s area of the library and explained to the young lady on duty that E liked books on Rome while writing furiously on a pad left conveniently on the desk that she was not—absolutely not—to let him check out anything rated above sixth grade. She looked at me as if I was completely insane, and I last glimpsed her heading into the picture-book area with E. I wished her luck in that endeavor. At least E wouldn’t try to escape, because he was absolutely and utterly in love with books and had never actually left the library when I’d left him alone.

Mind you, I suspected that, now that he could read, I might very well find him in another and completely different section. That was a risk I was willing to take, as I went through the corridor and door into the local-history area of the library.

This part of the building was always fairly empty and was usually staffed by one of the descendants of local blue bloods. In this case, the descendant was a woman about my age but infinitely better dressed. Again, a blonde. I think there is an archetypal blonde that was put on this Earth to annoy me, and I keep finding reflections of her everywhere. Oh, it’s not that every blonde annoys me, mind you, just the ones with perfect nails, perfect eyebrows, and mirror-smooth pale hair.

But in this case, she thwarted all my intentions of
hating her at first sight by being very nice, very attentive, and doing everything she could to help me.

She searched everything archived in the computer, as well as all the microfiches, but we couldn’t find anything on the house. Still, I didn’t feel reassured.

I emerged from the local library to find E (miracle!) still in the children’s library, having amassed quite the selection of books, including
Rotten Romans
, the companion to
Groovy Greeks
, and a couple of books on Roman legions, including what they wore and how they ate. Also, an infinitely more appropriate book on Julius Caesar, which I was
practically
sure didn’t include
Lock up your sons and your daughters; home we bring the bald seducer.