A Fatal Stain (3 page)

I made much more rapid progress than I’d expected. I’d just discovered some gashes on the table, and what looked suspiciously like bloodstains, when I heard Cas call me.

“Dyce, honestly,” he said. “Someone could sneak up
on you and kill you, and you wouldn’t even notice.”

I didn’t tell him I was quite likely to notice being dead. First off, it wouldn’t do me any good. When he was in this mood, he had no sense of humor. Second, I’d found that dating a policeman came with its very own set of issues. One of them was his certainty that everyone, everywhere, was looking to murder someone he cared for. He seemed to think people sat around all day going,
Who does Cas Wolfe like? Oh, yeah, that chick who does the furniture. Why haven’t we killed her yet?
It just wasn’t sane. I mean, for one, how many people could do this full time? Who would pay them? How would they have money for rent and groceries?

But it was useless telling Cas this. When he spent the night at my place, he would walk all around the house
every night, checking the locks in every window and door. He’d die if he knew how many times I’d left the door unlocked through the night. No, he wouldn’t die. He’d start foaming at the mouth and raving about murderers and rapists.

Mind you, I didn’t leave the door unlocked on purpose—not as such. But it wasn’t a big deal, because this wasn’t a bad area of Goldport. Oh, okay, so my friend Ben thought that downtown Goldport near the university was a slum and that gangs fought in the street in front of my house every day. But Goldport was never a big town, though it had achieved a somewhat large and definitely rowdy population during the gold rush. That had left its echo in places named Goldpan Alley and Three Shots Street, and the Leather and Lace Hotel up the street, which was a bed-and-breakfast on the site of a famous brothel.

The gold bust had left the town deserted, its fine Victorian buildings falling to pieces, until the University of Colorado (UC Goldport) had moved to town and brought with it a boom in tech and other white-collar jobs.

Goldport was so white bread that it was a wonder no one had ever tried to spread butter an inch thick all over it. Even downtown Goldport was as safe as suburbs in larger cities. If gangs fought on the street in front of my house, it would be the Paperclips versus the Calculators. They’d be hauling some serious numbers and glaring daggers at each other. They could do serious damage with the edges of their sharpened gold MasterCards.

But, of course, Cas thought otherwise, and there was no point arguing. After all, he saw whatever crime there was in town—and for him, even a single crime would be
too much. If murders didn’t happen, he’d upgrade graffiti to serious-crime status.

“I’m sorry.” I gave him something approaching a contrite smile—at least if my acting abilities were up to snuff—while I looked at the table. The table bothered me.

My acting went to waste. Cas was staring at the table. I knew that expression. It was the sort of expression he got when he tasted something I’d just cooked and discovered it wasn’t a gourmet meal. This shouldn’t be a surprise, mind. Other than pancakes—I had lots of practice on those—I could do a decent mac and cheese and heat up a mean can of soup. But hope springs eternal, and Cas’s other major blind spot was his belief I could do whatever I wanted to—including cooking. Which meant each new, bad experience was a shock.

His face now showed agonizing confusion mixed with an unwillingness to hurt me. Kind of like when my vol-au-vents broke the knife he tried to cut them with.

He was looking at the trench in the middle of the table and studiously avoiding looking back at me. Part of me wanted to tell him I’d done that on purpose, just to see how pretzel-like he’d become in his attempt at being supportive. But the other part of me—the part who desperately wished to make this relationship work—took a deep breath. “Uh…I shouldn’t use the sander on furniture,” I said. “Maybe on a large floor.”

His eyebrows went up, and he looked amused. “A
really
large floor?” he asked. “Open wide, with an inch of paint all over it?”

I realized that I’d just told him I couldn’t use his gift. “I don’t mean I won’t use it,” I said. “I could…” Was I really trying not to insult someone who had given me a
gift, even though I couldn’t use it? When had I become an adult? I didn’t like it. I demanded a recount. Surely I still had some childhood left?

He laughed. “It’s all right,” he said. “You said you wanted it, so I got it for you. I have no idea if it’s useful or not. I’ll get you something else.”

“No, no, you don’t need to get me anything else,” I said. “I was planning our wedding today,” I said, in a desperate attempt to change the subject. If we continued talking about this, we were going to talk about where we were going to live again. We were going to revisit Cas’s determination that we should buy a house, preferably in the suburbs, while things were still cheap. My problem is that I was sure the house in the suburbs would not really contain a workshop where I could continue pursuing furniture refinishing. It would be far too messy and stain things and all. And besides, when all was said and done, Cas didn’t really want me to continue doing this. And I didn’t want to give up refinishing.

No, it wasn’t anyone’s dream career. Well, at least it wasn’t mine. My dream career would be something like getting paid for lying on white, sandy beaches and testing the mixing on fruity drinks with umbrellas on top. Despite careful perusal of the classifieds, I’d yet to find someone looking for applicants to fill such a position.

Refinishing furniture was dirty, messy, occasionally dangerous—perhaps more dangerous than it should be, given that my parents had cursed me with discovering murders. Oh, okay, so I had no proof they’d done this, but then I had no proof they hadn’t done it, and it seemed like the sort of thing they would try. It led me to Dumpster diving and driving back alleys looking for furniture
discards on certain days. My hands were always scratched, my nails were a mess, and I kept my hair in a style that I could confine without destroying hours of work, because refinisher was really bad hair conditioner. But I had finally, after three years, built my business to where I could make enough to keep E and me in pancakes.

Cas must not have wanted to discuss that again, either, because he said, “Can you make it…I mean, is it repairable?”

“Yeah,” I said. I scraped a bit of the weird stain away, and I was sure there were more…organic stains there, and I was trying to tell myself they were not bloodstains. “It will take time.” I didn’t even want to think how long it would take. Mind you, the table was worth it, but it would take me the better part of a week to undo the mindless stupidity of a few seconds.

“It’s a different wood,” he said, as if he were probing. I wanted to tell him that, yeah, it was and that it was weird. Instead, I said, “It happens sometimes.” Because the alternative was telling him that it was the first time I’d seen expensive oak disguised as cheap pine. And the problem was that once you told something like that to a policeman, he’d want to know why anyone had done that, and he’d want to know if it was common, and if I started talking about it, I was going to show him the dark stains. And then he was going to accuse me of inventing murder, as if I had come up with the idea that it would be great to find a crime to investigate. Like anyone would do that. Other than my parents.

At which point several things would happen.

If he decided the stains were blood, he might think
he had probable cause to investigate the table and its provenance—only there were certain things the police were not even remotely prepared to do without evidence, and chances were that they would poke around for a while, then drop it when more concrete crimes emerged to occupy their time.

Or—and far more likely—he would either decide the stains weren’t blood or that they were blood but really old and not important. In which case, I would have to tell him he had no way of knowing that and demand that we discover more about it and then…

And then we’d be right back where we’d been six months ago, when I’d decided the old piano I was refinishing had contained clues to a tragic love affair and double murder. It had, of course, but on the other hand, the murderer hadn’t killed again in more than fifty years. Until I started investigating, and she’d tried to kill Ben and myself. And almost succeeded with Ben. So it could have been argued that Cas was right and it was best to let things lie.

This whole being-responsible thing was really, really hard, and I wasn’t sure I liked it at all. My instinctive approach to life was rather like taking that sander to the table. Usually with the same results.

“I…will have to sand carefully and rebuild a bit,” I said. “But it’s a good oak table and I—”

The phone rang. My cell phone, which I kept with me in the workshop. I looked for it under a stack of rags, then under a bunch of sandpaper. I swear the thing hides from me. I’d just leaned forward to peer behind the cans of varnish when Cas’s hand, holding the phone, appeared in my field of vision. “Near the sander box,” he said.
Which figured, since I’d never have put it there. Phones don’t like me and conduct a guerrilla warfare against me. It’s my cherished belief they’re an alien life form, come to drive me—specifically—completely insane. Though it might be argued it’s a short road and well paved.

I flipped the phone open and said, “Yeah,” before I registered that the number and name displayed belonged to All-ex Mahr. But it was much worse than that. Michelle, the new Mrs. Mahr, was the one who spoke, in her annoying I’ll-sound-like-a-little-girl voice. “Hi? Candyce?”

Her habit of calling me by my full name was one of the many, many things that made me want to throw things, not that I held a grudge against her or anything. Certainly not for marrying All-ex, of course. By the time she got him, I was more than done with him. No, it was because she exactly resembled all the perfect little girls whose existence had tormented me since grade school. They were pink and perfect, and their hair was always in the exactly right place. They dotted their i’s with little hearts. They never wanted to splash in muddy puddles, climb trees or walls, or go riding their bikes, with no hands, down Suicide Hill.

Their clothes never inexplicably turned up all frayed and torn and they never had to explain to their mothers that, really, through no fault of their own, their book bag had mysteriously been swung around and around by a very small, utterly spontaneous tornado, that really had nothing to do with their swirling it around and around over their head, till the tornado—not
them
at all, of course—had lost control and flung it into the middle of the street where an ill-timed eighteen-wheeler had run over it, but look, you’d managed to salvage two pages
from your math book, which had got blown back at you, and wasn’t that a good thing? And
their
mothers had probably never given loud thanks over dinner that it had been a full twenty-four hours without their causing either fire or severe property damage.

Girls, and now women, like that always gave me an urge to dip their pigtails in ink—even when both pigtails and ink were metaphorical.

But I gritted my teeth and said, “Yeah?” again.

“Well, it’s Enoch, you see,” she said, her high little-girl voice changing into the breathy, little-girl, I’m-too-cute-to-be-in-trouble voice.

“What about E?” I asked, refusing to call the kid by the psychosis-inducing name. The last time I’d had this kind of conversation, my son had flushed one of All-ex’s precious signed baseballs and flooded most of All-ex’s McMansion.

“Well…you see, he’s not feeling really well, and we’ve taken him to the doctor, and…”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s nothing serious. Just this cough thing that’s going around, we think, but since he’s running a high fever, and we’ve already been exposed, I was wondering…We got the prescription and all, if we could keep him over till next week. You can have him for more time, after that. I mean—”

I wanted to say no. But it didn’t make any sense to do so. For some time now, since the new Mrs. All-ex had been included in the joint custody—before that, All-ex hadn’t been really good at looking after a sick baby—if E got sick while with one of us, he stayed until he was feeling better. It made more sense than transferring
bottles of cough syrup and antibiotics. And besides, they took him to some fancy pediatrician on the other side of town, and since he was already being treated there, I couldn’t just go to my pediatrician close to home. Also, this would give me the weekend free with Cas.

It made perfect sense, and yet I felt my hackles rise, and I wanted to demand they give me my son now, as was agreed under our custody arrangements. I figured it must be the pressure of trying to be an adult elsewhere that was driving me nuts. I forced myself to say, “Oh. Okay. May I talk to him?”

“Well…no. That is, he’s taking a nap. You know how that cough medicine can make kids feel all tuckered out and—”

I swear at that moment I heard E’s voice in the background saying something about Peesgrass—Pythagoras, the cat—and another sound, like something rubbed against the phone. Or a hand clapped over the receiver.