A Fatal Stain (9 page)

I thought lovingly about the table in my shed and wished I could go back there and work. Then I thought of Jason Ashton. And ambled toward the phone book on the counter.

There was only one Jason Ashton, and he lived a few blocks away, on Jefferson Street—in a warren of Victorian streets named after presidents. I wondered if the three men would notice if I left right then. But, as Cas came and put his arm around my shoulders and said, “Don’t worry, Dyce. It will be all right. I’m not going to allow them to take E,” I had to assume they would. Well, at least Cas would notice I’d left if I crept out from under his arm. He could be quite observant that way. It was the investigative training.

But in one of those bizarre coincidences that real life can get away with, Nick said, “Come on. We have something like twenty arson suspects to investigate. How you’re going to figure all of that out—plus the Ashton disappearance—with three of us in the department is beyond me.”

“Ashton?” I said, startled at hearing the name spoken outside my head.

“Woman who left her husband and disappeared,” Cas said. “Her husband reported her as a missing person, so we have to look, but there doesn’t seem to be anything
we can do. She seems to be one of the voluntarily disappeared. We still have to look.”

“Oh,” I said, but I was thinking of that table in the back and the almost-for-sure bloodstains on it.

When the two policemen finished their coffee and left me alone with Ben, I told Ben the entire story of the table and the stains.

“But,” Ben said, “isn’t it kind of normal for one wood to be disguised as another wood?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But not for oak to be disguised as pine. And not for a bad, jammed stain to be piled atop a fine oil finish.”

He frowned. “But then you also say there’s never any reason for metallic finishes and people—”

“There’s never any reason now. In the sixties and seventies, I’d guess the reason was widespread cannabis use,” I said.

“Maybe this was—”

“Maybe,” I said. “But it looks more recent to me.”

“Oh.”

“At any rate, I thought I’d go out and talk to Jason Ashton and see if anything rings any bells,” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” Ben said. “Because we don’t have nearly enough trouble already.”

“Exactly. So are you coming with me?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Jason Ashton lived in an area of Jefferson that was
just starting to gentrify. This caused near-lethal whiplash, as one tried to figure out the character of the neighborhood.

Elaborately painted and restored Victorian houses, in the midst of immaculate lawns, sat right next to crumbling, shacklike piles surrounded by barbed wire.

In between the two, in spirit—though often not physically—were Victorians painted white and converted into apartments, usually surrounded by dead lawns or front yards covered in pebbles in a vain attempt to look water conscious but really just looking cheap. More often than not, too, the landlords had let the yard go bad, anyway, so that there was grass growing in between the pebbles.

There was one of those on the left side of the Ashton residence. On the other side was an elaborate house in
painted-lady style. Ben glanced at it and frowned and looked like he was going to say something, then didn’t. He pulled up in front of the house, looking dubious. I wasn’t sure why he’d look so worried. There were other new cars on the street, interspersed with rust buckets that might have been abandoned there by the receding waters of the Flood.

“So this is the house…” I said.

He just looked at me.

“Are you going to go and ring the doorbell?” I asked. “See what they look like?”

He looked at me again. “Dyce…we are in our thirties. We don’t ring strangers’ doorbells.”

I opened my mouth to tell him we didn’t need to stay there after we rang the doorbell. But his eyes told me this would be a really bad idea.

“Dyce, we are not ringing strangers’ doorbells and running away. And if we did, what in thunder would it gain us?”

“Uh…we’d know if the missing woman answered the door,” I said. Which was, in a nutshell, the problem. I mean, sure, I read cozies, too. There are all these stories about how people investigating other people and possible crimes they have no business looking into can dress as electric company workers or social workers or poll takers. The problem—I looked over at Ben’s impeccable attire and his look of just having stepped out of a magazine on fashion for the discerning businessman. The problem was that no one would believe Ben was a survey taker or worked for any utilities. At least not until fashion sense became a metered public utility.
Hello, ma’am, we’ve noticed you’ve been expending rather too much fashion sense lately. No? Ah, I see. You’ve been
advising yo
ur husband. Well, we know how it is, but it will cost you.

As for me, I might pass as a woman collecting for charity. At least if the charity were for single mothers with disturbingly imaginative children, I thought as E said, “Ccelly can ring the doorbell.”

But who would give to such an unorthodox charity?

Ben was drumming his fingers on the wheel. He made a face and expelled his breath, with every look of a small explosion. “Okay,” he said. “I didn’t realize it was just next door. There’s an off chance that Peter saw something or knows something about them.”

“Peter?” I said. Peter Milano, a violinist in the Goldport Philharmonic, was one of Ben’s best friends—the person who usually called to organize Ben’s birthday party and the like. Except I suspected this year it would be Nick doing that. At least I hoped so. But though I’d seen Peter half a dozen times, usually at Ben-related occasions, I’d no idea where he lived.

Ben gestured vaguely toward the painted lady, then frowned. “I don’t know how late the concert ran last night, though.” Which made sense, because the philharmonic usually had concerts on Friday night. “And Collin is probably in finals.” Collin was Peter’s partner, and I understood that he was a lecturer at the college. “So I have no idea if they’ll be up.” Which made no sense whatsoever, since it was close to three in the afternoon.

Ben nodded as if to himself. At least I hoped it was to himself, because I had failed to say anything. “Right,” he said. “You wait here.”

I waited. I knew for a fact that he was only leaving me in the car so he didn’t have to take E and the invisible
llama. He was probably scared of explaining the invisible llama to his friends. Coward.

He left the car and ran full tilt up the ten or so steps to the front door, where he stopped and, presumably—hard to see from where I was—rang the doorbell.

He’d turned back, as though giving up, when the door opened. Peter—whom I’d never before seen in T-shirt and jeans—came out on the porch. There was some conversation and Ben’s shoulders shook with laughter and then Peter was coming down the steps—barefoot.

Peter Milano always reminded me of those ultra-precious shepherd statues from Spain. The LladrÓ ones, where people were freakishly elongated and often vampire pale, with dark hair. He was like that, only not taken to the point of looking unnatural. Instead, he was one of those men who seemed to have been designed to wear a tux and who always seemed slightly awkward in anything else. Also, there was white in the perfect black hair, the sort of white men get at the temples and that makes them look suave and sophisticated.

He loped along the—must be cold as all heck—sidewalk toward me, and opened the car door. “Come inside,” he said. “We’ll have tea or something. Ben said you want to ask us some questions.”

Ben, who had followed more sedately, was opening the back car door and getting E out of his car seat. But E refused to go. “Ccelly,” he said, commandingly. “You have to let Ccelly in, too.”

Peter raised an eyebrow, and I shook my head. Maybe I, too, was a coward. At least I didn’t feel equal to explaining imaginary llamas. Instead, I went in the back, and made vague motions, until E said, “You’re not unbuckling his seat belt right. Here, let me help.”

He leaned over and mimed opening a seat belt. I tried not to imagine the seat-belted and sitting-like-a-person llama there. It would have to be a very small llama; otherwise, it would be poking its head through the ceiling of the car.

E looked approving and picked something invisible out of midair. “Now, take him out,” he said, handing me what had to be presumed were imaginary reins.

How do you lead an invisible llama?
Seemed like the opening to one of those drinking songs in which you end up counting objects—possibly invisible hooves—before you get all confused and throw up on your own shoes.

However, I did the best I could, until we got to the steps, when E said, “No, no, you’re going to pull his head off,” and ran back to push the invisible llama behind up the stairs.

Peter raised his eyebrows to Ben this time, and Ben said, “Don’t ask me. As best I can tell, it’s an imaginary transsexual pet llama named Cecily.”

“But it’s invisible,” I said.

“Because that makes everything much better,” Ben said.

I half-expected Peter to run madly up the stairs, but instead he grinned and shook his head. “Cecily?”

“No,” E explained, as he’d explained to me weeks ago. “Two
C
s, elly.”

“I see,” Peter said. “Because he’s a llama, right, so he has two
L
s…”

E beamed up at him. “Yes, so he needs two
C
s.” And added in a professorial tone, “Llamas have two
L
s because all talking llamas stutter.”

“Oh?” Peter asked. I couldn’t tell if the look on his face was amusement or fear.

“Yeah. That’s why all their names have two comeuppances in the beginning.”

“Comeuppances?” Ben said.

“Consonants,” I translated.

They held the door open while I came in, leading the imaginary llama. The problem with E’s imagination is that it’s contagious. I could almost feel the weight of the imaginary lead and hear the tiny llama hooves on the floor, all the while Ccelly looked at me with his superior llama sneer.

E closed the door behind us and dusted his hands. “There. He’s only scared of stairs.” He had the grace to look down at the gleaming waxed antique floor. “And you don’t need to be afraid he’ll hurt the floors. I got him little llama tennis shoes, because ’chelle gets upset if he leaves hoof marks on the carpet.”

The sound of hooves changed to the footfalls of a well-behaved, impeccably shod llama, and I wondered what Michelle had really gotten upset at.

Ben was explaining Michelle and All-ex as we were led down a pale-blue hallway to a very comfortable-looking sitting room, done up in sofas covered in what looked not so much like pastels, but faded jewel tones. Bookcases entirely surrounded the walls, all of them loaded down with books, but without any seeming order. There were leather-bound books right next to garish paperbacks.

“I’ll go see where Collin got to,” Peter said.

Ben started looking around at the bookcases, and E sat on the chair, petting Ccelly, who, presumably, liked the room and wasn’t causing any trouble.

“Did you tell him?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Ben said.

At that moment, Peter and Collin came back in,
bearing a tray with tea things and a plate of cookies. Before I had time to think, I was sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea and a cookie. E had a glass of milk and a cookie in each hand. When he tried to give Ccelly a cookie, Collin intervened and gave him an invisible-llama cookie.

When I’d first met Collin, I’d thought that Peter had been robbing the cradle, because Collin looked maybe twenty or twenty-one. Turned out he was my and Ben’s age and a lecturer of classics at the euphoniously named CUG—a slight play on its real name, University of Colorado at Goldport.

“So,” Peter said, sitting down across from me on one of the sofas, which were surprisingly comfortable for things that looked so prim. “Ben said you wanted to know more about Maria, next door.”

I explained about the table and the stains and how it had been bothering me even before I heard that someone had disappeared who had the same last name. “She was Jason Ashton’s wife, wasn’t she?” I asked.

Peter nodded. He looked circumspect, as though he’d tell me some things, but not all, and would very much like to know why I felt a need to ask.

“It’s like this,” I said. “The table was a good price, and it looks great, but I’m afraid that if I fix it and sell it, I’ll be cooperating in destroying evidence of a crime.”

Peter looked grave. “They seem like a very nice couple,” he said. “Really. I mean, if you’re going to ask us if we heard terrible arguments, or someone crying for help…”

“No…I just…” I shrugged and bit into my cookie. “I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t have disturbed you. I was going to ring the doorbell next door, but Ben thought…”

Ben sighed. “Peter, we’re not going to repeat any gossip anywhere, and Dyce is not going to go running to the police. If it helps, she’s experienced enough with refinishing that if she thinks something sounds odd, it probably is.”

“It’s the fact that no one would disguise expensive wood as cheap,” I said.