A Fatal Stain (14 page)

I couldn’t say anything. I mean, what could I say? In a movie, I would have said, “Or else what?” but look, things people do in movies are rarely a really good idea in life. Because in movies someone yells, “Cut,” and you get to change your makeup and you don’t have to go to the dentist and rearrange your teeth.

Besides, even if the taboo against beating women who are smaller and unarmed held—and it’s possible it would have because this smaller and unarmed woman had a fianc who was a police detective—if nothing else, there
were other ways he could take revenge on me. For one, just his smoking that close to my shed was making my entire body tense, and not in a nice way. Suddenly and for no reason I could explain, and certainly for no reason I wanted to dwell too much on, I saw the image of the burned condos and heard Cas say there had been someone dead in one of them. My stomach clenched. I looked around at the street, where a parked truck showed what seemed to me to be a flamethrower.

“I do handyman work around here,” Sebastian Dimas said. I wondered if he did handyman work up at the condos, too. A lot of the real estate companies hired contractors or casually attached workers to maintain places that were for sale. I wondered what type of work required a flamethrower.

And then I realized he’d been talking all along, as now he removed his cigarette from his mouth, threw it on the ground, and stepped on it. “But you’re not interested in my sob story, right? Right. No one said you had to be. Just, without Jason and Maria, I’d probably be in the homeless shelter right about now, so you can say I’m protective of them, okay? I mean, they’ll be leaving soon, but they leave me on my feet, and there’s debts you can never repay, right?”

He looked at me, and I got the impression he wanted to say something else, perhaps threaten me a little more. But he’d no more opened his mouth than the back door opened and I heard E say, “Did not.”

“Did too,” Ben said. “Here, we’ll ask Mommy.”

I turned to look at them for a moment, and when I looked back, Sebastian was in his truck and starting it. This must imply powers of teleportation, since I refused
to think that a grown man had run away at the sound of that particular argument.

Then again, perhaps he had. I felt like running away. I also felt a headache coming on, low and tight over the eyes, mingled with an odd and inexplicable relief.

“Mommy, I didn’t cheat,” E said. “I didn’t replace the cards.”

“He did too,” Ben said. “I caught him.”

I looked up, already shaking my head in the automatic mommy shake. “Ben, honestly. What does it matter?”

“We’re supposed to be teaching him honesty!”

I wanted to tell Ben to stow it, but of course he was right. The man had the horrible habit of being right.

“Ccelly hid the cards,” E said.

“There is no Ccelly!” Ben said.

“Yes there is.”

I shook my head again. “Ben, Ccelly—”

“You’re going to make it hard for him to tell the difference between reality and imagination.”

I put my hands out blindly and rested one hand on E’s head and clasped the other around Ben’s arm. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go inside before my headache becomes blinding.”

This was the first time my oh-so-observant friend noticed something was wrong. “Did it have anything to do with the guy who—”

I nodded.

“Who is he?” Ben asked.

“He was the guy who…He’s a friend of Jason Ashton.”

Ben’s eyes went really big. “Oh. You mean…He wanted to…talk about the table?”

“No. He wanted to tell me there was nothing to look at there, and please move along.”

“Oh.” Now he looked concerned, reminding me that though he could get quite goofy on the subject of three-year-olds cheating at Candy Land, he was often the closest thing I had to a protective older brother.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Come inside,” he said. “I’ll make tea or coffee or something.” And then to E, “You’ll have to put the game away.”

“But we’re not done,” E said, and stomped his foot.

“Well, no, but I need to talk to Mommy now.”

“I hate grown-up talk,” E said.

The problem is that I did, too. More so when it had just occurred to me that Sebastian Dimas could only have found out about my snooping in one way. Ben’s friends had to have told him. Now, I understood the man was extremely good looking, but all the same, surely they hadn’t thought it was a good idea to let him know I was looking into Ashton’s affairs.

And if they had done that, how much could I trust what they’d told me? And how was I going to tell Ben about it?

I woke up with Ben knocking at the bedroom door. At
least, I woke up with my chin resting on Cas’s chest, my arm thrown across his tummy, and an insistent pounding on the bedroom door, which—when we didn’t answer immediately—turned into a cautious turning of the door handle and Ben’s voice saying, “Excuse me, pardon me.”

My eyes took some effort to open—it had been a late night of debauchery for Cas and myself, at least if debauchery consisted of eating too much pizza while playing Candy Land with the three-year-old con man. Who had cheated. And won. And blamed missing, torn, and hidden-under-the-table cards on Ccelly.

When I managed to open them, and look toward Ben, he was crossing my room, in his pajamas, a hand decorously protecting him from the site of Cas and me. Presum ably because he wasn’t sure how decent we were. Which
was a point, as I was not decent, even if I was wearing pajamas. Cas, on the other hand, was only in his underwear. And clearly had woken at the same time I had. He now opened his eyes, somewhat. I felt him stir under me, and the words “What the heck?” rumbled through his chest and into my ear.

“Ben,” I said. “Carrying his clothes, and…” Right on time, the door to the bathroom closed and the shower went on. “Taking a shower.”

I sat up, and Cas sat up after me. “Dyce, I love you more than life, but we can’t have him live with us.”

“You think I want us to?”

“No, no,” Cas said. “I’m sure you don’t, even if he cooks better than you.” He stopped as though expecting me to get mad at this. I didn’t. Ben lives mostly on restau rant takeout, but I was very well aware that he could cook better than I. Not a big deal. Ccelly probably could, too.

Cas sighed. “Okay, well…at least we have to get a house with another bathroom. Which reminds me. I made an appointment for us to see a house this afternoon.”

“What?” I asked.

He shook his head. “It’s a good price, it has a shed in the back that you can use for your work, and it has a big backyard for E. If we’re lucky, any explosions he causes will be contained before they reach the fence.”

“But—”

Cas took hold of my hand. “The other part of this, before you say something hasty, is that I want to look at this house. If I’m right about the pattern I’ve been seeing, they’ll be going after this house next—the arsonists. And I have a theory as to why they’re going after these houses. I need a plausible reason to look, see?”

“So I’m supposed to help the police with their inquiries?” I asked, which was a bad choice of words, because I remembered the inquiries I had made on my own, and the result of that. And the fact that, as much as I’d managed to convey to Ben, he’d refused to believe and insisted, instead, that Peter and Collin would never have betrayed my confidence. Right. Of course, he’d also told me that what he could see of Sebastian Dimas didn’t look all that special.

I’ll give you that Ben was, presumably—no one would make as much fuss over arguments as he did, otherwise—a man in love and that his boyfriend bore a decided resemblance to Bacchus while Sebastian was more a Hephaestus, or perhaps a Pan, but I still refused to believe that Ben—let alone Peter and Collin—was completely blind to Sebastian’s charm.

“Okay,” I told Cas, thinking that he might go easier on me when he found out what I’d been up to. “Only if the backyard is big enough to contain explosions, though.”

“Oh, assuredly,” Cas said. “Of course, I’m not sure about Ccelly. That’s one wily imaginary llama.”

I nodded. Ben was now singing something thumpy, with an excess of enthusiasm. He doesn’t have a bad voice, but it echoed through the pipes and reverberated in such a way that you couldn’t make out the words.

“I’m going to make coffee,” I said.

Cas rolled his eyes. “I’ll make eggs or something,” he said.

As soon as we were out of the bedroom, he said, “You know he’s going to wake E.”

“Of course.”

“Look, it’s just…I’m not sure he can live with us. Not even in the apartment over the garage. Nick…”

“What?” I looked over at Cas, who was chewing the corner of his lip. I wondered what he was about to say that worried him so much. Had Nick told him he was giving up on Ben? Because, Greek or not, a pain or not, I was fairly sure that Ben was still madly in love with Nick. At least I’d never seen him make so much of a nuisance of himself over anyone else. Not even his ex, who had been borderline psychotic.

“Nick is not sleeping. He’s really worried, and I don’t even know what he’s worried about. He’s…I’m going to have to tell him where Ben is spending the night. Nick has no clue what is going on or why Ben is avoiding him.”

I stared at him. “Impossible. Surely they’re arguing?”

“Not as far as I can tell. As far as I can tell, those two have fewer communication skills than Clever Hans, the calculating horse. You know, stomp your hoof once for yes, twice for no. They don’t seem to be talking at all. Each one just assumes the other’s answer and goes on that way.” He looked anguished. “I’m very much afraid I’ll have to tell Nick what’s going on.”

“Well,” I said, going on into the kitchen and starting the coffee machine. “Of course you have to.”

He got eggs and bacon from the fridge. “You mean you’re not going to tell me I can’t? You’re not going to say it’s dishonorable?”

“What? Of course not. Obviously, they love each other and are inept. Sometimes you need to give a hand to these things.” I turned around and saw him looking at me dumbfounded. “Come on, Cas,” I said. “No woman would hesitate twice before doing that.”

He shook his head. “Femaleness is another country,” he said. “They do things differently there.”

“Clearly,” I said, as I measured coffee into the basket. And then I wondered if Peter and Collin had a different code, too. Well…Ben didn’t seem to and he knew them.

At that moment, the phone rang. I looked where it was supposed to be, sitting on the counter, but it was nowhere to be found, and I was about to issue a challenge to the world of wandering phones at large when Cas put it in my hand, returning to scramble a big bowl of eggs. “It’s your father,” he mouthed, as he handed the phone over.

The number in the caller ID was in fact that of the store. It could be my mother, of course, but she usually called from the house, not the bookstore.

I pressed the button with some misgivings. It wasn’t every day that my father remembered I existed, much less called me. Of course, it was entirely possible he’d decided that the Dyce Dare mentioned in his phone pad was some book distributor.

But as I turned the phone on, he didn’t ask me about book orders or delayed book shipments. Instead, he yelled, loud enough to be heard all over the kitchen. “Dyce! I must talk to you now.”

This was twice as bad, because when my father remembered I existed, he did not remember my name. Of course, perhaps he still thought I was someone else. “Uh…Dad?”

“Yeah. I have to talk to you about the murder.”

Across the kitchen, Cas looked at me and raised an eyebrow.
Oh, sure, Dad, way to go, mention murder around my fianc, who thinks I’m at risk of being murdered by random roving bands devoted to the extermination of furniture refinishers.
I took the phone with me—with some alacrity—to the living room, as I said,
in a whisper, hoping he would follow my lead, “What murder, Dad?”

I’d underestimated my father’s reading of social cues. As my voice dropped, so did his, and it came over the phone in a fumbling whisper I could not understand at all. So I cleared my throat and returned to normal levels of speech. “What murder, Dad? Did anyone get injured at the store?” You have to understand that my father’s level of attachment to reality is somewhat shaky. He had long ago eschewed reality for mystery books, and, at this point, his confusion between reality and imagination was worse than E’s. It was quite likely that the murder he wanted to complain about had happened on the Orient Express in Agatha Christie’s mind.

“No, don’t be stupid,” he said. “This murder that you committed.”

“What?”

“Oh, you know. I’m not about to tell anyone. People take these things much too seriously,” he said. “They don’t take in account different types of morality. It’s something that Raymond Chandler—”

“Dad,” I spoke as levelly as I could. “I didn’t murder anyone.”

“Oh, there’s no reason to pretend with me.”

E padded across the living room, clutching Pythagoras, and giving me no more than a vaguely sleepy look, as I told my dad, “I haven’t killed anyone, Dad. Honestly.”

“Oh, if you’re going to be that way,” Dad said in the tone of a man humoring the mentally ill. And then, sounding sullen and put-upon, “I’m only trying to help.”