A Fatal Stain (18 page)

“Find her balance?”

His jaw worked for a while, while he remained silent. “You see,” he said, “Maria was having these problems, and she went to the doctor. We thought she might be pregnant, because she would fall asleep for like fifteen minutes at a time, in the oddest places, and in the middle of doing stuff, and it was a lot like the first three months when she was pregnant with Isabella, so we thought…But it turned out she had narcolepsy.”

He saw my total confusion. “It’s a sleep disorder. It’s not mental, you know, or psychological, but it is in the brain. The brain doesn’t produce a certain protein that regulates sleep cycles. That means she wouldn’t sleep at night, and then she would fall asleep at unpredictable times during the day. We both work very hard. I mean, we both go to school, and she had the kids, and I work at the lumberyard part-time. Well, I did till last week. So it wasn’t like…I mean…it has no cure, but there are medications for it, so maybe we could control it. So she started taking the meds and all, but it takes time to adjust to them, and meanwhile she…needed help. Watching the kids, and making sure she was okay around the house and stuff, so we had to have one of our friends always with her, and…I think she felt useless. Or as if she was a burden on me, which was totally not true. She kept saying that the kids and I would be better off without her.”

“So you weren’t afraid she had committed suicide.”

“Well, no,” he said. “Because people who commit suicide don’t take all their clothes, the kitchen table, and a chair.”

“Oh, she…took stuff?” I was thinking of the table. He wouldn’t tell me about the table if he’d been the one to kill her, right? Or if the table was somehow involved? But the man at the semi-permanent garage sale had told me that he’d bought the table from Jason Ashton.

“Yeah. Our friend Sebastian normally stayed with her. He’s our oldest friend here in town, and he’s the most reliable of our friend group. So he stayed with her while I was at work. But he works as a handyman, and he can’t afford to turn work down, not in this market. So he had to go and fix someone’s leaking washer for an hour, and he says Maria told him she would be okay, so he left. When he came back, the kids were in bed and asleep—this was in the evening—but Maria was gone. She did not take her car, which is weird, but she’d taken a bag with all her clothes, and the kitchen table, and a chair.”

“Isn’t it weird?” I said. “I mean, that the only furniture she’d take was the kitchen table?”

He twirled my business card between his fingers. “Not really. The table came from her aunt’s house, and she was very attached to it. If she was going to take something from the house, it would be that.”

“But if she was only going to be gone for a few days…”

“I figured she’d rented a place somewhere and taken the table so that she could feel at home. You know, something she knew and was comfortable with? And I figured it was until she could figure out her medication and the dosages and come to terms with her illness. She had
trouble because she was convinced…Well, some of the medicines you take for narcolepsy are antidepressants, and she was afraid people would think she was mentally ill.”

“Ah. And when…when did you decide to go to the police?”

“I wanted to give her all the room she needed,” he said. “We got married right out of high school, you know, have been married for almost ten years, and I trusted her. I thought she would do the best possible, and I trusted she loved me and would eventually come back to me.”

“Trusted?” I said. “But not anymore?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I have trouble believing that she doesn’t love the kids, at least, even if she’s mad at me or feels she can’t come back to me. But that’s not it. What I’m afraid of,” he said, “is that something happened to her.”

“Why?”

“It’s like this,” he said. “I got an offer from a university in California. I just finished my doctorate in classical studies, and you know—or perhaps you don’t, but I know—how difficult it is to get a position in academia right now. But this place in California, no, not UC Berkeley, but a small, private college you probably never heard of, offered me an assistantship, and it has a good possibility of advancement, plus I’d make enough that I wouldn’t need to moonlight at Home Depot. It’s the kind of thing that’s too good to pass up. So, even though I’d been giving Maria room to decide she wanted to come back, I realized I needed to get in touch with her and tell her about this. Because, you know, if she finally decided to come home, even if there was someone here to tell her where the kids and I had gone, it could be a problem.
I mean, she’d wonder if I really cared for her because I hadn’t even bothered to tell her in advance.”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling sorry for what appeared to be a nice man in a terrible situation.

“The only lead I had to contact her was her doctor. I hated to tell the doctor I hadn’t the slightest notion where she’d gone, but it was also my only way to get to her. So I called Doctor Ludo.”

“And?”

“And he hadn’t heard from her since the week before she disappeared. In fact, she’d missed one appointment, and they were concerned because her medicine would be running out soon.”

“So then you told the police?”

He nodded. “Yes.” He hesitated. “And now, if I may, why do you ask? What…what has made you investigate?”

“I bought the table,” I said.

“What?”

“I bought your kitchen table. At a garage sale.”

“But…” He frowned. “Did Maria sell it?”

I shook my head. “Not that I know.” I told him about my interview with the man running the garage sale.

Jason looked puzzled. “But I didn’t sell it,” he said. “I thought…Do you have a description of the man who sold it?”

I shook my head.

“But surely you buy used furniture all the time,” he said. “What was so special about this one that you had to investigate it?”

So I told him. About the gummed-up top, but not about the blood. I didn’t want to tell him about the blood.
I’d decided there was enough in this, right now, to go to the police. Or to Cas, who was the more familiar, closer, and less scary form of the police. To him I could tell things like what Collin and Peter claimed to have seen—that is, Sebastian helping Maria out of the bathroom. I certainly was not going to tell this anxious, sad man about it.

“I want to see the table,” he said.

I hesitated. “It’s in my work space, and I don’t want anyone to go in without me there; besides, perhaps the time has come to talk to Cas…to the police about it.”

To my surprise, he nodded. “Yes. Of course. I wish you’d told me earlier.” He shook his head. “I mean, I wish I’d known earlier. Maria would never, ever, ever have done that kind of half-assed finish on the table, so I wonder what went wrong. I mean, someone could have robbed her. She could be somewhere in the high country without the means to get back. Or…”

I know both our minds went there at once.
Or she could be dead.

He looked at me, his eyes widening in horror. “I just want her to be well,” he said. “And…and I’d like her to come back. Yeah, I know she didn’t believe she was as much use to us after…well, she thought that we’d be happier without her, and she kept saying she’d get an apartment and get out of my hair, which is why I didn’t think anything about…” He put his hand on his forehead. “I just want my wife back.”

He might, of course, be the world’s greatest actor, but I couldn’t help believing him.

I got into the car with a flushed, happy E. “I left Ccelly
with them,” he announced.

“Huh? Oh,” I said, which was about my level of coherency.

“Isabella liked Ccelly, and she doesn’t have a Mommy just now. I have a Mommy, so I told her she could keep Ccelly for company.”

“That’s very sweet of you, honey,” I said. Which was true. It was also a little odd, as I’d never before heard of a child giving away his imaginary friend. But then, my son was nothing if not original.

“Yeah,” he said. “I left her a sack of oats, too. You don’t mind?” He looked worriedly at me.

“Of course not.” For all I cared, he could give away all the invisible, imaginary oats he wanted.

I drove for a few moments in silence, and then E said, softly, “You’d never just disappear, Mommy, would you?”

This, too, was one of the sweetest things E had ever said. Look, I have no illusions about my fitness as a mother. Even if I wanted to have them, I couldn’t. It seems like every other week All-ex throws one of my failings in my face. I am, it appears, insufficiently sensitive to E’s delicate development stages. I don’t give him organic, full-fiber food. I don’t dress him in shoes that support his growing arches or in clothes that won’t dent his self-esteem when he meets better-dressed peers. Add to that that I’ve failed to teach him to hold up his place in society with the right manners and that at three he has yet to learn a second language—which means, if I am to believe Michelle Mahr, that he’ll never make it into one of the better-rated preschools. This, in turn, will keep him from getting into the most exclusive kindergartens, and it will all end, by degrees, with E digging ditches for a living in some back-country town.

Or, at least, that’s what All-ex tells me. Though I’ll note his attempt to have E learn to play piano went badly wrong. I never got the full story out of Michelle, who can’t seem to explain herself when she’s also having hysterics. However, I believe it was something about how E had set fire to the teacher’s hair. But surely that couldn’t be true, unless it was accidental, or I’m sure I’d have heard something more about it. Of course, it was entirely possible E had simply set fire to the piano. He had a very forthright way of showing when he didn’t care for something.

I knew when Mother’s Day came around, if E ever got me a mug that said
To the world’s greatest mom
, it was
proof he hadn’t learned to read yet. Otherwise, it would be because it was the only thing he could buy on his way to see me.

But to hear him ask me not to vanish gave me a sort of inner happy feeling. Okay, it was sort of a minimal type of praise. After all, how many times do we go around wishing people would vanish, especially people we didn’t particularly like? But it was praise, nonetheless, and I hoped to hold on to it, to remember when E was a stormy teen who hated me, hated me, hated me.

So I said, “I will do my best not to.”

“Thanks,” he said. Then, as though he’d scoured his mind long and hard for a compliment that wouldn’t be a lie, he said, “No one makes pancakes like you.”

I realized I was about to drive by the house with the semi-permanent garage sale, and it occurred to me it wouldn’t hurt—before I talked to Cas—if I asked the man for a description of the person who’d sold the table. I mean, I had thought that Jason was plausible and truthful, but frankly, it wouldn’t be the first time I was fooled. I mean, I had married All-ex after all, even if I’d corrected the mistake as soon as it was humanly possible. So it’s not like I could claim an infallible knowledge of men. Or women, or even small animals. Or, possibly, my parents, who sometimes acted like aliens.

“I’m going to go talk to this man, okay?” I asked E as I parked my car and reached for the door.

He gave me an evaluating look. “At the icky garage sale again?”

“Yeah,” I said.

E looked worried. “You’re not going to buy me any of that stuff, right?”

I laughed. My son, the fashion arbiter, refused to let me buy stuff from a dclass garage sale. “No. I just want to ask the man a few questions.”

It wasn’t until I was out of the car, though, that it occurred to me if I just trooped up to the man and asked him about who had given him a check, he was likely to become defensive. Just a little. So defensive, in fact, that it was entirely possible he’d give me wrong information just to take revenge.

Between the sidewalk and the pathetic spread of things on the lawn, it occurred to me that the best strategy—since I didn’t have a lie detector available—would be to get the man relaxed. And the best way to do that would be for me to buy something.

I cast a desperate eye over the flotsam and jetsam of other people’s lives that had come to rest on this lawn. I’d seen better pickings in Dumpsters. At least those that didn’t contain dead bodies. Well, those, too, but you sort of had to work around the dead bodies.

Then I noticed a virulently green-gold box. At least, at first I thought it was a box, till I got closer and realized it was a wooden trunk. The sort of thing where, presumably, brides had kept their trousseaux. Or the type Grandma kept her quilts in.

Only anyone keeping quilts in something that was painted bright, virulent greenish-gold, as this one was, would find that everything inside had turned overnight into polyester in a paisley pattern. To make things worse, it had huge golden knobs on it. I opened the top, looked inside, and realized that this was a modern, very cheap piece.

It wasn’t that it was badly made, as such. I mean, it was real wood and not veneer, though I couldn’t quite
establish what the wood might be, besides “pale and smooth.” The paint was a very thin layer, probably applied by sprayer, and it was a weird shade between green and gold, so you could kind of see gold flecks in it.