A Fatal Stain (19 page)

The style was familiar, only because I’d recently seen it—ridiculously overpriced, of course—at one of those cutesy Asian import stores that sell paper umbrellas and baskets, also ridiculously overpriced. I remembered having looked at the pieces in horror and wondered who actually bought them, even if they were comparatively cheap and made of real wood.

But now I had to buy something, and other than headless dolls, which even the doll hospital could not fix—even if they’d been old and antique, which they weren’t—or what my son would undoubtedly class as icky clothes, and too small and babylike at that, I had nothing.

Except this.

The man who ran the garage sale approached. I knew this, because I could smell him at a distance. He loomed over me, his shadow, momentarily, obscuring the golden shimmers in the awful green paint. “Lovely piece,” he said. “Very classy. It’s amazing, really, that someone got rid of a piece that good. People moving out of state,” he said, and spit, his spit landing just beside the trunk. “They don’t have any choice but to sell, of course, but that piece there, I bet, cost them a pretty penny. It’s very new, too, none of that old junk you see around.”

I could tell it was very new, and I refrained from telling him it was new junk. Instead, I stood up, afraid next time he spit he would hit me by accident. I fished my wallet from my jeans pocket and looked in it to realize I only had ten dollars. “How much do you want for it?” I asked.

“Oh, a piece like that is easily worth a hundred dollars.”

That I could believe, since it had been marked exactly that at Ye Tacky Import Shop. However, I wasn’t going to tell him so. Instead, I said, “Um…all I have is ten dollars.” I was already calculating, in my mind, whether I could ask him to hold it while I drove to Ben’s office and asked Ben for a loan. A twenty or so. There was no way I was going to pay the man the same price this thing had cost new.

The problem, of course, was that Ben would probably commit me immediately after. One look at this trashy piece and he’d know I’d lost my mind for good. But I had to buy it, at least if I was going to be able to ask the man any questions about the supposed Jason Ashton. And besides, really, what room did the man who had been imitating a human burrito on my sofa have to talk about my sanity?

But the man, after a moment of drawing breath in, looked over my shoulder into my wallet and said, with ill grace, “Well, if that’s all you have.”

It was all I had. Quite literally. That is, it was all I had other than the money in the bank, which would go to pay the rent in a day or two.

These days, of course, the refrigerator tended to be stocked. It was very hard to get Cas to stop buying milk, eggs, and bacon. Heck, he’d been known to stop by Bread Alone and get the freshly baked loaves and sandwich fixings, too. Which to my mind was just his way of showing off his wealth. And with Ben staying over, the fridge and freezer would probably end up even more full. It was Ben’s way of repaying me whenever he’d had to crash on
my sofa for any reason. Though I might add that in the list of crazy reasons that had ever caused him to crash on my sofa, avoiding a conversation with Nick might be the silliest.

Which was something else I’d have to deal with soon but which had nothing to do with the fact that I didn’t have to like it when I was dependent on the guys for food. When I’d got divorced and found myself alone with E and confronted with All-ex’s erratic memory when it came to child support—and my not wanting to challenge it, or point out I needed it to be able to feed E, because All-ex might use that to prove I wasn’t fit to have joint custody of the child—all I could do was vow I’d never again be dependent on anyone. I’d worked hard to build my skill at refinishing and my business contacts. I didn’t want to owe Cas anything.

On the other hand, it occurred to me that marriage, after all, meant owing each other something. Sharing. And I’d agreed to marry Cas, which meant I had no business being aloof. I was either going to be his wife or not. And if I was going to be his wife, it meant letting him get food and, yeah, pay for the roof over my head. In return, I would have, after all, to have the kids, and probably— if I could find the time after all the refinishing—clean the house and do his laundry and all. I didn’t think that Cas would be crazy enough to let me cook. Or at least not often.

As this was going through my mind, I handed my last cash over. The man looked toward the car and said, “This is pretty heavy. Is your boy going to help you carry it?”

Perhaps E projected bigger through glass. “No, he’s three. Can you give me a hand?”

He gave me a hand, which meant enduring his smell
all the way to the car. We slid the trunk, top down, into the back of the station wagon, which, for once, was free of other cargo. Cas often said I used it as other people would use a warehouse, to store various finds from my shopping or scavenging trips, and only moved the objects to the shed when I had run out of space.

It was partly true. The real truth, though, is that I never moved them to the shed until I had the elbow room and the time to deal with them. Both of which were in such short supply right now that I’d not even bought any pieces to finish.

And now I had to finish planning the wedding. And, apparently, I had to come up with a bridesmaid. This was somewhat of a problem. I’d never had many friends, and of the few I’d managed, Ben was the only one I’d kept after my divorce. All the others—who were really more friendly acquaintances than friends, by then—had taken All-ex’s part in this. Possibly because All-ex was less likely to embarrass them.

This is not to say I lived a life in isolation, of course. I knew tons of people and had tons of contacts. This was the problem, though—the few friends I’d had growing up in school and such, the girls with whom I had shared confidences, the ones whose parties I’d attended, had either moved out of town or lived and worked in such different circles from me that I’d hardly even said hi to them for years.

The truth was that since I’d got divorced I’d been so busy making a living and so afraid that everyone I’d known before would disapprove of the way I made a living that they’d make snide remarks or act like I’d lost my mind. So I’d simply cut off most social contacts.

Which left me with a very odd dilemma. Who could be my maid of honor? I had no cousins. Other than Mom—who was an only child—I had no female relatives. So who could I conscript for the embarrassing role in my wedding? I mean, I didn’t think that vets gave sex-change operations, so even Pythagoras couldn’t be my maid of honor. Cas had a best man and a male attendant. No, two, since he was also having Nick’s brother as a male attendant. This was downright selfish of him. The least he could have done was have a female cousin or a sister. Didn’t he know I’d eventually need a maid of honor?

Thinking along these lines, I closed the back of the car. The man was threatening to lumber away, and I was, by gum, going to get my ten dollars’ worth of information.

“Wait,” I said. “Did you get this trunk from Jason Ashton, too?”

He stopped and frowned at me. “Who?”

“The man who sold you the table I bought before.”

His look, as memory cut through the fog of whatever he was on, seemed to say I was clearly obsessed with this Jason Ashton guy. But he shook his head.

“Oh,” I said. “I was hoping—” I let what I was hoping drop. “I wonder if he’s the Jason Ashton I know? Is he a tall, dark-haired guy?”

“Nah,” the man said. “Short, blond guy with big popped-out eyes.” He made an expression curiously reminiscent of my father’s. “Talks like this, too,” and he made a high, nasally sound that bordered terrifyingly on a whine.

“Did he…Did you see his driver’s license?”

He shook his head. “Nah. What for? I mean, I was paying him, not he me.”

“And you paid him by check?”

“Yeah.”

That was about as far as I could go. I wanted to ask him if the check had ever been cashed, but I suspected he already thought I was stalking this guy. So I said, “Oh, well. I wondered if he had other stuff to sell.”

“I don’t think he did,” the man said. “He was driving a rattrap of a car, and all he had were some baby clothes and that table.”

I nodded. Again, I couldn’t ask for a description of the rattrap of a car. But Cas could, and possibly would, once I put all the facts in his lap. At least I hoped he would, instead of thinking I’d finally slipped the last cog of sanity and contact with reality.

I said, “Well, thank you,” and jumped in the car, happy to be away from the man’s smell. I wondered if no one ever sold their stock of decorative soap, but I suspected if they did, the man running the sale would be so unfamiliar with the substance as to think of it as cheese, or perhaps cooking lard.

“Mom?” E said. In the rearview mirror, I could see he had his head turned back and was looking at the brand-new trunk. “That’s so…green.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. I was still vaguely afraid that Cas would have me put away for insanity, but right at that time, I wanted, more than anything, to get home and talk to Cas about the whole thing.

When I got home, the light was blinking on the
answering machine, and when I clicked it, I found it was Cas saying, “Dyce, I’m sorry. We’re staying over. They’ve identified the body, and Nick and I are making some phone calls. We’ll probably have something here, Chinese or whatever. There’s some cans of soup, and you could make grilled cheese sandwiches.” I loved how he sounded tentative. “I’m sure E would love that.”

E probably would have, but I’d had no time to more than get the can out of the pantry when Ben came in with Chinese. “Nick called,” he said. “To say he wasn’t coming home for dinner, so I figured…”

I didn’t even want to ask where “home” was, considering. Instead I said, “Uh…I thought you weren’t talking to each other.”

He managed to give me a completely blank look. “What? Of course we’re talking to each other.”

“Right,” I said. In my mind, the line went
Stomp once for yes, twice for no.

But he was opening rice containers, and E was jumping around like a maniac, saying, “Combination, combination, combination.”

Given all possible foods in the world, including chocolate-covered chocolate bars layered with chocolate, E would choose combination fried rice every time. Not only that, but when he starts eating it, he can’t seem to stop. In fact, there must be some form of special mechanism in his stomach that transports all the food to another dimension because he will eat an adult portion—far more than any sane toddler should be able to fit in a normal stomach.

Ben, of course, knew our tastes as well as he knew his own. He’d got hot-and-sour soup for the two of us and chicken curry for me. For himself, he’d got Peking duck, which he only liked at this particular restaurant. He got the plates and started distributing the food, while I got milk for E and soda water for myself.

Pythagoras came nosing around, rubbing on legs, and I got him tuna, which was probably a bad idea, as everything we were eating was suddenly suffused with eau de cheap tuna.

Because I couldn’t tell Ben about the murder—or possible murder—of Maria Ashton, I told him, instead, about the house I’d gone to see. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Nick told me.”

From the way he set his mouth, there was something
painful about the whole subject, and I wasn’t even about to guess what. “What do you mean Nick told you?”

“Well, the first time, Cas dragged him along to look at it.”

“Ah,” I said. “And what? Was someone murdered in it once or something? Did he sense a ghost lurking in the shadows? What is the problem with the house?”

He looked up and frowned. “Don’t be stupid.”

There was no talking to him when he was in that mood. I could have argued that I wasn’t stupid at all and that there was no reason I could see for him to look like that. Also, that it was almost impossible to read his mind when he was in this mood. Almost. I could sometimes figure it out, but it took a game of twenty questions, and I simply didn’t have the energy right now. It occurred to me that if I managed to be this bewildered, after knowing Ben for most of his life, then poor Nick must be baffled. “Stomp your foot once for yes, twice for no,” I said, cheerfully, eating my curry noodles.

He glared, and I was afraid he’d take the noodles and storm out the door, so I just made a mental note to look up the house in the news before we were irrevocably committed to buy it.

Instead, I concentrated on getting E to finish eating. As usual, when he ate this much, he was half asleep by the time we finished the meal, which was just as well, as I could then give him a bath and put him to bed.

Ben insisted on reading him a book, which must have been an excuse not to talk to me about the house—as if I were stupid enough to try that—because his idea of reading books to E included much too much ad-libbing. He was quite capable of reading a line like “The young
lady was always happy” and add his own codicil of “because she was taking Prozac by the truckload.” What he’d once done to a reading of
The 101 Dalmatians
could not—or should not—be reproduced in front of young and impressionable audiences. And the fact that E actually preferred the version of “The Three Little Pigs” in which Practical Pig decides his brothers are too stupid to live and roasts them and invites the wolf to the barbecue was something that would probably come back to haunt me in the form of therapy bills in ten years or so.