A Fatal Stain (21 page)

I drank another two beers with Ben that night. Now
, I realize that for most people three beers isn’t exactly something to get worried about, but for a woman who had spent the last two years unable to afford grains except in the form of flour for pancakes, three beers were an awful lot.

At any rate, I was never that good with alcohol. The last time I’d drunk any significant amount, I’d ended up climbing the statue of the miner downtown and sitting at the top imitating a chicken, until one of my friends—this had been during vacation from college—had thought to call Ben on the cell phone, and Ben had talked me into coming down. Or, at least, he had told me he had instructed my so-called friends to take pictures of me and send them around.

I couldn’t remember the whole episode very clearly, but I was halfway sure that at least one of the little wretches had gone ahead and taken the picture and probably at this very moment there was a picture of me in some photo service—or a video—called
Woman in Short Skirt Imitates Chicken atop Statue of Miner
. I’d always been too afraid to look.

At least I was fairly sure the beers hadn’t caused me to climb any statues—mostly because the closest thing to a statue in the house was E’s Darth Vader doll, and if I’d tried to climb that, it would be squished flat and E would be howling for my blood. Since I couldn’t hear any sirenlike yowls from my ever-beloved progeny, it stood to reason that the doll was fine, and also that I hadn’t tried to climb any statues.

I also had to deduce, with my extraordinary investigative powers, that I had at some time gone to bed, and that I’d still been enough in possession of my faculties to have undressed, dressed in my pajama pants and T-shirt, and put my dirty clothes in the hamper. At least I was wearing my normal sleep attire, I was in bed, and my day clothes were nowhere around.

Cas was asleep, facedown on the bed, with his head in his arms, snoring gently. I put my arm over his shoulders, as much to reassure myself that he was really there as to look over his head at the clock.

It was pushing seven in the morning, and I probably should get up. Besides, I felt a great hankering for coffee just then, even though I did not have a hangover. I sat up, and Cas opened his eyes. I told him what I was doing, and why, and he looked over at the clock. “Ah,” he said.
“I should get up, too. Have a long day ahead of me. And I talked to the agent, and she’s bringing the papers over for us to sign, for the offer, this afternoon at three.”

“Oh. To the police station?”

“Yeah.” He got up, looking quite nice in his boxer shorts and nothing else. Me? I refused to look in a mirror till I’d had some coffee. I was fairly sure my hair was all over the place and that my face had somehow become all puffy and wrinkly during the night, so that I looked more like Sir Winston Churchill than like myself. In fact, the only reason I had agreed to marry Cas—at least that I was willing to admit to—was that he was capable of looking me in the face when I first wakened and telling me I looked beautiful.

Since he was an officer of the law, and therefore not inclined to lie, this must mean that he was mostly blind. And when you find a man whose blindness leads him to believe you look wonderful in the morning, before you even wash your face, you secure that man’s affections with all the alacrity of a Victorian bride proposed to by a prince.

“Uh…who got murdered in the house?” I asked. I swear the words were out of my mouth before I’d thought about it. Weirdly, he didn’t even look surprised.

“Don’t know,” he said. “As far as we can tell it’s a male, aged about thirty-five, but we haven’t been able to identify him in any of our databases, so we’re sending the dental impressions out this morning, though you know, given the fire, those were pretty damaged, and fillings might have run out, and—”

“There was a fire?” I asked. “In the house?” I was wondering in which room it had been, trying to imagine
the interior blackened by fire. I wondered if we removed the tile and all the beautiful oak woodwork, whether we would find burnt timber beneath. “It was in the family room, wasn’t it?” I asked. “That’s why they have all the nice oak bookcases up.”

He stared at me for a moment. “Dyce? What in hell are you talking about?”

I waved my hands. “The family room. With all the bookcases. They probably put up the bookcases to hide charred stuff. There are probably other bodies behind there. And the stupid thing is, I was willing to buy the house because of the oak bookcases, because I thought they made the room feel warm. Warm. It must have been warm enough to—”

He laughed. “Dyce, no. We’re talking about different houses.”

“We’re buying another house?”

“No. I was talking about the condo fire we’re investigating. The corpse is male, and we haven’t been able to ID him. We’re going to send out the dental impressions, perhaps as far as Denver, and then we’re going to start asking the neighbors—who aren’t very close, but might still have seen something—if anyone has been around that house in the last few days and what he looked like. If we get a description, we might be able to identify the vic.” He looked at me.

I was too busy registering relief that the body in the house couldn’t possibly be Maria. Not unless she’d had a sex operation in the meantime, and anyway, I doubted that those showed up if all you had was a skeleton. “Oh. I thought you meant the house we’re buying. What was the murder there?”

He frowned. “I don’t think there was one. Why?”

“Ben.”

“What? Ben thought there had been a murder?”

“Ben told me there had been a murder,” I said, then thought over our exchange carefully. “No. Never mind. It wasn’t that, but he gave me the impression there had been a murder. He said Nick went and saw it with you.” This was almost accusing.

“Well, I had to make sure it was worth it before I took you over there under false pretenses, and Nick was with me. But I’m fairly sure I didn’t tell Nick there had been any crime in the house, and I doubt Nick told Ben any such thing.”

“Ben acted like there was something wrong with the house,” I said, stubbornly.

“Ah. Dyce…In case you didn’t notice, the house next door to it is also for sale.”

“So there’s something wrong with the house next door?” I asked. I was fathoms deep in the deepest mud, doing the backstroke while wearing a blindfold. Any minute now, I’d hit my head on the remains of Atlantis.

“Er…not that I know. Look, let’s not make a simple thing complicated, okay? Just come by the office at three, we sign the offer, and everything is fine, okay?” He smiled at me. “That way we can start finding pieces for it, and we’ll have it all ready to live in by the time we get married.”

It sounded lovely. And if he thought I was going to sign that offer before I went to the library and looked up the history of the house, he had another thing coming. But there was absolutely no point antagonizing him until I
had reason to, so I said, “Okay,” and got out of bed, and opened the bedroom door.

The mummy had brought his friend, scruffy zombie. The mummy was still lying on the sofa, completely wrapped in a white blanket, which he must have had in the trunk of his car the night before. But now there was another body on the floor. I was fairly sure this one wasn’t a mummy because he wasn’t all wrapped up in white, with his arms by the side of his rigidly held body. Instead, he was sprawled on the floor, his arms above his head—the better to bring them to a forward position when he headed off screaming,
Brains!

Instead of the white blanket, he was wearing…no. He was inside a sleeping bag. An orange, camouflage sleeping bag, designed, I guessed for those rare times when you needed to fit in inside a violently orange forest, possibly made of Play-Doh. And I would swear he was a zombie, because his dark, curly hair was a mess; his face looked three shades paler than normal, highlighting the slightly olive—no, greenish—tint of the skin; his mouth was slack; and—very important—he had dark circles around his eyes. If he had neck bolts, he’d be Frankenstein, but without neck bolts, we’d have to assume zombie.

I was about to make some comment about ever-multiplying cheap horror-movie critters when Cas leaned into me from behind and put his finger on my lips, as if to command silence. “In the kitchen,” he whispered in my ear.

So I went to the kitchen, but Cas wouldn’t even let me bang some cups around to wake the sleepers. Clearly, he
thought the curse of the mummy would kill us all. Instead he said, in a whisper, “Don’t.”

“But they have a home,” I said. “Two homes.”

He nodded. “I know. But they need to talk.”

“Oh, yeah? The only way you’ll get those two to talk is to make them stomp their feet for yes or no.”

“Okay, but for that to be effective, we’d have to put metal shoes on them.” He winked at me. “And yeah, I know it’s tempting just now, but we’d regret it in the morning. Seriously. They do need to talk, and I’m hoping they do.”

I nodded and started to get coffee going as quietly as I could.

“For one it would be truly annoying if my two groomsmen weren’t talking to each other at the wedding. For another, because it’s not like they’ve broken up. They’re just being weird. And I get plenty of weird from—” He stopped. I assumed, for charity’s sake, that he meant that he got plenty of weird at work. I mean, what could be more normal than my household, with the two horror critters in the living room, the son who had an invisible llama, and not a single female friend?

“Anyway, my life is weird enough,” Cas said. “I can’t take another source of weird. And Nick’s nonconfidence confidences are driving me insane. It’s like,
Guess what’s wrong in my life right now, for the prize of a burger and some really crunchy fries.”

“He gives you fries for guessing what’s wrong?”

“He takes me to lunch and then determinedly doesn’t pour his heart out to me.”

“Hey, Ben brought a six-pack of microbrews over. For the same purpose, I think.”

“Wonderful. If they’re not going to talk to us, the least we can do is get them to buy me alcohol, too.”

“So you told Nick—”

“Nope. I just invited him in for a coffee, and he came in, and Ben was asleep on the sofa. So Nick went to his car and got his sleeping bag.”

“Nick often hide in orange forests?”

“What? Oh. I think it’s designed for hunters. So they don’t get shot by accident.”

Which made perfect sense, of course. First, you made it of camouflage, so that they could blend into the forest, and any deer who were so observant as to look around for people would fail to see them, and second, you made it virulently, offensively orange so that if any hunter was wandering around looking for deer sprawled in sleeping bags on the forest floor, he wouldn’t accidentally shoot a fellow hunter. “Nick hunts?”

“Not that I know.”

Right. We were now well into primeval silt. Listen, when this mud had been deposited, fathoms deep at the heart of a dark ocean, dinosaurs had still walked the Earth. I’d find them, too, the moment I removed my welded-on blindfold.

The coffee started percolating, and Cas started scrambling eggs. There is this noisy element to eggs; they are not silent food. You have to crack the shells and use some kitchen utensil to scramble the contents. And, at any rate, the bacon that Cas had put in a very large pan was going to crackle and fizz. And the smell alone could wake the dead. Or, in this case, the undead.

I knew it had succeeded when a long, low moan came from the living room. It sounded so macabre and odd
that I almost jumped out of my skin, and would have, if it hadn’t been followed by, “You? What are you doing here?” in Ben’s indignant tones.

This was followed by Nick sounding about three octaves lower than he normally did. “Sleeping. At least, I was till you moaned like a ghost or something. What happened?”

“You’re here!”

“Yeah.”

“But this is not your place.”

“No. Or yours. Why isn’t it yours?”

“What? I wouldn’t rent here if—”

“No. Why aren’t you in your place?”

“Because I’m here.”

“Benedict Colm!”

“Okay, fine. Because you have a key to my place.”

“Oh.” That sounded…not quite offended, but wounded. And neither of them seemed to have given the slightest thought to the fact we could hear him. “You’re trying to avoid me?”

“No.”

“Uh.”

“Okay, Nick, if I were trying to avoid you, I wouldn’t you know…call you and stuff.”

“Right…” I couldn’t hear it, not really, but by now I knew Nick well enough to know he was rubbing his hand on his chin, producing a noise somewhat like running your nails over sandpaper. “Right. But you’re trying to avoid us spending the night in the same place?”

“You know what you’re like in the morning,” Ben said. “You always want to talk.”

“Yeah,” Nick conceded. “Like now.”

“Yeah, but we’re not home,” Ben said.

“Noted. Ben, can we talk. I mean, really?”

“Not even. Cas and Dyce are listening to everything we say.”

I felt my cheeks heat.

Nick chuckled. “So they are. So…lunch. My office. We’ll go to the deli.”

“People will listen.”

“Right. Take a coat. We’ll grab sandwiches, and we’ll go park somewhere and talk.”

“Right,” Ben said.

Cas lifted his hand, with the obvious intent of giving me a silent high five. I wasn’t sure this was the best idea in the world. And I was proven right, as the mummy—now converted into the human burrito—came shuffling into the kitchen, his bare feet protruding below the blanket.

“That,” he said, glaring at me, “was bad of you.”

“What was bad of me?” I said. “I swear it didn’t involve statues.”

“What?”

“I didn’t climb any statues.”

“I see, so it was you?” He looked at Cas, more in sorrow than in anger.

“Me? Never climbed a statue in my life. Closest I ever came was trying to get onto the roof of my college dorm.”

“You told him,” Ben hissed.

From the sounds, the reason he felt free to vent this was because the zombie had gone to use the bathroom.

“No. I just invited him for coffee.”

Ben crossed his arms on his chest. “Great. Just great. Now we’ll have to talk. And if we talk, he’ll decide I’m crazy, and then…”