A Fatal Stain (30 page)

Besides, this sounded like my dad, and it meant that he was probably trying to dissuade someone from buying a book, which happened at least twice a day and sometimes more. If he didn’t have extra copies of a book, he became outright possessive about it and tried to dissuade potential clients.

So I changed back into my jeans and T-shirt, which seemed like quite a bit of a letdown after the fancy stuff, and we put the dresses away, and I closed the door, making sure it didn’t latch. “I’ll look on eBay,” I told Mom, “and see what that stuff is worth. And yes, I probably can rebuild the pram. Seems to be mostly the leather that’s damaged, and I can replace or fix that.”

I was thinking warm thoughts of actually getting at
least most of the furniture for the house, so that Cas couldn’t say he’d done everything for the new place.

We went into the kitchen, E explaining to me how he’d picked the lock and how easy it was. But the talk of wires, barrels, and tumblers sounded more like something from a bar than something relating to a closet, so I listened with half an ear.

Pythagoras sat on E’s lap, while E ate candy corn. Mom had apparently locked Fluffy in her room. Not, mind you, to keep her from eating Pythagoras but because Mom was afraid that E might hurt Fluffy, or that I might hurt Fluffy’s feelings. So we were in relative peace while Ben looked around in the various cabinets and made me and himself hot chocolate.

Then he called his sister, Ellie, and had some trouble dissuading her from coming right on over to look at the dresses. He promised we’d bring them by this evening.

And then, looking somewhat worried, he called Nick. I could see his expression clear as Nick answered. He walked away from me, his hand cupped around the phone, talking into it, from which I gathered relationship stuff was being said. Ben hates to have anyone hear him sound mushy. He stood by the kitchen window, looking out, and spoke almost in whispers. He smiled once or twice and nodded once.

Then, suddenly, his demeanor changed. He straightened his shoulders. He said, audibly, “Oh, no. Really?”

He turned around. “Dyce, they are looking for Winston de Leon, but he seems to have disappeared, and they think he might be looking for you.”

“What?” I said, getting up.

“It’s like this. They traced the sales to the garage sale and all, way back, and it seems that…” He took a deep
breath, then hung up the phone and put it in his pocket. “They’re leaving Rafiel and some other people looking for him and following leads, but they’re coming here, because Cas thinks he might be coming here, and he doesn’t want us alone.”

“Why should he be coming here?” I asked.

“Nothing very definite,” Ben said. “Or at least…” He shrugged. “He said something about looking for you. Has said so in the past. But mostly because Cas thinks you attract trouble like a magnet.”

“It’s not my fault,” I protested.

“No,” Ben said. “And we know it’s not. But Dyce, it is true. You can’t help attracting trouble. And trouble finds you even when you’re hiding.”

My mother, who had opened her laptop, looked up with a faint smile. “We sold another collectible edition of Dorothy L. Sayers,” she said. “Really what people will give away or throw away or…forget, like those dresses your great-grandmother left behind, is just astonishing.”

Mom was in a world of her own, and we weren’t going to be able to call her attention to the present world or present concerns. It was just as well. I wasn’t absolutely sure I wanted to worry her. Just six months ago, a madwoman had shot up the bookstore and hit one of the pipes in the bathroom. Between the water damage and the bullet hole through a couple of shelves, Father hadn’t let me come into the store for a solid month. So it was best not to alarm Mom.

I left her blogging, and Ben and I went down to the landing, midstaircase, to wait for Cas and presumably Nick.

Who arrived, just minutes later.

They came up the staircase side by side, causing it
to shake beneath their feet. Of unspoken accord, Ben and I turned and walked up the stairs and to the kitchen. Yeah, we might be in love with these guys, but that didn’t mean we wanted to be on the staircase when it fell.

Mom barely glanced up from her laptop as they came in. Pythagoras went and nuzzled Cas’s ankle. He followed us to the parlor, as Ben and I led the two policemen there because I had no wish to talk around Mom.

E followed us with a fistful of candy corn that he tried to get into his mouth, with mixed results. Although he managed to have a mouthful of candy corn, he also left a trail on Mom’s carpet. Which was just as well, in case we got lost and needed to go back.

The parlor, or living room, as Mom liked to call it—but which was more of a parlor, since it was nowhere
near an external entrance—had been the scene of my attempt to play lion tamer, when I’d made the first Fluffy jump through a hoop of fire. Unfortunately, the hoop had been Mom’s quilting frame. She’d been into quilting at the time, having been deeply into some quilting mystery series. And since the quilt had also caught fire…

Well, after the fire department had come and the disaster-recovery people and Fluffy, okay except for her fur being mostly missing, was found and taken to the vet, Mom had finally gotten to decorate the parlor her way, instead of living with the furniture, wallpaper, and carpet chosen by Dad’s grandmother.

Now that I’d seen that lady’s taste in dresses, I almost regretted it. Mom’s taste was okay but bland. This might have been part of a suite in any discount hotel. The carpet was royal blue; the walls were cream. There were various family pictures on the wall, and the sofas were white and prim. Over the fireplace was a picture of Ben and I, in prom attire, blown up to about twice life-size. Nick, his hand on Ben’s, pulled him toward it. I wasn’t sure why, and at the moment I didn’t much care, since Cas was kissing me for good.

“You look great,” he said. “Except for your hair. You’ll either have to cut it all short, or we’ll have to find you a wig for the wedding. Otherwise our children will grow up believing Mom was some sort of very strange goth.”

I looked up at him. I loved being enclosed in his arms like this. “I’d just make a spider out of the wig,” I said. “So it must be short hair. I’ll go see a hairdresser next week. For now I just want to get the business back on its feet and, I guess, get us some furniture for the new house.”

I was so excited about the find in the closet that I poured
it all out to him before I remembered why they had come over. It finally hit me, as we sat on the sofa and he held my hand. “I was so worried about you,” he said. “Yesterday.”

This brought me back to de Leon and whatever danger I might be in. “Do you really think he’ll come here?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Cas said. “Almost sure. See, it was him who told Sebastian about you, but he made it sound like you were harassing Ashton and trying to get a story to sell to some publication or other. He sold him the idea that because your parents owned a mystery bookstore, it was likely that you would sell the story to a true-crime publisher.”

“But…” I said. “Why would he care that I was asking Ashton stuff?”

“Well, for one, because he didn’t want Ashton to find out what had happened to his wife. We still don’t know what that was, by the way, but the signs aren’t good. That stain on the table—a piece was thrown clear and far enough that we could analyze it, undamaged by fire. Pure luck, of course, but it is human blood. We still haven’t determined if it’s the same type as Maria’s blood, though it probably is. I mean…The chair”—he took a deep breath—“that she took with her was the same as the chair we found in the meth condo.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

“Oh, yes. Plus the garage sale guy…Remember your being utterly puzzled that he managed to make a living from selling that junk? And how many times you told me you just couldn’t believe there were enough people willing to buy that stuff to make him a profit?”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Well, there aren’t. Turns out he’s running a side
business in drugs. He actually used to be the owner of a well-known electronics store here in town, but…he got a drug habit, and fell through the cracks, and eventually ended up working the supply side of business.”

“And de Leon supplied him with meth?” I asked.

“Bingo. So when you came around asking about the other stuff de Leon had sold him—and, by the way, he did get a check in Ashton’s name, because he wanted the garage sale guy to think that Ashton was the one selling him stuff. Long story. He had a check-cashing account at a service—got it with a fake ID. Anyway, when you asked the garage sale guy about the table, he got alarmed and put some pressure on de Leon, and apparently you paid for the table with a check, which, Dyce, was unwise, so the garage sale guy knew your name and address. Finding out who you were and all didn’t take long, and de Leon first tried to send Sebastian after you. Part of it, of course, was that somehow you’d managed to make de Leon suspicious when you parked on that street and went to see Ben’s friends.”

“So he sent Sebastian after me.”

“Yes. I don’t think you know, but the Ashtons are what we call stray collectors, but they don’t collect stray animals, which is annoying but arguably safer. No, they collect human beings with problems or down on their luck, and they bring them home and look after them.” He shrugged. “It appears that Maria’s parents did this, too, and never had a bad experience. So Sebastian used to be on drugs, and he has a record—”

“And he set the bomb?” I said.

“Oh, no. His record is mostly for completely innocuous stuff. Vagrancy and loitering and such. He was living on the streets for some time, after dropping out of
college, but he says he’s been clean for the last two years and it’s probably true. He has no arrests in that time, and he has had several jobs, mostly of the contract and short-term type. He’s also going back to college in spring and has got in touch with his family, but…”

“But you think he—”

“No. Once he explained the situation to us, he told us de Leon had given him a story about your selling Maria’s disappearance to a true-crime publisher. He was only trying to protect his friends, and, frankly, he seems like a good guy. But here’s the thing: he said that among the strays that they picked up, he was worried about de Leon, who still seemed to be on what Sebastian charmingly called the hard stuff. He said he also got the impression de Leon was using the Ashtons, instead of making a bona fide attempt at straightening out his life. Also…”

He hesitated and looked around. By the fireplace, Ben and Nick were talking earnestly with their heads together. I hoped this meant that Ben had conquered his fears and that they were going to make up. Not because I was a romantic—though I was—but because I really, really, really wanted to avoid any further intrusions of the mummy or the zombie into our lives. And besides, staying at my parents was trying enough. Staying at my parents with Ben might lead me to squeeze out of the window in the attic and onto the ground below, considering the whole thing a world well lost.

“This is the thing we have no way to verify,” Cas said. “And if it weren’t for the fact that the piece of the chair was in the burned-out condo, I’d have some doubts about taking it, but…”

“But?”

“But Sebastian says that Maria had told him something that led him to believe she was afraid of de Leon. He didn’t give it much thought because Maria, having been diagnosed with narcolepsy, was on various antidepressants, as her doctor tried to find the right dosage to control the problem. As such, she was having mood swings, and she couldn’t, quite, make sense of reality at times. So he thought she was just imagining things. But now, with evidence piling up that something terrible might have happened to her, he is afraid because the last time he saw her, he asked de Leon to stay with her for a couple of hours. He didn’t like doing it, but he had to go out and do a job, or he would have lost that employer, who provided him with a steady stream of income. He owns a Laundromat that needed some pipe repair done. Yeah, we checked. So he left Maria with this guy for a couple of hours, because they were all afraid she would fall and hurt herself. Apparently, if the medicine is wrong, it can happen. Actually falling over or falling asleep standing up is often a symptom of narcolepsy, apparently. So he had to leave her with someone, even though Ashton had taken the kids to the doctor, since they were all sharing a cold.

“Well, when he came back, neither of them was in the house, and the table and chair and the other stuff was gone, and then, when he tracked de Leon down, he made a confused excuse, and Sebastian assumed that he’d gone off to make a deal, which Sebastian suspected him of doing all the time, anyway, and while he was out, Maria had taken advantage of being alone and left with her stuff, possibly in a U-Haul or something. Since they thought this was just a temporary aberration, and she’d
come to her senses and realize she really was not a burden and her husband and kids loved her, they didn’t tell anyone. And then, when a few weeks had passed…Well, neither they nor us could get a very precise idea of what had happened that day. I mean, people don’t pay attention, you know?”