A Fatal Stain (27 page)

I woke up while E was still asleep—and with great
hopes he would remain so or at least behave while I did the rounds of the various places where I usually found furniture, I headed downstairs. To stop in the hall between the two rooms.

On one side was my parents’ room, the his-and-hers bedside tables crammed with books and, in Mom’s case, notebooks, in which she made notes for book recommendations for her very own mystery book blog,
The Missing Clue
, part of their online bookstore website. The website was one of the biggest sources of revenue for the store and truly a brilliant idea on Mom’s part. It was also the reason why these days she spent more time at the kitchen table, working on her laptop, than at the store.

Mind you, when she sold books online, she then had to go downstairs and wrest them from Dad. Dad had this
thing about selling books, his idea being to surround himself with books and then bask in knowing he was insulated from reality by all those lovely words. You could always tell it had been a good sales day when Mom was all happy and Dad looked like he was going to break down and cry.

Their bed was neatly made, and I could hear Mom talking to Fluffy downstairs. But the other room, the room that had been my own, once upon a time, before I claimed the attic, was occupied by…the mummy.

The mummy, of course, was Ben completely wrapped up in his blanket, perfectly immobile and facing up. He said the fact that he could roll himself up and sleep all night like that was the sign of a clean conscience and a peaceful nature. Personally, I thought it was a sign of being crazier than should be allowed by law, and possibly the sign of a control freak.

What it shouldn’t be, however, was in my parents’ house. If he wanted to play
Return of the Mummy
, he should at least rent a hotel room. Of course, ideally, he should be with the zombie somewhere, making beautiful music, or whatever it was they did, and no, I didn’t want to know. I just didn’t want any more of the soap opera.

So I stepped into his room and said, “Benedict Colm! What are you doing here?”

He woke and sat up, straight from the waist, in perfect horror-movie style. But I never figured out what he would have answered, because at that moment, my mom yelled from downstairs, “Children? Breakfast is ready.”

Ben’s lips said,
Children?
soundlessly, and I said, “This is what you get for coming here to sleep. What do you think you’re doing?”

He got up, wrapped in his blanket, doing his imitation
of a human burrito with feet. “I was sleeping. I thought that was perfectly obvious.”

“Oh, please, Ben. Good Lord, so the man wants to buy a house and have you move in with him. It’s not like he asked you to sell your soul. Can’t you behave like a normal human being for a change?”

Ben stared at me for a moment and blinked. “Buy a house?” he asked, as though I’d suggested that Nick wanted to get Ben to his secret lair and feed him to the piranhas in the tank of doom.

“Oh, look at the time,” I said, realizing that Nick hadn’t got around to confessing that particular misdeed. “And Mom is waiting breakfast.”

I ran down the stairs before he could say anything else, taking advantage of the fact that he wasn’t yet fully awake.

Downstairs, the breakfast spread proved that there had indeed been an unsuccessful signing. At least, I think that even in my parents’ house, a breakfast spread of celery sticks, carrots, broccoli, and cauliflower surrounding jalapeño spread could only happen for that reason. But it’s not like my mother had forgotten I didn’t like spicy foods, particularly for breakfast. No way. She’d also set out a large bowl of cheese puffs, a bag of salt and vinegar potatoes, and—probably left over from Halloween’s Spooky Mystery Day, two months ago—a massive bowl of candy corn.

She was sitting at the table, with Fluffy on her lap, working madly at her laptop. When I came in, she got that just slightly disappointed look that she got when she expected Ben and she got me. I suspected she’d had that look in the hospital when she first saw me, too.

I noticed that she’d started coffee and edged around
her—and Fluffy—to get a cup and was seated safely at the table eating candy corn—for the energy—when Ben came downstairs, having showered, dressed in his stay-at-home uniform of chinos and button-down shirt with no tie.

“Aren’t you supposed to go to work today?” I asked him, to ward off questions about that house-buying thing.

He shrugged and petted Fluffy on the way to get a cup of coffee. “Nah. I had some time off coming, and I think I need to deal with…stuff.”

“You know, I could get horseshoes today. It wouldn’t be hard to nail them on, either.”

“Oh, are you going to buy a horse, Ben?” Mom asked, perking up. “But I wouldn’t let Dyce shoe it. She might be okay with her little furniture stuff, but she doesn’t know a thing about horses. She’d probably get herself kicked in the head.”

“She’s sure to get herself kicked, at least metaphorically,” he said, glaring at me over the rim of his coffee cup as he sipped his coffee. “Guaranteed.”

Mom typed something in her blog and beamed at one of us, then the other. “Well, since you have the day off, and Dyce is here—”

“Please don’t suggest I go shopping for dresses with him. I have to go and get stuff to get the business on its feet again. By the way,” I said, stuffing my mouth full of candy corn and speaking around it. “May I use the part of the garage that’s empty for my refinishing stuff?”

“You know,” Ben cut in, “the only thing that exceeds Dyce’s empathy for people in emotional turmoil is her dainty eating manners, isn’t it?”

My mom looked completely confused, and I struggled to swallow the candy corn. And the phone rang. Ben
grabbed it—no, he pounced on it as if he were expecting a call that told him whether he’d live or die. And his face fell. “Yeah,” he said. “She’s here.” And handed me the phone.

It was Cas. “Hello, sunshine,” he said. “How does the world look this morning?”

“With a high incidence of candy corn and jalapeño cheese for breakfast,” I said. “A way too high incidence of Ben, who is still being weird, apparently, and a mild to moderate tendency to shopping for refinishing stuff.”

Cas didn’t say anything, but I knew he was smiling. It’s hard to explain, okay? But after a while you get to know your significant other like that.

Then he cleared his throat. “Well, I thought you might want to know that your shed blew up because of a bomb—which makes some difference for the insurance policy, but not much, since Ben bought you the best plan. Your landlord is dealing with them, but I don’t know if they’ll let you come back. You might have to move out. Good thing our offer was accepted, huh?”

I felt my heart lurch and a vague sickness settle in the pit of my stomach. Okay, so I’d signed the offer for the house, but did these people really, truly have to accept it? And that fast? It seemed like unusually fast turnaround. It seemed like the future was rushing at me.

“I figure,” Cas said, “you can move into it in solitary splendor until the wedding. Or, at least, theoretically you’ll be there in solitary splendor, and then I’ll move in. So I asked for a closing date next week. Is that okay?”

I think I squeaked, but he interpreted it as meaning yes, because he said, “Okay, then I—”

I knew he was about to hang up, and I said, “Uh, Cas?”

“Yes?”

“What is the news, you know? On the Ashtons?”

“Oh. We…er…the table is…er…the table she took. And we did find human blood on one of the fragments…”

I noticed Ben was staring at me. “So. What are you doing about it?”

And I swear, like a bad mystery movie, Cas said, “We’re continuing our investigations,” and hung up on me. I stuffed my mouth with candy corn, washed it down with coffee, and found Ben still staring at me. “Most infuriating man in the universe,” I said.

He gave me the ghost of a smile and sat down across from me. “Oh, you haven’t spent much time with his cousin, have you?”

I couldn’t help grinning, and Ben reached for a celery stick. “So,” he said. “We’re shopping for refinishing stuff, are we?”

“Yes,” I said, hoping I read him correctly. “Mom, do you mind keeping an eye on E? You’re not going anywhere, are you?”

Mom looked worried for a minute, then said, “He’s not done with the coloring books, is he?”

“No, he has only done
Murder on the Orient Express
, though he might need another red crayon.”

She smiled. “Oh, that is easy.”

Ben and I hustled down the stairs and out to the circular driveway, where both our cars were parked. “My car,” I said. “You don’t want stuff to refinish in your car.”

“Not to worry,” he said. “I brought tarps to protect surfaces.”

I was greatly impressed with this bit of foresight but also a little suspicious. “To protect them from old furniture
and chemicals, right?” I said. “Not to protect them from Nick’s blood after you kill and dismember him, right?”

Ben stared at me for a moment, his eyes growing wide. “Why,” he asked, “would you even think of that? Ew. I love Nick.”

“You’ve been avoiding him for a week.”

Ben sighed. “That’s completely different. It’s just…I’m afraid he’ll think that I’m…I’m afraid of being too dependent on him, you know? I’ve always stayed fairly independent.”

And suddenly I understood the whole insanity, because I had gone through the exact same thing just considering staying with Cas for a week or so. I sighed. “Yeah, I get that.”

We got in the car, with him behind the wheel, which was the real reason that he didn’t want to take my car. The man has this thing about me driving. He seems to think I’m the world’s most dangerous driver, which only means he’s never been in a car that my dad was driving. Particularly not while Dad was enthusiastically telling the passenger about a book he had just read, gesturing broadly,
and
forgetting to have even a finger on the wheel. At one time he’d picked me up from the airport on a return trip from a vacation, and not only had we ended up in Denver—not Goldport—but once there, he’d jumped a median on Colfax Avenue and gone across the traffic stream and into the parking lot of a McDonald’s. He’d finally stopped only because the car had come to rest against a young sapling. And then he’d asked me where the tree had come from. That we made it back home, let alone in one piece, happened because I took the keys from his hands and insisted on driving back.

But to Ben I was the most dangerous driver in creation.

“But, Ben…if you want to live with him…I mean…”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

“Is this because you can’t marry him? I mean…”

He shrugged. “It’s just more work. We can make a bunch of legal contracts to protect me…and him, as much as if we were married. It just takes a bit more work, but it’s no big deal.” He chewed the corner of his lip as we drove out of my parents’ driveway. “I suppose we’re going to the flea markets?”

“Yeah,” I said. Taking Ben to the dive flea markets I frequented was a treat. Probably only because I have a low sense of humor, but watching Ben in his impeccable clothes edge away from dusty surfaces and look around like he feared contagion amused me no end.

Ben drove carefully along the narrow street with cars parked on both sides; it was a mystery to me how customers ever managed to park to come into the bookstore. “The thing is,” he said, “I’m not absolutely sure I wouldn’t be even more freaked out if it was possible for us to marry. Damn, Dyce, how can you have done it…and be about to do it, twice? Aren’t you scared?”

“Terrified,” I told him, and laughed. “But, you know…if you don’t risk this sort of thing, then you are, by definition, going to be always alone.”

“I suppose,” he said. Suddenly he chuckled. “Sometimes alone seems like a really good option—you know, free to go where the wild wind goes and all that—and then I see Nick again, or we go and sit up on some stupid hill, with the convertible top down, and eat sub sandwiches together, and I feel like if I let this go without at least
trying, I’ll kick myself for the rest of my life. But I don’t want to rush it, either, you know…I mean, it’s just that I think the habit of staying together, every night, might be clouding my decision. So, I thought, if I spent a few nights away from him, maybe I’d see things differently.”

“And did you?” I asked, curious.

“Yeah, I saw things considerably more lonely,” he said. “It’s totally stupid, but I think I’ve…Well, I think I have to give it a chance. He’s overbearing. He seems to think housework happens to other people. He calls me weird names in Greek. He gets upset when I borrow his books without permission…but I think I’m going to at least give it a try.”

“Ben,” I said, somewhat alarmed. “From experience, your doing all the housework and his not liking you borrowing his books can be problems over time.”

A weird smile broke out on Ben’s lips. “Oh, well…It’s entirely possible that he was in the middle of that book. It’s even entirely possible I knew that and subconsciously tried to get the book, so he’d…you know…come find me. As for the housework, he knows he has a problem with that. His mom and Cas’s mom do everything around the house, and his ex did everything around the house. He says he’s not sure he can get broken into it, but he’s perfectly willing to restore a few more cars on weekends or something and pay for a cleaning lady. And I’m okay with that. I mean, I have a cleaning service now; it’s just when I’m at his place…”

“So you’re going to move to the house next to the one Cas and I are buying?”

“Yeah, if he still wants me to. And if he’s buying it. Is he buying it, Dyce?”

“Are you going to go crazy if I say yes?”

“No, I just want to know. You know, I liked the way he put his hand on my arm, yesterday, like he was afraid the fire in the shed would come out and hurt me.”

Okay…having been down that path a couple of times, I knew silly love when I saw it. “Yeah,” I said, because there was no point arguing. “And yeah, he put an offer on the house. I don’t know if it was accepted. Our house…well, our
future
house has this garage, where they can restore cars.”

“The other one has a four-car garage, so they can store cars there. And Nick was telling me that you’d be right next door and we could babysit E when he needed it. I’m not sure the man understands what a selling point is.
Hey, we can babysit E. He can set fire to our stuff.
”