A Fatal Stain (33 page)

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

“I made Grandma and Granddad put the cats in the carriers,” he said. “So they wouldn’t run away.”

“Good E,” I said.

“Granddad has gone to tell the books everything is all right.”

“Good Granddad.”

“Cas had to go to the station, with the suspect. He wanted me to tell you.”

“Good Cas.”

I’d come to the place where I had no energy and no strength to run anymore. I didn’t think there was anything to do or anything I wanted to do, and at that moment in time, I would have been perfectly content to sit on that stair for the rest of my life, with the cold breeze in my face, while below me the police department and fire department swarmed in their inscrutable ways and Mom and Dad did whatever it was they did.

The world was a beautiful place, and I remained remarkably unexploded.

It couldn’t have lasted forever. Paradise never does.
Sooner or later, you get expelled and have to make your way through the hardscrabble reality on your own.

In this case, the hardscrabble reality presented itself as the phone ringing, somewhere, up there, in my mother’s kitchen.

I dragged myself up the flight of stairs and into the kitchen, where I picked up the phone, and heard Cas’s voice. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“Right as rain,” I said.

I could feel him smile on the other side. “I’m sorry I didn’t come up to make sure you were okay. Nick went up and looked at you and said you seemed to be okay, but in shock. I thought…We heard the explosion back there, when de Leon pressed the button, and that’s how we knew we weren’t going to be blown up. I went back
and looked, before I brought de Leon to the station. That was a magnificent crater.”

“There was one there before,” I said. “From when I blew up the oak.”

“Yeah, and I hope your parents don’t get too attached to covering it up, because E and probably our kids will blow it up again. Probably.”

I didn’t say anything. The idea of E and E’s siblings blowing up things was suddenly very warm and reassuring. “You took de Leon…”

“Yeah. He’s talking. Actually the problem is going to be making him stop talking. He’d braved himself for suicide, and now that he survived it, he just can’t stop telling us all about everything.”

“Like?”

“It appears when Sebastian left him with Maria, he got in an argument with her, and he says he just barely pushed her and she fell over and bled buckets. So he put her in a trash bag, in the back of his car.”

“The poor woman.”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds. She didn’t fit in the trash bag, of course. He seemed to think she was in rigor mortis, but it appears her body was merely rigid. Narcolepsy does that. Only de Leon didn’t bother to know anything about the illness, of course, nor did he realize people don’t get in rigor mortis as soon as they die. So he thought she was dead, and he threw her in the car, and then he took the table, and really random stuff to make it seem like she’d left, and then he drove to that condo they were using and dropped the stuff and he drove off with her in the trash bag, because to him that was the most important thing to get rid of.”

“Where did he dump her?”

“In Denver. Outside the hospital. He dropped her there, completely naked. By then, she was unconscious but, as he put it,
floppy
, so he decided rigor mortis had passed. She was still bleeding, but he thought she was dead. I imagine it was a slow bleed.”

“I take it she wasn’t dead?”

“No. She was in a coma for a bit, and she was very confused, and no one thought to correlate a woman dropped naked in front of a Denver hospital with what looked like a voluntary disappearance in Goldport. Yeah, my fault. I should have called the hospitals in all the nearby towns.”

“So…she’s alive?”

“Yeah. She woke up this morning. Since then she’s been trying to tell the doctors who she was, but she couldn’t remember her phone number or address. Aftereffects of concussion. She’s called now and talked to Jason Ashton, who is very relieved, and it seems like the doctors think her prognosis is good, so…”

“All is well when it ends well?”

“Seems like it. De Leon then came back to the condo, bought some stain and varnish to disguise the table, and thought it was a great idea to dispose of the stuff at the garage sale. He and the garage-sale guy have both been talking and, well, as an additional bonus, your ex really had nothing to do with the arson. Which I’m sure you and he, too, will be relieved to know. Well, in his case, he’ll be relieved to know that no one thinks he had anything to do with it, I presume.” He took a deep breath. “I’ll just finish up this report, and then I’ll come get you, okay? We’ll stay in a hotel for the night or something. I’m sorry, I can’t stay at your parents’; they’d drive me nuts.”

“Yeah, I know. They drive me nuts, too.”

We were in the middle of moving everything into the
house, which, even with my table and chairs, Cas’s sofas and dining room table, and his bed and mine, and all of E’s furniture, still looked like an empty place. I didn’t mind. There would be furniture later. The little fake trunk had sold for an obscene amount. With the lion-mouth pulls in place, it looked vaguely medieval, and some decorator in Denver had fallen in love with it.

The profit would be enough to buy nice stuff to refinish for E’s new room. And it could keep us in pancakes and Pythagoras in cat kibble, at least until the wedding.

Cas was theoretically staying with Nick until the wedding, having emptied his apartment and given the key to his landlord. Theoretically because, in point of fact, Nick was staying at Ben’s until they could move into the house next door. Their move was delayed by the fact that Ben
had hired Sebastian to pull up the carpets and refinish the quite beautiful oak floor underneath. Another week or so, and they would move in. I am glad to say that since the day I’d blown up my parents’ backyard, I hadn’t woken up to a mummy anywhere near me.

Dad and Mom had blocked those doors again, so that customers wouldn’t be found upstairs, browsing through their bedside books. Pythagoras’s tail tip had healed, and Fluffy, probably, remained offended by my refusal to let her be maid of honor.

Cas was bringing in his piano, with Nick’s help, when I heard them talking with someone in the living room. I was in the family room, a scarf protecting my newly short hair from dust, putting books on the shelves.

I put the books down and went to see who had come in.

It was Jason Ashton, holding hands with a very pretty, olive-skinned woman about his age and looking happy and possessive all in one. I presumed this was Maria. Their kids were with them.

E came out of the family room with me, and the little girl—Isabella—ran to him. I didn’t hear what they were talking about, because Cas grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the Ashtons.

“We just wanted to say thank you,” Maria said. “Jason told me how much you helped and how, without you, they might never have found me.”

“I’m sure it would have been all right,” I said. “Sooner or later, you’d have told them your phone number and all.”

She smiled and shrugged. “Yes, but probably not till after de Leon had hurt other people.”

“Well,” Cas said, “he’s going to trial on something like fifty counts. I’m sure he’ll be put away for a good, long time.”

“Good,” Jason said. “We’re off to California, but Sebastian will stay in town, and we’d love to get news now and then, if you tell him stuff. We’ll always be very grateful to you, and we hope the two of you will be very happy.”

At that point, I became aware of a small hand tugging at my shirt. “Mommy!” E said, in the tone of a boy who had already called my name half a dozen times.

“Yes?”

“Is it okay if I send Ccelly with Isabella to California?” he asked. “Because Ccelly has gotten used to her, and she’s afraid she’ll be very lonely till she makes some friends.”

The little girl’s dark eyes looked imploringly at me. “Sure,” I said. “Of course.”

Moments later, we stood on the porch, waving good
bye to the Ashtons.

“Do you think they’ll find good llama oats for Ccelly in California?” E asked, putting his hand in mine and sounding a little forlorn.

“I’m sure California has the best imaginary llama oats ever!” I said. “And you can write to Isabella and ask her to let you know how Ccelly is getting on.”

He perked up. “And I can tell her everything I learned about the Romans.”

“Yeah?” Cas said. “Like what?”

Honestly, he was going to have to learn better, if he was going to live with E.

“Like, they used to execute people by getting them bitten to death by inks, intsc, inx—”

“Insects,” Cas and Ben and Nick and I finished, in unison.

I’m not going to tell you how to take something in one
form of wood and make it look like another. There are excellent books on faux painting that cover the subject at least in part. I will give you a cursory look into the processes involved, but this is something that’s more art than craft and into which you’ll have to wade at your own risk and learn from your own mistakes.

Most of the time it is used to make pine look like cherry or mahogany or another of the very expensive woods.

At the very bottom of this, of course, is just buying one of those cans labeled “stain” and applying the appropriate stain. It won’t fool anyone, particularly if you apply it over pine and are striving for something with quite a different “figure” (the darker marks in the wood), such as mahogany, but if what you’re looking for is, for
example, making that cheap bookcase not stand out at first sight amid your antique ones, it will work well enough. A single caveat is to try it on a bit of the wood first, and make sure it matches the other pieces. I’ve found, for instance, that “cherry” stain often comes closer to the color of antique mahogany than the “mahogany” stain.

The next level is to procure a piece of the wood you want to imitate. Then prepare your piece. If it is—as in the built-in china cabinets in one room of my house—very rough, construction-grade pine, or if (not impossible with really old pieces) there’s a coat of paint you simply can’t remove completely, just sand it as smooth as possible, fill in any gaps and holes, and sand it again. Apply paint as close to the base color of the wood as possible; then sand again. Then, using something translucent (I use oil paint diluted in mineral spirits) and small brushes (or sponges, for some woods, like burled walnut), apply the figure over the paint. This is a trial-and-error process I can’t help you with. Consult your model frequently. You might have to apply layers of shellac in between layers of figuring (to give a sense of depth).

Of course, this is not a piece you can leave merely waxed. You’ll have to seal it and sand it. I’ve had the most success in this with the showy types of wood, like burled walnut, because the pattern is so distracting that people don’t examine it too closely.

An easier and more satisfying “forgery” is to take poplar or pine pieces of relatively simple construction—you can often find them unfinished or cheaply enough. The piece Dyce finishes in this book is based on a trunk I bought at a garage sale. It was painted what can only
be called radioactive green, and it had these large gilded medallions in the front. The whole thing was in screamingly bad taste, and my husband thought I was out of my mind to buy it.