Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (8 page)

I made a note to hit the thrift stores and the construction discount stores in Denver when I went up on Sunday—assuming a miracle got me there, of course—to check on my consignment pieces and take the new ones up. Unlikely as it was, you often found old pulls doing duty in modern, haphazardly repaired furniture in thrift stores. Or you
found a bunch of pulls taken from built-in cabinets rusting away in a corner of the building recycling store.

That was my best shot at getting something the same vintage as the dresser. Failing that, I’d have to look online, but I’d rather not spend that much money on this particular piece. There might also, frankly, be something modern that fit the style. I made a note of a couple of hardware stores to check, then another note to go and look in our very own building recycling store here in Goldport.

It was a place I tended to avoid, because going there with E since he learned to walk was about as safe as walking into a china shop happily leading a baby elephant. There were light fixtures and mirrors and other such building elements to which E was a clear and present danger. They also had a bad tendency to pile up boards with nails through them, pointing up, or to have piles and piles of removed tin ceilings, jagged edges and all.

Let alone the bugs my son could find, even in the cleanest environment, if I took my eyes off him for a second in that place, he’d eat a black widow spider
and
manage to spear himself on some jagged something, so it would be a race on whether he first bled to death, died of a poisonous bite, or got tetanus.

Trying to keep an eye on E while shopping for anything—much less things that might be hidden in a corner, behind a pile of roofing tile—just wasn’t feasible.

I could go when he was with All-ex, which was usually three days one week and four the next. The problem with that, though, was that those were days I used for intensive work in the workshop. However, this time, with two pieces on hand and underway, I might make an exception.

I went back to the table, prodded with the pointy bit again, and this time, amen and alleluia, the green paint came off and brought with it some of the paint underneath—metallic, silver. It wasn’t much, only about a thumb’s width
of paint, but enough to reveal the delicate carving underneath: a fleur de lis shape, delicately cut.

Hand carved. I would bet on it. My legs felt wobbly and I wished there were some place I could sit down except on the floor

The temptation, of course, once I saw what was underneath the paint, was to strip the entire thing.

But I couldn’t let myself do it. Though Ben wasn’t nearly as squeamish about changing E as he liked to pretend, the thing was that I needed to get E fed and cleaned and his stuff packed for his time with his father. And though I didn’t have a clock in here and had, yet again, managed to forget to wear a watch, something about the quality of the light—let alone the fact that I’d gone through three layers of paint on the carving—told me that I’d been in here far more than the one hour I’d promised Ben.

Now, normally that wouldn’t be a big deal, and if Ben had been upset about it he’d have come out back and at least told me through the door that he had to go somewhere. But whatever was happening with Ben—and I very much wished I knew what it was, even if it was absolutely none of my business—might mean that he wouldn’t complain. Ben had this tendency to go somewhere inside himself and mull things over, which was probably very manly and admirable, and made me think lovingly of denting his skull with something, to get some sense into it.

Of course, barring nuclear devices, there was nothing I could dent his skull with. I’d known that skull for far too long.

Reluctantly and with a loving last look at the table, I started pulling off all the various protective stuff, starting with gloves and ending with the coveralls. I turned off the fan, closed the windows—to prevent unlikely and unexpected driven rain soaking the furniture—and walked out, locking the door behind me with the padlock I’d had installed for the purpose.

The chances of anyone coming in there and deciding to steal the table were minimal. The chances of college students getting in there and huffing my refinishing chemicals were huge. And I didn’t need the lawsuit or the criminal prosecution for keeping an attractive nuisance.

I walked toward the house and opened the back door. And knew immediately that something was very wrong.

CHAPTER 6

Hanging

There is a feeling of wrongness sometimes when
you enter a room. It’s hard to define. A house that should be empty feels occupied. A place that should be warm feels cold. You can’t put your finger on it, but you feel it, deep inside, at a level below that at which thought happens. You could never say why, but you know something is . . . off.

That is what I felt when I first came in the back of my apartment. The back door didn’t open directly off the kitchen. Instead, there was a short hallway and a powder room off it, before the kitchen proper. Without seeing the kitchen, without anything being visibly wrong—the floor was clean, the walls clean, no mud, no weird smells, everything as I had left it—I was sure something was very wrong.

Please, understand I’m not a brave woman, I’m simply a motivated one. I didn’t get in fights at school because I liked to—or even because I enjoyed Mom’s comments when I came home with my dress in tatters, my hair a mess, and a big bruise over one of my eyes. But I enjoyed even less
having the big pack of eighth-grade bullies beat up on the smaller girls or boys.

That was why I’d made it my mission in life to beat up on the bullies—even if most of them were twice my size and even if on one occasion I’d needed Ben to rescue me. I’d ambush them when they were alone, at the back of the school or on the way home. I’d learned very early on that most bullies were at a loss when they couldn’t scare you. And they weren’t smart enough to know that behind my snarling mouth and my pounding fists, I was terrified.

Right now I couldn’t imagine anything more stupid than the thought that Ben might need me to rescue him. And yet the sense that something was very wrong in the house grew on me. My heart was pounding, my teeth were clenched, and my throat was closed on itself, so that I could hardly breathe.

I could not—I would not—call Ben’s name. If someone was in the house, if something was happening, that would give my position away. Instead, slowly, I pushed the powder room door open, looking inside and around to make sure no one was hiding there. I wished I had my vicious tool with me, but the powder room did provide a useful implement—to wit, a broom.

I grabbed it around the middle, much like Robin Hood and his men would have grasped their fighting sticks. Yes, yes, very funny, and I realize that, because I was five foot five and I weighed a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet, with my pockets full of lead.

But I was born with an odd glitch, you see? Some time ago some psychologists did an experiment with toddlers to find out how they reacted to fright—no, I don’t know what the mothers were doing while this was going on—and they found that most of the toddlers ran away from what scared them. A significant minority became frozen in place. And then there were those who ran toward whatever scared them. If they did this while screaming and
ready to claw, bite, and gouge eyes out, they were my kind of people.

When I was young and got into fights, some bullies laughed when they saw me coming. They didn’t laugh for very long.

Holding that broom, I started into the house, slowly. I looked around, making sure nothing hid in the shadows. The kitchen was empty, and I went on into the living room. It was empty, but as I stood there, I noticed that the front door was unlocked except for the bottom lock, the one that used a key and could be locked from either side. I was sure, as I was sure of standing here, that I’d left the door locked, all three locks.

More important, Ben wasn’t sitting on the sofa, reading or writing in his portfolio. Granted, maybe he’d gone into E’s room to read to E and had fallen asleep. It had happened at least once. I’d been out back and come in to find E asleep in Ben’s lap, both of them snuggled amid a cloud of stuffed animals. I had taken a picture, of course. Sometimes it’s impossible to resist the temptation. Ben had a copy of it in his wallet.

I went into my room and checked the closet in the best action-movie style, half-expecting someone to jump at me—which was very improbable because this closet was outfitted with close-set shelves crammed with my neatly folded clothes. The only villain who could hide in there would be Folio Man, the incredible self-laminating nemesis.

I entered E’s room, and by now at least part of my uneasiness had taken a rational shape. I didn’t hear any sounds, not even breathing. And in fact, E’s room was completely empty, though I did look under the crib and kick around the stuffed animals, just in case.

Nothing. I took a deep breath. Of course, it was entirely possible that Ben had taken E somewhere. He usually didn’t unless there was some very good reason—like
he’d been called to work and I couldn’t be reached—to saddle himself with E. For one, my adorable son, though nominally potty trained, was quite likely to fill his Pull-Ups at the least convenient time. For another, taking E anywhere was not for the faint of heart. You had to watch him every second.

Oh, Ben had done it in the past, taken E for a walk, or out to grab an ice cream or something. But never—never—without at least coming out back and telling me.

On the other hand, Ben had also never come to visit this early on a Saturday, with his shirt done wrong and a cut on his face.

Understand, I didn’t for a moment think that Ben had snapped and kidnapped E or anything equally ridiculous—it would be a very short kidnapping. The first time E squashed a bug all over one of Ben’s suits, Ben would return him to sender.

No, what worried me was less rational. Ben was in the midst of some crisis I couldn’t even understand—partly because the wall of silence had gone up and I simply was not going to be allowed in. What if Les had called? What if Les had said,
Come and see me now, or else
? What if . . .

I’d retraced my steps back into the living room. The door started opening. Someone came in. I leapt . . .

And stopped just in time, about an inch from bringing the broom handle down on Ben’s head. They froze, too: Ben, holding a paper bag with a smiling burger logo and E, next to him, one arm stretched up to hold Ben’s hand, the other hand clutching a travel cup of some soft drink.

Ben recovered first. “Holy Mary Mother, Dyce! What are you doing? Ninja samurai housewives?”

E, who couldn’t possibly know why this was funny or even if it was, gave a little giggle. “Bah,” he said, superciliously. “Bah nam nam.”

Ben looked down at him. “Yeah, but you didn’t say
Bah
when you got the burger,” he said, letting go of E’s hand and turning toward me. “I took E to Cy’s. For burgers. You took way longer than an hour, Dyce.”

I lowered the broom, feeling sheepish. “I was peeling the thing by layers,” I said.

“Obviously,” he said. “Well, the monkey got hungry and I couldn’t find anything in the house to feed him. He did find some tasty bugs on the windowsills, but I thought that wasn’t ideal.”

“You didn’t tell me you were taking him anywhere.”

“I left you a note,” Ben said, as he locked the door behind him. “On the kitchen table.”

“Oh,” I said feeling my cheeks heat. “But . . .” I started to say, but I was feeling so embarrassed over the whole samurai housewives thing that I didn’t feel like arguing. Instead I turned to go into the kitchen and looked to the table to see if Ben had in fact left me a note. And my mind stopped.

Ben had left me a note. At least, there was a paper on the table—a notebook page, probably taken from his portfolio—but it had been chopped into four bits. I knew it had been chopped, not torn, or cut, or simply left that way, because my cleaver—one of a set of good knives that my mother had given me for a wedding gift and one of the few things I’d kept when it all fell apart—had cut long, raw gashes into the mellow wood of the table and was still embedded in it, cutting the nearest piece of paper into two pieces.

I heard Ben gasp as he came in behind me. “What the . . . Dyce!”

“I didn’t do it,” I said as I neared the table, enough to read the note—or the pieces of it intact enough to be read. It was a normal Ben note, from the joking beginning,
Salute Magistra
, which he’d used ever since we’d taken a Latin class together—and I’d failed spectacularly—to the message:
Monkey threatening to chew off my arm. Taking
him to Cy’s and letting him play till he’s slobbered over every inch of play area. Enjoy the peace to work.
And the ending, which was how we always signed letters to each other, originating in a long convoluted joke in which we’d become “best girlfriends” back in tenth grade:
Love and kisses, Ben.