Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (9 page)

And someone had chopped it up. With a will. And half-destroyed my favorite table in the process.

The craftswoman in me was nattering at the back of my head, and I let it come out of my mouth without thinking. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” I said, running my fingers over the cut, just carefully enough to avoid the splinters. “The cuts are narrow enough even if deep, but the top is thick enough that it would take more than that to split the wood.” I poked at it. “A bit of wood putty, a lot of sanding, some oil finish, and you’ll have to look really closely to figure out that the table was ever cut. Besides, it probably adds character. Makes it look older. All of this old furniture has gone through some sort of upheaval.”

Ben made a low, explicit remark about what to do with the table—which was not only strangely graphic for Ben, and Ben around E at that, but also so anatomically unlikely as to be mind-boggling. “Ben!” I said. “E.”

“He’s not here,” he said. “Will you stop being an idiot, Dyce, and turn around? The last thing I care about is your fff—your table.”

I turned around. Ben was pale, his features tense. More tense than when he’d first arrived, which is to say more tense than I’d ever seen him. He was in serious danger of turning into granite. “Dyce, someone got in and attacked your table. Think . . . oh . . .
Fatal Attraction
.”

“What? I’m not having an affair with anyone. When would I have time to have an affair?”

“No. Don’t care. What I mean is the sign of a disturbed mind, Dyce. Sane people don’t go into other people’s houses and put cleavers into their tables.”

“Granted,” I said. “But—I don’t see how anyone could get in. You have a key, I have a key, Mom and Dad have a key. Did you lose yours?”

He put his hand in his pocket, as if to verify, though he must have just unlocked the bottom lock to come in, so he had to know it was there. But then his motto could be
Trust, but verify
. “No,” he said. “Still here. Your parents?”

“They’re at a mystery convention in Denver,” I said. Remembered Murder, the mystery bookstore my parents owned, got enough business, though normally from used-book sales, to make them a decent living. But in the end, the real business came down to doing all the local cons they could, particularly those dealing with books and mysteries. “Till Sunday.” My mind was working through the problem. “But the thing is, Ben, why would anyone want to steal my key, or come in and chop my table?”

He rubbed the middle of his forehead with his square-tipped fingers, and absurdly I felt a pang of jealousy at his impeccably kept nails. Between Dumpster diving, refinishing, and all—and never mind that I still bit them now and then—my nails looked like they’d been put through a shredder. That I needed to keep my nails better—and longer—was the only thing my mother and All-ex agreed on.

“When my sister Brigid got Grandma Elly’s desk, my sister Dana threatened to break it. Mind you, she never did, but . . .”

“I’m an only child, Ben. And so were my parents. If some relative is jealous of Grandma’s table, they had to come a long way to find me.”

“People do stuff like that,” he said, but didn’t sound like he believed it. “You know . . . idiot stuff.”

I shook my head. He took a deep breath, noisy in the silence, then said, “You know, it could be . . . I mean.” Another breath. “The table.”

“No, it couldn’t.” I refused to even consider it.

“I want you to come stay with us. For a bit.”

“With you?” I asked. Because Ben had to be crazy. As I said before, I thought any dislike he feigned for E was grossly exaggerated, if not a reversal of his true feelings. But I also knew what Ben’s loft looked like. And what E could do to it in three minutes, without trying. It was a
loft
in the self-consciously trendy sense of its being part of a building downtown that had started life in a nonresidential application.

The building in which Ben’s loft was located had been an office building. Three years ago the Loft Bunch, a re-development firm in town, had changed it completely and made it into several upper-end units that, on the inside, more closely resembled townhouses than units in a divided building. They ranged from two thousand square feet or so to Ben’s modest eight hundred square feet divided over two floors. A combination of a sudden slump in the local real estate market and the fact that Ben’s Grandma Elly—whose favorite he was—had left him considerably more than a desk had allowed him to buy it, though it would normally have been way out of his range. And mine. And that of anyone else our age.

As it was, it was not only an upper-floor unit—with a panoramic view of the downtown lights at night, and of the highway up above girding the slopes of the Rockies and shining in the dark like a lighted ribbon—but it was done up in all top-of-the-line materials. Granite countertops. Lovingly polished oak floors enhanced by Oriental rugs. Ben had decorated it to his taste, which ran to expansive glass surfaces and vast antique vases, about which he knew more than I could begin to guess. He had worked for months to find just the right piece for the right place. What E could do to such a place didn’t bear thinking—at least not if one wasn’t a sadist.

To top it off, the place had a completely open floor plan. Even the bathroom and the master bedroom—
accessible by a wrought-iron spiral staircase—didn’t have any walls. I remembered that when Ben had bought it, I’d asked him—considering that the external walls of the loft were pretty much glass—if he wanted the whole town to see him bathe. He’d told me if they wanted to take a helicopter up to the twentieth floor and use a special lens to look through the polarized glass, they had earned the right.

E aside, I wasn’t exactly happy at the idea of bathing where Les could look up and see me. And I was more than sure the feeling would be mutual. I didn’t even have the slightest wish to see Ben naked, something we’d avoided through seventeen years of friendship.

“You can stay in the guest room,” Ben said, still rubbing his forehead.

And if it weren’t for that gesture, which normally meant he had a massive stress headache forming, I would have laughed aloud. His guest room was partitioned from the living room not with a wall—no—but with an antique mahogany bookcase that he’d bought from the store where I consigned pieces in Denver. Its shelves were filled with Ben’s favorite books, all of them in pristine condition, because he could read his books and leave them immaculate, something I’d never managed. And with antique pottery glazed in lovely red and brown shades. E loose on those two things . . . I shuddered. “Don’t be stupid, Ben. I can’t stay with you.” I left unsaid, because I was fairly sure we both knew it, that I’d rather walk on blades in a salt desert than stay with Les.

I was sure that Ben knew it, because he’d gradually given up on having Les go with us when we went out to dinner. Not that I ever tried to antagonize the man. Ben loved him, and I didn’t have the power to have Ben committed. And I don’t think Les was trying to antagonize me. It’s more that we were such diametric opposites that we rubbed each other wrong without even trying.

If petite, slim, blond Les had been a girl, he would have been one of those flawless porcelain blondes who, in school, always brought out the worst in me. Not that—as I told the principal—I had anything to do with putting glue in their mascara holders, or even with the famous live bugs incident when all their purses had been stuffed with crickets. And the principal had never been able to prove it. Seems the pet store didn’t know who had bought all those crickets, and the person had paid in cash.

I was fairly sure that the fact that Ben and I had jokes going back years and could smile or laugh suddenly, at nothing that anyone else could understand, drove poor Les insane. Which, admittedly, was a short distance and a good road. Of course, our trying to explain the jokes or references only made him snippy.

“But I can’t leave you here, alone, with E. Not—”

At that moment, E screamed. I’m not exactly sure how Ben and I managed it, but we became entangled in the door going into my bedroom. He was bigger and finally got through first, bullying his way through the door to E’s room. And then he was silent. Very silent.

“Ben, what—”

I came in after him and followed into E’s room and the bathroom. And stopped, looking where he was looking. The only sound was E, who had gone through all levels of siren to
high-pitched fire alarm
. He was pointing a shaking finger at the dark bathroom. And there, swinging from the curtain rod, was one of his monkeys. It had been hanged with the belt of my bathrobe, which was in turn hanging on a hook on the wall.

“Right, you’re staying with us,” Ben said.

CHAPTER 7

The Law

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Don’t be silly. It’s just a
stuffed animal. Not a live bunny.” I walked into the bathroom, turned on the light, and started untying the noose from around the animal’s neck. It had been tied so tightly that it was indented deep into the fur and took all my stubbornness, not to mention further damage to my already destroyed nails, to get it undone. I was ten seconds from cutting through the belt, but it was my robe’s belt, and I liked that robe, damn it. E stopped crying and came up to me, extending his hand for the animal, but at least he wasn’t making that brain-blotting noise.

“But it’s only not a bunny because you don’t
have
a live bunny,” Ben said. “And I don’t even want to think what they might do to E.”

“They,” I said, trying to picture someone out there, someone who had killed that woman by making her half-melt and now had broken into my house to . . . cut up my table and hang one of my child’s stuffed animals? “Whoever they might be, they’re completely insane. There’s no
sense in this.” It couldn’t be about the table. Not my lovely, valuable table.

“Is that supposed to reassure me?” Ben asked, and then said in that tone he assumed when he thought he could simply get his way by speaking authoritatively and acting like he was in charge, “You are coming to stay with us and that’s it.”

I’m sure that this worked really well at his investment firm, but he knew better. And he knew I knew him better.

I got the noose untied and gave the animal—a realistic-looking chimp—to E, who cuddled it. “E isn’t going to be here till Tuesday, and I’ll be just fine.”

“But if E isn’t going to be here, then there’s no reason for you not to come and stay with us. You’re not going to break things or . . .”

I looked up at him. “No. I have a really valuable table in the back. I don’t want to leave the place alone.”

“But—”

“No.”

Ben took a deep breath and looked like he was trying to find sanity or at least strength. “Will you at least call the police?”

“Ben, don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “What am I going to tell the police? That someone came in, knifed my table, and hanged one of E’s animals by the neck? They’re going to think I’m nuts.”

“Not after you found a dead body, they’re not.”

“It’s not that simple. Look, there’s no reason to associate that dead body with me. Do you want them to think there is?”

He frowned. “There must be something. This is clearly a threat. A way to silence you.”

“Really? A threat? Hanging a stuffed animal?” The truth was, I wasn’t feeling nearly as sanguine as I tried to appear. And the sad part of it was that if Ben hadn’t been trying so hard to convince me that there was a serious threat,
I might have called the police of my own accord. But with him pushing at me, I could never do it. And besides, what would I tell them? Officer Hotstuff would think I was nuts. It shouldn’t matter, but it did. And I’d be damned if I was going to explain that complication to Ben.

As it was, he was looking exasperated, but he did what he did when he was truly annoyed. He followed me in stony silence, except for when he opened his mouth to be absolutely polite at me. His first gambit was, “Your burger is on the kitchen counter, and I’m sure it’s cold by now.”

Indeed. If he expected me to pick up on that line, he would be seriously disappointed. There was only one way to deal with Ben in this kind of a snit. Not to admit that you knew he was mad at you, and to carry on in as inconsequential a way as you could manage. And if you could surprise him enough to get him to burst out laughing—one of his rare, sudden eruptions of laughter—then you’d won. I wondered if Les had figured that out yet. If he hadn’t, he’d probably come close to murdering Ben several times—what with the silences my friend could fall into, which could easily last for days. Particularly when he knew he was right—which he undoubtedly did now—and when he was concerned for the person who was annoying him. Which I was sure he was.

I wasn’t in the mood to manage a zinger that would make him laugh suddenly, though that might come later. Instead, I decided to try for the light, inconsequential chatter, starting with, “That table is probably colonial. Seventeen hundreds. Cherry.” I realized I’d just repeated what was written at the bottom. A long shudder ran over me as I rushed to the kitchen and picked up the burger. It was cold, and I didn’t feel like eating.