French Polished Murder (30 page)

This left me feeling sad as I went into the house and cuddled up with Pythagoras.

I had been a little upset at Ben spending so much time hanging around my house and alphabetizing my spices while he was single, but I had a feeling I was going to miss him. I was certainly going to miss him while dealing with cats and rats.

“Oh, my,” I told Pythagoras, who gave me a “meow, meow” that indicated he was afraid the lions and tigers and bears would show up later.

All in all, it was a very quiet evening. I fed the rats, noting that Ratley was a little lethargic but seemed otherwise unharmed. I’d have been lethargic, too, if I’d spent three hours running. No, given my decidedly unathletic body, I’d be dead if I’d spent three hours running.

I fed Pythagoras, again, because he seemed to think it was one of the great injustices in the world that he shouldn’t get fed as much as baby rats. “You’re going to be a butterball,” I told him. “We’ll end up confusing you with the turkey and cooking you for Thanksgiving.” Seeing his stricken expression, big eyes staring up at me in terror, I said, “Joking. But you are going to destroy your cattish figure, my dear.”

He didn’t seem fully reassured and was scrambling sideways and skittish the rest of the night.

I put my pajamas on and climbed into bed to reread Agatha Christie’s
Sleeping Murder
, which was my idea of a rousing good time when alone at home on a winter’s night. When you’re practically raised by mystery books you acquire these kinds of quirks.

Pythagoras clearly decided that no one who was such a fuddy-duddy as to read Agatha Christie when she couldn’t have a good time with her hard-working policeman boyfriend, could possibly harbor such vigorous and innovative notions as cooking neurotic cats.

He put his paws on the bed and asked permission to jump on and, when I granted it, climbed up and nestled under my arm. It wasn’t really comfortable but it was very comforting.

So comforting in fact that I fell asleep like that. And woke up, two hours later, wide awake and convinced that I was in danger.

I sat up in bed so violently that I startled Pythagoras
who complained of my rudeness. Not sure what had alarmed me, and half-convinced I must have dreamed it, I petted Pythagoras while looking around the room. Everything was exactly as it had been when I’d fallen asleep, and I didn’t have a sense that there was anyone in the house. Well, anyone other than me, seven rats, and a truly confused cat.

Then why was my heart drumming up near my throat and why was I suddenly convinced that I was in great danger and needed to get out of the house?

I thought backward through the various things that had been in my sleeping mind when I woke up. The most important of those was a key. My key.

Cas had found my key in my purse, but I’d swear it wasn’t there the day before. Which meant . . . what? I thought back to the hardware store and to Julius saying that Mrs. Martin had been in to copy a key. Well, he had said Miss Martin, but of course that was impossible. Old people made that kind of mistake all the time. Given that he had to be at least two hundred, it was a minor slip. So . . . I petted Pythagoras and thought on. Mrs. Martin had come in to copy a key. Which had allowed her to have the housekeeper return said key to my purse when she had let me in to talk to Miss Martin. Probably the younger Martins had manipulated the older woman into asking me to come visit. They would never have expected her to tell me the truth.

And that brought me to two realizations. Mr. Martin had to know about his father’s guilt, of course. He’d been doing whatever he could to minimize chances his father would ever be exposed.

So I’d gotten my key back. Which meant that someone had already used it. To poison Ben’s moisturizer cream, thinking it was mine. Maybe the old lady had overheard something and that was why she questioned me about my skin care! It almost made sense.

I had insisted on investigating and poking my nose into an almost hundred-year-old murder. But if all of a sudden, I became a raving lunatic, no one would listen to anything I said about anything I might have found. At least, I hoped that the intent had been to make me sound crazy, so no one would pay attention to me, rather than kill me. It had been a masterful plan except for the fact that the moisturizer in the house was not mine but my male houseguest’s.

By now, though, whoever it was would know that they missed their target and even possibly that the skeletons in their closet had been found. This would not have made them happy. And they still had a key to the house . . .

My subconscious had finally come through and all of my scattered thoughts and suspicions were clear. I was out of the bed and packing. Pythagoras must have caught on that I was scared and trying to leave, because he climbed into the suitcase, forcing me to go find his carrier, shoo him into it, then finish filling a suitcase with enough clothing for a couple of days, just in case Cas had to work late tomorrow night, too.

The clock on my bedside table said it was midnight, and that meant that my parents would still be up, reading or discussing the latest mystery. In fact, I suspected discussing mysteries was what my parents did instead of sleeping, if they didn’t discuss them while asleep.

Of course, my taking refuge with my parents was the rough equivalent of Christians taking refuge in a lion’s den, or perhaps a virgin taking refuge in a bordello. Mom could drive me insane in no time flat, and I could only imagine how the two of them would take to Pythagoras and the rats. But the fear gnawing inside of me told me it was better to go home to Mom and Dad and let Fluffy the Second—now improved and with more fluffiness—pee on my bed than to stay here and end up maybe dead.

So I set out, in the middle of the night, with the aquarium and the cat carrier once again strapped side by side in the backseat, and Pythagoras muttering softly under his breath that it was truly an injustice and undignified too for him to be transported under these conditions and that if the car was going to be a rodent express he would want no part of it.

I was received as if I’d announced I’d come to
my senses and was finally moving back home and—probably—after suitable nagging by my mother, going back to college.

My mother is very good at believing the things she wants to believe and ignoring signs of any reality that is different. For instance, she often says that she and my father had wanted a large family. Knowing my father, I strongly doubted this. In my more uncharitable moments, I thought I had been conceived after Mom had glued books all over herself, and while Father was reading them something had gone wrong. Or right depending on your opinion.

Since one of her fondest wishes—right after the golden dream that I would marry her favorite child, Benedict Colm—was that I would move back home and go back to college and take a degree in English or library science or something else that could use in the store, she received me exactly as if I had finally chosen to do this. And while she didn’t kill the fatted calf, she received the ratty guests with something approaching euphoria.

After I’d climbed—
creak, creak, shake, shake
—the rickety, father-built stairs all the way to the top carrying the aquarium and the cat carrier (and made a second trip with my suitcase containing clothes for two days and the equipment to feed the rats), Mom had opened the door with a bright and fixed smile, and said, “Oh, hi, dear. I’m so glad you finally got in.”

Note that she didn’t say come back or even come home, but “got in,” as though I already lived there and had merely gone away for some hours. All those crazy people who claim you should act as though things were true and, presto, chango, they would become so, were amateurs compared to my mother.

She proclaimed Pythagoras the most beautiful cat in the world and quite the companion for her own precious little Fluffy, even as the king of neurosis—newly released from his carrier—was walking experimentally around the kitchen muttering apologies
.
“So sorry to be here without being invited. No manners, that girl. Of course she should have called in advance. Oh, look, a cat dish—” fearful look around “—from its dainty size and pink color I deduce it must belong to a ferocious man-eating tiger—” mad scared look in my direction “
—
you wouldn’t let me be eaten, would you?”

As for the rats, Mom was not crazy enough to touch them—not even, in fact, to go near their aquarium or get so near to them as to help me carry the aquarium to my attic bedroom. She had instead taken my suitcase while I carried the rats—with all of them crowding the glass and wondering where they were—up two more flights of stairs. Despite this distance and her rather obvious aversion to them, she proclaimed them darlings and the cutest things.

And once they were set on my desk and I—who didn’t trust Fluffy nearly as much as I trusted Pythagoras—had closed the door and sat on the bed to feed the rats, Mom had stayed behind to talk to me.

“Are you . . . are you intending to keep them?” she asked me, in a tone that implied she wished I wouldn’t, but was afraid to say it.

“No. Half of them are going to Ben and half to his new boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend?”

“A very nice police officer. Cas’s cousin. Greek. I think I mentioned him?”

It had taken my mother about ten seconds to process this information. You could tell she had arrived at one of her conclusions when her eyes lit up and she lifted her eyebrows and said, “Ah, Greek.” As if that explained everything.

“Born and raised in the States,” I said. “But his parents are of Greek origin.”

“Well,” Mom said. “We know everything about the Greeks. Alexander the Great . . . Huge influence on Greek culture. Anna Apostolou made that very clear.”

I refused to speculate on what Anna Apostolou had made very clear. In fact, I already had a pretty good idea, because I’d read a book by the author, sometime ago, called
Murder in Macedonia
and it contained enough sodomy to make Ben blush. I let that matter drop, because if we went into it, we’d end up discussing modern life as viewed through mysteries, which was always one of my mother’s problems, anyway.

So instead, I’d said, “So they’ll be taking the rats, and I can keep Pythagoras, though I think, really, he’s more E’s cat. He’s always sleeping with E or sitting on him.”

“Um . . .” Mom said. “We can change the guest room so that it’s E’s room. Unless you want to move there and have E sleep here.”

Given a choice, of course, if I ever
have
to move back to my parents’ house, I fully intend to stay in the attic and keep E with me. Neither of us needed to listen to my parents never-ending discussions of mysteries at all hours of the night. It had scarred me, would continue to scar me, and might very well scar E.

“Not needed, Mom. E is staying with All . . . with his father until Tuesday and I don’t expect to stay here more than one night at the most. I’m just here because uh . . .” I tried desperately to think of an excuse that wouldn’t get me questioned about the murder and everything that had happened, and wouldn’t get my parents all excited about having me in the middle of a real mystery. “The heating is out at my place. Nothing bad, the rental company should have it fixed it by the day after tomorrow, but I needed a place to stay for a couple of nights.” After which I would have had my locks changed, something I planned on doing by the dawn’s early light. And also by the dawn’s early light, I was going to call my boyfriend. First, to tell him the locks had been changed, just in case he found it necessary to go to my house. And second to tell him that either John Martin or possibly his wife was behind the poisoning, probably to hide the fact his father was a murderer.

It was just like an Agatha Christie novel with all the pronouncements on how bad blood could be passed on. Though, of course, in almost every Agatha Christie novel that theory was disproven and the child of the murderer or suspected long-ago murderer turned out to be completely innocent. But maybe Agatha was wrong and Rex Stout, American and supposedly a lot more progressive, whose villains often were the children of the damned was right.