French Polished Murder (9 page)

I was almost sure he would have had time to talk to his lawyers, and leave instructions. I remembered the paper said the law firm of Fenris, Fenris, and Nefer had been in charge of the dissolution of his property and satisfying his creditors. So, why hadn’t he left instructions? And why hadn’t he written letters, afterward—even if he sent them from some city other than where he was—giving instructions on how to dispose of property? Surely it was not that hard? Even if he and Almeria were hiding from her husband, surely good ol’ Jacinth was smart enough to send the letter to a friend of his to mail from across the country. There was just no reason whatsoever to let the business go, like that, as it would.

I set the five-point painter’s tool down. I’d cleaned off all of the keyboard cover, and now had only the final, fine sanding to do, before I had to figure out how to do French polish.

And meanwhile, I found, I wasn’t at all happy with the solution to the little mystery started by the letter.

Which meant that I would have to do some more poking around. I didn’t even know why, but the story needled at me. Perhaps it was the parallels between Almeria leaving with “
baby
” just as I had left in the middle of the night, with E only one year old. These days, it was easier, but all the same . . . And then there was that credit thing. And the feeling something just wasn’t right.

When I was about to be born, my parents had had the worst—possibly the only—big argument of their marriage, over what they should name me. Dad wanted to name me Sherlockia. Mother wanted to name me Agatha.

Unable to reconcile their differences, they had separated for months. Mom had taken a job somewhere—no one ever said exactly where—and lived in a boarding house.

My father’s mother, who would live to raise me, had felt her son was distraught over this. I won’t even guess how she detected this, since my father was not known to talk much at the best of times, unless he talked to his books, which he often did. To Father, at least left to his own devices, not eating, not bathing, and walking around in a bathrobe all day with his nose in a book weren’t symptoms of clinical depression. They were what he called normal life, unless Mom was around to make him act like a functioning adult human.

But either Grandma had seen or imagined signs of depression in my father, or perhaps she had simply seen the store closed day after day—since my father hated selling books. Grandma knew that the prospect of my father becoming a mad recluse loomed, a prospect Mom had banished by molding him into a merely eccentric bookseller. (The difference was small, but the recluse might die under an avalanche of books and not be found for months, while the eccentric bookseller would live to a ripe old age, admittedly getting more and more eccentric.)

Besides which, no doubt Grandma had some understandable interest in knowing her grandchild. At any rate, she’d searched high and low till she found where my mother was staying, and she’d convinced Mother and Father to meet in the neutral ground of a candy shop.

By then, so much time had gone by that Mom was ready to pop. Which she did. Right in the candy store. Which was why my name was Candyce Chocolat. Mom had wanted to make it Candy, but Dad had mercifully added the two extra letters.

Now, as I finished cleaning my tools, and hung up my protective clothing, I considered the possibility that both my parents had been right to begin with. Given how much the old mystery the letter hinted at wouldn’t let me quit it, perhaps I should have been called Sherlockia Agatha. Or Agatha Sherlock.

By the time I got into the house, I had my entire
story prepared, and was moving too fast for Ben to ask too much about it. As it was, it might have been unnecessary effort, since Ben was deep in a book, his brow furrowed in confusion. Judging by the title the book was about surviving depression, and he had a notebook open and was making notes.

I would have been worried and imagined he was on the verge of wandering about in a robe, reading books and not bathing, only I could see dollar signs on the cover, too, so I guessed the depression they were talking about wasn’t psychological. And since Ben was a financial planner, it made perfect sense.

“Working?” I asked him.

He had the aquarium with the rats, a supply of kitchen towels, the dropper, a thermos I’d bet would contain formula, and a wad of cotton balls all on one side of him, and Pythagoras on the other. From the sounds of wood blocks being tossed around his bedroom, E was doing what passed for quiet play for him. Ben had given him a set of Thomas the Tank Engine wooden tracks and trains, and E delighted in creating and destroying railroads. Over and over again.

Ben looked up. “What? Not exactly. But yeah . . . some of our clients have left, and I didn’t get nearly the bonuses I expected. Not that I’m not doing what I should, but . . .”

“Yeah, times are tough all over,” I said. I didn’t add that it might be the right time to shack up with a good man with a steady income because, despite all appearances to the contrary, I do not, in fact, have a death wish. “I need to buy some supplies for the French polishing,” I added, before he could do more than nod assent to my platitude. “I’ll be gone about an hour, maybe two. Is that okay?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “I’ll just stay here with the animals.”

I didn’t ask about E. I had a feeling he had been included in that description. Instead, I got out fast before Ben asked me exactly what kind of supplies I was buying.

North Waterfall Avenue was five blocks west of me. It was the richest area of downtown and, it had never gone to the dogs, even during the hard times and fast suburbanization of the seventies. Even the part of town where Mom and Dad lived, which was now a gentrified upscale area of brick houses with shops downstairs and lofts on the upper stories, had become a bit seedy in the seventies, when most of the houses had been apartments or flop houses. But North Waterfall had remained as it had been since it was built by the founder of our city, Major Goldport, and his cronies: dignified mansions, set a long way back from the street on immaculate lawns that could only be maintained in Colorado if a homeowner was willing to pour money out the water spigot and all over them twice a day, pretty much year-round unless there was snow on the ground.

Looking at the houses, you wouldn’t know there was any depression for Ben to be worried about, although there were a few more for sale signs than usual. The funny thing is that on this street even for sale signs were more upscale and discreet than in the rest of the city. Instead of screaming bright colors proclaiming, “price reduced,” or the garish metal signs showing pictures of smiling realtors saying you could trust them, these were wooden, easily confused for business signs, had this not been an aggressively residential area of town. One of the signs even had realistic-looking grape bunches suspended from its frame. The name of the realtor was Toscania Properties, which I supposed made sense, in that Colorado was absolutely nothing like any part of Italy and was not exactly a major grape growing region.

The house I was interested in didn’t have a for sale sign. Which, of course, gave me less of an excuse to ring the doorbell. But I was fairly sure I could think of something on the fly. So I walked down the walkway amid the trees. It was done in mosaic, in the roman style, with little colored pebbles making out designs—in this case the designs seemed to be infinitely curling dark spirals on a white background.

It seemed to me if you were going to spend a lot of money to make a design on your walkway, you would want something more imaginative. At least fauns or something. But I guessed the rich were truly different than the rest of us. For one, they had more money.

The doorbell, too, was impressive. When I pulled the hand ring next to the polished door, what sounded inside was like the carillon of a thousand abbey bells. Frankly, it was such a big and important sound, it almost scared me into leaving. Surely a house like this had a service entrance, and perhaps I was supposed to go around to it, and ring the bell that was sure to sound much less churchy and more practical. But then again, I wouldn’t bet on it, and besides, the one quality I got from both of my parents was tri-plated stubbornness.

So I stood my ground till at length the door was opened by a lady in a white apron. The fact that she was wearing a white apron didn’t make her any less of a lady. Beneath it she wore a dove gray blouse, and a tailored black skirt. She had a string of pearls around her neck. Probably fake, but nice-looking. Every one of her white hairs was in place, and her blue eyes shone down on me—she was taller than I—with benevolent enquiry. “Yes? How may I help you?”

I gave her a smile that would have made Nick’s seem pale. “Hello, my name is Dyce Dare. I run Daring Finds, a furniture recovery business. It’s been my experience in homes like this, furniture can be stored and forgotten in various states of disrepair.” I saw the look behind her eyes, and knew if I used the economic motive and pointed out I could pay for such old pieces, I would lose her completely and she would shut the door in my face. But I had another angle. “These days a lot of people who are ecologically minded view it as their duty to recirculate those pieces, thus allowing people to buy them once more, instead of purchasing new furniture, which would deplete our old growth resources, as well as pollute the world further with factory effluvia.” I could see her waver, so I put the pressure on. “I will of course pay for anything I think is recoverable, but the payment is purely nominal. The money should be of very little account, of course, compared to saving the environment.”

She blinked. Then sniffed. Then cleared her throat. “If you’ll wait a moment, Ms. . . .”

“Dare,” I supplied. And waited. She didn’t close the door completely, which I guess counted for something. So I got a view of sparkling hallway marble tiles, a glimmer of a very clean, elaborately framed mirror to the side, and heard her distant footsteps and echoes of her voice, though not actually the words.

When she came back she nodded to me. It was the nod of an aristocrat to a young and upcoming servant. Or something. “Mr. Martin says you might look at what’s stored in the carriage house,” she said. “We have recently sold some of the better furniture, but the trash pieces have been lingering, and one doesn’t quite know what to do with them.”

I wasn’t sure what had prompted the furniture sell-off, but I could never leave well enough alone. So, as I followed her out back, I said, in a casual voice. “You don’t have any idea how much they mean to list it for?” She could think I was talking about the furniture, of course. Or she could think anything she wanted, including that she had misunderstood me.

But she didn’t seem to give it a second thought. She nodded and said, “No, I’m afraid that’s quite out of my provenance. In the low two millions or thereabouts, I’d expect. But it’s more a matter of moving out into the country, as they’ve always wanted to. The ranch . . .” She shrugged. “With Miss Martin entering the hospice, there’s no longer any reason they shouldn’t, is there?”

It didn’t seem to occur to her there was no logical reason that anyone coming out of the blue to ring the doorbell would know anything about the Martins or their circumstances. But maybe I was the one who was delusional here. The family had lived in the public eye since at least the early twentieth century. Perhaps everyone in town knew everything about them, except me.

I made noncommittal noises and followed her out back. I was, of course, less than interested in whatever I might find—but I ended up surprising myself. What these people considered trash pieces made me start. They were of a better quality than what I was used to buying, fixing up, and reselling.

To be honest, my business was on the low rung of the ladder, and often, when I needed to sell but had little money to invest in materials or new pieces, I’d gone Dumpster diving or driving by expensive areas on trash day.

My bottom category of acceptability was low enough: the piece had to be real wood, not some unholy conglomerate, and it had to be reasonably well built, preferably with dowels, though I’d take screws.

My top, when I could get it, was antique. The contents of the carriage house—a vast, dusty expanse that still had, on the floor, a giant daisy-wheel type of contraption, which had at one time been used to turn carriages around in the available space, fell somewhere between the two. I would guess most of it was somewhere between fifty and seventy years old—too young to be a bona fide antique, but quite good enough for vintage furniture.

All of it was wood. In the dim light, I could see nearby a vast modern desk in what looked like cherry. The finish was dusty and crazed, but it might yet be recoverable. Against the wall was a china cabinet balanced on thin, spindly legs, its glass-front doors so dusty they were opaque. But the wood looked like mahogany. My mouth went dry. The business was doing better lately. Much better. A small antique table that had come my way six months ago had sold for enough profit to allow me to attend an estate sale, and that in turn had allowed me to turn an even handsomer profit. I had money in the bank. I cleared my throat. “What . . . what would be for sale, and what not?”