French Polished Murder (31 page)

(I told you that listening to all those late night discussions had scarred me. . . .)

I realized my mother was launched well away in one of her tirades. “It’s just not right, my dear. I mean, we all lived in college neighborhoods when we were college students, but it’s like living off noodles, you can’t go on doing it the rest of your life. You should move back here and go back to college. Better for you and for your son.”

I marveled at the idea that living in a college student area was considered juvenile, but going back to live with my parents was not. But again, it didn’t bear discussing.

She finally left me, after she had expressed—at length—her opinions about my completely unacceptable lifestyle. All the rats were fed. Pythagoras was waiting patiently at the door. A fresh batch of scratches across his nose told me that the resident kitten was less than ecstatic with the idea of a new playmate, and also that she found it less than pleasing to be apologized to constantly.

After I’d let him in, I cleaned the blood off his nose with a tissue. “You shouldn’t have gone near the little demon,” I told him. “I think she’s the incarnation of the most cantankerous cat ever to walk the Earth. She probably only scratched you because she knew you were my cat.”

He said, “Mew,” which in this case meant, “It’s all right, kind lady. I shouldn’t have tried to become friends with the little lion. She’s a bit territorial, but then I probably deserved it.”

And on that imperfect but perfectly amicable understanding, we’d gone to sleep. I’d dreamed confused dreams about moisturizer dripping from a hand, each of the droplets becoming poison.

When I woke up, I’d dialed Ben’s number before I realized he probably wouldn’t have his cell phone with him in the hospital. But judging from the very gruff, “Yes,” he did. And he also sounded less than pleased with being awakened at—I checked—seven in the morning. “You’re alive,” I said,

“Of course.”

“And in your right mind?”

This brought about a semi-cackle. “More or less. As much as I can be when people keep waking me every hour to take my temperature and blood pressure and stick me with a needle. But I guess everything is clear, because they say I should be discharged around noon. That means I can go home and sleep and be fine to go to work tomorrow.” There was a brief silence, and I was thinking of hanging up, when he said, “Dyce . . . the . . . uh . . . There really were skeletons, right? Nick told me, I think, but I still wasn’t very lucid when he was here last night.”

“There really were skeletons,” I said. “Apparently a man and a woman, the woman very pregnant, Cas says.” I shuddered. “That probably means that they found baby bones, too.”

“Poor bastards,” he said softly.

“Yeah.” And because I couldn’t bear the solemnity in his voice, nor the stupid feeling that I should somehow have been able to save these poor people who’d died before I was even a twinkle in my grandmother’s eye, I said. “And I hope in the future you understand the dangers of beauty products, young man.”

This brought another cackle, and a protest, “I don’t think there are teams of people roaming around poisoning cosmetics.”

“Oh, you never know,” I said. “I’m glad you’re sounding like yourself.”

“So am I,” he said. “I have blisters on my palms. Nick says they’re from a shovel. A shovel, me! A bit more of that stuff and I might have become a raging heterosexual, and then what would that do to my self-image?”

“Don’t worry, honey,” I said, tartly. “You’re likely to die first.”

He laughed again and said, “I’ll come by later after they discharge me. We can go to lunch at Cy’s.” Cy’s makes organic burgers and it’s sort of our local corner of paradise. Ben lived in hope it would cross with Dairy Queen and merge the name, but he loved the burgers anyway.

“Yeah, that would be nice.”

I got up, showered, and dressed and went into the kitchen in search of something that would pass for breakfast, before I went out to look for an early rising locksmith. And I had to call Cas.

Father was in the kitchen, eating buttered toast and drinking coffee. He looked up, startled, at my approach and once more proved my suspicion that he wasn’t so much absentminded as unmoored in time. Any time he met me around his house, he was as likely as not to ask me how my history test had gone, and mention my ninth grade teacher and her concerns on my work.

He looked up and for just a moment his unfocused gaze told me had no idea who I was, or perhaps even what I was. This was probably why he preferred books to people, because books have covers and titles on those covers, which makes them much easier to identify.

Father looks like me, or at least that’s what people tell me. This resemblance had stopped me, in my most snarky moments, from making even worse surmises about my parents’ sex life and my birth.

However,
looks like
is a vague thing. For me to look like my father, I would need to lose most of my hair, leave the rest short, and comb it so that it stood on end. My face would need to look like Ben says it’s going to look in no time at all if I don’t start using moisturizer, and I’d need to start wearing large, square, black-rimmed glasses. Right now, from behind his glasses, his eyes blinked distractedly at me. He raised a finger, as if he were experimentally, feeling the wind. “Sherlock . . . No, that’s not your name, is it?”

“Candyce, Daddy,” I said, helping myself to coffee. One of the things my parents do well is get coffee from the Beanery, which has its own blend—the smoothest, least acid coffee on the planet.

“Oh, yes, that whole silly thing with that ridiculous candy shop.” He sighed. “I suppose it’s a good thing that your mother agreed to come back, though.”

He seemed to be asking me for confirmation. “I think so,” I told him. “I might not have had the most standard upbringing in the world, but without it I’d be someone else, and I like myself.”

“Good, good,” he said.

Then, when I sat down with coffee and my toast, I guess he felt it his paternal duty to ask another question. “So . . . so . . . have you got any boyfriends?”

“One, Daddy. Castor Wolfe. He’s a detective with the Goldport Police Department. Serious Crimes Unit.”

“Ah, good. A policeman is always good. We really should give him that new police procedural your mother read and passed to me. I think it’s a good book, but I wonder about some of the details. Do you think he’d be willing to discuss them?”

In the blissful certainty that my father would almost immediately forget that Cas existed, I said, “Probably, Daddy. I’ll ask him.”

And with that, Father finished the rest of his coffee and went downstairs to man the bookstore. Or more likely to walk aimlessly amid the crowded bookshelves, picking out a book now and then and—if he got half a chance—discouraging prospective buyers from purchasing any of his darlings. I’d seen him do it and it was a masterpiece of the anti-salesman art. First he’d find out what the customer liked to read and then no matter what the customer selected assure him or her that the book was just not going to be to his or her taste.

It didn’t work for the regulars, but it worked for practically everyone else, because, after all, who believed that a bookseller did
not
want to sell his books?

Fortified with coffee, I took my phone out of my pocket, and called Cas.

“No, Dyce, I don’t think so,” he said, after he heard
my full theory of why John Martin was the culprit, with the help of his wife, who had the key made.

“Just like that?” I said. “You listen to my whole idea and you say, “ ‘No, Dyce, I don’t think so.’ Why not, I’d like to know?”

He sighed. He got very cranky when he’d spent the night without sleep. “Mostly because Mrs. Martin had a heart attack yesterday morning, when she was starting her work at the library. She was rushed to hospital, where she’s in intensive care with her husband by her side. I don’t think she left the hospital with her oxygen mask and tank, to get a key cut. Even old Julius would have remembered that.”

“Oh,” I said, as my lovely theory deflated. “I wonder then who Julius thought was Miss Martin . . .”

“I have no idea,” Cas said. “However, I do agree with you that the key having disappeared and the tampering with the moisturizer may be related . . . it doesn’t make me happy. Your place is just not secure enough. If you want to continue renting it, you could make it a business deduction and store furniture in the front while you do your work in the back. But I think, frankly, it makes more sense for us to look around and see if there is the same sort of space somewhere else at around the same price, that can be turned into a storefront. I’m not saying to stop putting your pieces for sale up in Denver, but you might as well have a little place here to sell them, too.”

“And where would I live?” I asked, baffled.

“With me, of course. Haven’t we talked about this?”

Suddenly, there were a heavy weight on my stomach. Oh, not that again. I felt stupid telling Cas I wouldn’t move in with him without a wedding ring. It made me feel like someone of Miss Martin’s generation. And yet, I
wouldn’t
move in with him without a wedding ring. . . . “I haven’t decided yet.”

“Uh . . . I see,” he said. “Well, we’ll talk about it tonight. You can go back home, I should be able to spend the night. And I’m taking some comp time tomorrow, so we can have the locksmith come by then.”

Like that, he destroyed my plans for the day. Which was just as well, because a second later, my mother came up the stairs and into the kitchen. “Dyce, my dear, your father and I really need to go over to Mail Depot, Etc., and see if the new shipment of
Too Cold To Die
has arrived. It’s selling faster than we can keep it on the shelves, and your father, you know, doesn’t like to be down to the last book. It would be so much easier if the company shipped with one of the other carriers, but it’s all UPS, and of course, instead of delivering yesterday they left us one of those yellow little tickets saying that the package is at Mail Depot, Etc. And it’s in your father’s name, so he’ll need to go. There’s no use saying he doesn’t, because I’ve tried to get those books out of hock on my own and they always say it has to be the person to whom it’s addressed. And it’s no use, either, your telling me I should just let your dad drive alone, because the last time I did that he ended up driving to the book mall, all the way in Denver, and coming home with a thousand dollars of books that weren’t even for resale.”

I avoided laughing at my father’s typical behavior and instead tried to figure out what Mom meant by that long ramble. “Uh . . . and you’re telling me this, because?”

I had the terrifying feeling that she wanted me to drive my father to Mail Depot, Etc., or, worse, keep him on track while he drove there. If it was awkward to spend time in a kitchen over breakfast with a man who has known you since you were born and has no idea who you are, it is twice as disconcerting to do it in a moving car. Particularly when that man, probably on purpose, suddenly accuses you of having carjacked him and threatens to put his head out the window and scream he’s been kidnapped unless you take him exactly where he says.

Mom must have read my fear in my eyes. She smiled. “I’d never ask you to drive your father,” she reassured me. “I know how difficult he can be. But we just opened the store, and I would hate to close it again, even for an hour. We have to do it, of course, when we’re here alone, but since you’re here today, I don’t suppose you’d stay in the store while we go?”

Alarm shed off me in waves, replaced by relief. “Oh, that,” I said. “Of course.”

I made sure that the rats and Pythagoras were safe, then went downstairs to man the counter.

Bookstore work at nine in the morning on a Sunday is probably the most boring thing in the world. My mother and father were the only ones on the street who opened their store that early on Sundays. But Mom said there was a link between preachers and turning people to thinking of murder. Probably when the sermons were too long. She said they got a steady crowd starting with those leaving the early Catholic and Episcopal services, through the noontime when the Baptists left theirs, and then again in the early evening when the more exotic denominations were done.

I suspected it was because mystery fanatics are such that their idea of a satisfying day off always revolves around a good book. So, faced with the expanse of Sunday afternoon, they came in search of that good book to read.

Mom was right. The store started getting people in waves. Not singly, but in groups of fifteen or so, between which the bell behind the door would be completely silent.

I don’t mean that they came in a group. They would arrive, by ones or twos, and make their purchases, one by one or two by two. Then the shop would be silent for a while. Fluffy had been the bookstore cat and kept my parents company during the lulls, but the new and improved Fluffy the Second hadn’t yet been trained in her duties of sleeping in the chairs arranged in front of the fireplace to the left of the entrance or winding in and out of people’s steps as they walked around looking at books. So I was completely alone.