A Fatal Stain (24 page)

So I sighed and plopped down on the battered metal chair across from his desk. Cas’s office is a work in progress, as I guess is most of the police station. The desks and chairs have seen better days but he’d put really nice pictures on the walls and a rug on the floor. It looked homey, strangely, despite the dented chairs and chipped desk.

I sat down. E was on the floor reading
Rotten Romans
.

“It’s Jason Ashton,” I said.

This time, Cas dropped into a chair and raised his eyebrows. “Explain,” he said.

I explained. In detail. Including the bloodstains on the table. By the time I finished, Cas had his face in his hands, his elbows on the desk. “Dyce, what am I going to do with you?”

I didn’t say
Marry me
because I was afraid he’d decide that was way too far-fetched. So, instead, I said, “Uh…I don’t know.”

“Me neither,” he said. “And I suspect neither does anyone else. When were you planning on telling me all this?”

“When Jason identified the table, of course,” I said.

“Of course,” Cas said. “The fact that he might be lying and coming over to eliminate you has never occurred to you, right?”

“Um…not really. I think he’s nice, Cas.”

Cas stared at me for a moment, then sighed. “And he might very well be, but you see, in the police, we can’t just go based on how someone looks. Supposedly, he sold that table, and then he said his wife had taken it with her. I don’t need to tell you that in nine out of ten spousal murders—”

“The criminal is the other spouse?” I said. “No. But he couldn’t make himself a bug-eyed blond, which is what the guy at the garage sale said he was.”

Cas shrugged. “Could be an accomplice. I’m paid to think of suspicious circumstances and things that can go seriously wrong. So you should have told me.”

“Maybe,” I conceded. The problem was that at some level I agreed with him. When he talked to me about stuff
like this, I always emerged feeling like I’d been totally reckless and also a bit foolish.

“Yeah, more than maybe,” he said. “I tell you what—I’ll come with you. We’ll bring E and his Romans. And I’ll meet Ashton with you. If he has any bad intentions, the fact that I’m there should be enough to thwart them. If he doesn’t have any bad intentions…It all depends on whether that table was the one Maria took or not, doesn’t it?”

I nodded. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t even say for sure why I didn’t like it, but I didn’t. It had to do with the fact that I’d told Ashton I’d be there alone and that I’d never told Cas anything. Now he was going to think I’d been lying and perhaps setting a trap. At best, that would make him defensive. At worst, it might make him lie about the table.

But there was nothing to do about it, as Cas convinced E to get up and he followed me in his car to my place.

As it was, I half-expected Ben and Nick to converge
on us as we approached the driveway, because that would really set the cap on this mess. Then Ashton would think that I’d called everyone I knew to my aid or something.

But we pulled up on the driveway and beside Ashton’s brown, dinged beater Toyota. He had been behind the wheel and came out of the car. The way he managed not to look like he was surprised, much less upset at Cas being there also, was pretty convincing.

Cas, on the other hand, acted with an odd mix of protectiveness and possessiveness, going around me to stand in front, holding out a hand to Ashton. “Hello, Mr. Ashton. We’ve met before.”

“Oh, yes,” Ashton said, and blinked up at him, in a confused way. He looked even smaller, more rumpled, and more inoffensive next to Cas. “Dyce…er…
Ms. Dare said that perhaps she bought at a garage sale the table that my wife took with her, and I thought I’d look at it before we bothered you with it, because, you know, she might be quite mistaken.”

“Yes, of course,” Cas said, and then added, “Did she tell you about the bloodstains?”

Jason Ashton stopped. He’d been reaching a hand to shake mine, but he just froze in midgesture. “What?” he asked, and shot me a terrified look. “What bloodstains? What do you mean bloodstains? Where were the bloodstains?”

He looked like a man on the verge of a heart attack. If he were acting, he shouldn’t only be on the stage; he should be in movies. He would probably be the best actor ever, in fact.

Cas shook his head. “Maybe they’re not blood. Dyce wasn’t sure. There are some stains. Perhaps you know something about them?”

“There were no stains,” Ashton said, frowning. He took a deep breath. “I wish I knew where Maria is and what happened to her. This is insane. I can’t believe she would disappear this long. And if the table is stained, it wasn’t when she took it.” He paused. “Perhaps that is why she got rid of it?”

“Perhaps,” Cas said, appealingly.

He managed to sort of guide Ashton up to the house. As we got in, he said, “Dyce’s workshop is at the back, and it’s easier to walk through the house than to go around.”

“Yeah,” Ashton said, but he was in a daze. As we walked through the house, he went first, with me right behind him, and Cas, holding E, at the back. But in the kitchen, Jason Ashton turned back. He was visibly nervous. I thought he
was afraid of looking at the table, of confirming that it actually belonged to his wife, of knowing something he didn’t want to think about or believe. “Where were these stains?” he asked. “On the top? On the legs? I mean, we used to have this dog…” He frowned. “But you couldn’t remotely confuse that with blood, could you? Or maybe you could? Does it look burned, because dog—”

“No,” I said. “It looks like some dark substance was spilled all over it and penetrated the wood. It’s hard to tell though, because of the—”

“He’ll see,” Cas said, clearing his throat, and I guessed that it didn’t suit his plans to have Ashton know that the table had a weird top finish. “It’ll be obvious.”

“Okay,” I said, and stepped into the back hallway ahead of Jason Ashton, to open the door to the backyard. Then I held it open, while he stepped through it.

The backyard wasn’t big. It was not nearly as large as either my parents’ backyard or the backyard of the house—I still had trouble believing this—we were planning to buy. There were maybe twenty steps between the house and my shed.

To this day, I can’t tell you why it felt wrong. It just did. As far as I could tell, there were no footprints on the ground, and the door wasn’t ajar or anything, only the place felt wrong, all of it; the entire area around the shed felt as though something was seriously out of kilter.

And then I realized there was a hiss coming from the shed—a hiss just on the edge of hearing. And I thought of all the things I had in there that could make that sound. There were chemicals and jars of stuff and…

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of light blossom and shine through the window high up on the wall.

I didn’t think. I didn’t have time to think. I had a feeling I should jump back, but Ashton was almost at the shed, so I jumped forward, grabbed his wrist, and jumped back, pulling him.

We collided with Cas, who was carrying E, and all of us went crashing and careening against the back door, which opened. Cas and E got shoved through the door, and Ashton and I barely had time to cover our heads.

There had been a boom sometime along the line, only I was too busy trying to get back to pay attention.

Now there were other booms and a muffled succession of pops.

Something big and heavy hit me on the head, hard. And darkness fell.

I woke up in a fog of smoke. Thick smoke all over, and
fire engines echoing all around. It was raining. No. It was water, but not rain. A paramedic—had to be a paramedic because he was wearing a surgical mask—was leaning over me, and from somewhere in the fog, Cas said, “Is she…”

“She’s fine. Just got knocked out when some debris fell on her head,” the paramedic said.

I demanded a recount. My head felt like it was on fire, and my lungs felt like they were about to burst. If the paramedic thought this was being all right, I had news for him. But I had more immediate concerns, to wit, “E? Is E all right? What happened to Ashton?” I asked in the general direction Cas’s voice had sounded.

“E’s fine and Ashton’s getting taken care of,” he said, and now his face came through the smoke, looking at
me. His hair was all up on end, and he had a smudge on his cheek. His eyes were red and tearing, obviously from the smoke. He was the best sight I’d ever seen.

“E’s okay?”

“He’s in the front room with Ben.”

“With Ben?” I said, confused. “How long was I out?”

“About fifteen minutes. Ben was in his car, heard about the explosion on the radio, and drove here. He says he knew where it was immediately. He managed to get E to the living room by telling him, with great authority, that you’d be fine. Apparently the rest of us aren’t as trustworthy,” he said with a grin.

“He’s been ordering E around at least as long as I have,” I said. “And with the same mixed results, but sometimes it works.”

Cas squeezed my hand, and since the paramedic had left, I tried standing up. I felt dizzy and vaguely drunk, and my head hurt; plus, my hair felt weird.

“Your hair caught fire,” Cas said, as I put my hand up to it. “On the right side. We managed to put it out before it got to the scalp. Ashton is worse off; he has burns all over his arms. He put one over his head and one over yours, which is probably why you didn’t get hit worse. Also, his jeans caught fire.”

“Uh,” I said, which was about my level of eloquence, as I was led into the house and all the way to the living room. Someone had closed the door between the dining room and the living room. Since this was a pocket door that had been jammed, and I’d never tried to close it before, someone had expended a great deal of effort in this. Cas now opened it with visible effort and pushed me through it and into the living room.

The air was surprisingly clear, the windows open, both with fans in them—the ones I used in summer—blowing air in.

The air in front of the house was just a little hazy, not black with smoke like in the back. “We’re lucky how the wind is blowing,” Cas said.

“There are still…I had chemicals back there that…” I tried to explain inhaling the stuff back there wasn’t good for anyone, but then it occurred to me the quantities I had weren’t that great. Though they would feed the fire and guarantee that no piece of the shed stayed unburned, I doubted they were more than about one-tenth of the total material burning. Most of it would be old wood and old shingles.

“Yeah, but most of it was right at the beginning. And the firefighters are bringing it under control,” Cas said. He closed the pocket door behind us.

“Mommy!” E said and ran to hug my knees, leaving Ben on the sofa, holding
Groovy Greeks
open.

I patted my son’s head distractedly and realized there was a third person in the room before Cas and I entered it. He was tall; had overlong blond hair that always looked a little unruly, reminding one of a leonine mane; and had a way of looking almost terminally relaxed, even in his suit pants and with a dress shirt on. His name was Rafiel Trall, and, with Cas, he was one of two senior investigators in the Serious Crimes Unit of the Goldport police. He was also one of Cas’s friends dating back to their days in college. Or at least they were friendly acquaintances. Cas said that Rafiel didn’t really encourage close friendships, seeming to prefer to keep his distance. He also seemed to be a bit of a ladies’ man, never settling for one woman and
changing his clothes several times during the day, in a way his colleagues thought denoted clandestine encounters.

Whether this was true, I didn’t know. I’d always liked the man when our paths converged. He was polite, professional, and generally a nice person, even volunteering to watch E when Cas and I wanted a minute to talk about something important in his office. Cas had said that he thought Rafiel had a girlfriend just now, but there hadn’t been time to give me the full gossip.

He now smiled at me and nodded, and I realized he was here in an official capacity and that it was his job to talk to me.

“Uh,” I said. It seemed to be my most common word just now. In fact, I probably could give it the sort of intonation that would make it into an entire dictionary, but I’d probably sound like I was imitating a chimp. And because that is how my mind works, I had to make an effort to stop myself from scratching in a simian fashion and saying, “Uh uh uh.”

Instead, I went over to the sofa and sat down. Rafiel came over and looked as though he’d sit on the coffee table, but a “No,” from Cas, and Ben hastily getting up and standing by the window, made him change his mind and sit beside me, a little way away, instead.

He took a small tape recorder from his pocket and said, “Do you mind?”

I shook my head and instantly regretted it. Maybe my head wasn’t as hard as everyone kept telling me.

“Okay. So do you know what happened?” he asked. “And do you feel well enough to talk about it?”

“Oh. Yeah,” I said. “The shed exploded, and I guess I got hit with a piece of it.”