A Fatal Stain (26 page)

It seemed like old times, climbing my parents’ rickety
staircase from the backyard to the kitchen door on the second floor.

The house had once belonged to my grandmother and had, therefore, like most Victorians in this area, a kitchen on the ground floor as well as an entrance room, a parlor, a powder room, and a glassed-in back porch. Now all of those were given over to the bookstore, with bookcases against every available wall as well as framing the windows and the fireplaces and marching in ordered rows through the middle of the rooms. These days, the kitchen on the bottom floor was used to prepare cakes and refreshments for big signings and parties.

When I was in high school, Ben and I used to hide out in the kitchen and eat leftover cake and whatever appetizers had been put out for the parties, while the adults
circulated, talked books, and tried to look important. Immediately after the end of high school, Ben had seemed to find one particular beginning writer who had come for a signing very fascinating, but since the writer had departed back to his home somewhere in the East, I would presume nothing came of that.

I suppose when my dad lived in the house alone and filled it with books, he’d used the kitchen downstairs, at least when he remembered he needed to heat a can of soup or something. Having seen my father’s attempts at housekeeping since then, I had to assume my mother had cleaned it with a blowtorch before she allowed it to be used for anything public.

But when my mother moved in and the store became a store, they needed a kitchen on the second floor. And then they needed access directly to the second floor, so that every person they invited over didn’t have to come in through the bookstore. (Also because, after a while, they’d had to block that door with a bookcase. I remembered being five or six and finding disoriented customers who, with the best intentions in the world, had gotten so lost wandering through the store’s labyrinthine confines that they were now browsing mysteries in Mom’s kitchen or living room.)

So Mom had got on Dad to build a staircase to the second floor. Let alone that I had no idea how she had managed to focus him on reality—or hammer and nails—long enough for this to happen, I was in awe at the moment of insanity in which she thought this was a good idea.

At the best of times, entrusting Dad with anything more lethal or potentially dangerous to his own life and
limbs than a pen was a chancy business. But, presumably, she’d handed him a saw, nails, a hammer, and very large, very heavy boards.

Or maybe he’d got the boards himself, since they bore the hallmarks of having been grabbed more or less at random by someone heedless of quality, strength, or weight. Or, for that matter, size and shape. They had also been minimally sawed—if sawed at all.

Instead, Dad had taken these varying-size-and-shape boards and built a one-story-high staircase with a landing halfway up that resembled nothing so much as a cat’s cradle in wood.

And yet it worked and had worked for the entire time of my childhood, when, sometimes, dozens of family friends gathered on that landing to watch the Fourth of July fireworks set off at a nearby park.

At this point, I felt fairly safe climbing it, even though it swayed and creaked like a sailing ship under a gale. I kept thinking that, by all that was holy and rational, this thing should not be able to stand, but when had anything around this house been rational, anyway?

So I climbed up, with a cat carrier in one hand and E by the other hand, and felt like I’d felt a dozen times before—coming home from college—only this time with cat and son. Or when I’d first left All-ex and lodged with Mom and Dad for a brief while.

My mother opened the door as soon as I got to the top. I swear she has the landing bugged and possibly covered by a spy camera. Mom looks nothing like me. She has white hair, is skinny, and has a china-doll prettiness. She didn’t even stare, despite the fact that the hair on one side of my head was about one inch long, with
frazzled ends. If she thought anything at all, she probably thought I was trying out a new hairstyle.

Instead, she threw the door wide and said, “Come on in. I assume you want to discuss the bridesmaid thing again? I’ve been talking to Fluffy about it, and we’ve decided not to press you on the subject. I mean, if you’re not comfortable having Fluffy as your maid of honor, we’re not going to push it. Are we, baby?”

Baby
, who was by her dish—yes, porcelain, with
Mommy’s Fluffy Princess
painted on the side—arched up and hissed for all she was worth. I gave her a look that said I didn’t care if this was the second life she’d hated me, I could still light an embroidery hoop on fire and make her jump through it.

She yowled. I dropped the carrier and E’s hand.

In the next moment, E and my mother—together—were prying Fluffy from the leg of my jeans.

“I don’t understand,” Mom said, picking the cat up and petting her, while examining her for…I don’t know, trauma at having attacked me? “She never acts like this for anyone else, does she-ums? No, she doesn’t. Baby is the bestest kitten in the world, she is.”

Fluffy purred in an entirely artificial way while giving me the evilest glare any cat had ever given a human in the entire history of interspecies relations.

“Never mind me,” I told my mother, who was not, in fact, minding me at all. “I’m sure my leg will be perfectly fine. It’s not like cat claws can lead to lethal infections or anything, and if they have to amputate, I’ll just have a peg leg put in with a stiletto heel at the end; that way I’ll always be perfectly dressed.”

Mom nodded. Which just goes to show you. I have no
idea what it goes to show you, but it definitely does. She had Fluffy upside down and was petting the cat’s belly while reassuring her that everything would be all right. Why everything shouldn’t have been all right—for the cat—while the wretch was licking my blood off her claws, I don’t know.

“I’ll just go up to my room, shall I?”

Mom nodded while telling Fluffy-ums that she was a “good, good fluffy kitteh.” Heaven preserve us from a
bad fluffy kitteh
, in that case.

“Fluffy is a good guard cat,” E said, pensively, as we walked up the staircase toward my room in the attic of the house. I suppose when one grows up with me as a mother, one learns to make the best of things. But I had to burst his bubble. “Not really,” I said. “She is just really good at guarding against me.”

“Well,” he said, cheerily, “maybe that’s something.”

“Ah, just wait until she pees on your bed. Or mine.” The third floor had two bedrooms facing each other. One was my parents’ bedroom, and the other had been my childhood bedroom. But, eventually, around adolescence, I’d realized there were things that no girl should hear. Like, for instance, the endless discussions about the ending of novels that had just come out. Which totally ruined my fun in reading them and, besides, kept me up half the night and caused me to fall asleep in math the next day.

And so, with my grandmother’s rather formidable backing, I’d moved upstairs to the attic, a room that ran the entire length of the house, though not the entire height. The roof sloped so that on the edges, it was about two feet from the floor. This had been okay when I was shorter, and was still okay, I supposed, if I minded my
head, but I’d come close to braining myself several times by walking full force into the sloping sides.

But it had a desk against the tiny window that gave out onto the roof—and now two beds, one for me and one for E, at opposite ends of the room.

Coming into this room was another trip into the past because when Ben was tired of his noisy and ebullient family—who I always found fascinating but he seemed to find less so—he’d come here to do homework with me, and we’d inevitably end up on the floor, talking about everything but homework, over the mess of books.

I remembered the dinky tape player that I’d taken from downstairs without anyone ever noticing and the spirited arguments where we took the world apart and put it back together again, and I had a moment of wistful fear that E wouldn’t get that when he entered school. But he probably would. He probably would also get in a never-ending world of trouble that would cause me to be called to the school multiple times a week, but nothing could be done about that.

And then I closed the door to my room and released Pythagoras from his carrier. E was carrying a bag with Pythagoras’s litter box, litter, and dishes, which I set up in a corner of the room. The last time we’d had to stay over, Mom had tried to get him to share a litter box with Fluffy. Which, of course, meant that Pythagoras had ended up peeing on a pile of books in the living room and had almost got thrown out the second-floor window by Dad, who called him a vandal.

This time, we wouldn’t let that happen. I’d left the bag of clothes for myself and E in the car.

The room had never, at the best of times, had really
good light, but I used to have a floor lamp and a desk lamp, which I’d taken with me to college and which, in the fullness of time, had been left somewhere when I’d got married and moved to a real house.

E went to his bed and rooted underneath for the stuff he’d left there the last time he’d stayed over—which was not the last time I’d stayed over, as Mom and Dad had kept him over a weekend when Cas and I had been so foolish as to go to Denver for New Year’s.

Mom assured me the fire department people were really quite nice and that one of them remembered the last time they were called to the house, when I’d tried to make homemade fireworks, so they weren’t surprised at all to see E do the same.

But fortunately, as Mom had explained, they’d found a series of Agatha Christie coloring books and given E a large box of crayons, and that had taken care of the rest of the stay.

Now E took out
Murder on the Orient Express
and his red crayon and went back to working on the interrupted coloring. I stared for a moment, wondering where Mom and Dad had found these books. I had a suspicion they were printed by some tiny press and served a demographic consisting of my parents and twenty other people like them, worldwide.

I considered my options as I rolled up my pants leg and examined the deep claw marks on my skin. Much as I hated to, I thought I would take E out for burgers at Cy’s. Or perhaps to the George for breakfast. Breakfast was E’s favorite meal of the day, and he’d gladly eat it all three meals.

I’m not going to say that my mother is a bad cook
because it wouldn’t be exactly right. Mom is a fair to decent cook and an excellent baker. She is, however, mostly an absentminded cook. Meals tend to happen whenever they happen, and you might very well get cookies instead of dinner.

Also, they, too, were in the habit of living off the leftovers from signing parties. Mind you, it was, in many ways, an economic necessity. Sometimes you threw a signing party and only half a dozen people showed up, though you’d bought food for fifty. That meant you had little cheese balls and vegetables and chips and dip that you’d paid for and that were not covered by books sold at the party. The food had to go somewhere, and where it went was the fridge, where Mom and Dad lived off of it for a while.

Normally, I’d at least check and see if the fridge was stocked, but two things deterred me. One was that Fluffy would be patrolling the kitchen, and although one peg leg might be acceptable, I felt fairly sure that if I had two stiletto-like peg legs, people would notice and perhaps remark on them. Besides, I had a feeling that Cas wouldn’t like it.

The other thing was that I had E. And feeding E on cheese balls and chips—though perfectly acceptable and likely to give him his daily dose of preservatives and colorings, which, as everyone knows, are absolutely needed for one to live a long life and have healthy color—was likely to be frowned upon by All-ex and Michelle whenever they heard about it. Michelle shopped only at Organic Foods. I knew this because she always brought one of their bags when she had to come near me. I was fairly sure that she used it as a protective device, kind of
like a cross to a vampire. I was pretty sure of this because there was absolutely no reason for her to have a bag with her when she came to see me, much less every time she came to see me. Organic Foods was a few blocks from her house, in the opposite direction of the route she had to take when she came to my place.

Also, Michelle often packed organic muffins—with the consistency of ill-mixed cement and the general taste of sawdust—and fruit when E came back home. Exactly as if she was packing for him to go into the desert and live with savages. Which meant it behooved me, in return, to make sure that E got a bit of nonorganic-type food. Organic in the Michelle sense, of course. Although Pythagoras might be quite capable of eating coins, screws, and, on one memorable occasion, a roll of piano wire, I didn’t think E would be interested in nonorganic substances.

But when it came to that, a shake at Cy’s would be considered an indulgence. Living off of chips and cheese balls probably not.

So I’d take E out for dinner. Then I’d come back up and bring our clothes up. And somewhere along the line, before going to bed, I’d ask Mom if I could use her garage for refinishing. If I hit her at just the right time, she probably would not have the faintest notion what I was asking her and would say yes without thinking.

This meant that tomorrow I could start refinishing the horrible green trunk. And looking for other small pieces to finish. And determinedly not thinking of Jason Ashton, or Maria Ashton, or the blood stained table that had gone up in flames in my shed. But not gone enough that it hadn’t been identified.