A Fatal Stain (29 page)

“So,” Ben said. “What is Cas doing about this? What is he looking into?”

“He told me he’s pursuing inquiries,” I said.

“That,” Ben said, “is so…him! So we take this stuff to your mom’s house, start whatever it is you do to furniture, and then I call Nick. I’ll see if I can get more out of him than you can get out of Cas.”

“What are the chances of that?”

“Oh, let me see…I’ve been spending time away for four days, and he bought a house without telling me. It’s all in how I work those.”

“You’re utterly shameless,” I said.

“Why, ma’am, thank you kindly.”

Which is how we ended up in Mom’s garage, with one
of Ben’s tarps on the floor, the green trunk on top of it, and the no-fume stripper on it. After a while, Ben coughed. “Are you sure that thing is no fumes?”

“It says so,” I said, defensively, putting my sleeve in front of my mouth. “No fumes for indoor stripping.”

“Perhaps they meant the other kind of stripping,” he said, and put his own sleeve in front of his nose and mouth.

“Perhaps we should step outside to give this time to work without choking ourselves?” I said.

We did, and Ben called Nick, but he wasn’t in his office and his cell phone was turned off. “Which means he is in a meeting,” Ben said.

“Or he’s avoiding you,” I said. Ben looked worried.

I went back inside and found, to my surprise, that the finish had already bubbled up. It came up fairly easily,
too, with my new scraper. I scraped it onto an old newspaper, which I rolled and discarded outside the garage to minimize the fumes. What I was left with, without the horrible handles and the horrible green finish, was basically a square box done in some pale wood that might be poplar but was more likely some derivative of bamboo.

“Would you be terribly offended if I told you it still doesn’t look like much?”

“No,” I said, but I had an idea. There was an almost imperceptible gold indentation around the top of the lip. The wood was good, or at least unflawed and clean. There was no reason at all that I shouldn’t be able to make this into whatever I wanted to. And the lion-mouth pulls I’d bought came to mind. If I stained the trunk a convincing mahogany or even walnut, highlighted that indentation with gold in a convincing enough way that it looked like a broken or just worn out inlay of gold wire, and then put the lion-mouth pulls in, no one would know this wasn’t a nineteenth-century piece.

Oh, I wouldn’t sell it as such. There is a fine line between faking and forgery. But it had been my experience that in choosing between a truly good piece that looked so-so and an utter fake—identified as such—that looked like the real thing and that fit with modern taste and decor—which the simple lines of this trunk did—people would always pay more for the fake. And I thought this piece might more than pay for itself.

I cleaned it carefully—because even a hint of refinishing paste left behind would ruin the final finish—then gave it a coat of mahogany stain. Now I’d let it dry, give it another coat, let it dry again, and, finally, I thought, give it several coats of hand-applied polyurethane oil
finish. Because this had no pretensions to authenticity, there was absolutely no reason not to use it, and people nowadays liked that their furniture wasn’t ruined when they failed to use a coaster.

I was humming softly to myself as I finished applying the stain and looked up to see Ben frowning down at me. “Okay,” he said. “So now it’s a dark-wood box. It still doesn’t look like much.”

“Hush now,” I said. “Wait till it’s done.”

He looked doubtful, which just goes to show that the man didn’t learn from experience. He had known me how long? And he still didn’t know if I saw a way of making something look good, I could and would carry it off.

I was about to make a pointed remark in that direction when my mom came in. “Dyce, there is something in the house you’ll need to look at.”

All of a sudden, my happiness vanished. Look, you can’t live with your parents that long—and certainly you can’t live with my parents that long—without knowing the tone of voice that denotes truly bad stuff. And Mom had that tone. Also, her lips were all tight and stuff.

“Oh, no,” I said. “Who did he kill?”

“Who?”

“E, of course. Who did he kill? Did he set something on fire?”

“Well, no,” Mom said. “He did hit Fluffy on the nose with a coloring book.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, while inwardly I wondered what Fluffy had done to deserve it.

“Yes, it was uncalled for, but he said he had to make her let go of Pythagoras’s tail.”

“What?”

“She was being playful,” my mom said and sniffed. “But E thought she was trying to eat Pythagoras.”

“No,” I said. Since I’d seen Fluffy try to do exactly that before, I didn’t know why my mother thought she wasn’t trying to do it just now.

“Yes. At most she was tasting him. I mean, there was almost no blood.”

“Uh oh,” Ben said from behind me, in his semi-official capacity as Greek chorus in these exchanges.

“But then E insisted on looking for the hydrogen peroxide, and I told him it was at the back of the hall closet.”

“Uh-oh, uh-oh,” Ben said.

Mentally I said,
Yes, thank you, Mr. Colm. This has been noted.
But aloud I said, “And then.”

“And then,” my mother said, tightening her lips, “he found the dresses and…objects.”

This sounded utterly ominous. I said, “Knives? Guns? Poison vials?”

Mom looked shocked. “What? No. Just…You’d better come and see.”

I went to see, followed closely by Ben, who frankly wouldn’t be pried away, not even with knives, guns, or poison vials. We went up and into the kitchen and then to the hall closet.

The hall closet, strictly speaking, wasn’t. It had, once upon a time, I think, been a dressing room between Mom’s room and the stairs. But it had been used as a sort of catchall, probably before Dad inherited the house from his grandmother. When I was a child, it had been a fascinating place to find the unexpected, ranging from old cleaning implements, like a rug-beating paddle, to half-finished embroidery from my great-grandmother’s era
and, one glorious time, a wig that I had used to make a giant hair-spider to freak out my classmates.

It also had, close to the entrance, a couple of shelves where Mom kept the more prosaic cleaning implements and first-aid stuff.

The closet door was thrown open, and E was in there somewhere, talking to Pythagoras. “Yeah, I know,” he told Pythagoras, in that disconcerting way he had of making it sound like Pythagoras could talk back to him. “I think it’s cool, too. But that door at the back, I’m sure it leads to another world.”

Now, thoroughly spooked, I called out, “E?”

My son emerged from a narrow passage between an ironing board and a vacuum cleaner. “Come and see, Mom.” At least he didn’t sound like what was back there was dire.

I went to see, with Ben right behind me, looming over me and breathing down my neck.

Past the stuff, there…there was a door. I vaguely remembered seeing it. Mom had always told me it probably had been a door to some exterior stairs. Since it seemed to be an exterior door and, moreover, since it was very firmly locked and I’d never been able to get it to open, I’d eventually come to accept it as another wall. I will confess I had spent a couple of happy summers collecting old keys and trying them in the lock, but none had ever worked.

Now E had turned on an battery-operated lantern and, clearly, had managed to open the lock. The door stood open and inside…

It was a closet. A proper closet, or perhaps it would be called a wardrobe. There were shelves at the top, with boxes. There were dresses hanging in the middle. And on the bottom there were…a pram, a trunk, and a few
wooden boxes. At the back of that, there was another door, smaller, and this one almost for sure an external door. It was locked, though E had a wire in the hole.

“Don’t open that,” I said.

He looked up at me.

“It’s probably just a wall behind there, but it might just be some boards, and I’m sure that leads out, and you’ll just fall down the side of the house. Don’t open it.”

“But…There could be another world,” he protested.

“Oh, there will be another world all right, if you fall and die,” Ben said. “Come out of there. Stop fooling with that door. There’s nothing behind that. And there’s no more fantasy movies for you, young man.”

The little wretch, of course, listened to Ben as he hadn’t listened to me. He and the wretched cat, with a bloody tip of tail, went past me and toward Ben.

“I thought you might want to sell these. I mean, I assume there’s a market. And I thought you’d want to use them to get money, you know, to furnish your new house, or something,” Mom called from outside the area. “And maybe you can fix that pram. I’m sure it’s an antique.”

I was sure it was an antique, too. I was afraid to touch anything for fear it would dissolve into dust. And offering me all of this perfectly fit in with Mom’s casual generosity. She didn’t have a use for it, so she didn’t see why I shouldn’t have all of it.

But then, something caught my eye, at the extreme left side of the closet. It was a dress, and it had a veil with it, on the same hanger, and it looked like…

I touched it, afraid it would go up in a cloud of dust, but it wasn’t even that dusty in there, because the door
had apparently been sealed pretty tightly. I reached over and removed the hanger and looked at it.

The dress looked like cream silk, though it might have been somewhat yellowed with age. It was so simple that it looked almost severe. The only ornament was a belt embroidered with tiny pearls in the shape of roses and leaves. And it looked like my exact size.

“Try it on,” Ben said.

“Uh…It will probably tear…”

“If it feels too fragile, you can stop. But if you can, try it on.”

I went into the room that Ben had used the night before and put the dress on. It not only didn’t tear, but it seemed to be at least as solid as any other dress I’d ever put on. It was almost a miracle. Of course, judging from the smell, great-grandmother had double ensured that the moths wouldn’t eat it.

I put the veil on, awkwardly, since it was the sort of veil that covered both the back and the face. The dress had mutton sleeves, or at least I think it’s what they are called. The sleeves fit tightly from wrist to elbow, and there was an infinity of little white pearl buttons keeping it cinched. I buttoned every third, just enough to keep it in place, then put the belt on and hooked it in the back, and walked out, pulling the skirt up a little, because I think it hadn’t been designed for someone wearing completely flat tennis shoes.

“Perfect,” Ben said.

Which unfortunately was exactly my idea. I now knew where I’d got my figure, since apparently Great-Grandma and I were not only of the same general size, but a perfect match, line for line. “We can make it a Victorian wedding,” he said. “I know this place in Denver where we
can rent period-appropriate tuxes and hats and all. What?” he said, at my look. “There was this party Peter gave a couple of years ago…Anyway, it will be great. I’ll research the flowers, and we’ll have the bouquets done to fit with the time. And maybe one of those other dresses can be copied for your bridesmaids.”

“Supposing I ever get any,” I said.

“Oh, come on. If there are pretty Victorian dresses involved, you’ll have to keep my sister, Ellie, away with barbed wire. She’s a member of several reenactor socie ties, from the Society for Creative Anachronism to various Victorian and heritage societies, and it’s all for the dresses. Heck, she probably knows people who can make the bridesmaids’ dresses.”

We went back into the closet and took a tally. One of the boxes contained several hundred bone buttons, which Ben told me people who made reproduction dresses paid unreal amounts for. The other boxes contained bits of handmade lace, pearls for trimming, and various other bits and pieces of female frippery that could, probably—to be honest—if sold, furnish my house. The dresses included several morning and afternoon dresses and various other garments that must have made Great-Grandma the envy of society women in Goldport when she was young. Though truly, since at that time the society in Goldport consisted of a few pioneers and half a dozen Native American tribes—at least as far as my mental image of local history went—that wouldn’t have been difficult.

However, when I told Mom that, she shook her head. “Oh, my,” she said. “No. Your great-grandmother was British, and when she married your great-grandfather, he
brought her to live here in some luxury. These were probably things she brought in her trousseau and that were either out of fashion in this area or that she found she had no occasion of using, society being much simpler here.”

It was amazing how you could not know anything about your ancestors, even four generations back. No one had ever told me my great-grandmother was British, not even what her name was. My dad just called her Grandma. And, of course, my dad never remembered any details about people.

As Ben picked up a beautiful pink gown, much along the same lines as my dress, and said, “This will do perfectly for the bridesmaids,” I thought I heard a distant scream, but I didn’t give it much thought. I mean, look, the bookstore is downtown. So it’s in one of the quieter streets of downtown, which means there is less traffic and general disturbance than in the outright commercial areas. But there are still people who scream for no reason.