A Fatal Stain (32 page)

“I expect you guys to arrange for me to get out of here without anyone bothering me and to get me a car to take me to the airport, and a plane ride somewhere. London. Yeah, I think London.”

I wasn’t sure if England had mutual extradition agreements with us, but I was almost sure they did, and I was almost sure that he’d be arrested as soon as he landed. “I’ll give the phone to the stewardess over the ocean,” he said.

And this, too, was misguided, because of course the moment he was out of the store, we’d be opening that door, and getting the bomb away from Dad.

“Help!” Dad yelled, and this time hit the door, as if he had thrown himself against it.

“Tell him to stop,” de Leon yelled. “The bomb is on the floor, and he might step on it in the dark.”

Which was a problem. The other problem was that I was almost sure the little weasel would push that button long before he was on the plane. And what if he sneezed or something.

Ben, between Cas and Nick, making a bulwark of defense in front of me, though he didn’t even have a gun, turned around and whispered, “Dyce, go. Find help.”

And this time, I went and found help.

I tiptoed out to a corner of a bookcase, then got on
my hands and knees and crawled behind the rows of bookcases to the door. On my hands and knees, because then it was far less likely that de Leon, looking at eye level, would see even a hint of movement.

Once I got to the door, I ran hell for leather down the porch and around the house. In my head, not very clear, was the idea that I would get E, and that E would go into the store and open the door with his magic lock-picking skills. I wasn’t absolutely sure how we’d manage to do this with de Leon right there, but there had to be a way. Unlock the door, get Dad out, or even better, get the bomb out, and throw it to the bottom of the garden. And then, while Cas and Nick grabbed the little twerp, have quiet hysterics.

I didn’t count on finding E just around the corner,
looking angelic, with his hands in his pockets. He perked up when he saw me. “Come,” he said, pulling me toward the house.

“No,” I said. “You have to come this way and open the door to rescue Granddad.”

He shook his head. “No. I heard. But you have to come, the other way.”

“How could you hear?” I said. “Were you in there?”

“No,” he said. “The other way.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but one thing was for sure. Oh, of course you can get toddlers to do whatever you want to, if you use force. You can grab them and throw them over your shoulder and carry them anywhere. And you can physically restrain them and keep them from eating chocolate, or setting fire to the cat.

What you can’t do is get a toddler to use a very specific and specialized skill that requires him to think, unless you get his buy-in. And I knew my son well enough to know that I wasn’t going to convince him to pick a lock unless I got his buy-in.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go with you, but then you have to come with me and help me open the door to get Granddad out of there.”

E shook his head. “That would be stupid,” he said. “The bad guy would see me, and he wouldn’t let me do it. He would blow up the place.”

When I was first friends with Ben, his parents, who were—and are—Catholic and very religious, used to take me to mass with them. Since my parents weren’t particularly religious—though Dad’s grandmother had been well known for her work in the Unitarian Church here in town—his mother had taken it upon herself to
teach me to pray. It had never taken. I once read some writer or other who said that people’s ideas of God were based on themselves. I don’t know. I think, myself, people’s ideas of God are based on their parents. They extrapolate someone benevolent and disinterested who watches over them.

Well, if that was the case, it would explain why I never got my idea of God to jell. Because the closest I could come to understanding God would be as a man who wandered vaguely around the universe, looking for the book he’d left face down somewhere and muttering stuff concerning the latest mystery he’d read. Also, possibly getting my name wrong.

However, as I followed E around the house, hoping there would really be something he could do to rescue my father, and unable to imagine what that would be, I found myself praying. Really praying.
God, if you get me out of this, and get Cas and Nick and Ben and Dad out of this, I promise never to be thoughtless again.

We went up the stairs, into the kitchen. Neither my mother, nor Fluffy, nor Pythagoras were anywhere to be seen. I wondered if Fluffy had eaten Mom and Pythagoras. Perhaps E’s plan was to take Fluffy to the bookstore, and get her to eat through the door, and get her to eat the bomb.

I promise I won’t pick stupid arguments.

Up the stairs, to the middle floor of my parents’ home, the third floor of the building, where the bedrooms were located.
I promise I’ll learn to cook and clean, and I’ll never again bug Ben about his behavior. And I promise I won’t complain that my parents are so weird.

The door to the closet was open, and Mom was…inside
the door at the back of the closet, only she was only visible from the waist up, and my first thought was that Mom was being swallowed, then she emerged fully, pulling Dad behind her.

I stared. I opened my mouth wide and stared at them as they emerged from the door that I’d assumed led outward, out the side of the house.

“There’s a stairs,” E said, smugly. “And the stairs go into the closet where Granddad was. So everything is okay now.”

Like hell it was. Mom said, “You see, I realized your father’s cries were coming from in there, and then E opened the door, and—”

I grabbed the lantern from the floor and went into the closet, moving past them.

“Sherlockia!” Dad said. “Where are you going? There’s a bomb down there.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And there’s my boyfriend and my best friend, and his boyfriend, too.” And, to Dad’s look of incomprehension, “And all those books, Dad. If the bomb explodes, the bookstore will go up in smoke.”

Dad started toward me then, but I said, “No. Go back. Take E, Mom, and the two cats, and go to the garage. And stay there. Inside. With the doors closed. I’m going to try to fix things. Leave every door open all the way out to the stairs.” I looked at them. “Go, now.”

They went.

Lantern in hand, hurrying down the incredibly narrow
circular stairs, all the while wondering why and when it had been built, I realized I was running toward danger again. As I got down further, I could hear Cas’s voice and de Leon’s, but I couldn’t make out their words.

It wasn’t that the words weren’t clear. They probably were, and I was fairly sure that this was why and how E and my mom had heard what was going on. But, you see, the blood was pounding in my ears. I also felt vaguely queasy, and there was this buzz that seemed to be in my brain.

I knew that at any minute, as I was running down, de Leon could get tired of waiting and push the button and send everything up. At least Mom and Dad and E and the cats would be safe. The garage was cement block,
with a solid roof. There was very little chance of their getting hurt, even if the house went up in flames.

I ran all the way down the stairs to where another door stood open—my son had been busy indeed—and past that door, a little room lined with shelves, the shelves lined with books.

The bomb was obvious, right by the door, on the floor, as de Leon said it would be: an untidy package wrapped in duct tape and with wires and things coming out of it.

I grabbed it carefully with my free hand and clutched it to my chest; then I ran up the stairs, holding the lantern in my other hand and praying under my breath that I wouldn’t trip.

Out of the back door, then out of the closet, I dropped the lantern, and now I held the bomb with both hands, expecting that at any second it would blow. At least, even if it blew now, it was unlikely it would kill the guys downstairs. Oh, it might cause a fire up here, but they’d still have the time to get away.

Weirdly, as scared of dying as I was, this didn’t seem nearly as scary as taking the guys with me if I went. At least I suspected that death by explosion would be fairly painless, or at least instant, and then the guys…Well, they’d figure it out. And Cas would probably keep an eye out for E so that All-ex couldn’t drive him completely insane. I hoped.

My mouth was dry, and though I knew I was running—running through the house, to the open door of the kitchen—I felt as though I was going very slowly and as if everything around me had gone very slow and very quiet, too.

It was like one of those dream sequences in movies, where the protagonist runs through a not quite real landscape. Perhaps the bomb had already gone off, and now I was a ghost, running this circuit forever, trying to make it to the back door.

The fresher, cooler outside air hit me in the face like a reviving slap, and I was suddenly aware that I was on the staircase, and looking down at the backyard, holding a bomb. A bomb that could go off at any minute.

My parents’ backyard is huge. We hold the Mystery Lovers picnic there in the summer. The garage is at one end of it, but the other end is not only completely clear, but is also far away from the neighbors’ house and their garage. There used to be an oak tree there, when I was little, one of those sprawling, massive trees, where one can hang swings and in whose branches one can build tree houses.

But I’d long since blown that to smithereens in an accident involving a bottle of gasoline and a grill.

There weren’t even any windows on the garage on that side. And the garage was solid.

So I took a deep breath…and let the bomb fly.

De Leon had been right that it might go off by being bumped. Either that or, I thought, muzzily, de Leon had pushed the button at the exact same time that the bomb hit the ground, down there, sending up a shower of earth clods and pebbles that rattled all around me like hail.

My legs felt like jelly. I sat down and waited for the sirens.

I don’t know how long I sat there. There were indeed
sirens, screaming their approach from all directions. Fire and police. I don’t do things by half, no sirree; when it comes to tying up the emergency services of Goldport, I’ve always managed to tie up all of them at once. It’s a gift; what can I say?

I sat on the stairs, and after a while, I let my head rest against the side rail. The backyard became a swarm of policemen and firemen, though there wasn’t much for the firemen to do, except put out the straggling grass fire. And the policemen…I didn’t know what they were doing.

Vague noises reached me, from the bookstore, footsteps, voices. Cars stopped in the driveway; cars drove off. I seemed to be in another world, far above it all and only slightly woozy.

Dad and Mom and E came out of the garage, carrying two cat carriers.

After a while, I became aware that E was sitting next to me. “Mom.” He had a carrier with Pythagoras. “Cas said thank you and that everything is safe now.”