A Fatal Stain (4 page)

I fully expected Michelle to come back and tell me that E was awake after all, but instead there was a long silence, and then the little-girl voice again, speaking very fast, “So, you see, I’m glad you agreed. I’ll call you when he can come home—bye.” And then she hung up.

I stared at the phone.

“Anything wrong?” Cas asked.

“Other than the fact that I can’t strangle her even though she desperately needs it?”

“Well, you can, but then I’d have to arrest you, and you know I’d hate to do that. I mean, if you really want to wear handcuffs…” He stopped when he realized I wasn’t responding. “I presume it was Michelle Mahr?”

“Yeah.” I closed the phone and put it in my pocket and
looked up into his concerned gaze. “She says E has a cough and a fever, and they’ve already been exposed, so they’re keeping him until he’s done with the antibiotics.”

“But?”

“But I think I heard him in the background.”

“Well, he has a cough. He’s not dead.”

“Yeah, but she told me I couldn’t talk to him, because he was sleeping.”

Cas’s lips twitched a little. “Knowing E,” he said, “she might not have wanted him to talk to you, anyway.”

“Why?”

“Oh, come on.” Cas grinned at me, his eyes sparkling with mischief. “Remember the time he told you they were really aliens wearing human skins and were attempting to cook him?”

I remembered it very well. I wasn’t absolutely sure he hadn’t been telling the truth. I did my best impression of a mule at Cas. “So? They can’t have thought I believed it.” Though I’d given it some good, long thought, frankly.

“It can’t be pleasant for her overhearing that stuff.”

“Why? Is she afraid she
is
an alien and I’ll find out?”

Cas’s lids came down halfway, and he gave me a reproachful look, though his lips were still twisted upward in amusement. “Uh-uh. Besides, if he heard you, he might decide he wants to come home now and make himself an unholy terror. More than usual, I mean,” he said, then looked as if he was afraid I’d be upset with him.

I wasn’t about to argue that E could be an unholy—or holy—terror. He’d started getting in trouble as soon as he was capable of independent mobility. You’d think a
three-month-old baby couldn’t hurt himself or others, but he’d staged a great escape from the bassinet, slithering on his belly up a stack of stuffed animals and—but for my being close enough to catch him—attempting to crack his head by dropping onto the floor. Then, as soon as he’d started walking, he’d perfected the fine art of removing all his clothes and running out stark naked.

Goldport is not the world’s largest city, but neither is it the smallest. And we lived near the part of town that had all the bars and diners. Frankly, I still hadn’t decided if it was worse to have your toddler run off stark naked along a sidewalk crowded with late-night diners and drinkers or to have him run off toward the darker areas of the neighborhood and cross streets in the dead of night, braving oncoming traffic. Both of those had constituted a great part of my exercise the last several years.

After that, E had decided to make his father—and my parents, when they thought about it—think I was stark raving mad by not speaking to anyone but me, or when anyone but myself was present.

Since he’d finally decided to add speaking to the world at-large to his accomplishments, he’d immediately used it to get in trouble. He’d honed the fine art of lying, complaining, and wheedling to the point where he could sell rubber boots to a colony of snakes. And probably would if he ever came across a colony of snakes. All-ex said that at three and a half, E should enter preschool, but I would protect the school system from him—and myself from phone calls over the fire alarm being pulled in the middle of a math lesson, or the bugs that had inexplicably found their way into someone’s lunch box—as long as I could. The school system might be a mess, but I didn’t
think it was bad enough to deserve having my pride and joy inflicted on it.

I was very proud of my son. Like Tom Sawyer, he promised to go far, if someone didn’t kill him first.

And there was no denying that he drove his poor father insane. All-ex vacillated between feeling proprietary about his son and trying to keep him from my evil influence and sending him home to me early, showing every sign of believing the child was demonic spawn. He was probably right on both counts, since E was a lot like me as a child, and we understood each other perfectly. And my parents swore I was demonic spawn.

Well, not quite like me. At least so far, he had failed to set the cat on fire or cause the backyard to explode. A fact I gave thanks for daily. Just not aloud and over dinner.

“Well, you have more explosives than the Mahrs,” Cas said. “With the refinishing stuff. So if he exploded a backyard, it would probably be here.”

I refused to believe I was thinking aloud, and I was not about to ask Cas how come everyone seemed to read my mind. Instead, I said, “Yeah, all right,” and pretended to be looking for some refinishing fluid on the shelves.

But he grabbed me from behind and turned me around and pulled me into his arms. I know I’m about five foot five inches tall in my stocking feet, and I weigh one hundred and ten pounds, soaking wet and with lead in both pockets. Still, I normally don’t think of myself as little. I’m big enough to do what I must.

Yet, when Cas put his arms around me, I did feel little. And though it should have upset me, it didn’t. Instead, with his arms around me, I felt as if I’d been walking
outside in a storm for a long time and had finally come into a safe, cozy home, warm and welcoming. Where I belonged.

He bent down and I looked up, and he kissed me—very thoroughly—until my knees felt weak. “It will be fine,” he told me, as I put my forehead against his chest. “All this mess will pass, and we’ll be a family soon enough.”

I sighed. “I don’t suppose we could elope?” I said.

“No.” He kissed the top of my head. “I’ve gone over it and over it in my head, and I think we could fit Ben and Nick and E and Pythagoras in my car, but there is no way we could fit your parents. We could probably trust my parents to follow in another car, but yours would stop at the first mystery bookstore and not be heard from again for days.”

I sighed. “Yeah. And if we tied Dad to the front bumper, the wind would probably rip the book out of his hands.”

Cas’s chest moved. I think he was laughing. Of course, there was no reason to laugh. I was deathly serious. My father would need that book, or he would not be happy.

Cass kissed my head again. “I have to go,” he said. “There’s some weird stuff with arson at vacant properties here in town, and Nick and I will probably be working late on it.” He met my gaze, as I looked up. “Nah, don’t worry, Dyce. It shouldn’t be anything dangerous. It’s just with so many houses vacant…this stuff happens, you know? People get rid of a bad bet. Probably insurance fraud. It’s just a bunch of work. It’s not like we can investigate as thoroughly as the insurance agencies can. I’ll get pizza for dinner, okay?”

The man knew how to bribe me. But when he left, I stared at the table for a long time, then thought of E not coming home tonight, and couldn’t help feeling uneasy. I’d swear the table had bloodstains. And E…

Well, at the best of times, I didn’t like having to give him up to All-ex once a week. Michelle was in the habit of feeding my poor boy an all-natural diet, involving bran and vegetables. Without his daily dose of preservatives, he’d probably have wrinkles by five. And the Mahrs had absolutely no sense of humor when it came to little things, like taking off all one’s clothes and legging it out of the house during a dinner with All-ex’s employers.

But right then, it felt weirder. All-ex had already expressed his dislike of my marrying a policeman. Of course, he wouldn’t like my marrying anyone. His having divorced me hadn’t convinced him that he didn’t have the right to be jealous of any men around me. He continued to violently dislike Ben on the mistaken belief Ben was a rival. Which—like my mother’s belief that Ben was the ideal man for me—took more than a bit of insanity. Cas was bound to drive All-ex insane just by existing.

I bit my lip. I couldn’t explain it, but I really felt weird, both about E and about that table. And it wasn’t the type of worry I could calm down by just shutting my mind to it and working some more.

Instead, I closed and locked the shed and went through the back door into my home, which took up the entire bottom floor of a stately Edwardian home.

It consisted of a living room carpeted in arterial-blood-red carpet and furnished with a stained sofa and a coffee table made of such shoddy material that I hadn’t
even considered selling it. The living room led into the kitchen, with an ancient stove, nice tiled counters, and ancient tile on the floor. It had a deep pantry, which was usually empty except for a large box of pancake mix, and my grandmother’s kitchen table and matching chairs, looking as out of place here as a duchess in a slum. Cas wanted us to move in with him after the wedding while we looked for another house, and although his apartment was not exactly the stuff of dreams, it would still be several notches above this. At least the carpet was white and plush, not worn down by generations of tenants.

From the kitchen, a narrow hallway led to the back door, past a tiny bathroom. The other way from the living room, a door opened into my bedroom, which led, through a tiny hallway and past a slightly larger but stained and aged bathroom, into E’s bedroom.

Pythagoras was sitting mournfully by his food dish in the kitchen. As I approached, he made a series of little mews that clearly meant, “Excuse me, kind lady, but I don’t know if you noticed the patent lack of food in this here dish. I wonder, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, if you could possibly remedy that problem.”

Pythagoras is to cats what a professional wrestler is to your average office worker. On shape and muscles alone, you’d mistake him for a Bombay, a breed of cat created and maintained to look like miniature panthers. But his eyes look like no wildcat ever—they are green with a circle of intense blue in the center and bear the most self-effacing, apologetic expression ever seen in any living being.

If he were a human, he’d wear glasses taped together in the middle and stammer as he spoke. Since he is a cat,
he meows, in tiny little sounds that seem to strangle themselves in his throat out of extreme politeness.

I got a can of tuna, opened it, and gave it to him. He looked at me for a moment, to make sure my feeding him wasn’t a mistake, then set to, eating in delicate little bites. After a moment, he looked up at me, and meowed with a questioning tone.

“No,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”

He asked again, just to make sure, and I said, “I don’t think there’s anything you can do to help. I do think I’m going to have to go look around, see if I can figure out where that table came from and if there’s a chance those stains are old. And I need to go see if E really is sick.”

He looked at me, with crossed eyes and a worried expression.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’m sure everything is fine, and I’m just being weird.”

Pythagoras looked doubtful.

As it turned out, he had reason to, and I was wrong.

I’d bought the table at the semi-permanent garage
sale two blocks from my house, while All-ex lived across town, in one of the new suburbs growing at the northern edge of town.

I didn’t realize I meant to take care of last things first until I was on the highway, breezing past the new condo developments and half-finished construction on office complexes. Not that I had any intention of turning around. I mean, I wanted to make sure E was all right, first. That’s what a good mother would do. Even if I often thought that the only way I’d know what a good mother would do was to capture one and turn a really bright light on her eyes as I interrogated her.

Turning into All-ex’s neighborhood, I felt like just the appearance of my car on the block should send half of the owners of the well-manicured lawns to the phones to call 911.
After all, my car was a very late model Volvo—so late, it might in fact be dead—that announced its arrival with the high whine of a transmission belt about to part company with the world. All the cars I could see—that is, the ones that weren’t carefully sequestered behind the wide garage doors next to the gleaming white or cream houses—had come out of the assembly line no more than a week ago and had been buffed to a shine no more than an hour ago.

But as I made it three streets into the neighborhood and no one called the police, I started to feel more self-confident. Besides, I called the police station so often to talk to Cas that if anyone called to report me, the worst that would happen is that Cas—or Nick, if Cas happened to be out—would get really worried about what I might be up to.

Cresting the road, I could see All-ex’s home two blocks down, and I thought it might be safer to go around to the back. Fortunately, there was an alley that ran behind All-ex’s house, all the sprawling four thousand square feet of it.

Back there, a fence ran around All-ex’s backyard. And from inside the fence, like music to my ears, came E’s voice saying something that sounded like “kaboom,” then the zooming sound of his electric bike.