French Polished Murder (16 page)

“Now, don’t you call the poor cat that. Yeah. Locking him in the bathroom even for two hours was really not good. He looked so upset when I let him out.”

“E is petting him,” I said. “Can you handle E and the rats till I come back?”

He assured me he could. All right, he might have laughed at the idea that he couldn’t. Frankly, I thought the only reason he laughed was that he had completely forgotten that E might at any minute jump on his motorcycle and terrorize the house or, heaven forbid, the neighborhood. On the other hand, he had now developed symptoms, including but not limited to talking to baby rats, so I was seriously worried for his sanity.

But I wanted to go to this tea, find out what the Martins had to say for themselves. What Cas had said about politicians controlled by the mob made me shudder. I’d much rather have kept thinking such things ended with the era of fedora hats and empty violin cases.

In my bedroom, I looked through the clothes hanging in my closet, selecting a white blouse and a salmon-pink, knee-length skirt, under the theory that I needed to look feminine and like I belonged in country club circles. Besides, both colors looked wonderful with my olive complexion and dark, curly hair.

I tied my hair back, put on that modicum of makeup—blush, eyeliner, a touch of loose powder, a bit of lipstick—I allowed myself in these situations, and made a face in the mirror. I slipped on one of my two pairs of good shoes—black pumps—but I still didn’t feel dressy enough for a tea. I wished I had one of those big flower hats that old ladies wore to church.

In a fit of creativity, I grabbed a pink scarf from my drawer, and tied it around my head.

The outfit seemed to make Ben lose the ability to talk for about a second. He was sitting with E on his lap reading from the lab rats books when I came in. He looked up, and his jaw dropped. He had to swallow before he could speak. “Dyce, unless you’re actually dressing as a character from Agatha Christie, I’d lose the scarf. And, really, honestly, with ice still on the ground, should you go out wearing a pink skirt?”

“It’s a tea,” I said helplessly. I always feel helpless when Ben starts talking about the clothes I’m wearing.

He sighed and herded me ahead of him to the bedroom. “You can leave the blouse on,” he said, and threw on the bed, in rapid succession, a black skirt and my black blazer. “There, let’s go for decent and presentable, instead of romantic fantasy, shall we?”

Like the gentleman he is, he left the room to allow me to change, but shouted back through the half-open door, “And don’t even think about the bead earrings and necklace. Wear the pearl ones your grandmother gave you for high school graduation.”

I withdrew my hand from the beads, mentally protesting against whomever it was who had given Ben the power to read minds.

“No, I can’t read your mind,” he said from the living room. “I just know your taste.”

Right. And he expected me to believe that?

The country club in Goldport is located on Country
Club Drive, which, strangely, is not in the most expensive area of town, but out toward the middle-class suburbs, most of them built in the fifties and tidy enough, if hardly the homes the wealthy would want.

I suspected—knowing how planning worked around these parts, that there had been some sort of development planned for that part of town, which the country club was going to anchor, only the development had never happened. So the country club was in the southern part of town, while the upscale and ever growing suburbs were on the other side. Not that it mattered, since the people who belonged to it could afford the gas and the time to drive across town.

I drove into the parking lot in front of an unassuming low-slung, one-story building that could have been an artsy design for a ranch—all rough stone and low-slung timbers. Behind that was a stand of trees, and I knew—from previous visits, back in my married days—that there were actually paths running through the tall conifers to the various other buildings of the club. Farther behind them were the horse stables, which had never meant much to me. Until I was ten, I had thought that horses were carnivorous, and, to this day, I still wasn’t sure my instinct hadn’t been right.

I noted that my mother’s ancient Volvo with the
I Brake for Good Books
bumper sticker was parked near the door, but I saw no signs of All-ex’s all white, babied Hummer. Not that this meant anything, as—this being Colorado—the parking lot was filled with various SUVs and I wasn’t willing to go row after row, looking for All-ex’s particular vehicle. I didn’t even have that much interest in seeing him, except that I knew whenever he met me anywhere he didn’t expect to, it ruined his day. Yeah, I’m petty and small, but I enjoyed making All-ex’s life difficult, provided it didn’t affect E. After all, he made my life difficult in so many small ways.

I went into the country club head high, half expecting to be tossed out because of the stains of refinishing fluid under my nails, but of course that didn’t happen. Instead, when I asked about the tea for the historical mystery society, I was directed to one of the buildings at the back. The reception hall was large and decorated on massive lines, with a huge fireplace, where logs seemed to burn summer and winter—in summer, with great help from the air-conditioning system, I assumed—a massive desk, and the sort of chairs that gave the impression of having been built for giants and then accidentally dropped into an ordinary room.

The actual room where the meeting was being held—on the other hand—looked Victorian in appointments. Wainscot paneling in a damn good imitation of red mahogany, walls painted in various pastel shades, hung with decorative plates and tapestries and hunting-scene pictures.

I don’t know what I expected, but I suppose it was something like people sitting down at little tables, and servers circulating amongst them. That was how things had been when I’d been here before, during the time I was Mrs. Mahr. For this affair, on the other hand, there was only occasional seating. What I suspected were actually folding chairs had been swathed in a profusion of pink fabric—to match the walls—and bows. These chairs were then set out in random groupings. Amid the groupings, here and there, though not necessarily near the chairs were dainty tables with multitiered plates on them. On the plates was pastry, or fruit, or sandwiches with their crusts cut off.

At slightly larger tables were tea services, the teapots, rounded and huge, gleaming silver, and the creamers either silver or china. These stations were attended by white-gloved, suited young men. A few of them gave me nervous looks as I walked by, and I couldn’t imagine why. It wasn’t as if any of them was old enough to remember the things I’d done at this place, when I was a child before Mom had decided to stop bringing me with her.

Mind you, it had all had been purely accidental and, sometimes though rarely, the result of my having been really bored. I would then think up things I thought might amuse me. One afternoon, I found out that removing the white tablecloth from under the warming plates at a buffet was not considered amusing. It just hadn’t gone as I’d planned. I hadn’t removed only the tablecloth. Chafing dishes and little warming candles and all had come tumbling to the floor, but honestly, was that my fault? The book of magic I’d found at Grandma’s house assured me it was all in the speed of the hand, and heaven knows I was fast enough, since neither Mom nor any of the attendants had managed to stop me.

In fact, Mom had ended with one of the candles on her lap—fortunately the glass of water that she’d been drinking had dropped from her nerveless fingers, too, so there had been no fire.

But all that had happened a good twenty years ago, and none of these young men looked old enough to remember it. Circling around the crowd, trying to identify familiar faces, I blushed as I thought I might have become a legend at the country club, the memory of my exploits passed on to each new employee, like the stories of the ghost on the tennis courts.

Surely not! Unless they also showed a picture of me at the same time, how would these young men know me? And I’d been about six then. They’d never recognize the adult me. Would they? I caught a suspicious glare from one waiter who should have been looking at the tea he was pouring, and hurried the other way . . . smack into my mother who—ah, Ben should see this!—was wearing a lilac skirt suit and a massive hat in the same color. With flowers.

“Mom!” I said, half startled by her getup.

“Candy,” she said, as though I were the long-lost prodigal daughter finally returning to the land of crustless sandwiches. “I’m so glad you’re here. The Martins were asking about you.”

I froze in place. “The Martins?” I said. “Because I bought their furniture?”

“No, no. And by the way, the truck made the delivery, so you must come by and see if everything is there.”

“Of course,” I said, mechanically. “But why would the Martins want to talk to me?”

“I told them of your little project,” Mom said. “Oh, don’t look so stricken. It’s not a bad thing. They don’t mind talking about the disappearances. In fact, John was positively eager to speak to you.”

“Uh . . . he was?” I felt very odd. All of a sudden it hit me that it was indecent to pry into these people’s lives, under the excuse of a book that I had no intention of writing. Somehow, from Mom’s shining eyes, I deduced she had been waiting all along for me to show a talent for anything more than turpentine and a way with a five-point scraper.

I would have registered my objections, too, I swear, except that Mom was dragging me through the crowd like an ocean cruiser at full steam dragging a small tug-boat. I could no more escape her than I could grow a second set of arms. In fact, growing a second set of arms might be easier.

We passed more perfumed, well-dressed people than I cared to mention, including—I was sure of it, though I couldn’t stop to take a close look—All-ex and Mrs. All-ex, she attired in what looked uncommonly like a blue wedding cake. I made a note that I must check out that dress, even as Mom brought me to a halt in front of a couple.

The woman I recognized almost immediately from the library. She was the colorless, white haired librarian, but something had happened like that old movie cliché, where a woman shakes out her hair and becomes someone completely different. She had let down her white hair from what must have been a fairly tight bun and masses of it flowed around her shoulders.

While she was probably the most conservatively dressed woman there, after me—thank you, Ben!—in a gray suit, both the jacket and the skirt cut loosely, giving the impression of being merely separate pieces of cloth that happened to fall in an incredibly becoming way on her spare figure, she managed to look beautiful and very feminine.

Her husband, on the other hand, looked about as out of place at a country club as I felt. To begin with, unlike all the other men around, he wasn’t wearing a suit, or even a proper button-down shirt with a tie. Instead, he wore an unbuttoned-at-the-neck white shirt, under a pullover the same color as his wife’s suit. Over that, he wore an unzipped black leather jacket. His pants were also black and, I realized as I looked down, he was wearing black cowboy boots with incrustations that looked awfully like he’d been walking in the stable yard just before attending the tea. I hoped not, otherwise the waiters would probably start showing pictures of him around to new hirees, too.

They both greeted me like a long-lost friend, smiling over my buying their used furniture and pretending to be awfully interested in my work as a furniture refinisher. I could tell that their housekeeper had talked to them, too, because Mrs. Martin gave me this great approving glance and started talking about how she wished more young ladies were as environmentally conscious in their choices of small business.

I answered their questions and tried not to appear unfriendly but also tried to keep my imagination under control, because I had a strong feeling I could tell them I removed the paint from old furniture by squeezing the tail of a fire-breathing lizard and pointing it the right way, and they wouldn’t have known any better or thought it at all unlikely.

Not that they were stupid. As my mother shoved—daintily—a saucer and cup of weak tea and a small plate of sandwiches into my hands, and they started to talk, (I pondered the age-old dilemma of how one eats when both one’s hands are taken up just holding the food—that extra set of arms would have come in really handy right about then) I realized they were intelligent and interested in their particular fields. Her’s seemed to be the conservation of historical documents and also the uses to which such archival treasures could be put. His was horse breeding. I had no idea what this very strange couple talked about when they were home alone of an evening. I sort of imagined them sitting there, their twin monologues crossing in the air as they periodically took notice of each other.