French Polished Murder (22 page)

“No, you were just being very mystery-reader morbid about it. My parents would have been proud.”

“Right,” he said. “All right. I’ll keep the monkey till after noon, then I’ll find out what plans, if anything Nick has.”

“You two are . . . I mean . . .” I said.

“Oh, it’s early yet,” he said. “Ask me again in a year, but I think there is an outside chance he is the one.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, good.” For some reason, though, I felt oddly bereft. As though I was about to lose my best friend.

“If you need me,” I said. “Call Mom’s place or my cell.”

I am not sure what I was expecting to find in Mom’s
garage, other than furniture, but I am sure I was expecting
something
, because I was disappointed when I opened the garage door and saw exactly what I had seen in the carriage house. Only by the brighter light of early morning coming unimpeded through the garage door, I saw that, if anything, the find was better than I thought. I would make a lot of money out of this deal.

There were two rolltop desks. I wondered if Ben would be interested in one of them, since he had made sounds about making his guest room into a home office. There were two vanity tables, kidney shaped, on spindly legs. A couple of what looked like dining room tables, and fry me in oil and call me Lorena if there weren’t a breakfront buffet and a tall kitchen cabinet with oak shelves that seemed designed to display compotes, or more likely someone’s collection of plates. Added to this, there was a love seat with rosewood frame, and two large, antique, wood-framed mirrors. There was also an assortment of smaller furniture. Occasional tables, tea carts—a profusion of them.

I realized I was looking at it all with an idiotic smile, when my mother said, “Is it everything you expected?”

I nodded. “Everything I hoped for.” I went into the garage, and went around the furniture, looking at everything.

That’s when I realized I was looking for something like ax marks on the tables and furniture, as unlikely as that was. But there was nothing to be seen, nothing out of the usual. But why should there be? I doubted any of the furniture dated back farther than the fifties, when old Abihu might have been alive, but surely not in charge of the house anymore. This would be stuff that John Martin’s father had bought. Except maybe the mirrors. I stared at the mirrors, wondering if they had once reflected Almeria and what Almeria might have looked like.

“When are you going to start working on this?” my mother asked.

I shrugged, without turning. “Probably next week. First I need to finish the piano, so that Cas can fix it on the inside.”

“So, you and Castor . . . you’re still, you know . . . together?”

I came out of the garage and gave my mother a look. Sometimes there is no possible way of knowing where Mom gets her notions or what she comes up with. Like the idea that Ben wasn’t gay, none of it, no matter how many boyfriends he had, or how open he was about it. She either referred to it as his illusion or mine, and would smile sweetly and continue thinking what she wished to.

“I should hope so, otherwise he’d better explain why he came to my house last night to take me out for ice cream.”

She sighed, as she closed up the garage. “Well, your going to the tea at the country club made me wonder. You were really very rude to Alex’s wife, but I would understand, if you’re still in love with him and hope to reconcile.”

“Mother, I would rather eat live frogs. With warts.”

“Well . . . you know, after you left, she was in tears about the things you said about her dress, and Alex said you gave her a migraine.”

Yes, of course. Alex would also say that I was responsible for the swine flu, the Ebola virus, and the common cold. “Mom, you did see her dress?”

My mother looked embarrassed and fidgeted with her engagement and wedding rings, turning them around, because she had nothing else to play with, and she had to play with something when she was embarrassed. “I’m sure it was a very fashionable dress and that it cost her a lot of money. What you must remember, Candy, is that she’s your son’s other mother, and that if you antagonize her, you’re giving her possible reasons to hate your son.”

“I don’t think she hates E,” I said, soberly. Fear, whine about, and hide from, sure. Hate, no. You needed to actually know something properly before you could hate it, and poor Michelle had no clue what made E tick. The fact that I didn’t, either, most of the time, made no difference. At least I didn’t let it bother me.

My mother gave me a very odd look. “I don’t understand you, Candy. You’re thirty. I don’t know what you expect to do with your life. I have told you before that your father and I will help finance your degree, if you should choose to go back to college.” She shook her head. “Unless, of course, you and Cas are going to get married. Then, you know, you probably should have children right away because it’s much harder when you’re older, I should know. We always wanted a large family.”

I stared at my mother. I was sure that if I looked very carefully in the basement of the bookstore, I’d find a pod person hiding somewhere. First, my parents had married when they were both well past forty, so I couldn’t imagine with which body Mom had intended to have that large family. And second, I had it on good authority—my grandmother’s—that Mom had never intended to have even the one child, and her pregnancy had caught her so completely by surprise that it accounted for her hysterical behavior over what I was to be named.

And third, I didn’t know with whom Mom could have intended to have this large family. My father is a sweet man, one of the nicest men alive. However, he’s also not fully rooted in the real world.

If he had been born in the Middle Ages, he’d have been an ascetic monk or anchorite, hidden in his cell, talking to a God only he understood or heard. But he had been born in the twentieth century and come of age in an era when devotion to God was not widespread or expected. So he’d grown up surrounded by books.

When his grandmother had left him a house in her will, hoping it would give him the capital to make something out of himself, he’d filled it with books. And if Mom hadn’t come along, hung a bookstore sign over the door, and forced him to move his living quarters to the upper floor and install a cash register by the front door, I suspected that right now Dad would be living like a monk, hidden in the world’s largest fire hazard. At least if he hadn’t managed to get crushed under a falling pile of books. So far.

Even now, he hated to sell books. Mother made him, but he still hated to do it. Whenever they did a convention or a show and sold a good number of books, he would come home and take a day or two to reassure his remaining books that he still loved them.

I wasn’t absolutely sure, in fact, that my father was aware of my existence. Or if he was, that he knew what I was up to at any given time. If I weren’t available for him to talk to about mysteries, he just talked about them to whoever else was present.

Sometimes he seemed to be curiously unmoored in time, and think that I was still in high school.

I could imagine that if Mom had succeeded in having the large family she wanted, Dad would wander along in a fog, assuming we were customers come to buy his books and trying to protect them from us.

“We’re doing the best we can,” I mumbled at my mother, hoping she wouldn’t ask who “we” was. In this case it happened to be the royal we, and I was in fact doing the best I could.

“If only you would talk to Ben,” she said. “I’m sure that none of this strangeness of his is real. I mean, I think it’s some joke he tells you and you believe him.”

“Ben has a new boyfriend,” I said. “He’s Cas’s cousin. Oh, and they’re adopting rats together. So cute.”

Mom’s gaze slid across me. It always did that when I said something that she either couldn’t accept or didn’t know how to respond to. She twirled her rings again, then said, “Want to come and meet Fluffy?”

It was my turn to do a double take. Fluffy had been my parents’ cat the whole time I’d been growing up. She was a beautiful white Persian, or at least she started out that way. When she’d gone to the great mouse hunting ground in the sky, she had been a skinny, scrawny little thing with yellow fur, most of her teeth missing, and an undying hatred in her heart for me. Which was perhaps understandable, since I had set fire to her fur, scared her with explosions, and generally driven her insane. Though by the time she died, you really couldn’t see the scars, and the only thing she was suffering from was her age, which was pushing twenty-four. Her last act before she died had been to drag herself up the stairs and piss all over my former bed.

Mom said they’d found her dead at the foot of the bed with an expression of profound satisfaction on her grizzled face. That she cried when she told me, was something I didn’t want to probe too deeply. But I did want to know why she wanted me to meet a zombie cat. “Mom, Fluffy died. You have her ashes on the mantelpiece.” Right under the picture of Ben and me at the prom. We’d gone together because neither of us had a relationship at the time, but of course, it had given Mom ideas. And Mom’s ideas took time to die. She probably still imagined Fluffy alive. Or, of course, she wanted to introduce me to the ashes.

Mom shook her head. “No, dear. Fluffy the Second.”

“You got another cat?” I said hopefully, since at least this was a better topic than my love life, my professional life, or how Ben would make an ideal partner for me, if I only just took the trouble to understand him.

Mom nodded, and, looking very proud, took me up the stairs to the area that my parents lived in. The house was on a street of redbrick, three-story houses, with attics. Most of them hosted a store on the bottom floor, and Mom and Dad’s wasn’t an exception. A lot had lofts in the upper stories, but instead, Mom and Dad lived in their upstairs and treated it pretty much like a suburban house.

There was a deep green garden between the garage and driveway and the house proper. We crossed it to reach the foot of a staircase that looked like it had been designed and built by a madman. In a way it had been. Mom had probably—I wasn’t sure, since it had happened before I was cognizant—nagged Dad into building it, and Dad had taken the same approach to it as he did to any housework or home improvement she requested of him—he’d done an absolutely piss-poor job, in the serene conviction that if he did things badly enough she would stop asking him to do anything ever again.

Imagine a spiral staircase, built in wood, by someone who had used boards of whatever length and width came to hand, without bothering to cut them down to size. If you add in the fact that the supports for the structure didn’t seem to be placed according to any rational system known to man, you’d think the thing should have fallen long ago. Which was true. But over the thirty years of my life, my mother and father had hosted parties and barbecues and the annual get-together for the area mystery writers every last weekend in June, all without the stairs doing more than the usual growling and moaning and swaying. Climbing them gave me the impression of being on a ship on the high seas.

We entered the house through the kitchen, which was the only way to do so since the erstwhile staircase from downstairs, which ended in the living room, had finally been blocked with bookcases, after one too many mystery readers had climbed them and come into our house and tried to buy books off the to-be-read shelf, an offense that even my mother wouldn’t tolerate.

Through the kitchen we went past a short hallway, and to the living room. It was, but for the fact that it couldn’t be entered directly, a rather formal room, with deeply upholstered sofas of the people-eater variety and a nice, solid coffee table, as well as the ubiquitous bookcases.

Mother’s crochet project—at the time her handiwork of choice was fluffy, woolen crochet—lay on one of the sofas. Next to it was . . .

Well, it looked as much like Fluffy as a kitten as it could possibly look without being Fluffy as a kitten. Just in case, I took a look at the urn of ashes, which was still on the mantelpiece.

Mind you, the kitten was considerably smaller than Fluffy had been, even at end of life, and its head was proportionately bigger.

But even though it was asleep when I came in, it woke up and lifted its little leonine head to fix me with a look of pure hatred. Then it rose, tottering on its kitten legs, and extended one paw, hesitantly, with all the claws out, and hissed at me.

It was the most pathetic hiss I’d ever heard out of any cat.

Meanwhile, Mom was saying, “Astounding, it’s like Fluffy come again. If I were a believing woman, I’d say it was Fluffy’s reincarnation.”

I reached out a hand to it and said, “Come on, Fluffs. You don’t want to fight with me for two lives. Look, I no longer set fire to things, and I even have a cat.” I extended my hand so that it could smell it . . .