French Polished Murder (3 page)

But Cas has a dark secret. He plays the piano, having learned from his grandmother, who gave private lessons. Now that he had his own place, a few blocks from mine, in downtown Goldport, he’d been dreaming of owning of a piano of his own. His grandmother’s Steinway had gone to—he said—his least favorite aunt. And though Cas did pretty well, a really good piano was hard to afford on a police officer’s salary.

I’d heard him sigh and moan long enough. I’d gone with him from store to store, playing pianos, trying them out. There was no piano-selling store, between downtown Goldport and Pueblo, ranging from piano-manufacturer outlets to thrift stores, that he and I hadn’t visited. But the pianos we found fell into two categories: the ones that were too far gone to be recovered and the ones that were too expensive.

So, when we’d found this piano at a flea market, Cas had immediately looked at the back, at the soundboard, which he said was intact, then opened the keyboard cover and fingered the keys.

It had started innocuously enough. “The soundboard is not cracked,” Cas had said. He had that excited little-boy gleam to his eye, a look guaranteed to melt the hearts of mothers and girlfriends.

I’d looked at the piano, which looked dismal but not too bad, in the half dark of the old movie theater’s lobby. “Wouldn’t it be too hard to tune, though?” I said.

“Nah. I used to help my uncle tune grandma’s piano. . . .”

He’d walked around, making
um
sounds, and poking at things, then said, “Mind you, it will need all new felts, and the ivories need cleaning and, of course, it needs to be cleaned inside, too, and tuned.” Then he’d looked closer at the open keyboard cover and sighed. “And it’s a Steinway, too. Looks like one of the early ones.” He’d sighed. “Only, I don’t think it can ever be made presentable. That pink paint looks like melted plastic or something. Even if I could make it play properly, I’d be embarrassed to have it in the living room.”

This was when I lost my mind. I’d looked at the wrecked piano and said the first thing that came to me, which happened to be, “I can refinish it, if you can tune it.”

I realized how far out on a limb I’d climbed when Cas gave me a sobering look. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” I said, all the while wondering what exactly I’d taken in my morning coffee.

Now I decided whatever it was had to be potent, because there was no way I knew what to do with this mess.

Aren’t pianos supposed to be French polished?
he said.
They are,
I’d said.
You know how to do that?
he asked.
Of course,
I said.

I groaned. I knew how to apply French polish just like I knew how to fly. First method, buy a ticket in an airliner. Second method, grow wings.

This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,
I thought vaguely, as I took a deep breath and contemplated the dismal, plasticky expanse of dusty, filthy piano.

In these circumstances, my grandmother has a way of coming to my rescue. Oh, not literally, since the dear lady had been dead for years, and even someone of her disposition couldn’t defeat that kind of handicap. But the kinds of things she’d told me and taught me came to mind when nothing else would do. And what came to mind right now was that there wasn’t anything so hopeless that a good cleaning wouldn’t take it a fair way toward being solved.

I’d had a sink installed in the workshop, though there was no pipe in there, of course. Instead, I had a large plastic barrel with a faucet on it, leaning on a shelf at the back of the sink. There were some chemicals for which the best antidote was rinsing in plenty of water. I now grabbed a rag and wet it in the water, then took it back to the piano, and started washing a corner of it. Which, well . . . made the plasticky expanse look a brighter pink.

Right.

I went back to the shelf and grabbed one of the patent paint removers. Normally I used a bit of denatured alcohol and paint thinner mixed together, but I had a feeling the bright, bright pink cover was polyurethane and I didn’t believe in hitting my head against walls.

So instead, I wet the tip of an old paintbrush and applied the furniture-finish remover to a corner of the piano.

Which is when I heard a squeak. It sounded like . . . a wheel out of joint. In fact, my first impulse was to think of the wheel of E’s bike, which almost made me dive behind the piano. But then the squeak didn’t sound again. So I thought it was a trick of my ears.

I grabbed the five-point painter’s tool and tried to pry at the plastic paint that was bubbling up beautifully. Beneath it, there was gleaming silver. Right. I applied paint remover—again.

I opened the keyboard cover and got a rag moistened with water, and started wiping the keys, then went back and prized at the little bit of the silver paint off to reveal white. I put a bit more paint remover on, and went back to wipe the keys some more. They took a lot of wiping, as the rag kept coming away dark brown.

As I wiped, I couldn’t help pressing the keys of course, and every time I did, there was a squeak as an echo.

I stepped back and frowned at the piano. The squeak continued—at first faint, then with increased urgency.
Squeak, squeak, squeak
.

It was undeniable that the sound was coming from inside the piano. But I was fairly sure pianos didn’t squeak. Not absolutely sure, mind you. After all, Cas had said he needed to change the felts and what not, maybe there were also rubber parts inside the piano that needed changing. Or perhaps oiling . . .

I stared at it for a moment, but had to admit nothing was going to get done as long as the piano continued to squeak at me.

So I looked closer at the upright panel between the bottom of the keyboard and the pedals. I thought that it would have to be removed, anyway, so Cas could do whatever it was he wanted to do with felts and what not. So, eventually, he was going to have to open the bottom. And if it was rubber or something, I’d just give it a shot of oil and not be distracted as I was cleaning.

I grabbed the electric screwdriver from the shelf. There were four screws holding the panel in. It was only a moment’s work to remove them and pull off the panel and—

Somehow, I’d dropped the wood panel, and I was on the other side of the shed, my body pressed flat against the wall, while my hands tried to figure out a means to escape backward into it.

Because inside the piano was a litter of papers, newspapers, and—rats.

Don’t ask me how I knew they were rats. They were mostly pink and small and crawling all over one another. But I knew they were rats. And the instinctive reaction forming in my gut wanted me to climb on a chair and pull up the skirt I didn’t have on and scream, “A rat, a rat!”

It took me several deep breaths before I realized that while these were probably rats—or mice, or perhaps guinea pigs or rabbits, though those were less likely to go wandering about inside old pianos—they were, in fact, tiny, pink, furless, and clearly harmless. Also, there were at least six of them, so screaming, “A rat,” would not only be futile but also seriously understating things.

Continuing to take deep breaths—because the oxygen is likely to make you a little drunk, I guess—I forced myself to get closer. Yep. Rats or mice. Probably rats, because I had the idea mice were smaller at this stage of development—though the only baby rats I’d ever seen were the ones we dissected in biology—six of them. In a nest made of papers and other bits of rubbish.

As I moved nearer I thought the little things were actually kind of cute. In fact, they reminded me of E when he was born, all big head and flailing limbs.

Considering how often I’d called All-ex a rat, perhaps there was a reason for the resemblance. But unlike E, these baby rats were in a pile, and all of them seemed to be trying to dig under the others, trying to get down into a warm or safe place. . . .

The sane thing to do, I thought, was to kill them or something, right? But how did one kill baby rats? Poison? Or smack their little heads with the screwdriver. The idea made me cringe. They hadn’t done anything wrong. Okay, so probably Cas would say they deserved death for nesting inside a piano, but if rats understood pianos, then the world was too complicated for my taste.

But if I left them there, I had a feeling they’d die, anyway, from cold or hunger or something.

So . . . they needed some place warm. Most babies did. And also food. And then I’d call wildlife rescue and ask them to find a foster mother or something. Mom had done that when she’d found a baby squirrel in the attic storage area of the bookstore.

I still was not particularly fond of the idea of touching them. After all, they could have plague or salmonella or retrovirus or whatever. However, I also couldn’t let them die. So I put on my dust mask—to ward off the retrovirus thing—and I put on my heavy gloves, and then I dug underneath, trying to get all of the little rats and the nest, too.

It wasn’t as easy as it sounds, because as I had all six in the space between my hands, I felt another one flail underneath, so I had to reach farther.

When I was done, the mess of newspaper and paper and wiggling baby rats didn’t fit in my hands. So I grabbed a clean paint tray and dumped it all in it, covered it with a rag, because I was going to have to cross the space outside where the temperature was in the thirties, and ran, holding the tray, out of the shed and into the back hallway of the house, then along it to the kitchen, where I set the tray on the table.

The rats were still wiggling around wildly, and I considered putting them in the oven on warm, but I had the vague idea that it might prove to be a bad move. So I did what anyone else would do. I figured they were too young to actually walk. They seemed to be wriggling around on their bellies. I’d put them in a shallow, oven-proof glass dish.

I couldn’t quite bring myself to put the mess of bits of paper and dirty stuff in it, though, so instead I used kitchen towels. I moved the babies, one by one into the dish, atop the towels.

Then I got my warming tray, put towels on top of it to mitigate the heat somewhat; set the dish atop the towels, and covered it with another towel.

They continued to squeak, but it didn’t speed up or anything, so they were probably okay.

I grabbed the paint tray and shook the mess of papers into the trash.

And there, right on top of it all, a letter fell. It was so old that the envelope looked almost mustard yellow and the addresses were sepia-toned.

But it was a letter, and I couldn’t throw a letter away. I fished it out of the trash and looked at it, realizing it was indeed very old.

The letter was addressed from someone named
Almeria to Jacinth Jones, on Wisteria Court. I looked at the envelope a good long time, because Wisteria Court was just around the corner from me. Well, five blocks down, another of the neighborhoods populated almost exclusively by students living ten or twelve to a dilapidated Victorian. I guessed when the letter had been written the neighborhood was quite different.

Temptation to open the letter and read it warred with hesitation to pry into the lives of others. I opened the envelope just enough to see that there was indeed a letter inside. The whole thing was so fragile, though, that I was afraid it would fall apart in my hands. I set it down on the table and told myself maybe I would take it to the library or the downtown historical society. Or I might try to track down the descendants of Jacinth Jones. Surely they’d be the appropriate people to give the letter to.

Right now I had more important things to do. There was no wildlife rescue listed in the phone book, but the library gave me a name. I dialed it. And was met with incredulity. “Rats?”

“I think so. They could be mice.” I thought about it a moment. “Large mice, with strangely shaped heads.”

There was a long silence from the other side. “Rats aren’t wildlife you know?” the person said. He sounded uncertainly male, like boys do when they stop growing but their voice hasn’t caught up with their bodies yet. His kept cracking on the heights of incredulity. I thought he must be a high school student, putting in his required volunteer hours. “They are, in their own way, as domesticated as cats and dogs. That’s why we don’t advise taking them to the wild and setting them free.”

I actually took the phone away from my ear and looked at it, to make sure it was indeed the phone and not some other sort of audio device of a prepared lecture. “I don’t want to release them to the wild. They’re babies!”

A throat cleared impatiently at the other end of the line, and then the voice, nasally high, asked, “How old did you say they were?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “They’re pink, they have no fur. Their eyes are closed. You tell me.”

There was a long rustle, papers being shuffled and moved maybe. “They sound,” he said at last, “like somewhere between newborn and a week old.”