French Polished Murder (7 page)

Meanwhile, I poured myself coffee, and grabbed a pancake, and was feeling almost human by the time Ben came into the kitchen looking like a new man, or at least one who had slept and put on a nice clean shirt and pants, and tied his tie to a degree of exactness that pleased him.

I let him grab a coffee and pancakes, before I asked, “Why did you write on the rats?”

He blinked at me, as if I had asked him why he had a nose on his face. “Eh?” he said. And then with a shrug. “To tell them apart.”

“Ben . . . they all have different patches of color!” I said.

“Do they?” He looked genuinely surprised. “I don’t know. In the middle of the night they all looked the same. I wrote on them to make sure I fed them all.” He looked around on the counter and gave me a notepad with a name line: Ratley, Ratso, Rat Fink, Rat Face, You Dirty Rat, Nestor, and Rat Tail. Each of the names had three neat check marks in front of them. “The rats now have names?” I asked

Ben nodded. “I used your laundry marker,” he said.

It was both so strange and so absolutely Ben with his mania for organization that I started giggling.

“What? It was perfectly logical,” he said.

“They’re lucky you didn’t put a little arrow by their heads, with
This End Up
. Or perhaps not.”

He grinned ruefully. “I would have figured it out,” he said. “Eventually.”

In the best of humors, he agreed to keep an eye on Pythagoras and feed the never-satisfied rats while I went to the library. I stuck the old letter from the piano in my purse, but let Ben assume I was just going to browse for refinishing materials or look in at the flea market, or the other things I did when I had time. As a peace offering—and because I was afraid he would either run over Pythagoras, topple the aquarium, or maim Ben with the electrical motorcycle, I took E with me.

I first bathed him in the bathroom, which between Pythagoras’s little tent and Ben’s case of beauty products—the man had a moisturizer for each time of day, I swear—was getting pretty cramped. Then I dressed him in his little jeans, blue sweatshirt, and the jacket Mom had brought him from the Inspector Maigret Fest she had attended in Paris last summer. I assumed she hadn’t bought it at the convention itself, since it wasn’t even vaguely murder related. It was a lambskin jacket, with a hood with little rounded ears sewn on it. The back read
Douce Comme un Agneau
. It made old ladies say, “aww,” and everyone else smile when they saw E. It also ranked up there with the most brazen lie in the history of the universe.

Still, perhaps because a toddler in possession of an electric motorcycle, a cat, and seven rats—even if his mother isn’t kind enough to give him cigarettes and coffee for breakfast—has very little more mischief he needs to make. E was quiet except for the sort of remarks he makes when he’s strapped into his car seat at the back of the car. These tend to consist of his pointing at things out the window and saying, “Car!” “Car!” “Dog!” “Red House.” I don’t know if he does this because he thinks I can’t see them or if he wants to show his amazing ability to see and say. Impressively, he shouted, “Books!” as we pulled into the parking lot of the library—one of the old Carnegie libraries, in golden stone, set in the middle of a garden all the more surprisingly luscious with old green trees and grass, as it was the middle of winter in Colorado, where the only way to keep a green lawn was to have a plastic one, or to have sold your soul to the devil.

Being the heartless woman I was, I couldn’t care less which librarian had condemned herself to eternal hellfire to bring about this result. I reveled in the tall evergreens surrounding the library and the carpet of grass that extended from the parking lot all around the building.

Inside, the library was very well kept and though I had heard of this strange trend where libraries were eschewing actual books in favor of audio books, programs, and even movies, the Goldport Library devoted itself to books almost exclusively. The meager collection of audio books huddled by the door, on a ratty bookcase, looking like at any minute it might be banished to the eternal darkness, or at least the eternal evergreen lawn outside.

The book area, on the other hand, was well lit, and contained comfy chairs arrayed around large, well-polished tables. I had a dream where I became a great scholar or a writer or something and came to work here every morning, in the quiet and the clean. I knew it was just a dream and also that it would last about five hours of my being there before all hell broke loose, an effect I had on most places I frequented.

However, for the time being we were safe. I took E to the children’s area—lower bookcases and vast, washable cushions—and left him there under the benevolent eye of a volunteer manning, or at least “girling,”the area.

For a kid who could, and often did, make the religious minded cross themselves or look up elaborate exorcisms, E was fairly safe around books. I credited—or blamed—Ben who, not having the slightest idea what to do with kids, spent a lot of the time reading to him. Ben swore up and down the block that E had a particular predilection for Ray Bradbury’s science fiction and a fine appreciation of the poetry of Jorge Luis Borges.

I thought that sooner or later Ben would end up needing intensive therapy, and could only hope he would wait long enough he could get a group discount with E who, raised by All-ex and myself couldn’t possibly escape it.

But it couldn’t be denied that E would remain quiet and happy as long as there were books around that he hadn’t looked at. The problem around the house was that I simply could not afford enough picture books.

Freed for the moment, I went to the computer area and looked up French polishing. It sounded absolutely daunting, but I printed the article, nonetheless, and folded it to stick in my purse. Then I found the letter and did a quick Web search for Jacinth Jones, but found nothing.

So I went over to the research desk—
wo
manned by a tall, dignified lady in a red and yellow pullover that looked exactly like she’d run down some poor creature on the way to work and was now wearing it, in all its blood and fat—and asked about a previous resident of Goldport, by the name of Jacinth Jones.

“Oh, you want area history. There’s a special wing for that.”

“There is?” I asked, as I imagined them strapping a pair of wings on me, so that I could access the unattainable heights of local history.

It turned out to be nothing so exciting. It was just a part of the library I’d never known existed, behind the children’s area. There was an oak door that looked like it came from a castle. Above the door I expected it to say
Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here
, but instead it said
Donated to the City Of Goldport by the Family of Abihu Martin
.

Inside the clean and quiet atmosphere of the rest of the library turned to clean and upscale. The wing was all polished mosaic floors and oak trim. There were massive file cabinets and flat files like my artist friends used. There were polished-oak bookcases and tables that looked like they were real antiques—possibly French polished.

And there was another tall and imposing woman, this one dressed all in white—a white skirt suit—and with her white hair firmly pinned back. I couldn’t get rid of the impression she’d come in here as a young woman and then become bleached by never going out in the sun again.

She answered my queries with a lot of polite murmurs, consulting a computer that I assumed wasn’t linked to the Internet. Then she led me amid the flat files and pulled out a drawer. From the drawer, with almost reverent care, she pulled out . . . laminated sheets of newspaper.

On the whole she ended up going through three drawers and getting me three different pages from three different editions of the
Goldport Conspirator
. It was—appropriately from what I knew of its present-day edition—yellowed and the date on top declared it to be from 1929.

The first one had a headline proclaiming “Owner of Local House of Ill Repute Vanishes. Creditors Enraged.” And right in the first paragraph was the name of Jacinth Jones.

I asked the lady to photocopy the pages, and she looked like I had asked her to kill her newborn children and tender me their blood in a cup. I was treated to a lecture on the Proper Treatment Of Archival Materials, with all the capitals clearly audible. It turned out, though, that the papers were available on microfiche and that those could be printed. I paid the price for them, stuffed them in my purse with the printouts on French polishing, and rushed out.

To find that pod people had replaced E. The lady in charge of the children’s library told me he was the sweetest little boy she’d ever seen and also that she’d been reading him some books, which he would like to borrow. Did I have a library card?

I refrained from pointing out that, as the daughter of bookstore owners, not only did I have a library card but it was probably the same age as my birth certificate. I also refrained from asking her what she had done with my son and who this smiling-faced little boy holding a stack of six books could be.

The books turned out to be a children’s series called The Lab Rats Adventures. They were predicated on the concept of lab rats who accidentally acquire intelligence and live in the walls of the lab. I half expected it to plead the line that experimentation was wrong, but it didn’t—I checked by skimming. Not that I like hurting little rats or bunnies, or worse, cats or dogs, but I did understand it was better than hurting humans—instead the rats had adventures, helped the scientists, and generally got in trouble with the help of their great cat friend Euclid.

At least it made sense for E to be fascinated with rats just now.

When I got back home, there was a police car in the driveway. Or rather, there was a car no one would identify as a police car, but that I had seen Cas drive before.

I opened the door, half expecting to find Cas in the house. I was, of course, wrong.

“I came by to see how the rats are doing,” Nick said, looking more than a little embarrassed. “I used to have rats when I was little . . . And I had some time at lunch and I thought . . .”

“Not a problem,” I said. I noted that Ben didn’t offer to give him all the rats right then. I also noted that Ben was at the stove doing something. I refused to guess why he’d been such a pain the day before and was being so nice now. Instead, I took E to the bathroom, washed both his hands and mine, set the books down in his room, and came back to the kitchen to find that E was petting a bewildered Pythagoras. I contemplated whether to wash his hands again, but Ben pointed him at the table and told him to sit down. For a miracle, E did. So did Nick, who apparently interpreted Ben’s stern expression as a command to everyone around. I didn’t, because given half a chance, Ben would set up as the evil dictator of the world. Or at least as the extremely organized ruler of the known world and the rest of the universe as soon as he got to it.

“I couldn’t make omelets,” Ben told me, with a hint of censure. “Because you didn’t call me to tell me you were coming back, and I had no intention of making shoe leather.”

He pointed at the table again, and this time I went, because there was no use fighting it. Nick and E, I noticed, had taken up the two central seats. Since the table was against the wall, that left me with the option of sitting next to one of them. I sat next to E. If Ben didn’t like that, let him stew.

Ben set a pot of soup in the middle of the table, then went back, opened the oven and, moments later, set down a basket of savory cheese muffins, covered with a kitchen cloth that looked like it was trying to be extra prim to avoid serving as a rat receiving blanket.

Ben sat down in the remaining available chair, without so much as a frown at me. “It’s just vegetable soup with bought broth,” he said. “Sorry. I didn’t have time for anything more complex. But the muffins are savory cheese and should be good.”

I didn’t ask why he was apologizing to the woman whose main culinary accomplishment was pancakes. It was clear he wasn’t apologizing to any woman at all. I just wished he would decide whether he wanted to fish, cut bait, or reel the fish in and let it go very fast until the fish had concussion.

Poor Nick was already looking like someone had hit him on the back of his head, hard, with a baseball bat. Only that would account for the way his smile went all wobbly.

“I just thought you were right,” Ben said. “And I’d
been a bit of an ass yesterday, okay? There’s nothing else going on! He came by to look at the rats, and I thought it was fair to offer him lunch. I mean, he wanted to go out to lunch, but I couldn’t leave the rats.”

“Right,” I said.

“In fact . . .” Red climbed up his face in waves. Watching Ben blush has always been one of my favorite things, because he usually doesn’t allow anyone to see his emotions, but he has the type of clear, translucent skin that shows blushes like a neon sign. “If you could take over rat duty . . . this evening . . .”