Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (11 page)

“Alexander,” I said, which was a bad move because the priss actually liked his full name.

“I was wondering if we could come by and take Enoch a little early. You see, Michelle’s parents would like us to come to dinner, and I thought we’d make Enoch—” He stopped. “I mean, that we would like to take Enoch with us, and you know, he’s quite likely to crush a bug on himself or something, just before . . . anyway . . . Michelle
says she’ll bring him earlier on Tuesday, too. And that way it will all be even, but if you wouldn’t mind . . .”

I minded. Of course I minded. I minded having to send E to his house at all. But the thing was that eventually I’d need a favor of the kind or to keep E an extra day, and for me to be trouble over this—or even to take offense at the unstated fact that they wanted to make E decent before taking him out—would only be a problem for me later on.

“Okay,” I said. I turned around the way you do when you’re trying to turn away from the person on the phone, and you do it physically. “All right. He’s ready, just about.”

“Oh, good,” All-ex said, sounding only mildly surprised. “We’re about thirty minutes away and we’ll be there—”

All hell broke loose. As I’d turned away, E had broken away from the room and bolted toward the living room, saying, “Bah! Bah! Bah!”

I heard Ben shout, “No, don’t—”

I hung up and ran.

For such a series of sounds, the scene was nothing like I expected. E was holding on to Ben’s leg, and Ben was standing looking at his cell phone with the expression of someone who expected the small, compact phone to turn into a three-headed frog.

“What happened?” I said.

Ben looked at me. His free hand went up to rub the middle of his forehead. “Nothing. It’s just . . . Les . . . is being a—” He stopped and gave the impression he’d bit his tongue, then shrugged. “I have no idea what’s going on, but he had . . . he’s been under stress at the symphony. Something about the brass section.” He shrugged again. “He’ll calm down.”

“I’m sorry I let E run out,” I said. “I was trying to keep him in his room.”

He gave me something that approached a smile. “Well, having the monkey run in and shout didn’t help, but it was probably headed that way anyway. He’ll calm down. He’s just . . . stressed.”

Right. For someone who said they’d never had a disagreement before, to the point where he had no idea what the making-up procedure might be, Ben was acting like someone in the middle of a huge flare-up. But there was the rule.

I told him that All-ex was coming to pick up E early.

“All right, then I probably should go,” he said. He grimaced. “You know how well we get along. But I really don’t want you staying here. Can you go stay at your parents’, or something? I know they’re not there, but—”

I didn’t want to go stay at my parents’. Too many reasons to list, but at the end of them all, Fluffy would piss on my bed. She always did, even when I tried to shut her out of the room. And besides, again, she didn’t need that sort of stress. “Yeah, sure.”

He looked doubtful. As he’d pointed out before, he knew me rather well. But he said, “Okay,” and petted the top of E’s head. “See you later, monkey. Be good for Daddy and Stepmommy.”

“Bah.”

“Yes, but you probably shouldn’t tell them that.”

The doorbell rang.

I detached E from Ben’s leg, and Ben took two steps toward the door. So All-ex had gotten here early. Which meant there was no point at all to Ben’s leaving to avoid a confrontation.

I walked quickly, peevishly, to the door and flung it open. And found myself staring—no doubt disapprovingly—at the confused face of Officer Hotstuff, aka Cas Wolfe.

“Ms. Dare,” he said.

“Officer Wolfe,” I said.

He blinked at me and looked over my shoulder toward Ben. “Did you know your car is . . . that someone slashed the tires?”

CHAPTER 8

The Bright Eyes of the Law

“The BMW,” Officer Hotstuff Wolfe said.

Ben made a sound that might have been an explosion and headed out the door to his car.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset your husband.”

Honestly. Should a grown man look that sheepish? “He’s not my husband. Just a friend.” And then, realizing that
just a friend
these days could be an entire category of dating, “Not . . . a romantic interest.” And then of course I wanted to bite my tongue off, because why in hell should I be telling this to a total stranger? Next I would tell him that Ben was just so incredibly gay . . .

But he didn’t seem surprised, and nodded as he asked, “May I come in?”

“Of course,” I said, stepping aside, more than a little confused. Part of the confusion was the fact that Ben was now looking at his tires. Part was that Officer Cas Wolfe really was
all that
—broad shoulders and perfect features and all.

He walked into the house, but stood by my side looking
out at Ben. I knew where he was looking without turning to glance at him. I could tell from the heat radiating from his body that he was standing very close indeed, and felt tenseness from him.

Ben came back to the house, talking on his cell phone. As he got close to us, he said, “Just a second,” then to me, “I called roadside assist. They’ll send someone out.” He shook his head, frowning, his look at me intent.

I knew what the extraordinarily focused gaze meant, but I didn’t want to say anything one way or another. He wanted me to tell Mr. Policeman about someone coming in, knifing the table, and hanging a stuffed toy by the neck. He thought it was related to the slashing of his tires.

Which beggared the mind. For one, it couldn’t all have happened at the same time. Clearly, the stuffed chimp had already been swinging, the table knifed when Ben came home. Clearly, too, Ben and E had not been riding around in a car with slashed tires.

So . . . My mind reeled, trying to make sense of all of this. Ultimately, the stuffed animal and the knifed table couldn’t have anything to do with the slashed tires. The slashed tires were probably the result of parking a BMW in this neighborhood. After all, when I’d decided to move in, Ben had brought up all sorts of scary statistics, including but not limited to the fact that this neighborhood had more bashed mailboxes than any other in town. It wasn’t that far from bashed mailboxes to slashed tires, and I’d be damned if I was going to tell Officer Hotstuff Wolfe that people were out to get me, were targeting me, or—or gave him any other reason to think I was paranoid.

And then, in the way these things happen, the roadside assist people arrived, and Ben went to deal with them. Which meant he was standing at the edge of the driveway as All-ex and Mrs. All-ex pulled up in their car. I didn’t know if All-ex had actually steered toward Ben, but Ben stepped out of the way anyway. I was curious enough to
watch them load the car onto a trailer while Ben gave them instructions. But he didn’t go with them. This seemed at best impolitic, unless he thought he needed to defend me from All-ex, which wouldn’t be the first and probably not the last time.

It all happened very quickly. All-ex and Mrs. All-ex got out of the car, and Ben walked toward me, hands in pockets, looking far more casual than if he were actually at ease. For one, he never put his hands in his pockets when he was at actual ease, because it ruined the line of the suit. “Dyce,” he said, before All-ex could talk. “If you wouldn’t mind giving me a ride home, then Les can give me a ride to the shop to pick up my car.”

“Sure,” I said, as All-ex came up the steps to the front porch—a little cement enclosure just up from the street—and glared at me as if I had personally offended him by talking to Ben. He glared at Ben, then glared at Officer Wolfe, just as Michelle—blandly pretty and wearing a pink skirt suit with just a bit of a lace collar showing, and a set of matched pearls around her neck—gave Ben and Officer Wolfe a pale, embarrassed smile.

All-ex was dark blond and barely taller than I. I’d always thought part of his problem with Ben was Ben’s height. If so, Officer Wolfe wasn’t helping, and from the look All-ex gave each of them, you’d think All-ex and I were still married and he’d caught me in flagrante delicto with both men. He straightened his neck and gave the men a ferocious, challenging glare.

I’d seen that glare before. It was the year Grandma kept chickens and she had two roosters. The smaller of the two looked at the world with that same mad, defiant expression. “I need to talk to you,” he said to me, before I could even introduce Officer Wolfe. Which is probably just as well, because after his look, I wanted to tell him that yes, I was carrying on with Officer Wolfe and that all his darkest suspicions about Ben were true. The gay thing
was just a ruse. A very well-carried-out ruse. It required him to make out with the student council president in high school and to live with Les Howard.

Instead, I tried to discipline myself to say hello. Somewhere behind me, in the living room, I was aware of the sound of little running feet, and wasn’t sure if E was coming forward to greet his father or to hide behind me as his father attempted to take him away.

Before I could open my mouth, though, All-ex said, “We have to talk.”

“Oh no,” I said. “Isn’t that the woman’s line?”

He looked confused. Poor All-ex had spent a great part of our marriage looking confused. He frowned, bringing his eyebrows low over his eyes. “Did you read the note in Enoch’s backpack?”

“There was a note?” I asked, all sweetness and light.

“You know damn well there was a note,” he said. “The thing is, Michelle and I were talking in the car, and we really need to take Enoch to a therapist. He’s over two and a half now, and he should be saying something. At least
Mom
and
Dad
.”

And Ben—Ben, who normally would have sided with All-ex on this—blurted out, “Well, he says
Bah
.”

All-ex gave him a withering look, then glared at me. “He says all sorts of things,” I said. “Selective mutism is not unusual in gifted children. He will speak more to other people as he becomes older and . . .”

“There is no proof that he speaks to
anyone
,” All-ex said. “Just because you keep telling me that—”

“She’s right,” Officer Wolfe put in, all too helpfully.

“Selective mutism is quite common in smart kids. I didn’t talk to anyone but my mother for—”

“Enoch is my son, not yours,” All-ex said, in the voice of a man holding fast to that one basic truth in the face of his ex-wife’s obvious and clear lack of morals, which had enlisted all these men to her cause.

At that moment, E pushed forward, keeping close to my legs and holding on to me, turned his innocent face up to his father’s enraged countenance, and said, “Oh, holy fuck.”

It rang clear as a bell and, unmistakably, in Ben’s intonation.

CHAPTER 9

Run, Baby, Run!

“Well,” I said, because sometimes, frankly, the quilt
frame is already on fire and the cat is going to get burned whether or not she jumps through it, “as you can see, he can talk.”

All-ex swallowed. Our married life together had ended the day he slapped me, something I didn’t normally tell people about because I didn’t think it was that All-ex was necessarily an abuser or would ever slap any other woman. And it wasn’t so much that I blamed myself as that I knew, to quote my mother, that I could make a saint turn devil. Since then, All-ex had gone out of his way to not even raise his voice at me. But right then, he clenched his fist by the side of his body, and I could see him physically hold himself back. “What kind of language—” he said.

“Dear, remember your blood pressure,” his wife said.

“It was my fault,” Ben said, as if it would help anything. “I don’t normally swear . . . well . . . not in front of him, but it escaped. You see, Dyce found . . .”

“A problem in a piece of furniture,” I said, cutting him
short. Not only was his admission of fault not going to buy him any slack, but if he went around talking about me finding a body, let alone having my table slashed and a stuffed animal hanged from the shower curtain bar, All-ex would call in the lawyers. And he would do his best to keep me from seeing E ever again, for the rest of my life. Hell, that was why I never took him to court over missed child support. Because it could be worse.