Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (14 page)

Ben put his suitcases in the trunk of my car and opened the passenger door. By the time I got in, he was fully buckled in place and looking like a lord of the manor waiting for the chauffeur to start up the car. I put on my seat belt, started the car, and turned around. “Where to?”

He looked surprised. “What?”

“Where are you staying? Where should I take you?”

“Oh.” He opened his mouth as if to argue. What? He’d packed and everything, and it had never occurred to him that he’d need to stay somewhere?

But when he spoke again, the words came out hesitantly, more as if he were trying something on and not sure how to get it across. “Uh . . . I thought I’d stay with you.”

“With me?”

“If you don’t mind,” he said, humbly.

“I don’t mind,” I said, even as I tried to figure out what was going on. Ben had never asked to stay with me, not even while he had work being done at his place. “There’s only the sofa, you know?” I said, as I steered carefully out of the parking lot. “That is, I don’t think you’ll fit into E’s crib.”

“I’m sure I won’t fit into E’s crib,” he said, with a little smile that made him look almost human. “And the sofa will be fine.”

I opened my mouth to point out that my ratty tenth-hand sofa, covered in a slipcover I’d made myself and which was therefore crooked and had lumps of seams in all the wrong places, was quite a drop in his standards, when I remembered the Mastercard being passed over to the disaster recovery team leader. Right. Of course he’d be tight on money.

I opened my mouth again to ask if he was sure he didn’t want to go home to his parents’, but then realized not only that it would be churlish when he’d asked for my hospitality, but also that he was as likely to like the idea of crawling home to Mom and Dad in the middle of a disaster as I would enjoy crawling back to my mother and father’s place in a crisis.

Ben’s family was not like mine. In fact, in many ways it was the opposite of mine. I’d often thought that he kept urging me to go home to Mom and Dad because no one can really understand other families. No matter how much we’re exposed to them, in our minds we see them through the lens of the only family we knew really well and early enough.

I was the only daughter of aged parents who not only had married late but had never expected to have children. In fact, if I understood the gist of the conversation between my parents when talking of my birth, they’d gone to some trouble to avoid children. You see, they’d met at a mystery convention where Dad was selling books and
Mom was trying to find a buyer for her manuscripts. I wasn’t absolutely sure how they’d courted, much less married, because Mom was a romantic soul and Dad was as dry and impervious as his collectible books. But court and marry they had. I’d come along ten years after that, and my advent had caused such a quake in their otherwise ordered lives that Mom had left Dad for a while—if either of them was to be believed—over what they were going to call me. They’d reconciled in the candy store just as Mom went into labor, which both of them seemed to think justified my name.

After that flurry of activity concerning me, they’d ignored me and returned to—mostly—babying the bookstore while leaving me to be raised—mostly—by Grandma. Not that I resented this, mind you. It was very much a case of their not doing what they were not equipped to do.

Ben, on the other hand, was the first of seven kids and his mother and father—even if his dad was a high school teacher—made it a point that their main job was to raise the kids. To wander into their house, as I first had at twelve, was to walk into a veritable hail of questions over how you were doing, what you were doing, if you were having any trouble with your homework, and could you grab a mop and do something about what the dog had just done on the floor by the piano?

Ben’s mom didn’t work, except for giving piano lessons at home while the kids were at school. Ben’s next two sisters were in the grades after us and had counted on him to help them with the homework. His sister after that was the beauty of the family as well as a talented singer, and I don’t think I’d ever visited when she hadn’t been practicing scales somewhere in her bedroom.

His three brothers were much younger and just a year apart from each other. When we’d been twelve, the youngest one had still been in diapers, and he was now a senior in high school.

The Colm household was referred to by my high school counselor as a three-ring circus, and that it was—even now when only the three younger boys still lived at home—but with all that, I couldn’t go to his family’s house to drop off something, pick up something, or attend a party without becoming the object of his parents’ protective attention.

During the long years of our friendship, I think they had completely forgotten I wasn’t one of theirs. Unlike my parents, they had never had the slightest illusion that Ben and I might be an item. Instead, they treated me as though I were an additional daughter, squished somehow between Ben and Dana, who was a year and a half younger. I’d never been able to figure out how they thought that, particularly because their brood ran to tall, well built, and varying shades of strawberry blond, but I was small, dark, and Mediterranean-looking.

However, after I’d started coming home and doing homework with Ben for six months or so, they began setting a place for me at the table, and his mom was as likely to tell me to go wash my hands or fix my hair as she was one of his sisters. And I swear his mom was far more vigilant and interested in the boys who took me out in high school than my mom ever was. For that matter, she’d never really approved of All-ex, and I should have listened to her.

Of course I had no clue how she felt about Les. I was fairly sure they knew that Ben was gay. The simple fact that his mom had never pushed girls at him was evidence enough. I didn’t know if Ben had told them—it wasn’t any of my business—but he hadn’t exactly hidden Les. Even if it would be easy to do. All he had to do was stuff him in that oversized toiletries case.

“Dyce!” Ben said, sharply, and for a moment I thought he was rebuking me for my inner thoughts. Turned out he was reminding me that the light in front of me had just
turned red. I stomped hard on the brakes, and he made a sound that wasn’t quite a protest as I returned to my thoughts. No. Ben couldn’t go home to his parents. What the heck was he supposed to tell his mom when she asked what had happened to his place? I got a feeling he’d rather eat his own tongue sautéed in parsley than discuss Les’s temper tantrum with them.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll give you sheets and a blanket.”

He looked amused. “Oh, good. I was afraid you were going to make me sleep on the coffee stains.”

It didn’t deserve to be dignified with an answer. “Tea stains,” I said, as I pulled into my driveway.

CHAPTER 11

Gentleman Caller

Wouldn’t you know it that Ben wouldn’t let me just
go out to dinner with Officer Hotstuff without fussing over me? It started as soon as we got into my living room. He put his suitcases on the floor by the sofa and said, “Go get dressed.”

I looked down at my jeans-and-T-shirt-clad body, then back at him. “I’m naked?”

He rolled his eyes. “You’re not dressed to go on a date.”

“I’m going on a date?”

“You know, Dyce, just repeating back what I say can get very tedious. Didn’t Officer Wolfe say he was taking you out to dinner?”

“It’s not a date,” I said, realizing that an edge of desperation had crept into my voice. I’d seen Ben in this mode, usually trying to persuade his sisters to dress up for the one suitor he considered worthy.

Of course, I had no idea why he considered Officer Hotstuff worthy. Or perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps he expected me to use my feminine wiles on the law and . . .
and what? Make him search high and low for whoever had hung a stuffed animal?

I looked at Ben out of narrowed eyes and met with a clear stare and features firmly set.

So I went to my closet and put clothes on, and of course they weren’t
right
. My slacks were too “business.” My blouse was too “blousy”—which gets a prize for redundancy. My good skirt looked like I was trying to sell real estate.

He nixed my little black dress before I put it on, which was a good thing because frankly I wasn’t even sure it fit me anymore and I thought there was a good chance the moths had gotten to it. He said we didn’t want it to look like I expected the man to take me to an expensive restaurant. I didn’t want it to look like I expected the man to take me to any restaurant, even if he had invited me.

In the end, he marched me into the bedroom, stood staring at my closet, then grabbed a wrinkly cotton skirt that had an elastic waist and a dizzying array of colors. “That,” he said, “should do it. Do you have a bright blue T-shirt?”

I didn’t, but I had a bright red one, which he approved of. “Hanging earrings,” he said. “And let your hair loose, just kind of run your fingers through it. Yeah.”

“Didn’t your sisters let you play with their Barbies?”

“What?”

“Never mind.” I’d never seen Ben like this when it came to me going out, and it occurred to me that it was probably as much displacement from his own troubles as anything else.

“No makeup, I think,” he said. Which was very good, because I didn’t think I had any. Oh, I’m sure there was a ziplock bag with some stuff in it in the depths of the linen cabinet. But I’d bet money the lipstick was dry and the mascara reduced to black powder.

The doorbell rang and he went to open the door, leaving me to throw my clothes on. Yeah, yeah, I know, technically it should be okay to get dressed in front of Ben, and of course I’d known him forever. But it didn’t feel right.

When I emerged from the bedroom, Ben and Officer Hotstuff were talking together in the middle of the room. For two people who had no interest in each other, they sure talked a lot. However, the minute I emerged, Officer Wolfe turned to me in a most gratifying way. And grinned in an even more gratifying way, while his eyes opened just a slight bit, that hint of
oh wow
every woman lives for.

If I hadn’t caught a smug
I told you so
look from Ben, I’d even have felt grateful for his dressing advice. But the smug look annoyed me, so I looked at the policeman and said, “I hope you don’t need to take up my entire evening, Officer, because I need to get up early and drive to Denver to take some furniture up.”

He should have looked wounded at least, because he was clearly appraising me as more than someone to interview. Instead, he looked amused. That was it. I was going to ask him to go to the burger joint around the corner, answer his questions in five minutes, then leave.

Possessed of determination and righteous indignation I stalked ahead of him up the driveway, then said, “Perhaps I should follow you in my car?” It had occurred to me, after all, that as weird as things had been lately, it might not be the brightest thing in the world to get into a car with a strange male, even one who was a cop.

But Officer Wolfe was not a
gentleman
, something he proceeded to prove by smiling lazily at me, gray eyes sparking blue, and opening the passenger door of his car to allow me in. There was, in that smile and the sparkling eyes, a sort of challenge. If I refused the invitation now, it would be the same as admitting I was afraid of being
alone with him. And I had no intention of letting him—or any man—know I was scared of him. I got in the car, sat down, and strapped on the seat belt.

Let him do his worst. It wasn’t like no one knew I was with him. And Ben might be running mad these days, but it was a madness that applied to Les only, and had nothing to do with how he viewed the rest of the world. I very much doubted he was about to pretend that I didn’t exist or not to look for me if I didn’t come home.

I suspect my expression must have been as weird as my thoughts. Officer Wolfe, having closed the door, rounded the car and came in on the other side. He gave me a look with raised eyebrows and I half-opened my mouth, ready to tell him I’d go to Cy’s—even though two burgers in a day might be too rich for me. But he just said, “I have reservations. It’s not very far.”

Reservations. That meant we were going somewhere with tables and chairs, probably not made of plastic. There was even a chance that there wouldn’t be a play area anywhere in sight. Well, if he thought he was going to soften me up by treating me as an adult, he had another thing coming!

But I confess as we drew up outside a tall square building that I vaguely remembered as a bank and that now bore a sign saying
Stock and Cattle
, I gave him an odd look. Perhaps it was his idea of fun to go eat at a savings and loan, chow down on contracts, or eat piles of notes. Who knew? I had no idea how the other half lived. Particularly if the other half was police officers.

“It’s a new place,” he said, and managed to sound much younger and suddenly defensive. “Steak mostly.” And then, in a sudden rush, “You’re not vegetarian, right? Your friend said you were pancakarian, but I think he was joking.”