Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (19 page)

Ben was a smart man, and—for all his silences and touchiness—fairly mature. He had seen the same specials I had, and I knew he read more magazines than I did. Surely he knew the signs of spousal abuse as well as I did. If he wanted to be a doormat, I wasn’t going to say a thing. Not a thing.

It wasn’t until we pulled in front of the consignment furniture store on South Broadway in Denver, and Ben had parked, carefully, in one of the metered spaces, right in front of the store—which itself was wedged between a wig shop and a used bookstore—that he turned to me and allowed his lips to twitch.

“Dyce, are you really imagining me being bullied by Les?”

I glared at him, though it was truly hard to avoid the return smile when he wore this expression. “I fail to see what is so funny.”

He grinned. “Comparative size alone. And besides that, when have I ever let myself be bullied?”

“It’s different when you’re in a relationship. You let yourself be told things and done things to that you’d never allow . . .” I let it trail off. I was not going to enter into candid confessions.

But he didn’t seem to realize how close I’d come to breaking the rule on my own behalf. Instead he shook his head. “Trust me,” he said, in that tone men use when you truly shouldn’t trust them, because they’re head down in some sort of weird fix that they couldn’t ever find their way out of on their own. “Les is having some . . . issues at work, and he’s misinterpreting stuff at home, but this is not that big a deal or that important, truly. He didn’t realize he’d set off the fire alarm.”

I could believe that last, because Les was blond, but all
the same, leaving the house after creating that much of a mess seemed . . . well . . . a little excessive. “What happened to your window?” I asked. It had been replaced at the shop, and the dent in the back had been pulled out, but I remembered them.

He gave me a pained look and seemed about to tell me it was none of my business, but he had opened the discussion. “Les threw a couple of . . . small things from the balcony, as I was driving underneath.”

I didn’t ask what small things. Not Les’s brain, because—though no one might notice he was functioning without one—it would be too small to dent anything at all. Doubtless more pictures. Instead I said, “It could have killed you, if it had come through the windshield.”

He shrugged. “It was nothing that big. He wasn’t thinking.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “I need to bring new pieces in.” And see what the owner had heard from the refinishing world, which would hopefully prove the table wasn’t related to the murder. Like that roving bands of refinishers were leaving notes on the bottom of antique tables, or something. The emphasis being on the
or something
and fishing for info, though I hoped I wasn’t going to make it that obvious, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell Ben about it. Because if I did, then I’d have to explain why I felt like investigating, and I could just see him rolling his eyes and telling me I was too big to play Nancy Drew.

But he didn’t ask anything—no doubt relieved we weren’t discussing his less-than-sane partner anymore. Instead, he got out, as did I, after monitoring for a few minutes for a break in traffic that would allow me to open the door.

Broadway had been a fashionable shopping area in the early part of the century, till about the fifties. It was now one of those
interesting
shopping places that artistic types
shop in—as well as people with an eye for antiques who wish to get a bargain. Which the pieces in this shop were.

I wasn’t stupid and was very aware that the stuff I sold here—even the things that weren’t exactly antiques—would sell for a lot more in the antiques places around Cherry Creek Mall. But those places weren’t consignment, and I’d have to sell them to the owner at considerably less than I got from Shabby Chic, even after the owners took their cut for keeping things there on consignment.

Inside the shop, it was an Aladdin’s cave of interesting furniture, no two pieces alike, most of it glistening with varnish or polish, all of it artfully arranged under carefully placed lighting—one of the reasons this shop did better than most of its kind. It smelled faintly of polish and old furniture, like the parlor of some obsessively clean grandmother.

There were a few things that weren’t furniture, too. One of the people who placed work on consignment here regularly was a stick-thin woman whose name I could never remember, who must have had the fastest hands west of the Pecos River, because every time I went in she had another set of intricate crocheted curtains. They hung suspended on rods from the ceiling and were worked from some antique book—the figures on them ranged from what could only be classed as colonial houses, to fantasy castles and horse riders, to—at the moment front and center—a bald eagle swooping down toward a moun tainscape in snowy cotton. There were also abstract designs reminiscent of Art Deco or twenties lace curtains. I’d once looked at the price on one of those and almost had a heart attack. Too bad Grandma—the last woman in the family to be gifted with the knowledge—hadn’t seen fit to teach me crochet.

There were also, arranged against the far wall on a
permanent table, a set of meticulously beaded lampshades. Ben always shuddered when he looked at them, but I could imagine that they would work very well if your objective was to be completely period in your decoration.

Here and there, amid the furniture, were other objects also for sale. Mostly things that the furniture seller or refinisher had acquired at an estate sale or a garage sale. Sometimes there were quite good reproductions of statues—I remembered one of Rodin’s
The Kiss
—but more often there were vases and things, most of dubious provenance. However, these were enough to keep Ben amused, and he went flitting away from me to look at something or other sparkling in the crowded depths of the store.

Me, I made my way to my little corner—with the big, hand-lettered sign on the wall proclaiming the furniture under its aegis
Daring Finds
—the corner being all I could afford. You paid more of your sales to put pieces on consignment near the front.

And I let out a big relieved breath. I’d called yesterday and been told I hadn’t sold anything, so I must have had a very good morning today, because only a couple of pieces were left in the corner—a tea cart and a gateleg table. In my mind I went over what had been there. A quite good twenties vintage bedroom set of burled walnut. Not exactly a known manufacturer and not exactly antique, but very nice. Bought at a garage sale for fifty dollars. Bed, bedside table, and dresser, all covered in ten layers of sickly sweet pink paint. An oak rolltop desk that was not even remotely vintage, but was real wood and had come to me covered in layers and layers of paint, only to leave with just a light waxing, as pure and virginal as if it had come from the Oak Friends workshop. And a kidney-shaped vanity table, which I’d French-polished to a mirror shine after liberating it from coats and coats of—for some reason—purple paint.

Well, it looked like I would have a decent paycheck coming to me, which was good, even if Ben had gotten me enough food probably to last a month. I was sure of it if he’d gone shopping. The man didn’t know moderation. If he shopped, he shopped in quantities. But this money would cover the rent and food until the pieces now in the car sold. Perhaps I could get my car fixed, buy E a new pair of sneakers, and stay away from the dreaded pancakes for a while.

I looked around for the shop owners and focused on movement rounding the corner of a massive wardrobe. But it was neither Janet, the white-haired grandmalike lady who ran this place, nor her husband, Mike. No. The person who rounded the corner of the wardrobe—resplendent in a cowled green robe that, other than the color and the fact that it was obviously polyester, could have come from any medieval monastery—was none other than Inobart Oakfriend.

Inobart had a peculiar trick of always looking at you without looking at you. He’d swivel his head around so that he was facing now the ceiling, now the floor, now the side wall, now the shop window. The wardrobe next to him seemed to hold his attention, then the coffee table on the other side, and finally the tip of his scruffy shoe. And all the time—all the time—he was looking at you from the side of his less-than-focused, not-quite-all-there pale blue eyes.

It was vaguely unnerving until you got to know him. But then most of the stuff about Inobart was vaguely disturbing, whether you knew him or not. Ben had once said that Inobart had gone on an acid trip sometime in the seventies and hadn’t come down from it yet. Much as I hated to say it, Ben was probably right.

As Inobart inched toward me, looking at me out of the corner of his eye, even as he stared—ostensibly—at the wardrobe next to him, I found Ben materializing behind
me. It had the feel of his coming to act as my bodyguard, which was ridiculous because—as far as I knew—Inobart had never hurt a living soul. Well, at least not a human living soul. I’d never been near enough to his house to know whether he killed bugs. On the other hand, given his respect for long-dead trees, he probably let the rats and cockroaches run free through his abode.

“Hello, Candyce,” he said, speaking to the tip of his shoe and watching me out the corner of his eye. “Hello, Mr. Colm.”

Ben had once, long ago, introduced me as Candyce Dare and himself as Mr. Colm. Inobart was the sort of person who filed this stuff away—in the roach-filled depths of his mind—only to extract it at need. The standoffish hauteur that Ben had attempted to introduce had been quite lost on Inobart. Names were just handles. Ben might as well have told him we were Maryhadalittlelamb and Thebigbadwolf, and we’d have been that for the rest of Inobart’s life.

“Hi, Inobart,” I said, being a little more friendly than I would be to anyone else, because Inobart did give me the creeps and to compensate I went out of my way to make sure I didn’t offend him.

My warmth must have startled him because for just a second he looked directly at me. Then he looked at my corner and gestured with his chin. “I guess you sold a lot of things. Janet was telling me someone bought your stuff just an hour ago . . .”

“Yeah, I guess so; have you seen Janet?”

“Oh sure,” he said confidently. “She’s in the back there.” He pointed a long, trembling finger vaguely in the direction where I knew from previous visits there was a sort of breakroom with a coffeemaker and such. I saw Ben turn to look in that direction and had a sudden idea that Janet was dead somewhere back there. Which was silly, as I saw her come through the door right then.

She waved at us and started walking in our direction, which would take a while because she had to walk the aisles between the furniture displays.

“She gave me a check, too,” Inobart confided to the tip of his left shoe.

“Oh, she did? Good,” I said. And then because Janet was still not next to us, and because I wanted, after all, to find out more about who might have murdered someone—particularly if the situation was going to force me to carry occasional tables around on the back of whatever car I was in—I said, “Do you have a lye vat?”

Inobart gave an inarticulate cry. He stepped back so hastily, he almost tripped. He looked at me—fully at me—his eyes full of terror. A bit of spittle formed on the side of his mouth. His hands came up and did something odd that took me a moment to recognize as an attempt to form a five-pointed star—I guess the same way that people would lift a cross toward a vampire.

I was too speechless to say anything, but Ben asked from behind me, “What is wrong?”

What was wrong, clearly, was that Inobart had inhaled a bit too much refinishing fumes. Then again, perhaps he knew about the body in the lye vat . . .

I looked back at him. “Well, do you?” I asked his terrified expression, even as he breathed rapidly like someone on the verge of a panic attack.

“No,” he said, though there is no way to reproduce the sound he actually made, which was sort of a long, drawn-out exhalation crossed with a high-pitched whine. “Noooooooo,” he repeated. “I’d never. The lye is bad. The lye burns the wood.” Spittle flew as he spoke, and his eyes rolled in his head, as if he were in some sort of frenzy. After stepping back away from me, he now stepped very close, to give me the benefit of life-sucking halitosis and a shower of spittle that made me wish I had brought an umbrella. “The spirits of the wood cry out,” he said. “It burns
the nymphs captive in the grain. Lye is worse than the paint it removes. It gets in the fibers and darkens them forever.”

“I see,” I said, fighting an urge to interpose my open hand between his mouth and my face.

“Rocky uses lye,” he said. “Rocky is evil. I told his wife, Nell, that it was evil, and she said it was true. That she knew it burned the soul of the tree. And then they got divorced. You see,” he said, confidentially, bringing his face closer, “Nell is an enlightened being. I’m very sure she’s close to making the transition. I could help her.” His eyes now burned with intent and something approaching fanaticism. His white hair clung to either side of his face, looking like it hadn’t been washed since the acid trip had begun.

“The transition?” I said.

He waved his hands around, sort of like someone who thinks he’s gotten hold of the secret to unaided flight. “To a light being,” he said. “One of the shining ones. I could help her. That way . . .”

Janet’s hand came to rest on Inobart’s shoulder. “There, Inobart, you’re delaying Dyce and I need to talk to her about accounts.”

Like that, the sudden smarmy intensity was turned off and Inobart was looking at the ceiling while spying Janet out of the corner of his eye and saying confidentially to the ceiling beam, “Yes, yes, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t keep her. I have a long drive back to Goldport anyway.”

He shrugged, and looked almost like a normal person. Well, a normal person wearing a lime-green polyester monk’s robe with a gold and black upholstery cord at the waist. Okay, right, not a normal person at all, but at least better than what I’d seen in the last few minutes. He started to shuffle away, but then turned around and flashed me the weird sign with all his fingers bent and trying to form a star. “Don’t use lye,” he said. “Remember that. Lye
hurts the living soul of the wood. People who use lye are hurting the spirit of the world.”