Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (2 page)

My working retail would have supported us—sort of—but I’d have had to leave E with someone. Mom and Dad weren’t an option. They worked all day in Remembered Murder, the mystery bookstore they owned, where Fluffy—who I believed remained alive on the hopes I’d die first—was store cat. And Fluffy started twitching whenever she saw me or E.

This left me with the one skill I’d more or less inadvertently picked up while furnishing my first home. I’d taken a course in furniture restoration and refinishing at the community college. Back then I’d done it to fit furnishing a house within the scant budget All-ex would allot to it.

On my own—after some experimentation—I found that picking up old beat-up and abused furniture, refinishing it or fixing it or giving it a total makeover, and selling it—under the business name of Daring Finds—made just about enough money to keep me and E in three meals a day with a roof over our heads.

Said roof was rented and in an area of town that made my friend Ben cringe, and the meals might run to pancakes a lot, but it beat the alternative. Homeless shelters struck me as a terrible place to take a kid who liked to sample bugs.

And so I was at the corner of the college, on a bright Saturday in late May, looking at a bulky green Dumpster.

You see, although real antiques go for exorbitant sums in Colorado, they sell at those prices
because
they are hard to get. Very few people have an attic full of pieces like Grandmama’s breakfront dresser or Great-Great-Grandmama’s Duncan Phyfe dining set that they would be willing to sell at a garage sale for mere pennies and that could be made radiant by a simple wiping with oil.

No. I heard of such things from other people who came from places out east, but I figured that most people on the way to Colorado by covered wagon had ditched Grandma’s carved walnut chairs halfway across Kansas, possibly with Grandma still clinging to them.

What could be gotten—in various states of disrepair—were twentieth-century knockoffs and good, solid furniture of forties and fifties vintage, made in factories, but capable of looking quite good once one had scraped off the twenty coats of paint, including the two inevitable metallic coats applied in the sixties by someone who had found truly interesting mushrooms.

Oh, sometimes, rarely, in a thrift shop or at a garage sale, I’d come across a good piece, which I refinished and took to Denver to leave for consignment at Shabby Chic. But for the most part, I cleaned and fixed and varnished,
then put the pieces up at the local flea market, where they made a modest profit.

Which brought me to cost cutting.

“Bah, bah, bah, bah!” E said from the strapped-in safety of his child seat in the back of my fifth-hand blue Volvo station wagon. I looked over to see him glaring at me, his face scrunched intently, as he clutched the top of the half-lowered window with his chubby spit-covered fingers. “Bah!”

Because he could say quite a few words and even the occasional sentence, I assumed “Bah” was his view of the situation.

I looked over to the Dumpster, overflowing with black trash bags. Though it was still too early in the morning for it to be really hot, there was a distinct smell of spoiled meat coming off the container. “Undoubtedly,” I told E. “On the other hand, look—there’s something that looks like a gracefully curved table leg. Painted white, but a table leg.”

“Bah!” E said.

Which was probably true. I frowned up at the maybe-table-leg.

Yeah, it was definitely wood and it looked gracefully curved. But the way my luck was running lately, it was probably just the leg, which some student had broken off the long-discarded table and used for years as an ersatz remote control to turn the TV on and off without getting up.

On the other hand, I’d learned in my year and a half in this business that end of term at the college was the absolutely best time to pick up real antiques—the type of thing I could restore and sell for enough to keep me in rent and food for a month. I figured parents back east gave the kids whatever had been kicking around the family for a few decades, and the kids—not really caring for it—discarded it when they graduated. So it was worth a try. Though I
would admit, the way things were piled in that Dumpster, it was likely to all collapse on me as I tried to look through it.

Well
, I thought, dubiously, as I shoved my hands in the pocket of my denim coveralls, donned for the occasion. If that happened, I would just have to remove the coveralls and shove them in the trunk of my car to wash when I got back home. “Tell you what,” I told E. “I’ll give it a quick look, and if there’s no sign of anything interesting, we’ll go back home and have some nice pancakes.”

E looked offended, probably because we had eaten pancakes for the last three meals in a row, and said, “Bah!”

“Okay, fine. Just a quick look.” As I spoke, I pulled out the extra-thick, chemical-resistant gloves I kept in the pocket of the coveralls and slipped them on. I’d added the gloves to my getup about six months ago, when I’d put my hand on something so disgusting even E wouldn’t put it in his mouth. I started climbing up the side of the metal container.

There is a technique to climbing Dumpsters. I’m as sure of it as I’m sure there is a technique to lion taming. Unfortunately, I don’t know either.

What I did was to try to clamber up the little metal ridge on the side of the Dumpster, the one where the claws of the trash truck grab when they tip it, and try to touch the piled-up bags as little as humanly possible, while I took a look at the contents. If justified, I would then map my acquisition of the pieces that were worth getting.

A hand here, a hand there, a hand on the plastic bag, and another hand reaching up for the table leg. So far, so good. To be honest, my greatest fear when doing this was that I’d get my hand stuck on a used needle. I didn’t think the gloves would hold up to it.

Precariously perched on the mass of trash, I grabbed at the table leg and pulled. It was held up on something,
which meant that it just might be an intact table. Also, from the look of it, up closer, it deserved investigation. You can tell real wood because it’s lighter, and the edges of any carving are sharper—even under multiple layers of paint—than pressed conglomerate board.

Of course, this wasn’t a guarantee that the rest of the piece was antique or even real wood. Because legs are hard to make of pressboard, they usually are real wood—often cheap pine—even in trash modern pieces.

I pulled at it again. It didn’t feel heavy enough to be pressboard, but it was definitely caught on something.

One more pull, and it came loose. And then I did. There was that moment of confusion that comes before any accident—the moment before you go flying off your bike and mouth meets ground, at the bottom of Suicide Hill. The moment you will replay over and over again in your mind, thinking if only you’d done something, if only you’d reacted in some specific way, you could have averted the whole mess.

The truth was, it was already too late.

As I pulled, the table gave—the whole thing coming loose and leaving me to overbalance and fall backward, landing with a thud on the asphalt of the parking lot, while bags of trash, a chair, and what looked like a piece of a drawer rained all around me.

As soon as my brain stopped rattling in my head, I thought something had made the Dumpster explode. But as I blinked and looked around, I realized nothing had been fragmented as such.

Now, I don’t have much experience with explosions. The closest I ever came was when I had filled a flask with gasoline and thrown it at the garden shed. I was twelve and I’d just read about this in a book. Look,
nothing
would have happened, if Mom hadn’t been warming up the grill at the time and if I weren’t such a bad shot.

But the fragments of the grill—and the oak tree, bits of
which had somehow managed to end up embedded in our back door—hadn’t looked as whole as these bags did.

The bags must have been holding the tabletop down, and I’d pulled hard enough to bring down all the bags atop the overloaded Dumpster. I groaned, realizing that now I would have to pick up each one and throw it back in. At least the table seemed to be a real prize—the top too thin to be any kind of pressboard, and the little downturn on the edge speaking of at least reasonable quality, if not age.

“Oooh oh,” E said from the car, his face contracting into a distasteful frown. “Phew.”

The
phew
was justified. I realized that the miasma of rotting meat had grown exponentially stronger. Presumably the rotting burgers were in one of the bags. “Yeah, ew,” I told E, as I opened the back of the car and put the table in, before looking back at the bags. “Right, I’ll put them back in, and then we’ll go home, okay?”

“Yay.”

It was universal. Okay. There might be other furniture in the Dumpster, but I didn’t feel like looking. Not with that smell. Nope. I was going to put the bags back and go home.

So I grabbed the nearest couple of bags, which felt quite light, as though they were filled with clothes, and headed for the Dumpster. I’d taken the whole accumulation of bags off the top, and I could probably fling these into the Dumpster without climbing it. Except that with my luck they’d fall on my head again.

I looked over my shoulder and saw E looking intently at me, like he expected me to do something interesting. Right. I wasn’t in the mood to gratify his expectations. I’d climb the side of the Dumpster and
put
the bags on top.

Joining action to thought, I climbed up the side of the Dumpster again, carefully balancing with a bag in each
hand. At the top, I stretched out my hand to put the first bag inside.

And then I made a terrible mistake. I looked in the Dumpster. I swallowed hard—my body reacting to the stench before I could figure out what I was looking at.

What looked like another chair that matched the one that had fallen off lay at cross angles to what appeared to have been—once—a lovely little dresser, possibly of French restoration vintage or a good imitation. But in the middle of it there was . . .

At first I thought it was a plastic mannequin that someone had put in the fire that had partially melted. An art project? But why did it smell like that? Not like melting plastic . . . like rotting meat.

I stared at the distorted, gelatinous-looking facial features, which led down to a distorted, gelatinous body, and I swallowed hard. My stomach, sending burning bile up to my throat, was trying to tell me something I was simply not ready to accept.

And then I realized that the mannequin had . . . well, the top of it, from the forehead up, was undeniably the top of a very human forehead, and there was blond hair cut short, frosted and coiffed into those little peaks I always wondered how people managed. It wasn’t melted, and it wasn’t—had never been—a plastic mannequin.

I felt like I’d been looking at one of those weird pictures, with an area in black and one in white, that look like one thing, until you blink and they look like another completely different thing.

Realizing that the . . . thing had been human made me see that it was a body. Torso, two legs, arms. All of it distorted as if it had been turned into wax and held up to heat till it melted. Or perhaps it had been thrown into acid. I didn’t know what could make a human look like that, and I didn’t want to know.

Some places, like the nearest knee, shining wetly, were still a recognizable shape, but the rest of the body was such a taffy-pulled shape that I couldn’t even tell what gender the person might have been.

I felt the bags I’d been holding fall from nerveless hands, while my stomach clutched and did a flip-flop and the smell rose worse, more penetrating, as though it were entering not just through my nostrils, but through my eyes and ears and my all-too-porous skin.

Slowly, very slowly, afraid that I was going to fall, I stepped down, climbing my way down from the Dumpster to the asphalt of the parking lot.

There was a buzzing in my ears, like the sound of the sea or the sound of an accelerating fan. Through it, I vaguely heard E say, “Mom?”

I shook my head at him, wanting to get in the car and drive him away from all this. Drive him away fast.

But this was real life, and I was no longer six years old. One didn’t run and hide when something went wrong, and one didn’t drive away from an accident, much less from something like this.

An inner voice encouraged me to just run. After all, it said, I
was
wearing gloves. There would be no fingerprints.

But someone might have seen the car. And besides, I watched TV. I knew the police had ways of figuring out things these days, even without fingerprints.

Right. I swallowed hard, because some bitter fluid was trying to make its way up from my throat.

I opened my car door deliberately, as though each movement might cause an explosion. Which it very well might. It might cause me to throw up and that would be explosion enough.

With relief I dropped to sitting on the driver’s seat and reached over to the floor on the passenger side, where I’d left my purse. I grabbed my cell phone and turned it on,
and realized that Ben had called me twice without my answering. This would lead to a lecture about actually carrying your cell phone on your person at all times. Right at that moment, I’d welcome a lecture from Ben. But I was not twelve, and I would not call Ben to come and save me from the scary discovery.

I swallowed again, and instead of dialing him back, I dialed 911. I heard my own voice, thickened and strange. “Police,” I said. “I want to report a murder.”

CHAPTER 2

A Table in Hand