Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (21 page)

“But you’re staying here in case you need to protect me.”

He opened his mouth again, then closed it, and finally opened it again. “Yes,” he said.

“I don’t need your protection,” I said. I knew it wasn’t true. Or probably it wasn’t true. I had needed Ben’s protection in the past—or we wouldn’t have met over his rescuing me from playground bullies—and I might very well need it in the future. And if truth be told, I was scared. Very scared. But the fact that I was scared, looking at those huge letters, terrified of what might have been done inside the house, only made me want to act tougher. “If I needed someone’s protection, I’d have stayed married, or gotten married again.” I reached for the door handle.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To look inside my house,” I said opening the door.

Ben reached over and grabbed my wrist. I tried to shake it loose, but Ben—for all that he makes his living as a financial planner—has a hand like a paw, a hand that doubtless did justice to his manual-laborer ancestors who’d probably come across the ocean at the time of the potato famine. He grabbed my wrist in a vise grip. “Dyce, no,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked. “You think I’m such a fragile flower that I’ll break down crying at the sight of another big
Bitch
spray-painted inside? You think—”

“No,” he said. He spoke very quietly and evenly. “I’m afraid that the person who painted that is still in there. I’m afraid he’s lurking in the dark with a knife. I’m afraid by the time I get in there, you’ll have been sliced, diced, and filleted.” He took advantage of the fact that I was speechless at the image to add, “Do you mind? I like Dyce Dare very much and I’d prefer she stay alive.”

I swallowed. I was too far gone for the cajoling to
make me laugh, but it jolted me out of my panic fear and into something resembling mere terror. I swallowed again and took a deep breath that hissed in and out of my lungs. “Do you think it was Inobart?” I asked. “Off his meds?”

“Could be,” he said.

He was spared saying anything else because at that moment Officer Wolfe pulled up behind me, and moments later a police car—lights blazing—arrived.

CHAPTER 14

Broken, Searched, Sprayed

“Do you have any boyfriends you broke up with?”
Officer Wolfe asked, looking intently at me.
What big eyes you have!
“Someone who might think you betrayed him?”

We were sitting at my kitchen table. The wood filling had dried very nicely, but I took no joy in it. Ben had made coffee and was serving it to Officer Wolfe. He’d given me my tea with a week’s worth of sugar. All the while he fussed with his special tea. I knew he didn’t drink coffee during the day because he was—as he put it—working on a stress ulcer.

For the first time I wondered what the stress was all about. I’d always assumed it was work, but the thing was that I’d never heard Ben refer to his job with anything but unalloyed interest and enjoyment. He’d come out of the College of William and Mary—where he’d gotten an MBA on a scholarship or a grant or something—and gotten a job with an old, established firm in Goldport. A better job than he had hoped to get, making more than he expected. And from the little bits he let drop—not a lot, of course, because a lot of his work was, after all, confidential—he
really seemed to enjoy himself. And according to what he’d told me when he’d had his first-year review, his bosses were quite happy with him.

I’d thought it was just Ben being Ben and getting fussed over the work and trying to be perfect at it, like he tried to tie his ties perfectly. But now I wondered if it was Les. The scene in the loft stuck in my head, and I wondered how many such scenes I’d missed. Yeah, okay, so Ben said they’d never fought before. But then again, Ben also said that Les hadn’t really meant to do anything bad by setting fire to pictures and frames on the stove. It was entirely possible that Ben’s ideas of
slightly disturbed
,
eccentric
, and
crazy as a loon
were a bit off.

It occurred to me that, being my friend, he was probably used to a high degree of insanity, and I hid my face in my hands. Only to feel Ben’s hand on my shoulder as he slipped another cup of tea in front of me. “Come on, Dyce, you’re going to have Officer Wolfe thinking that you’re the object of disputes between many of the single males in Goldport.”

At which point, of course, my tongue answered before my mind caught up. “Not all of them,” I said. “I think there are one or two who have other girlfriends.”

Ben gave me a serious look, and I realized I was being an idiot. “I’m sorry,” I told Officer Wolfe. “No, I haven’t been dating. In fact, I haven’t dated since my divorce. I was afraid of the . . . disruptive effect of dating and bringing new and possibly temporary people in contact with my son, particularly after the divorce. Why?”

“Because this has all the feel of a
crime passionnel
,” he said, and gestured around the apartment. “The whole thing, from your underwear drawer being turned out over most of the bedroom, to your closet being ransacked, to . . .”

The
to
. . . was the word
Bitch
written twice more, in the same excessive size and same red color, once over the
sofa and once over my bed. The intruder had also tried to write the word
Fuck
in the shower, but had run out of spray halfway through and therefore had written what looked like
Fuch
, which I thought was a brand of electronics.

At least, I thought, E’s stuffed animals had been left alone this time.

“So,” Officer Wolfe said. “It seems like an intimate assault. Particularly the underwear drawer and the one box they tore apart in the closet.”

That box was my collection of mementos. Mostly silly stuff from middle school all the way through my wedding. I’d even kept the mementos of my wedding, as memories of how I’d once felt about All-ex and why I’d married him. I figured I might need it as fortification in the days ahead. In which case I would have to do some really good work of collecting all the pictures that I’d saved in two envelopes—the marriage had been too short for me to put them into albums—because they’d been strewn all over the room, and a few of them had been crumpled. The prom picture of Ben and me—the same one my parents had in a huge enlargement over the fireplace at their home—had also been crumpled. The blue garter from my wedding had been torn through. My dried bouquet had been pulled apart.

Yeah, I could see how Officer Wolfe thought it was the work of a man scorned who—though he might not be as great a fury as a woman scorned—was surely no piece of cake. But the thing was that I was telling him the absolute truth. “I really didn’t give anyone the idea that we were involved. I mean, me and someone, some person, some guy,” I clarified, afraid Officer Wolfe would think I was claiming to be involved with him.

“What about someone who might have gotten the idea without your giving it?” he asked. “Someone who is prone to fantasy or something?”

“I don’t know anyone like that, either,” I said. “The type of life I’ve been living, I might as well be a nun. The only people I know, just about, are other people who refinish furniture or who work in thrift . . .” My voice slowed down. I’d remembered Inobart. I told him the story of my encounter with the man. Ben chimed in to point out that he’d always found Inobart strange and worrisome.

“And he’d have come back to town midway through the afternoon, so he’d have had plenty of time to do this.”

“Yeah,” Officer Wolfe said. “We’ll look into him. You know, his real name is Melchiazar.”

“What?”

“Melchiazar Jones. I checked him out this morning when I was looking at refinishers, you know, the names you’d given me. Perhaps he went a little crazy because of that name. I mean, it’s possible.”

“Or perhaps it’s hereditary insanity,” Ben said. “And I thought Dyce’s parents were bad.”

“Yeah, but . . . I didn’t see a restraining order against him. Of course, if it’s very recent it may not be filed yet. In fact, the paperwork may not be completed. But I’d agree that he sounds like a good candidate for this.” He took some notes, then drank his coffee. “You know, we’ll know more once we go through the results of the scene workup.”

He looked at us. “You should know, though, that the door was not forced.”

“But I did lock it,” Ben said. He’d made his tea and was now holding the cup and frowning at Officer Wolfe. “I remember.”

“I didn’t mean to imply the door was open, just that it was not forced. You’re absolutely certain that you locked it?”

“Someone came in before,” I said. “When I was sure the door was locked.” Officer Wolfe gave me a look, and I
told him about the knifed table and the hanged stuffed animal. His eyebrows rose during the narration.

He sighed. “And you didn’t think this was something I needed to know?”

“Ben wanted to tell you,” I said. “But I thought it was students playing a prank.”

“I told her it could be important,” he said. “Right after, you know . . . she found a corpse.”

Officer Wolfe didn’t seem to be listening anymore. He was drumming his fingers on the table. “And you’re sure the door was locked that time?” he said.

“The front door?” I said. “Well . . . Ben is compulsive about it.” I heroically abstained from saying that Ben was compulsive about everything. “And he said he had locked it. Only, you know, I thought . . . but . . . once he might have missed it. Twice . . .”

Officer Wolfe drummed his fingers some more. “It sounds,” he said, “like somehow someone got hold of a key to your house. Is that possible?”

“I think so,” I said. I rubbed at my nose, not so much because it itched, but because I felt like I would burst into tears at any minute and I didn’t want to. “I mean, it’s never happened, but then . . .” I cleared my throat, trying to keep tears at bay. “See, that’s why I thought it was a student prank. I got the apartment . . . I mean, the landlord is Pads and Flats, which rents mostly to students at the college, and you know what they can be like. I think they don’t change the locks in between renters, you know . . .”

“Um,” he said, which was not nearly as reassuring a sound as perhaps he might have thought it was.

“She gave me a key and one to her parents,” Ben said, helpfully.

“Where do your parents keep it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Could they have lost it?”

“Nothing more likely,” Ben put in helpfully. “They lose everything. Frankly, it’s a miracle they haven’t lost the bookstore yet.” This about the people who considered him a son. “Dyce, have they come in with it at all? Recently?”

“Not that I remember,” I said. “Wait, maybe the week I moved in. Mom came in to pick up some stuff for E because they were keeping him.” No use telling him Mom had been looking for a baby emetic after catching E eating spiders in a corner of the bookstore. She hadn’t found it, anyway.

“So someone may have gotten their key,” Officer Wolfe said, making another notation. He frowned down at his notebook for a while. He sighed. “I don’t want to alarm either of you, but I’m going to call a friend who’s a locksmith to change that front door lock. I have to tell you I’d feel better if the two of you didn’t stay here tonight. The house hasn’t been broken into as such, but if someone who didn’t have a key wanted to, it wouldn’t be at all hard.”

“We could go to a hotel,” Ben said.

“I don’t have the money for a hotel,” I said. Yeah, I still had almost two thousand dollars in my purse, but there was rent coming up and the car to fix, not to mention various supplies for the workshop. And then there was E. He was about to need shoes, and it wasn’t like All-ex would ever buy him sneakers. Left to his own devices, he’d probably get him mini wingtips.

“I’ll pay,” Ben said.

But I thought of that bill to the recovery service. The thing is that I knew pretty well, within a close approximation, what Ben made. Not that he’d ever told me, but I could guess from the monthly expenses he incurred and from what he thought was too much money.

He’d never have been able to afford his lovely loft if he hadn’t bought it with the inheritance from his grandma. And he would never be able to afford the payments on it if
he hadn’t put down such a substantial down payment that the mortgage was less than half the original and if the inheritance hadn’t paid for his car outright, too. This left him enough for what I considered a dream life. He bought decorative stuff for the loft. He bought nice furniture. He ate well. He and Les went out to eat two or three times a week. And he had enough money left over for nice clothes—very nice clothes—and to give E and me gifts well above our reach.

But he and Les didn’t take foreign vacations or do any of the things All-ex did. Weekends in New York City, summer in Italy. That sort of thing. So I knew Ben was comfortable but not wealthy—oh, he was rich beyond the dreams of avarice compared to me, but that wasn’t difficult.