Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (22 page)

And the bill for that cleanup and recovery had truly been staggering. Okay, he’d put it on Mastercard and he’d pay it off by bits, but . . . he still had to live while he did it. As far as I could determine—and of course I’d never asked—Les didn’t contribute anything to the household. It was Ben’s place, and it was Ben’s expense to maintain it.

“I don’t want you to pay,” I said. “I don’t. Please don’t argue.”

He looked like he was going to argue anyway, so I said, hastily, “I’ll go stay at my parents’ place.”

Officer Wolfe looked at Ben, who expelled air with an explosive sound, but then sighed. “Do you think they’ll put me up, too?”

I looked up at him and was about to ask if he’d taken leave of his mind. Did he really want Mom to start thinking that her dreams were finally coming true?

Officer Wolfe spoke first. “I’d feel better knowing Mr. Colm is with you,” he said. “You see, I would like to assign an officer to look after you, but I don’t think I can. We’re a small department, and assigning someone to guard you full time would mean getting approval to make
one of the part-timers full time for a week or so, or moving someone from another case. And until then . . .” He shrugged. “Well, you know, you say your parents may have lost the key.”

“I didn’t,” I said. “Ben did.”

“Right. Is it possible that they lost the key?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, then, if they lost the key, they may have lost keys to their house as well, and I understand they’re elderly.”

I sniffed. Yeah, okay. I had been born when both Mom and Dad were on the wrong side of forty, and because I was now nearing thirty, they were in their seventies. But if Mr. Policeman Wolfe thought that my parents were de fenseless, or even at risk because of absentmindedness, he quite mistook the matter. They approached the world as if reality and everything in it were a distraction from the all-important business of reading. That was Mom and Dad’s armor of righteousness, their unpierceable shield.

It had allowed them to sail through all the less-than-well-thought-out adventures of my childhood without ever wondering if I would turn out all right, or even if I would kill someone by the time I was ten. They had taken my broken marriage in stride, and they were able to hold on to their confident notion that I’d eventually marry Ben—whom they regarded as a second child, the son they always wanted—because they hadn’t taken their noses out of a book long enough to realize that Ben was in fact gayer than a dance reel.

If a murderer or vandal broke into their house, Dad’s sheer impervious lack of noticing him would send the man screaming into the night—that is, if he didn’t get co-opted into finding the book Dad was currently reading—
It was right here, I swear. Rats. I must have set it facedown somewhere. It has a blue cover. Or it might be green. On the other hand, perhaps brown? It’s called
Murder
something.
Or maybe
Death
. Might be
Crime of
something or other.
Or Mom might assume the intruder was there to help her find a particular book in her prodigious collection of favorite books with such sheer force of belief that the poor creature—and yes, I would feel pity even for a murderer in such circumstances—would be trapped forever in the basement, with its makeshift bookcases and Mom’s less-than-stellar instructions—
It’s a Van Gulick. I’m sure of it. Oh, dear. I can never remember if I shelved it under
V
or
G
. Or perhaps
K
because, you know, that final sound is so forceful. Or
C
because the mysteries are set in China.
So I was not really worried about Mom and Dad. Not really.

On the other hand, having Ben around—even if it would encourage Mom’s delusions—would make going home somewhat easier. I could leave him to find Dad’s book or Mom’s favorite novel and sleep late. Ben was very nice to them. This was one of the reasons why I was an only child, but still not my parents’ favorite.

It was only for a night. I somehow suspect that Ulysses told himself that, too, when setting off to return home from Troy.
It’s only one night. How bad can it get?

We waited till the nice locksmith had changed the lock and given us the new keys, and then Ben and I drove separately to my parents’, furniture and bust still in the back of his car.

CHAPTER 15

The Fledgling Returns

It was close to midnight as we drove up Mom and
Dad’s street. The neighborhood was composed of brownstones built side by side, connected like townhouses, though they were far too big to be townhouses. I’d always wondered what the rationale had been for building them—maybe someone was really homesick for the East.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, they’d been inhabited by the upper middle class, but by the middle of it they were all—except ours—run-down apartments. However, in the last twenty years the place had become pricey again and was full of young couples, most of whom ran commercial establishments on the bottom floor. All of those cafés, art galleries, organic delis, and bicycle shops were now closed and dark. All except Mom and Dad’s house, which blazed with lights. Even the bottom floor, which was the store.

Mom and Dad’s house was three stories tall—four if you counted the very short attic where my bedroom was. It had been the home of Dad’s grandmother and left to him in her will. I expect she’d thought Dad would sell it
and perhaps use the money to finance a college education. The house was, after all, big enough to turn into a small hotel, and she probably thought no sane person could have wanted to keep it, not in the fifties when the fashion was all for one-story homes and streamlined furniture and when—from what I understood of the history of this area—this street had been going downhill, with all the grand brownstones subdivided into apartments inhabited by entirely the wrong sort of people.

Great-Grandmother had made only one mistake in her calculations. She’d failed to consider that Dad might not be sane. It should have been glaringly obvious to just about everyone. I’d seen pictures of him in his teens and twenties, when his grandmother must have decided on the inheritance.

He was a gawky young man, with curly dark hair and the sort of glasses that, though not bulletproof, would probably have stopped a shot because of their thickness. From behind those lenses, his eyes shone with the glare of the fanatic.

In previous centuries Dad would probably have gone into the church and ended up as a hermit or an anchorite somewhere. One of those holy men who never washed and sat in a corner thinking increasingly complex thoughts about dancing angels.

Born in the thirties into a white, Anglo-Saxon family, bearers of a decent sort of Episcopal faith—the kind that believed in God but thought it was bad manners to speak about it in public—he had lacked the religious background to become a holy man. Instead, he’d turned the basement of his parents’ house into an ever more complex maze of book piles.

He’d graduated from high school—to believe my Grandma, at least—because his parents went down and found him every morning, stuck him under a shower after wrestling the current book out of his hands, forced him into
clean clothes, and dropped him off at school. Where he had to get through the day before he was allowed into his basement again.

Eventually his labyrinth of books got too complex for him to be easily found. Fortunately, this was after he graduated.

And shortly thereafter his deluded grandmother, who probably thought he only needed an opportunity, had left him her house, which was right next door.

So it was easy for him to move there with his books and line every wall with bookcases. I was still not absolutely sure he’d decided to open a store so much as one day someone stumbled through the door, decided that this must be a bookstore, and offered him money for one of the books he was least attached to.

Over time, he’d caught on to how the store worked, at least to the point of moving the books he didn’t want to sell to the basement or the upper floors, buying a register, and giving the store a name and a sign.

How the store survived and made money was a bit of a puzzle. Well, from what I understood, from reading mystery books and from talking to the mystery authors who came by for signings, it is always a bit of a puzzle how independent mystery bookstores survive. My favorite theory was that of the best-selling author who told me that she always figured that the stores were fronts for numbers games.

But I knew Dad didn’t run numbers. And heaven knew he made even less effort to sell books than the average mystery bookseller.

I truly had no idea at all how he’d survived till Mom married him. After that, Mom—for all her dreams of being an author—had taken the matter of their livelihood in hand, made sure the sign was big enough to be seen from the street, persuaded Dad to sell some of the better books, and made it clear to him that when they went to mystery
conventions he was to spend less buying books than they made selling books. She had also persuaded him to carry a limited number of newly printed books—multiple copies of each, even. These he was not nearly as attached to as his used, vintage, and collectible books.

Selling those books was still a nerve-racking endeavor for my father, and right now, after he’d returned from the mystery convention, I knew what he was doing. He was in the store, alone, reshelving the books that had escaped what he viewed as the horrible fate of selling, and reassuring the other ones, left on the shelves, that they had a good three months before the next convention and that he would do whatever was needed to avoid parting with them.

I drove into the nearest alley to the back of the row of houses, and Ben followed me to the circular driveway that surrounded the backyard and ended in a large three-car garage. On the far side of the garage, a driveway, now walled off, used to lead to the house my dad grew up in, which had been sold to strangers a few years ago. I pulled up in front of the short brick wall and got out to tell Ben to pull into the one open space in the garage. He didn’t argue, which was good, because I would have had to tell him I was doing this because his car was so much better than mine. The truth, though, was that I was afraid someone would figure out where we had gone, and get into the trunk and hurt the little table. I just hated to lie to Ben.

The driveway encircled the backyard, where, except for one area given entirely to crabgrass—the reminder of my incident with the gasoline bottle—there were big maple trees everywhere, with a few tall pines to break the monotony. In summer it had been a wonderful place to play at being lost in a magic forest. In winter it had created a winter wonderland to play at being at the North Pole and breaking into Santa Claus’s ultrasecret workshop, which was usually the shed under the largest pine tree.

Right now, on a spring night, it was a backyard to get through as quickly as possible. My luggage consisted of my toothbrush, shoved hastily into my purse. I still had jeans and T-shirts in my closet here, and thank heavens, my size hadn’t changed much.

Ben, on the other hand, was lugging his two shoulder bags. It occurred to me to wonder, after going through everything in my closet, tearing through my souvenir box, and upending my underwear drawer, why the intruder had left Ben’s things completely untouched. Which could mean that either Officer Wolfe was wrong and the mayhem wasn’t caused by some man who had a crush on me, or the man knew Ben and me well enough to know Ben was no threat. Or was afraid of Ben.

Or perhaps, of course, the intruder simply understood that a man who traveled with his weight in cosmetics was not having an affair with any woman under the sun. But it still seemed very odd.

We walked as fast as we could, avoiding being tripped by oak tree roots, all the way to the stairs that led to my parents’ kitchen door on the second floor. The staircase had always scared me a little. I didn’t know when it had been built or by whom, though I suspected—both from the workmanship and the look of it—that it had been built by Dad under Mom’s direction and at her insistence after she married him and explained that he couldn’t be cooking and sleeping in what was, technically, a store and that the door into the house from the store had to be permanently closed.

It was sort of what a wrought-iron staircase would be if it had been built by a man who had neither iron nor the slightest idea how to build a staircase. Supports of irregular lengths and widths, nailed with the sort of nails one expects to hold down railroad ties, held a spiral of sorts, only one whose basis was the square rather than the circle.
The construction had been somewhat complicated by the fact that though Dad can calculate and measure like nobody’s business, he can’t cut anything straight or to the proper length. So each step was slightly different from the previous one: wider, thinner, longer, shorter. Also, the distance between them was slightly different, so that you had to concentrate on going up the stairs and couldn’t get into a rhythm.