Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (23 page)

Frankly, if a psychiatrist saw that staircase, he’d probably have Dad committed, and Mom, too, for not realizing Dad was less than sane. But of course, Mom and Dad’s friends included booksellers, book buyers, book writers, and cover artists but virtually no psychiatrists. And the staircase, for its appearance of having been built by monkeys from found materials, had stood firm for all of my childhood, and still didn’t shudder as we walked up it.

At the top of the stairs was a little platform—it would be much too much of an honor to call it a porch—where I paused to dig through my jeans pocket for my keys. Before I could get them out, Mom’s psychic powers struck.

I’d never understood this, unless of course she had some sort of sensor set up under the floorboards on that stair, but Mom always knew when someone was at the back door. She was particularly good at knowing when Ben was at the back door, as she proved right now by opening the inner door, pushing the screen door open, and beaming up at Ben. “Hello, Ben.” And then smiling at me. “Hi, Candy.” She backed into the house, keeping the door open with her body as she did so.

Mom looks more or less as I know I’ll look as I get older—small, skinny, with the sort of face that people call interesting, because it was never pretty. She had two things going for her, which I had quite failed to inherit: her golden hair, which had now turned a fluffy, sparkling white, and china-doll-blue eyes. Her eyes were, right then,
full of gratified expectation. “I was just about to go to bed,” she said. “I’m glad I stayed up, though, so I could be here when you came in.”

Oh, boy. She had the look of a mom who expects an announcement. And I doubted the announcement she expected was that I’d found a body and now someone had vandalized my house and therefore I must sleep somewhere else. But then I realized I could never tell her that. It would be wiser to say that Ben and I were getting married and driving to Vegas in the morning. At least then she’d let us go. If we told her I’d been anywhere near a murder, let alone a murder and break-in, I’d be a permanent guest. They might lock me up in the attic until I gave them the crucial clue to who had committed the crimes.

No, to even let Mom suspect the whole story would be suicidal. So I was ready as Ben started to say, “We’re only here because—”

“Ben’s place is getting renovated,” I said. “And my house has . . . a gas leak. That’s it. A gas leak.”

Ben looked at me. The man had a very odd addiction to the truth. But he must have caught something in my eyes, because he said, “That’s it,” and cleared his throat. “A gas leak.”

“Oh.” To say Mom’s face fell would be going too far, but the pleasant expectancy left her eyes. Instead, she stepped back near the sink. As she did so, Fluffy rose from her basket near the stove. At twenty-some years of age, she was more fur and bones than cat. In fact, most of the time all you saw of her was patchy fur sticking out at all angles. And most of the time, people seeing her in her basket thought she was just a bit of abandoned fur. More than one guest—Mom said—had believed she was dead and tried to tell Mom this. The impression was fostered by the fact that Fluffy’s digestive processes let forth the most foul smells experienced on Earth since all the dead dinosaurs rotted at once.

However, deaf, nearly blind, and possibly a zombie though she might be, there was still one thing that caused Fluffy to spring up in her basket, hiss like a kettle on the boil, and wave a paw with gnarled and yellowed claws in the direction of the perceived threat: me.

“Oh, dear,” Mom said. “I’ll have to give her Valium again.”

I looked at Fluffy’s maddened golden eyes peering amid the yellowed fur and sighed. “Yeah.”

Ben didn’t even say anything—he edged away from the hissing cat and toward the hallway. “Is it all right,” he asked, “if I stay on the living room sofa?”

Mom made a clucking sound and followed him. “No, no, no. I’ll change the sheets on the guest bed, of course.”

Of course. If Ben was in luck, she’d even put a mint on his pillow. Of course the mint might be resting on a note listing the advantages of marrying her daughter, but I was sure Ben could manage. After all, he wore big-boy pants.

I left him to it and, feeling only the slightest bit cowardly, hoofed it up the stairs, one flight to the bedroom floor, then another flight to my bedroom.

I’d colonized the attic when I was twelve or maybe thirteen, with the approval and help of my grandmother, who had convinced Mom that a growing girl needed a room of her own for makeup and stuff, and convinced Dad that I needed more space for my books. What I’d actually wanted, at the time, was to escape the bedroom that had since become the guest room.

Let me explain—the now-guest-room shared a wall with my parents’ room. There were certain noises that were unavoidable, and that as a teen I’d become very self-conscious about. By which I mean the sounds of my parents discussing the latest mystery they were reading together, and arguing hotly over the solution.

They could go on till all hours of the morning, and it was starting to affect my performance at school. I would
lapse into fitful dreams during math and insist that it was the cook who had poisoned the stew when Mrs. Marplot asked me the result of a quadratic equation.

The attic was finished, in the sense that the walls were plastered and painted. The only place I could stand straight was in the middle, but I spent most of my time in my bedroom either on my bed reading, or at the desk by the window doing my homework, so the fact that I couldn’t stand straight hadn’t bothered me much. Now, in addition to my bed, there was a little inflatable mattress, which I used whenever E and I had to stay here for some reason.

The only inconvenience, really, I thought, as I set the toothbrush on the side of my desk, was that the nearest toilet was at the foot of the stairs, and it was just a toilet and a sink—what the Victorians had no doubt called a water closet—where I could only close the door while using it because I was short.

The only place to shower was another floor beneath that, next to the kitchen. As a high schooler, I’d showered the night before. I wondered how Ben would fare with his multitude of skin-care products, then decided it was entirely his problem. I really hated to leave him to fend for himself, but there it was. There was always the hope Mom would take one look at the toiletries bag and run screaming into the night.

I realized that I felt very tired, doubtless because of the drive to Denver and the shock of seeing all my personal underthings thrown around. So I went into the built-in closet that took up one of the sloping-roof areas and looked through the drawer for pajamas. I failed to find any, but I found a nightgown that I’d only mostly outgrown, in the sense that it now came to my upper thighs where it had once covered my knees.

I had changed into it and was brushing my hair when someone knocked on the door.

For a horrible moment, as I stammered, “Come in,” I imagined it would be Ben. He had come to tell me he couldn’t take my parents anymore, and he’d try to persuade me to throw ourselves from one of the attic windows—which in his case would require either greasing or a shoehorn, because the windows were tiny—and shout
Better die free
on our way to the ground.

Instead, it was my mom, bearing a glass of milk and a plate of cookies. I raised my eyebrow at her as she came in, walking stooped, and set the plate and cup of milk on the desk. “I thought you’d need something. Ben said you were on the road all that time . . .”

My first thought of course was that Ben—the rat!—had told my mom about the murder and the break-in. But then Mom sat on the bed in her it’s-just-us-girls pose, and I bit my tongue. Oh. That kind of talk. Well, I might as well have the milk and cookies to fortify me, and besides, hell, this would save me from sitting on the bed next to her.

I backed up until my butt was against my desk, and then I sort of pulled myself up to sit on it. The desk was the sturdiest piece of furniture in the house—as sturdy as the house, in fact. It was composed of an oak piece inset in the dormer window and supported by a sort of brick ridge all around. I grabbed a cookie—one of the things Mom has always done well is bake, even if she normally does it with a mystery in one hand, just as she embroiders, quilts, and crochets—and munched it, while looking at Mom.

It occurred to me that I would let her lead into the subject and embarrass herself. Look, I know it is cruel of me, but the thing was that if I had to put up with my parents, then I should derive some satisfaction from it. By the time I was fourteen I had figured out that the only possible satisfaction was amusement.

I sat there, eating my cookies and drinking my milk, while Mom smoothed the bedspread, looked around, and
said in a casual tone, “I always thought this was such a pleasant room.”

“Mmm,” I said. It
was
a pleasant room, surprisingly airy and bright, and I’d enjoyed it, but it was hot as a furnace in summer—forcing me to put in a window air conditioner, which rather diminished the brightness—and ice cold in winter, forcing me to bring up a heater and close the door, which diminished the airiness. However, right now it was pleasant and I was willing to enjoy it. And the show Mom was about to put on.

“You know, Candy,” Mom said. “I know that you don’t like me to talk about your private life . . .”

I smiled.

This seemed to encourage her. “But you know your father and I always worry about your ending up old and alone . . . after . . . after we’re gone.” She looked at me with such sympathy that I would have believed it, if not for the fact that I knew any such discussions would have to be sandwiched between arguments over who killed whom in the latest book and that more than likely they would be limited to Mom saying,
I always worry about Candy ending up old and alone.
Then Dad would say,
Who?
Mom would say,
Your daughter, Candyce
. Dad would say,
You know she hates to be called Candy.
And it would all go downhill from there.

“I know that you are concentrating your efforts on being a good mother for little Enoch,” Mom went on, caressing the bedspread absently, and almost causing me to say
Who?
in turn. “But you know, you’re not getting any younger, either, and one day Enoch will be grown and gone . . .” She gave me that piercing
Trust me, I know
look. “And you’ll be all alone. Surely you don’t intend to be a burden on Enoch . . .”

“Of course not,” I said, and smiled reassuringly, resisting an urge to cross the room and pat her hand. In the play we were engaging in, it was, after all, my role to be reassuring.
“I’m sure I’ll have crashed my car or died of inhaling refinishing fumes long before Enoch leaves the house.”

For some reason, this failed to calm her down. She did pause and frown, as if not sure how to answer that, but then she went on with her set role. “The thing is, dear, as I’m sure you know, I always thought your marriage was a mistake.”

This was absolutely true, but only because my mother had always had it set in her head that, failing Ben and me coming to terms with our raging love that only Mom saw, I would marry a mystery author. The number of times they’d thrown me at the heads of likely—and unlikely, often visibly married or gay—male authors at conventions was almost embarrassing. And All-ex had established at his first meal in the house that not only didn’t he write mysteries, but he also had no intention of ever reading one.

I chewed a cookie and said “Mmmm” again.

“And I know that it’s never very exciting, you know . . . to fall in love with one’s childhood friends, but I think that you are now mature enough to consider that perhaps it would be better for both you and Ben if you . . . well . . . if you came to terms with the fact that the sort of friendship you have is love, too. If you just . . . made a match, as my mother would say, and settled down.” She sighed. “You know your father and I would like to see our grand-children before we die.”

“You see E all the time,” I said. Though I would grant they usually saw him for two seconds before he spun off to the backyard in pursuit of Fluffy or on a grand search for bugs.

Mom started, as if she hadn’t realized that E was their grandchild, which of course, she hadn’t. She thought of E as something that had sort of happened to me. Their grandchild would be little Sherlock, or perhaps little
Agatha. “Yes, of course, but . . . our other grandchil dren . . .”

“Well, you’ll be glad to know I’m seeing someone,” I said, though I felt like a complete fool. I knew she would take this to mean that I was dating, though in strict honesty, I was seeing someone. Lots of someones. I wasn’t blind. But as she blinked, I couldn’t let a good thing lie. Or a good lie rest. “His name is Cas Wolfe and he’s a policeman with the Goldport Serious Crimes Unit.”

She brightened up, and for just a moment I thought I’d thrown her off the scent and that she would now pursue this idea that I would perhaps marry someone at least remotely connected to crime. But she was a woman on a mission, and I couldn’t sway her from it. She frowned a little, clearly trying to control her enthusiasm, then sighed. “I can’t help but feel like you keep trying to find substitutes for what is obviously before your eyes, which you refuse to admit . . .”

“Uh . . . You said E would grow up . . . If I want companionship . . . Well, I suppose I could buy a dog . . .”

“Candy, you can be really frustrating sometimes,” Mom said, then remembered she was being sweet and kind and concerned about—of all things—my loneliness in old age. “Has it occurred to you that there is a reason that Ben hasn’t married yet?”

“Yes, Mom, it has. Ben hasn’t married because there’s a limited number of states allowing it, and also it’s not universally recognized. Besides, he has really bad taste in men. I hope he doesn’t marry Les because that man just isn’t very tightly wrapped.”

Mom sighed and rolled her eyes. “Frankly,” she said. “I think you imagine these things. I don’t know where you got the idea that Ben is a—a homosexual. I think it’s your idea of a joke.”