Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (32 page)

It hurt a little to think that Cas Wolfe thought she was
attractive, but it hurt more that she had just slightly wavy hair, which she had cut in layers, then dyed, so that her hair looked like a tapestry in earth tones, with the pattern shifting every time she moved. I’d kill for hair like that. The only time I’d dyed my hair . . . It didn’t end well.

She led us to the booth in the corner, even though it had a sign over it that said it was for four or more people. It also had, right overhead, a painting of St. George slaying the dragon. I’m sure it was a fine painting and it looked old, but I sat with my back to it all the same. The only red I wanted to see while eating was ketchup.

Officer Wolfe sat across from me. The proprietress took our order for drinks—two iced teas—and smiled when I asked her if she should give us the biggest booth. “I can always put groups in the tables in the extension,” she said. “But this is the quietest booth.”

Quietest booth. I looked across the table at Cas Wolfe studying his menu. “Do you come here often?”

He looked over his menu. “Only when there’s a pretty woman involved in a case I’m investigating.”

“Officer Wolfe, I—” I started, not sure at all what I was going to tell him, except that I wasn’t looking to date, couldn’t date. And if it was information he wanted, I’d give it to him without his having to beat around the bush and pretend to court me. I’d only not told where I’d gone exactly because after all, Ben would have been even more upset.

“Call me
Cas
. Or
Castor
, though that always makes people ask if my middle name is
Oil
.”

“I . . . don’t know you that well.”

“Well enough,” he said. “Read your menu. You’ll need to order.”

I read my menu. It was very cute, having the name of the food, and then underneath it the diner lingo for it. Clearly, though, they’d run out of diner lingo, because I didn’t believe that there was any such thing as Armageddon
Steak, even if it was squid steak. “Really,” I said. “In Colorado?” It was the second time I had come across them. Was there some secret squid mine around here?

“It’s fresh,” Kyrie said, materializing in front of our booth. “We get it flown in. Tom does it with a garlic marinade. It’s very popular.”

It was also, according to the menu notation, low in fat. “All right,” I said. “I’ll try it.” As I said so, I looked toward the grill, where a dark-haired man was working with the spatula. He had a bandanna tied around his head pirate-style, I suppose because of health regulations, but his hair fell in a ponytail as long as his girlfriend’s. I couldn’t get up to verify Ben’s assertion that the young man had the best-looking ass in the tristate area. Besides, I didn’t know where the competition was or who had judged it. But I was willing to take Ben’s word for it.

After Cas ordered steak, rare—“No, I mean, get the cow, bring it near the grill, let it get scared of the flames, then cut the steak and put it on my plate”—and fries, Kyrie went away, and he turned to me. “Now suppose you tell me what really happened this afternoon.”

I told him. To the best of my ability, though I can’t say I remembered everything. Only of course, I avoided all mention of the tea table, because I wasn’t stupid, and besides I still intended to keep that table. As far as I was concerned, if someone was going to put gelatined corpses in my workshop, I was going to get something out of it.

He listened to it all with an appraising look, then raised an eyebrow. “You really are something else, you know that.”

I shrugged. “Compared to what?”

He didn’t say anything as our meal was put in front of us. I really am not qualified to judge food. I mean, it wasn’t pancakes, so it seemed pretty good to me. But I can say that it was a pleasant experience I wouldn’t mind repeating. The salad was fresh and crisp, the Greek dressing
perfectly balanced, and the squid steak tender and flavorful. And the gentleman across from me was amused at my adventures—though I hadn’t yet decided whether that was good or bad.

At the end of the meal, he got up to pay, and I followed him. While he was paying, I stood in the little entrance area, which had a few copies of local papers, including college papers.

I grabbed yesterday’s copy of the local paper—the
Weekly Inquirer
, which was, of course, daily—more or less so that I wouldn’t have to look at Cas Wolfe as he paid. Because, see, I was wondering, after all the looks he’d given me during dinner, whether he had the intention of kissing me again. And I didn’t want him to feel I was either expecting it or dreading it. Particularly because I had no clue how I felt. All of which was very weird, because, of course, I knew that I couldn’t possibly date until E was much, much older. I mean, it was bad enough he had to cope with All-ex’s Michelle without my further confusing him.

It wasn’t even a matter of my remarrying. That by itself might be fine. It was the dating leading up to it. If I dated a succession of men I didn’t marry, how would that make E feel? He was bound to be confused. Now if I could marry someone compatible without dating . . . but that was like the lion and the goats again.

I looked through the paper and stopped suddenly on the fifth page, which was the crime report. There was only a very small paragraph mentioning a body found in a Dumpster, identified as local resident Nell Gwen. Something about the report bothered me, but it wasn’t until I got in the car to be driven back—tragically still unkissed—that I realized what it was.

“Uh,” I said. “Have you gone over to Rocky’s and interrogated them yet?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No. We talked to Rocky himself,
but we asked him not to talk to his workers or . . . well, anyone.” He looked at me. “What is going on in your head?”

I shook my head and decided that the last thing I wanted to tell him was what was going on in there. Besides the fact that he was taking his sweet time to kiss me again—which frankly I wouldn’t tell him unless he drove rusty nails into my fingers, and even then, I might hold out—I did not intend to tell him I was wondering how and when Tiff had found out about the circumstances of the murder. Instead, I said, “No. I was just wondering what Rocky was doing . . . I mean, has he been married many times?”

“Three.”

“And?”

“All to the same woman.”

“Oh.” I said. Well, there went a lovely theory. “Unless he changed all their names, so you thought it was the same woman?” I asked, as we pulled into my driveway. Okay, that sounded as stupid as suspecting small, slight, and definitely nice Tiff. Maybe actually more stupid.

He grinned as he got out and walked around to open the car door. Then he suddenly leaned in, said, “Don’t get that complicated,” and kissed me.

It was worth the wait.

CHAPTER 23

In the Still of the Night

I came into the house, half-expecting to find Ben
hastily scurrying back from the letter opening. But he wasn’t there, and the light was off. I was about to turn it on when, my eyes having adapted, I realized that Ben
was
there. He was on the sofa, wrapped in one of my extra blankets, in his usual mummy position, except for an arm thrown over his eyes.

I considered waking him up to discuss the crime, because, you see, I was wondering: Did Tiffany find out from Rocky that Nell Gwen had been put in lye? And if not, how did she know? I still didn’t think she was the murderer, but I also couldn’t make heads or tails of anyone else being the murderer. I mean, if Rocky had killed his wife, why would he tell Tiff? And if he hadn’t, why would he tell her how the body was found, once the police had asked him not to?

But I remembered that Ben had told me my parents had kept him up till four A.M. and then he had gotten up early to come looking for me. And then there had been . . .
poor Inobart and all. I could see that Ben needed to sleep, and I’d already been too inconsiderate of his comfort and well-being.

I very much doubted I was going to be able to sleep while this stuff was on my mind. And I wanted to work on the tea table. But I hated going to the workshop after dark at the best of times, and these weren’t the best of times. I could imagine being out there in the dark, fumbling for the light switch by the door . . .

I shivered. It was impossible to shake the feeling that out of the dark a hand would emerge, a gelatinous and distorted hand, swathed in a bright green polyester robe.

But even as I shivered, I realized that if I didn’t go back now, soon I would be unable to use the workshop at all. First I would be afraid of going out there at night, and then I’d become unable to go during the day, and given time and my active imagination, it was quite possible the day would come when I’d be afraid to go near anything made of wood, night or day. I’d imagine poor Inobart’s spirit reaching out to touch the wood, or perhaps to protect the wood from me.

Imagine
was the operative word. The thing was that Ben was right here on the sofa, his car out front, should anyone look. And the killer had already put a corpse in my workshop once; surely he—or she—wouldn’t do it again. Plus, the police had been in and out all day. In fact, before they left, they had put a new padlock on the workshop door, and Cas had given Ben and me the keys. I could go in, I thought, and take the padlock off and padlock myself from the inside. Then no one could come in and do anything to me.

Reassured, I grabbed Ben’s car keys from his briefcase, which was on the floor next to his head. I went outside, unlocked his car, and came back in, carrying the table.

On my way through the living room, I noted today’s newspaper by Ben’s side, but I didn’t have the time to stop
and read. Instead, I went all the way out back, carrying my padlock key. I unlocked the workshop, which didn’t look spooky at all and in fact looked far cleaner than it had been in a long, long time. I supposed it was the effect of all those little crime-scene vacuums that the police had brought.

I set the tea table down while I padlocked the door on the inside, very glad that this was possible.

I opened the windows, turned on the fan, and went to work. I’d planned on using the heat gun, but the heat gun caused stains and burns on the piece, and I wanted it to look as good as possible. I started working on a layer of paint at a time, swathing it in my turpentine-mineral spirits-cornstarch mixture. I’d do a small area—one I could scrape off once it was softened before it dried and hardened again. Before I started scraping, I’d put the mixture on another patch, so that my only relatively idle time was when the first mixture was taking effect. I used that time to assemble the drawers of my in-pieces dresser.

I don’t know how long I worked, but I’d gotten one of the corners down to the wood, which was indeed cherry, and the other side to the last layer, white paint. I despise people who paint good furniture in white paint, but it seems to be almost as common a sin as painting in metallic or green.

By the time I’d gotten that much done, I was exhausted and remembered that I, too, had been up very early. Which was not a good thing. With a sudden shock I realized that if Ben woke up and I wasn’t in the house, and he called Cas and was told I had been dropped off hours before, he might get worried.

I unlocked the padlock and pushed on the door. Nothing happened. I thought the door was just stuck, but as I pushed harder, I heard steps walk away.

Damn. Someone had locked me in. Someone had locked me in the shed where a corpse had been found.
Someone might, even now, be going to get gasoline to pour around the workshop and then set a match . . .

I put my shoulder to the door and pushed, hard, to no effect. I was wondering what tools I could use. I probably could pry parts of the door off with the crowbar, but then I wouldn’t be able to lock it.

Okay. I’d try once more, with brute force, and then consider the crowbar.

I ran at the door and kicked it hard on one of the reinforcement crosspieces.

It flew open and I went forward, propelled by my own momentum, to stop against a nearby tree, hands forward. I turned around. The workshop looked completely innocuous with the light on. I didn’t see a chain or a padlock, or any hint there had been one on the outside.

A shiver went through me. The ghost of Inobart had come back and . . . But then I saw a stick on the ground, next to the two rings I normally padlocked. It was broken through.

I took a deep breath. Not Inobart. Completely unrelated. Obviously, one of the college students who passed by late at night, the same ones who often left empty beer bottles or cigarette butts on this path, had done this. Probably not even with malice, just one of those absent-minded things. There was a stick, and there was a loop it went through.

And I’d gotten myself all worked up, imagining that someone had locked me in. Which only went to prove that I had way too much imagination and often used it in a stupid manner.

Still . . . I didn’t feel quite up to leaving the tea table. I wiped it clean of all traces of chemicals, grabbed it by the legs, set it down, put the padlock on the door, walked to my back door, opened it, and went in.