Dipped, Stripped, and Dead

by

Elise Hyatt

One Woman’s Trash
A Table in Hand
Two Ciphers

One Woman’s Trash

    When I was little, I was going to be a ballerina. This was a strange ambition for a five year old who could trip over both feet at the same time while standing still. As soon as that tragic fact dawned on me, I settled on the more attainable ambition of becoming a lion tamer. This, at least, seemed perfectly within my reach, since my cat always did exactly what I wanted her to – well, except when she balked at jumping through the lighted hoop. Which is just as well, since Mom didn’t exactly approve of my setting fire to her quilting frame. With the quilt in it.
    In the aftermath of the fire-in-the-living-room incident and subsequent grounding, I’d regretfully dropped the lion taming ambition – probably good, since Fluffy wouldn’t come near me any more, though her fur did grow back – and with it all my hopes of a career in the performing arts.
    A failure at the age of six, my ego crushed, I’d actually been weak enough to consider dad’s life-long ambition of having me grow up to become a private eye. Except that I wasn’t absolutely sure what a private eye was – it seemed to me you’d have to go around with your hands over your eyes to prevent anyone seeing them and...
    Well, that also didn’t go well. And My Little Investigator’s Kit which Dad bought me, didn’t provide me with many clues. I spread the fingerprint powder over the cat, finger painted with the inking pad and used the magnifying lens to start a fire in the leaf pile in the backyard.
    After the fire department had been by and we’d found Fluffy cowering under the azalea bushes at the far end, I thought that this private eye thing was by far too hazardous.
    And this is how I never quite figured out what to be when I grew up.
    Which probably explained why, at twenty nine years of age, I had parked at the edge of Goldport college campus and was rummaging through a dumpster.
    Okay, it wasn’t exactly as dire as Mom had always said it would be. I wasn’t living on the streets. I still had all my teeth – even if there had been some doubt about that when I went flying from my bike at the age of eight, after riding down suicide hill with no hands – and I wasn’t looking for food.
    Well, at least I wasn’t exactly looking for food, only for the stuff that allowed me to make a living. Because, after waffling through two years as an English major – until the words post modernism could put me to sleep like hypnotic suggestion – and a year as a teaching major – before I remembered another name for hell was school room full of kids – and a year in pre law, before I realized I just didn’t have the required forked tongue, I’d left college with a Mrs. degree.
    And when that exploded in my face – worse than the quilting frame – I’d found myself as at a loss for what I wanted to do with my life as I had been at six, when my hopes of lion taming had been so cruelly dashed.
    Only it no longer was a career a matter of keeping myself amused, or even of feeling I was a productive member of a society. No. My marriage with Alex – All-ex, completely ex, he couldn’t be more ex if I killed him, something I was tempted to do twice a week and four times on Sundays or whenever we had any interaction – Mahr while otherwise completely unproductive, had left me with a child.
    Enoch – his father had chosen the name because he thought it sounded solid. I called him E because I hoped to save on therapy bills when he grew up -- had been one when his father and I got divorced. His primary interests in life had been attempting to stuff all his fingers in his mouth at once and finding ever more interesting bugs to eat.
    He was still interested in gastronomic entomology at two and a half. But he didn’t look at all like All-ex – or like me, though he had the blond hair and blue eyes I’d had till three, before both had turned pitch black – and he showed some signs of, through some amazing genetic mutation, growing up to be someone worthwhile. Which would be thwarted if I let him starve to death or even – forbid the thought – if I allowed his father full custody.
    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 and where Fluffy – whom 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 make over, 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 and 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, while 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 grandmama’s break front 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 which 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 on the way to Colorado by covered wagon, most people had ditched their grandma’s carved walnut chairs halfway across Kansas, possibly with Grandma still clinging to them.
    What could be got – in various states of disrepair --were twentieth century knock offs 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 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 greatest part, I cleaned and fixed and varnished, then put the pieces up at the local flea market where they made a modest profit just barely enough for our daily pancakes.
    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!”
    Since 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 is something there 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. And if that happened, I would 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, I slipped them on. I’d added the gloves to my getup about six months ago, when I 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 trying 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 is 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 are usually 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 lose. 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 coming loose and leaving me to overbalance and fall backward through space and land 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 that 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 of 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 table top 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 of these bags and throw them 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 the miasma of rotting meat had just 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 looking 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. Balancing, I stretched my hand to put the right 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. It was quite odd.
    There was wood. 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 and which had partially melted. An art project? But why did it smell like that? It didn’t smell like melting plastic. It smelled... like rotting meat.
    I stared at the distorted, gelatinous looking 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 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 wandered 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 this and I didn’t want to know.
    Some places, like the nearest knee, shining wetly, was 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 and to the asphalt of the parking lot.
    There was a buzzing from 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 side and reached over to the floor on the passenger side, where I’d left my purse. I grabbed the cell phone, turned it on. 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, dialed 911. I heard my own voice, thickened and strange, “Police,” I said. “I want to report a murder.”

Top

A Table in Hand

    They gave me coffee from a thermos. Hot, strong and sugary, poured into a paper cup and pressed into my hand. A woman officer had come and asked me questions. I had no clue what I’d told her, save for one thing – I had not told her about the table in the back of the car.
    In retrospect, this seems completely insane – and probably was – but all I could think about was that if I was going to find a corpse, and have to sit here, with E quiet and sullen in his seat in the back, I was going to get a table out of it, damn it. It was, I think, my attempt at preserving a bare shred of rationality, as irrational as it might be. I had gone through this to get a table, and I was going to get that table.
    After the woman left, I sat in my car, the door open and my legs hanging out, my feet in dirty tennis shoes resting on the black asphalt. E had gone very quiet except for the occasional, outraged “Phew.”
    I sipped my refilled cup of coffee trying to stretch it out, before it became all cold and gross, because I’d rather smell the coffee than the body, and looking at the officer who had interrogated me, because the most threatening thing she was carrying was a clipboard. She wasn’t going near the body, and she wasn’t carrying any weird instruments.
    Other people were doing scarier things – I was vaguely aware of them, around the dumpster and behind the woman. They were taking pictures of the dumpster, and tagging all the trash that had come out of it. And two had climbed nimbly into the dumpster, looking like they had got the secret handbook of dumpster climbing that no one had bothered to share with me.
    The female officer who’d talked to me now approached the people near the dumpster and presumably called to one of the men there, who took the clipboard from her. He was tall – as tall as Ben, which was saying a lot since Ben was six three easy -- though, at least from this far, of a completely different type – dark haired, golden skinned. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, either, just a pair of jeans and a blue t-shirt. From the back, I thought, as I sipped my coffee and tried to breathe only the smell of coffee and not the smell of death all around, he didn’t look at all bad. Broad shoulders narrowing down the length of a well-muscled body to a nicely trim waist. Long legs which – though one thing had nothing to do with another – made me think he might be a runner.
    He gestured broadly, and though I couldn’t quite hear what he said, I gathered the impression that he was giving orders to the swarm of people doing something I refused to look at out by the dumpster. He nodded, which I thought was to the officer who’d interviewed me. I caught only the tail end of his words, carried on a sudden bit of breeze blowing my way, “Right there.”
    But then he walked away towards a parked van on the end of the vast agglomerate of police vehicles on the other side of the parking lot from the dumpster, which I took to mean that the right there he would presumably be right at was some distance away and required driving.
    I watched the woman officer walk away from the dumpster and go to another van and retrieve a couple of heavy bags, presumably with equipment. I wondered when I’d be allowed to leave. Which didn’t at all prepare me for a silky smooth voice from my left a few minutes later, “Ms. Dare?”
    I looked to the side. He was undeniably the guy I’d seen from the back before. From the front... My first reaction was that he was absolutely the ugliest man I’d ever seen. Not that there was anything exactly wrong with his looks. His face was well-shaped, with strongly marked cheekbones, and a square chin. His nose was aquiline and straight. His eyes, under dark eyebrows, were a stormy-sky grey, of the kind that looked like clouds might move across it at any minute. And while his mouth might be just slightly too broad, it was not in any way misshapen or shapeless. It was more, I thought, as I looked up at him, that his features just didn’t seem to work together, like each was slightly at odds with the others.
    And in that moment, as I thought that, something happened. In between one blink and the other, one breath and the other, the man I was looking at went from being the ugliest man I’d ever seen to being the best looking.
    Overwhelmingly handsome – beautiful really, with an almost inhuman beauty that couldn’t help but cause a reaction – just looking at him was kind of like being hit on the head with mallet. All thought stopped, your mouth dropped open, and you couldn’t quite remember how to speak. A sentence that I thought was from the Bible, which Grandma used to read now and then, ran through my head: beautiful and terrible like an army arrayed for combat. I felt a blush climb up from under my t-shirt and coveralls and up my flaming cheeks in a tide of warmth. The features don’t work together because each of them is so perfect, I thought. At least I hope I thought it and didn’t say it, not that at that moment I could really have said much more than inarticulate syllables. I was reduced to cavewoman thinking. Big man take me to cave and bring much mammoth? Only truth be told I hadn’t got as far as the mammoth.
    He cleared his throat and looked slightly amused, and the heat on my face was in serious danger of causing my complete self-combustion, and in confusion I looked at his t-shirt which was just a little too tight – not as though it didn’t fit him, but as if it were the sort of clothes one wears around the house or while doing laundry. In paler blue, on the chest, it said, Tell The Law Everything.
    On this I found my footing, because I’d be damned if I told him about the table. Let him imagine I’d got it elsewhere and it just happened to be in the back of the car. I sat up straight and looked back at him, and realized he was looking behind me at E, who in turn was sitting in his car seat, bending slightly forward.
    “Your son?” he asked.
    “Yes,” I said. “That’s E.”
    “He?”
    “No, E. It’s his initial. It’s what I call him.”
    He raised his eyebrows at me, but didn’t say anything. Instead, he turned to E. “Hey, E, would you like a sprite?” he asked, in a soft voice but not, I noted with relief, the sort of voice that people who don’t know kids normally use.
    I waited to see if his approach had worked, but it hadn’t. E remained silent, though his eyes were riveted to the sprite can the officer held in his right hand.
    “He won’t talk,” I said, tiredly. Right then explaining E’s foibles seemed like rolling a particularly heavy stone uphill.
    “He can’t talk yet?” the policeman asked.
    I shrugged. “He talks to me, but no one else. To me he even says sentences.”
    This brought a delighted chuckle from the man and, at what must have been my look of total, bewildered surprise, he explained. “I did that to my mom till I was three. People thought she was crazy. She recorded me speaking and Dad said it was her doing voices.”
    I groaned, I could imagine E doing this to me for another six months or more.
    “Can he have the sprite?”
    “Sure,” I said, and he opened the can and gave it to E. Considering E and I had mostly been drinking water with our pancakes, a sprite was a rare treat and if E didn’t say thank you, he graced the policeman with a broad grin.
    “So, you’re Ms. Dare?” he said, turning to me, after a final smile at my son.
    “Dyce Dare,” I said.
    “Like... playing dice?”
    “No, like Candyce. With a y. I was ...” I was not about to tell a total stranger the story of my birth. “I was born in a candy store. Unexpected. Mom went into labor.” I wasn’t about to explain that Mom and Dad had had such a huge fight after the ultrasound showing I was a girl, that Mom had left Dad and they were meeting in the candy store to discuss making up. Nor that the fight had been about names, because Mom wanted to call me Agatha and Dad wanted to call me Sherlockia. Nor would I, even under torture, reveal that my middle name was Chocolat. Only Ben knew that, and only because my mom had told him. “So Mom wanted to call me Candy, but Dad added the c and the e, and I go by Dyce.”
    He made a face, half grimace, half grin. “My father called me Castor. I go by Cas.” He offered me a massive, square hand. “Cas Wolfe. I’m one of two senior serious crimes investigators in Goldport.” He nodded towards the dumpster. “We don’t get many of these. Not this bad.”
    I shook his hand. It was hard and firm and squeezed enough to let me know he could crush my hand – without his actually doing it. “It is...” I said. “It is a murder, then?”
    He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “It might very well be just inappropriate disposal of a corpse, but when people go to this kind of trouble...” He shrugged.
    I nodded. “Like those corpses thrown into the shark aquarium last year,” I said.
    “Exactly like that,” he said.
    “Turned out some woman was pushing guys she seduced into the tank, didn’t it?” I asked, dimly remembering the solution of the case that had kept the pages of the local paper full of lurid and unlikely pictures. I confess I always skimmed murder news, mostly because Mom and Dad discussed every case from the moment the first signs of crime were discovered. Normally I was tired of the whole thing long before the murderer was caught.
    “Something like that,” Officer Wolfe said, with a sin-inducing grin. “Though my team wasn’t on that case.”
    I became aware that he was almost bent over to talk to me – to keep his head at a level with mine. I gestured vaguely towards the passenger seat. “If you want to sit down.”
    Again I was graced with the expressive, mobile grin that made the blush start again, upward, on a path from my belly button to my cheeks. Oh, pipe down, Dyce, I told myself. Man like that will be drowning in co-eds every weekend – and maybe during the week too. What would he want with the almost thirty year old , divorced, mother of one and queen of pancakes?
    By the time I’d talked myself down – or a convincing counterfeit thereof -- he had walked around the car, opened the passenger door and sat down. “Thank you,” he said. “Not that I have much more to ask.” He looked over the clipboard. “Officer Giles seems to have asked you all the relevant questions. You were... looking for furniture?” he said.
    “It’s not illegal,” I said, defensively. “I refinish it. It’s what I do for a living.”
    He shrugged. “I’m sure if I dug through the books I’d find some ordinance against looking through dumpsters for discarded furniture. Probably a public health measure. But the thing is, that I have no interest in that. People rescue stuff out of dumpsters, so much the better for... for landfills and all. You were... climbing the dumpster?”
    “Yeah,” I said, and was glad I was blushing anyway. I looked away. “I put my hand on a bag, and the whole thing fell.” I took a deep breath, which was a bad idea, because I got a big noseful of the smell. I swallowed hard, and said, “And then I went to put them back and I saw... I saw...”
    I became aware my voice was shaking. He nodded. “The first one is always bad.” He shrugged. “Weirdly, this one is not that bad, because it doesn’t really look human. Or not at first glance.”
    “No,” I said. I rubbed my nose because I felt like I was about to cry. “I thought it was a mannequin. I only knew it was human by the hair. And the top of the forehead, you know?”
    He nodded. “Well, that’s about it,” he said. “You didn’t do anything else we need to know about, right? Removed something, or put something extra in the dumpster?”
    I shook my head. I was not going to tell him about the table, even if this had started to have the feel of when I went to explore the construction site without telling my parents. It was impossible that the table had anything to do with it. The corpse hadn't been bludgeoned with a table, and I was not about to lose my table for the sake of bureaucracy.
    “And you gave us your address,” he said. “You’ll be at 216 Quicksilver today?”
    “I’m always there,” I said. “Well, unless I’m out, you know, delivering furniture or...” I shrugged. “You have my cell phone.”
    “Right. And I’ll get back to you on this. Sorry you had such a shock. Try to take it easy today, okay? Have a quiet day with the munchkin back there. Don’t think about any of this.”
    A likely idea. First the quiet day with the munchkin would, get cut short as I had to hand him back to All-ex this evening, to stay till Tuesday evening at his dad’s place. Second... second – I thought of Ben’s messages on my phone, as yet un-listened to – this was not shaping up to be a quiet anything.
    “Do you have any idea who she was?” I asked.
    At first I got back a slight stare, then an intent frown. “She?” he asked.
    “The... corpse...”
    And just as suddenly the very hot guy with the laid back manner was replaced by the eagle eye of the law. His eyebrows seemed to struggle to go up, while he kept them, stubbornly on a level, and he spoke in a voice that was too deceptively calm, “How do you know if it’s a woman?”
    “The hairstyle,” I said. “I’ve seen that short, blond, frosted hairstyle in magazines. Must be very expensive.” I sighed. “I could never afford it and there’s no way I could do it to myself. The one time I tried to cut my hair...” I was not going to tell my life story to a stranger. “It didn’t end well.”
    He looked curious and something like a sparkle ran through the grey eyes, making them seem, momentarily, blueish. He seemed to be considering something. “I’ll try to give you a call later. To see how you’re holding up.”
    Like that, he offered me his hand again, and I squeezed it. He wasn’t wearing gloves. That probably meant that he hadn’t been physically handling the body. For some reason that made me feel better. I was taken by the feel that had made cultures throughout history declare dead bodies unclean. I didn’t want to be near it. I didn’t want to touch anything it had touched. And I wanted to drive far away from its smell.
    He fished in the pocket of his pants and brought out a business card. “If you think of anything, or anything seems strange, give me a call, okay?” His business card read Cas Wolfe, Goldport police Department, Serious Crimes Unit. “Call my cell phone. If you call the department they’re as likely as not to put you through to the other investigator, Rafiel Trall and he won’t know anything about this. At least not unless it gets really bad and we need to bring in every available person.”
    I nodded. E waved at him, as he turned to say, “Bye, little one. See you later.” Even if E didn’t trust him enough to talk, the wave was a big honor. E didn’t wave at anyone but Ben.
    I was conscious Ben’s messages on my cell phone in the purse on the floor of the passenger seat but I had to get out of this smell before I listened to any messages. I drove carefully out of the parking lot, through the crowd of policemen, who got out of the way. Some looked towards Officer Wolfe, who waved as if to say that I was free to go.
    Over the bump and onto the tree-lined downtown street, and then down that and around the corner into Fairfax Avenue. My house was eight blocks down it and then a sharp right on Quicksilver.
    Fairfax was a busy street, the East-West artery of the town. I pulled into the parking lot of a drugstore and got my phone out of my purse. It was not normal for Ben to call me on Saturday morning, certainly not two times in what seemed to be half an hour or less.
    Les Howard, Ben’s live-in lover, was a French horn player at the symphony downtown and Friday night was usually concert night, which meant that they stayed up late, of necessity. The earliest I heard from Ben, these days, on Saturday, was mid afternoon, when he usually did call, keeping up an habit from our highschool days of finding out how the week had gone with the other. Even while I’d been married to All-ex, we’d kept it up. It was one of All-ex’s big all time complaints, as if he really were in any danger from Ben. And I kept it up now too, even though, frankly, I could be fonder of his boyfriend – partner seemed all too final and Ben hadn’t done anything bad enough to deserve that. I could be fonder of Les Howard, for instance, if it had been his body I’d found back there.
    But this thought brought with it an all too clear image of the body and I shook my head. No. I didn’t wish that on anyone. And besides, I had nothing really against Les, except the way he looked at me and the suspicion that he wasn’t making Ben very happy.
    Ben and I had been friends since we were twelve, when he’d rescued me after I’d gotten in over my head in a fight with playground bullies. It would take more than our truly despicable taste in men to break that.
    As I thought that, I was dialing my messages, and I got Ben’s voice, crisp, clipped, over the phone, “Dyce? Why aren’t you answering at either phone? Where are you? Call me.”
    It didn’t sound particularly urgent, but something about it disquieted me. I erased it, and listened to the next. And became far more worried. Ben’s voice had lost the patented, almost inhuman calm he seemed to think was necessary when leaving a phone message. “Dyce! Oh, for the love of– ” I didn’t know for whose love it was, because the next word was slurred. And then, in growing annoyance, “Dyce, answer the damn phone now. Where are you? Would you please answer and tell Les that I– Les, would you PLEASE?”
    The connection ended. I opened my mouth, closed it, and looked at the dashboard, at officer Cas Wolfe’s card. But what was I going to tell him? That I thought Ben had had some sort of domestic scene, what... an hour and a half ago? Yes, that would be helpful.
    And the thing was that the idea of a domestic disturbance between Ben and Les would strike people as either funny or as Ben’s fault. Les was all of five five, maybe five six, elegantly slim, with the sort of build that seemed made for the tuxes he wore to work, while Ben was six three, built like an assault tank and only kept slim through strenuous and continuous exercise.
    Any policeman seeing Ben and Les fight would immediately arrest Ben for assault. Even if Ben hadn’t touched him.
    And besides Ben didn’t fight with people as such. Even when we met – I’d been involved in trying to punish two bullies at once and had momentarily forgotten that they were ninth graders and a year older than I and probably singly outweighed me by double – he’d walked up and punched the bullies out, and asked me if I was all right. Then he’d dusted his clothes – which didn’t need it – and introduced himself, and walked away with me, leaving the bullies in the dust. All without looking even mildly upset, much less angry.
    No, I had no idea what was going on with Les, but the idea they were fighting was absurd.
    I dialed his house, just in case, but the phone rang and rang, and no one answered. I closed it and was about to put it back in my purse, when it rang.
    I opened it. Ben’s cell phone number. “Ben!” I said.
    “Dyce.” He sounded like himself again, and wasn’t yelling. “Where are you?” Correction, he sounded terribly tired. He probably had woken up too early.
    “Shorty Drugs.”
    “Where?” Which was justified since Shorty was the local chain and it was all over town.
    “On Fairfax.”
    “Are you coming home?”
    “I was about to.”
    “Good. I’ll wait.”
    I was going to tell him to let himself in – he and my parents were the only people with keys – something he never did without permission. But he’d already hung up.

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Two Ciphers

    As I pulled up into my driveway -- beside the once-opulent blue Edwardian mansion of which I rented the bottom floor – alongside Ben’s BMW, E said “Uh oh” from the back seat.
    I didn’t know – exactly – what called for that sound. He shouldn’t know anything was wrong. From where he was he couldn’t see what I could. That the back hood of Ben’s car was dented, and that his back windshield had a crack straight across.
    Ben sat in the driver’s seat. He’d rolled down the window, and he was scribbling on a pad in a leather portfolio that looked like work. And Ben’s appearance was as wrong as the dent on his normally impeccable car, as wrong as his being here at this time of the morning on a Saturday, of all days.
    It’s hard to explain how Ben relates to clothes. It’s not that he’s exacting about them – he is – and it’s not that he cares how he looks – he does – it’s something well beyond that. Ben is attached to clothes as if they were his armor of righteousness, without which he would dissolve. If he were a super hero he would be Captain Suit and Tie, and if he had a trade mark it would be to leave behind an impeccably tied tie or at least the drawing of one.
    Now, though I suspected it had taken him his college years to get over this, he wasn’t so fanatic about it that he wore a suit and tie on weekends. But even then he did usually look as though he’d put himself together to exact measure from some picture in a magazine captioned the man who has it all relaxes.
    He was still wearing nice clothes – a pale cream shirt with two buttons unbuttoned at the chest. But the shirt was misbuttoned on the uppermost button, one up from where it should be.
    As he got out of the car, I became even more alarmed. His khaki pants looked... rumpled. And up on the left side of his forehead, there was a very thin, jagged ... scratch, I decided, I wouldn’t call it cut. From it a drop of blood had run on an irregular pattern down Ben’s square, closely-shaven face. And I was sure he hadn’t noticed. Or he’d never have come out looking like that.
    I couldn’t even look. Something was wrong. Very wrong. I thought of the corpse in the dumpster. Everything was wrong. I’d taken a wrong turn. Reality was askew.
    “What’s wrong?” I said, as I got out of my car in turn, and opened the back door to unbuckle E. He was squirming and screaming “Bah!” which was the closest he’d ever come to talking near another human being that wasn’t myself. I had no idea what about Ben prompted the exclamation, and probably neither did Ben who looked unusually dazed.
    E escaped my grasp and ran, gleefully, out of the car, to hug Ben’s legs. “Bah.”
    “Uh,” Ben said, somewhere between amused and puzzled. “Same to you, buddy.” He looked back up at me, and I became suddenly conscious that I was still wearing my denim coveralls, probably stained all over with stuff from the dumpster. “Ugh. What have you been doing?”
    “Dumpster diving,” I said, but unzipped my coveralls, and folded them, clean side out, which is normally what I did when I was trying to keep the car clean – what I should have done before I drove here. I put them under my arm to take inside. “For furniture. End of term at the college.” I wasn’t going to tell him anything else. At least not yet. I didn’t have words to tell him anything else. Yet.
    Ben visibly hesitated. “Look, your parents– ”
    “Stuff it. No.”
    I didn’t really want to discuss for the tenth time why it was profoundly unadvisable for me to live with my parents, and because E was firmly attached to Ben’s legs saying “Bah” up at him in wild adoration, I was free to go to the back of the car and pick up the little table.
    Its being just a tea table, it could – barely -- be lifted with one hand and left me the other free to offer to E on the way in, “Come on, E. Let’s go in.”
    But Ben reached down and grabbed E around the waist, lifting him up and sort of sitting him on his right arm. “Come on, monkey,” he said.
    I’d never fully understood Ben’s and E’s relationship. They were the two people in the world closest to me – the ones who mattered most. I’d known one of them for seventeen years and the other one was only a toddler and I’d known him before he was born.
    It should have been easy to figure out how they related. But their relationship was more complex than some third world diplomatic negotiations and had all the protocol of Mandarin ceremony. Somewhere between the fact that Ben lived in dread of what E.’s spit-covered hands would do to his clothes, and the fact that E acted around Ben like cats act around people who hate them, they had a very strange friendship of sorts. The thing was that Ben didn’t hate E. Not even close to it. I was sure of it. You could tell it in times like this, when he carried E even though he could have avoided it. Or the times when he actually babysat, twisting his life all of out of shape to look after E so I could deal with divorce hearings and such. Not to mention the utter panic Ben had gone into the night that E had the ear infection and his fever wouldn’t stop going up. He’d all but physically threatened the ER doctors. But most of the time Ben avoided E and called him monkey and accused me of having kidnaped him out of the local zoo. And E thrived on this, as he didn’t on fawning and petting and cajoling.
    I opened my front door and we went into the apartment that had been home to me for the last year and a half. Howsoever dumpy, it was still... well, dumpy. It was the sort of apartment that rented to students, though the landlord had given me a break on the rent because I’d been willing to sign a two year contract and because – presumably – he guessed my cleaning skills were better than the average bear’s. Or college student’s. But I repeat myself.
    It wasn’t so much an apartment as the bottom half of an Edwardian house and relatively sprawling as these places went. I was lady of a domain that comprised a living room carpeted in spilled ketchup red and wallpapered in prim little yellow roses. This spacious room, I’d furnished with an old blue couch and a table that I could never sell for any decent price, mostly because I hadn’t yet determined whether the table was wood or cardboard but I was fairly sure it was glued together with spit and its legs tried to sprawl wide at the slightest touch.
    Through the door at the back on the far right, you came to the bedroom. Or rather the bedrooms, which sort of flowed into each other, with a narrow door in between. The bedroom I used had a my childhood bed – single, rickety, white-painted – a makeshift shelf of bricks and boards, which held the books I actually read – no literature because it brought out my PTSD from college. It was carpeted in neon-glaring blue and the walls had a wallpaper that looked like a snapshot of spiders involved in an orgy spanning all of spiderdom. All of this over a red background. Through the narrow door was E’s bedroom which someone filled with foresight had refused to carpet and covered instead in poo-brown vinyl. What it was covered in, though, most of the time, was stuffed animals. For reasons unknown to me – though I was sure there were reasons, perhaps involving secret memos and a strategy for driving me insane – everyone I knew, even the most casual of acquaintances, gave E stuffed animals. He had every creature that had ever stumbled into old Noah’s arc. Only not two by two. Oh, no. As Noahs went, E was clearly broad-minded and his beasties marched by three, by four, my multitudinous crowd.
    E was a normal little boy. Except for the occasional cuteness mode – which I always suspected was more for my benefit than his – he used his stuffed animals as projectiles, which he lobbed with unerring aim at the head of the unsuspecting. Usually me. From this sea of sickly-colored fake fur emerged E’s crib -- which he still used, as I was till looking for a little bed at a good price – and, in the corner, a set of plastic drawers and cubes, which contained his clothes and toys-that-weren’t-fuzzy. The only toy he’d shown any interest in so far was the toy piano Ben had given him for Christmas and which had regretfully been put in a safe place by me, while Ben had been put on my what was he thinking? list. My only regret was that Ben was unlikely to ever have kids. Otherwise, the kids would already, pre-existence, be enrolled in my give a drum set to list.
    Out of E’s bedroom, the other way from my room, one came to a large and ugly bathroom. The sink – stained, squarish and graced with a mostly rusted faucet – sat on little metallic stilts as if porcelain supports were definitely to expensive for the likes of us. The bathtub, also large and squarish, had had rust stains on the bottom, which I’d covered with porcelain paint. It was an imperfect effort, but it had left the bottom of the bathroom nicely ridged and definitely a non-slip surface. When I’d moved in, Ben had spent about an hour in that bathroom with cleaning products and a series of brushes – which was very funny, since he paid to have his house cleaned – because he was sure I would catch tetanus – or perhaps rabies – from the tub. It had taken him that long to convince himself the dirt was probably a structural part of what held up the bathroom. And when I’d told him you couldn’t get rabies from bathrooms because they didn’t bite people, he had removed the industrial-looking rubber gloves, glared at me and said “That one might.”
    The other door out of the living room led directly to the kitchen, which was the only room in the house that Ben approved of. Just as well, since that was where we spent most of the time when he visited. For some reason – and I still couldn’t believe it was the benevolent impulses of the rental company, so it must have been to hide something, possibly a body under the floor, the kitchen had been tiled – both floor and counter. The floor was a serviceable clay tile, the counters were large white tiles. There was a plant window over the sink where I kept the only plants – probably weeds – that I couldn’t kill, and I loved the effect of the morning light on the counter tiles. I’d furnished the room in grandma’s old pine table, oiled to a mellow shine and, after having tried to balance on the rickety barstools I’d found at the thrift store and failing, Ben had given me a pair of pine chairs that perfectly matched the table – though they had to be of much younger vintage – and which had probably cost him more than anything in this place was worth. Next to it stood E’s highchair, a baby gift from my in-laws when I was still married, and the finest plastic and vinyl money could buy. Not that I was complaining. It cleaned up easily.
    Through the kitchen door at the back, and all of maybe ten steps distant was what had undoubtedly been designed as a storage unit. I’d made it into my workshop, where I kept the refinishing fluids, furniture under processing, paints, oil, and other things that would be an invitation to disaster in E’s curious hands. I worked while E napped (rarely, but it happened) or while I could con someone – usually Ben, though Mom had done it once or twice – into babysitting. Or, of course, while E was with All-ex.
    I let Ben ahead of me into the living room and closed the door behind us, dropping the little table in the middle of the living room. I was dying to see what it was, and where it had come from, but, realistically, it could wait till All-ex picked up E. And meanwhile there was Ben and whatever was up with him. Oh, he acted like nothing was wrong as he carried E into the kitchen to an ecstatic chorus of “Bah!” but this just wasn’t normal. Not Ben here, at this hour in the morning, and what the hell had happened to him? Car accident?
    I concentrated on Ben to banish from my mind any thought of the body. Look, Goldport is a safe city. An old mining town, turned college town, it might have enough crimes for a Serious Crimes unit, but I thought the annual murders hovered around ten, most of those either crimes of passion or drug related. Neither of which mixed well with a melted corpse in a college dumpster.
    If I turned, right after setting the table down, to triple lock the door behind me, it wasn’t because of fear of burglars, but because E’s current hobby was stripping naked and running screaming out the front door, up into Fairfax Avenue traffic. While I’d not been a bad runner in highschool, my glory days were well behind me, and besides running was a hair-raising sport as E forced it on me.
    The door secured in a way that – so far, at least – E had not defeated, I walked into the kitchen. Ben had strapped E into his high chair and was standing in front of my open fridge. As I came in, he turned around, the almost-empty bottle of milk in his hand. “Dyce!”
    “He’s going to his dad's today. There wasn’t any point buying any more till he comes back on Tuesday,” I said.
    Ben frowned. “And you intend on eating?”
    “Whatever,” I said. “I won’t starve.”
    He mumbled something under his breath and I said, “You can’t be too thin or too rich.”
    "You can if you starve enough to get yourself ill, Dyce." He looked over at me, his brown eyes closed enough that they were overshadowed by his blonddish-red eyelashes a perfect match for the never-out-of-place reddish blond hair that had made every woman in the highschool want to kill him, because of the natural flip in front. He narrowed his lips, but didn’t say anything.
    And I’d be damned if I was going to be lectured by a man my age, who had his shirt buttoned wrong and didn’t seem aware of the fact that he had bled – something people normally noticed. “Well,” I said, with more heat than logic. “At least I don’t have blood on my face.”
    He was reaching into the cabinet for one of the plastic sippy cups that E used, and turned around at my brilliant come back. “What?”
    “You have blood on your face,” I said. “And your top button is wrong.”
    For just a second he frowned at me, as if I were speaking a foreign language, then filled the sippy cup with just about the rest of the milk, capped it and set it in front of E with, “Here you go, monkey.” And then he turned on heel without a word.
    In a wild, momentary rush, I wondered if he was going out of the house. Throwing a fit was not exactly Ben’s thing. Correction. Ben’s fits were cold things, where he seemed to mentally remove himself from the presence of whoever had pissed him off. He had never stomped out of the house, much less for having it pointed to him that he had blood on his face.
    But then I heard him cross the bedrooms on the way to the inner sanctum of the bathroom, and I heard water running. Even though one needed to cross three doorways to get to the bathroom, it did share a wall with the kitchen – the one behind the stove.
    I filled the tea kettle in turn, because, frankly, after the events of the morning, I needed tea. Coffee has never been my beverage of choice and as for the coffee the police gave me, I was grateful, but I think some of my paint thinner was less potent.
    When Ben came back – his face clean, his shirt properly buttoned, but looking somehow less healthy than he had before – I had retrieved my favorite cup – a vast red cup – from the cabinet and was in the process of tying to the handle the string of two bags of Earl Grey Tea. And Ben must have been off balance, because there was no comment about Earl Grey being all perfume and no tea.
    He kept his own tea here, mostly because he didn’t trust me to buy his tea. Which was just fine, as I didn’t trust him to buy mine. Yes, yes, I could stand the whole expensive loose leaf thing – except that I tended to lose my tea ball and spill the tea all over while I was using it – and I actually enjoyed the Victorian High Tea at Green’s Hotel, where Mom took me twice every year, whether I needed it or not. I enjoyed the whole bit of picking an outre type of tea, and having it served just so.
    It’s just that that stuff, tasty though it was, wasn’t tea. Not the tea of my childhood, not the comforting stuff that made you stop crying or helped you get better when you had a headache.
    Grandma – Dad’s Mom – used to live just up the street from us, and until I was six I’d spent more time at her house than my parents’. And grandma’s house meant a cup of inky black tea – Earl Grey by preference – usually stewed by her forgetting to remove the bags and so sweetened that the spoon left a trail in the liquid when you stirred. I couldn’t afford that much sugar, but other than that, that’s how I drank my tea.
    Ben was getting out his own small teapot and the cup that matched it and doing whatever it was with the tea ball and the container of ridiculously expensive tea he got at the tea store down the road, and I left him to it. For a moment, truce reigned. The sort of truce that descends on towns just before they’re bombed to kingdom come, something I was damn well aware of.
    I felt my back tense, in expectation, as I took the tea bags out of my cup, tossed them, added a judicious teaspoon of sugar to the golden mixture and sat down. And it came, just as I expected it to. “Dyce, your shoes are wearing through at the tip, your car sounds like a ufo landing, you have no food other than flour and half a sippy cup of milk. Have you considered going back to stay with your parents? I mean, you could go back to college and perhaps...”
    Ben was my dearest friend in the whole world. He was very much the sibling I’d never had. In many ways he was the adult “relative” closest to me, since Grandma had died. Or at least the only relative who acted like he was older than I. And he’d known me for over half my life, and ostensibly he knew my parents. And yet, I’d never been able to convey to him the layers of wrongness in my little, dysfunctional nuclear family. Mostly because Mom and Dad were all smiles and best behavior around him. They had the framed picture of us together at prom over the fireplace. And when I told them I lacked an essential piece of equipment to be Ben’s type, they told me I had an awful sense of humor. I’d once tried to explain to Ben the essential issue contained in the phrase “adult children” that preceded so many therapeutic groups. Adult children of alcoholics. Adult children of abuse. Adult children of drug users. Not that I could claim anything so well defined or politically correct. I was just the adult child. I had been the adult in the house from about age ten. I was not going back to that. Besides, it would give Fluffy a heart attack, and she was a geriatric cat.
    So, instead, I struck out, “What happened to you? What happened to your car?”
    He carried his cup to the table and sat down, and for a second, for just a second, there was something in his eyes.
    Look, Ben is six foot three and built like an assault tank. He disguises it. He’s an investment planner and does his best to project an image of someone who lives by the mind. But somewhere, in his genetic background, there was some ancestor probably in Ireland, who could plow his fields better without his oxen, and who could do the work of ten men in half the time they’d take. And yet, the one thing I could honestly say, in our seventeen years of acquaintance, was that I’d never seen Ben furious. I’d seen him upset. I’d seen him withdraw inside himself. But the closest I’d seem him to lashing out was when he’d told the ER doctor that triage be damned and he’d see E now. And the doctor had been smart enough to shut up and do it.
    But now at my question, he looked up and for a moment – for just the space of a breath – there was something very much like burning anger in his eyes, quickly replaced by bewilderment, hurt and then just tiredness. “Les and I argued. I don’t want to talk about it.”
    I opened my mouth to say hell of an argument. It dented you car? But the thing was, though he was looking at his tea and seemed perfectly all right, I wasn’t sure – at all – that he wouldn’t give me that angry look again. And even though I was almost absolutely sure the look hadn’t been directed at me, as such, I didn’t want to see it. And besides, Ben had kept quiet – mostly – through the rather fast breakup of my marriage. Save for his insistence that I should live with my parents. So I bit my tongue and instead said, “Are you all right?”
    “Yes,” he said. “It was just a stupid scratch.” He shrugged.
    But he looked so withdrawn – the way he did when he really didn’t want to discuss something – that I took a sip of my tea, floundered around wildly looking for something to say, and said the first thing that came to mind, “I found a body in the dumpster today.”
    Ben didn’t drop his cup, but it came close. It trembled in his fingers for just a moment, a massive loss of control as far as Ben’s reactions went. He recovered, not so much by controlling himself but because he was overcome with complete bafflement. He looked up at me, his expression perfectly blank. “What?” he said.
    Which is when we realized that E had used his mad Houdini skills to escape his high chair and was somewhere in the living room. I did not have time to worry he might have left the house, since he was yelling “Bah, Bah, Bah,” in the demanding tone of an emperor calling his vassals.

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