French Polished Murder

by

Elise Hyatt

The Fast And the Electrically Furious
Of Rats And Pianos
Wild Life and Secrets

The Fast And the Electrically Furious

    We were thirty years old – and, in his case, a little more than six months -- when I came to the sad conclusion that I would have to murder my friend Benedict Colm.
    This was as sad as it was necessary, but there was no escaping the fact as my son, Enoch – whom I called E in an attempt to save him therapy bills as he got older – came speeding into the living room, atop Ben’s Christmas gift to him.
    The gift was an electric toy motorcycle with a top speed of ten miles per hour, an acceleration that might seem impossible for a small boy to achieve in a home that was less than seventy feet in either direction, but which E managed, quite often.
    I heard the horn blare a moment before E came riding in and, with the practice born of two weeks of terror, dove behind the sofa, while Ben, who stood square in the middle of the living room, his arms crossed on his chest, became an impromptu traffic circle.
    E sped around him once, twice, then headed the other way, at increased velocity.
    “What do you mean you’ll have to kill me?” Ben asked, obtusely, looking at me. “And what are you doing behind the sofa?”
    I crept out and up to stand on the sofa itself, having learned that a large piece of furniture was the best defense against the toddler version of the fast and the furious being played in my house. “Isn’t it obvious?” I said as, from the kitchen, there came a now-familiar series of sounds indicating that E was either rearranging the kitchen chairs to use as slalom cones or simply hitting them and dragging them along with sweet disregard for what it might do to chair legs and seats.
    I dropped to sitting on the sofa, shaking slightly, with what I figured was a form of post traumatic stress disorder, only not particularly post, since the stress had started just over two weeks ago when E had unwrapped the fully-charged electric motorcycle.
    “If you were likely to have children,” I told Ben darkly. “I’d already have started payments on the realistic drum set with electronic amplification.”
    “You are making no sense at all,” Ben said, in that even tone that made me want to strangle him with my bare hands – even though I was aware that was one of the stupidest ways to kill him, as I would be immediately discovered. “What can the possibility of my having children have to do with this, and surely you remember I used to have a garage band. In the unlikely event I ever have a child, I’d be happy if you gave him or her a drum set.”
    I think that was when I picked up the nearest object – a collection of mystery short stories, leather bound and weighing in at about three pounds, a Christmas gift from my parents – and flung it at his head, missing, of course, just as E came back through the door from the dining room, in time to ride over the book and break its spine.
    “Well, you shouldn’t have thrown it at me,” Ben said, looking baffled when I howled in outrage. He picked up the book and tried to smooth the broken spine.
    Ben stood six three in his stocking feet, with reddish brown hair and the sort of face that is pleasant to look at rather than handsome. Because this was the weekend and also, still, part of his Christmas vacation he was in what he considered his relaxed attire – dark green pants, with a broadcloth shirt, a cashmere pullover just a shade darker than his pants and the sort of tie he considered playful and holiday-like – in this case green, with a barely discernable red dot. I would bet that were I to lift his sweater I would find his tie had been precisely tied to fall just over the top half of his belt.
    I thought, not for the first time, that it was a very good thing that Ben was gay because any woman worth her salt, forced into a romantic relationship with someone so unflappable, exact and unemotional-seeming would have done the sensible thing and put a steak knife through his heart.
    “Not your steak knives,” he said, when I communicated this sentiment. “They’d never get past the rib cage. You never sharpen them.” He set the abused book on my coffee table, which is third hand and made mostly – I think – of spit and cardboard. The legs bowed under the weight of the book, which wasn’t exactly hard, since they bowed under the weight of a coffee cup.
    Ben and I had been best friends since middle school, when I was Lancelot, Galahad and the belle dame sans mercy rolled into one -- or actually, considering that my parents were the owners of the largest used/new mystery book store west of Kansas, Miss Marple, Poirot , Perry Mason and Nero Wolfe -- forever running off in defense of those younger than I or those in peril of some sort. Or again, perhaps not, since the only small, young or shy teenagers that those four were likely to rise in defense of would be those who had been unjustly accused of murder, while I ran to the defense of any smaller person who was being bullied or otherwise abused or ganged up on by people bigger than them.
    At less than five feet tall – which was my adult height – and weighing less than a hundred pounds, soaking wet and with lead in my pockets, I’d been constitutionally incapable of sleeping at night if I thought that someone, somewhere, was getting away with committing blatant injustice against his fellow man or woman or snively, pimply middle school kid.
    Ben had first come to my rescue when I’d taken on three bullies – each of whom outweighed me by almost double – at once and had insisted on helping me despite my outraged howls that I had them surrounded.
    We’d been best friends ever since and cooperated in an unusual way, in which I charged in and got way over my head, and he jumped after me to rescue me and incidentally finish off whatever dragon I’d been fighting. But now, I thought, staring at him, my eyes misting with tears, I would simply have to kill him.
    “Why on Earth are you crying?” Ben asked, as E came back in and whirled around him three more times, before speeding back out to the dining room, causing a hollow sound in his wake, that I was afraid was the knocking down and breaking of the potted plant my boyfriend’s mother had given me for Christmas.
    “Because I really am going to hate having to kill you. And then, you know, at your size and in the middle of winter, with the ground frozen solid, there is no way that I can dig a hole large enough to bury you in. And that means that either you’ll be found right away and I’ll have to figure out a system of misdirection so they think someone else is the culprit, or I’ll have to figure out a way to dissolve your body, so I can flush it down the drains or something.” I thought a moment. “Given how dirty that bathtub was when I moved in, do you think there would be any noticeable difference if I used it as a container to dissolve you in muriatic acid?”
    He sighed heavily. “Don’t you think that buying enough muriatic acid for that purpose would call attention in and of itself? Besides, from what I read, it doesn’t dissolve the body completely. You’d end up with clogged drains, and they’d find pieces of me down in the plumbing.” He had to shout the last part because E had come back for a whirl around the living room and, this time, was blaring the horn at the top of its capacity and continuously, which created a sort of siren effect. “Besides, your neighbors upstairs would probably complain about the smell.”
    “Why not?” I said, as the siren receded towards the kitchen, followed by a series of thuds that meant that E was trying to open the door to the bathroom by dint of knocking on it with the front wheel. “They have already complained about the noise. Which means I’ll get evicted before the month is out and I have no idea if the security deposit will cover impact marks on the bathroom door.” I brightened up, as the noise indicated that E had hopped directly from the motorbike onto the toilet, which was, at least, an advantage over the last time, when he’d brightly informed me that the electric bike was plastic and washable. “Where did you say your ex lives now? I wonder if I might simply make it seem like he did you in. I mean, the police already know he set fire to the inside of your condo when you broke up.”
    “Only that part of the police force that is currently dating you,” Ben said tartly, and then in the tone of one defeated, “Fine, fine, fine, fine. Do you want me to take the boy out for a spin on the sidewalk, to tire him out, so he can stop terrorizing you?”
    “Would you?” I asked, as the horn/siren started up again. “That is ever so sweet of you.”
    Ben rolled his eyes as he reached to the toppled hall tree and grabbed E’s little black leather jacket, which was the other part of Ben’s Christmas gift. “Why is this coat tree brok– oh, never mind,” he said, as E rode the electric motorcycle straight against his leg and stopped with a thud. In Ben’s defense, he didn’t even flinch. Calves of steel. Clearly his daily work out was doing something.
    He got the jacket on E in a single movement, reminiscent of a matador’s wrangling a bull in full charge, and then took advantage of E’s momentarily puzzled state to say, “Come on, E, we’re going for a ride outside.”
    “Outside!” E said. He had just recently started talking in front of people who were not his mother – that is to say, most of the world – but he seemed to think the function of his vocal chords was to enable him to become part play-back machine and part question generator.
    Ben handled this with more aplomb than I managed. He said, “That’s right, outside.” And with a bright and horrible smile, he reached over and flung the front door open. Which allowed E to dart out of it on his electric motorcycle, at top speed.
    I heard the sound of the motorbike going down the front cement steps, and then E’s battle scream. Ben darted out the front door. “Wait!” I heard him scream, shortly followed by, “Not on the street. Not on the street.”
    I climbed to my feet, closed the front door and relished the relative quiet of a toddler free apartment in the downtown a small-size town. I wasn’t in the least worried that Ben would let E play in traffic. I had long ago laid down the rule for their outings together without my supervision and that was that if Ben broke E he would give birth to the replacement and I would make sure that this happened, no matter what the physical impossibilities.
    Able to hear myself think for the first time in over a week, I thought I would go out back to my work shed and make room for the piano I was going to refinish for my boyfriend’s birthday.
    Which is why I was alone when I found the letter.

Top

Of Rats And Pianos

    I was picking up the potted plant in its miraculously unbroken pot and setting it back atop the windowsill when the phone rang. Since the plant wasn’t long for this world from the moment it had entered my house, I sort of patted at the dirt, shoved the pot into a corner of the sill, and rushed off to track down the phone.
    It’s not that we put the phone in weird places. It’s more like it gets tired of waiting for someone to call and starts roaming around the house, finding ever more inventive places to hide. This time I got it on the third ring because it was only behind the toaster. “You should have known I’d catch you!” I said. “You were only two feet from the base.”
    “Dyce?” the voice on the other side said.
    Fortunately I’d lived with my nickname long enough that I knew this wasn’t a plea from Gamblers Anonymous. “Were you talking to the phone again?”
    The voice was Cas – Castor – Wolfe’s. He was my first boyfriend in two years of divorce and we’d been dating six months. Which didn’t give him the right to know that much about me.
    “Never mind,” he said. He said it in the sort of tone that implied that other, normal women didn’t chase their phones all over the house. Which, frankly, either meant their phones were far better behaved than mine, or that they were phone-whipped. But Cas didn’t give me a chance to reply. Instead he said, “The guys will be there to deliver the piano any minute now. I told them to come through the backyard gate.”
    “Right,” I said.
    “Are you sure you can refinish it?” he asked. “It’s in pretty bad shape.”
    “Oh, sure,” I said. Which translated roughly to I sure as heck hoped so.
    But by the time I made it out the back door and into the yard, to unlock the door to the shed that was one of the reasons I lived here, I wasn’t sure at all.
    The truck was already there, maneuvering over the ten feet of dead grass and remains of snow in the backyard. It was beat up truck, painted an indifferent brown that mingled well with the patches of dirt. On the side of it, it said “Starving Students, Moving” in the kind of writing that suggested a drunken midnight and a can of spray paint. Only, it was more like several cans of spray paint, since the S was in pink, but in the middle of the V it changed to black, then turned yellow on the D and finished in glorious orange after the O. In fact, whoever had used the orange was so enthusiastic that it dotted off to the front of the truck and only quit in front of the wheel well, though I suspected the ground had got spray-painted as well.
    The guys who jumped out each door of the truck as soon as it stopped didn’t look like they were starving. They also didn’t look like college students, unless the category were expanded to include those students who had gone on a trip in the eighties, had failed to come down to Earth, and hadn’t yet realized that twenty years had gone by.
    The bellies protruding out of their too short t-shirts and above their too-tight pants, definitely had taken twenty years and a lot of beer to develop.
    “Yo,” the nearest one said. “Is this where we drop the piano?”
    In these circumstances, I’m always possessed by the ghost of my grandmother, the last woman in my family who put any stock in the term ladylike. I straightened myself up, which meant I reached these guys’ chests, but never mind. Morally, I was standing on a mountain. “If you please,” I said. “It should go in the workshop.”
    I think I was a little surprised they didn’t look at me like I was a total nut. Instead, they climbed onto the back of the truck and started untying the piano, which was cradled in a confusion of ropes that looked like a cat’s cradle.
    While they were doing that, I went into the workshop, leaving the door open. Mind you, it was a workshop. It was also where I earned the living that kept me and E in roof, food and clothes.
    Having tried three majors on for size, I’d left college to get married. This course of study had proven as much a success and now All-ex – couldn’t be any more ex unless I killed him, something I considered two times a week and three times on Sunday – Mahr and I were divorced. And I’d defaulted to the furniture refinishing talents I’d picked up while trying to furnish the house on a shoe string to keep up my side of E’s upkeep and my own. So, the food often defaulted to pancakes, my clothes sometimes came from flea markets and the roof was in the sort of neighborhood that made Ben worry about my safety. But I was managing. I was on my own.
    And it all happened in this little shed, with its chemical and tool-filled shelves, its work table made of four sturdy kitchen cabinets topped by a big, heavy board, and its pegs on the wall, that held my protective suit – resistant to most chemicals – my goggles and my ear protectors.
    When the guys came in carrying the piano, I was trying to drag the work table to the side of the workshop, which was easier said than done. First, because I had some pieces awaiting refinishing over by that wall. Second, because cabinets and plywood top and all, the worktable probably outweighed me by a good double, maybe triple, and that was without the cans of stain and varnish I had stashed under it.
    I’d managed to push it maybe five inches – okay, two – when the guys said, “Whoa, there. Let us do that.”
    They pushed the table as far as it would go without moving the teacart and the leather-topped desk by the wall. The blonder of the two – though it might just have been white hair shining from within his mullet that gave that impression – said, “What do you keep under there, little lady?”
    He could have chosen a less appropriate thing to call me, since little I am, but lady is open for debate. Before I realized it, my mouth said the first thing that crossed my mind, “The body of the last guy who asked that question.”
    I don’t know if they thought I was just crazy or if they believed me. This sort of stuff tends to sound much more plausible when you’re in a girl’s workshop, surrounded by cutting tools and power tools.
    Whether they thought I spoke the truth or that I was the rudest woman on Earth, they went ahead and brought the piano in and left it where the worktable had been. When I turned around to give them the twenty bucks I had in my pocket for that purpose, they were already hurrying to their truck, slamming both doors behind them.
    “Your husband already paid us,” the less blond one said, out the window, as they tore out of the backyard, in a shower of half melted ice and clods of earth and dead grass.
    Since All-ex wouldn’t be caught dead near such a ragtag outfit and, in fact, would probably pay ten times as much just to have white-glove movers do whatever needed to be done, I assumed they meant Cas.
    Which was just as well, I thought, as I came back to the workshop and took a look the piano, because All-ex would also not be caught dead near something in this condition. And for once, perhaps he was right.
    To begin with, the piano was painted – in patchy, irregular bits – in the sort of pink that suggested someone had melted a lot of cartoon horses – or perhaps a lot of little girls. Then it was covered in dirt. Opening the keyboard cover revealed ivories as yellowed as an old man’s teeth.
    But the inside of the keyboard cover was not painted, and it had the name stencilled on what I was almost sure was rosewood. It said “Steinway” in golden letters. And that had been the problem.
    You see, Cas Wolfe is a manly man of the sort that – Ben tells me – one imagines sitting at home growing his chest hair. He works one of those dangerous professions that every little boy dreams of doing and every little girl dreams of marrying – in his case, investigator in the serious crimes unit of the Goldport Police. He drives a four-wheel drive vehicle, and he calls it vehicle too. He climbs tall mountains. He runs for miles every morning. He likes going to the range with his dad and his brother of a weekend, and the least manly thing he will admit to is fencing at the Goldport University Club on Saturday mornings. And that’s kind of a cheat, because some guys might sneer at fencing, but every girl knows that the three musketeers were no sissies, and besides there’s just something inherently right about a big muscular guy with a big gleaming sword.
    But Cas has a dark secret. He plays the piano, having learned from his grandmother, who gave private lessons. Now that he had his own place, a few blocks from mine, in downtown Goldport, he dreamed of a piano of his own. His grandmother’s Steinway had gone to – he said – his least favorite aunt. And though Cas did pretty well, a good piano was hard to get on a police officer’s salary.
    I’d heard him sigh and moan long enough. I’d gone with him from store to store, playing pianos, trying them out. There was no piano selling store, between Downtown Goldport and Pueblo, ranging from piano manufacturer outlets to thrift stores, that he and I hadn’t visited. But the pianos we found fell into two categories. The ones that were too far gone to be recovered and the ones that were too expensive for Cas’s means.
    So, when we’d found this piano at a flea market, Cas had immediately looked at the back, at the sound board, which he said was intact, then opened the keyboard cover and fingered the keys.
    It had started innocuously enough. “The soundboard is not cracked,” Cas had said. He had that excited little-boy gleam to his eye, guaranteed to melt the hearts of mothers and girlfriends.
    I’d looked at the piano, which looked dismal but not too bad, in the half-dark of the old movie theater’s lobby. “Wouldn’t it be too hard to tune, though?” I said.
    “Nah. I used to help my uncle tune grandma’s piano...”
    He’d walked around, making “um” sounds, and poking at things, then said, “Mind you, it will need all new felts, and the ivories need cleaning and of course, it needs to be cleaned inside, too, and tuned.” Then he’d looked closer at the open keyboard cover and sighed. “And it is a Steinway, too. Looks like one of the early ones.” He’d sighed. “Only, I don’t think it can ever be made presentable. That pink paint looks like melted plastic or something. Even if I could make it play properly, I’d be embarrassed to have it in the living room.”
    This was when I lost my mind. I’d looked at the wrecked piano and said the first thing that came to me, which happened to be, “Sure, I can refinish it, if you can tune it.”
    I realized how far out on a limb I’d climbed when Cas gave me a sobering look, “Are you sure?”
    “Of course I’m sure,” I said, all the while wondering what exactly I’d taken in my morning coffee.
    Now I decided whatever it was had to be potent, because there was no way I knew what to do with this mess.
    Aren’t pianos supposed to be French polished? he said. Sure, I’d said. You know how to do that? he asked. Of course, I said.
    I groaned. I knew how to apply French polish just like I knew how to fly. First method, buy a ticket in an airliner. Second method, grow wings.
    This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into, I thought vaguely, as I took a deep breath and contemplated the dismal, plasticky, expanse of dusty, filthy piano.
    In these circumstances, my grandmother has a way of coming to my rescue. Oh, not literally, since the dear lady had been dead for years, and even someone of her disposition couldn’t defeat that kind of handicap. But the kind of things she’d told me and taught me came to mind when nothing else would do. And what came to mind right now was that there wasn’t anything so hopeless that a good cleaning wouldn’t take it a good way towards being solved.
    I’d had a sink installed in the workshop, though there was no pipe in there, of course. Instead, I had a large plastic barrel with a faucet on it, leaning on a shelf at the back of the sink. There were some chemicals for which the best antidote was rinsing in plenty of water. I now grabbed a rag and wet it in the water, then took it back to the piano, and started washing a corner of it. Which, well... made the plasticky expanse look a brighter pink.
    Right.
    I went back to the shelf and grabbed one of the patent paint removers. Normally I just used a bit of denatured alcohol and paint thinner mixed together, but I had a feeling the bright, bright pink cover was polyurethane and I didn’t believe in hitting my head against walls.
    So instead, I wet the tip of an old brush and applied the furniture finish remover to a corner of the piano.
    Which is when I heard a squeak. It sounded like ... a wheel out of joint. In fact, my first impulse was to think of the wheel of E’s bike, which almost made me dive behind the piano. But then the squeak didn’t sound again. So I thought it was just a trick of my ears.
    I grabbed the five-point painter’s tool and tried to pry at the plastic paint that was bubbling up, beautifully. Beneath it, there was gleaming silver. Right. I applied paint remover, again.
    I opened the keyboard cover and got a rag moistened with water, and started wiping the keys, then went back and prized at the little bit of the silver paint off to reveal white. I put a bit more of paint remover on, and went back to wipe the keys some more. They took a lot of wiping, as the rag kept coming away dark brown.
    As I wiped, I couldn’t help pressing the keys of course, and every time I did, there was a “squeak” as an echo.
    I stepped back and frowned at the piano. The squeak continued. At first faint then with increased urgency. “Squeak, squeak, squeak.”
    It was undeniable that the sound was coming from inside the piano. But I was fairly sure pianos didn’t squeak. Not absolutely sure, mind you. After all, Cas had said he needed to change the felts and what not, maybe there were also rubber parts inside the piano that needed changing. Or perhaps oiling...
    I stared at it for a moment, but had to admit nothing was going to get done as long as the piano continued to squeak at me.
    So I looked closer at the upright panel between the bottom of the keyboard and the pedals, and I thought that it would have to be removed, anyway, so Cas could do whatever it was he wanted to do with felts and what not. So... I was going to have to open the bottom, anyway. And if it was rubber or something, I’d just give it a shot of oil and not be distracted as I was cleaning.
    I grabbed the electric screwdriver from the shelf. There were four screws holding the panel in. It was the work of a moment to remove them and pull off the panel and–
    Somehow, I’d dropped the wood panel, and I was on the other side of the shed, my body pressed flat against the wall, while my hands tried to figure out a means to escape backwards into it.
    Because inside the piano was a litter of papers, newspapers and – rats.
    Don’t ask me how I knew they were rats. They were mostly pink, and small, and crawling all over one another. But I knew they were rats. And the instinctive reaction forming in my gut wanted me to climb on a chair and pull up the skirt I didn’t have on and scream “a rat, a rat!”
    It took me several deep breaths before I realized that while these were probably rats – or mice, or perhaps guinea pigs or rabbits, though those were less likely to go wandering about inside old pianos. Probably – they were tiny, pink, furless and clearly harmless. Also, there were at least six of them, so screaming “A rat” would not only be futile but also seriously understating things.
    Continuing to take deep breaths – because the oxygen is likely to make you a little drunk, I guess – I forced myself to get closer. Yep. Rats or mice. Probably rats, because I had the idea mice were smaller at this stage of development – though the only baby rats I’d ever seen were the ones we dissected in biology – six of them. In a nest made of papers and other bits of rubbish.
    As I moved nearer I thought the stupid things were actually kind of cute. In fact, they reminded me of E when he was born, all big head and flailing limbs.
    Considering how often I’d called All-ex a rat, perhaps there was a reason for the resemblance. But unlike E, these little rats were in a pile, and all of them seemed to be trying to dig under the others, trying to get down into a warm or safe place...
    The sane thing to do, I thought, was to kill them or something, right? But how did one kill baby rats? Poison? Or just smack their little heads with the screwdriver. The idea made me cringe. They hadn’t done anything wrong. Okay, so probably Cas would say they deserved death for nesting inside a piano, but if rats understood pianos, then the world was too complicated for my taste.
    But if I left them sitting there, I had a feeling they’d die, anyway, from cold or hunger or something.
    So... they needed some place warm. Most babies did. And also food. And then I’d call wildlife rescue and ask them to find a foster mother or something. Mom had done that when she’d found a baby squirrel in the attic storage area of the bookstore.
    I still was not particularly fond of the idea of touching them. After all, they could have plague or salmonella or retrovirus or whatever. However, I also couldn’t let them die. So I put on my dust mask – to ward off the retrovirus thing – and I put on my heavy gloves. And then I dug underneath, trying to get all of the little rats and the nest too.
    It wasn’t as easy as it sounds, because as I had all six in the space between my hands, I felt another one flail underneath, so I had to reach further.
    When I was done, the mess of newspaper and paper and wiggling baby rats didn’t fit in my hands. So I grabbed a clean paint tray and dumped it all in it, covered it with a rag, because I was going to have to cross the space outside where the temperature was in the thirties, and ran, holding the tray, out of the shed and into the back hallway of the house, then along it to the kitchen, where I set the tray on the table.
    The rats were still wiggling around wildly, and I considered putting them in the oven on warm, but I had the vague idea that it might prove too hot. So I did what anyone else would do. I figured they were too young to actually walk. They seemed to be wriggling around on their bellies. So I’d put them in a shallow, oven-proof glass dish.
    I couldn’t quite bring myself to put the mess of bits of paper and dirty stuff in it, though, so instead I used kitchen towels. I moved the babies, one by one into the dish, atop the towels.
    Then I got my warming tray, put towels on top of it to mitigate the heat somewhat; set the dish atop the towels, and covered it with another towel.
    They continued to squeak, but it didn’t speed up or anything, so they were probably okay.
    So I grabbed the paint tray and shook the mess of papers into the trash.
    And there, right on top of it all a letter fell. It was so old that the envelope looked almost mustard yellow and the addresses were sepia toned.
    But it was a letter, and I couldn’t just throw a letter away. I fished it out of the trash and looked at it, realizing it was very old.

Top

Wild Life and Secrets

    The letter was addressed from Almeria to Jacinth Jones, in Wisteria Court. I looked at the envelope a good long time, because Wisteria Court was just around the corner from me. Well, five blocks down, another of the neighborhoods populated almost exclusively by students living ten or twelve to a dilapidated Victorian. I guessed when the letter had been written the neighborhood was quite different.
    The temptation to open the letter and read it warred with hesitation to pry into the lives of others. I pried the envelope open a little and saw there was indeed a letter inside. The whole was so fragile, though, that I was afraid it would fall apart as I opened it. I set it down on the table and told myself maybe I could take it to the library or the downtown historical society. Or I might try to track down the descendants of Jacinth Jones. Surely they’d be the appropriate people to give it to.
    Right then I had more important things to do. There was no wildlife rescue listed in the phone book, but the library gave me a name. I dialed in. And was met with incredulity. “Rats?”
    “I think so. They could be mice.” I thought about it a moment. “Large mice, with strangely shaped heads.”
    There was a long silence from the other side. “Rats aren’t wildlife you know?” the person said. He sounded uncertainly male, like boys do when they stop growing but their voice hasn’t caught up with the body yet. It kept cracking on his heights of incredulity. I thought he must be a high school student, putting in his required volunteer hours. “They are in their own way as domesticated as cats and dogs. That’s why we don’t advise taking them to the wild and setting them free.”
    I actually took the phone away from my ear and looked at it, to make sure it was indeed the phone and not some other sort of audio device reading a prepared lecture. “I don’t want to release them to the wild. They’re babies!”
    A throat cleared impatiently at the other end of the line, and then the voice, tending to nasally high, asked, “How old did you say they were?”
    “I have no idea,” I said. “They’re pink, they have no fur. Their eyes are closed. You tell me.”
    There was a long rustle from the other end, as papers were shuffled and moved. “They sound,” he said at last. “Like somewhere between newborn and a week old.”
    I looked at the dish. Still squeaking under the dish towel, and still moving but the movement was less frantic. I wondered if they were warm enough? Too warm? “Good to know,” I said impatiently. “But I really need to give them to someone experienced in looking after rats.”
    “We don’t have anyone,” he said. “Most people... er... kill rats.”
    Which I completely understood, given my reaction to finding them. I might even have brought myself to do it, had they been adult. Doubtful, since during the very brief suburban idyll of my marriage I’d found out I had trouble buying ant poison to clean up the anthills in the yard. “Right. But I don’t want to kill them. I want to raise them.”
    “Perhaps...” he said, hesitantly. “If you call pet shops? My book says that the best care for rats is a foster mother. They might know breeders, who have a foster mother with a litter the right age.”
    “That’s it?” I said.
    “I’m afraid so,” he said. “Rats are outside our provenance.” And, as if he just couldn’t help himself. “We also don’t care for cockroaches.”
    Hah hah funny. I would have told him so, but he had hung up.
    Cursing under my breath, I looked through the phone book again. Three pet shops. Bird Beauty, the first one, seemed vaguely horrified I wanted to do anything at all with rats. Apparently rodents were beneath them. They sold birdseed, they informed me. Just birdseed. Gourmet birdseed.
    I hung up wondering what kind of birds were gourmets. And did they take their seed with caviar.
    Next up on the list was Fluffy Friends animal store. They treated me to a long diatribe on the evils of pet shops that actually sold pets and tried to intimate I was running a rat mill. I informed them, primly, that I didn’t even own a loom, and hung up.
    But of all three of them the worst was the third, Pets To Go. As soon as I mentioned, tentatively, that I’d found a litter of baby rats, they said, “Alive?”
    “There wouldn’t be much point calling you if they were dead.”
    “Well, we can’t give you much,” the guy said. “Only fifty cents a piece.”
    “Oh,” I said, since I hadn’t been thinking of money at all. “So you have a foster mother?”
    “No, no, no. As food.”
    “You’re going to give me fifty cents for the rats to eat?”
    A long exasperated sigh was my answer. I had a feeling he was thinking I was the ultimate in dumb from the sneering tone in which he said, “No. Fifty cents per piece per rat as food for pet snakes.”
    I hung up on him. Look, I realize that snakes have to eat, but I wasn’t about to sell baby anything to be eaten alive. I still had to sleep with myself at night.
    Right. This left me with... Well, it left me with a bunch of baby rats that I didn’t want to kill, but who were going to die if I didn’t take care of them as surely as if I killed them. So... I had to figure out how to feed them and look after them. I had the vague idea that if I looked on the internet, I could find a dozen sites telling me how to care for rats. The problem was that my laptop had died shortly after my marriage and I had yet to find the money to replace it. Ben had a laptop, of course, but not at my house.
    I called Cas. At work, something I rarely did. I got the receptionist I always thought was much too perky for what she actually said, “Goldport Serious Crimes Unit! How may I help you?”
    Though it always seemed to me like she was the perky teen operator at a catalogue ordering center, I refrained – at great cost in will power – from telling her she could mail me three murder cases and five burglaries. Something for which I should get a medal. “I’d like to speak with Officer Wolfe, please. Tell him it’s Dyce Dare.”
    There was the muffled shuffling talk that one hears when someone else has covered the telephone receiver with a hand. And then there was Cas’ voice, “Hi Dyce. Are you ready?”
    For a brief, disturbed moment, I thought that he expected me to have the piano all done now. Then I remembered we were supposed to go out to dinner, which was part of the reason that Ben was there. Because he was supposed to babysit E. Of course, he was not supposed to arrive three hours early, alphabetize my pantry, color code my hairpins and generally make himself a borderline OCD nuisance. Except that this was how Ben behaved when he was between relationships. “Oh. That. Not yet.”
    “Oh,” he said. “But we have reservations for six.”
    I looked at the clock. It was five thirty. This meant that Ben and E had been out for a little over two hours. Weird. Normally they didn’t stay out that long. I wasn’t – mind you – worried that something had happened, because Ben was very competent at keeping people safe, having practiced on me for years. On the other hand...
    “Ben took E out,” I said. “And they’re not back yet.”
    There was a little silence and then Cas said “On the electric bike?”
    “Well, E hardly has any room to ride in the house.”
    There was a low chuckle. “Dyce, you’re a mean, vengeful woman.”
    “I do what I can,” I said modestly. “But right now I need you to look up how to take care of baby rats for me. Would you?”
    There was another silence. “Uh. Dyce. I don’t think you can lock Ben in your shed and let rats lose on him. I mean, you can, of course, but I wouldn’t advise it. I am an officer of the law and I–”
    “No. If I were to lock Ben up with rats, they’d be big rats. With sharp teeth. Trained to chew on ties.”
    “Dyce!”
    “Well... he did give E that thing. But no, you see, I found a litter of baby rats in the piano.”
    “Pet shops will buy them for–”
    “No.”
    “I see.” I heard him tapping the keyboard. “Um... looks like you need to put them somewhere on top of a heating pad on lowest setting, and shield them with towels, you know, so they don’t get burned.”
    I looked at the dish. “Check.”
    “Oh, good. You’re also supposed to give them baby formula. Using an eyedropper.”
    “I don’t–” I started.
    “I figured. I’ll stop by the supermarket on the way there.” I heard him close his laptop. “I’ll be there in about ... twenty minutes. Can they wait that long?”
    “I hope so,” I said. “See you soon, then.”
    Having hung up, I was left with nothing more to do. It wasn’t like I could feed the babies until Cas came home. That meant... I looked at the letter. Part of me – the part that had been raised by my grandmother – informed me sternly that ladies don’t read other people’s correspondence. But judging by the color of the paper, the color of the ink and the pointy, old fashioned handwriting, I suspected whoever had written this letter, and whoever was supposed to receive it had long been dust in the dust. And come on, I told grandma’s shade. If people didn’t read other people’s letters, there would be no histories. No biographies. No blackmail. No indictments for conspiracy. All sorts of productive enterprises would never happen.
    I sat at the table and opened the letter, pulling out the paper gingerly, so it wouldn’t fall apart. Took me forever to manage to get the sheet open without tearing it.
    The writing inside was more faded than outside, just a sepia tracery on the yellow page. I had to turn the light on over the kitchen table, to be able to read what it said.
    Dear Jacinth, it said. I had hoped things would never come to this pass. Pass was underlined five times. But I’m afraid my husband knows. Or at least, he has enough reason to suspect. Sometimes he looks at me in such a way that I’m not sure I can stand it (far less survive it.) I will meet you next week, at seven thirty, at the fruit stand. I will bring baby. I am afraid the time has come to take you up on your offer and leave as soon as possible. Yours, always, Almeria.
    I looked at it, and confess I felt shocked. Victorian people – and I was almost sure that the letter was at least a hundred years old – weren’t supposed to have complications like a husband while being someone else’s “always.”
    Still sitting at the table, staring at the letter, wondering at the long-lost love affair behind it, I heard the front door open and Ben’s all too brisk voice, “That’s it, E. You bring Pythagoras in.”
    Pythagoras? Since I heard the bike almost immediately, I assumed they’d named it, though it seemed like a truly bizarre idea. Then there were sounds of E dismounting, and moments later, Ben’s forced-cheerful voice from the dining room, “Dyce, we’re home. Sorry to be late, but I–” He stopped at the door to the kitchen. “You didn’t have to make dinner. I figured I’d take E for burgers or something.” He crossed the kitchen as he spoke, and lifted the dishtowel. And jumped back.
    “Dyce, what the hell? I’m not eating that.”
    “Good,” I told him. “You’d have to pay me fifty cents a piece!”
    “What?”
    “Please cover them. Cas is getting formula and an eyedropper to feed them.”
    “They’re rats!”
    “Yes, I found them in the piano.”
    “Ew!”
    “They’re just babies. Don’t tell me I should have killed them.”
    “I wasn’t about to tell you anything of the kind. I’ve known you for almost twenty years.” He made a low whistle under his breath. “Uh... so... you’re raising them.”
    “That’s the general idea.”
    “And then?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “Put an ad in paper. Sell them or something. For more than fifty cents, so people don’t feed them to snakes.”
    Ben pulled a chair away from the table and sat down in it. At this moment, E came bounding in, pulling at my shirt. “Mom, mom, mom. Mom!!!! Cat.”
    Ben ran his hand backwards through is hair, opened his mouth.
    “No, honey. They’re rats.”
    E looked confused. He shook his head. “Cat. Peegrass!”
    Ben closed his mouth with a snap, then drew in a deep breath. “Uh... no, uh... he means cat.”
    “What?”
    “Well... you see, we found this cat, two blocks away, choking and foaming at the mouth. So we took him to the vet. He’d been given poison. So the vet induced vomiting. So, the cat didn’t have a chip or a tag or anything, and he’s really sweet. Big black tom. So E and I... wethoughtwe’dkeephimandbringhimhome.”
    “What?!”
    “Peegrass E’s cat!”
    “Benedict Colm, are you out of your ever loving mind?”
    He put a finger inside his collar, as if it had suddenly gotten too tight around his neck, and actually stammered, “Well, well, yo-you see, E really liked him, and he wanted to keep him. I couldn’t say no!”
    “Oh, right, hide behind the toddler.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Rats, cats, toddlers, oh my. “You know I never got along with cats.”
    “Only Fluffy. And that’s because you set her on fire when you were five.”
    “I didn’t set her on fire,” I said. “I just lit the quilting frame and tried to get her to jump through it. If she’d been quick about it, and I hadn’t had to use the shoelace, she’d not have caught fire.”
    “Shoelace?”
    “Whip. I didn’t have a whip. Couldn’t be a lion tamer without a whip. I had to try something. And anyway, Fluffy never forgave me. She had to take valium whenever she saw me. And she piddled in my bed whenever I stayed at mom’s.”
    “Which is probably why it’s best for everyone that she’s gone to a better place.”
    I abstained from pointing out I wasn’t sure that mom’s fireplace mantel was a better place, since that’s where the ashes were, inside an urn shaped like a Persian cat. At least the urn didn’t hiss when it saw me, which was an improvement.
    “So now you can have Pythagoras. Really, he’s a very sweet cat!”
    “If he’s so sweet, why don’t you keep him?” I asked.
    “Because he’s E’s cat.”
    “Peegrass E’s cat!” my son, the traitor, said, nodding vigorously.
    “Right, agree with Ben, why don’t you?”
    “Aguee wid Ben!”
    “So, Mister Colm, why can’t you take Peegrass yourself?”
    Ben squirmed. “He’s black!”
    “And? Is your condo color segregated?”
    He looked at me like I’d taken leave of my senses. “He would clash horribly with my rugs and the sofas. It’s all white or red! He’d be completely out of place.”
    Since this concept of color coordinated pets had never occurred to me, I was silent for a moment and before I could tell him to dye the cat a more appropriate color, E had run out of the room and returned carrying a plastic cage with a metal grate door.
    He sat the cage on my knees, so that I had to put out a hand to balance it. It weighed at least fifteen pounds. E grinned at me, “Peegrass!”
    Pythagoras the cat looked at me through the cage. He was huge and black, and looked exactly like a baby panther. A baby panther in dire need of a corner to hide himself in.
    He was apple headed, with a big, round cranium and the sort of jaw that says I can crush you with one bite. However, his green eyes had an intensely blue center, and crossed ever so slightly. And the expression in his eyes said, I’m sorry. I hope I’m not trespassing. And, could you please direct me at the nearest corner where I may cower and piddle quietly on myself? He looked – if such were possible, like a much younger and somewhat more feline version of Woody Allen.
    I sighed. I could kick him out into the cold cruel world. Sure I could. Right after I strangled the baby rats with my bare hands and danced on their little corpses.
    “Peegrass good cat!” E said.
    “Mmmeeeee?” Pythagoras said, in what was clearly, “I’m not intruding, am I? Pay no attention to me. I’ll just sit here and cross my eyes at you.” He put a paw out through the bars and touched my hand, with every claw retracted.
    Right. “Ben, I’m never going to forgive you. Never, ever, ever, ever. What am I going to do with a cat and seven baby rats?”
    He opened his mouth, and I could tell he was considering telling me that one sort of solved the other, but thought better of it before the words crossed his lips. Which meant that despite all appearances, Ben had the capacity to learn. “Uh,” he said. “The... the rats is a temporary thing, right? I could... I could stay here and ... uh... catsit. You know, to make sure they don’t... uh... Come in contact. Until we find homes for the rats!”
    It was at this moment that the love of my life walked through the door. Cas Wolfe is slightly taller than Ben and has the sort of face that makes you think he’s very, very ugly, until that is, you realize the reason his features don’t work together is that each of them is perfect. And he has the sort of smile that melts snow and makes all the little plants perk up and flirt.
    He was giving me that smile as he looked from the carrier, to me. “Nice,” he said. “Are you opening a pet shop as a side line?”
    “I see nothing escapes you,” I said, putting the carrier down
    “Of course not,” he said, setting the bag from Youngling Foods on the table, and leaning down to half pick me up my feet and kiss the living day lights out of me. I’d been kissed before Cas Wolfe had ever kissed me, and it was entirely possible I’d be kissed after, but I was fairly sure no one else could kiss me like he did. For one, I was fairly sure he kept a time-distortion device in his pocket. As his lips closed over mine, his arms crushing me against his muscular chest, his tongue darting into my mouth, I felt as though time had stopped. Like in those old movies, when someone presses a stopwatch and everything around them stops, and only they are intensely alive. By the time he sat me down, I had no idea what he was talking about as he added, “It’s my training in the police.”
    And then he proceeded to take charge, the way he normally did, “Here’s the formula,” he told Ben, setting the formula can – ten times as large as all the rats combined – on the table, with a print out and one of those droppers one uses for giving medicine to children. “The instructions are on the paper, Ben. They say you have to feed them pretty much every couple of hours, though. Or whenever they squirm and cry.”
    “I?” Ben said.
    “You. Because I’m taking Dyce out to dinner.”

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