Free A Fatal Stain by Elise Hyatt Page A

must have caught a flicker of worry in my eyes, as he pulled my hair out of my face and said, “Look, I’ll talk to Mahr about keeping E another week. I’ll smooth things over. They can’t say much, not to me.”
    No, probably not. Not if they were afraid of the police. But I suspected I was going to pay for all this soon enough, if not openly.
    Proving he knew it as well, he sighed. “I’ll poke around, okay? But I really don’t think he’s involved in the fires. For one, not all the houses burned down are listed with his realty company, and besides—”
    And besides, Nick and Ben were now in the kitchen and clearing their throats, so we stood a little further apart, as E came and inserted himself between us. I knew this was an attempt to be reassured that we still loved him, and I was capable of rational behavior sometimes, so we hugged my son.
    “Cas, we need to go,” Nick said. “There’s that interview with—”
    “I know, I know.” Cas kissed my lips and the top of E’s head. “E, do try not to be too bad a boy for Mommy, okay?”
    “Okay,” my son said, back to his impersonation of a cherub, which wouldn’t take in anyone who had known him for any amount of time. “I’ll take care of Ccelly, too.”
    “Er…uh…good,” Cas said, getting up and starting toward the door.
    Ben cleared his throat. “Uh, before you go…Which color rat do you want for your boutonniere?”

CHAPTER 6
Of Rats and Men

    Once I managed to convince Cas that they were not joking about the rats, he put his foot down. “Absolutely no rodents in the wedding,” he said.
    Nick’s lips were twitching. “This was Dyce’s mom’s idea, wasn’t it?”
    “Uh, yeah.”
    “Ben! They’d eat the tuxes. Also, have you considered rat poo—”
    “Right,” Ben said. “Okay. Okay. No rats.”
    “And no best cat, either. Nick is my best man, and we don’t need a best cat.”
    “But Peesgrass wants to come!” E said. He’d retrieved Pythagoras from wherever the cat had been sunning himself and was holding him clutched to his chest. Pythagoras’s little cross-eyed face stared at us in acuteembarrassment, whether at his position or at the idea of being in the wedding, I couldn’t tell.
    “They make harness leashes for cats,” Nick said. “I’ll look after him. He’s already black; all we need is to attach a little white tie to his collar,” he said.
    I didn’t say anything. If the cat died of embarrassment, the SPCA would be all over us.
    I thought lovingly about the table in my shed and wished I could go back there and work. Then I thought of Jason Ashton. And ambled toward the phone book on the counter.
    There was only one Jason Ashton, and he lived a few blocks away, on Jefferson Street—in a warren of Victorian streets named after presidents. I wondered if the three men would notice if I left right then. But, as Cas came and put his arm around my shoulders and said, “Don’t worry, Dyce. It will be all right. I’m not going to allow them to take E,” I had to assume they would. Well, at least Cas would notice I’d left if I crept out from under his arm. He could be quite observant that way. It was the investigative training.
    But in one of those bizarre coincidences that real life can get away with, Nick said, “Come on. We have something like twenty arson suspects to investigate. How you’re going to figure all of that out—plus the Ashton disappearance—with three of us in the department is beyond me.”
    “Ashton?” I said, startled at hearing the name spoken outside my head.
    “Woman who left her husband and disappeared,” Cas said. “Her husband reported her as a missing person, so we have to look, but there doesn’t seem to be anythingwe can do. She seems to be one of the voluntarily disappeared. We still have to look.”
    “Oh,” I said, but I was thinking of that table in the back and the almost-for-sure bloodstains on it.
    When the two policemen finished their coffee and left me alone