French Polished Murder by Elise Hyatt Page A

dishes, and Cas dried them and put them away, in a sweetly domestic way.
    He caught me looking at him and must have seen something in my eyes, because he smiled back at me. “You know, I’ve been thinking. There is a way to avoid all this you know . . . having to abstain from unseemly behavior while Alex is away.”
    “There is?” I asked, since though I hated to admit it I was frankly missing the unseemly behavior and everything that went with it.
    “Well, you know, I got this place. It’s not in the best area, but it’s better than this.” He’d bought a working-man’s Victorian a few blocks from me, in the other direction from Waterfall Avenue. “And it has two bedrooms, and a big garage. You could take over one side of it for the refinishing and, you know, there would be a yard for Peegrass and the rats.”
    I had to blink away an image of Pythagoras chained next to the rats, each of them with their own little dog—or cat and rat—houses, each one with the name written on top in Ben’s exact handwriting. “His name is Pythagoras,” I said. I looked over at E who was completely absorbed in his drawing. “Cats and rats aren’t yard sort of animals. And besides, I thought we’d agreed we weren’t going to do that.”
    “We did? Agreed we weren’t going to put the cat and the rats in the yard?” He was smiling teasingly, but it was entirely possible he was also confused. I seemed to have that effect on people.
    “Well, we did agree we weren’t going to have you stay over so that we wouldn’t confuse him.” I gestured toward E. “I mean, it’s bad enough that he has three parents, I don’t want to subject him to a revolving door of step fathers or . . . something.”
    “Revolving door?” Cas asked, sounding somewhat incredulous.
    His surprise was justified since, of course, he had probably gathered there hadn’t been any dating between the breakup of my marriage and his not taking no for an answer about becoming a part of my life. “Okay,” I said. “Probably a bad analogy, but I just wanted to point out that we’ve only been dating six months, and what if you move on, and then he wonders where you went and . . . you know. This sort of extra-legal relationship is fine for adults, but when the adults have kids, one has to—”
    “Silly,” Cas said, sounding affectionately amused. “I wasn’t asking for extra-legal anything. What I was trying to say—”
    The phone rang. There followed an intense moment of hunting for the phone, and the answering machine had already picked up with my mom’s dry voice saying, “Candy, I know you’re there,” when I found the phone and said, “Mom!”
    “Oh,” she said. “Are you screening calls? You didn’t break up with Cas, did you?” I made a face at Cas, who had heard that—Mom has a loud phone voice—and was grinning at me.
    “No, Mother. Cas is right here. We were just washing the dishes and had to find the phone.”
    “Oh.”
    E chose this moment to be excited by his grandmother’s phone call. Normally his level of excitement for anything relating to my parents hits somewhere between watching paint dry and yawning, far lower than his interest in a small rock, since small rocks were collectors’ objects for E, who carried them in his pockets by the dozen. Possibly to provide ballast. In which case they failed. He continued to move at a speed just below that of light.
    Not that I blamed him for being indifferent to two people who either read him murder mysteries or tried to convince him he wanted to change his name to Sherlock.
    “Gamma!” E said, pulling at my shirt with one hand and reaching for the phone with the other. “Gamma, we have rats! And Peegrass.”
    “Candy, did the child just say you had rats? Do you need me to give you the name of a good exterminator? When we had mice in the store—”
    “No, Mom. Pet rats. Seven of them.” And then, with utter mendaciousness, I added, “They’re Ben’s. We’re helping him