“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 coat 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 into his leg and stopped with a thud. In Ben’s defense, he didn’t even flinch. Calves of steel. Clearly his daily workout 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 cords 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 motorcycle going down the front cement steps, and then E’s battle cry. Ben darted out the front door. “Wait!” I heard him scream, shortly followed by, “Not on the street. Not on the street.”
I closed the front door and relished the relative quiet of a toddler-free apartment. I wasn’t in the least worried that Ben would let E play in traffic. I had long ago laid down the rules 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 more than 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.
CHAPTER 2
Of Rats and Pianos
I was picking up the 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 I 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 after two years of being divorced, and we’d been dating six months. Which didn’t give him the right to know that much about me.
“Never mind,” he said 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.”
“No problem,” I said, which translated roughly to “I sure as heck hope so.”
But by the time I made it out the back and into the yard, to unlock the door to the shed that was one of the reasons I lived where I did, 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 a beat-up truck, painted an indifferent brown that mingled well with the patches of dirt. On