French Polished Murder Read Online Free Page B

do it, had they been adult. Though this was doubtful, since during the very brief suburban idyll of my marriage I’d found out I had trouble even 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—only 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 apiece.”
    “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 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 cheery 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 felt 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’s 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 at my place. 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.