April's Affections and Intrigues: Love and Mystery Bloom

Dipped, Stripped, And Dead, October 2009 A Daring Finds Mystery by Elise Hyatt Berkley Featuring: Candyce "Dyce" Dare 288 pages ISBN: 0425230783 EAN: 9780425230787 Paperback Add to Wish List Purchase Amazon Barnes & Noble Powell's Books Books-A-Million Indie BookShop

"A Dumpster-dive leads to more than just a great find--it also reveals a murder victim"

Dipped, Stripped, And Dead
Elise Hyatt

Reviewed by Denise Powers
Posted January 2, 2010

Mystery Amateur Sleuth

In Goldport, Colorado, Candyce "Dyce" Dare lives a hand-to-mouth existence with her toddler son E (short for Enoch--her ex's choice of name, not hers) after her divorce. She makes a meager living by restoring furniture that she buys on the cheap or finds Dumpster-diving. She's doing the latter when she makes an unfortunate discovery--a dead body that's oddly "melted".

Turns out the body had been dipped in lye and allowed to begin to dissolve, but apparently it was moved before the process could be completed. Dyce is briefly a suspect due to her career as a refinisher, but her small operation doesn't run to a large lye vat, which would be necessary to completely immerse a body. Hunky cop Cas Wolfe asks for Dyce's help since she knows the people involved locally in furniture refinishing.

As Dyce tries to ferret out clues to the mystery woman's death, she's also dealing with her best friend Ben Colm and the drama that's his relationship with his live-in lover Les Howard. As much as she would like to tell Ben to dump Les and forgot him, they have an agreement to stay out of each other's personal relationships. When Dyce becomes the target of a vandal, she isn't sure who is to blame. Why would someone target her? The killer? Surely not. But who else could it be? As the attacks get more brazen, Dyce and those close to her may end up victims too if she doesn't figure out who is responsible.

DIPPED, STRIPPED, AND DEAD is the first book in the Daring Finds mystery series. If readers can look past a few TSTL (too stupid to live) moments from Dyce, they should enjoy Dyce's breezy style and unique view of life. Despite the TSTL behavior, I found Ms. Hyatt's novel to be a fun read and I look forward to seeing Dyce's next adventures. An eccentric, entertaining cast of characters rounds out this cozy mystery. Refinishing tips are included as a bonus.

Learn more about Dipped, Stripped, And Dead

SUMMARY

Divorced and strapped for cash, Candyce "Dyce" Dare starts up Daring Finds, a furniture refinishing business. But when she goes dumpster diving for discarded furniture-and uncovers a corpse-Dyce may find herself redecorating a jail cell.

Excerpt

In the aftermath of the fire-in-the-living-room incident and subsequent grounding, I’d regretfully dropped the lion taming ambition – probably good, since Fluffy wouldn’t come near me any more, though her fur did grow back – and with it all my hopes of a career in the performing arts.

A failure at the age of six, my ego crushed, I’d actually been weak enough to consider dad’s life-long ambition of having me grow up to become a private eye. Except that I wasn’t absolutely sure what a private eye was – it seemed to me you’d have to go around with your hands over your eyes to prevent anyone seeing them and...

Well, that also didn’t go well. And My Little Investigator’s Kit which Dad bought me, didn’t provide me with many clues. I spread the fingerprint powder over the cat, finger painted with the inking pad and used the magnifying lens to start a fire in the leaf pile in the backyard.

After the fire department had been by and we’d found Fluffy cowering under the azalea bushes at the far end, I thought that this private eye thing was by far too hazardous.

And this is how I never quite figured out what to be when I grew up.

Which probably explained why, at twenty nine years of age, I had parked at the edge of Goldport college campus and was rummaging through a dumpster.

Okay, it wasn’t exactly as dire as Mom had always said it would be. I wasn’t living on the streets. I still had all my teeth – even if there had been some doubt about that when I went flying from my bike at the age of eight, after riding down suicide hill with no hands – and I wasn’t looking for food.

Well, at least I wasn’t exactly looking for food, only for the stuff that allowed me to make a living. Because, after waffling through two years as an English major – until the words post modernism could put me to sleep like hypnotic suggestion – and a year as a teaching major – before I remembered another name for hell was school room full of kids – and a year in pre law, before I realized I just didn’t have the required forked tongue, I’d left college with a Mrs. degree.

And when that exploded in my face – worse than the quilting frame – I’d found myself as at a loss for what I wanted to do with my life as I had been at six, when my hopes of lion taming had been so cruelly dashed.

Only it no longer was a career a matter of keeping myself amused, or even of feeling I was a productive member of a society. No. My marriage with Alex – All-ex, completely ex, he couldn’t be more ex if I killed him, something I was tempted to do twice a week and four times on Sundays or whenever we had any interaction – Mahr while otherwise completely unproductive, had left me with a child.

Enoch – his father had chosen the name because he thought it sounded solid. I called him E because I hoped to save on therapy bills when he grew up -- had been one when his father and I got divorced. His primary interests in life had been attempting to stuff all his fingers in his mouth at once and finding ever more interesting bugs to eat.

He was still interested in gastronomic entomology at two and a half. But he didn’t look at all like All-ex – or like me, though he had the blond hair and blue eyes I’d had till three, before both had turned pitch black – and he showed some signs of, through some amazing genetic mutation, growing up to be someone worthwhile. Which would be thwarted if I let him starve to death or even – forbid the thought – if I allowed his father full custody.

My working retail would have supported us – sort of – but I’d have had to leave E with someone. Mom and Dad weren’t an option. They worked all day in Remembered Murder, the mystery bookstore they owned and where Fluffy – whom I believed remained alive on the hopes I’d die first – was store cat. And Fluffy started twitching whenever she saw me, or E.

This left me with the one skill I’d more or less inadvertently picked up while furnishing my first home. I’d taken a course in furniture restoration and refinishing at the community college. Back then I’d done it to fit furnishing a house within the scant budget All-ex would allot to it.

On my own -- after some experimentation -- I found that picking up old, beat up and abused furniture, refinishing it or fixing it or giving it a total make over, and selling it – under the business name of Daring Finds -- made just about enough money to keep me and E in three meals a day and a roof over our heads.

Said roof was rented and in an area of town that made my friend Ben cringe and the meals might run to pancakes a lot, but it beat the alternative. Homeless shelters struck me as a terrible place to take a kid who liked to sample bugs.

And so I was at the corner of the college, on a bright Saturday in late May, looking at a bulky green dumpster.

You see, while real antiques go for exorbitant sums in Colorado, they sell at those prices because they are hard to get. Very few people have an attic full of grandmama’s break front dresser or great great grandmama’s Duncan Phyfe dining set that they would be willing to sell at a garage sale for mere pennies and which could be made radiant by a simple wiping with oil.

No. I heard of such things from other people who came from places out East, but I figured on the way to Colorado by covered wagon, most people had ditched their grandma’s carved walnut chairs halfway across Kansas, possibly with Grandma still clinging to them.

What could be got – in various states of disrepair --were twentieth century knock offs and good, solid furniture of forties and fifties vintage, made in factories, but capable of looking quite good once one had scraped off the twenty coats of paint, including the two inevitable metallic coats applied in the sixties by someone who had found truly interesting mushrooms.

Oh, sometimes, rarely, in a thrift shop or a garage sale, I’d come across a good piece, which I refinished and took to Denver to leave for consignment at Shabby Chic. But for the greatest part, I cleaned and fixed and varnished, then put the pieces up at the local flea market where they made a modest profit just barely enough for our daily pancakes.

Which brought me to cost-cutting.

“Bah, bah, bah, bah!” E said from the strapped-in safety of his child seat in the back of my fifth hand blue Volvo station wagon. I looked over to see him glaring at me, his face scrunched intently, as he clutched the top of the half-lowered window with his chubby spit-covered fingers. “Bah!”

Since he could say quite a few words and even the occasional sentence, I assumed “bah” was his view of the situation.

I looked over to the dumpster, overflowing with black trash bags. Though it was still too early in the morning for it to be really hot, there was a distinct smell of spoiled meat coming off the container. “Undoubtedly,” I told E. “On the other hand, look, there is something there that looks like a gracefully curved table leg. Painted white, but a table leg.”

“Bah!” E said.

Which was probably true. I frowned up at the maybe-table-leg.

Yeah, it was definitely wood and it looked gracefully curved. But the way my luck was running, lately, it was probably just the leg, which some student had broken off the long-discarded table and used for years as an ersatz remote control to turn the tv on and off without getting up.

On the other hand, I’d learned in my year and a half in this business that end of term at the college was the absolutely best time to pick up real antiques – the type of thing I could restore and sell for enough to keep me in rent and food for a month. I figured parents back east gave the kids whatever had been kicking around the family for a few decades and the kids – not really caring for it – discarded it when they graduated. So it was worth a try. Though I would admit the way things were piled in that dumpster, it was likely to all collapse on me as I tried to look through it.

Well, I thought, dubiously, as I shoved my hands in the pocket of my denim coveralls, donned for the occasion. And if that happened, I would remove the coveralls and shove them in the trunk of my car to wash when I got back home. “Tell you what,” I told E. “I’ll give it a quick look, and if there’s no sign of anything interesting, we’ll go back home and have some nice pancakes.”

E looked offended, probably because we had eaten pancakes for the last three meals in a row, and said, “Bah!”

“Okay, fine. Just a quick look.” As I spoke, I pulled out the extra-thick, chemical-resistant gloves I kept in the pocket, I slipped them on. I’d added the gloves to my getup about six months ago, when I put my hand on something so disgusting even E wouldn’t put it in his mouth. I started climbing up the side of the metal container.

There is a technique to climbing dumpsters. I’m as sure of it as I’m sure there is a technique to lion taming. Unfortunately I don’t know either.

What I did was to try to clamber up the little metal ridge on the side of the dumpster, the one where the claws of the trash truck grab when they tip it, and trying to touch the piled up bags as little as humanly possible, while I took a look at the contents. If justified, I would then map my acquisition of the pieces that were worth getting.

A hand here, a hand there, a hand on the plastic bag, and another hand reaching up for the table leg. So far so good. To be honest, my greatest fear when doing this was that I’d get my hand stuck on a used needle. I didn’t think the gloves would hold up to it.

Precariously perched on the mass of trash, I grabbed at the table leg and pulled. It was held up on something, which meant that it just might be an intact table. Also, from the look of it, up closer, it deserved investigation. You can tell real wood because it is lighter, and the edges of any carving are sharper – even under multiple layers of paint – than pressed conglomerate board.

Of course, this wasn’t a guarantee that the rest of the piece was antique or even real wood. Because legs are hard to make of pressboard, they are usually real wood – often cheap pine – even in trash modern pieces.

I pulled at it again. It didn’t feel heavy enough to be pressboard, but it was definitely caught on something.

One more pull, and it came lose. And then I did. There was that moment of confusion that comes before any accident – the moment before you go flying off your bike and mouth meets ground, at the bottom of Suicide Hill. The moment you will replay over and over again in your mind, thinking if only you’d done something, if only you’d reacted in some specific way, you could have averted the whole mess.

The truth was, it was already too late.

As I pulled, the table gave – the whole coming loose and leaving me to overbalance and fall backward through space and land with a thud on the asphalt of the parking lot, while bags of trash, a chair and what looked like a piece of a drawer rained all around me.

As soon as my brain stopped rattling in my head, I thought that something had made the dumpster explode. But as I blinked and looked around, I realized nothing had been fragmented as such.

Now, I don’t have much experience of explosions. The closest I ever came was when I had filled a flask with gasoline, and thrown it at the garden shed. I was twelve and I’d just read about this in a book. Look, NOTHING would have happened, if Mom hadn’t been warming up the grill at the time and if I weren’t such a bad shot.

But the fragments of the grill – and the oak tree, bits of which had somehow managed to end up embedded in our back door – hadn’t looked as whole as these bags did.

The bags must have been holding the table top down, and I’d pulled hard enough to bring down all the bags atop the overloaded dumpster. I groaned, realizing that now I would have to pick up each one of these bags and throw them in. At least the table seemed to be a real prize – the top too thin to be any kind of pressboard, and the little downturn on the edge speaking of at least reasonable quality, if not age.

“Oooh oh,” E said, from the car his face contracting into a distasteful frown. “Phew.”

The phew was justified. I realized the miasma of rotting meat had just grown exponentially stronger. Presumably the rotting burgers were in one of the bags. “Yeah, ew,” I told E, as I opened the back of the car and put the table in, before looking back at the bags. “Right, I’ll put them back in, and then we’ll go home, okay.”

“Yay.”

It was universal. Okay. There might be other furniture in the dumpster, but I didn’t feel looking with that smell. Nope. I was going to put the bags back and go home.

So I grabbed the nearest couple of bags, which felt quite light, as though they were filled with clothes, and headed for the dumpster. I’d taken the whole accumulation of bags off the top, and I could probably fling these into the dumpster without climbing it. Except that with my luck they’d fall on my head again.

I looked over my shoulder and saw E looking intently at me, like he expected me to do something interesting. Right. I wasn’t in the mood to gratify his expectations. I’d climb the side of the dumpster, and PUT the bags on top.

Joining action to thought, I climbed up the side of the dumpster again, carefully balancing with a bag in each hand. Balancing, I stretched my hand to put the right bag inside.

And then I made a terrible mistake. I looked in the dumpster. I swallowed hard – my body reacting to the stench before I could figure out what I was looking at. It was quite odd.

There was wood. What looked like another chair that matched the one that had fallen off lay at cross angles to what appeared to have been – once – a lovely little dresser, possibly of French restoration vintage or a good imitation. But in the middle of it there was...

At first I thought it was a plastic mannequin that someone had put in the fire and which had partially melted. An art project? But why did it smell like that? It didn’t smell like melting plastic. It smelled... like rotting meat.

I stared at the distorted, gelatinous looking features which led down to a distorted, gelatinous body and I swallowed hard. My stomach, sending burning bile up to my throat, was trying to tell me something I was simply not ready to accept.

And then I realized that mannequin had ... well, the top of it, from the forehead up, was undeniably the top of a very human forehead, and there was blond hair cut short, frosted and coiffed into those little peaks I always wandered how people managed. It wasn’t melted, and it wasn’t – had never been -- a plastic mannequin.

I felt like I’d been looking at one of those weird pictures, with an area in black and one in white, that look like one thing, until you blink and they look like another completely different thing.

Realizing that the... thing had been human made me see that it was a body. Torso, two legs, arms. All of it distorted as if it had been turned into wax and held up to heat till it melted. Or perhaps it had been thrown into acid. I didn’t know what could make a human look like this and I didn’t want to know.

Some places, like the nearest knee, shining wetly, was still a recognizable shape, but the rest of the body was such a taffy-pulled shape that I couldn’t even tell what gender the person might have been.

I felt the bags I’d been holding fall from nerveless hands, while my stomach clutched and did a flip-flop and the smell rose worse, more penetrating, as though it were entering not just through my nostrils, but through my eyes and ears and my all-too porous skin.

Slowly, very slowly, afraid that I was going to fall, I stepped down, climbing my way down from the dumpster and to the asphalt of the parking lot.

There was a buzzing from my ears, like the sound of the sea or the sound of an accelerating fan. Through it, I vaguely heard E say, “Mom?”

I shook my head at him, wanting to get in the car and drive him away from all this. Drive him away fast.

But this was real life, and I was no longer six years old. One didn’t run and hide when something went wrong and one didn't drive away from an accident, much less from something like this.

An inner voice encouraged me to just run. After all, it said, I was wearing gloves. There would be no fingerprints.

But someone might have seen the car. And besides, I watched TV. I knew the police had ways of figuring out things these days, even without fingerprints.

Right. I swallowed hard, because some bitter fluid was trying to make its way up from my throat.

I opened my car door deliberately, as though each movement might cause an explosion. Which it very well might. It might cause me to throw up and that would be explosion enough.

With relief I dropped to sitting on the driver’s side and reached over to the floor on the passenger side, where I’d left my purse. I grabbed the cell phone, turned it on. Realized that Ben had called me twice without my answering. This would lead to a lecture about actually carrying your cell phone on your person at all times. Right at that moment, I’d welcome a lecture from Ben. But I was not twelve, and I would not call Ben to come and save me from the scary discovery.

I swallowed again, and instead of dialing him back, dialed 911. I heard my own voice, thickened and strange, “Police,” I said. “I want to report a murder.”

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