Changes

by Judith Arnold

  Chapter Seven

  “James?” Diana sat inside the rental car, staring through the windshield at the compact Cape-Cod style house sitting squarely on a scraggly lawn that showed no signs of spring revival. The house’s roof sagged slightly, its clapboard siding was in desperate need of fresh paint, and the asphalt driveway leading to its one-car garage rippled with cold heaves and cracks.

  Diana had just emerged from the house, raced to her car and punched in her boss’s number on her cell phone. Her heart thumped with excitement. Another find. Another score—or it would be another score if James gave her his approval.

  “Don’t tell me you found some more Tiffany lamps,” he said.

  “Even better. The concierge at the inn where I’m staying told me about a friend of hers whose grandmother had recently died, and the friend was planning to empty her grandmother’s house so she could sell it. She’s got a liquidator coming in on Saturday. But Claudia—the concierge—gave me her friend’s number and said I should see if she’d let me look around first. If we come up with a better bid than the liquidator, she’ll cancel that Saturday appointment and let us clean the place out, instead.”

  “And we would do that because…?”

  “It’s like a pirate’s treasure chest, James. There’s plenty of junk, but…my God. It’s amazing! The grandmother was a packrat.”

  “A hoarder?” Diana could practically hear him grimacing and shuddering through her cell phone. “We don’t deal in old newspapers.”

  “No old newspapers. But lots of rare books in mint condition. She’s got this amazing Stickley oak sideboard. A gorgeous roll-top desk with a patent and date stamped in it—1878—in excellent condition. There’s a crank gramophone that actually works, with a gorgeous morning-glory horn. She’s got a collection of music boxes to die for—and they all work, too. A couple of rugs—I think they were Turkish, but Eugene would have to appraise them. Oh, and a mirrored vanity table…” She sighed. She’d loved that vanity table. She’d imagined herself sitting on the tufted satin stool, gazing into the triptych mirror, grooming her hair with the sterling-silver-handled hairbrush sitting on the marble-topped table and then spritzing some perfume behind her ears from the cut-crystal atomizer next to the hairbrush. “James, we have to make a bid on this.”

  “The whole lot?”

  “I know, that sounds kind of crazy. But I’m telling you—this is a phenomenal find. Even if we had to toss half of what we got, we’d make a mint on the other half.”

  “I don’t like to buy entire lots, Diana. We’re not liquidators. We’ve built a reputation on our selectivity—”

  Diana didn’t make a habit of interrupting her boss. He was revered among antique dealers throughout the country. He often appeared on TV shows, sharing his expertise. He had hired Diana shortly after she’d graduated from college, at least in part because her parents and grandparents had purchased more than a few big-ticket items from Shomback-Sawyer over the years, and he’d trained her. He’d sent her to seminars. He’d brought her along with him to estate sales. Five years after joining his staff, she still had a great deal to learn, and she made it her practice to keep her mouth shut and absorb his wisdom, not to question him.

  But this time, this house… She just knew that if James was with her, he’d be bidding on the whole thing, if only to get his hands on that sideboard. And the gramophone. And the vanity.

  “Lenore—that’s the granddaughter—wants the entire house cleared out,” Diana explained to James. “Everything has to go so she can sell the place. She’s on a tight schedule. There must be at least fifty thousand dollars’ worth of antiques here, probably closer to six figures. She said the liquidator offered her eight thousand for everything. He’s not an antiques dealer. He has no idea what she’s got.”

  James said nothing. Diana wasn’t sure if his silence was a result of his crunching numbers or keeling over in shock.

  “We could easily get it for twelve grand plus moving costs,” she said. “Maybe even less. But we have to act fast.”

  “You ran that number past her? Twelve thousand dollars?”

  “No, but she seemed to think getting eight thousand was a good deal. Why would she object to getting fifty percent more?”

  James sighed. “This is not like you, Diana.”

  “What’s not like me?” she asked hesitantly. Was he going to chew her out? Fire her?

  “Sounding so…so sure of yourself. So confident.”

  She allowed herself a small laugh. “Well, I am confident about this. We shouldn’t let this opportunity pass us by.”

  Another sigh. “Where are you now?”

  “Parked at the curb in front of the house.”

  James fell silent again. This time she could hear a faint tapping through her phone. He must be running figures on his calculator. “We’d have to secure the truck, make sure we have room in the warehouse... I’ll need a little time to work out the logistics. Do you think your eager heiress can wait a few minutes?”

  Diana felt the tension ebb from her shoulders. Not only wasn’t James firing her, but he actually seemed persuaded. Her uncharacteristic confidence had won him over. “A few minutes, sure,” she said. “Not a few hours.”

  “A few minutes. And this house is where? New Hampshire?”

  “I’m just south of the state line, in Massachusetts. A few miles north of Brogan’s Point,” she told her boss.

  “Brogan’s Point. The antiques capital of the world,” he said, his voice tinged with sarcasm. “Who would have thought?”

  “I’ve made some lucky finds, that’s all,” she said modestly. Just because he wasn’t firing her didn’t mean she ought to brag that stumbling upon two fantastic deals in as many days had been due to her superior skill rather than a stroke—or two strokes—of luck. Luck was a huge part of it. So was the fact that she was exploring a region Shomback-Sawyer rarely visited. The firm tended to track estate sales closer to the city, and to rely on tips from colleagues and past customers. Diana was checking out collections that would have fallen under Shomback-Sawyer’s radar. She was alert and observant, and she trusted her instincts. She was confident.

  “Next thing I know, you’re going to suggest that we open an office up on Cape Ann so you can keep scouring the area for new finds. All right, let me see what I can work out. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”

  Diana said goodbye and thumbed the icon to end the call. She didn’t want to consider how much the idea of opening an office in Brogan’s Point appealed to her. She knew James had been joking when he’d suggested it. Brogan Point was barely an hour’s drive north of Boston. Shomback-Sawyer didn’t need an outpost here.

  Besides, she reminded herself, she liked living in the city. She’d grown up in Brookline, the sprawling urban town that shared more than half of its border with Boston. She’d been riding the T all her life, visiting the Museum of Fine Arts by herself from the time she was ten years old, shopping on Newberry Street by the time she was fifteen, and attending Red Sox games at Fenway Park for as long as she could remember. Currently, she rented a lovely flat in the South End. Peter resided in a charming, and much larger, place in Back Bay, but Diana had insisted that they maintain separate residences until they got married. She loved the South End—the restaurants, the boutiques, the humming energy of the city.

  Didn’t she?

  In Boston, she couldn’t jog on the beach. In fact, she rarely jogged outdoors in the city because there was too much traffic. Instead, she ran on a treadmill in a fitness center down the block from her apartment, where membership cost her $500 a year.

  And at night, even with her windows closed, the city’s noise seeped into her bedroom. She never had the pleasure of being blanketed in silence when she slept, because silence didn’t exist in a city. There were always car engines, horns, dogs barking, distant sirens, the ranting of some inebriated person staggering down the street at two in the morning.

  Nighttime in
Boston was nothing like the tranquility of Brogan’s Point. Diana slept more deeply in her broad, cozy bed at the Ocean Bluff Inn, where the only sound was the faint whisper of waves rolling onto the shore a few hundred feet from her window, than she ever did in Boston. She woke up better rested, her mind sharper, her nerves absorbing everything around her with a sensitivity usually dulled by the city’s clamor and clutter.

  God help her, she liked living here.

  Visiting here, she silently amended. She was only visiting, not living.

  Her fondness for Brogan’s Point had nothing to do with Nick, she assured herself. She hadn’t even seen him today. He hadn’t been standing by the retaining wall with his morning coffee when she’d jogged along the beach—she’d been watching for him and she hadn’t seen him. Which was a good thing, she reminded herself. If she’d seen him, she might have done something crazy, like fling herself at him and resume kissing him, picking up where they’d left off last night.

  Where she’d left off. She’d ended the kiss because she had to. She couldn’t pursue anything with him until she’d sorted out her feelings about Peter.

  She also couldn’t pursue anything with Nick because, for all she knew, there was nothing to pursue. He was a sexy dude willing to enjoy a no-strings fling with a tourist. He was a local boy looking for fun. He was…

  She didn’t know what he was. She knew pathetically little about him.

  At the moment, she felt as if she knew pathetically little about herself, too. Her emotions were more turbulent than the ocean during a storm, a churn of whitecaps and undertows and whipping winds. She had no idea what she wanted…other than Nick. She knew she wanted him.

  Her phone vibrated in her hand, and she acknowledged that she wanted something else, as well: James’s approval, so she could negotiate with Lenore for the right to haul away the cornucopia of gems and junk inside her late grandmother’s house. Nick might be a fantasy, a dangerously alluring bit of flotsam the stormy sea had tossed at her feet. But the contents of the aging house at the end of the crumbling driveway were real. The profit possibilities were stupefying. The sheer joy of stumbling upon so many precious pieces, so many amusing curiosities, so much intriguing history was immeasurable. And the confidence—the understanding that she was ready to start making deals on her own, that she could assess merchandise accurately and take responsibility for bringing it to the firm—yes, she wanted that.

  “Our inventory is low after the holiday shopping sprees,” James informed her. “We’ve got space in the warehouse. If we can move everything in one full-size van, we can schedule a pick-up for Thursday. But if this turns out to be a bomb, and all these fabulous pieces turn out to be junk, it’s coming out of your hide.”

  “Fair enough,” she said, then mouthed the word confidence. “As long as I get a bonus if all these fabulous pieces turn out to be treasures.”

  “I hope you’re right.” Again James paused, as if choosing his words with great care. “You’ve changed Diana.”

  “For the better, I hope.” The David Bowie song echoed faintly in her mind. “I’m going to give the woman an offer she can’t refuse. And I’m going to earn that bonus. Because you know what? I am right.”