Antiques Bizarre

by Barbara Allan

  Mother nodded, but then qualified it. “Only the choir room and here—the sanctuary and walkway have windows, and the lights would be noticed. No need to go out of our way, attracting attention.”

  “Dibs on the walkway,” Jake exclaimed.

  “Oh, no,” I said, latching on to his arm, “you’re staying with me.”

  But he wiggled out of my grasp and ran for the staircase.

  “I’ll be careful, Mom,” he called back.

  Richards said, “Katherine and I will take the sanctuary—two people can cover it better with flashlights.”

  “I take choir room,” Ivanov said.

  “That leaves Mother and me here,” I said.

  After the others departed, and I’d seen that Jake was safely on the walkway above, Mother and I surveyed the room.

  We had already examined the furnace, but there were other areas of interest, including several storage cabinets of hand tools, paint cans, and such, plus a wall of stacked, labeled boxes containing old music, costumes, decorations, and overflow from the choir room.

  “Where should we look first?” I asked.

  Mother nodded to the boxes. “These don’t seem to have been disturbed for years—a perfect place to stash the egg without fear of discovery until it could be safely retrieved.”

  We dug in, and were into the third box, sitting on the hard, cold floor, when I told her, “You know, the egg may not be here.”

  “Well, certainly it’s somewhere here in the church.”

  “Is it? Why did it have to ever be in the church at all? Consider—Martinette obviously had the counterfeit Fabergé fabricated during the six months he held on to it for ‘authentication.’ He returned it to Madam Petrova, who was no expert, and who assumed she’d received the original.”

  Mother had frozen in her efforts and was paying me uncharacteristic close attention. “Go on, dear.”

  “Martinette needed to win the bid and retrieve the bogus egg, to cover his long-ago crime. Then, after the auction, during the commotion of rampant food poisoning, someone killed Martinette—someone who did not know the egg was fraudulent, and hid it in the furnace, for later retrieval. As for the real egg, Martinette could have sold it years ago to some collector….”

  Mother’s eyes were flashing. “The Maltese Falcon was a fake, too, dear, remember! The stuff that dreams are made of, Bogie said!”

  “Right. On the other hand, the Fabergé could still turn up in Martinette’s estate, in a safe or in a lockbox.”

  “And the murders were committed by someone who didn’t realize the egg was a fake!”

  “Maybe.”

  “But who could it have been, dear?”

  “I think I know. But there is one other possibility about the real egg’s whereabouts—there was another time it could have been switched, and another place where it may be right now.”

  I told her.

  Her eyes danced behind the thick lenses. “My dear, you are a genius off your medication! Forget I ever complained about your behavior! You are a detective worthy of…well, your mother.”

  “Gee, thanks for—”

  “Nothing!” Jake yelled down from the top of the staircase. “Not a darn thing up here!”

  Soon the others had returned from their equally unsuccessful egg hunts. I wasn’t surprised—the police had given the church a fairly thorough search. I qualify that with “fairly” because the long arm of the law hadn’t been as long as Vivian Borne’s, reaching into that pilot-light nook.

  Estherhaus asked, “What now?”

  Richards answered her. “Now we call the police.”

  “Yes,” Mother said. “But there’s something you should know—my daughter came up with a very interesting alternate theory.”

  And she shared with them my scenario in which Martinette had switched the egg years ago, after he’d had the fake fabricated, and that the real egg had never been in Serenity at all, much less the sanctuary at St. Mary’s. That the killings were the work of a thief unaware that the egg was a fake.

  Estherhaus began to object on some point or other, but Mother cut her off. “Here’s how we’re going to do this. I am calling the police, or at least my daughter will. You, Ms. Estherhaus, will return the fake egg to Brandy, and the lot of you will depart, otherwise we will inform the police of your intention to break and enter…no! No discussion for now. Go back to your hotel, and wait to hear from me. We will meet tomorrow and discuss the details of this case, and perhaps unveil a murderer. Where and when to be disclosed at a later date.”

  There was grumbling, but the trio departed.

  “What do you have in mind, Mother?”

  “A Rex Stout-style charade, my dear! Full-blown and with Chief Cassato in attendance…and a murderer.”

  “I thought we were doing Agatha Christie.”

  “What we are doing,” she said, and she put her arm around me and gave me a hug, “is a Borne Girls mystery, in our own inimitable style.”

  Jake popped in with “What style is that, Grandma?”

  “No one knows, dear. No one knows.”

  A Trash ‘n’ Treasures Tip

  Don’t bid immediately on the item you want, because the auctioneer often starts too high—wait for the bidding to come down. I know a woman who jumped the gun and bought a pair of ugly old drapes for fifty dollars. They’re in Mother’s bedroom.

  Chapter Twelve

  Ham and Eggs

  Before we continue, I should mention that Mother wrote an additional chapter, also labeled “Chapter Twelve,” which does not appear in this book. She is not happy with me, and I believe she feels that if enough complaints are registered with the publisher, her twelfth chapter (“Eggs-xamination”) might appear in some future edition. She is wrong.

  Instead of just calling the police, after finding the (fake) egg at St. Mary’s, I called and woke up Chief Cassato, and he arrived at the church shortly after the patrol car he’d dispatched. We went to the “cop shop,” as Mother insisted on calling it, which is to say the police station, and had a conversation with Tony in his office that lasted better than two hours. It covered everything we had learned and seen and done at St. Mary’s, and it encompassed as well Mother’s plan to hold what she insisted upon calling a “charade,” in which she would unveil the murderer.

  It took much wheedling on Mother’s part, and cajoling on mine, to get Tony to go along with the charade, and even more to get him to help organize it, the chief himself asking the participants to come at two P.M. to the home of the late Nastasya Petrova.

  Why he went along with us on this stunt, I’m not quite sure. I believe on the one hand, Tony was fond enough of me to put up with us and our scheme; and, on the other, he saw that Mother’s plan was just crazy enough (as the saying goes) to work. Also, should this not pan out as planned, Mother had promised the chief to “hang up” her “sleuthing togs” (whatever those were) and never intrude on his investigations again…which may simply have been too tempting for Tony to resist.

  Anyway, I’m skipping that scene. As indicated, I let Mother try to write it, but have made the executive decision to exclude her chapter because (a) it was seventy manuscript pages long, single-spaced, (b) perhaps sixty percent invention with Mother padding and rewriting her part, and (c) gave away all of the information you are about to learn in my chapter.

  When we returned home from the police station, not long after dawn, Mother insisted upon ensconcing herself in the music/library room to write (in longhand on a yellow pad) what she was now calling a play (entitled “Rotten Egg: How Louis Martinette Made a Switch and Got Himself and Several Others Murdered,” her longest title to date).

  This took perhaps three hours, during which time I napped on the living room couch nearby with Sushi curled to me, and after which I convinced Mother to get some sleep while I helped prepare for the show.

  Mother insisted on having refreshments served precurtain time—there would be no growling stomachs in her audience!—and I enlisted Ja
ke’s help in creating little bags of popcorn and making a big jug of lemonade. In part I was trying to keep my son busy, and a part of things, because I knew he was about to be very disappointed.

  We went through four bags of microwave popcorn, the smell of which drove Sushi mad, capering at our feet as if inflicted with St. Vitus’ Dance. At one point she scavenged an empty microwave popcorn bag, burrowed in for a stray kernel, and got the small bag stuck on her head. This was fairly amusing, and Jake laughed and laughed while I dreaded what I would soon have to do.

  As I sampled his lemonade with a wooden spoon, he watched in wide-eyed anticipation for my reaction. I gave him the thumbs up, though it was a little sweet for my taste, and asked him to load up the car with a cardboard box of the popcorn bags as well as his jug of lemonade.

  When he returned to the kitchen, all smiles, I broke it to him. “Sweetie, you have to stay and sit with Sushi.”

  “What! No way! I am in on this! I was at the church, and I helped find the egg, and—”

  “There will be a murderer present this afternoon. A killer who has caused, directly or indirectly, three deaths. I can’t in good conscience let you come along. I just can’t. Somebody would kill me, and it wouldn’t take much of a detective to figure out it was your father.”

  Five minutes of back and forth followed, but I won, after he pleaded his case to his grandmother only to have her (astoundingly) agree with me.

  “I do wish you could see my performance,” she said, “and I promise you a reenactment later. But your mother is right, Jake—this may be very dangerous.”

  “But the police will be there!”

  “So will the murderer. No. Anyway, we need someone to watch Sushi—she’s been very naughty lately when we’ve been away.”

  Around one o’clock, we arrived at the big old mansion, pulling up at the portico, where Clifford Ashland met us, opening the car door for Mother. As on our first visit here, he wore resort-style clothes, looking dapper in a brown jacket with darker brown elbow patches, off-white open-collar shirt, light tan slacks, and white deck shoes, sock-less. Again, I recalled the old swashbuckling British actor, Stewart Granger—handsome, mildly amused, vaguely aloof.

  “You’re the first to arrive,” he told Mother.

  Credit the guy for not commenting on Mother’s appearance—hair in curlers, she was wearing her pink fuzzy bathrobe and matching slippers, same as the night she’d gone to visit Mrs. Mulligan and had found a corpse. Her wardrobe for the play was in the backseat in a garment bag.

  “You’re very generous to provide this venue,” Mother said.

  He shrugged, smiled a little. “Chief Cassato told me it would help clear things up. And, at the very least, help the bidders who came to participate in the auction finally leave Serenity.”

  I was coming around to open the trunk. “You’re very kind to put up with this…and us.”

  “Can I give you a hand?”

  “That’d be nice.”

  I was already getting Mother’s cardboard replica of the church out of the trunk; there was a little box with her game pieces in it, as well.

  “Good Lord, what’s this?” Ashland asked, half smiling but obviously somewhat aghast as he regarded Mother’s masterwork.

  “A little show-and-tell for Mother,” I whispered. “Please don’t mind her.”

  Between Mother’s props and the refreshments, it took several trips, even with our host’s help.

  “I’m sorry the house is so musty,” he said in the kitchen, helping me with the cardboard box of popcorn bags and Jake’s big jug of lemonade, which went into the refrigerator. “It’s been closed up all week.”

  “What are your plans for the place?”

  “I hope to restore it, maybe to live here at least for a while, perhaps eventually to make a museum out of it. Beyond that stupid egg, my aunt had a lot of interesting artifacts from Russia and the early days in Serenity.”

  “Chief Cassato filled you in…?”

  Ashland nodded, leaned against the counter, a hand casually on a hip. “Hell of a shock to find out that that egg is a fake. I wonder who the phony belongs to, anyway?”

  “That’s a legal issue, I guess. Maybe to you.”

  “Be a nice exhibit for the museum, if I could make that happen.” He nodded toward the popcorn bags. “You know, if I’d known you wanted refreshments, I could have—”

  “No! You’ve done enough. That’s just Mother’s eccentricity. I learn to pick my battles with her, and little stuff like this…? I just give her.”

  Speaking of which, my next job was to arrange the seating, complete with cards attached to the back indicating where each suspect, that is, guest was to sit. The play or charade or show or whatever Mother was calling it at any given moment would take place in the parlor, where everything had begun. Wooden folding chairs that Ashland had led me to, in a closet off the kitchen, were arranged in a single fanned-out row, putting the unlighted fireplace at Mother’s back.

  A card table we’d brought with us was home to her cardboard masterpiece of the church. The replica had needed minor repairs just before we left, because Sushi had eaten the little boxes representing the pulpit and lectern, as Mother hadn’t taken the cereal out of them.

  Mother’s audience would be seated, left to right facing la Diva: Don Kaufman (Forbes family rep), Katherine Estherhaus (Christie’s), John Richards (Sotheby’s), Sergei Ivanov (collector), Samuel Woods (American Mid-West Magazine publisher), and Madeline Pierce (church secretary). Chief Cassato, when he got here, would take one of the chairs or sofas in the Victorian chamber, with its religious icons and framed photo of Tsar Alexander and his ill-fated clan.

  I set up a second table for the bags of popcorn and disposable cups of lemonade, very low-end hors d’oeuvres for so grand if gloomy a parlor.

  Tony arrived at a quarter till two, and two uniformed officers were with him, positioned outside. He wasn’t wearing a sport coat, his short-sleeve white shirt cut by the leather of his shoulder holster, .38 pistol butt jutting threateningly from under his left arm. I wondered if that was to give him easier access, should he need it, or just tell any murderers present that he meant business.

  Whichever, I didn’t ask.

  I went up to him and said, rather timidly, “Thank you for this.”

  “I can’t believe I’m doing it,” he said, and rolled his eyes. “She just wore me down, finally.”

  He meant Mother, of course.

  “I’ve been there,” I said.

  The house was indeed musty and I opened a few windows, then went outside to get some fresh air. I saw the various bidders arrive, with Estherhaus, Richards, Kaufman, and Ivanov showing up in a shared rental Lexus, and Woods in a BMW that was presumably his own, judging by the Illinois license plate, anyway. Dowdy Madeline Pierce arrived in an old Chevy and a bad mood.

  The bidders were rather informally dressed, much as they’d been at Ivanov’s birthday party out at the mall, and looked bone-weary, to a man and woman. Their collective visit to Serenity had not gone as advertised. Soon they were in their seats, with everyone partaking of Jake’s lemonade but only the Russian chowing down on the popcorn. I had a chair near where Mother would be standing, my back to the fireplace as I faced the single-row audience. Over at the left, the chief and Ashland were seated on a horsehair sofa.

  At precisely two P.M., the parlor doors swung open, and Mother, wearing her favorite emerald-green pants suit, her hair beautifully coiffed, swept in. She had even worn a pair of pink-framed eyeglasses with occasional rhinestone touches that were just a little too garish for Dame Edna Everage.

  She had wanted me to clap, and prime the pump, because after all, applauding is what one does when the star first comes on stage. But I’d told her no way, and she hadn’t pushed the issue.

  “I would like to thank all of you for attending,” she said regally.

  She was not working from her script; she’d spent an hour memorizing it. I had her yellow pad to refer to,
however.

  “I know it’s an imposition,” she continued, “but I promise you it will be a worthwhile expenditure of your valuable time. Chief Cassato, thank you—Mr. Ashland, our gracious and generous host, my sincere thanks.”

  Ashland nodded. Tony sat stone-faced.

  “You’re very welcome, gentlemen,” Mother said. Actually, the two hadn’t thanked her, but they weren’t aware there was a script to stick to, and that they’d missed their lines.

  From where I sat, I had a good view of the audience, and their expressions ranged from dumbfounded to horrified—why in the hell had the local chief of police asked them to come and be subjected to this nonsense? As for me, whenever Mother goes into full-throttle performance-art mode, I am no longer embarrassed, rather viewing her antics as free entertainment, and taking a perverse pleasure watching her victims squirm.

  Mother began: “Act One, Scene One. The time is nineteen ninety-two. The place, Nastasya Petrova’s parlor—this very room.”

  Maybe I should have handed out programs….

  “Our host, Clifford Ashland, was not yet the successful broker we’ve come to know—he was, in fact, a used car salesman, considered by his aunt…with my apologies, sir…as something of an underachiever in business, and rather a loose cannon in his personal life. Do I overstate?”

  With a trace of a smile, his voice filling the parlor, Ashland said, “No. You’re quite correct, Mrs. Borne. I was fairly wild as a young man.”

  “At any rate, Clifford suggested to his weathy aunt that she have her one-of-a-kind Fabergé egg appraised for insurance purposes. He made contact with Louis Martinette of Chicago, Illinois, a specialist in the works of the House of Fabergé, to come and view the egg. I have a feeling that Mr. Martinette may have been a member of the Russian Orthodox Church—is that correct, Mr. Ashland?”

  “It is,” he said. “Very perceptive, Mrs. Borne. My aunt wouldn’t have given her trust over to just anyone.”

  “Unfortunately for you both, Martinette should not have been trusted. Martinette told both Madam Petrova and her nephew that he needed considerable time to authenticate the egg, and was allowed to take it back with him to Chicago for that purpose. His real purpose, however, was to have a copy made, to create a counterfeit egg that would fool the untrained eye. So—years ago—Madam Petrova placed that false egg in the wall safe in this very room, where it stayed, until my daughter and I…in Act One, Scene Two…convinced the generous mistress of this house to put it up for auction, for charity.”