Killer Keepsakes

by Jane K. Cleland

  First thing, I brought in the newspaper the delivery person had tossed on the front stoop. Wes’s headline blared with innuendo, as usual:

  APB ISSUED FOR MURDER APT OWNER:

  HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN—GRETCHEN BROCK?

  The article’s overall tone was more restrained than most of his work, and my name only appeared twice, first in paragraph three, mentioning that I was Gretchen’s boss, and once in paragraph eight, referring to me as an antiques expert. Somehow Wes had acquired a photo of Gretchen’s vase. The caption stated that the police planned on asking me to examine it after their lab had finished its forensic work.

  Later, I made my mother’s fancy Raspberry Chicken Roll and we watched Sea of Love, one of my favorite old movies.

  While I was setting the table for dinner, the phone rang, and Ty went into his den to answer it. When he came back, he reported, “Vince Collins is, by all accounts, a bad guy.”

  I met his gaze and waited for the details.

  “Here’s what I’ve learned: Collins works for a residential real estate development company that’s doing well. He’s a project manager. From all reports, he’s a real hard-ass to work for. He believes in management by choking. No, really,” he said, reacting to my startled look of inquiry. “No charges were filed because the guy he choked quit. In fact, he’s left the state.” He shrugged. “Moving along, it seems that the police are keeping close tabs on Vince, and he knows it. There have been a couple of altercations—shouting only—in which he’s challenged the officers tailing him to justify their actions.”

  I laughed. “I love your diction,” I said.

  He smiled. “Vince is on probation, so I’m betting he won’t do anything beyond shouting, if you get my drift.”

  I found his common sense persuasive, but I was still worried about Mandy. I had an edgy, amorphous feeling that she knew something about Gretchen and was afraid to tell—something we needed to know.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  M

  onday morning, I woke up more worried than when I’d fallen asleep and more convinced than ever that Mandy was key. She knew something. It was like having an itch I couldn’t scratch—frustrating, all-consuming, and irritating.

  I drove straight to her apartment to try to persuade her to confide in me.

  It was sunny and cool, with a hint of hoarfrost shimmering on the lawn and a chill in the air, but I could tell it would warm up by afternoon.

  Vince’s Jeep wasn’t there, but a silver Honda was. I parked under the willow tree, ran up the front steps, and rang the bell. I heard it chime, but no one came to the door. I rang again. Still no answer. Sounds of water running came from somewhere to the left. I stepped around the corner of the building.

  Mandy stood with her back to me, watering flowers. I called to her, and she whip-turned, startled.

  “Oh, hi, Josie,” she said. “Did you ring the bell? Sorry, I didn’t hear it.”

  “I’m sorry to bug you. Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  She laid down the hose and led the way across the small patch of lawn and tiny garden into the mudroom. Mandy wiped her feet on the rough coir mat, then sat on the built-in storage box to exchange her bright yellow rubber boots for slippers.

  As I waited, I glanced up, saw the light fixture, and nearly fainted. The light fixture I was staring at was a match for the one in Gretchen’s hall—a hand-painted Dutch scene with tulips and a windmill.

  I’d noticed Gretchen’s light fixture the first time I was in her apartment—when Meryl and I discovered the corpse. Yet when I’d returned with Detective Brownley specifically to collect any object that might be traceable, I’d missed it. I could have kicked myself, I felt so stupid.

  Mandy stood up, ready to enter the kitchen.

  “That’s beautiful,” I said, pointing to the fixture.

  “Thanks. Vince got it for me last month. I love it.”

  “Is it an antique?” I asked.

  “I think so.”

  I waited until Mandy served us coffee and we were settled at the kitchen table to speak.

  “I’m worried about you.” I aimed for a soothing tone. “I think you know something about Gretchen or the dead man, and I think you’re afraid to tell. I want to help you manage the situation.”

  Mandy looked away and tucked her hair behind her ear. I couldn’t read her expression at all. “Thank you, Josie, but you’re wrong.”

  “I promise you that I will do everything I can to protect you from whatever danger you might be in.”

  She shook her head. “I was just upset about that reporter. Vince and I talked about it. He’s going to call him, so I don’t have to.” She tried to smile, but it was a pretty feeble effort. “Vince will take care of it.”

  “It wasn’t just the reporter. There’s something else.”

  She shook her head.

  “If you change your mind about telling, you can always come to me,” I added.

  “You’re wrong,” she repeated. She stood up. “I’m sorry, but I have to get ready for work.”

  Outside, a soft breeze had kicked up, and shadows from the willow tree danced on the hood of my car. I called Detective Brownley. As soon as I got to the part about the light fixture that matched the one in Gretchen’s hallway, she interrupted me.

  “Couldn’t it be a coincidence?” she asked.

  “No way are they stock items. They’re hand-painted and probably antiques. I feel so stupid for having missed it before.”

  She thanked me, told me she’d check into it, and hung up before I could ask her to let me know what she’d learned.

  As I drove toward my building, I had a thought. If I wanted to buy an antique light fixture, I knew where I would go—Phil’s Barn, known for carrying high-quality architectural artifacts.

  Phil’s Barn was accessed from a small dirt road about half a mile off of Oak Street in Exeter, a pretty drive through a traditional New England town. As I crossed over the Squamscott River on High Street, then turned onto Oak, the forest closed in on either side. It felt like a movie set. I could have been a million miles away from civilization. I turned into Phil’s gravel-strewn yard and saw Phil standing with his hands on his hips, his head tilted back, gesturing as he talked to someone on the roof.

  I parked off to the side. A young man with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth hoisted a section of wrought-iron fencing into the back of a brown pickup. Another man, this one middle-aged and fat, rolled an old carriage wheel toward his SUV. At Phil’s Barn, commerce started early and continued steady all day.

  “Did you check the valley flashing?” Phil called, pointing to the metal gully that ran from the peak to the gutter.

  “Doing it now,” the voice shouted back.

  “Hey, Josie,” Phil said as I walked up to join him. “I got a leak. Damn thing. Can’t find it.”

  “I hate leaks.”

  “Damn straight.” He shrugged. “Glad you stopped by. I was going to be calling you. I’ve got a dozen glass doorknobs on brass shanks. Five pair are green glass, one’s lavender, four are clear, and two are black. I set aside the chipped ones. All these are in excellent condition.”

  Glass doorknobs were popular items, hard to find in unchipped and nonrusty condition. At the tag sale, we’d always price them at fifty dollars or more a set.

  “You are a source of wonder and awe, Phil! You must have quite a supply chain going. First the locks and now the knobs.”

  “Thanks. I do okay. Sorry about not getting you the knobs last week. I’ve been out sick for a couple of days.” He exploded into a coughing fit that lasted several seconds. “Damn cough—my wife has been pestering me to stay home to try and shake it off.”

  “Maybe she’s right—you sound bad. You feel all right?”

  “ ’Bout the same. You know that old adage about it taking a week to get over a cold if you stay in bed, but if you go into work, it takes seven days? Seems true in my case.”

  I laughed. “You’re on
what, day five?”

  “Exactly right. The doorknobs came in last Wednesday, just after I went home for lunch and my wife chained me to the bed.”

  I laughed again; then we talked price. At a guess, Phil had paid no more than thirteen or fourteen dollars a set, so my offer of seventeen dollars per pair represented a nifty profit for him for his few minutes’ work examining their condition. We shook on it, and the deal was done.

  “They’re inside.” He lifted his head and called to the man on the roof, still crab-walking along the flashing. “Don’t come down ‘til you find that damn leak.”

  I followed him across the old barn to a worktable on the left. As we walked, I asked, “You expecting more salvage pieces?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me. There’s a lot of construction going on hereabouts.”

  “You have any light fixtures? Something hand-painted, maybe?”

  “Nope, nothing like you might have in mind. Just eighties trash.”

  “You get anything, you call me, okay?”

  “You bet.”

  The doorknobs were layered with generations of grime, but they were in good condition.

  “As described,” I acknowledged. “I’ll pack them up.”

  Another customer called to Phil.

  “See ya, Josie,” Phil said and started off toward the front.

  Using supplies I kept in the trunk of my car, I individually wrapped each knob in bubble wrap and placed them in a sturdy cardboard box. As I worked, I looked around. Phil’s inventory was basically unchanged from my last visit. He had almost no small items, but he had plenty of large objects. I spotted a windmill, in pieces; two weather vanes; shelves of broken appliances, mostly sold for parts; layers of Oriental rugs, some rare and in extraordinary condition; and miscellaneous used furniture stacked partway up the back wall.

  I drove to the ocean, crossed the sandy scrub brush onto the beach, and approached the surf. The ocean was calm. White froth licked at my boots as the tide washed in.

  I wanted to try to come up with new tactics to find Gretchen. I had no new information. There were only three options that I could see to account for her disappearance: She was voluntarily absent; she was being held somewhere under duress; or she’d been whisked away by the U.S. Marshals. I stared out over the water.

  Close to shore, the ocean was cobalt blue. Farther out, it turned bottle green. Farther still, the water appeared black.

  Wes said she got a new Social Security number seven years ago.

  How? I wondered. Of course, if she was in the witness protection program, everything was provided for her, but what if she wasn’t under government oversight, if she was, as Wes suggested, on the run for some reason? In this age of terrorism and ID theft, surely it couldn’t be easy to sign up for a new Social Security card.

  Then I thought of a way Gretchen might have gotten her new ID. I ran across the beach to my car and was on my way to work in nothing flat.

  I arrived about ten thirty and greeted everyone in a hurry. As soon as my computer booted up, I Googled “City Clerk” and “Welton, Massachusetts,” my hometown. The first listing gave me the phone number.

  “Welton City Clerk’s office, may I help you?”

  “I lost my birth certificate,” I said. “How can I get a replacement?”

  “Easy as pie! Send us a letter listing your date of birth, your parents’ names, and a check or money order for ten dollars.”

  “That’s it?” I asked, astonished.

  “That’s it,” the woman confirmed.

  It’s frighteningly simple, I realized. Anyone can do it for any reason. All you’d have to do is canvass graveyards until you find someone born about the same time as you who died in infancy and do a little research to discover his or her parents’ names. Even if a child had been issued a Social Security number before he or she died, the plan would work—you’d get either a new number or a replacement card for a number that hadn’t been used in years.

  I tried a search for “Gretchen Brock” and “obituaries” and got a few hits, all recent. If the Gretchen Brock whose identity she adopted had died before newspapers archived their issues online, finding the obit would require as much luck as science.

  Another idea, another dead end.

  I glanced at the clock and wondered when I could expect to hear from Serena about the Sidlawn Fencing Company belt buckle. I decided to wait until late afternoon. Instead, I picked up the photograph showing Gretchen’s vase’s marks.

  I’d reached a stumbling block when I hadn’t been able to locate Percy Oliver Johns’s inventory of decorative items in St. James’s Palace. I wondered whether I should keep trying or continue Sasha’s efforts to discover whether Faring Auctions was still in business.

  If the note we found in Gretchen’s envelope was accurate, sixty years had passed since the vase had been purchased, and finding someone who remembered selling a certain vase back in the 1940s—even a special one like the Meissen—was unlikely in the extreme. My best hope lay in finding archived notes. While most professionals are loath to include details that can’t be proven in a written appraisal, they’re equally unlikely to throw their research notes away. In fact, many organizations keep original or computerized records of appraisal notes archived forever. It was a long shot, for sure, but I’d discovered over the years that sometimes long shots paid off.

  I visited the Web sites of the Cheyenne Chamber of Commerce, the Wyoming Better Business Bureau, and the Wyoming State Historical Society. At each site, I looked up the Faring auction house. I’d follow up with phone calls just to be sure, but from the online evidence, it seemed that Faring Auctions wasn’t a member of the chamber of commerce and no complaints had been filed against it with the Better Business Bureau. On the Wyoming State Historical Society site, despite learning that the society hadn’t been established until 1953, I found my first evidence that Faring Auctions had existed.

  When I entered “Faring Auctions” in the Web site’s search bar, I got two hits, both from scholarly articles. One of them, from a Washington, D.C.–based university journal dated 1939, referred to Faring’s track record as a purveyor of Native American crafts, and the second, from an art magazine in the 1940s, described a specific item that had been sold in 1942, a folk art painting by a little-known artist.

  I jotted down the three organizations’ contact information and got ready to work the phone. From the Cheyenne yellow pages, under the category “Antiques, Dealers,” I selected three businesses to query. It’s hard to gauge substance from ads, but all three appeared to be well-established firms.

  At noon, 9:00 A.M. on the West Coast, I began making my phone calls. I struck out at the Better Business Bureau. The historical society also had no record of the auction house, but unless it had been located in a landmark building or owned by a founding family or something of that nature, the absence of information about it didn’t indicate anything one way or the other. At the chamber of commerce, I finally got some information—but it wasn’t easy.

  The friendly woman who answered the phone had trouble understanding why I was calling but was game to figure it out. From her perspective, if I didn’t want to join the chamber, reach a current member, attend a function, buy a raffle ticket, sell something, or contact an employee—why was I calling? Finally she gave up and connected me to Wilma, the member services representative.

  “I’m trying to locate information about a company that operated in Cheyenne in the 1940s called Faring Auctions,” I explained. “I don’t think they’re still in business, but—”

  “And you want to know if they’ve ever been a member, right?” Wilma asked, reading my mind and breaking in.

  “Yes, and if so, when they dropped out.”

  “I’ve never heard of Faring Auctions,” Wilma said, “and I’ve been here almost six years. Let me check a directory from before then. Hold on a sec.” Less than a minute later she was back. “I checked the 1999, 2000, and 2001 directories—no Faring. How far back do you w
ant to go?”

  “Could we go back to 1949?” I asked, thinking that it would be great to get a benchmark. According to the note, that was the year the Meissen vase had been purchased. Surely Faring Auctions existed then, and most likely it had been a member of the chamber.

  “For that I need to go to the executive director’s office. She has a complete set of membership directories on her shelves. Do you want to hold or do you want me to call you back?”

  I asked to hold, clicked over to the speakerphone function so I could have my hands free while I waited, and turned my attention back to ways to research the vase’s provenance.

  “Faring Auctions is listed in the 1949 directory,” Wilma told me, sounding as pleased as if she’d found a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk. She chuckled. “I deputized the executive director’s assistant to help. She started with the recent directories and I started with the old ones, and we had a race. I won. Their last mention was in 1969.”

  “Wilma, you are sharp as a tack and bright as a star,” I said, quoting one of my mother’s favorite compliments. To merit that accolade you had to both show initiative and do well. “When is the directory published?” I asked. “How far in advance?”

  Again Wilma read my mind. “They would have had to renew their membership by the end of July 1968. Back then, that was the closing date for the next year’s directory.” She laughed. “I remember because we only changed it to October a couple of years ago when our printer went completely digital, and as you might imagine, a change that major created quite a stir. In any event, to be fair, I ought to mention that Faring Auctions might still be in business,” she said with another chuckle. “Hard to believe, but some companies do drop their memberships.”

  Wilma agreed to photocopy the 1969 directory entry and fax it to me. We ended our conversation by comparing weather notes. When I told her I’d seen crocuses, she was amazed, reporting that she wouldn’t expect to see them for a month or more. I added her to my online address book. If I ever went to Cheyenne, I’d definitely look her up.