Silent Auction

by Jane K. Cleland

  He made them himself, I thought.

  “Once we get the production solid, I’ll be branching out into other designs—traditional scrimshaw stuff just like this one … you know … ships and compasses, that sort of thing,” he said.

  Like the design elements he copied from the Myrick tooth he showed Eric, I speculated silently. “Great,” I replied, keeping my tone casual. “Did you get the scrimming machine from Lenny Wilton?”

  “I don’t know any Lennys. I use another guy’s machine. I’m his helper, you know?” He winked again when he spoke the word “helper,” as if something about him being an apprentice or an assistant was funny. “But don’t you worry about anything. I’m your contact—and I guarantee I’ll do right by you. How many are you thinking of getting?”

  “How much are they?”

  “A hundred twenty a dozen, ten bucks each.”

  That wasn’t a bad price—even if the material was resin, we could sell them for twenty-nine dollars each, close to the three-to-one markup ratio I try to maintain.

  “I’ll need to examine the materials,” I said. “Can you tell me anything about them?”

  “No can do. I’m not the materials buyer. I’m production. You buy them, you can authenticate all you want!” Another wink.

  “I’ll take three now from different lots, do my testing, and let you know how it works out—but I’m only interested if the design is centered and clean.”

  “You got it!” Curt said.

  He seemed so excited at having landed a sale, I wondered if I was his first customer.

  “Have you sold a lot of them?” I asked.

  “Not so far.” Yet another wink. “But I will.”

  I handed over the cash, packed up the three buckles, and said, “See ya!”

  I watched as Curt reentered the police station, then crossed Ocean Avenue and climbed the soft sand to the top of the dune, glad to stretch my legs and extra glad to get away from him. Rather than risk being seen or overheard talking to Chief Hunter while Curt or Greg was in or around the lobby, I called him. I got his voice mail.

  “Well, I was wrong. Curt wasn’t selling the same cufflinks as Sam, so I couldn’t ask him about his source. A good idea, but no soap. Curt had scrimmed belt buckles, though, which I suspect he made himself. He said he plans on expanding his offerings. In any event, I bought three to test them. I’m going to run inside now and give it a whirl.”

  I crossed the street and stepped inside the police station. Neither Greg nor Curt was in sight. When I explained to Cathy what I wanted to do, she called Chief Hunter to pass on the message that he should listen to his voice mail and that I was waiting for permission to use the lunchroom for more testing. His okay was immediate. It took me ten minutes to confirm that the materials were either identical or similar to the ivory and silver used in the cufflinks. Using Chief Hunter’s parlance, they were “real.”

  I left the information with Cathy, then returned to the beach. Knife-sharp tension had tightened my neck and shoulder muscles, and I willed myself to relax.

  I watched the tide lick barnacle-covered stones, then slip away, in and out, in and out, and as I did, I felt my breathing slow to match the calm and steady rhythm of the sea. The ocean was smooth, like satin, and dark blue, like a midnight sky in summer. No one was around. No boats or ships were in sight. I looked north toward the Rocky Point jetty. Mica sparkled in the granite like sequins on a gown. Waves lapped the edges. I raised and lowered my shoulders and felt the rock-hard tension ease a bit. At the shoreline, I saw tiny pricks—air holes. Clams and mussels had burrowed in the sand.

  A memory came to me—clamming for littlenecks with my dad at Nantasket Beach. I’d been about eight. It was early on the Saturday before Labor Day, maybe seven or seven thirty in the morning, and the beach was empty. My mom was at home baking cookies for our last weekend at the beach house before school started while my dad and I walked the hard-packed sand near the surf line. It was cloudy and cool. My dad carried the pitchfork and a bucket half full of ocean water. My job was running ahead seeking out air holes. At every sighting, he’d unearth the clams, and I’d toss them into the bucket. When we figured we had enough, we brought them home, and my mom rinsed them over and over and over again.

  After they were clean of sand and grit, she placed them in aluminum foil packets filled with a luscious mixture of butter, garlic, vermouth, parsley, and white wine, a recipe of her own invention—Summer Clams, she’d called it. She’d seal them up, and we’d sit on the patio sipping sweet ice tea and talking about everything under the sun as those packets of clams simmered on the grill, and to this day, I found it hard to imagine that life could get any better than that.

  I’d asked about clamming in Rocky Point just after I moved to New Hampshire, and I’d been told that it had been twenty years or more since clamming had been allowed. It made me feel old.

  Ty would be on the road, somewhere north of Augusta, Maine, and if all was on schedule, he was only a few hours away from home. I called him.

  “Josie!” he said, happiness rippling in his voice. “I’m so tired of driving, I can’t even tell you.”

  “Tell me you can stay close to home next week.”

  “I can stay close to home next week.”

  “Excellent!”

  “Yeah. I’ll be in Portsmouth three days and Laconia two. So what’s happening?” he asked.

  I told Ty about Eric spotting the tooth in Curt’s car, and about my buying Sam’s cufflinks and Curt’s belt buckles and analyzing the materials for Chief Hunter, then said, “Nothing makes sense. If you were still chief, what would you do?”

  “When nothing makes sense, all you can do is keep talking to people and looking under rocks,” he said.

  “Which must be why Chief Hunter is bringing everyone back in for more questioning. Does it work?” I asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “What do you do if it doesn’t?”

  “Think of more questions to ask or more people to talk to or more rocks to look under.”

  Far out to sea, lines of white marked the windbreak. The ocean had been dead calm only moments earlier, but now the eastern breeze was churning up froth.

  “Hurry home,” I said. “An east wind is blowing.”

  “You’re standing on a tall dune watching whitecaps in the distance?”

  “You are an all-seeing wonder man.”

  “About time you noticed.”

  “Ha. As if. I’ve known that about you forever.”

  “You’re my wonder woman.”

  I smiled, tickled pink at his compliment. “What do you want for dinner?”

  “Half a cow.”

  “Done.”

  After we hung up, I stayed on the dune awhile longer listening to the surf, thinking about Myrick teeth, and Winslow Homer etchings, and Curt Grimes.

  Had Curt lied when he said he didn’t know Lenny, that he used another guy’s scrimming machine to make the belt buckles? Was Curt the brains behind what ever scheme was going on? No way, I thought. Curt couldn’t find his way out of a paper bag without instructions. Curt barely knew scrimshaw from Scrimshank. He was learning the novelty business, but he was a small-time operator with the merchan-053-42980_ch01_4P.indd 218 2/20/10 12:12 AMdizing sense of a lizard. He darted here and there, to Prescott’s and other shops up and down the coast, hoping to nail a buyer or two, the way a gecko hunts for insects. Unlike Curt’s business strategy—selling inferior goods from the trunk of his car—this plan featured high-quality objects sold from a reputable gallery.

  Could Sam be the power behind the ploy? He seemed smart and savvy—and Greg said he’d bought the tooth from Sam. I shook my head. I just didn’t believe it. Sam was an itinerant merchant, not a manufacturer.

  If neither Curt nor Sam was running the show, who was? It had to be someone smart and knowledgeable and confident.

  Someone like Lenny, I realized, appalled at the thought.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

&nbs
p; I called Wes.

  “Curt is involved in wholesaling repros and modern scrimmed objects,” I explained, filling him in about Curt’s offerings.

  “Did you get any photos?” Wes asked.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head at his audacity.

  He sighed heavily, letting me know how disappointed he was in me, then said, “I have a source telling me that Curt stole the Myrick tooth.”

  My heart fell, then jumped. I crossed my fingers, hoping Eric’s name was being kept out of the reports. “Really?” I asked with assumed insouciance.

  “Yup. Apparently, he returned it, so I guess it’s more correct to say he borrowed it.”

  “Do you know for sure he returned it?”

  “Didn’t he?” Wes asked, hoping for a scoop.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he returned a repro.”

  “Good one, Josie.”

  “I’m not saying he did.”

  “Gotcha. Either way, he’s a crook.”

  “An alleged crook.”

  “Yeah, yeah. So tell me—what do his belt buckles have to do with Frankie’s murder?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What do you think?”

  I watched the tide sweep into shore for a moment, then replied, “There’s a lot of buying and selling going on—maybe everything is on the up-and-up, but I wonder. Not to state the obvious, but Frankie was killed for a reason.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out about Curt’s business dealings.”

  “Good. There’s someone else I’m hoping you’ll check out, too—Lenny Wilton.”

  “Why?”

  I couldn’t think of how to express the vague worry teasing me. While I had no reason to suspect Lenny of either fraud or murder, neither had I any reason not to. It was shockingly easy to come up with credible and damning scenarios.

  Lenny could have set Curt up in business. He might well be the cufflink scrimshander, too. Without question, he could have scrimmed a good-enough fake Myrick to fool anyone conducting as cursory an examination as Ashley’s.

  I took in a breath, considering how fraud could have led to murder. What if Curt told Frankie what he and Lenny were up to—I could see him bragging, “I’m a player, hanging with the big boys … It’s easy money … I take one tooth out and slip another one in … and no one’s the wiser,” wink, wink. Frankie might have been outraged and determined to protect his employer. If he threatened them with exposure, one or the other of them might have killed Frankie to keep him from spilling the beans.

  I shook my head. It was easy to make stuff up, but my conjectures bore no known relationship to fact. Lenny was disciplined and self-contained, and from what I could tell, he was a nice guy and a straight shooter. It took quite a leap of imagination to suggest that Lenny was involved in anything duplicitous, and an even bigger leap to think that he might have killed Frankie. Still, what harm can it do for Wes to check? I asked myself.

  “I don’t have any reason to suspect Lenny,” I replied. “So check just ’cause, okay?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “His alibi, if he has one, and his financial standing.”

  “Okeydokey. So,” he said, clearing his throat, “thanks, Josie, for calling about Curt. I got some great photos. And an even better quote. ‘Frankie was my best friend,’ he told me.”

  “Good,” I said. “What do you do now?”

  “Write my lead for tomorrow’s newspaper article,” he said. “I’ve already done the headline: ‘Alleged Thief Questioned in Winterelli Murder.’”

  “Yikes,” I said. “That’s pretty strong stuff.”

  “Thanks,” Wes said, then ended the call with a cheery “Talk later!”

  I watched the tide for a while longer, then sidestepped down the dune, ready to head to Portsmouth.

  Fred called as I walked down Penhallow toward Bow Street. I’d left my car in an open lot about ten blocks away, so I could try to ease the constricting pressure in my back by stretching my legs.

  “I can confirm the bad news,” Fred said. “The Janice Walker basket purse is new. The design was introduced last summer, so it’s not even one of her early pieces—not that a designer with only a few years under her belt has ‘early pieces,’ exactly.”

  “And no family weavers in her past.”

  “Nada.”

  “Okay, then,” I said. “That’s that.”

  “Sasha wants to talk to you. She has news about the Homer.”

  He passed her the phone. “Homer didn’t use an échoppe,” Sasha said. “Or if he did, I can’t find evidence of it.”

  “Was he open about his work habits?” I asked.

  “Sort of. He was pretty private in his personal life, but he didn’t refuse to talk about his work or anything. Also,” she said, her concern evident in her tone, “there’s no record of this etching. No prior sales, no current offerings. It’s as if it’s a one-off.”

  “Maybe it is,” I suggested. “It’s possible he hated it and destroyed the plate.”

  “That’s theoretically possible, of course, but it’s not likely. First of all, I would expect there to be more than one extant etching—this one isn’t marked as an artist’s proof. Second, if anyone knew about his decision to destroy the plate, someone would have commented on it as a novel event in the artist’s life if nothing else. The printer, the printer’s apprentice, another artist—someone. I’ve checked academic research and dissertations, recent sales, exhibition essays, and catalogues for past and upcoming auctions, and I can’t find any hint that this etching even exists, let alone that it comes with a dramatic history like a destroyed plate.”

  I took in air. “What about the artistic style?”

  “Homer didn’t use dark border lines, but other than that, there’s nothing to indicate that it’s not an original.”

  Myrick didn’t use highlight lines either, I thought.

  “Anything on the materials?”

  “The paper and ink appear period-appropriate, but of course, if we decide to proceed, we’ll need to test them.”

  “What do you think we should do at this point?” I asked.

  She paused. “I know you don’t want word to get out—but I think we need more information. I’d like to call Dr. Swann.”

  Dr. Milton Swann was a world-renowned Homer expert based in Boston. “I trust your instincts, Sasha, and if your gut is telling you there’s something wrong, we should find out about it sooner rather than later. So yes, by all means, call him. On a confidential basis, of course.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  I heard the relief in her voice, and I understood: We shared a sense that something was very rotten in the state of Denmark.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Standing across the street from the Blue Dolphin, I counted five reporters by the front door, Bertie included.

  A middle-aged man with wavy hair wearing a gray pin-stripe suit and a red tie recognized me. I knew him from an interview he’d conducted on fun summer activities in the seacoast region—my tag sale had made his list. He was a reporter from a Manchester TV station.

  “Josie,” he called. “Does your meeting with the Whitestones have anything to do with Frankie’s murder?”

  A young woman with short blond hair wiggled in front of him. “Hi, Josie! I’m with Antiques Insights. Can you describe the decor inside Rocky Point Light? Throw me a couple of adjectives, will you? Is it eclectic? Masculine? Earthy?”

  Bertie bounded across the street, smiling broadly, aiming her recorder at me like a conductor’s baton. “Congratulations on breaking the story that Curt Grimes stole the Myrick tooth, Josie. That’s quite a coup. How’d you do it?”

  I took in a deep-to-my-toes breath, wondering whether she had a separate source or was following Wes’s lead, then crossed the street, ignoring them all. They followed me, jostling for position, hemming me in. My heart pounded against my ribs, but I stared straight ahead and kept walking. I made it, and opened the heavy
oak door. Inside, I stood until my throbbing pulse quieted.

  “Josie,” Frieda, the hostess, said, returning from seating some patrons. “Mr. Whitestone told me you’d be joining them.”

  At her words, all thoughts of encroaching reporters vanished. I was pleased that Guy was there. I’d been looking forward to telling Maddie about his great find with the ship’s bell, but it would be even more fun telling him directly.

  Stepping inside the Blue Dolphin was like going back in time two hundred years. The walls were mellowed brick. The ceilings were low. The lighting was muted. Bulbs designed to look like candles twinkled in glass sconces. The flooring, ancient oak planks, had been polished to a golden sheen. Tables in the dining room were covered with crisp white linen. Silver gleamed. Crystal sparkled.

  In the lounge, glass covered the mahogany tabletops. The walls were painted hunter green. Jimmy, the redheaded bartender who’d worked there forever, waved and called hello as I entered.

  I liked everything about the place; it had become a kind of home away from home for me, a safe haven where I could always be sure of a warm welcome and friendly chitchat.

  Frieda led me to the Whitestones’ table, a four-top tucked in a bay window enclosure in the back of the lounge. Guy stood to hold my chair as I approached.

  Men with courtly manners always reminded me of my father. My dad had routinely opened doors, held chairs, and stood when my mother or I arrived at or left a table or a room, and after an eve ning out, he thanked us for a lovely time. It had been a shock to begin dating and discover that almost none of the boys and men I’d met knew or cared about that sort of thing. Guy did, and it put a smile on my face.

  I thanked him, greeted Maddie, then turned back to Guy. “I’d say welcome back, except that isn’t exactly what I mean.”

  Freida placed a menu in front of me, saying, “In case you feel like a little something,” then slipped away with professional discretion.

  “Maddie’s been telling me how stressful it’s been for her. I’m sure it’s been tough for you, too,” he said, his baritone resonating with an orator’s confidence. “Do you have any news? Are the police getting any closer to an arrest?”