Treasure in Exile (Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series, #5)

by Hubbard, S. W.

  My new partner leans across the table and lowers his voice. “Then Levi goes, ‘Have you told Dennis about this? What’d he say?’ Like he’s worried.”

  Henry shakes his head. “I told Levi I don’t need to be askin’ permission from some kid about how to run my business. What’s gotten into that man?”

  “My father says Levi’s under some pressure. Not everyone likes the way he’s running the Parks Center.”

  “Hmmm. Levi doesn’t like to rock the boat. He’s nothin’ like his old man. I guess you’re too young to remember Levi Senior.” Henry jumps up. “What a preacher! He knew how to make a crowd roar. Renounce Satan! A-men! Ride the school bus to the white school! A-men!” Henry’s eyes shine with the memory. Then he kicks the worn linoleum with his steel-toe boot. “It’s not easy to be the son of a great man. Always livin’ in a shadow.”

  “I guess Dennis seems more like Levi Senior to some people.”

  “Ha! Dennis has the shoutin’ down, that’s for sure. But leadership is more than makin’ noise. Gotta understand how people think. Gotta make ‘em work together. That’s what Levi Senior knew how to do. Dennis got a long way to go on that front.”

  By the time Donna and Ty have returned with our food, Henry has shown me around the kitchen. There are hardly any dishes in the cabinets. Seventy years of eating from the same crockery has reduced the supply to a few mismatched and chipped plates and bowls. The pots and pans are equally sparse and worn. Henry shakes his head. “Those old gals shoulda signed up for Meals on Wheels. There’s hardly any food in this house. Looks like they lived on canned soup and instant oatmeal.”

  “Can we see the room where Maybelle and Vareena hung out?” Donna asks with such childlike innocence that Henry doesn’t feel like we’re treading on his turf.

  He shrugs. “Nothin’ of value in there, but if you’re nosey....”

  So before we eat, we follow Henry down a narrow side hall where he opens a door.

  The room is no bigger than fifteen feet square, with one window and a bare wooden floor with a frayed rag rug.

  “This must have been the cook’s bedroom originally.” Instinctively, I straighten the crooked, yellowing shade on the floor lamp. A scratched wooden table sits between two upholstered chairs. The chairs’ coverings are shiny with age, and the seats have been hollowed out with the impressions of the sitters’ bottoms.

  “They didn’t have a TV, just that old-timey radio. It still works.” Henry reaches over to the big console and flips a switch. The scratchy sound of the all-news station fills the room.

  “What did they do all day?”

  “Guess they read books,” Ty says, pulling out a romance novel from a tall, rickety bookcase jammed with paperbacks. The cover is a classic bodice ripper—a beautiful young woman in a low-cut ball gown being ravished by a dark prince with flowing locks. Ty flips to front of the well-worn book. “It’s got a price penciled inside—twenty-five cents. They musta bought their books at the Saint Stephen’s thrift shop.”

  “That’s sad—they never even treated themselves to a new book?” I move in to study the books on the shelf. A book collection tells me so much about a house’s occupants: intellectuals, pragmatists, romantics, dreamers. The books don’t lie.

  These shelves are neatly divided between fiction and nonfiction. The fiction is all romance and family sagas. The nonfiction is more diverse: biography and history, but also psychology and social science. There are even some fairly recent bestsellers like Freakonomics and The Boys in the Boat. Now who was reading that?

  “Here’s some hardcovers,” Donna says. “Uh-oh, they’re library books. A month overdue.”

  “Put them in my tote bag. I’ll return them on the way home.”

  “They didn’t get out much,” Henry says. “The car is a 1954 DeSoto. Sixty-three years old and it has 62,000 miles on it.”

  ‘They drove less than a thousand miles a year!”

  “Car still runs good. There’s an oil change sticker on it from Hyler’s Garage. Chuck Hyler is in his fifties and he says his dad had been taking care of that car from the time he was a teenager. Maybelle only drove the car in Palmyrton. She wouldn’t drive out on the highway. Never took it on Route 287 or Route 24. Never even drove out to the big box stores on Route 10.”

  “Where did they buy their clothes? Surely not at Anais or The Left Bank.” These days, downtown Palmyrton only has fancy boutiques. Nothing suitable for frugal old ladies.

  “Look over here.” Donna calls our attention to a large basket on the floor. It’s full of catalogs. “Lands End, LL Bean, Burpees Seeds, JC Penny.” She digs through them. “The pages are marked with stuff they ordered. Look.”

  Donna shows me a Lands End Catalog. On the winter boots page, someone has written in perfect printing “one brown, size 7.”

  And then right below “one blue, size 8.”

  “They each got the same boots, one in brown, one in blue. I wonder whose feet were bigger?”

  “And look here.” Donna flips to the next page with a turned-down corner: fleece jackets. The same neat printing marks the page. “One wheat size small, One cerulean, size medium.”

  Ty peers over our shoulders at the catalog. “If Maybelle was the maid, how come she got the same clothes as Vareena?”

  “I guess they were more like friends after so many years together. It would be pretty mean of Vareena to make Maybelle wear her hand-me-downs,” Donna says. “And it’s not like Land’s End is fancy.”

  “Hmmm—you sure don’t know much about rich people. She made Maybelle buy the books at the thrift shop. Vareena might’ve let Maybelle buy new boots, but I bet we get upstairs to the bedrooms, you’ll see Maybelle’s closet full o’ rags from Saint Stephens.”

  “If they were hard-up for cash, why didn’t they sell this old pile and move into a nice little condo?” Donna taps the cast iron radiator with the toe of her sneaker. “Something with forced air heat. This place is probably drafty and freezing in the winter. I bet that’s why they holed up in this small room.”

  “Sean’s grandfather lives in a house that’s ridiculously inconvenient, but he refuses to move. I guess once a place feels like home, it’s hard to leave.”

  “Yeah, but that’s what’s so weird,” Ty says. “This place don’t feel homey at all.”

  After we finally eat lunch, we decide to finish the day in the room Edgar Tate used as an office.

  “Wow, look at that big black phone!” Donna crosses to the huge walnut desk and holds the receiver to her ear. “There’s still a dial tone. Boy, is it heavy. I wouldn’t want to talk to my sister for an hour on that thing.”

  “Who even has a landline anymore?” Ty says.

  “Hardly anyone. But Vareena and Maybelle sure didn’t have cellphones, so I guess this phone must’ve been their one connection to the outside world.”

  “I wonder who they called? They didn’t have any friends or family.” Donna sets the receiver down with a wistful expression. “I hope they didn’t have to race down all those hallways every time the phone rang with a telemarketer offering them a new credit card.”

  I sit in the tall leather desk chair and take my turn with the phone. “Look at me—I’m a captain of industry. Edgar Tate Junior must have used this phone to wheel and deal.”

  I open the top desk drawer. Inside is a thick leather-bound ledger with ACCOUNTS printed on the cover in gold. I open it up. The first page says TRADESMEN and under that heading is a long list of the people needed to keep this house running. The early entries begin with, “Coal, Ice, Hay.” About a third of the way down, the handwriting changes and the entries say, “Window-washer, laundress, gardener.” At that point, the Tates no longer had enough servants to do all the cleaning and maintenance. Some newer additions are written in ballpoint pen in script less spidery, more modern: electrician, car repair, plumber. Each category is followed by a name and number. Sometimes a name is crossed out and a replacement entered, but for the most part, the ladies were rem
arkably loyal. These are the people who served Vareena and Maybelle until their death. “Looks like they got their groceries delivered by the Fairchild Market and their car repaired by Hyler’s Garage. Those suppliers must have seen the ladies pretty regularly. I wonder what they thought of them?”

  I flip the page and see long columns of entries and figures. Every expenditure since the house was built is entered here. “Wow, guys—look. In 1891, a load of coal cost $7.00. And in 1942, it cost $20.00.”

  I keep paging through the ledger. “And look—in 1945, Vareena hired Formby Architects to design the kitchen addition. The whole thing only cost five thousand dollars! I wish our kitchen remodeling had been that cheap.”

  “I don’t think fifty years from now my grandkids are gonna give a damn how much I paid for gas and phone.” Ty prowls around the office looking for items worth selling.

  “Well, I think it’s interesting. I’m going to save this ledger and see if the Palmyrton History Room in the library wants it.”

  Then my eye is drawn to a change in the columns of figures. “Look at this. In 1944, the handwriting on the ledger changes from this old-fashioned, spidery style, to this round, neat script. That must’ve been Vareena taking over after her father-in-law died. And in 1945 there are a bunch of entries for carpenters and plumbers and roofers. I bet that’s the year they built the kitchen extension. But then in 1964, the writing changes again to this sprawling, slanted script, and it stays that way until the end.”

  Donna looks over my shoulder. “So you think in 1964, Maybelle took over paying the bills? What happened that year?”

  “I have no idea.” I close the heavy book. “But it’s odd that the maid was in charge of their finances.”

  Donna spritzes some vinegar water on the glass front of an étagère. “Maybe Maybelle was holding Vareena hostage.” She grins as she polishes the glass.

  Easy to imagine in this gloomy room. “Like in that old Bette Davis movie, “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”

  “Oh my God, that movie gave me nightmares for a week.” Donna shivers. “That scene where she serves her sister the pet canary on a silver platter. Gack!”

  “Can you two stop tellin’ fairy tales and help me with this cabinet?” Ty glares at us from across the room.

  Automatically, I move to help him, but my mind is elsewhere. If Sean were killed, would I give up caring about our house and my business? Would I turn decision-making about my life over to someone else? I don’t think I would. But certainly my own father retreated from life after my mother died. But not to the extent Vareena did after Lawrence Tate died.

  Why was his death so devastating? After all, they’d had a whirlwind romance. They barely knew each other when they married.

  Maybe that made the loss even harder to bear. Vareena was mourning the life she’d been anticipating, not the life she’d had.

  Chapter 21

  “HOW’S THIS FOR A PLAN?” I’m strategizing with Ty as we drive away from our first day of work at the Tate mansion. We’ve dropped everything to plunge into this windfall project, but the Armentrout sale has been scheduled, and we have to juggle that too. “Donna and I will handle the Armentrout sale tomorrow while you stay at the Tate Mansion and keep working with Henry.”

  Ty purses his lips as he steers the balky old van around a tight corner. “That’s a lot for you to manage being that this is Donna’s first sale. I better come over at the end of the day to help clean up.”

  I laugh. “Donna could clean Versailles single-handedly, but you could help load the van with whatever doesn’t sell.”

  Ty glances over his shoulder into the cargo area. “That girl be trippin’ when she sees how dirty this van is. You better not leave anything you want in here, or it be gone by tomorrow.”

  “True.” I kick through some papers floating in the footwell of the passenger seat. “Where are those old comic books I said I was going to give to Sean’s nephew?”

  “Think they slid under the seat.” He taps the big, dusty ledger from Edgar Tate’s office, which is propped against the console next to the gearshift. “If you’re really going to take that old book to the library, you better move it to your car tonight. If it winds up in the back, you’ll never see it again.”

  “Right. Don’t let me forget it.”

  As we reach the business district, we decide to stop for gas, and as long as we’re at the QuickCheck, I run in to get some milk and eggs. By the time I make it through the long line and exit the store, Ty has moved the van away from the pumps and is standing beside it talking to a young man.

  I start across the parking lot and realize the man is Dennis Sykes.

  Good. This is my chance to confront him about the lies he and Levi told Henry and me.

  I quicken my pace and watch Ty jab his index finger toward Dennis’s chest. Dennis says one last thing and turns toward his own car. Ty gives a dismissive wave to Dennis’s retreating figure and gets back into the van. I trot up to the driver’s window just in time to see Dennis peel out of his parking spot.

  “What was that all about?”

  Ty blows air between his lips. “Dennis being helpful. Wanted to let me know I’m oppressed, but I’m too dumb to see it.”

  Ty had laughed when I first told him about Dennis calling me a capitalist overlord. Now he doesn’t seem so amused. He’s gazing into the distance at the spot where Dennis’s car disappeared into traffic.

  “Did you ask him why he and Levi lied to Henry and me?”

  “He claims Henry is the one who changed his tune. That Henry wanted the whole job for himself and—”

  “I don’t believe that. Henry was really surprised when we talked at the post office. He couldn’t have faked that.”

  Ty points to the passenger seat. “C’mon, let’s go. No point in goin’ around and around about it.”

  But when I get in the van, Ty still seems disturbed by his encounter with Dennis. He starts the engine but doesn’t put the van in gear.

  “What’s wrong? What else did you talk about?”

  Ty turns to face me. “Dennis wanted to know about how we know if something’s worth a lot of money. Do we look at every single piece of furniture? Do we open all the drawers? Do we take the paintings off the walls and look at the backs? I told him yeah, in a house with antiques and fancy shit, we gotta do that. In a place where we can tell the pictures came from HomeGoods, then no.”

  “Why was he interested? He was willing to let Henry sell all the antiques in a giant garage sale, then he was willing to get ripped off by Dexter Abernathy. But now he’s worried we don’t know what we’re doing?”

  Ty frowns. “I don’t think that’s what was in his head. It was more like he was worried we’d be paying too much attention. He kept askin’ about you...like he was tryin’ to judge how sharp you were.”

  Ty’s observation has flipped the problem one hundred eighty degrees. “You think Levi and Dennis didn’t want me to have the job because they’re afraid of what I’ll figure out when I’m in the house? But they themselves don’t know what’s in there.”

  Ty shrugs. “You gotta rep on the street, Audge. People know you good at figurin’ stuff out.”

  Although some of my highest-spending regulars aren’t interested in the Armentrout sale because of the dearth of antiques, there’s still a sizeable crowd queuing up on Birdie’s street as we drive up to open the sale. The weather is perfect: no rain, but not so sunny and clear that people are tempted to go to the shore instead of a sale.

  Donna presses her nose against the passenger side window of the AMT van. “Wow, it’s only seven o’clock—did they sleep here last night?”

  I navigate past a mammoth Chevy Suburban parked at the corner of Birdie’s driveway. “This is nothing. Wait’ll you see the crowd at a really big sale.”

  My stomach flutters. Like the Tate sale. Man, that’s going to be a trip! Even with our revenue-sharing arrangement with Henry, Another Man’s Treasure will walk away with a high five-figure
check. And the Parks Center will get an instant infusion of cash to tide them over until the house sells.

  We left Birdie’s house in good shape, so there’s not much to do this morning apart from setting up the checkout area. As I arrange the cash box and receipt book, my phone rings. George Armentrout. Probably calling with a last-minute request to pull something out of the sale. These calls are quite common, but I’m surprised that lawyerly George would ask for something that’s a clear violation of our contract.

  “Good morning, George. What can I do for you?”

  “Oh, hello, Audrey. I...er...I just wanted to check if the sale was going to take place today?” His sentence ends on a questioning up-note. “Because.....”

  Because what? Surely he can’t be thinking that we can cancel now.

  “I’m right here at Birdie’s house getting ready to open the doors. The customers are lined up. I’m sure we’re going to have a very successful sale.” I keep my tone upbeat, not allowing the possibility of any backsliding on his part.

  “Oh, I see. Yes, of course....”

  Do not ask him what’s wrong. Do not go there. Just thank him for calling and hang up. That’s my practical businesswoman talking.

  A void of dead air hangs between us. When have I ever listened to that bitch?

  “What’s the matter, George?”

  “Oh, I know it’s crazy, but I haven’t slept a wink all night. Do you think I’m doing the right thing? Selling all of Birdie’s precious things? Selling her house, when she’s still...still.... And what about her garden? What if whoever buys the house paves over the garden and puts in a swimming pool?”

  Swimming emerges as a long, anguished wail.

  “Of course you’re doing the right thing, George. Birdie’s not going to be able to come back here. And she might live in the nursing home for a long time, so you have to get her affairs in order. And I bet whoever buys the house will want to enjoy the lovely garden and do their swimming at the country club.”

  I pull that last bit out of my ass, but it seems to reassure George. “True. Very true.” He sighs. “I’m glad I talked to you, Audrey. I think I’ll go play a round of golf until I’m sure the sale is over.”