Antiques Wanted

by Barbara Allan

  Mother pressed on. “Was Harriet smoking when you went in that morning?”

  “No. If the biddy ever took that stupid risk, she was smart enough to wait till everyone made their rounds.”

  “Did you notice anything out-of-the ordinary that morning?”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, any little thing.”

  “No.” Then: “Oh. Well.”

  Mother leaned forward. “Yes?”

  “Uh, I saw you”—he craned his neck my way—“and her, going around getting stuff for some sale or something. That was different.”

  Was he being facetious?

  Disappointed, Mother sat back with a sigh. “Yes, thank you, young man. That’s all.”

  Rudder stood. “You can go.”

  The janitor picked up the sack and rose. At the door, he paused, then turned. “Mrs. Borne, I knew that wheelchair shouldn’ta been used, because the screws on the brakes were bad—that’s why it was in storage. Glad you didn’t get yourself hurt.”

  And he left.

  Mother and I stared at each other.

  Had Burnett given her the faulty wheelchair on purpose? Had he asked Wanda to write the note, putting Mother’s “accident” in motion?

  Mother turned her attention to Rudder. “Now, Sheriff, you’re going to tell me what you know that’s made you revisit the explosion . . . otherwise you’ll get no more information from me.”

  Rudder gave her no resistance. “The oxygen tank had indeed been tampered with.”

  Mother gasped. “How?”

  “Now, that information I can’t share at the moment.”

  “But . . . you’re sure?” Mother asked.

  “Confirmed by the manufacturer,” he replied.

  I had walked over with Sushi in my arms. “The manufacturer could be covering for a defective product.”

  Rudder shook his head. “The tampering was corroborated by an investigator at the DCI.”

  “So it was murder,” Mother exclaimed, a little too gleefully. “I knew it! Come, Brandy, help me with my crutches.”

  “Time to get out of Dodge?” I asked.

  “Yes, and for once we’re beating the sheriff’s time limit!”

  And I’ll be darned if Rudder wasn’t smiling as we went.

  A Trash ’n’ Treasures Tip

  Wear comfy shoes, and carry a cross-body purse to free up your hands. A bodysuit beneath your outfit will allow you to try on clothes discreetly if there are no dressing rooms. Mother goes with a friend who’s her size and makes the friend try the items on.

  Chapter Nine

  Hang ’em High

  Now that Mother was home, running the shop became impossible, so we enlisted Joe Lange, whose own mother was happy to get her admittedly eccentric son out of the house.

  La Diva Borne wasted no time in having her casts removed and replaced with special medical shoes—open-toed with Velcro straps that stopped at her ankle—which enabled her to get around with the use of a cane.

  She also was quick to corral me into the library/music/ TV/incident room, on a sunny spring morning that offered so many better options.

  I, the pupil, once again sat on the piano bench, while schoolmarm Mother stood at the antique wooden board, leaning on the cane with one hand, a piece of white chalk in the other.

  Sushi had found a puddle of sunshine on the Persian carpet to curl up in.

  “Dear,” Mother was saying ecstatically, “I don’t believe there’s ever been a time when both sides of the board were required to do full justice to two murders.”

  “We know Harriet was murdered,” I pointed out, “but not necessarily Wanda.”

  “Oh, but she was, dear.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “Let’s say I strongly suspect it,” Mother replied patiently, as if I were the slowest child in class.

  “And why is that?”

  “Because last night—or I should say in the wee morning hours—when I went to the nurses’ station to find the late Wanda Mercer, I spied an empty cup from a fast-food restaurant. Someone had thoughtfully brought Wanda coffee, which almost certainly was spiked with the opiate overdose. Possibly just to knock her out, but her own drug usage combined with the Mickey Finn proved unfortunately fatal. Or, more likely, the intention was to get rid of her for what she knew.”

  “The ‘someone,’ who did this, you assume, is the same someone who entered your room after the spurned Mr. Fillmore took his leave?”

  Mother nodded. “I think he—or she—returned at a quarter to three to make sure Wanda was out of commission, then planned to harm me, but was chased off by my spirited yelling, and the unexpected appearance of our charming yapping dog. And he didn’t have time—or simply forgot—to retrieve the cup.”

  “Why didn’t you mention this to Rudder?”

  She made a face. “You can bet he’s already having that cup tested, yet he didn’t mention it to me. The sneak! Why should I share anything with him?”

  Mother doesn’t just hold a grudge, she caresses and nurtures them.

  She swiveled to the board. “Now! Let’s start with Harriet.” And she began to write.

  When Mother had finished, a back and forth discussion began between us (which I’ll spare you) to correct any differences in our recollections, mostly regarding the suspect’s Time of Last Contact (TOLC) with the woman. The final product looked like this:

  HARRIET DOUGLAS SUSPECT LIST

  “Not too promising,” I said from the piano bench.

  Mother sighed and studied the board. “I’m afraid you’re right, dear. A mere four suspects, one of whom is deceased already, making her at best an accomplice. They all had an opportunity to tamper with Harriet’s tank. I wish I knew exactly what had been done to it . . . but my best conjecture is that the mechanism was adjusted . . . or one might say maladjusted . . . in order to cause a slow leak and a buildup of oxygen in the room.”

  “That would allow the killer to leave and be elsewhere when the explosion came later.”

  “Precisely.”

  I frowned. “With Rudder playing his cards close to the vest, we’re guessing. Don’t you have any snitches in the sheriff’s department?”

  Mother never used money to coerce her stoolies, which were usually women. She would exploit their weaknesses by offering them small parts in her plays, or Godiva chocolates, or autographed photos of pet TV or movie star personalities of theirs, the latter usually forged by her. (“I said they were signed photos, dear, and they are.”)

  Mother turned to face me. “I’m afraid the sheriff’s-department well has gone dry. Of course, when I’m sheriff, I’ll make sure any potential leaks are plugged! But till then, there’s a new dispatcher to cultivate, but I have yet to meet her.”

  “Whatever sabotage was done to that tank,” I said, “it had to be fast, and without Harriet noticing.”

  “That’s why Joan is my pick,” Mother said, tapping the woman’s name on the board. “She set up the tank, and her fiddling with it would seem normal.”

  “But what would her motive be? Actually, what would any of their motives be? What kind of dirt could Harriet have had on any of them?”

  Mother turned back to the board. “Well, let’s see . . . Joan could have been pilfering the pills—Wanda, too. And Harriet has already caused Mr. Burnett scads of grief. Who knows what else she had in store for him?”

  “And Blake Ferrell?”

  She tapped his name on the board. “Harriet could have found out our friendly neighborhood janitor had a police record, and threatened to tell Burnett.”

  I was nodding. “Or, more likely—since I don’t think Burnett would really have cared—that Blake was in on the pill pilfering.”

  “Very astute,” Mother said, turning toward me. “The young man certainly could be a conduit for selling the drugs, having connections from his stint in jail.”

  “Don’t forget the political intrigue and soap opera silliness that can be part of any workplace.
We already know Blake and Wanda had an on-again-off-again affair. Maybe Joan was part of that mix—or even Burnett. Or other staffers who aren’t even on our radar.”

  We fell silent.

  Then I mused, “Killing Harriet was pretty easy, as murders go, for either a man or woman to commit.”

  Mother frowned. “Dear?”

  “Well, the killer didn’t have to shoot her, or stab her, or strangle her. Just jimmy the tank, and let Harriet’s own bad judgment, smoking around it, define when the ‘accident’ happened. Like when it next rained, just letting things take their course.”

  Mother nodded. “Making it look like she unintentionally designed her own demise. Well-reasoned, dear. You are an increasingly worthy Watson.”

  I hoped she meant Watson in the Doyle stories and not in the old Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce movies she so adored, where Bruce somehow managed to be both a medical doctor and an utter dunce. Anyway, I wasn’t Watson—I was Archie Goodwin. You’d think a woman who had been reading Death of a Dude as long as she had would know as much.

  Mother gestured theatrically to the board. “Let’s move on to Wanda, shall we?”

  She flipped the board over and it conked her on the head, and I stifled a giggle. Who was Nigel Bruce now?

  Wanda’s suspect list looked similar to Harriet’s—the only suspect missing was Wanda herself.

  WANDA MERCER SUSPECT LIST

  Mother said, “We can speculate that all three could have returned to Sunny Meadow around midnight on some pretense or other, and brought Wanda that special brew—probably a latte with whipped cream, which I’d noticed the woman had a fondness for.”

  I was nodding again. “If we stick with the stolen drugs, Wanda could have wanted out of the operation. That might account for her note to you, which, if someone knew about it, could have led to her murder.”

  “True. Then, what might Burnett’s motive be?”

  I shrugged. “He could have been involved with the rest of them. Perhaps Sunny Meadow was home to a ring of drug dealers, with Burnett as the mastermind!”

  “Possible. Far-fetched, but possible.”

  “Or Burnett knew about the drug scheme and looked the other way. In a sick way, it would allow him to pay his staff poorly, knowing they had another income source.”

  “The kind of ‘sick’ that medication doesn’t cure.” Mother touched the chalk to her lower lip. “If I could find out who came into my room at a quarter to three, we’d know who the killer was.”

  Suddenly she sucked in air.

  I sat forward. “What?”

  “A session with Tilda might jar the ol’ memory!” she declared.

  I jumped to my feet, shaking my head furiously. “Oh, no! Oh, no!”

  Matilda “Tilda” Tompkins was Serenity’s resident New Age guru, who sometimes hypnotized Mother into remembering or anyway bringing into focus some important aspect of a case.

  “Every time you go under,” I whined, “another reincarnation of some past life of yours pops out! And what good does that ever do us? And it’s always someone famous!”

  “Not at all, dear. It’s never anyone famous.”

  That was sort of true. She always turned out to be somebody associated with a famous figure in history.

  In 44 BC, Mother had been Iras, handmaiden to Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen’s asp page handler; in 1608 AD, she was Matoaka, younger sister of Pocahontas, and the real love (or so she claimed) of Captain John Smith; and in 1788, she was Myles Carter, personal attendant to King George the Third, who convinced the monarch that any talk of revolution by the colonists was merely empty “poppycock.”

  “Even so,” Mother was saying, “Tilda dispatches them quickly. And we’ve had very good results where retrieving clues and insights into our investigations are concerned.”

  I decided not to remind her about the trouble that the guru/hypnotist had with Helena Kowalski, Madame Curie’s talkative cook who kept reappearing throughout one session, insisting that she (Mother) had given Madame Curie the idea of pasteurization.

  Mother was saying, “Dear, if Tilda can help, you’ll just have to put up with any of my former selves, though I’m sure in all their various carnations, they are quite charming and intelligent.”

  “A carnation is a flower, Mother, when it isn’t evaporated milk. You mean incarnations.”

  “Incarnations, incantations, it’s all in a day’s work for Tilda Tompkins! Shall I call her, dear, or would you like to do the honors?”

  “All right,” I grumbled. “I’ll give her a call.”

  As it happened, Tilda could see Mother in about an hour, between the guru’s tantric sex class and a chakra session. So at the appropriate time, Mother and I arrived at the white two-story clapboard house, still in need of a fresh coat of paint, across from Serenity’s cemetery.

  I was curious to see who came out of the place from attending the tantric sex class, but we’d arrived too late, or else the members had slipped out the back way. They say tantric sex can last as long as five hours, and among the questions I had was what kind of people had that kind of time on their hands.

  A cracked sidewalk led to a dilapidated porch with wicker chairs that had seen better days. Maybe they’d be plush, cushioned affairs in their next carnation.

  Mother rang the bell.

  After a few moments, the door opened with a hint of Addams Family creak.

  Tilda was a slender forty-something with long golden-red hair and translucent skin, a scattering of youthful freckles across the bridge of her nose. She wore Bohemian attire—white blouse with voluminous sleeves, a long patchwork skirt, and Birkenstock sandals.

  The guru/hypnotist bid us to enter, gesturing graciously, and we moved into a mystic shrine of soothing candles, healing crystals, and swirling mobiles of planets and stars—much of it for sale. Incense hung in the air like a fragrant curtain, if a curtain required you to stifle a cough, and from somewhere drifted the tinkling of New Age music. The room served as a living space, waiting area, and shop.

  “I’m sorry, but there’s no time to sit and partake of small talk,” Tilda said apologetically. “My students will be showing up for the chakra class in half an hour.”

  That was fine with me. Because in addition to the multitude of candles, crystals, and mobiles in the room, a multitude of cats was stretched out on the couch (seat and back) and every chair and windowsill.

  And they weren’t just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill felines, either, but reincarnations of specific dead people—souls from the cemetery across the street, whose idea of “crossing over” was to come live with Tilda (or so she believed).

  Mother and I followed the woman, who moved with ethereal, dreamy grace, back to the kitchen, off of which was a small, dark, claustrophobic room.

  The single window had been shuttered, the only source of light a table lamp with a revolving shade whose cutout stars sent its own galaxy swirling on the ceiling. In addition to the small table and lamp, the room had a red-velvet Victorian fainting couch (for Mother), a straight-backed cane chair (for Tilda), and a small stool for one guest (me).

  The furniture had been slightly rearranged since our last visit, most notably the placement of the stool, which now was positioned where I could watch Tilda, instead of being directly behind her.

  We all took our places.

  Tilda addressed Mother. “Before beginning, I must reiterate that we have limited time, and therefore appearances of past lives are to be discouraged.”

  Mother, stretched out comfortably, said, “Yes, yes. I understand. I have prepared a script for you to read, which should address that problem.”

  From the pocket of her slacks Mother pulled out a folded piece of paper, on which she had written during our hour wait for the appointment, and handed it to Tilda.

  “This is what you are to say,” Mother instructed, “along with the questions you must ask me.”

  Tilda unfolded the paper, studied it for a moment, placed it in her lap, then reache
d to the little table for the long gold-chained necklace with its round, shiny disk.

  My job was to record on my phone what Mother said after she was put into a trance. On our first visit, I had recorded the “putting into a trance” part, only when I later played it back for Mother, at home, she went under again, and I had to call Tilda to snap her out of it.

  Dangling the necklace before Mother’s face, Tilda started to swing it like a pendulum.

  “Watch the medallion,” Tilda said slowly, softly. “Consider its gentle motion. Surrender to its gentle motion. You feel relaxed . . . so very relaxed. You’re getting sleepy . . . so very sleepy. Your eyelids are heavy . . . so very heavy . . . so heavy that you simply can’t keep them open. I’m going to count backward from ten to one. When I say one, you will be asleep, completely, deeply asleep, and will respond to what I say. Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”

  And the next thing I knew I was bent over Mother, my hands around her neck, hers around mine, and we were choking each other!

  Tilda’s voice, very far away, commanded, “Brandy, Vivian—wake up!”

  We dropped our hands. I straightened, and Mother sat up.

  “What happened?” we asked in unison, rubbing our respective necks.

  The usually mellow Tilda was visibly rattled. “You both went under, after which Brandy reappeared as Pocahontas, with Vivian in Matoaka mode.”

  “Oh dear,” Mother said.

  I said “Oh” something.

  “And,” Tilda continued, “Pocahontas told Matoaka to keep her maize-pickin’ hands off John Smith, and Matoaka said she wouldn’t because he really loved her, and then you two got physical.”

  “You mean,” I exclaimed, “I was Pocahontas in a former life!”

  “I doubt that, dear,” Mother huffed. “You are just highly suggestible, as some weak-willed persons tend to be. You were merely influenced by my appearance as Matoaka.”

  “Ladies,” Tilda said, one hand rubbing her forehead like a magic lamp—a magic lamp with a headache. “I must remind you of my impending chakra class. We must start again immediately. Brandy, I would suggest repositioning yourself.”