“Where is Mrs. Wheel?” asked Oh.
Tim shook his head.
He wasn’t sure what Jane was doing right now. He just wished she wasn’t doing it in his car.
Jane’s first phone call was to the Riverview Real Estate office. If one could judge the size and staff of an office by the size of its display ad in the phone book, it was at least as large as K3 Realty. Jane hoped that meant there would be an agent waiting by the phone who could arrange an immediate viewing of a property. Jane described the house she wanted to see and told the agent that she only had thirty minutes on her lunch hour and she hoped they would be able to accommodate her.
“I know it’s crazy, but my husband and I have driven past it a million times and I just have to get in there before he leaves on his business trip tomorrow. He’ll be gone for a month, and he said if I can make up my mind today … well, we can just go ahead with it, so …” Jane let her voice trail off and hoped that all Realtors in town were as desperate as those she had met at the K3 office.
“I can meet you there in five minutes,” said the agent, whose name was Ted Burke. “I have the house up on the computer, yes, and there’s a lock box, so there should be no … hmmm … Well, there are renters there.”
“What does that mean?” asked Jane, who had just pulled up in front of the late Roger Groveland’s house.
“The owner’s note says it can be shown; but if the renters are there, they can refuse to admit us…. We’re supposed to give them notice,” said Burke. “But don’t worry, we’ll just knock on the door, and if they’re home, I’m sure they’ll cooperate. If they’re not home, no problem. I’ll put in a call right now and just check. You go over there.”
“I will,” said Jane, getting out of the car and stepping onto the lawn.
She slipped on one of the hospital smocks and buttoned it over her T-shirt and jeans. She stepped up on the porch and knocked at the front door. No answer. She tried the door, but it was locked. She walked around to the attached garage and peeked in the window.
The scene inside the garage was reminiscent of her own stop-and-start garage sale, but this one was not abandoned as much as closed for business. Boxes had been packed and were labeled for Salvation Army pickup. There was a collapsible clothes rack still hung with men’s clothing. A bowling ball sat on the one table that was still set up. There were some bags of what might have been books.
“Hello?”
Jane turned to see a large man in a suit and tie, smiling the smile of a man with something to sell. “I’m Ted Burke and you must be Mrs. Schaefer,” the Realtor said, reading her name tag.
“I must be,” said Jane, extending her hand.
It had been one of those two-for-one brainstorms. When she saw the hospital smocks, complete with official hospital name badges, Jane immediately thought of Johnny Sullivan wearing the K3 Realty blazer with Groveland’s name tag, Roger Groveland’s blazer. The person who had reported the discovery of bones on Fuzzy’s property had given the name Roger Groveland. The flyer and business card on the refrigerator was handed out by someone using the name Roger Groveland.
Everyone had asked why Johnny Sullivan had been wearing Roger Groveland’s jacket on the night he was killed. Jane knew Munson initially had concentrated on finding a link between the two men, but what if the only link was the one forged between seller and buyer at a garage sale? When Henry Bennett had failed to identify the body as Roger Groveland, he had mentioned that after Roger died, some family member had come and run a house sale. He had also said the house was still up for sale.
House sales, name tags. Name tags, house sales. When Jane saw those hospital smocks, with the ID badges still clipped on, it had crossed her mind that perhaps the tags should be taken off before a sale. Otherwise, couldn’t someone buy them, slip one on, and walk into the hospital and have access to authorized areas? Once Jane had been at a Chicago house sale and seen a Lincoln Park Zoo volunteer shirt, complete with employee ID clipped to the shirt. She had worried about it all night.
“I should have bought it,” she told Charley around midnight, when he opened his eyes and saw her wide awake staring at the ceiling. “What if someone buys it and wears it to get in someplace they don’t belong?”
Charley had laughed it off and told her she had been reading too many mysteries, but Jane was not mollified. First of all, she never read mysteries—too contrived—and second, she knew that her first thought when she saw the uniform—and she was a law-abiding citizen—was that she could buy the shirt and use it like a backstage pass at the zoo.
Jane wasn’t sure why one might desire backstage access to the Lincoln Park Zoo. Did animal tranquilizers have a street value? And was it realistic to envision a drug lord sending out his minions to scour every garage sale in the city to see if they could round up some bogus name tags to get them into the private areas of public places?
Jane tried to picture a dangerous street punk waving an ID badge from the Field Museum. “Hey, boss, now we can get behind one of them Great Plains prairie dog dioramas and score us some taxidermy!”
Maybe Charley was right about this one particular anxiety not being worth the sleepless night. On the other hand, Olivia Schaefer’s hospital smock had easily allowed Jane to assume an alternative identity. Had Roger Groveland’s blazer allowed Johnny Sullivan access to a scam he was about to expose? Or given him an alternative identity so he could participate in it?
“Looks like they moved out in a hurry and left things behind. Unless those boxes are the renter’s things,” said Jane.
Burke scanned the paper he was holding. “We’re not the listing agent on this, so I have to see if the notes … here. Oh, sad, this was Roger’s house.” Burke stopped reading and looked up at the house. “Of course, I should have known that. I’ve been in here before,” he said. “The owner died. No immediate family in the area. And I assure you, it was natural causes, in the hospital, not in the house.”
He waited for someone to answer the bell, then punched in a code on the lockbox and removed the front door key. “I called the tenants from the car and there was no answer; but I always like to ring the bell, don’t want to scare anyone coming out of the shower or …”
The front door swung open at his touch. The house was dark because every curtain was closed, every shade pulled. Burke immediately went for light switches and drapery cords. Jane walked through the living room, making what she hoped were appropriate interested buyer noises. She wanted to go through the house as quickly as possible and get to the garage. She wasn’t sure why she felt the leftovers from Roger Groveland’s house sale held one of the keys to Sullivan’s death. Perhaps it was the simple reason that she wasn’t ready to assume that Fuzzy, in his dementia, had wandered out to his cornfield in the middle of the night and shot Johnny Sullivan. Case closed. Even if Fuzzy did wander around at night and even if he did carry his rifle with him, there had to be some reason Johnny Sullivan was out there wearing that stupid blazer. Besides, Nick had said something she couldn’t forget. No matter how much of his memory he was losing every day, Fuzzy would find a way to tell them that something had happened. Fuzzy was a storyteller.
“Mr. Burke, this is going to sound a little nutty, but my husband is a stickler for the details on the furnace and hot water heater. Could you go down to the basement and jot down the particulars while I measure the garage?” Jane said. “And I mean every fact and figure, please, and also note the serial numbers on the utility meters, please. Also any appliance serial numbers you can get to. He’s a nut for checking recall lists.” Jane had no idea what she was talking about, but she thought it sounded like the kind of nitpicking details that might keep him occupied for ten minutes.
“My husband is a collector of vintage cars,” Jane said, “so I’ll check out the garage,” she added, not knowing if antique cars would require more or less space, but waving her key ring with a flashlight, magnifier, and tape measure, essential for a picker and, it seemed, handy for a detective pret
ending to be a home buyer. She’d have to remember to tell Tim—it was the kind of Nancy Drew lore he loved.
She didn’t wait for an answer and stepped down into the two-car garage and closed the door behind her. The garage-sale tables had been pushed back toward the walls to allow space for at least one car. The overhead light was burned out, but enough sun came in from the high windows on either side to allow her to see the sale leftovers. A lot of kitchen plastic, some old burned pans, an encrusted waffle iron with a frayed cord. Roger’s relatives must not have read one of the garage-sale guides that suggested that merchandise be cleaned before it was offered for sale. One table held a few boxes that were packed with books, but additional volumes were piled on the table. One was a yearbook, the Herscher Hi-Reminder. Roger had gone to Herscher High School and Jane to Bishop Mac; but they were the same year and Jane paged through the annual, trying to remember who else she knew to look up besides Roger. A flash of green on the clothing rack caught her eye and she walked over to it. The rack was shoved up against the wall opposite the garage door, and Jane could see by some of the marks on the clothes that whoever had been parking the car was not being careful about keeping a distance. Jane thought the clothes were the saddest remnants of this man’s life. Inexpensive white shirts, slightly frayed at the cuffs and gray at the collars, were hung with pieces of masking tape on the hangers offering them for a quarter. The green Jane had noticed was a K3 Realty blazer. So perhaps Johnny Sullivan had done a little shopping here?
There was a small ink stain at the pocket. The name badge was still pinned in place. Jane touched the badge and pictured her childhood friend, now a grown man, struggling alone every day to make a life. She pictured him looking in the mirror, seeing the ink stain, and hoped that he would realize he could pin the badge a little lower to cover it. Roger had always had good ideas when they were kids. He invented the game “adventure bike rides” where one of them had to plan ahead some secret destination and plant a picnic or a snack there, then lead the other one to it. Remembering that, Jane stuck the yearbook under her arm and, using two hands to unpin the badge, began to repin it to cover the stain. It wasn’t much reparation for not mourning him properly when she’d heard about his death, but it was something.
A loud grinding noise surprised her. Light began moving from the ground up over the contents of the garage, and it was one of those unexpected moments that causes lost bearings and small screams until one realizes that a perfectly normal event is occurring. After all, to Jane a garage might mean the appendage to a house that allows for goods to be bought and sold, and an area where the overstock of items purchased could be stored; but to most people a garage meant a safe enclosure in which to park a car.
The garage door continued grinding open and Jane, finally realizing what was happening, flattened herself against the wall. The car was coming in too fast and too carelessly and Jane, too late, remembered that she had just seen dirt on the clothes where the car would have kissed up against them. She jump stepped over the bottom of the rack, ducking under the hanging clothes; and from the other side, pushed as hard as she could. The rack moved forward and tipped, falling on the hood of the car with a crash. When the brakes squealed and held, the front of the car was four inches from the yearbook Jane had instinctively held in front of her.
“Oh man, oh man, what the hell am I going to tell Joe?” The driver lifted the rack and ran his hand over the dent in the hood. “Goddamn it!”
Jane was, of course, familiar with the expression caught like a deer in the headlights; however, she had never been so acutely aware of what the deer actually felt like. Since she was not sure she had the ability to speak and since she could think of nothing relevant to say at the moment, except perhaps a thank you to whatever angel, saint, and/or survival instinct had helped her to move and think as quickly as she had, she remained still. The driver, illustrating that rule of illusion that says one seldom sees what one is not expecting to see, was completely unaware of her presence. And illustrating a different kind of rule, the rule of male drivers who are really pissed off at something and therefore need to punish an inanimate object, this one flung the rack back off the car where it hit the wall, framing Jane with the bars but covering her with the clothes that had miraculously remained on their hangers. Jane, peeking out from behind polyester and acrylic, saw the driver clearly, Michael Hoover. He walked over to a large cardboard box by the side door, clicked the automatic trunk opener, and lifted the box into the trunk. She could tell it was heavy, watching him struggle getting it over the side of the car. A piece of paper that had been stuck under the box flap fluttered unnoticed to the floor. From her spot behind the clothes, Jane could make out a large B written in marker on the side. Hoover then reached up and pulled a flat box from a stack of what looked like old board games on the metal shelf shoved against the side and threw it in on top and slammed the trunk lid. He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket, punched in a number, and waited.
“Yeah, it’s me. I got them and I’m leaving right now. Come on, Joe, what’s done is done. Nah. Why? Not if they lock up that crazy sonofabitch.”
He then got into his car and backed out of the garage as fast as he had pulled in. The garage door went down with the same painful grinding noise, and Jane was left standing there against the wall, still covered with clothes.
A few minutes later, when Ted Burke opened the door to the garage from the small mudroom and asked if she was done measuring, Jane was standing in front of the metal shelves, facing the stack of boxes. She was writing something down in a large notebook, which she stuck back into a file folder. Looking down, she tsked-tsked at a piece of paper she had apparently dropped and picked it up and stuffed it, too, in the folder. Tucking it under her arm, she stepped back into the house, accepted the notes Burke had written down for her, and told him she would be in touch. She tore a piece of paper off the business notepad that was by the phone in order to write down Burke’s cell phone number, but he handed her a card. She kept the piece of paper and the card and slipped them both into the bulging folder. She hurried out of the house into Tim’s red Mustang and drove off, leaving Burke staring after her, looking like a man who still had some questions. Why didn’t she want to see the bedrooms or the dining room? Didn’t she care about the steam shower and the Jacuzzi?
Was she carrying that file folder when she entered the house?
When Jane realized how hand-shaking hungry she was, she laughed out loud. She always got hungry when she was excited and that little bit of work in her newly chosen field was pretty darn thrilling. It was a fine line, she had to admit, between scary and thrilling. But when it was possible that one might be pinned up against a wall like a bug and one escaped the pinning … well, that was thrilling. And walking out of there with Roger Groveland’s Hometown files, K3 stationery, and business cards was pretty high on the thrill-o-meter, too. And as for the Herscher Hi-Reminder she had also tucked into the cardboard file jacket? Perhaps not really part of the case, but she could never resist a yearbook and this one she would keep in honor of Roger. The five-dollar bill she had left on the table in the garage more than covered her shopping spree.
The only thing she wanted but couldn’t get away with taking out of there was one of those boxes. There were six of them left on the shelf, and none of them were games like she’d originally thought. They were all commercially labeled rock collections, the kind of hobby kits that one bought for a child who wanted to jump-start his or her own collection. Professor Geology Junior and Mr. Stone’s Rock Shop—Genuine Samples from All Over the World. Rocks were glued to cardboard squares listing the relevant facts about each sample. Jane was familiar with them—Nick had always received a fair share of these kinds of hobby sets every birthday since friends and family assumed they were the perfect gift for the son of a geologist.
In fact at Jane’s own garage sale—when was that? Two, three days, twenty years ago? She remembered that Claire Oh had lined up a few cigar boxes full of those roc
ks that five-year-old Nick had, of course, pulled off the cardboard backing and mixed up into containers so he could carry them around like they were his own discovery … his buried treasure, he had called them.
Jane grinned like an idiot. Not only was she alive after a close call, she was pretty sure she had found a source of Fuzzy Neilson’s buried treasure. She could remember that stone she had examined at Fuzzy and Lula’s—the Austinite. She recalled that she had seen a small speck of green on the sample and was going to ask Charley about it but had gotten distracted. Now she knew exactly what it was. Not a part of the rock or a speck of moss or a streak of some other mineral, it was one of those stubborn bits of green felted cardboard that these rocks were always fixed on inside of the boxes. She remembered finding Nick, when he was six years old, scrubbing away at some of his rocks with his toothbrush. When she had asked him what he was doing, he told her was cleaning his treasure. Jane helped him finish scraping off the gluey green bits before they went to the drugstore for a new toothbrush.
What did Michael Hoover want with one of these rock collections? All it took was one expert like Charley—heck, in this case, all it took was an amateur rockhound like Nick—to identify a piece of Austinite, to prove the interesting find was phony. Maybe that was just an accident, planting the more exotic stones. Most of the boxes contained dinosaur teeth, fossils, and genuine arrowheads as well as rocks. Maybe it was those kinds of artifacts they were using to salt the farmland around Kankakee.
Jane’s thoughts zoomed and raced as she headed for the only food she appreciated in Kankakee besides that of her mother’s at the EZ Way Inn, the Root Beer Stand. It might not have the character of Pink’s, but it had food she loved. She needed a frosty mug and a sauce bun with onions right now. She drove a little faster, trying to keep up with her mind, she told herself. Contributing to her feeling of reckless detective joy was this car … this magnificent red Mustang. No wonder Tim drove like a maniac. Jane finally got it. She now understood Tim’s abandon when it came to driving. In fact she was feeling so giddy and in tune with Tim, it took her three blocks to realize that the red flashing light in her rearview mirror was not some kind of exuberant aura, but a police car that had been following her and now was using the bullhorn to tell her to pull over.
Buried Stuff Page 22
