Scary Stuff

by Sharon Fiffer

  “Are you talking about Swanette’s mother-in-law?”

  “Who else would I be talking about? You know, in the living room, where she held court, judging from the bed set up there and TV and all, she liked the more ornate Victorian stuff. Those big chairs and the ottomans? The velvet pouf with the tassels? Also, there’s a trunk full of linens under that picture window that appears to have been hers, maybe handed down from her mother. But then there’s a cheap rattan trunk full of T.J. Maxx irregulars. There’s a lot of silver, too. All of a vintage that makes sense given her age. Then there’s a boatload of cheap silverplate. Then there’s the bedroom that Swanette says her niece lived in and that’s got all the vintage teenage stuff, like it’s been frozen in time . . .”

  “We come in from the outside and see it frozen in time, but people who are living in it? It’s not frozen, it’s a part of their everyday life, it’s what—” said Jane, breaking off.

  “What?”

  “The house is just what Swanette’s mother-in-law lived with. Within. It was her life and it was in flux, not frozen. If her nurse or the handyman or whoever was in the house, moving stuff around, rearranging, bringing stuff in and taking stuff out . . .”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “If I wanted to steal stuff and sell it, just to get along, you know, like a part-time job? What better steady income than finding an old lady like Swanette’s mother-in-law, who is surrounded with stuff? But instead of scaring her off and robbing her, why not let her belongings provide a steady stream of product for your sales? Sell her antique linens, and just bring in a bunch of cheap stuff to fill the trunk, so nothing is ever really missing?

  “I mean, it wouldn’t work for anyone who was with it, but it would work with someone who was already nutty. I mean, Swanette’s mother-in-law was an invalid who wouldn’t even let Swanette in the house. No one who had her best interest at heart could get close enough to keep an eye on her valuables. And Ada . . . Ada’s library?” said Jane. “If books were missing outright, Ada might notice, even with her bad eyes. But if one or two disappear and the spaces are filled in with fakes? Maybe it’s only a hundred or two hundred dollars a book, but still, with a whole library to pillage?”

  “Could be a living,” said Tim, nodding his head. “A modest living.”

  Tim turned into Swanette’s drive and whistled at the equipment set up on the grounds. “Are we back in Hollywood? Looks like they’re shooting a major movie here,” said Tim.

  “Yeah, Len’s a good guy. Until he needs this stuff for a paying job at the end of the week, he’s willing to leave us the lights and the trailer. Since the barn has electricity, they were able to rig it all up without an extra generator. The tech pried open the door to get in and connect everything.”

  The technician who had set up the lighting was presumably still sleeping in the trailer parked near the road. Jane reminded Tim to go out and introduce himself and warn him that other people would be out and about on the property as the day wore on.

  “And I have to remember to tell everyone else about him. If Nellie gets here and sees a stranger, she might try to whack him with a board herself, so let’s make sure everybody knows who’s around. Len said he was sending one of his best guys . . . Dave, I think he said his name was. I assume he’ll be here while the equipment’s here for the next day or two,” said Jane.

  Tim eased the truck into the parking area between the kitchen door and the row of sheds. Already parked closest to the house was a Mercedes, the color of coffee with an indulgent dose of cream.

  “Whose car? Pretty fancy for a lighting guy,” said Tim. “Hey, you know whose car it looks like . . . ?”

  “I meant to tell you before we got here,” said Jane. “I know you don’t really need any help, but just go along . . .”

  “Almost right on time,” said Claire Oh, appearing at Jane’s side as soon as she and Tim got out of the car. How did she manage that? Tall and impeccable, Claire had a talent for showing up. She didn’t arrive, she materialized . . . usually in the very spot you thought you wanted to be. If there was a glass case at a flea market and you just knew it held a silver bracelet, obscured by tarnish, with a designer signature undetected by the seller, Claire Oh would be the buyer in front of you, boxing you out of your closer look and pointing to the very item herself, asking if she could see that dirty little piece in the corner. Openmouthed, you’d watch her lay it across her elegant wrist with a scornful look, and then ask for a better price since she’d really have to clean it up before she let her niece have it for her dress-up box. Before the transaction was finished, Claire would have the seller convinced she was lucky to have gotten rid of the thing, and Claire would be pocketing a delicate multistrand bracelet that would clean up to reveal two Tiffany signatures and, in a week, appear in Claire’s own locked case, wearing a two-hundred-dollar price tag.

  Jane thought she heard Tim groan at the sight of Claire, but tried to convince herself that she imagined it. It’s not that Tim wasn’t fond of her. He admired her, actually, or at least claimed that he did and encouraged Jane to take a page from her book. Think up-scale, like Claire Oh, he often told Jane when he caught her running her fingers through a tin of buttons, or paging through a 1930s high school yearbook, reading the signatures of graduating seniors. So why wouldn’t he be pleased to see her here at Swanette’s when they had so much stuff to sift through, so many pieces of furniture to touch and turn upside down and scratch their thumbnails against? So many pieces of costume jewelry to study through a jeweler’s loupe, searching for that elusive hallmark, that coveted signature? Claire would be an enormous help, wouldn’t she?

  “Darling, Tim, so good to see you again,” Claire said, offering him a perfectly made-up cheek. “Jane told me you’ve got your hands full.”

  “Did she?” asked Tim, glaring at Jane.

  “I thought perhaps while Detective Oh and I puttered around and went into town to talk to Ada, you and Claire might get a good start on—”

  Jane stopped and looked at the two of them. Claire and Tim were giving each other such frozen smiles that Jane could picture their lips and teeth cracking and falling from their faces. This was ridiculous. There was a full house and at least three outbuildings and a huge barn filled with stuff. Surely there was enough to go around. About to say just that, she opened her mouth, but before she could begin, Tim turned his frozen grin on her.

  “So generous of you, Jane, to think of me and realize I’d need some help. Let’s see . . . we give me first refusal on everything since it’s my sale, and then, it would have been you next, of course, because you’re my partner and you found the deal for me, but since Claire drove all the way down here, let’s give her second dibs, okay? Then you? Or maybe Nellie, then you? That seems only fair.”

  Jane nodded, conscious now of her own frozen smile. She probably deserved that. But Claire wouldn’t want the same stuff as Jane, would she? If there was a stash of old wooden knitting needles sitting in a blue jar or a tin of buttons or a bag of old quilting scraps or rolled balls of fabric for rug making? Claire Oh wouldn’t care about that junk, would she? Tim knew that, but he also knew where to aim the arrow—it was the whole first-look thing. Tim didn’t want Claire to see anything first, even if she didn’t want another set of Spode for one her clients. That’s why Tim resented her presence. In the long run, he knew it would help to have her here. It was just hard to share that first look. Jane knew that Claire wouldn’t want any old typewriter-ribbon tins, but having them tossed aside by her first, into a pile of stuff that Claire would mentally label Jane’s junk, somehow took a little of the shimmer off the discovery, didn’t it?

  “Mrs. Wheel?” Jane turned around, so happy to see Detective Oh that she had to fight an urge to reach out to him. Although she had taken his arm on occasion and he had patted her shoulder once or twice, their relationship was one of intellectual oneness mixed with what felt like awkward physical adolescence. Jane was drawn to his voice, his face,
his eyes. She often wanted to reach out and touch one of his vintage ties, which she knew he consented to wear only to please Claire, but Jane held herself back, fearing that even rubbing fabric worn close to his heart would be too intimate a gesture.

  “Shall we all begin inside?” he asked, and led the way to the porch and kitchen door.

  After the initial glaring period, Tim and Claire lost themselves inside the farm house, Tim pointing out some of the better pieces he had seen the day before. Claire had taken out a leather folder filled with custom-engraved index cards and began writing notes, placing them on tables, chairs, and small chests. Jane, from the kitchen, could see her gliding from piece to piece as Tim pointed out spindles and pulled out drawers to illustrate his conjectures.

  Bruce Oh stood at the kitchen sink, looking out of the window toward the barn.

  “The service road goes back around behind . . . there?” he asked, pointing.

  Jane nodded.

  He turned to his left and moved to the other window, which faced the driveway where the cars were parked and the two sheds and the chicken coop were lined up, each around twenty-five to thirty feet apart from each other.

  “If Mrs. Swanette was struck in that shed,” he said pointing, “you are correct that it would have been easily accessed from that road. Easy to get to the buildings, easy to leave without being seen.”

  “Tim had music on and it was so loud, he wouldn’t have heard a vehicle drive onto the property—even here at the kitchen door, let alone back there behind the barn. And if Tim wouldn’t have heard it, Swanette’s mother-in-law, living in that interior room with the television on, wouldn’t have heard the comings and goings out on the property. These windows are warped and haven’t been opened in years. Tim and I both tried them yesterday. Whoever was doing whatever with all of that stuff in the barn and the buildings would have been able to come and go whenever they pleased,” said Jane.

  “Let’s go look at the building where your friend might have been attacked,” said Oh.

  Jane wanted to correct him and say that there was no “might have been” about this, but she knew that in his own careful way, Oh was right. Until they found proof that someone was in the shed with her, or until Swanette woke up to tell them what happened, they had no proof that she didn’t trip or fall ill.

  The morning light illuminated the shed much more brightly than the late afternoon light did yesterday when Jane found Swanette unconscious. She got down on her knees to show Oh exactly where Swanette was lying and where Jane had seen the slat from the crate. It was still there, between two other tall sealed boxes. Oh nodded at Jane’s observation that it might have been used as a weapon, but he didn’t remove it.

  “Tim said she had a large ring of keys . . . and we couldn’t find it anywhere,” said Jane. She also told him about the phone message from Swanette that she had just heard. “I haven’t seen any coins and she specifically said coins and jewelry, but I haven’t had time to really look at anything.”

  “Presence rather than absence makes for better proof, Mrs. Wheel,” said Oh. “Although it seems logical that her assailant would have taken the keys and anything valuable that she had stumbled upon, having something gone or missing is simply not as definitive as finding something here that proves that someone else was with her in the shed and was responsible for her injury.”

  Jane reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out the pumpkin seeds that she had removed from Swanette’s arm.

  “Not only is this something concrete that proves the presence of another, I think it connects everything to Ada’s. That’s where the pumpkins were, but also, that’s where the Internet auction complaints were—on the desk—and where the books are missing from the study,” said Jane.

  “And where the ghost lives,” said Oh.

  Jane nodded.

  “I believe that I would like to visit the ghost,” said Oh. “Tim Lowry, my wife, and your mother will be inspecting everything here. The three of them together are almost as good with the concrete objects as you, Mrs. Wheel. I find that my strength usually lies in the invisible. May we visit the ghost?”

  Jane nodded and carefully rewrapped the pumpkin seeds and put them back into her jacket pocket. They had become as much of a good-luck talisman as one of the buckeyes from Cobb Park. Jane knew if she found out who had finished carving that pumpkin, she would find the person who was using her brother’s photograph to run crooked auctions and who was storing his phony or stolen goods right here on Swanette’s farm. Honest Joe was going to turn out to be Michael’s doppelgänger who was going to turn out to be stealing from Cousin Ada and who was going to be running his operation from Swanette’s barn and a Herscher post office box.

  Oh said he would get the car keys from Claire and drive them into town. Jane took her time leaving the shed, since she held on to the belief that if she just looked hard enough, she would find that presence of proof that Oh said they needed. This particular outbuilding contained only packed boxes and crates. Jane realized that there was a definite progression in these buildings. This shed contained packed crates and boxes. The next building over had objects all unpacked and arrayed on shelves. In the barn, where she had just stolen a glance now that it was opened by Dave, the lighting tech, objects were not only displayed, they were tagged and coded with dates and numbers. If she were to number these buildings one through three, the sequence would go from stored goods, to examined objects, to sale items. So this was the building where they received objects and sorted them for sale? Jane picked a cardboard box off the shelf that was nearest to her and stripped the thick tape from it. On top of the box was written “Kitchen” with a date underneath, about five and half years earlier. Jane unwrapped the newspaper from a stainless steel ladle. Nothing special about it. Jane set the box back on the shelf and pulled another one close and saw that the handwriting on this box was totally different. In broad black marker was written “Cottage Linens.” Jane opened up the carton to find pale blue sheets and pillowcases, clean and decent, but again, nothing special. These were, indeed, the slightly worn sheets you might earmark for your summer cottage.

  If Swanette had really seen valuable goods in the house, her attacker had removed any of them that had been stored in the shed. And Oh had suggested they needed to find something instead of speculating about what had vanished. Jane pulled and turned some of the boxes on the shelves. Most were marked—“Living Room,” “Kit’s bedroom,” “Jillian’s Office.” Who were those people? Kit and Jillian? On the carton marked “Jillian’s Office,” Jane saw an address and underneath was printed, “For Storage.”

  When people moved and packed up their goods, they often labeled the boxes by room. That was the logical way to know where everything should be put when they arrived at their new place.

  Okay. What was unusual in this shed about all these packed cartons? The boxes were so random. There were no two boxes that had the same handwriting, the same type of marker. One box came from a self-moving company, another from a private moving company. There were boxes that had hauled bananas to grocery stores and cartons that had held twelve bottles of wine. Some of the boxes had advertising on the side and no two were the same. Why did that seem so odd? Jane thought about all the times she had moved in college and afterward into her first series of apartments. How had she packed her stuff? Even if she did travel lighter in those days, there were books and records and clothes. Yes, fewer McCoy flowerpots and vintage typewriters, but still objects needing to be packed.

  Like everyone else she knew, Jane had gone into the grocery store and asked for boxes. Clerks usually sent her to the produce department where she got four boxes freshly unpacked of broccoli or green beans that had just arrived. She remembered that the produce guys told her that they usually broke down the boxes immediately, so she was lucky that she had just come in after a delivery and was able to grab the broccoli group.

  That was what seemed unusual. Swanette said that she believed her mother-in-law was the “ke
eper of the stuff” for her family; that she had all of the handed-down memorabilia and objects that her family had left behind when they passed on. Swanette told Jane that was what had filled these outbuildings. Those treasure boxes were what prompted the heavily padlocked doors. Looking over all these cartons, Jane agreed that they were packed as if they were being put away for a while. In fact, this shed could be anyone’s storage locker containing the extra stuff that hadn’t been unpacked during the initial stages of the move, except for the fact that each box seemed to belong to a different person or persons. Jane looked at Kit’s box and Jillian’s box. Totally different handwriting and markers. One box came from a Tulsa supermarket and the other was a purchased U-Haul medium-sized carton.

  “Kit and Jillian don’t even know each other,” Jane said when Oh came back with the car keys.

  Oh looked at the shelf to which she pointed.

  “Interesting, Mrs. Wheel,” said Oh. He scanned the shelves she had been studying. “Although . . . perhaps they just marked their own boxes with their own markers?”

  “And purchased separate rolls of tape?” said Jane, pointing to the clear tape on one, and tan strapping tape used on the other. “Nope. These boxes are definitely one-offs. It’s as if someone took one carton off every moving van rolling its separate way down the highway.”

  “Interesting,” repeated Oh. “Shall we visit the ghost now?”

  14

  Jane tried to describe Ada in the precise manner she knew Detective Oh appreciated. She told him she dressed in black, maintained an erect posture, hadn’t had a haircut in a long time, if ever, and tilted her head to the right when she listened to a question.

  “Does she look directly at you when she speaks or does she seem to look into the distance?” asked Oh.

  That was a new one.

  “Actually,” Jane said, “she did seem to be looking over my shoulder, although I’m sure she doesn’t see or hear well, so that just may be a kind of mannerism that developed because of her limitations.”