Mrs. Wheel, here and now and very much alive, needed him.
Oh tried to remember if he had ever seen Mrs. Wheel cry. He knew she had closed herself up in her car and wept after a friend’s funeral. He had witnessed that from a distance. He remembered being impressed with the immensity of her emotion, matched by her need to express it privately. Had she ever openly cried in front of him? He couldn’t recall a time.
It looked as if she were wiping away tears now, though, as she stood in the library doorway.
“Swanette died,” said Jane, loudly and deliberately. It was as if she were still speaking in the voice she used for Ada. “A few minutes ago.”
“Shall we go to the hospital?” asked Oh, stepping away from the library steps he had been about to test.
Jane shook her head.
“Mom and Dad are with Christine. That’s her best friend who has power of attorney. My dad said she stayed groggy for a while last night, in and out of consciousness. The doctor said if she woke up and stayed awake, she’d . . . I guess she talked to Christine who was by her side all night. But she didn’t make sense and drifted off and lapsed into a coma. ‘Brain activity ceased,’ they said, and”—Jane’s voice caught—“then I guess they just unhooked everything and let her slip away.”
“Have you called Mr. Lowry?”
“No need. We’ll tell him when we go back there. Christine told my folks that we should keep on doing what we’re doing since now the farm would have to be sold. Dad said Christine is overwhelmed with all of the responsibility. As he put it, Christine isn’t any spring chicken herself and her husband is incapacitated. He was a pretty important lawyer in this county, so she knows people to advise her, but still . . . it’s a lot on her shoulders,” said Jane.
“And the grief makes everything weigh so much more,” said Oh. “It will balance . . . the tasks ahead of her will help manage her sadness . . . but right now, the weight is crushing.”
“I think we should talk to the police. Even if they didn’t believe me before, they’ll have to pay attention to murder. That board in the shed . . . it would have fingerprints . . .”
“Let’s assess the situation today and talk to the police tonight or in the morning, Mrs. Wheel,” said Oh. “That will give your parents and their friend Christine some time to rest and recover.”
Jane’s cell phone chimed. She looked at the number and shook her head. “I don’t know who it is, but it can’t be anyone I want to talk to.”
Bruce Oh slightly raised an eyebrow. Jane saw it and knew that he wouldn’t say anything, would never interfere with her feelings, but as sure as that eyebrow moved a centimeter, she knew that he wanted her to answer her telephone.
“Yes?” said Jane.
“Can you hear me?” asked Tim. “I’m using the house phone. My cell couldn’t hold a call and—”
“What is it, Tim?” asked Jane.
“Honey, I heard. I know about Swanette. But you better get back here.”
“What’s the matter? Has something . . . ?”
“Claire and I are fine. I just want you to get back here. It’s important, not life threatening, not break-every-law-to-get-here-urgent, just important, okay?”
Jane nodded, then, remembering she was on the phone, told Tim she would leave right away. “Let me tell you what they said about Swanette,” Jane said, and repeated to Tim what she had just told Oh.
“We need to have the sale as soon as possible,” said Jane, before hanging up.
Linda Weller came through the kitchen door balancing two pumpkins. Both were small, one had a smiling face and the other was uncarved.
“Ada passed her physical, so I’ll be leaving,” she said. Looking at Jane’s face, she added, “Are you okay?”
“Did you know Swanette Flanders? She lived in town here, but had a farm where her mother-in-law had been living until a few years ago?” Jane didn’t wait for an answer. “She just passed away.”
“No way,” said Linda. “I saw her at Edna’s place last week. She was as fit as . . . What happened to her?”
“Murdered,” said Jane.
“Mrs. Wheel,” said Oh quietly, “perhaps you should wait for the police to determine what exactly happened.”
Jane looked at Oh, then back to Linda Weller, who stood, openmouthed, holding a pumpkin under each arm.
“Murdered,” Jane repeated.
15
Jane and Oh drove back to Swanette’s farm in silence. Jane had promised Ada that she would return and Oh had received Ada’s permission to return, as well, to examine her library as both a scholar and a collector. Ada seemed genuinely pleased that someone was taking an interest.
“My mother and father made that room. They said we didn’t need a school outside this house if we had all the important books in the world right here. My father said an education was a private business between a person and his books. If a person was smart enough to want to be educated, he was smart enough to educate himself,” said Ada, taking a deep breath when she finished, as if she hadn’t made such a long speech for a while.
“Your father sounds like a wise man,” Oh had told her.
“A wise man,” she had repeated, nodding.
Jane pulled into the parking area at the farm, noting that there was a new vehicle next to Tim’s truck. The white midsize had a small rental logo on the bumper sticker.
“Tim,” Jane called out as soon as they entered through the back door, not seeing either Claire or Tim in the kitchen or adjoining parlor. Jane turned around and went past Oh to get back to the kitchen door. She started to feel panicky, remembering the last time she had gone out to the shed, but before she left the porch, three people came out of the other shed and walked toward the house.
Tim and Claire were listening to the third figure, a man, explain something. Jane could hear him saying, “Okay, I’m an idiot, I admit it, but if you tell me one more time exactly how idiotic I am, Lowry, I’m going to . . .”
Jane ran to the threesome and hugged the idiot so fiercely that Oh, watching, winced. Jane, so glad to hear her brother Michael’s voice and see him, safe and sound, and on her turf, that she didn’t even notice, until backing out of her uncharacteristically emotional embrace, that her brother was sporting a swollen black eye.
Before she could begin the questioning, Michael put his hand on her shoulder and suggested they all go inside and sit and he would explain everything.
“Perhaps we can all have some tea or coffee, Mrs. Wheel. I think we could all use something to revive us,” said Oh. He looked at Claire who nodded and walked ahead. In the few minutes it took them to catch up to her in the kitchen she had already set a large kettle of water on to boil and was rummaging through the kitchen cupboards in search of tea or instant coffee. Tim had cleared the round oak table in the kitchen except for his own equipment . . . a basket with tape, markers, scissors, tags, and a plastic price-tag gun for attaching price tags to linens and clothes.
Michael extended his hand to Bruce Oh and introduced himself.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Jane, “I’m just so surprised to . . . what the hell happened to your eye?”
“As Tim has been pointing out to me for the last twenty-five minutes or so, I’m an idiot. And I have a black eye because someone punched me, and because I was an idiot . . . and greedy to boot . . . I deserved to be punched. And I believe I was also told I was a lucky idiot to have come out of the encounter with only one black eye.”
“Someone thought you were Honest Joe again, right? I warned you, I—” Jane began.
“Before you, too, get to the idiot part of your speech, I beg you, please, stop and let me just tell this, okay? And although out of sequence, I do want you to know, up front, this was not a case of mistaken identity. The guy who punched me knew exactly who I was and meant to punch me, Michael, and did just that.” Michael barely smiled, rubbing his purple cheekbone.
Claire didn’t bother to ask who wanted tea nor did she offer a selection from the b
oxes she found. She rinsed out a Hall Autumn Leaf pattern, Aladdin-style teapot she had found in the cupboard, filled the ceramic insert with some loose black tea, and filled the pot with boiling water, setting it on a hammered-aluminum Wendell August tray to steep. She found the matching sugar and creamer, filled them with some old sugar cubes she dug out of the pantry and the fresh cream Tim had brought, along with coffee and soft drinks and snacks, with the hope that they wouldn’t have to leave the property for coffee breaks.
When Claire set the tray down, along with some pink Lu-Ray cups and saucers, Jane knew, that under any other circumstance, she would be delighted to attend this hodgepodge vintage tea party. Who knew that Claire would appreciate the quaint kitsch of the vintage kitchenware she was using to serve the tea? Jane had Oh’s wife figured more for modern Paul McCobb designs or maybe some fine English bone china.
“Not to worry, Tim, I used the rummage ware for us and put the good things in the dining room,” said Claire.
So much for Jane Wheel’s and Claire Oh’s moment on the same page in Ye Old Stuffe catalog, thought Jane.
“Remember the box of baseball cards you found next to Q’s stamps?” asked Michael. “Okay, I bought those from a guy about a month ago who had—”
“You wanted me to think Nellie had let you save your stuff and not mine, didn’t you? You said—”
“Jane, I didn’t say those were my childhood cards. When you asked about them, I said Mom liked me best. You just assumed that meant she kept my stuff for me,” said Michael. “My sister,” he said, explaining to Claire and Bruce, “has always equated old stuff with old love or something like that . . . ever since her teddy bear got left behind when—”
“Okay, okay, go on . . .” said Jane.
“I, for one, would like to hear the rest of that saga sometime,” said Claire.
“Anyway, I met this guy at a golf outing for work. We got to talking baseball and childhood heroes at the nineteenth hole. . . .”
Jane saw Bruce Oh taking notes and looked at his notepad. He had written 19 holes? Not 18? Jane smiled for the first time since seeing her brother’s black eye.
“The guy tells me that he’s been collecting great baseball cards and he had some really valuable cards and lots of multiples of them, since he could never resist one when he found it for sale. I told him I might be interested in buying some of his spares if he ever wanted to part with them and one thing led to another and one drink led to another and pretty soon I had made a deal to look at his collection. We exchanged numbers, and the next day he called me, sounding really upset. He told me he had been doing some gambling lately, sports betting, and he had just lost a huge bet and didn’t have the cash. He was just in a panic and then he remembered we had talked about the cards and he offered me all of these great rookie cards and said he’d take a loss if I just got him cash right away and he said he was sure I could sell the spares on eBay and double my money, but he just didn’t have the time to do that himself. If he didn’t pay off his bookie, he was going to be in big trouble.
“Monica would have killed me if she knew I was taking money out of our savings to buy baseball cards, but I figured I’d just take a look at what he had and maybe make some money on the deal. Phil, if that was his name, met me at a coffee shop, said he didn’t want to do anything at his office and didn’t want anybody to be able to find him until he had the money, and even though I didn’t think I’d ever do anything like this . . . you know, make a cash purchase for something like . . . oh God, I saw those cards and my brain just went to mush. I don’t know how to explain it, but I knew I had to have them, it was like I was drugged or hypnotized or . . .”
“Meiji period Japanese porcelain,” said Claire.
“Harvey Probber furniture,” said Tim, nodding.
“Bakelite buttons,” said Jane.
Oh, seeing the puzzled look on Michael’s face, explained. “Those are the objects that drug them.”
Michael still shook his head.
“It just means they understand your need for the baseball cards,” said Oh.
“Well, even though I had taken this money out of our savings account, I never meant to spend it all. I thought I might buy a Mantle and maybe a Nolan Ryan . . . I don’t know. But when I saw them and he told me what they were worth individually, I knew he was on the mark since I had looked a few up myself on the Internet. I figured I could triple my money by selling off the spares.”
“Oh, honey,” said Jane, laying her hand on Michael’s arm. “How much did you pay?”
“Six thousand. Cash.”
No one spoke as Tim, Claire, and Jane all remembered their own purchases of desire . . . when need and greed obliterated common sense and practicality.
“It would have been a bargain if—”
“Fakes?” asked Jane.
“All but two, and together they might be worth around five hundred.”
“Sounds like maybe this other guy should have the black eye,” said Tim.
“If I could find him, he’d have worse than that,” said Michael. “The number he gave me was a cell phone—no longer in service. No, it turns out the guy wasn’t even part of the golf outing I was on. He was waiting to play alone and got picked up as a fourth before I got there, so I didn’t even know that he wasn’t part of the party I was joining.”
“He was clever, this Phillip,” said Oh. “Con men are wonderful listeners. He had time to observe, pay attention, and fill himself in on who he was supposed to be associated with, he saw you arrive late, and knew that you wouldn’t have noticed he was an outsider.”
“The black eye, sweetie,” said Jane. “Get to the black eye.”
“I put a few cards up on eBay, hoping to get my money back fast—before Monica even noticed it was gone. Then yesterday I went to a card shop where they sell all kinds of memorabilia. They were having this parking lot event. A bunch of dealers had card tables set up and stuff. I started talking to this guy who was looking for a birthday present for his dad. I told him I had a lot of great cards. He said if I had a Stan Musial Bowman rookie card in good shape, he’d buy it for a thousand cash and I had one and we made the deal right there. Problem was, I wasn’t a dealer and shouldn’t have been dealing like that anyway, right in front of all those professionals who were set up . . . and this guy takes the Musial right over to a dealer who starts laughing and pointing out that it’s a fake. I was still browsing, hadn’t even gone twenty feet away, and this guy comes up and slugs me. People wanted to call the police for my sake, but I didn’t want the police involved—hell, I wasn’t really the injured party—so I gave the guy his money back and apologized. One of the dealers took pity on me when he heard me tell my story and looked over the cards. He’s the one that authenticated the two that were real. I got a quick education and this,” Michael said, pointing to his eye.
“I called Monica and told her I had to come and help you on a case, that you needed a lawyerly take on something that had to be kept confidential—a last-minute thing—and since her two sisters had come for a week and I was clearly the fifth wheel around the place, she told me I should definitely come. They were all at Disneyland for the day when I stopped at home to fill a bag. I’ve got some flexibility at work, especially since I can handle most of this week’s obligations from my laptop. I felt like a thief sneaking out of town like that, but I figured maybe you’d be able to track down my scam artist at the same time you found out who this Honest Joe guy was. Maybe I’d be able to help you since I’m the one that looks like him and all,” said Michael. “And by the time I get back home, this,” he said, pointing to his eye, “will have faded a bit.”
Jane looked at her baby brother who was a head taller and who had always seemed more adult and sophisticated than she had—even though she was the alleged big sister. At this moment, he looked like her baby brother again, waiting for her to come up with a plan. She patted his arm and looked at Oh and Tim to help her deliver the news.
“No chance, Mike
,” said Tim, draining his tea and getting up to rinse out his cup. “That guy is in another town selling cards or stamps or Beatles cards or whatever to some other sucker right now. Most people don’t even report a scam like this because they’re embarrassed about being taken. I can’t believe you could ever find him. Am I right?” he asked, looking at Detective Oh.
“As a rule, yes, I’m afraid Mr. Lowry is right,” said Oh. “In this case, you might be lucky. You can report your encounter, and since you still have the cards, you might be able to recover your bad investment if they catch your ‘Phil.’ If you report it, it will help warn others and alert potential victims. You would have the satisfaction of stopping him from doing the same to another,” said Oh.
“Satisfaction plus six thousand dollars would be better, but if I have to settle for satisfaction, so be it,” said Michael. “It’s not like I didn’t deserve it. I was greedy and—”
“No one deserves to be cheated,” said Jane. “Just because you love something or long for something or just because you get excited at discovering a treasure, that doesn’t make you less of a deserving person. It’s easy to get fooled or not see a chip. . . .”
“Or a tiny hairline crack that renders worthless a vase that would have been worth thousands that you thought you were lucky to spot at an estate sale where they had no idea of what it was . . .” said Claire, staring at a space above all of their heads.
“Professional hazards,” said Tim. “We all have a kind of hysterical blindness when we see something that’s too good to believe. We know in our brain that something too good to be true usually is exactly that, but our hearts always win and we stick up our bidding paddles or grab something and pay and then run away like a thief, and when we get to the car, realize we overpaid or missed a flaw and we feel like such idiots. . . .”
“Thanks,” said Michael. “I didn’t think that I could smile again after this mess, but being an idiot in the company of idiots is more comforting than I would have imagined.”
Scary Stuff Page 16
