The Wrong Stuff

by Sharon Fiffer

  If Claire Oh could be arrested for murder, anything was possible. Yes, if the world turned upside down and an antique dealer wife of a former police detective could be arrested for murder, Jane Wheel could become a clean and mindful wife and mother, perfectly organized. And she could become a detective and solve the crime.

  Aha! Jane found her wallet and fished out a credit card from among the ticket stubs and old receipts. Sure, she could solve Claire’s problems. She had, after all, found her wallet.

  Jane Wheel, girl hero. Yes, she liked the sound of that. She hadn’t thought of any of the right questions to ask Bruce Oh when he’d told her about Claire’s situation. His word, “situation.” Instead of asking the who, what, and where a good detective might ask, she offered to bring her anything she needed. A toothbrush? Was that what women needed in jail these days?

  Oh had assured Jane that their attorney was attending to Claire’s release on bond. He told her he would meet her at the coffee shop next to the bookstore to fill her in. In fact, he told her, Claire had insisted that Bruce leave her with the lawyer. She’d asked him to go and persuade Jane Wheel to help her. Nice to be in demand, Jane thought. Nick sure wasn’t going to be asking for her this weekend. Jane settled into a booth with her bag of books—the collected works of Belinda St. Germain—along with several others on organizing closets and simplifying one’s life.

  Jane stared into her purse, a large bag made out of an old hand-braided rag rug. Yes, she needed a lot of this stuff, but maybe three items could go. There were stubs of old theater tickets, but those came in handy as bookmarks. After all, she had all these Belinda St. Germain books now—she would need to mark essential passages. An old EZ Way Inn key chain that her parents, Don and Nellie, had given out in the early sixties as customers’ Christmas gifts. Six pens. Well, you never knew when one was going to go dry. A wrinkled buckeye that Nick had picked up out of a neighbor’s yard as a good luck charm a few years ago, then discarded. Jane had picked it out of his wastebasket, just in case there was some luck left. Surely there must be something in here that could be discarded….

  “Mrs. Wheel?”

  Bruce Oh, who would forever in Jane’s mind be Police Detective Oh, even if he had resigned to teach and consult, even if his identification was now the license of a private investigator rather than a police department shield, sat down opposite her.

  He smiled, or at least Jane thought he might be trying to smile. He was not a man of easy expressions.

  “Botox would be wasted on you,” said Jane.

  “Pardon?” Oh signaled to the waitress by pointing to Jane’s cup and making a T with his two index fingers.

  “You don’t frown, you don’t furrow, you don’t squint, you don’t scrunch,” said Jane, “and yet…”

  “Yes?” Oh allowed his lips to turn upward a scant few degrees.

  “You are not without expression. How do you do it?” Jane asked.

  “Claire says that my eyes tell her everything she needs to know,” he said, pouring the hot water in the stainless pot over the tea bag in his cup.

  Jane nodded. It was true. At the moment his eyes showed a kind of puzzled pain, as if he was physically hurt but couldn’t pinpoint the bruise or break.

  “Claire. How does she tell you everything you need to know?” Jane asked.

  Jane was looking down at her coffee cup when she asked the question. More precisely, when she heard herself ask the question. How in heaven had she made herself so bold, so prying, so intimate?

  Oh seemed more puzzled than put off by the question. “One week ago I’d have told you that Claire spoke directly to me, never holding back.”

  Oh thanked the waitress who’d brought him more hot water.

  “And now?” asked Jane, wondering how Oh was able to silently request tea, receive it in a timely and civil fashion, then be rewarded with a second cup, when she had been trying for fifteen minutes to snag a coffee refill.

  “There is nothing direct about Claire right now. She told me to get you on this case. That was the clearest message she sent.”

  Oh told Jane about the case, which was almost literally a case. The piece of furniture that had started all the trouble was a kind of chest of drawers that Claire had found holding old tools in the basement of a house on Sheridan Road. She’d recognized it as a potentially valuable piece, asked about it, the owners had given it to her…

  Jane stopped Oh. “Gave it to her? For how much?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How much nothing?” asked Jane.

  Oh stared at Jane, one of his I-hear-you-and-I’m-quite-sure-that-you-are-speaking-the-English-language-but-your-inventive-use-of-said-language-is-a-mystery-to-me looks.

  “I tell Charley ‘nothing’ all the time when he asks how much I paid for something. ‘How much for that broken lamp with the frayed cord, Jane?’ ‘Nothing,’ I say, when it’s just a little. Nothing used to mean under five bucks. Now I’ve had to keep up with inflation. Anything under ten is nothing now.”

  “I mean zero dollars, Mrs. Wheel,” said Oh. “The person running the sale said she’d check with the owner. It hadn’t been priced because they’d thought it was a built-in in the workroom, an old chest holding hammers and nails and brushes. She returned and told Claire that if she hauled it out of the basement after the sale ended that afternoon, she could have it for nothing.”

  When Jane met Claire Oh later that day, she picked up the story there, at the most amazing part. The “you can have it for nothing” miracle part. After the greeting at the door, Bruce Oh’s no-nonsense introduction—Jane Wheel, Claire Oh—and Jane’s momentary distraction with Claire’s height—six feet, two inches, at least—Claire led Jane into a large room with rich, apricot-colored walls.

  Jane saw right away that each piece of furniture—a standing desk under a west-facing window with nothing on its surface except three cut crystal paperweights catching the rays of the setting sun, the down-filled sofa covered in French toile, the two perfectly proportioned wing chairs, the eighteenth-century English landscapes that flanked the fireplace—was perfect and perfectly placed. Everything was elegant, exquisite, and spare. No extras. No cardboard boxes filled with Pyrex mixing bowls, no stacks of Workbasket magazines from the fifties. Had Belinda St. Germain already been here? It was only when Claire began to talk, her voice hoarse, her eyes glistening with a picker’s frenzy, that Jane recognized a kindred spirit.

  “I couldn’t believe my luck,” said Claire Oh, looking around her living room, drinking it in as if she thought she would never see it again.

  “They were giving me the chest. And I had already bought the top piece. Somewhere along the line, someone had separated the top shelf from the drawers below. They were using it as a makeshift coffee table and had it priced at ten dollars. I was sure it was the top part of the chest. The carving matched up…I…I was beside myself….”

  Claire leaned forward toward Jane, sitting in the chair opposite her. She held her hands out, palms facing each other, as if she were measuring a drawer. Her hands were square, her nails manicured, but left unpolished. Her face, although pale now—did someone pick up prison pallor after a few hours in a police station—had clearly seen the sun. Too many years of it, thought Jane.

  Jane realized that she had never thought about Detective Oh’s age. He had a face that could belong to someone forty or sixty or anywhere in between. Jane knew the exact year a certain blue dye lot was used on a tablecloth and she could date a McCoy vase within a year, but she always had a hard time with people. Eyes were often so much younger, or older, than the curve of lips. A wisp of bangs often said one year, while the soft, translucent skin around the eyes argued for another. Claire Oh’s eyes had youthful zeal when she spoke, but the sag of her jaw, the weathering around her gray-green eyes told a different story.

  “A Westman chest and they were giving it to me, thanking me for hauling it out of their way,” said Claire, her hands still outstretched. For a moment, Jane thought Cla
ire was going to grasp her hands and shake them. Jane understood perfectly the depth of her feeling. Finding something was something. Finding something for nothing was everything.

  “I knew it couldn’t really be a Westman Sunflower Chest. There are only two of those known to exist. But the wood and the carving, I mean it was under two layers of paint and it was pretty gouged out, the finely delineated feet had water damage from being in the basement, there was hardware missing, but I felt it. I felt the hand of the carver. I ran my hand over the sunflower and I thought, What if there are three? What if Mathew Westman made three?”

  “The feel of the wood told you?” Oh asked his wife.

  Jane and Claire both looked at Oh, then back at each other.

  Jane knew how wood felt, what it held, the story it could tell. Her father, Don, had told her a few months ago that he might replace the oak bar in the EZ Way Inn. Jane had grown up in her parents’ tavern, the EZ Way Inn, done her homework by the dim light of the hanging fixture over the pool table. When she was old enough, in the eighth grade, Don had taught her to draw a glass of Schlitz without leaving too large a head of foam, and Nellie, her mother, had taught her the right way to wash a glass. Three times up and down, twisting it slightly over the vertical bristled brushes in the stainless wash tank, dunk twice in the rinse tank, then place upside down on a clean bar towel to protect the rim. The EZ Way Inn was where she had learned everything important. She had learned there what Claire knew, too. That you could read old wood, that the feel of it could tell you everything you needed to know.

  The bar at the EZ Way Inn was a massive stretch of solid oak with a fat, rolled edge where elbows had softened it, fingers had drummed songs into it, heads had rested on hands, contemplating life’s mysteries. As a little girl, waiting for her parents to clean the bar at night or in the morning before opening, Jane had walked the length of the bar, running her hand over that warm, worn wood. Every hill and valley softly carved out of that wood told her a story, sang her a song. There was Henry, who’d liked to sit by the window and always had a Hershey bar for her after school, and Barney who, in his broken Polish accent, had emphasized the importance of music education. That bar was the shadow box, the souvenir album of her family, Don and Nellie and her brother, Michael, and all the other extended family members who stopped by every day when the 3:30 whistle blew at the factory across the street. “Don’t replace the bar,” Jane had begged her dad.

  “Where is it?” Jane asked. She vaguely remembered that she should be asking questions about the murder, the who, what, and when of why she was in the Ohs’ perfectly appointed living room in the first place, but all she could think about was touching one of the carved wooden sunflowers on the Westman chest.

  The room off the Ohs’ kitchen, in the hands of parents and children and cats and dogs, would have been named and used as the family room. A television and squishy couch, upholstered in a color that wouldn’t show spilled cocoa, would have taken up most of the sunny space.

  Bruce and Claire Oh, however, had kept this room spare. The mullioned windows were bare of curtains; however, the carefully placed trees and trailing vines on the outside of the glass offered natural privacy. The walls were painted a deep tan; the trim was a rich cream. A thick carpet, patterned with florals and vines, the colors all softened by at least a century, anchored the room. Two buttery leather chairs sat on either end of a mission library table. A reading room? A meditation space? Belinda St. Germain would give her eyeteeth for this room, thought Jane. There’s not one wasted object, not one piece of filler. Even the large chest of drawers sitting in the middle of the rug seemed as if it might belong there, as the object of display in a small, elegant museum gallery.

  Jane approached the chest and stroked one of the large, carved sunflowers on the drawer. She knelt to feel the carving of vines trailing down the chest’s heavy legs and feet. Instead of a griffon’s claw or a hairy paw for the chest’s feet, Westman, if it was indeed Westman who was the maker of this magnificent piece, had continued his garden design and carved ivy leaves encircling the legs and clinging sensuously to the ball feet. Jane stood up and ran her hand along the top of the shelf, which was now reattached to the three-drawer body.

  “Someone had pried off the shelf and used it as a narrow table. Probably in a child’s room for a while,” Claire said. “There was paint and waxy stuff all over the surface, maybe crayons. I saw it and spotted the sunflower carvings at the top of legs, and I knew a master hand had touched it.”

  The way she said it, “a master hand,” made Jane stand up a little straighter. Yes, that was what one, sometimes, some lucky times, saw across a room—the work of a master hand.

  “What I didn’t see right away was that the table was actually the top shelf of a chest. The top surface was narrow, but that could mean it was handmade and offsize, that’s all. It was only when I saw the chest that I put it together,” said Claire. “I guess I mean that literally as well as figuratively.” She smiled, almost apologetically, at Bruce Oh, who had barely spoken since Jane had entered the house.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Jane, knowing that any word was inadequate when used to describe treasure. She felt the pull of the chest and continued to stroke one of the larger carvings on the drawer.

  Jane knew that wood could talk, tell stories. She believed that the carved chest had whispered just loud enough for the right person to hear, “Take me home, Claire. I’m something.”

  “Yes,” said Claire, walking around to the back of the chest, turning and looking back at Jane and her husband. She was taller than the chest, tall enough to look across the top of it. Claire leaned her chin on the shelf, half closed her eyes, and sighed. “It’s a fake,” she said.

  3

  How many pairs of shoes do you own? Don’t check yet. Got the number? Now go to your closet and count. Twice as many? Three times as many? Why do you own what you can’t even remember you have?

  —BELINDA ST. GERMAIN, Overstuffed

  “A beautiful fake,” said Claire, “but a fake nonetheless.”

  Jane looked back and forth from Claire’s eyes to the drawer pulls and the sunflower carvings and shook her head.

  “I’d bet my…,” Jane began to say.

  Claire stopped her. “Don’t. You’d lose it.” She came back around the front of the chest and pulled out the drawer. “You can see where they aged the wood, but it’s a little too even, too neat. Dovetails are all large and too perfect. Look how it fits.”

  Claire slid the drawer back in place.

  “Perfect, isn’t it?” asked Jane.

  “Yes,” Claire said. “It shouldn’t be though. A drawer from an authentic piece wouldn’t go all the way in, wouldn’t be such a perfect fit. There would be more ventilation space left at the back. There are other clues, too….”

  Bruce Oh, who had quietly brought in a tray with coffee, set it down and motioned for Jane to come over and sit.

  “Claire rarely makes mistakes,” he said.

  “But when I do…,” Claire said, letting the thought trail.

  “If Mrs. Wheel is going to help…,” said Oh.

  Lost in the land of ellipses, thought Jane. Somebody better finish a sentence around here.

  “What is it you think I can…?” Jane began to ask.

  Claire cleared her throat and straightened herself to her full six plus feet. Jane had always mistrusted people that tall. The truth was, and she knew it, she was jealous. Jane worried that the tall were able to see everything she, as the smaller than average, missed: dust on top of the refrigerator, cobwebs on the ceiling, the frailties of the human heart. Right now, even though Claire Oh was clearly in distress, Jane was certain she would never lose her keys, mismatch her socks, or mislay a permission slip.

  “I called my helper, Stanley, to bring the truck over, and we loaded up the chest together. I kept it here, at home, in the garage. Horace came to see it. He agreed with me that it was a Westman—or the closest thing we were ever going to
find. Wrote me a check for a deposit, and I told him I’d drive it up to Campbell and LaSalle myself for the cleaning and restoration.”

  Claire looked Jane over from top to bottom. “Do you know about Campbell and LaSalle?” she asked.

  Jane was surprised at how thoroughly she resented Claire Oh’s question. Yes, she was a picker not a dealer, and yes, she liked the old and worn more than the old and precious, and yes, she was wearing a boxy, vintage wool jacket over a pair of skinny jeans instead of the slim, gray Armani skirt and silk blouse that Claire was wearing. Yes, even after some jail time, Claire Oh had the dealer look, the I-know-the-value-of-everything-you’ve-ever-touched look, and yes, she had on Manolo Blahnik heels, too, but did that give her the right to assume Jane would not know that Campbell and LaSalle were the premiere restorers/refinishers/rebuilders in the country? Just because the jewelry Jane was sporting was a Bakelite pin with dangling butterscotch cherries instead of the forties Cartier diamond watch that Claire wore on her left wrist? Jane reminded herself that she really liked Bruce Oh, and he had asked her to come and talk to Claire.

  “Who is Horace?” Jane asked.

  “Horace Cutler’s a dealer in fine European antiques. This wasn’t his cup of tea, but he had a buyer. Everyone was going to make something on this,” Claire said, patting the surface of the chest.

  Everyone but the owner, Jane thought, but didn’t say anything out loud. After all, would she refuse if someone running an estate sale gave her something? Just asked her to haul it away? No. But what if she thought the something was something? Would she tell?

  “I checked it in with one of the carpenters at Campbell and LaSalle and told him I wanted the minimum amount of work done. Clean it up, put it back together, save the age, you know, the patina,” Claire said.

  Jane nodded. She and her pal, Tim, when out of earshot and sight of Charley and Nick, played a pretend game. Tim would link his arm though Jane’s at a flea market, and they would discuss their imaginary daughter, little Patina. “Would Patina like a little dressing table for her room?” “Is Patina still collecting poodles?”