The Wrong Stuff

by Sharon Fiffer

  “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way.”

  Jane had not turned off her cell phone.

  Jane looked around the room. Tim and Scott were both laughing, their shoulders heaving silently. Roxanne had the courtesy to turn away. The rest just looked at her with a mixture of curiosity and horror.

  “I’m going to have to take this,” Jane said. “I promised my son I would always pick up, see, and…”

  Jane got up and backed out of the room, holding the cell phone in front of her like a weapon. Stay back everybody, she was thinking in her best Edward G. Robinson silent-to-self voice, the first one of you who makes a move gets a speed dial right in the kisser.

  As soon as she was out of the main room and into the large, tiled foyer, she looked at her phone. Not Nick. Nellie.

  “Mom, I can’t talk; I’ll call you back,” she whispered.

  “What?” Nellie shouted. “Are you still driving?”

  “I’ll call you back,” Jane said.

  “You don’t have to come back; it’s not even broken, the doctor says,” said Nellie, “although he’s an old quack.”

  “What?” Jane shouted, forgetting that she was supposed to be talking in a church whisper.

  “I’ll call you back. Your dad’s trying to watch his program.”

  Jane stood with her mouth open, thinking that her mother might be straying off the earthly human path herself and into some kind of voodoo realm and perhaps Martine might like to conjure her spirit; and just when she thought she couldn’t feel any more confused or discombobulated, she looked out the window into the dark Michigan night.

  She was still holding on to her glass of Grey Goose in her left hand, so she took a long swallow. It had no effect. What she saw out the window stayed perfectly still and perfectly visible. Peering in, with her eyebrows raised and a perfectly manicured finger held to her lips, was Claire Oh.

  8

  In my past life as a collector, an acquirer, and a rabid consumer, I often felt like a lost and lonely pioneer, hacking my way through a forest, no clear path ahead, no horizon line to guide me.

  —BELINDA ST. GERMAIN, Overstuffed

  Bruce Oh had definitely noticed changes in his wife’s behavior during the past few months. First, she had been leaving her cell phone turned on at all times, running to answer it no matter what the call might be interrupting. Second, she had been using her alumni status at Northwestern University to check out library books, big, heavy books that she took up to her study and read for hours each night. Third, and most telling he now thought, she had stopped buying him vintage ties.

  That might be explained away by a dearth of vintage ties on the market, an explainable absence of clothing of any kind at the estate sales she had been attending. But not only had she not presented him with any new old patterns or colors to set his teeth on edge, she hadn’t noticed the plain conventional ties he had taken to wearing each day. She hadn’t commented or insisted that he should stop being so predictable. In fact, his wife had stopped looking at him altogether.

  Claire had not been herself and he knew it, but Bruce Oh had felt that it would be unfair and judgmental to pry into his wife’s individual life. Their marriage was founded on a kind of mutual respect for privacy. Bruce Oh went off to work every day and became Detective Oh, and Claire went off to work each day and became Claire Nelson, dealer in fine antiques. They came together each evening and shared a peaceful dinner, perhaps with a few amusing stories or remarks about their respective days, but mostly they talked about world events, philosophy, their garden, their extensive summer trips. Bruce meditated in the morning and the evening; Claire practiced yoga. To outsiders, they might seem too quiet, too uninvolved in each others’ lives, but Bruce Oh had never felt that way. Their communication was crystal clear. Respect without demands. Admiration without question. Interest without judgment.

  Yes, Claire did have the tie fixation. That was a bit of whimsy that amused them both. Until it disappeared, Bruce Oh had thought of it as a minor part of their relationship. He now realized that it was crucial to their intimacy. When Claire had stopped looking at his reflection in the mirror, standing over his shoulder and shaking her head about how he would never take the world by surprise if he insisted on wearing navy-blue-and-maroon stripes instead of purple squares inside of lime green circles, he had felt a loss as great as if his wife had confessed to an affair. Yes, he should have been more alert when his wife stopped caring about his neckwear.

  An even more interesting puzzle, he realized, was why he was now lamenting Claire’s loss of attention to his sartorial habits when he should be paying more attention to the cloud of suspicion surrounding his wife. Hadn’t she just been questioned about the murder of Horace Cutler? Hadn’t she now disappeared from the house without saying a word to him? Shouldn’t he be in furious motion trying to find her since she had been released into his custody?

  No, Bruce Oh could honestly say he was never in furious motion. That was not his style. He sometimes sat at the table in his study, staring out at the willow tree, waiting for the answers to come. If he told others at the police department that he practiced clearing his mind to allow answers to come to him, the more polite officers would have waited until he was out of sight before laughing and making mock bowing gestures to each other. Most of his coworkers, though, would not have hidden their skepticism. It wasn’t that Oh did not use conventional police methods—he most certainly did—he just opened himself to other channels of thought.

  For example, now as he sat ruminating on the tie-selection business with Claire, he realized that he could pinpoint exactly the day Claire had stopped supervising his daily choice of clothing. It was almost two months ago, two days after she had walked away from the Lake Forest estate sale where she had stumbled upon the Westman chest. This piece of furniture, this “find of a lifetime” as Claire had characterized it, had taken over his wife’s life. She had become consumed in researching the chest and its probable/possible maker, Mathew Westman. She had spent her days talking to museum directors, dealers in antiques, historians, appraisers. She had spent her nights studying pictures of hardware, dowels, pegs, nails, and the tongue and groove joinings of Early American drawers in the big books she had hauled home from the university library.

  From her office doorway, he had watched her tap her foot nervously while waiting for a fax to come through, a page explaining and illustrating patterns of oxidation on wood. She would pull the sheet out of the machine, raise herself up to her full height, tap a finely sharpened pencil against her teeth, and finally say, “aha,” or some other likely exclamation, favoring him with a vacant smile as she walked past him in the hall.

  How could she have noticed the tie he was wearing? She hadn’t even known her husband’s name for the past two months. If asked for the name of the man she had been living with, she would have to answer, Mathew Westman. He was the man who now commanded her full attention.

  Bruce Oh had not remained sitting still, staring out the window at his willow tree, while trying to put puzzle pieces in place. Uncharacteristically, he had been roaming through the house. He now stood in front of his rival’s masterwork.

  Earlier, he had watched Jane Wheel watch Claire stroke the carved sunflowers on the drawers. He had read the desire in Mrs. Wheel’s eyes—she, too, wanted to touch those carvings, feel the work of a master carver. What was it that these two women saw or sensed from this piece of wooden furniture?

  His wife, who had studied art history in college, was a savvy businesswoman, and he knew she viewed the chest as the find of a lifetime, a career maker. Mrs. Wheel, well, she would probably tell him all about the warmth and feel of the wood, the passion that had gone into the making of the piece, the people’s lives that this chest of drawers had witnessed. That was the kind of thinking Mrs. Wheel followed. That was a difference between the two women. Claire tried to find the right object to place in people’s lives while poor Mrs. Wheel got stuck creating a life for the inan
imate object.

  He would do it. He would touch those flowers and try to feel what they had. He placed his right hand on the sunflower on the top right-hand drawer and followed the raised wooden stems and leaves down the side of the chest. Perhaps he was getting it because he began to feel strange. A wave washed over him, something he had never felt before. What was this strange sensation? Ah yes, he felt ridiculous.

  The carving was intricate, and he could feel each petal sharply delineated. He put a hand on each side of the top drawer and felt the wooden edges. Something struck him again, this time a more curious feeling. Something Mrs. Wheel had told him about the feel of old wood and something he felt here did not match up. And something about that disjointed feeling startled him back into the present moment.

  He walked back into the kitchen and looked at the notepad next to the telephone. “Gone for milk” was written on the lower half of the top sheet of paper. Claire had printed it in block letters, using a great deal of pressure. There was something odd about the note. First of all, they rarely left each other notes. It was too late for the small neighborhood grocery to be open. And, even stranger, they didn’t drink milk. If Claire were truly herself, she would have come up with a much better lie than that. Something more, though…

  It struck him. Claire always doodled while on the phone. She was listening on this extension when Mrs. Wheel phoned and told them about the death of Rick Moore at Campbell and LaSalle. Where was the page with her drawings, her little cats and dogs, her trees and houses? When she didn’t draw pictures, she printed words over and over, using different lettering styles. Where were her doodles?

  Oh walked over to the trash can, thoughtfully concealed in a pull-out bin in the food preparation island. On top of the yogurt carton, orange peels, and coffee grounds were two pieces of crumpled notepaper. Oh smoothed them out and read the name, RICK MOORE, printed in large capitals. Surrounding the name, Claire Oh had doodled what appeared to be tiny spears or featherless arrows. Bruce Oh tried not to lose himself in what the drawings actually represented. What seemed most important was that fifteen small sharpened points were all aimed at RICK MOORE.

  9

  “As Granny St. Germain used to say, “too many cooks spoil the broth.” Well, I’m here to tell you that too many spoons, ladles and bowls in your cupboard do exactly the same thing.”

  —BELINDA ST. GERMAIN, Overstuffed

  “If I meet one more person here who is described to me as a ‘master’ something or other, I’m going to scream,” Jane whispered to Tim.

  Roxanne had moved away with Geoff and Jake, who seemed shaken but not stirred. They had both commented on how painful and disruptive Rick’s accident was and would be to their own work, but neither seemed to be particularly sad. Rick Moore’s death was a troubling event, but Rick Moore’s life didn’t seem to be anything people much cared about. Neither the “tragic accident,” which now seemed to be the official title, nor the memorial service had diminished anyone’s appetite. Apparently, right after Jane made her exit, Martine wound up her performance and a late cocktail hour began. As soon as Jane had clicked off the phone and moved over to the window, she heard people remarking on the beautiful trays of appetizers being wheeled in from the kitchen.

  Jane did not tell Tim that she thought she’d seen Claire Oh’s face peeking in at her. She excused herself and went outside, claiming she needed to return the phone call that had come in and needed to search for better reception. She circled the entire lodge, checked the benches in the garden, and walked over to the guest parking area to see if she recognized a new vehicle. She didn’t notice any changes. Maybe Claire’s face was just a smudge on the window, a passing shadow, “a bit of undigested beef?” Claire Oh starring as the Ghost of Christmas Past?

  Jane decided to make a few calls. No answer at the Oh house. No answer on Charley’s cell phone, so she left a good-night-and-have-fun message for him and Nick. Too late, after she had hung up, she realized she should have asked about Charley’s speech at the museum. Ah well, as soon as she was organized, uncluttered, and the perfect mother, she would work on being a more solicitous wife. How many roles is one woman expected to perfect at a time?

  Jane hit number seven on her speed dial and waited for Nellie’s familiar snarl.

  “Yeah?” asked Nellie, already in the middle of a conversation with Don about whether something should be soaked.

  “Mom, what happened?”

  “I dropped a bag of onions on my toe is all,” said Nellie, “and your father is acting like I got gangrene or something.”

  “Let me talk to Dad.”

  “I’m on the other line, honey,” said Don. “Your mother is exaggerating. I just think she should maybe soak it or something.”

  “Can’t hurt to do that, Mom, why don’t…,” said Jane, cut off by Nellie’s insistent, “There’s not a thing wrong. I’ve done this before. It turns all black, then the toenail…,” who was in turn cut off by Don’s, “Oh, for god’s sake, Nellie, spare us the details. I just want it to feel better.”

  A moment of silence while everyone decided whom to interrupt next.

  “Daddy, has she seen a doctor?” asked Jane.

  “I talked to him on the phone and he said if I could move it, it wasn’t broken,” said Nellie.

  “But you can’t move it,” said Don.

  Jane wondered if her parents ever talked to each other when she wasn’t on the phone and they were on separate extensions. It seemed to her that real communication only took place while she played switchboard operator.

  “Now,” said Nellie. “I can’t move it now, but I could then. There’s the water boiling. I’ll be back.”

  Jane heard the extension fall to the floor. Was her mother the only person left who didn’t walk from room to room with a cordless?

  “Jane,” said Don, “are you there?”

  “Yes, how bad really?”

  “Black and blue, maybe broken. I’ll take her in tomorrow. She wanted to slice up the onions for vegetable soup, and I told her to wait until I got the dolly to carry in the bag from the back porch, but you know her, impatient.”

  Jane stopped looking behind the bushes and into cabin windows as she was walking, hoping for another glimpse of Claire Oh while her parents used her to witness one of their nightly wrangles.

  “A dolly? How big of a bag are we talking about?”

  “Fifty pounds,” said Don.

  Jane hesitated. She knew her parents were too old to run the EZ Way Inn, to work both days and nights, to cook lunches for the factory workers and run bowling leagues in the winter and golfing leagues in the summer. Her dad, Don, shouldn’t be tapping beer kegs and lifting cases of bottles, and her mother, Nellie—well, there were many things Nellie shouldn’t be doing, but trying to move a fifty-pound bag of onions was high on the list. As a dutiful daughter, shouldn’t she be forbidding them to do such hard work, such heavy lifting? On the other hand, in their few free hours, they fought like cats and dogs. At the EZ Way Inn, they worked like a well-oiled, if often grouchy and cantankerous, machine.

  “Where the hell are you anyway?” Nellie asked, back from stirring her cauldron on the stove.

  “Mom, don’t lift those heavy bags anymore. Get Duane or Carl to carry stuff in the night before.”

  “Are you still off in the woods with Tim?” asked Nellie, ignoring Jane’s suggestion to use their occasional nighttime bartenders for anything more than verbal abuse.

  “Yeah, I’m on a case,” Jane whispered.

  There. She had said it. Didn’t that make her a real detective?

  “Well, stop it. You can’t put a round peg in a square hole, you know. Get back to your family. Where’s Nick?” asked Nellie, while Don shushed her, telling Jane to be careful.

  “He’s with the good parent,” Jane said, promising her father to call the next day, not saying anything directly to her mother.

  What did Belinda St. Germain have to say about emotional clutter? Jane hadn’t rea
d that far, but she wondered if there was a chapter on how to be wife, mother, daughter, picker, and detective all at the same time. It seemed to Jane that if you have to carry around that kind of personal baggage, you ought to at least be able to pack it up in a collection of vintage leather train cases with lovely red or butterscotch Bakelite handles.

  Jane was starved, and she knew they must be serving something wonderful over in the lodge. She decided to dash into her cabin, run a brush through her hair, and put on a bit of lipstick. She hadn’t brought enough clothes to be able to actually change for dinner, but she thought the celebration of Rick Moore’s life might have taken a small but cosmetically repairable toll. When Martine had called on her to speak, she had felt her hair stand on end. Maybe she could calm it down.

  The hand-crafted lamp on the dresser was turned on. Its leaded-glass shade cast a soft glow over the cherry surface of the dresser. There was a wooden hand mirror face down next to her makeup bag. She picked it up to check the damage, feeling like she might be grateful that the light was low. She wasn’t, though. The dim light might lessen the laughter creases around her mouth and the newest crinkles around her eyes, but it also made it more difficult to read the words printed on the mirror. As neatly and carefully as one can manage using a worn-down tube of Clinique–Angel Red, someone had printed:

  R.M. MURDERED

  Jane continued to look into the mirror. Peeking around the lipstick letters were her brown eyes; and since they were hers, had been hers forever, why did they now look so foreign to her? Who was this middle-aged, middle-class woman, middle-of-the-road person who found herself at the center of murders? Okay, maybe murders, possible murders. Oh, what the hell, couldn’t they all forget that alleged-possible-maybe crap? This was a murder. Period.