The Wrong Stuff

by Sharon Fiffer

  Jane smiled, thinking that the kill or cure part was probably what Nellie prized in this recipe. Knowing her mother, she was sure that Nellie would be just as happy to see it kill…well, just happy to see it kill.

  Tim was desperate enough to drink it down with two aspirin and a B-complex vitamin that Jane fished out of her bag.

  “What’s in it?” Tim asked, wiping his mouth.

  “Last night I saw Claire Oh’s face in the window right out there,” Jane said, ignoring his question and pointing to the small windows flanking the front door of the lodge. “I think she’s still here on the grounds somewhere. You have to find her.”

  “What…?” Tim began again.

  “I have to get into Rick Moore’s cabin now. Murkel was talking to Roxanne, and something’s simmering about him. Before it gets closed off to me, I have to get in there and see if I can find out what he was working on.”

  Tim was still trying to figure out what Jane had made him drink, but somehow he felt a little better and decided maybe it was better not to know. In fact, she had told him it was Nellie’s recipe and perhaps that was all anyone was supposed to know. He saluted her and headed out to cover the grounds.

  Jane went directly to Rick’s cabin.

  Jane prided herself on being able to figure people out by their possessions. She wandered into estate sales, fingered the old clothes in the backs of closets, counted up sets of towels and sheets, peered into the back reaches of kitchen cupboards to find the mismatched glasses, the hidden talismans of everyday lives. Jane Wheel, completely at sixes and sevens in the housewares section of a department store, unable to make a single decision about a new purchase, could look around someone else’s kitchen and tell you every item that was either well-used, well-loved, or merely kept out of duty and obligation. She often felt, standing in the middle of someone else’s house, that she could step into their lives, inhabit their world, and pass for that person by simply slipping in among the objects. So why, in her own house, in her own life, did she so often feel like a stranger, an imposter?

  When Nick was an infant and she took him shopping or for a walk in the park, she would often look over her shoulder, thinking someone would surely spot her and report her as someone posing as an adult, as a mother. She and Charley joked about it. They’d named it—this nagging fear and self-doubt—the baby inspector. “Watch out,” they would say, when one of them had forgotten to bring Nick’s hat and a breeze blew up, “the baby inspector will see.”

  She had outgrown this lack of confidence though; she was sure of it. Except for this recent little glitch of losing the field trip permission slip, she had done nothing in the past few years to warrant a visit from the baby inspector.

  So why did she feel the hair on the back of her neck stand up when she slipped into Rick Moore’s cabin? She was comfortable among the possessions of others, yes? She could assess his personality, his strengths and weaknesses, by what he’d kept, what he’d saved. And it was important to find out who he had been and what he had known. It might explain why he was dead.

  There was a small worktable opposite the bed. Jane went over and sat in the chair that was pulled up to it. A leather portfolio, scuffed and worn, lay on the table. Slowly and carefully, Jane opened it. She actually laughed softly when she saw the first page. A list of paint colors, drawings of finishing brushes. What had she expected? Bats to fly out and announce who’d murdered Horace Cutler.

  There was a small appointment calendar, a giveaway from a hardware store. Jane looked through it quickly. Dates of antique shows and flea markets were noted. The Chicago show where Horace had made a scene at Claire’s booth was noted with the others. There was also a phone list in the back. At least forty dealers in the Chicago area alone—Horace and Claire among them—but nothing starred or underlined. What was Jane hoping for? A yellow highlighter marking victims? Victims of whom? What? Jane saw Tim Lowry’s name listed and smiled. He’d be pleased that even though his business was officially in Kankakee, he had made it into the ranks of the Chicago dealers.

  Jane noted that Rick’s wardrobe was a definite Belinda St. Germain “Do” rather than “Don’t.” In his closet he had two pairs of identical blue jeans, three plaid work shirts, a navy hooded sweatshirt, and on the floor, heavy work boots and a pair of beat-up, cheap running shoes—efficient and economical.

  Something was missing here though. Jane had to sit again in his chair and try to feel what had made this man tick. No reading material on his bedside table; no photographs or knickknacks, even though he had occupied this cabin for a month or two at a time. He had lived on the very surface of this place, had barely made a ripple in the air in this cabin.

  What had everyone said about him? A consumate craftsman and student of Blake’s. He loved Campbell and LaSalle and yet, it appeared to Jane, he had hardly put any roots down in this spot. When Jane had walked into her guest cabin, she had felt it as so homey, so welcoming. One had to make an effort to make one of these guest rooms feel cold and sterile. Rick Moore had succeeded. This cabin had no personality. Where was he? Jane couldn’t accept the fact that, even though he was dead, he didn’t exist. She had known far too many people who went on long after they were gone, making themselves known by the pot holders they had crocheted or the photo albums they had tended.

  Jane looked out the back window of the cabin. Unlike hers, this one had a back door. She stepped out and was struck by the fairy tale view. This was the Woods with a capital W. Hansel and Gretel could surely get lost there and emerge, tired and hungry, at Rick Moore’s doorstep. They wouldn’t find much to nibble on here, Jane thought, then somehow nibbling reminded her of breakfast and breakfast took her to Murkel’s talk with Roxanne, and Roxanne’s words sent her out the door and down the path that must lead to the access road.

  There it was: Rick Moore’s real home, a blue pickup truck with a camper top over the rear bed. Jane knew right away that this was where Rick lived. She opened the driver’s side and felt the warmth of habitation. Piles of papers, books, a stack of restorers’ catalogues, one devoted solely to hinges. On the passenger seat, a handmade, well-worn wooden box. Rick Moore’s tools. Jane opened it as carefully as she would a jewelry box containing precious gems. At least a dozen brushes, some with only two or three hairs in them, it seemed. Carving blades, antique nails, crude, wooden-handled objects that Jane thought beautiful but utterly confounding. These must be the allowed tools, the ones that Blake and the others permitted their craftsmen to use when doing restoration work. A piece of paper was folded up in the bottom of the box, and Jane smoothed it out, half expecting to see old spidery penmanship and have the paper crumble into dust, but it was a contemporary page ripped out of a college-ruled notebook. On it was a hurried sketch of a young man’s face—scary, creepy, a sad and haunted face. When Jane looked closer, she realized it looked frightening because it wasn’t the sketch of a real person but a sketch of a carved face. Someone had drawn a detailed picture of a Mathew Westman carving, a carving of his dead son. The sketch was annotated with numbers and blade descriptions. It reminded Jane of a paint-by-numbers drawing. Someone had written meticulous instructions on how to carve a disturbed Mathew Westman face. Were they Rick’s own notes on the carving? Or were they Rick’s instructions from someone else?

  Jane shoved the paper into her pocket. She would sort out who had instructed whom to do what later. She crawled into the back of the truck and flashed her narrow beam of light into the corners. She opened a small metal box and found some hinges, a few brass drawer pulls, and a few pieces of carved wood. Jane held them up close and smiled in spite of what they told her. It felt so good to see them again, to run her fingers over the wood, these beautifully carved petals…flowers identical to the ones that bloomed on Claire Oh’s Westman Sunflower Chest.

  Jane saw a large manila envelope marked IMPORTANT and grabbed it, crawling backward out of the truck. Flashing her light around one last time, she saw some clothes rolled up into a ball in the corner.
They looked filthy, covered with paint or stain, and she noticed a drop cloth and rags on the same side of the truck. She didn’t need to go through Rick’s laundry just yet. It would be just as interesting and much less messy to read the contents of the envelope that he had marked important.

  Jane brushed herself off and pulled out a sheaf of papers printed out from a Web site. The first page had a picture of a chair and a bold headline, but Jane didn’t have time to read it. She heard voices and footsteps that were far too heavy to belong to Hansel and Gretel. Stepping in among the trees, she hoped she was as invisible as she felt.

  Glen LaSalle and Scott Tailor stood in front of the truck, peering into the windows. Although they talked quietly, Jane could make out most of what they said.

  “I don’t like robbing the dead,” Scott said, “but Rick wouldn’t want his tools out here, rusting or getting ripped off by teenagers coming out here to get high.”

  “If that makes you feel better about what we’re doing, by all means cling to it,” said Glen, sounding amused, “but no teenagers come out to Campbell and LaSalle to drink six-packs. It’s two miles to the blacktop from here and only a few people even recognize this as a limited access road.”

  Jane couldn’t see their faces, but she tried to imagine Scott’s expression. She didn’t think he looked pleased. “Rick didn’t have anything in his life but his work and those tools. They belong in the barn, not in some police evidence room or wherever those idiots would toss them.”

  “Yes,” Glen said, “you’re right about that.”

  Jane heard them open and close the truck door, then heard their footsteps fade away in the direction they had come.

  Two miles to the blacktop was too far for Jane to walk now. It would take too long and put her out on the highway too far from Campbell and LaSalle’s main entrance. She would just have to wait a few minutes and take a chance walking back the way she had come. She needed to get back to see if Tim had found any trace of Claire. Perhaps she had lipsticked another note for them to find. Jane wanted more than a scrawled word or two now. If Rick Moore had been murdered, she needed to find out why—or how. She would settle for how since any of the big questions often led to the biggest answer of all—who.

  Oh. The cell phone began its “Jingle Bells,” and Jane realized how lucky she was that it hadn’t rung while Scott and Glen were standing five feet away from her at the truck. Nick would have to show her how to set the phone to vibrate and not ring. She thought she had done that, but now it vibrated and rang. She was afraid that if she tried to do anything else to it, it would light up and whine like a siren. She answered, sure that Bruce Oh had gotten her message and would be able to help her answer some pressing Claire questions.

  Instead of Oh’s polite but clipped voice, Nellie was yelling at Don to turn down the television. Only when Jane yelled into the phone three times did Nellie turn her attention back to the phone call. “What are you yelling about? Where are you?”

  “Mom, I’m still in Michigan, and you yelled first,” said Jane. “Yeah, well, I broke my toe. At least that’s what that quack Bernard says, and your dad wants you to come and work with us for a few days,” Nellie said.

  Jane could hear her father in the background shouting that he did not want Jane to come to Kankakee; they could manage fine. Then she heard her mother tell him that Jane liked to come and work at the tavern, and her father answered that Jane had better things to do with her time. She was a professional. “A professional what?” Nellie asked Don. “Junk picker? Private eye? Washing some dishes; making some soup. That is real work, and it wouldn’t hurt her to pitch in.” Jane’s dad answered back that Jane pitched in all the time, but it wasn’t necessary now since he could handle the next few days and he had help lined up for the following week.

  Jane knew that this argument about her, around her, over her, could go on for days, and she would not be required to say one word. She clicked the “end” button. An hour or so from now, when Nellie noticed that her daughter was no longer on the line, she would call back. Nellie, unfortunately, in many more ways than one, had Jane’s number.

  Back at Rick’s cabin, Jane picked up her bag that she had left by the door, stuck in the envelope from the truck, and went in search of the hungover Tim. If he had found Claire, she could cut to the chase fairly quickly. Had Claire been in cahoots with Rick Moore to fabricate a fake Westman chest? Jane had pocketed one of the carved sunflowers from Rick’s truck, and she pictured herself holding it out to Claire, asking if this were the work of a master’s hand. Who else knew about the Westman forgery? Was that the person who’d murdered Horace Cutler? Had Rick Moore really been murdered? What was behind all the we-at-Campbell-and-LaSalle hocus-pocus? How deeply was Claire involved in all of this?

  And why was Jane—a modern woman, a youngish-middle-aged, attractive, intelligent picker PI, whose own son told her she was stylin’ when she wore her new boot-cut jeans—using a word like “cahoots”?

  12

  If there were a fire in your home, heaven forbid, what would you save? If you said anything, and I mean anything, other than your spouse, your children, your pets, and yourself, you still have much work to do.

  —BELINDA ST. GERMAIN, Overstuffed

  Tim stumbled over a tree root in front of Annie’s cabin and fell headfirst into a terra-cotta pot filled with violet pansies, tiny bronze mums, and purple-and-chartreuse sweet potato vines. The inner hangover sufferer in him swore and cursed aloud, but his inner florist was quite impressed with the fall arrangement. The timing was right for the flowers, but it seemed late in the season for these vines to be so strong and healthy. Since his nose was practically in the pot, he sniffed to see what these plants were being fed.

  “How do I crack wise about this? Let me count the ways…,” said Scott, who had walked up behind him on the path. “Do I start with a pun about nosing around or getting back to the land or ask about you falling for someone or…”

  “You speak softly,” said Tim. “Better yet, you do not speak at all.”

  Back on his feet, Tim looked Scott over. He thought they had gone at the vodka bottle drink for drink, but Scott seemed clear-eyed and chipper. His downright morning perkiness only added to Tim’s distress, although he had to admit that whatever poisonous cocktail Jane had served him had helped him approach normal. He wasn’t feeling quite right, but he could see it from here.

  “We at Campbell and LaSalle can hold our liquor, my friend. You’ve been too long at the shopkeeper’s life and forgotten how to party like it’s 1999.”

  “Eighteen ninety-nine is more appropriate for this crowd,” said Tim, regaining his balance and gesturing at the antique brushes Scott was holding in his left hand.

  “You like?” Scott asked, beaming. He held them up as if they were a bouquet of roses. “Hog bristle for varnishing; sable for detail work. This one is camel, but not from a camel…it’s made from Russian squirrel. Blake thinks good old American squirrel hair is too coarse, but I aim to prove him wrong on that. I like this one for oil and glazings…pure badger. And for lettering, ah, my sweet little ox. See, the hair here is taken from behind the ears.”

  “And you thought it was funny to see me sniffing flowers,” said Tim.

  “Hey, man, a craftsman is only as good as his tools,” said Scott, slipping the brushes into the pocket of a short canvas apron. “What do you want with Annie?”

  Tim hoped he didn’t look as blank as he felt. He had managed to search the grounds of all the cabins looking for signs of Claire Oh without running into anyone at home or on the paths. He didn’t really have a story prepared for why he was making the rounds. He had been a fairly facile liar all his life, but now that Jane was drawing him into her midlife-crisis career of intrigue, he felt more pressure. He seemed to remember that a good rule of thumb when telling a convincing lie was to stick as close as possible to the truth.

  “Aspirin. Jane didn’t have any, so I thought I’d see if Annie had a well-stocked medicine che
st before bothering Roxanne up at the lodge.”

  “Sorry, pal. Annie won’t have any corporate OTC meds around. She’s strictly homeopathic, aruyvedic, organic, vegan, aromatherapeutic.”

  Tim shrugged it off. The fall had actually helped clear his head, and he could feel the fog lifting. “How about you? Coming to pay a call on Miss Annie?”

  “I’m doing a little color consulting. She’s doing some textile design that is supposed to complement a line of furniture that Geoff and Jake have been cooking up,” said Scott.

  “Lots of entrepreneurial work going on here lately,” said Tim. “Used to be perfection and restoration, one piece at a time.”

  Scott nodded. Over drinks the previous night, Scott had talked gossip about collectors they both knew, craftsmen they had encountered at Campbell and LaSalle, but he hadn’t really touched on any of the work being done here.

  “Used to be that everyone was happy to sit at the feet of Glen and Blake, but we aging hippies need to have some security. It’s not as if our independent contractor status around here pays for dental insurance.”

  “I’m not sure I follow,” said Tim, both of them heading up the path to Annie’s door.

  “A lot of us started coming here in our twenties, right after college. It was like that big commune in Tennessee somewhere, except here you got great gourmet meals instead of beans and brown rice, no one made you till the soil, and there was no leader who had to approve marriages or asserted his right to sleep with your girlfriend. Hell, I helped build a lot of these cabins in those days. Blake and Glen both had family money to burn, and we just sat around talking about making the world a more beautiful place and refining our spiritual selves by creating beautiful objects,” said Scott.

  “Blake and Glen weren’t gurus?” asked Tim.

  “Yeah, maybe, I guess. But they were more like designer gurus than spiritual leaders…”