“If you’re sure nobody here wants it?” they heard the old man say.
They couldn’t hear a response or see the mad hammerer from where they stood, but he must have thanked the old man for taking it because he responded with a “No, thank you. I’ll sure find somebody who wants it, can use it.”
“TOM’S TRASH AND TREASURES,” Oh read aloud from the side of the truck. “Do either of you know Tom?”
Tim and Jane both shook their heads.
They waited for their man to come back out the door and onto the path. Jane came out from behind the bushes when she heard two car doors slam shut. “He’s leaving with him, with Tom.” She moved around to the end of the building in time to see the truck drive around the curve in the road that led back to the main entrance of Campbell and LaSalle.
“Whoever it is is going to be back at the lodge long before we can get there on foot,” said Jane.
“Do you think he saw you at the door? Did he see or hear you get attacked?” asked Oh.
“Not necessarily,” Jane said. “I was all the way back at the door, and it was really loud in there. As soon as I had my first whiff of the stuff, I staggered backward and tried to run toward where I thought the path would be.”
“Someone’s coming down the path. That way,” Tim said, pointing beyond the warehouse.
Quickly they walked back to their hidden spot around the other side of the building just in time to see Mickey and Annie. She was shaking her head and wiping her eyes, and Mickey was speaking nonstop into her ear.
Without one word, Oh put his finger to his lips and signaled them to take two steps backward and stand perfectly still.
“We are trees,” Jane heard him say, almost silently. It was less than a whisper, slightly more than a pantomime. They stood perfectly still. Mickey and Annie walked past them, close enough that Jane could have plucked the handkerchief out of Annie’s hand. They remained silent, watching them as they disappeared from view.
Jane looked admiringly at Oh. He had saved them, bailed them out. She and Tim would have bumbled their way in front of them and would have had to make up some ridiculous story. What kind of ancient wisdom did Oh draw on? What could she say to him that wouldn’t sound stupid and coy?
“Brilliant strategy. ‘We are trees.’ Is it from tai chi or something? I mean, it was almost mystical,” Jane said. She walked ahead without waiting for an answer.
“What? What did you say about trees?” asked Tim, turning to Oh, who lifted his shoulders slightly and shook his head.
“Nothing. I said I don’t think they’ll see us.”
Back at her cabin, Jane realized that what she wanted more than anything at that moment, more than answers, more than the identity of the person who had almost poisoned her with lethal chemicals, more than a Grey Goose on the rocks, which was something she wanted pretty badly, was more clothes. She wanted a great big suitcase with lots of shirts and sweaters and more socks. Yes, she had been reading a page here and a page there of Belinda St. Germain’s Bible, and she even felt like some of it made sense, but this six-item packing challenge was a crock, at least when you’re in the middle of the woods being gassed and rolling around in pine needles. She needed a bath and clean clothes.
She started the tub, pouring in the lavish rosemary mint bubble bath provided by Campbell and LaSalle, and walked into Tim’s cabin next door without knocking.
“I don’t want any lip; I just want some clothes. Nice clean clothes,” she announced.
Tim nodded. He took out an olive green T-shirt and a maroon cashmere V-neck from the chest by the bed. Rummaging in his closet, he pulled out a pair of olive linen drawstring pants. She took them all in her arms without a word. He dangled a pair of silk boxers, and she tried to give him a withering smile.
The bath was really helping. Especially since Tim went all the way up to the lodge, poured her a drink, put in six olives, and stumbled into her bathroom with one hand over his eyes to put it on the side of the tub.
“Is this Grey Goose?”
“Right country. It’s Ciroc. From France, multiply distilled from grapes instead of grain. Smooth. More like grappa, yes?” Tim said, holding up his own glass.
“Grappa, shmappa. Don’t go all yuppie wine tasting on me. It’s good,” she took another taste, “very, very good.”
“Are you relaxed enough to hear something without freaking out?” Tim asked, standing by the door, his eyes still closed.
“Maybe,” said Jane, sipping her Ciroc.
“I found your phone near where you fell. It was off, dead battery, and I know how you like to always be in touch. It’s plugged in, recharging now. I figure you’ve only been unreachable for about two hours,” he said.
“It’s okay,” said Jane. “Nick’s with the good parent, so he wouldn’t be upset if I didn’t pick up the phone. He wouldn’t even be trying to call me.”
“Janie, stop being so hard on yourself. It was a permission slip for a field trip for god’s sake. You didn’t abandon him in a basket in the bullrushes. He got to go on a better trip with Charley, and you get to solve a mystery.”
“Oh, I’m doing a bang-up job of that. Do you have a clue as to what’s going on here? Besides the fact that I almost got”—Jane said, thinking how to describe what had happened to her—“ragged to death?”
Jane and Tim both started laughing. They were so loud in fact that at first they didn’t hear the faint “Jingle Bells” coming from the bedside table.
“Phone’s charged,” said Tim, as he went to get it. Checking the caller ID as he brought it to Jane, he smiled, forgetting that he was supposed to be covering his eyes, “It’s Nellie.”
“Oh great. Now I do get ragged to death,” said Jane, setting them both off again.
“Yeah?” said Nellie, responding to Jane’s hello.
“You called me, Mom,” Jane said, unable to stop giggling.
“What the hell’s going on?” asked Nellie.
“Well, I’m in the bathtub drinking vodka and Tim is lending me some clothes and I can’t come home from Michigan because I found somebody who was murdered here and I almost got killed today by a rag soaked in some kind of chemicals. How’s the toe?”
“What the hell is Tim doing in the bathroom with you?” shouted Nellie.
“Not looking,” said Jane.
“I am too looking,” said Tim, raising his voice. “I’m looking, Nellie. I’m looking right at her. All my scheming pretending to be gay has finally paid off.”
“Now you listen to me, both of you!” yelled Nellie, loud enough that they both could hear her. “It’s dangerous to drink in the bathtub. You can goddamn drown or worse. Tim Lowry, you just stay homosexual, you hear me? You’re fine the way you are. Jane, you leave him alone. Where’s Charley?”
“Oh great, now it’s me trying to seduce you,” said Jane. “Mom, Charley and Nick are in Rockford. They’ll be back home tonight, but I won’t. Maybe tomorrow. How’s your foot?”
“I told you, Don, she’s still at some furniture farm somewhere with Tim. Oh hell, you can’t fit a square peg in a round…oh damn, I don’t know what I mean either. I just think she shouldn’t be taking a bath with him. I suppose you think that’s all right?”
Jane held the phone over the water.
Tim reached over and took it from her, made a quasi-believable static noise from the back of his throat, and said in a high-pitched whisper, “You’re breaking up, Mom. Call you back later from a real phone.” He pushed the “end” button.
“How’d you learn to make that noise?” Jane asked.
“Three years of Sunday night calls to my dad in his Florida condo and then to my mom in hers. The only compelling reason I can think of that they should have stayed married is that it would have saved me one phone call per week—156 phone calls. Static imitation has saved me many a time,” said Tim.
“Is it about time for Oh’s meeting with Blake to be over? I’m dying to hear what he comes up with,” Jane said, then sto
pped when the bathroom door creaked slowly open.
Tim and Jane both froze.
Slowly peeking around the door was a very dirty, very tall woman wearing elegant high-heeled boots.
“Is this where you investigators solve your cases?” asked Claire Oh. “Because if not, and you can do it on dry land, perhaps I could have a turn here in the famous detective school. I could really use a bath.”
16
There are those who will tell you that certain corners of your house, certain areas of your life, need to be cleared before you can channel your energy and be successful. I am telling you that if any corner of your life is left cluttered and blocked, you will be locked in a permanently stalled position.
—BELINDA ST. GERMAIN, Overstuffed
“I think she’s fabulous,” whispered Tim, handing Jane a belt so she could cinch up his linen pants. He rolled up the cuffs for her and stood back. “You look pretty cute in a thirties/forties Hollywood musical my-dad’s-got-a-barn-let’s-put-on-a-show-after-I-plow-the-field kind of way.
“Pretty haughty, if you ask me,” Jane whispered back. “We’re out here risking our necks for her, and she just waltzes in…”
Claire Oh walked into the main room of Jane’s cabin, wrapped in Tim’s bathrobe, Jane’s spare towel wrapped around her wet hair. Jane realized that no one looked that haughty when they were all wet, and Claire, without her heels, looked almost approachable.
“You must be starved,” Jane said. “Maybe we can get some leftover tea sandwiches…they said dinner wouldn’t be until nine tonight.” Jane turned to Tim, “Did they have tea today?”
“I don’t know. I was rescuing you, remember?”
Jane remembered. She asked Tim if he could go and charm a plate of food out of the kitchen since they had over an hour until the dinner gong would ring. She also whispered to him to give Bruce Oh a heads-up that Claire had surfaced. Oh’s meeting with Blake was certainly going on long. Tim promised to do his best, saluted, and went off to forage.
Jane watched Claire comb out her wet hair. Jane tried to think of a way to open the conversation without just launching into the twenty or so questions she wanted to fire at her, but Claire beat her to the punch.
“You must have a million questions,” Claire said. “I’m ready for them, but I might not have very good answers.”
Claire was definitely deflated, certainly approachable. It made sense that she would be relieved to know she was no longer a suspect in Cutler’s murder. Would it last? Jane tried to compartmentalize quickly. She wanted to ask all of her questions while Claire was still wet. Who knew what would happen after she was dressed and her hair blown-dry. Jane, in her former career, had watched enough actors and models transform themselves through makeup, hair styling, and costuming; she knew it was important to strike while the iron was hot or, in this case, while the heels were off.
“Is that why you raced up here last night? To find out your own answers about what happened to the Westman chest?”
“Not only the chest. Look, I knew Rick Moore hadn’t choked on chemicals. He’s been working around these solvents and finishes for years. He might have lost a few brain cells, but he had enough left to remember to wear a mask and keep those windows open. Besides, it was too much of a coincidence. He was the one I talked to when I called up here that night, after Horace came down on me. And he worked on the restoration of the piece, I know he did. He’s the only one Blake would have trusted with it,” said Claire.
“Is Blake the one you met with when you brought it up here?” Jane asked.
“He wasn’t here. I talked it out with Glen, who knew all about Westman, too, of course, and he agreed that it just might be the real deal. He said he’d go over it with Blake, and they’d call and keep me posted. They didn’t call back right away, so I called them. I talked to Rick then, and he was thrilled. He said he’d seen it in the barn and had already done tons of research on the wood and carving style. Couldn’t locate information about it through the Westman files though, no record of a third chest.
“Rick said he’d called the house sale people and they’d told him the chest had never come up with the owner, although he had left listings and descriptions of other valuable pieces in the house. The person in charge of the sale told both me and Rick that she hadn’t even noticed it. It was only after boxes of sale stuff got removed from the top of it that it came into sight at all,” Claire said, sighing. She thought it must have been an old built-in. “I was just in the right place at the right time, I guess.”
Claire smiled hopefully at Jane. Jane really wanted to ask her why she had put on such an act when they had first met, but, once again, Claire beat her to the question with an answer.
“I’m sorry I was such a…so unfriendly when you came to the house. I was…I don’t know…embarrassed? I mean, here I was, such an expert, an art historian as I always remind Bruce, not a junk picker.” Claire stopped, then smiled at Jane. “I love junk and I don’t mean anything by that, it’s just that Bruce is so…spare, you know? So I tried to make my work match up, measure up…then getting fooled like that, it just made me furious and I become a snobby bitch when I get mad. Does that make any sense to you at all?”
Jane thought about the many times she had snapped when poor Charley had simply looked sideways at the boxes she’d brought in from a sale. Charley, with his scientific names for everything and his special containers and his labels and his graduate students and his damn credibility. She reflected on her own defenses, her elaborate explanations of the psychology of print aprons from the fifties or souvenir salt and pepper shakers, her crafting of stories that went with her auction purchases that rivaled any university anthropological text.
“Yes,” Jane said, nodding and inwardly wincing at how pretentious she must sound when she justified buying a box of advertising combs. “I think I can understand.”
Jane asked Claire if she had any paperwork at all that mentioned the chest, and Claire looked up and blinked.
“What kind of paperwork? A bill of sale?”
“Yes,” said Jane, “that or something that says the name of the people who owned the house. Do you have the address and all? Because if that chest had been there for a while, maybe through a couple of owners, perhaps we’ll find a plausible explanation for a Westman chest being there.”
Claire stopped fussing with the towel and her hair for a moment and looked straight at Jane. “I didn’t even think about that,” she said. “That’s the strangest part of this whole thing.”
“What?” asked Jane.
“No one here asked me for that kind of paperwork. No one asked where the chest came from—except Rick. He called me to get the name of the estate sale company so he could follow up a bit. Didn’t even make it a big deal. In fact, he said it was just so he could go through the basement and look for old hardware since he had found a few interesting nails and knobs in one of the chest drawers. No one else asked for a bill of sale,” said Claire.
“They know you, right? They wouldn’t think you were bringing them stolen goods, so maybe…”
“They always asked a million questions. For the same reasons you asked…not because they were worried about me stealing it, but because they wanted to establish some kind of plausible provenance. That’s why you bring something to Campbell and LaSalle—because once they sign off on it, it’s established. They’re like museum curators. But this happened so fast. I already had a buyer. Horace snapped at it when I called. I was so excited, did lots of research myself on Westman and how he worked, but I never realized that they weren’t asking me anything.”
Jane remembered the envelope she had taken from Rick Moore’s truck. Maybe that had some research in it that would shed some light. He had marked it important. Jane drew it from her bag and looked at it. It was just a few pages listing a lot of Web sites. The first page, though, had an elaborate drawing of a large wooden armchair on it. Printed underneath was a capital B.
“What the hell does this
mean?” Jane asked aloud, turning when she heard the door open. It was Tim, playing the victorious hunter, carrying a plate of sandwiches, some sodas, and bottled water.
“Let’s write everything down,” said Jane. “It’ll be a start. You bought the chest at the…?”
“McDougal estate sale. It was run by the blondes, you know?”
Jane knew. They were ruthless. They often left things unpriced just so they could see how badly you wanted it when you brought it to them. They’d charge their own mothers to buy back their wedding silver. How could they be the ones to give Claire Oh the chest for free?
“They didn’t want to,” said Claire, when Jane asked. “They called the owner, just to make sure it could be sold; they had some strict orders about some of the stuff apparently. The owner insisted they not charge. I was standing right there and heard the guy’s voice over the cell phone. Believe me, if I hadn’t heard and mentioned that I’d heard, they would have put some price on it. That’s what was so sweet about this whole deal.”
“Who was the guy they talked to? McDougal?” Tim asked, reaching for his third sandwich.
“No, it was a real estate sale. McDougal was dead. No wife, no kids. He had been a gentleman scholar of all kinds of subjects. By the looks of his house and possessions, I’d say he was old money with lots of good taste, but everything had grown old and shabby around him. He had a magnificent library that was swooped down on by the book guys and a great basement with lots of old paper. Theater and opera programs, torn tickets, old college notebooks…,” said Claire. “Junk, but smart junk, you know?”
Jane knew. She was salivating. How had she missed this sale?
“I think the man on the phone was the heir. A nephew or something. He was strong-willed, to say the least, with a loud voice. He said that under no circumstances should they sell that old chest but just have it hauled away. And he said to remind the customer that it would be at her own risk in case it falls apart on her when she’s taking it out. I remember him yelling it into the phone,” said Claire. “In fact, I asked about him, and Blondie number one said she had never met him, had done everything by mail and phone, and she never wanted to meet him. Said he sounded like a bastard. And that’s something coming from such a bi—Hello, Bruce,” said Claire, standing.
The Wrong Stuff Page 16
