The Wrong Stuff

by Sharon Fiffer

  Jane sat on the glider, its oilcloth-covered cushions reminding her of one her parents had had on their back porch when she was a child. She pulled her knees up to her chest and stretched the bottom of Tim’s cashmere pullover until it covered all of her down to her toes. It had gotten chilly and the ridiculously expensive sweater was warming, but the reason behind this fashion statement was all about the stretching. When she tossed it back to Tim tomorrow, she was confident he would have little choice but to toss it right into what Belinda St. Germain would call the “Definitely Discardable” pile. It was the least Jane could do.

  She tried to work up more steam at Tim’s practical joke, but Jane was actually relieved to be outside. Glen’s pathetic speech felt like the last gasp of someone who knows that he’s lost everything. Jane hadn’t thought about him much. He was the smart one, or at least the smart-looking one. Blake was the front man, the billboard, but Glen was the professorial backup, the one who convinced everyone of the Campbell and LaSalle quality. Glen gave their stamp of approval its credibility.

  Glen LaSalle was the expert who gave all the special lectures or “booth talks” at the major antique shows around the country. When the photo appeared on the society page with the benefit cochairs who had sponsored the preview party, however, it was Blake Campbell, handsome and rugged in his tuxedo, his arm around a Junior League president in a black strapless gown, who represented the “face” of Campbell and LaSalle.

  And that face was going to end up with egg all over it soon enough. A murderer among them, who in turn is murdered by a second murderer among them? There had to be some kind of snappy headline that could be fashioned from that. Plus, a scandal about furniture either stolen, forged, switched, whatever had been done to the Westman chest. It would probably be the crime against the Westman chest that would bring Campbell and LaSalle crashing down even more than the murderer-within-murderer scenario. What had Tim called the murder in his shop in Kankakee? Midnight in the garden of good and stupid? Well, this was indeed murder in the garden of good and greedy. The lifestyle here was good, but fragile, and someone had seriously wanted Rick Moore to stop fucking up all the chi.

  It wasn’t hard to tell who of the head honchos would fare the worst if Campbell and LaSalle came crashing down. Glen might land on his feet professionally because of his authorship of books on nineteenth-century landscapes and Early American silversmiths, but Blake, the craftsman with the movie star good looks, would be the one in demand for appearances on the Antiques Roadshow.

  Since Blake always seemed quiet, Jane couldn’t tell if there was any change in his behavior during dinner. He only seemed mildly interested in what Glen was saying to the group at large, but then again, Jane thought Blake always looked a little disinterested. Jane wished he wasn’t so handsome. She was afraid it meant he was guilty of something. After all, if a handsome movie star was the guest on a television show, the surprise ending was never a surprise. No big star is going to guest on a weekly program if he or she isn’t given something big to do, and big on television means solve or commit. Since the series’ stars solve, the big-name guest stars commit. Blake was clearly the big-name star here.

  Watching Roxanne, a beautiful and poised and talented woman in her own right, hover around him only added to his stature. She was clearly no one’s fool, and if she thought Blake was more than a pretty face and worth her time, Jane wanted to believe it, too.

  Oh came out on the porch, and Jane waited to speak until she was sure that Martine wasn’t following close behind.

  “She’s gone to get me a chapter of the book she’s writing,” Oh said, answering the question Jane hadn’t yet asked. Oh looked off toward the trees, as if imploring his wife to come down from her tree house hideaway.

  Jane took out the napkin and unfolded it to show Oh. She thought that he might be interested in the Geoff/Jake interaction that had gone on.

  “Officer Murkel came in and asked for you,” said Oh. “He mentioned that he wanted to speak to everyone for a moment after dinner, but he wanted to talk to you privately.

  “Why? He couldn’t have…,” Jane said.

  Oh shook his head. “I think he wants to explain what is still off-limits. Maybe, too, he wants to see some reactions when everyone is together, maybe drop a few hints about what someone said, causing another to react a certain way.”

  “No, I think it’s going to be like The Mousetrap, and he’s going to reveal…,” said Tim, who had come up behind them, humming the Monkees’ song.

  “Shut up, Tim. I’ve never seen it,” said Jane.

  “You’ve never seen The Mousetrap?” asked Tim. “And you call yourself a detective.”

  Oh smiled his almost-maybe-smile.

  “Do you, Mrs. Wheel?” Oh asked.

  “What?” asked Jane, still trying to stare down Tim, who was back to humming.

  “Call yourself a detective?”

  Jane looked down at the napkin on her knee. Before she could answer, Tim stopped his singing and leaned over her shoulder. “Why do you have a picture of the Brewster chair?”

  Jane and Oh both looked at Tim.

  “What’s the matter? I just asked why you have a sketch of the Brewster chair?”

  “I give up,” said Jane, “why do I have a picture of the Brewster chair?”

  “Am I supposed to know what the Brewster chair is?” asked Oh. “Is this one of those popular culture questions that Claire says everyone except me could answer?”

  Tim shook his head. “Not exactly common knowledge, but Claire would recognize the sketch, I bet. It’s a famous piece. I mean it’s famous and infamous,” said Tim. “Is that a sketch of the real deal or the copy?” he asked.

  Jane held the napkin up. “You tell me. It’s a copy of a drawing that Rick Moore had among some of his papers. I was doodling it at the table, and the Geoff/Jake duo added a few lines,” said Jane, pointing to the spindles in back and the foot rail.

  Tim picked it up and studied it for a moment.

  “The Brewster chair was one of the earliest chairs made in America. Experts can say America for sure because it’s made of ash, native here, not to England. It wasn’t supposed to be comfortable; it was just supposed to be the biggest frigging chair in the room. You know, the king had his throne, but Elder Brewster had his chair. Two are known to exist. One is in the Metropolitan and one, I think, is in the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth,” said Tim.

  “No wonder Geoff and Jake got such a bang out of me asking if they’d worked on the chair,” said Jane.

  “They got a bang out of it because of the copy, which is just as famous as the chair,” said Tim.

  Oh looked over Tim’s shoulder. “Let’s walk and talk, Mr. Lowry. We’ll hear better if someone comes up behind. I think, for the time being, you should just be educating Mrs. Wheel and me.”

  The three of them got up, Tim taking out a cigar. Jane was shocked since Tim rarely smoked. He shrugged at her look and told her that Blake had offered him one of his Cubans, and no one turns down one of those. Besides, Tim had said, it would explain why they were outside. They stationed themselves around one of the carved meditation benches. Oh made sure Tim was facing the lodge so he would be able to stop talking if Martine or anyone else sought them out.

  “Murkel will certainly have someone ring the gong if we’re needed,” Oh said. “Now, please, Mr. Lowry.”

  “So there are two Brewster chairs known, but there’s always been a rumor of a third. Every dealer in New England at one time or another probably had a dream of finding that elusive chair,” said Tim.

  “So someone made fakes?” asked Jane, smoothing the napkin over her knee.

  “A fake,” said Tim. “A beauty.”

  “But he was caught?” asked Oh. “When did all this take place?”

  Jane knew Oh was sensitive to Martine’s hunting instincts, since he rarely interrupted anyone with questions. He would normally be cautioning her to let the story unravel. If Martine only knew what a tribute t
o her tenacity Oh’s questions were.

  “I’ve read a couple of versions of the story, but the quick and dirty one is this. There was this artist in the sixties see, who one day goes to some museum with his buddy to view some Early American furniture exhibit. They’re both builders, craftsmen you know, and they’re wearing work clothes and want to see the underside of the chair. So they’re on the floor looking at the chair or table or whatever, and a curator comes in with a tour and sees these guys who look like local farmers or something lying on the floor talking about the sloppy workmanship of these museum treasures. Well, the curator gets all snooty and tells them off and embarrasses them, throwing them out of the museum. This artist, Armand LaMontagne, is plenty pissed off,” said Tim, finally getting the cigar to stay lit.

  “He plots his revenge on snooty museum curators by building the perfect fake. Something that would fool the experts. And he doesn’t go after something small. He decides to make a Brewster chair. I heard that he drilled the holes for the legs with a modern drill and saved the shavings of wood, you know, so he could prove later that he had built it. Otherwise he made it so true it could fool a museum—used the right wood, then aged it, then dunked it in salt-water. He even broke off one of the bottom rails to make it look like it had been kicking around for a while, you know?”

  “Wait a minute,” said Jane, “the sixties this is?”

  “Yeah. That’s when he made it, but then he has a friend of his put it in his antique store with a low price on it, like the dealer doesn’t know anything about it. Dealers come in and out and spot the chair, make him low-ball offers so he won’t know what he’s got, and it finally gets sold to somebody who resells it. Each time the piece gets resold, the price gets higher, and finally the thing goes for a lot of money to a museum. The Henry Ford in Michigan, I think,” said Tim.

  “So the artist was waiting for…?” asked Jane.

  “Satisfaction,” said Tim. “He had the chair rung and the shavings from drilling the holes for the rails and spindles. I think the newspaper story broke in the late seventies.”

  “What incredible patience,” said Jane.

  “Yeah, but in some ways, it backfired. I mean, he’s a noted sculptor now, but everybody always asks him about the Brewster chair. He says he was just a kid, and kids do crazy things.”

  “But that guy who embarrassed him, what happened…?” asked Jane.

  “Who knows? I mean some museum official probably lost his job over this, but it wouldn’t necessarily have been the original guy. You know, a lesson was learned, I’m just not sure if whoever learned it was the one who deserved such a comedown,” said Tim. “On the other hand, I’m not sure it ever is.”

  “Is the artist still in prison?” asked Jane.

  “What law did he break?” asked Tim.

  “Yes,” said Oh, “he never represented the piece as authentic. It sounds like he allowed others to name the chair for him.”

  “Wow,” said Jane. “I think I’m in love.”

  “Really?” said Tim. “With someone who spent all that time faking it, huh? Boy, you think you know someone…”

  “It’s the passion,” said Jane. “Think about the work that went into making that chair. And the incredible patience waiting while it all played out. And creating the story of its past and imagining its future. If someone doesn’t take me seriously about something, I mean if someone laughs at me when I’m trying to make a point, I’m furious. And that’s in private. Imagine the public embarrassment in that first museum. And here he was, an artist just studying his craft. And then to have someone not take him or his talent seriously…” Jane stopped. “Seriously,” she repeated.

  “Sergeant Murkel at six o’clock,” said Tim with a smile.

  Jane turned and saw him approaching: a man with a plan.

  “Mrs. Wheel, may I have a word?”

  Tim and Oh nodded to Jane and wandered back toward the lodge, Oh glancing up, scanning the trees, and Tim puffing desperately on his cigar.

  Jane had nothing concrete to report to Murkel. The story about the Brewster chair was interesting, but she didn’t know yet if or how it added up to Rick Moore’s murder. She told him that someone was banging up furniture in the large storage shed on the fringe of the property, but she hadn’t figured out what that had to do with anything yet either.

  “I think another night of reflection on the events here might get someone remembering something from the afternoon of Moore’s murder. If people get restless, they start looking at each other a bit more suspiciously,” said Murkel.

  “You might want to check the tree houses,” Jane said, deciding that she really needed to trust Murkel. He was, after all, the police. “Someone tried to knock me out this afternoon.” Jane quickly described the warehouse, went over the destruction of furniture again, and the attempt someone had made to close her eyes to what was going on. She hadn’t even planned on telling him, but once she started, she couldn’t stop.

  Murkel chided her for not coming to him directly, but he agreed to send his crew up into the treetops. As he started back to the lodge, Jane stopped him, remembering that Claire Oh might get trapped up there.

  Murkel cut off her explanation. “Mrs. Oh is in your cabin. Her husband told us to get her down before it got too dark,” he said.

  “Yes, we know that Bruce Oh is Mr. Kuruma,” Murkel added. “He remains more valuable as Kuruma—someone who arrived after the fact and would be of little interest to me. It isn’t so strange if I seek you out, Mrs. Wheel. You found the body, and I might continue to have further questions. If I gather together Mr. Kuruma and Mr. Lowry and you to talk to, you all lose your anonymity and the other residents might treat you a bit more warily.”

  Murkel left Jane and went to ring the gong to gather everyone in the lodge. He announced that they would be staying on the grounds, available if anyone remembered anything he or she might have forgotten to mention earlier. Jane, standing in the back of the room, didn’t know if she had become paranoid and suspicious as a detective or whether her observations were true and objective, but she sensed that something was going on among the residents. There was a palpable excitement. She noticed Mickey passing a note to Annie, who passed it to Scott. Geoff and Jake were, of course, always passing a paper between them, but this was more unusual behavior on the part of the others. Even Roxanne peered over Scott’s shoulder and read the note, slightly smiling when she rocked back on her heels.

  Scott whispered to Tim, who grinned broadly and nodded. Martine had tossed her head and looked disinterested when the paper came her way. No one bothered to pass it to Silver.

  As soon as Murkel finished his little speech, Tim came over to Jane and escorted her out the door, whispering in her ear. “Go to the cabin and get an extra sweater and make sure you have all your cash with you. Oh says Claire is there, so bring her, too. Walk directly to the visitors’ parking lot on the other side of the craft classroom space. Oh and I will be in the car, but we won’t have the lights on. We have to get out by the access road on the other side. I’ll explain as soon as you get there, but hurry.”

  Jane stood still for a moment, thinking that she had just made a tacit agreement to work with Murkel, and perhaps this wasn’t the way to keep her end of the bargain; but Tim gave her a push and she knew if she didn’t just do what he said, she’d miss out on something good. It was vibrating in the air around him.

  Claire was sitting at the desk reading Belinda St. Germain’s book.

  Before Jane could tell her to grab another sweater, Claire was up and tossing one to Jane. “I know. I’ve been waiting.”

  “Good,” said Jane. “You can tell me what this is about.”

  Outside as they ran for the parking lot, Claire pointed up to the sky. “It’s a full moon, the harvest moon.”

  “Yes?” said Jane.

  Jane heard other footsteps. Everyone seemed to be running for their cars in the distant parking lot. Murkel had someone stationed on the main road in and out
of Campbell and LaSalle, but not on the access roads or in the parking lots. This was a small Michigan town, and he had a small staff. He couldn’t have anticipated a mass exodus on the night of a full moon. Claire had whispered that they’d all be back by sunrise.

  “From where?” asked Jane.

  They got into the backseat, Tim and Oh were in front, and Tim drove off the road and onto a gravel path that he said connected with the highway in a little less than a quarter mile.

  “Moonlight Market,” said Tim.

  They bumped slowly along the path, using only the parking lights. Once they were out of sight of the main lodge, Tim turned on the headlights. He was grinning ear to ear as he sped up and jumped them onto the main road.

  “It’s a tradition,” said Claire. “I’ve only been to one, about five years ago. I got those two Chinese vases, remember, Bruce? I sold them for a huge profit to that couple from Barrington?”

  “Moonlight Market is held all night, starting around midnight, on the night of the last full moon in the fall. Summer season’s over, so all the resort town antique dealers drag stuff out that they want to turn over, junkers come from three states, pickers are here from all over, it’s the last big score before people go south for the winter and the sales dry up until next spring. People park in the lots at the consolidated high school and sell out of their trucks or the trunks of their cars. Some people set up tables on the grounds with candles or oil lamps. It’s fabulous,” said Tim, practically licking his lips.

  “What about Murkel?” asked Jane, checking to see how much cash she had in her wallet.

  “He’s a smart man,” said Oh, “and has lived here a long time. He knows about this market and will figure that people are going—he will expect us to keep an eye on everyone.”