A Tale of Two Biddies (17 page)

Or was he?

When I opened my mouth to respond with I don’t know what, I saw that his hands were poked into the pockets of his jeans. He refused to meet my eyes.

Whatever I had expected from him, it wasn’t bashfulness, and in a twisted sort of way it gave me courage. “Hey.” I stepped up nice and close, the better to catch his eye and force him to look at me. “You left in a hurry the other night.”

“I did.” He did not sound especially proud of this, which is why I would have cut him some slack if he didn’t add, “It was a mistake.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer, but I had to ask so I swallowed hard and plunged right in. “Leaving? Or kissing me?”

Levi lifted his chin. “We need to talk.”

“Sure. And when you answer my question, we’ll be talking. Which was the mistake, Levi, leaving so fast or kissing me in the first place?”

“Both,” he admitted.

It’s not like I thought one kiss—as spectacular as it may have been—was some kind of commitment that was going to change my life. I’m way too much of an adult for that. But hearing him dismiss the incident so out of hand, I felt as if a fist had just introduced itself to my solar plexus. I may have even gasped, which is a terrible thing to even think about, and because I didn’t want to, I simply whirled around and rushed over to take one of the three seats to the left of the microphone in the center of the gazebo.

“Ah, so you’re one of the judges.” When Gregory Ashburn stepped up and smiled as if he thought being a guest at the B and B would somehow give him an edge in the contest, I’m pretty sure I didn’t smile back. I was trying too hard not to burst into tears.

Levi slipped into the chair next to mine. “That came out wrong,” he said.

I gave him the briefest of glances and clung hard and fast to the minutiae of the occasion. Better that than giving in to the mortification that left me feeling inadequate and the inadequacy that mortified me. I lifted my chin. “These chairs are for the judges.”

“You didn’t tell me you were a judge.”

As statements went, it was pretty noncommital. But I was past the objective stage. Anger bunched in my stomach. “So, first you don’t think I’m smart enough to investigate a murder, and now you don’t even think I can handle judging a trivia contest. I guess that proves you
are
right. What happened the other night
was
a mistake.”

Oh, how I love it when they squirm!

Levi ran a hand through his hair. “That’s not what I meant.”

“About me being smart? Or about the other night?”

Since Marianne zipped over to stand in front of us, I couldn’t be sure, but I think Levi’s response was either a curse or a growl.

“Questions,” she said, and she handed Levi a manila folder like the one she’d given me.

My mouth fell open and I spun in my seat to face him, and yes, the question came out a bit too loud. “You’re a judge, too?”

“What, you don’t think I’m smart enough to be a judge?”

I wasn’t in the mood to handle the cocky smile that went along with his question, so I turned in my seat so I was facing the audience again. “I’d like to think I have a little more class than that,” I said, and gave myself a mental pat on the back. Way to go putting him right in his place!

Before I could get too carried away congratulating myself, Marianne took the chair on the other side of me and Gordon Hunter stepped up to the microphone to introduce each of the Dickens impersonators and ask them to step up to the gazebo. While he was at it, I took another quick look around and noticed Margaret sitting in the back row nibbling out of that blue candy bag.

But still no Mason Burke.

Maybe he got cold feet, I told myself.

Maybe his wife had a relapse and, devoted husband that he was, he opted to stay with her.

Maybe he couldn’t find his top hat, or lost his pocket watch, or wasn’t happy with the way his cravat was tied.

Maybe—

“. . . good-looking.”

The word Levi whispered snapped me out of my thoughts and I automatically glanced his way. Good thing I didn’t assume he was talking about me and say something stupid like, “Oh, this old outfit, it’s just something I threw on,” because I saw that he was watching Eva DeNato.

“That suit, and the silver-tipped cane,” he rasped when he realized my mind had been a million miles away and he needed to repeat himself. “It’s a good-looking outfit.”

It was, and as it turned out, Eva DeNato did it proud. She was as smart as a whip. One by one, we went through our questions, following the ground rules that had been established for the contest:

Each judge took a turn asking one question.

Each contestant could get two questions wrong before being disqualified.

Each contestant had to stay in the Dickens persona the entire time.

Needless to say, that pretty much disqualified Max and Tyler from the get-go, but hey, they were nothing if not good sports. When they were dismissed, they smiled and waved and bowed like rock stars.

That left Drake, Ashburn, and Ms. DeNato, and that’s when things got interesting.

Not to mention cutthroat.

“Who is Phillip Pirrip?” Marianne asked, and when Drake, whose turn it was to answer, hesitated for just a moment, Ashburn clicked his tongue.

Drake shot him a look, pulled back his shoulders, and in his very best—and loudest—British accent—said, “‘. . . my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.’ The answer to your question, madam, is Pip,
Great Expectations
.”

There was a smattering of applause from the crowd, not for knowledge, because let’s face it, this was a pretty easy question, but certainly for style. Ashburn did not join in. It was his turn to answer and my turn to ask.

“Why did Mrs. Bardell take Mr. Pickwick to court?” I wanted to know.

The way Ashburn rolled his eyes sent the very clear message that my question was not in his know-it-all league. “For breach of promise,” he said.

“Ah, love.”

This from Levi who at my side, breathed the words more than said them so as not to attract attention.

I pretended not to hear him, and held my breath while he asked the next question.

And so it went with each of the three contestants easily handling anything we threw at them, even when we got down to the nitty-gritty.

My turn to ask and Drake’s to answer. “What,” I asked, “is the connection between Charles Dickens and the famous line from literature, ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’”

“Dickens never wrote that,” Drake blurted out, then remembered himself and stammered, “That is, I never wrote that.”

“Aha!” Ashburn pointed a finger at his opponent. “He didn’t stay in the character of Dickens.”

“Dickens?” Drake whined. “You should have said, ‘He didn’t stay in
my
character.’ He should have said
my
character, am I right?” He turned pleading eyes on us, then a smile as venomous as a snake on Ashburn. “
Hasta la vista
, baby!”

“Hasta la vista!”
That pointed finger of his quivering, Ashburn jumped up and down. “That disqualifies him! That disqualifies him!”

“That . . .” Because Marianne sat there with her mouth hanging open, I jumped to my feet. “That disqualifies both of you.” I poked my thumb over my shoulder. “Outta here, fellas.”

They stuttered and huffed and puffed and hesitated, but in the end, Ashburn and Drake knew they’d blown it. But that didn’t automatically make Eva the winner. I explained that she still needed to answer the question Drake had missed and then (as laid out in the rules) answer a final question that each of the three judges would agree upon.

She took a deep breath. “There is a connection between ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ and myself,” she said, glancing to where Drake and Ashburn sat in the audience, red-faced and regretful. “Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who wrote that famous line, was a friend of mine, and in fact, my youngest son, Edward Bulwer-Lytton Dickens was named for him.”

We applauded, but just when we were going to put our heads together and decide on a final question, Levi spoke up. “I’ve got one,” he said, consulting his notes. “You ladies mind?”

Marianne assured him we didn’t, though I wasn’t quite so sure. It all depended on what he wondered if I minded.

“So here goes,” Levi said, raising his voice so he could be heard clearly all the way at the back of the crowd.

“Dickens believed in something unorthodox,” he said. “Something that may . . . or may not be factual.” Here, Levi’s gaze slid to me briefly before it returned to our contestant. “Can you tell us what it was?”

I flipped through my mental Rolodex of Dickens trivia, but try as I might, I couldn’t come up with anything about Dickens that justified that sly little look I’d gotten from Levi.

No matter.

Eva DeNato didn’t have the same problem. Or the distraction of sitting so close to Levi, his thigh touching mine.

“Krook in
Bleak House
dies this way,” she said, but alas (in keeping with the Victorian theme), I was at a loss. At least until she added, “SHC, Spontaneous Human Combustion.”

Right about then, I was a believer, too, because I was pretty sure when Levi grinned at me, my cheeks caught fire.

Thank goodness no one but Levi noticed. They were too busy applauding and congratulating Eva.

“Told you that would be fun!” Marianne beamed with all the enthusiasm of a bookworm who had, in her own small way, helped spread her love of reading. “I just wish I would have had a chance to ask one last question.” She’d left a book on the floor of the gazebo next to her chair, and now she lifted it and showed me the cover. “It’s a reproduction of a first edition of
A Tale of Two Cities
,” she said, and she lovingly ran her hand over the cover before she flipped the book open. “It even has the original illustrations. Look at this one.” She pointed. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

Wonderful, yes.

And familiar.

The pen-and-ink sketch showed a man in Colonial clothing standing behind a wooden counter. There was another man in front of the counter, also in knee breeches and a tricorn hat, and a woman sitting behind it, a mobcap on her head and her attention on her knitting.

“It’s the drawing that hangs behind Alice and Margaret’s cash register,” I said, and automatically looked around for Margaret, but she and her bag of candy were already gone. “It’s Madame Defarge! Wait until I tell them, they’ll be tickled.”

Marianne trilled. “Oh, maybe it’s worth a fortune. You know, there’s a story about the original drawing, they say it’s been lost for years and that there are treasure hunters all over who—”

“Treasure hunters?” Funny how these thoughts hit. With all the wallop of an atomic bomb.

Mason Burke, that wrapped poster of his, and the way he hurried through the dark, his chin on his chest.

“Like the man who hopped off the boat next to Luella’s the night of the party on the dock,” I cried, and raced out of the gazebo.

Poor Marianne didn’t have much of a chance to say more than, “What are you talking about?” and no way she could keep up.

Levi had no trouble at all.

“You want to explain?” He matched me step for step when I hurried to the knitting shop.

“I do. I can. I mean, he said his wife sprained her ankle when they were packing up the boat, right? But when he got off the boat the night of the storm, he was all alone. He should have been helping her. He shouldn’t have been running because he should have been walking with her. What kind of man would leave his injured wife on a boat in the middle of a storm?” Levi had no answer, and I knew it so I went right on. “The same kind of man who says he’s bringing Margaret and Alice a gift, when maybe what he’s really doing is trying to replace a valuable picture with a reproduction.”

We turned the corner and put on the brakes.

Even from here, I could tell that the front door of the knitting shop was wide open.

Though he was at my side, Levi was already one step ahead of me. He got out his phone and called Hank.

I
didn’t want to, but Levi clamped a hand on my arm and held on tight, making me wait right there in the middle of the street until Hank and a couple of patrol officers arrived on the scene. When they rushed into the knitting shop, I squirmed away from Levi’s steely grip and followed right along.

With Levi at my heels (grumbling something about how I refused to be corralled), I toed the line between the front stoop and the open door of the shop and watched the ugly truth dawn on Mason Burke, who was standing near the front counter. As soon as he got a gander of the boys in blue, his eyes grew wide. His jaw dropped and his face went ashen. All telling signs, I thought, but not nearly as interesting (or as damning) as the fact that there was string and torn brown paper on the floor around his feet and he was holding an exact duplicate of the drawing from
A Tale of Two Cities
that hung behind Margaret and Alice’s front counter.

“You want to explain?” Hank asked.

Was that another grumble I heard from the honey-haired hunk who stood at my shoulder?

Indeed, and I’m pretty sure it had something to do with Hank’s question being intended not for Mason Burke, but for me.

I took this as a sign that I was welcome both in terms of the investigation and into the knitting shop, so I stepped inside. At this point, I probably don’t need to mention that Levi did, too.

“There’s a legend about that drawing. It’s an illustration from
A Tale of Two Cities
,
and that one . . .” I pointed to the drawing that hung on the wall. “Well, of course it’s impossible to know for certain without authentication, but I have a feeling that it might be the original.”

“So . . .” Leave it to Hank to sound like this was no big deal. His thumbs hooked in his belt, he strolled nearer to Burke. “So what do you have there in your hands, Mr. . . . er . . .”

“Burke.” I supplied the information for him. “Mason Burke. He’s staying at a cottage over on the west side of the island, and he claims he’s here with his wife who sprained her ankle just as they were getting on their boat on the mainland to come over here.”

“Claims?” Hank rubbed a hand over his chin. “You want to explain that, Mr. Burke?”

Burke swallowed hard, and when one of the patrol officers slipped on latex gloves and took the picture out of his hands, he didn’t put up a fight. “Of course I’m here with my wife,” he said. “And as far as that picture . . .” Now that he’d had a few minutes to compose himself, he recovered pretty quickly and laughed. “This is just one big mix-up, officer. I told Bea yesterday, my wife and I found this knitting picture at a garage sale.” He pointed at the drawing now being held by the police officer. “I brought it over here to give to Alice and Margaret. As a gift. Honestly, all I wanted to do . . .” The gaze Burke turned on Hank was so open and so darned honest, it almost fooled even me.

“The shop was locked up tight earlier,” Burke said, “but when I tried the door now, well, you can see it opened right up. I assumed the sisters would be around, but as far as I can see . . .” As if we didn’t know what he was talking about, he looked all around. “There’s no one here. All I wanted to do was surprise those nice old ladies. Honest. That’s why I came here today.”

“Except this morning you told me you wanted to give them the picture in person,” I reminded Burke. “So if they’re not here, what were you going to do with the picture?”

His jaw went stiff. “I changed my mind. About giving them the picture in person. But then, it hardly matters, does it? I didn’t realize the picture we found at the garage sale . . . That is, I didn’t remember the one hanging here as well as I thought I remembered it. You can imagine how shocked I was when I realized the picture we’d bought was the same as the one already hanging here. My wife’s going to be so disappointed. She wanted a special way to thank Margaret and Alice for helping me pick out some yarn so she had a way to pass the time while she’s laid up.”

“Not true,” I said for Hank’s benefit. “Because Mr. Burke isn’t here with his wife. He’s on the island alone.”

With his eyebrows traveling toward his buzzed hair, Hank glanced at Levi before he looked at me. “And you know this . . . how, Bea?”

“Because of the storm the other night, of course,” I said, and threw my hands in the air. That is, before I realized that what was so crystal clear to me was still mud to Levi and Hank. I drew in a breath to calm my pounding heart. “When we were at the party on the dock the other night and the storm kicked up, Mr. Burke got off his boat. Alone.”

Hank pursed his lips.

“Don’t you get it?” I asked, and then was sorry I did. Something told me that wasn’t the sort of thing a person asks a cop who has a potential felon on his hands. I backed off the comment with a wave of my hands. “If there was a Mrs. Burke,” I said, “and if she’d sprained her ankle as they were packing up the boat on the mainland like Mr. Burke said she did, he wouldn’t have jumped off the boat and hurried away from the dock by himself. He would have had to help her.”

“Okay.” Hank gave me that much, but tempered the comment with a, “So?”

“So when Chandra and I stopped in here the other day, Mr. Burke was here, too. He said he was picking up some yarn and needles for his wife. You know, so she’d have something to do while he was here to be in the Dickens contest. Only he didn’t show up at the Dickens contest today, so that got me to thinking.”

“That doesn’t mean there’s not a Mrs. Burke waiting back at the cottage,” Hank said.

“Except if she is, he leaves her in the dark every time he goes out.” I met Burke’s look head-on, challenging him to dispute this, and when he didn’t, I suggested to Hank, “Maybe you could send someone out there to the cottage to check. You know, just to be sure.”

“No.” Burke stepped forward, then froze in place when the nearest cop—a young guy with big biceps and a square chin—pulled back his shoulders and laid a hand oh so casually on the taser clipped to his belt. He mumbled something under his breath, and when Hank leaned nearer because he couldn’t hear, Burke huffed. “Bea’s right. You won’t find Mrs. Burke at the cottage. There is no Mrs. Burke.”

Since he seemed to be in the mood to tell the truth, I figured I might as well go for broke. “And you were here to steal Alice and Margaret’s drawing.”

Burke bit his lower lip. His audacity washed out with the tears that streamed down his cheeks. “They bought it at a garage sale,” he whimpered. “Did you know that? Those old ladies, they told me the story. They went to a garage sale and Alice, she liked the picture, and she bought it for seven dollars.”

“She told Margaret it cost five,” I added for Levi’s and Hank’s benefit.

“It’s just . . .” Burke pulled at his hair. “It’s maddening. Impossible. The original illustrations in Dickens’s books were made from etchings, of course. But the artist, Hablot Knight Browne, made sketches before he produced the final etchings. The other drawings and all the etchings are accounted for. Every single one of them. Private collections, museums, libraries. Browne signed his pieces
Phiz
, and all the original Phiz illustrations and etchings are well documented. Except for this one.” Burke turned to look with reverence at the drawing on the wall. “
The Wine-shop
.”

While all this made perfect if somewhat skewed sense to me, it wasn’t straightforward enough to appeal to Hank’s cop senses. He scratched a hand behind his ear. “So what are you, Mr. Burke, some sort of burglar? You take the chance—”

“He didn’t have to take a chance,” I told Hank, and I knew I was right. From Burke’s point of view there was only one way his plan would have worked. “I’d bet anything Mr. Burke has been on the island before, probably more than once. I guarantee you that’s why he was one of the contestants in the Dickens contest this weekend. You’d been to the shop before, right, Mr. Burke? You must have been, because you would have wanted to check out the picture and try to determine if it was what you thought it was. You asked questions, you poked around. And when you realized how close you were to the Holy Grail of Phiz illustrations, you knew you had to come back and do the ol’ switcheroo. The picture you brought had to be an exact replica, down to the hanging wire on the frame. Otherwise, someone might notice. You couldn’t take the chance of Alice or Margaret recognizing you as the man who’d stopped into the shop before, so you needed the top hat and the goatee and the old-fashioned clothes. As a disguise.”

Burke didn’t confirm or deny. He didn’t need to. Instead, he simply shook his head, slow and steady, the gesture filled with both disgust and disappointment. “There have been so many stories about
The Wine-shop
over the years,” he said. “So many tantalizing little clues. I’ve spent the better part of my adult life following each and every one of them. The original illustration was owned by a family in England, then it went to France, then it came to this country, then . . .” He threw his hands in the air and they landed against his thighs with a slap. “It disappeared. Just disappeared. That is, until I was able to track it to an island in the middle of nowhere and find out that a little old lady bought it for five dollars.”

“Seven,” I corrected him, but I don’t think he much cared.

“So you see, Officer . . .” Burke looked Hank’s way. “I’m not a burglar, I’m a treasure hunter. And this treasure . . .” When one of the cops turned Burke around and slapped the cuffs on him, he found himself looking right at the Phiz drawing. “This treasure was the chance of a lifetime.”

Hank and one of the other officers took Burke away. The other policeman was sent out to look for Alice and Margaret since there was no sign that anyone was home at the cottage. When he motioned toward the door, Levi and I stepped back out into the late afternoon sunshine.

Never let it be said that the island grapevine isn’t efficient. No sooner were we outside than Chandra, Luella, and Kate came racing around the corner.

“What’s going on?”

“We just saw Hank putting that Mason Burke in a patrol car. What happened?”

“Bea, you’ve got to tell us!”

I did have to tell them, but not in the middle of the street. When Levi invited us into the bar, I balked, but I was outvoted by the other Ladies who were all carrying shopping bags (craft show, remember) and complaining that they were hot and their feet were tired.

My pride might be hurt. My ego might be crushed. My spirit might be flagging. But I know a losing cause when I’m in the middle of one. My own feet dragging, I followed my friends into Levi’s where he offered us a (relatively) quiet table in a (relatively) quiet corner, and a bottle of pinot grigio he had delivered to us compliments of the house.

Not that one bottle of a modest domestic pinot grigio was going to get him off the hook for anything.

Sure, Levi and I had just been in on the nabbing of an art thief together, and yes, the wine . . . I sipped. The crisp, acidic flavor of the wine was just what I needed after a close encounter of the felonious kind. But even nice wine can’t wash away certain memories.

Like a guy I know coming right out and saying that kissing me was a big ol’ mistake.

“What? The wine’s no good?” I guess my expression gave away something of what I was thinking, because Kate gave me a look and sipped her own wine. She pronounced it fine with a little nod, folded her hands on the table in front of her, and said, “Okay, spill the beans.”

She was not talking about what had just happened over at the knitting shop.

Which is precisely why I pretended she was, and told my friends what happened with Mason Burke.

“Brilliant,” Luella said when I’d finished. “You put the pieces of the mystery together like an author plotting a novel.”

I wouldn’t go that far, and I told her so.

“This calls for a celebration,” Chandra announced, and she dug inside her shopping bag. She pulled out a blue bag from the candy shop and offered it to me. “Fudge?”

I wasn’t hungry. But there are times when sugar is a very good thing. Especially when it comes to sweetening a sour mood. “What flavor?” I asked her before I made up my mind.

Chandra grinned. “You don’t go to the candy shop much, do you? The chocolate fudge comes in a blue bag, the vanilla fudge comes in red, the peanut butter fudge comes in green, and so on. It’s a system Glenda over at the shop came up with so her summer workers at the cash registers would know how much to charge for what the workers behind the counter packed.”

Chocolate then. I dug right in and Chandra passed the bag around.

“So that Burke guy was nothing but a two-bit thief.” Luella munched and shook her head.

“Only something tells me two-bit has nothing to do with it,” I said. In my months on the island, I had been virtuous and avoided the candy shop completely. Darn, one bite of the chocolate fudge studded with pecans and I knew the next time I walked by, my resolve would poof away completely and I’d load up on more fudge. “I bet that drawing’s worth a fortune. Wait until Margaret and Alice find out! They were talking about refinancing the building, right? If they sold the drawing, they probably wouldn’t need to. Heck, they might be able to retire someplace nice and warm and live like queens.”

“That will be quite a relief to Margaret.” Luella finished her piece of fudge and reached for one of the paper napkins in the holder at the center of the table. “Not having to refinance, I mean. She’s never been as dedicated to the knitting shop as Alice is, you know. A couple weeks ago, when I talked to Margaret about the refinancing . . . well, she wasn’t exactly enthusiastic. Said she’d rather go back to Florida than stay here and have to listen to Alice criticize her knitting skills.”