Another Man's Treasure (a romantic thriller) (Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series Book 1) (12 page)

When he makes no effort to use the pen and paper, I press on. “Is Brian Bascomb someone you worked with?”  The minute the words are out of my mouth I could kick myself.  You better believe Detective Coughlin would never make such a stupid blunder—offer up a ready-made lie.  Sure enough, Dad looks up and nods eagerly. 

I decide to come back to Brian Bascomb later.  I have more important matters to tackle.

“Guess who I saw this week?  Melody Olsen’s mother, Lisa.  Remember her?”

Dad’s hand freezes on Ethel’s head.

“She and mom were good friends.  You must remember her.”

He nods warily. 

“She’s such a kind person.  Generous, you know?  I’d forgotten that.”

I can see his sunken chest rising and falling under the gray shroud of a cardigan he wears every day.

“She was willing to sit and talk to me about Mom.  Really talk, I mean.  Answer questions, reminisce.”  I let this information hang there for a moment.  No one moves.

After the silence has dragged on long enough, I continue.  “Mrs. Olsen told me Mom had gone back to work a year after I was born.  I never knew that.  Said she worked for a small PR firm—really loved it.”

Dad nods while keeping his eyes focused on Ethel.

“What was the firm called?”  This could be valuable information.  Maybe I can find other people who knew my mother well at the time of her disappearance.

Dad shakes his head.

“You won’t tell me?”

Finally he picks up the pen and pad.  He writes and holds it up.
Don’t remember
.

This may or may not be true.  Dad has never had a good memory for mundane details, like when the garbage men pick up or how to change the ink in the printer. But maybe he doesn’t want me to know.  Why?

“Mrs. Olsen said mom quit her job in the city when I was born, but then didn’t like not working so she found a job closer to home.”  I try to arrange my features to look nothing more than mildly curious. “How close was her office to our house?  I think I remember going there with her.” 

In the harsh fluorescent light of the nursing home, my father looks exceptionally pale and frail.  But his bright blue eyes haven’t dimmed. Despite his refusal to work on his recovery, despite his inability to speak, my father—sharp, shrewd, analytical--is in there.  He knows I’m after something although he’s not sure what it might be.  We play a non-verbal game of cat and mouse. Me, smiling benignly as I take a little stroll down memory lane.  Him, gauging whether I’ll drop the subject faster if he answers or he refuses.

Finally, he drops his gaze to the notepad, and gripping the pen in his left hand, awkwardly scratches out a few words.  When he’s done I squint to read what he’s written:
Reston Ave.  She took you in stroller.

Whattaya know?  The bit about remembering going there with her was total fabrication on my part, but apparently true.  “She didn’t take me every day?  Sometimes you watched me, right?”

Dad nods, a faraway look in his eyes.

“Didn’t you ever have a nanny, even a part-time babysitter?” I ask.  “It must’ve been hard for you to get your work done with a crying baby to deal with.” He shakes his head and croaks out a word I can’t understand.

“What?”

Dad picks up the pen again. 
Good baby.

Ridiculously, I feel a lump form in my throat.  Imagine--I was a good baby.  That’s the most complimentary thing my father has said to me in years.

We’re quiet for a moment, but it’s not the usual excruciating silence of seconds counted until we can be released from each other’s company.  Instead we’re sort of basking in the glow of a happier time, a time I don’t truly remember.

And then, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid. “Dad, Mrs. Olsen said she thought Mom might have been pregnant when she disappeared.  Is that true?”

I see his hands tighten on the arms of his wheelchair.  His eyes widen and he shakes his head furiously, as if I’m the knife-wielding maniac and he’s the cornered babysitter.  Then he lurches forward and pounds the call button beside his bed. Of course I shouldn’t have blurted out the question so brutally.  It’s just that I’m not used to protecting his feelings.  I’m not used to him having feelings.

Out in the hall I hear the squeak of the aide’s approaching feet. I need to recoup.  “Dad? Mrs. O. said Mom was excited about something in the weeks before she…, before Christmas.  Was it a baby? Do you know?”

But there’s no time to say more.  Desiree the aide has arrived and Dad thrusts his chin toward the bathroom.  As she wheels him in, the light reflects something shiny.

His cheeks are wet with tears.

I try to ride out my father’s retreat into the bathroom, but after twenty minutes Desiree comes back in, fixes me with a withering glare, and tells me Dad is having trouble “moving things along” and my continuing presence must be “constricting.”  Her dark eyes lock with mine, her broad, brown face frozen with disdain.  I know in that moment that if Desiree’s father ever had a stroke she would not put him in a place like Manor View.  She’d bring him to her house, carry him in her strong arms, feed him, wipe him, bathe him, all without complaint.  She doesn’t understand us Americans, doesn’t like us much either, although it’s our strange ways that create a job for her.  She’d like to tell me what a sorry excuse I am for a daughter that I don’t take my father out myself.  That I don’t, apparently, even know who his one friend is.  But honesty is not one of the perks of her job.

Invalids trump healthy people every time—I have no choice but to leave.  But I know damn well it’s not an intestinal crisis keeping him holed up in the loo. I want to shout “we’re not done with this conversation” through the bathroom door as I leave his room, but the aide’s tapping foot and crossed arms silence me, and I slink out with Ethel.

Now she and I are home, grappling with the saddest stretch of the week: Sunday afternoon.  This is the time when lovers lounge in bed, trading sections of the New York Times; when families go bike-riding or apple-picking or some other hyphenated activity; when old married couples take long hand-in-hand walks.  Ethel and I are none of those things, so we struggle to find ways to fill the long hours between sleeping in and going to bed early.  Ethel alternates restless pacing with heavy sighing.  I mostly brood.

The Sundays of my childhood were spent with Nana and Pop. They’d pick me up at eight for Sunday school, an activity my father only tolerated because it got me out of the house early and motivated my grandparents to keep me all day. How I loved Sunday school!  Making the Popsicle stick manger with the clothespin baby Jesus.  Eating the wholesome graham cracker and apple juice snack.  Memorizing the 23
rd
Psalm. 
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil….Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me…. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies….
   I had no idea what it meant but I loved the sound of the words as they rolled off my tongue.

After church, we’d go out to lunch at the Afton Restaurant and I’d get a Shirley Temple with my grilled cheese sandwich.  At the table Nana would pull out the neatly clipped
Things to Do
column from the Palmyrton
Daily Record
and suggest outings.  Petting Zoo?  Hay ride? Gingerbread house competition?  As I look back on those Sundays, I marvel at my optimism.  Every week, brimming with anticipation, I’d choose an excursion.  Every week I was just slightly let down.  I could never lose the feeling that the other kids—the ones who were there with their screaming little brothers and bored older sisters and piggy-back ride giving fathers—were having more fun than I was.  Most of all, I couldn’t shake the sense that if my mom had been there to shoo away the aggressive goose at the farm or take my picture in the funny colonial hat, my Sunday afternoon would have been pure bliss.  Instead, on the way home I often wept quietly in the back seat, overcome by waves of sadness, while my grandparents chatted away in the front of the big Buick, pleased with the success of their entertainment.

Sundays haven’t improved much in the past twenty-five years.  I still feel pulled toward tears, and it doesn’t take much to set me off.  A guy puts his hand on his wife’s shoulder as they’re crossing the street and I start scrabbling through my pockets looking for a balled up napkin to mop up my over-reaction.

Sometimes I surrender to the sadness and wallow. Make like a pig and wade right into the mire. That’s when the scrap book comes out.

I slide my feet out from under Ethel’s sprawl at the end of the sofa and pad over to the bookcase.  The scrapbook resides on the top shelf, holding the only remnants of family I possess.  Nana assembled it, and every page is a testament to her resolute cheerfulness and her despair.

The book begins with my mother’s birth.  A velum card, only slightly yellow around the edges, trumpets the arrival of Charlotte Elizabeth Perry, 6 pounds, 7 ounces.  Proud parents: William and Elinor.  The next few pages chronicle my mother’s meteoric rise: star of the ballet recital, champion of the summer swim league, top seller of Girl Scout cookies.  Nana has saved every ribbon and award, carefully mounting and labeling them.  Nestled between the mementoes are faded snapshots of a smiling Charlotte in a number of different get-ups, even then projecting an astonishing grace.

I study the pictures as I always have, searching for some similarity between us.  Where in that beautiful, confident, athletic girl is the seed that would one day become me?

I turn two pages and we are into the high school years. Cheerleader, prom queen, school musical soloist, field hockey star.  Face it—if I had met my mother at my high school, I would’ve been scared to death of her.  Wouldn’t any mere mortal? I know Nana assembled this scrapbook with the best of intentions.  She wanted me to know my mother, to love her as she and Pop did.  But the scrapbook has always backfired.

If you asked the average person to conjure up the sensation of dread what would they imagine?  A trip to the dentist, maybe, or a phone ringing in the middle of the night.  For me, it would be the sight of Nana advancing on me with that scrapbook in her hands. I knew I should have enjoyed snuggling on the sofa with Nana, breathing in her familiar combination of peppermint Lifesavers, Estee Lauder and Aqua Net, leafing through the pages of my mother’s life.  The fact that I hated it scared me, and instinctively I knew I could never tell Nana how I really felt.  I needed Nana, needed her desperately, so I couldn’t afford to do anything that might make her stop loving me. That’s why I endured those sessions, endured them right up until the day before she died.

I still hate the scrapbook, but with Nana gone at least I don’t have to pretend to like it.  Now when I get it out it’s because I want the perverse pleasure of picking at a scab.  Today I flip past the early years and cut to the chase: Charlotte as wife and mother. I study the wedding pictures with an interest I’ve never felt before.  Naturally, my mother was a stunning bride. But today I don’t focus on her elegant gown or the flowing illusion veil.  I scrutinize my father.  He appears in only two photos, as if he were a bit player on this big day.  But in both pictures he looks like he’s just won the Nobel Prize, basking in the glow of knowing the world finally recognizes his true genius.  Dad was never conventionally handsome, but in these pictures he radiates an energy that makes him attractive.  It’s not a stretch to understand why my mother married him.

My hand hesitates on the scrapbook page.  These final photos have always been the hardest for me to look at.  Charlotte as Madonna.  Nana has selected only those photos that portray my mother with one foot in Heaven. Exhausted but proud Charlotte in her hospital bed.  Doting Charlotte nursing.  Laughing Charlotte spooning in the baby food.  Energetic Charlotte pushing the stroller. I’m in the pictures, but just like my father at the wedding, I seem like nothing more than a prop. 

There are three empty pages at the end of the scrapbook. Of course Nana didn’t include the obituary or the newspaper article entitled, “Young Mother Apparent Drowning Victim.” I slap the book shut.  There’s nothing I don’t already know here.  Time to move on to something more productive.

On a lark I go to the Rutgers website and search the faculty list.  No Brian Bascomb there. Then I Google the name and get several hits.  One is an obituary of a 103- year-old Brian in Plano, Texas.  Another is a plastic surgeon in Palo Alto.  The third is a Brian Bascomb with a Facebook page.  The Info page says he’s from Somerville, NJ.  I can’t view the rest unless I become Brian’s friend.  Now I’m getting somewhere. I try finding a phone listing in Somerville but come up empty. 

I guess Facebook is my best bet.  I put in a friend request with a message: “Hi, I’m Audrey Nealon, Roger’s daughter.  Thanks for taking him out to lunch.” As I hit send, my phone rings: Cal.

“Hi.” I strive for blasé but fall significantly short.

“Hi, yourself.  Busy?”

Busy working myself into a twist
.  “No, just relaxing with Ethel.  You?”

Cal sighs.  “I’m at the office, trying to get a jump on this week’s campaign events.  That’s why I called.  What works better for you, Tuesday or Wednesday?”

I feel a prickle of fear.  Surely he doesn’t expect me to host some rubber chicken dinner or give a speech for Spencer in front of the Montclair Rotary Club? “Works for what?”  I can hear the wariness in my voice.

“To have dinner with me.”  For the first time since I met him, Cal sounds uncertain.  “I mean…I guess I thought you, you know, might want to, but…”

Stupid, stupid Audrey!  “I do!  I definitely do.  But the way you said ‘planning campaign events’ and ‘what works for you’ I thought you meant you wanted me to campaign for Spencer.”  I prattle on until Cal’s laughter cuts me off.

“Poor Audrey—I expect you to read my mind.  What I was trying to express was I can leave one night this week free of campaign events so I can see you.  Which would you prefer? I promise I won’t put you to work ringing doorbells.”

Now my heart is pounding.  I’m about to say either night is fine, but I catch myself.  No need for him to know I’m sitting home alone every night.  “Tuesday,” I say with conviction.  “Tuesday works best for me.”

“Tuesday it is.  Oh, hell—there’s Spencer on my call waiting.  See you at seven, baby.”

I stare at the dead phone in my hand.  Baby?

Preparations for the Reicker sale are in full swing when I get to the office on Monday morning. I can hear the phone ringing and the sound of packing tape zipping off the roll even before I open the door. The tower of packages waiting for the UPS man, the spicy aroma of Jill’s chai latte, the tinny, insistent beat emanating from Ty’s iPod—I embrace the reassuring familiarity of my office.  What a relief it is to be away from home, where I’ve spent the last eighteen hours obsessing about my father’s reaction to my question about my mother’s pregnancy.

“Audrey, have you seen your picture in the Sunday
Star Ledger
?” Jill squeals the moment I walk through the door.  “It’s from that party you went to.”

“What picture?” I hold out my hand for the paper.  There on the Style page is a big picture of two people in profile: Spencer shaking the hand of a slender, long-legged woman in a black dress.  “Are you nuts? That’s not me!”

“It is too,” Jill insists.  “The caption says, ‘Audrey Nealon helps Spencer Finneran celebrate his birthday.’  And that’s your new haircut. 
Love
your dress.  You look fabulous.”

I squint at the photo.  That is my haircut.  And my new ridiculously high pumps.  “Geez, I didn’t even recognize myself.”

Ty crowds over my shoulder.  “Dress is hot.”  He taps the page.  “You got great legs, Audge.  Why you always wear those baggy sweats?”

I pull the paper away from them and toss it face-down on the desk. I’m not comfortable with this Audrey- as-Angelina-Jolie schtick. “Let’s get to work.  Any messages?”

“The Chamber of Commerce called twice,” Jill says. “They want to know if you’re going to the Meet and Greet next Wednesday at five.”

I wrinkle my nose. Guys whose guts are ready to pop out of their button down shirts talking to my boobs.  Women with frosted hair and color coordinated handbags tossing around terms like loyalty index and cycle time.  At the Chamber Meet and Greet, I always feel like the only kid at the grown-up’s table.  “Do I have to go?  God, I hate those things.”

“We got three new customers the last time you networked there,” Jill reminds me.  “You told me then it was my job to force you to go every time.”

“It’s your job to reconcile the checkbook every month and you never do that.  And don’t use network as a verb in a sentence where I’m the subject.  What I do at these functions is hover pathetically near the cheese and crackers until Isabelle arrives, then trail around in her shadow, handing out my card to everyone she hands hers to.”

“Seems to be working.  Should I call and say you’ll be there?”

“Whatever.”  I sit at my desk and start going through the mail. Seconds later, Jill is motioning for me to pick up the phone.

“Louise, the assistant director, wants to talk to you.”

  I roll my eyes and pick up.  Turns out Louise wants to know if I’ll serve on the table decorations committee for the Chamber’s annual fundraising dinner dance.  Gee, poke a sharp stick in my eye/serve on the decorations committee.  It’s a toss-up.  “Honestly Louise, I’m honored to be asked, but you know, I haven’t fully recovered from being in the hospital. Maybe next year, when I’ve got all my energy back.”  Was that brilliant, or what?  I have twelve months to figure out an excuse for next year.

“Oh, Audrey, I totally understand!”  Louise’s voice drips remorse.  “I shouldn’t have asked—I don’t know what I was thinking. Is there anything we here at the Chamber can do for you?”

I’m about to gracefully decline and make my escape when an idea pops into my head.  “Actually, Louise, there is something I could use your help with.  I’m looking for a PR firm—do you maintain a list of Chamber members sorted by business type?”