The Wrong Stuff (13 page)

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”?

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 chest 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…”

“Ralph Lauren instead of Ram Dass?”

“Exactly,” said Scott, laughing. “And they always paid well for the work, and nobody needed much to live on anyway—enough for a pair of tickets to see a Dylan concert or maybe a down payment on a VW bus.”

“I get it. Enough to keep you in designer tie dye, but no one saved for a rainy day,” said Tim.

“Rainy day? It's one thing to have no health insurance when you're twenty-five and going to live forever, but now…Have you ever had to pay for a root canal? Holy shit, man.”

Tim looked at Scott's expensive boots and the cashmere v-neck he so casually wore under the apron as work clothes. He thought, but didn't say aloud, that Glen and Blake had cultivated a talented bunch of artists and had instilled within them exquisite taste.

“And I laughed at my dad when he suggested dental school,” said Scott.

 

After Tim had said hello to Annie and tidied himself up from his brush with the planter, he left Scott with her for their color consultation. “Color consultation”? Tim wondered if that might be a C & L euphemism for a different kind of consultation altogether. Annie was a beautiful girl, all dark hair and pale skin, violet eyes, Elizabeth Taylor in
National Velvet.
Her gorgeous eyes though, when she answered the door, were red-rimmed. Was there someone at last shedding a tear for old Rick? As he walked down the path, he paused again at the planter and bent over, trying to hear what Scott was saying. He thought it was something about someone not being able to hurt her anymore. Had Rick been her lover and now was Scott moving in? For the “color consultation”?

He could hear Glen LaSalle announcing at one of the orientations for new artists: “We at Campbell and LaSalle do not have affairs, dalliances, quickies, or nooners, as they might be called elsewhere. We at Campbell and LaSalle have ‘color consultations.'”

Tim was trying to decide whether or not to head over to Rick's cabin and see if he could find Jane or help her find whatever it was she was looking for. Knowing Jane, he was sure she didn't know what it would be until she saw it. That quality often made her a good scout at a rummage sale—not too set in her ways, not too dead-on to the lady head vases or the souvenir bottle openers to the exclusion of everything else that was interesting. No, Janie saw all the good stuff, but unfortunately she had only one set of eyes and one pair of hands. She couldn't scoop up the first editions and the collectible LPs in one room and still be the first one to the Pyrex or the button box in the room around the corner. In fact, she could get so caught up in looking over everything that she sometimes didn't make it out of the one room she started in.

Bruce Oh had told Jane that it was her persistent looking, her openness to what there was to see that would make her a good investigator. Yes, Oh was right about that. And it made her a good picker for Tim, but he had to train her to know when to stop looking, too. He had to be able to rouse her from that trance she got into when she started going through a box of photos, a tray of old mismatched silverware. What was she always looking for? Tim wasn't sure. He wasn't sure what any of them were always looking for, except now. He was looking for Claire Oh.

Feeling more than a little silly, he walked off the path and searched behind bushes, around the rear of some of the cabins and studios. His eyes kept sweeping the property the way he wanted to teach Jane to sweep a sales room. In fact, he had used the old game show,
Supermarket Sweep,
as an example of how she was to train herself. They used to watch it when they both faked being sick on the same day in elementary school. Jane, an independent fourth grader, would be left home alone with a can of chicken noodle soup and an opener and instructions to call the EZ Way Inn if she felt any worse.

Tim would be tucked into his bed with a quilt and a tray with tea and toast. He'd have to beg his overzealous mother to go watch her soap operas in the living room because he wanted to call Janie's house and see if she had the same flu bug. As planned out the night before, Jane would be cozied under a blanket in her father's recliner watching television. Tim would call, and Janie would do the play by play.

“Oh my god, she's taking all the cereal boxes into her cart; is she nuts?” Jane would say. “Go for the hams, go for the meat counter, you idiot,” she'd scream into the phone.

“You know what she'll say, don't you? But my kids love that kind and it always seems expensive and I just thought if I got enough…,” Tim would respond, disgusted. “What's she wearing? What's her hair like?”

Then Tim would make up a story about her and her unhappy life with her husband. “They have great kids, though,” Tim would say. “They are her pride and joy.”

Yes, Tim would remind Jane about
Supermarket Sweep,
and that would help her use her keen rummage-sale eye to great advantage.

Just when Tim thought he was completely over his hangover, he hallucinated. He saw a rope ladder fall down out of a tree four feet in front of him. Shaking his head and squinting and beginning to feel vaguely like Jack-in-the-Beanstalk, he looked up.

No hallucination, not even one of Tim's, ever swore like the man descending the rope.

Mickey, dressed in sweatpants and a kind of loose-fitting kimono, was letting fly with a string of expletives when he saw a startled Tim standing directly in front of him.

“What do you know about this?” Mickey demanded, holding out a chunk of gold set with what appeared to Tim to be a real ruby.

Tim shook his head, looking up to see if Mickey had indeed come down from a beanstalk after raiding the nest of a golden-Cartier-earring-laying hen.

“I built this tree house. I take care of it, and it is my sanctuary. Do you hear that? Blake and Glen have both okayed it. They know I need a place to meditate, and now I find this. There're food scraps up there, too, which, if you didn't know, I'll be happy to tell you, will bring every critter in the world into my house—
my
house,” Mickey said, still holding out the earring.

Tim thought to himself that it didn't look like it belonged to any of the women in residence here, but he decided anything he said right now to the enraged Mickey might be held against him. Was this the same stoned-looking, laid-back painter who had casually dropped food all over Jane last night?

Mickey began breathing deeply—in, out. Tim could count one on the inhale, two on the exhale. Mickey was clearly trying to calm himself. He seemed to be succeeding. His face lost some of its redness; he unclenched his fists.

“I'm sorry, pal. I was out of control there for a minute,” Mickey said, his voice soft and measured.

“No problem,” said Tim. “If I may ask, uh, what's up? I mean up there?”

“I built it as a getaway,” Mickey said. “Yeah, I know, I know, Campbell and LaSalle is a getaway, but I just need a little more, you know. I'm tenser than the average bear, and I like to have a place where no one can find me. Hardly anybody even knows about this place, but…” Mickey let his voice trail off, then shrugged. “I brought Martine and Silver out here last night, and we got pretty loaded. When we left, I must have left the ladder down. So someone was up there, and it just bugs me, you know.”

Yeah, Tim did know. It would be like someone finding your secret clubhouse.

“Anything missing?” Tim asked.

“Like my dope?” asked Mickey with a laugh. “Nah. Looks like someone just wanted a place to crash.” Mickey opened his hand and looked at the earring. “With his lady, I guess.”

“That lets me out,” said Tim with a smile. He took off his sunglasses, a dark and mirrored pair that had protected his bleary bloodshot eyes from the early morning light.

“No interest in stargazing?” asked Mickey.

“No lady,” said Tim.

“Well, turn around while I hide the ladder so I won't put you on my list of suspects if it happens again.”

Obediently Tim turned around. Holding his sunglasses just so in front of him, he watched in the reflection as Mickey pulled a rope hidden on the other side of the tree that hoisted the ladder high up into the leaves. Mickey then wound the pulley rope around a hidden branch and poof, no more beanstalk.

It wouldn't take a genius to figure out that system,
thought Tim, looking around at several vantage points from which they could be seen. They were in plain sight of the deck of the art gallery and the rear of two of the cabins. There were two telescopes that Tim knew about—one on the deck of the lodge and one in the gallery library of the barn. Mickey's little secret was probably known by every resident and guest of Campbell and LaSalle, even the ones he hadn't brought up for a little taste of stoned stargazing.

Tim left Mickey mumbling to himself and shuffling off toward his own cabin. Scott had mentioned last night that Mickey was angling to become Blake's right-hand man now that Rick was gone, but Tim didn't think he had a shot at it if Blake knew he was a doper. And Mickey didn't look like he was trying to keep that fact a secret.

Tim decided to go back to the lodge and meet with Jane. It would be time for lunch soon. They hadn't made a plan on where to rendezvous, but Tim had never known Jane to miss a meal. He could ask her how she was doing on her research assignment, and they could wander out to the porch rockers. She could tell him all about what she had found in Rick Moore's cabin, and he could tell her all about not finding Claire Oh.