The Wrong Stuff (9 page)

“We all knew and loved Rick, a quiet man, a fine craftsman, a determined scholar, and we invite his spirit to stay here, with us, at Campbell and LaSalle, to inspire us and guide us…” Martine looked up, her eyes closed, her arms outstretched.

“Eeny-meeny-jelly-beany, the spirits are about to speak,” whispered Tim in his best Bullwinkle J. Moose voice.

Jane laughed, sloshing the ice cubes in her glass.

Martine looked straight at her, suddenly all business. “That is a wonderful idea,” she said, still looking at Jane. Jane did a
Who me?
kind of take, looking behind her to see if anyone was signaling something to Martine. But, alas, no. Martine, it appeared, had honed in on Jane.

“We must all speak tonight. We will share our stories and our memories of Rick, and in that way keep him with us. Our newest guest, Jane, was the last to arrive here and sadly was the last to experience the earthly manifestation of Rick and perhaps the first to experience his new being as a spirit among us. Please share,” Martine said, again holding her arms out, this time in supplication to Jane.

Jane felt the flush moving up from her toes. Who was this woman but the recreation of her seventh-grade teacher, who had constantly called her out and embarrassed her for talking when she was merely laughing at one of smart-aleck Tim's remarks. Jane tried to shake her head in a serious and spiritual manner, one that conveyed the message that she was too overcome to speak, but Martine's eagle eyes bored into her. Jane knew that she would not let go until her talons wrapped around Jane's neck and lifted her high in the air—Jane, the little rabbit in the nature documentary that was such easy prey, and so easy to drop from the mountaintop.

Jane cleared her throat and raised her own hands to gesture, then realized she was spilling expensive vodka on her jeans and, oh for the love of mike, was that an olive rolling down her ankle? Martine was standing about four feet away from her and without looking down, she grasped the hands of the two people who sat on either side of the aisle that they had made for her when she began walking to the back of the room. Annie and Mickey, willingly or not, now had their hands raised to Jane.

Jane glanced at Tim, who gave her an innocent and hopeful smile.

“Well, I didn't know; I mean he was already…,” Jane said, then felt a curious vibration before she heard anything.
Thank god,
she thought,
it's an earthquake.
But the floor did not seem to be moving, the glassware on the sideboard was still, and she realized the vibration was coming from her own pocket and she briefly thought that a heart attack was just as good as an earthquake. Maybe better. It was then she heard what everyone else in the room seemed to be listening to so intently.

“Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way.”

Jane had not turned off her cell phone.

Jane looked around the room. Tim and Scott were both laughing, their shoulders heaving silently. Roxanne had the courtesy to turn away. The rest just looked at her with a mixture of curiosity and horror.

“I'm going to have to take this,” Jane said. “I promised my son I would always pick up, see, and…”

Jane got up and backed out of the room, holding the cell phone in front of her like a weapon.
Stay back everybody,
she was thinking in her best Edward G. Robinson silent-to-self voice,
the first one of you who makes a move gets a speed dial right in the kisser.

As soon as she was out of the main room and into the large, tiled foyer, she looked at her phone. Not Nick. Nellie.

“Mom, I can't talk; I'll call you back,” she whispered.

“What?” Nellie shouted. “Are you still driving?”

“I'll call you back,” Jane said.

“You don't have to come back; it's not even broken, the doctor says,” said Nellie, “although he's an old quack.”

“What?” Jane shouted, forgetting that she was supposed to be talking in a church whisper.

“I'll call you back. Your dad's trying to watch his program.”

Jane stood with her mouth open, thinking that her mother might be straying off the earthly human path herself and into some kind of voodoo realm and perhaps Martine might like to conjure her spirit; and just when she thought she couldn't feel any more confused or discombobulated, she looked out the window into the dark Michigan night.

She was still holding on to her glass of Grey Goose in her left hand, so she took a long swallow. It had no effect. What she saw out the window stayed perfectly still and perfectly visible. Peering in, with her eyebrows raised and a perfectly manicured finger held to her lips, was Claire Oh.

Bruce Oh had definitely noticed changes in his wife's behavior during the past few months. First, she had been leaving her cell phone turned on at all times, running to answer it no matter what the call might be interrupting. Second, she had been using her alumni status at Northwestern University to check out library books, big, heavy books that she took up to her study and read for hours each night. Third, and most telling he now thought, she had stopped buying him vintage ties.

That might be explained away by a dearth of vintage ties on the market, an explainable absence of clothing of any kind at the estate sales she had been attending. But not only had she not presented him with any new old patterns or colors to set his teeth on edge, she hadn't noticed the plain conventional ties he had taken to wearing each day. She hadn't commented or insisted that he should stop being so predictable. In fact, his wife had stopped looking at him altogether.

Claire had not been herself and he knew it, but Bruce Oh had felt that it would be unfair and judgmental to pry into his wife's individual life. Their marriage was founded on a kind of mutual respect for privacy. Bruce Oh went off to work every day and became Detective Oh, and Claire went off to work each day and became Claire Nelson, dealer in fine antiques. They came together each evening and shared a peaceful dinner, perhaps with a few amusing stories or remarks about their respective days, but mostly they talked about world events, philosophy, their garden, their extensive summer trips. Bruce meditated in the morning and the evening; Claire practiced yoga. To outsiders, they might seem too quiet, too uninvolved in each others' lives, but Bruce Oh had never felt that way. Their communication was crystal clear. Respect without demands. Admiration without question. Interest without judgment.

Yes, Claire did have the tie fixation. That was a bit of whimsy that amused them both. Until it disappeared, Bruce Oh had thought of it as a minor part of their relationship. He now realized that it was crucial to their intimacy. When Claire had stopped looking at his reflection in the mirror, standing over his shoulder and shaking her head about how he would never take the world by surprise if he insisted on wearing navy-blue-and-maroon stripes instead of purple squares inside of lime green circles, he had felt a loss as great as if his wife had confessed to an affair. Yes, he should have been more alert when his wife stopped caring about his neckwear.

An even more interesting puzzle, he realized, was why he was now lamenting Claire's loss of attention to his sartorial habits when he should be paying more attention to the cloud of suspicion surrounding his wife. Hadn't she just been questioned about the murder of Horace Cutler? Hadn't she now disappeared from the house without saying a word to him? Shouldn't he be in furious motion trying to find her since she had been released into his custody?

No, Bruce Oh could honestly say he was never in furious motion. That was not his style. He sometimes sat at the table in his study, staring out at the willow tree, waiting for the answers to come. If he told others at the police department that he practiced clearing his mind to allow answers to come to him, the more polite officers would have waited until he was out of sight before laughing and making mock bowing gestures to each other. Most of his coworkers, though, would not have hidden their skepticism. It wasn't that Oh did not use conventional police methods—he most certainly did—he just opened himself to other channels of thought.

For example, now as he sat ruminating on the tie-selection business with Claire, he realized that he could pinpoint exactly the day Claire had stopped supervising his daily choice of clothing. It was almost two months ago, two days after she had walked away from the Lake Forest estate sale where she had stumbled upon the Westman chest. This piece of furniture, this “find of a lifetime” as Claire had characterized it, had taken over his wife's life. She had become consumed in researching the chest and its probable/possible maker, Mathew Westman. She had spent her days talking to museum directors, dealers in antiques, historians, appraisers. She had spent her nights studying pictures of hardware, dowels, pegs, nails, and the tongue and groove joinings of Early American drawers in the big books she had hauled home from the university library.

From her office doorway, he had watched her tap her foot nervously while waiting for a fax to come through, a page explaining and illustrating patterns of oxidation on wood. She would pull the sheet out of the machine, raise herself up to her full height, tap a finely sharpened pencil against her teeth, and finally say, “aha,” or some other likely exclamation, favoring him with a vacant smile as she walked past him in the hall.

How could she have noticed the tie he was wearing? She hadn't even known her husband's name for the past two months. If asked for the name of the man she had been living with, she would have to answer, Mathew Westman. He was the man who now commanded her full attention.

Bruce Oh had not remained sitting still, staring out the window at his willow tree, while trying to put puzzle pieces in place. Uncharacteristically, he had been roaming through the house. He now stood in front of his rival's masterwork.

Earlier, he had watched Jane Wheel watch Claire stroke the carved sunflowers on the drawers. He had read the desire in Mrs. Wheel's eyes—she, too, wanted to touch those carvings, feel the work of a master carver. What was it that these two women saw or sensed from this piece of wooden furniture?

His wife, who had studied art history in college, was a savvy businesswoman, and he knew she viewed the chest as the find of a lifetime, a career maker. Mrs. Wheel, well, she would probably tell him all about the warmth and feel of the wood, the passion that had gone into the making of the piece, the people's lives that this chest of drawers had witnessed. That was the kind of thinking Mrs. Wheel followed. That was a difference between the two women. Claire tried to find the right object to place in people's lives while poor Mrs. Wheel got stuck creating a life for the inanimate object.

He would do it. He would touch those flowers and try to feel what they had. He placed his right hand on the sunflower on the top right-hand drawer and followed the raised wooden stems and leaves down the side of the chest. Perhaps he was getting it because he began to feel strange. A wave washed over him, something he had never felt before. What was this strange sensation? Ah yes, he felt ridiculous.

The carving was intricate, and he could feel each petal sharply delineated. He put a hand on each side of the top drawer and felt the wooden edges. Something struck him again, this time a more curious feeling. Something Mrs. Wheel had told him about the feel of old wood and something he felt here did not match up. And something about that disjointed feeling startled him back into the present moment.

He walked back into the kitchen and looked at the notepad next to the telephone. “Gone for milk” was written on the lower half of the top sheet of paper. Claire had printed it in block letters, using a great deal of pressure. There was something odd about the note. First of all, they rarely left each other notes. It was too late for the small neighborhood grocery to be open. And, even stranger, they didn't drink milk. If Claire were truly herself, she would have come up with a much better lie than that. Something more, though…

It struck him. Claire always doodled while on the phone. She was listening on this extension when Mrs. Wheel phoned and told them about the death of Rick Moore at Campbell and LaSalle. Where was the page with her drawings, her little cats and dogs, her trees and houses? When she didn't draw pictures, she printed words over and over, using different lettering styles. Where were her doodles?

Oh walked over to the trash can, thoughtfully concealed in a pull-out bin in the food preparation island. On top of the yogurt carton, orange peels, and coffee grounds were two pieces of crumpled notepaper. Oh smoothed them out and read the name, RICK MOORE, printed in large capitals. Surrounding the name, Claire Oh had doodled what appeared to be tiny spears or featherless arrows. Bruce Oh tried not to lose himself in what the drawings actually represented. What seemed most important was that fifteen small sharpened points were all aimed at RICK MOORE.