A Dollhouse to Die For (A Deadly Notions Mystery) (9 page)

“I’ll pay you.”

“Don’t be silly. God knows I owe you, after all the work you’ve done around here. But how can he start selling her stuff? Doesn’t he have to wait for probate?”

I felt like I was becoming an expert in the ways of estate settlement.

“Apparently the house was titled in both their names, so it automatically rolls over to Birch. She never changed her will, so everything else goes to him, too.”

• • •

W
hen I got to Harriet’s house, the only vehicle there was Angus’s Ford F-150 pickup. I parked behind him on the street, ran over to the passenger side, and hopped into the cab, just as I’d done so many times before on our picking adventures.

“What’s up, Daisy Duke?” Even though it was a big truck, Angus seemed to fill it up with his shock of white hair and mountain man physique. His meaty hands rested on the base of the steering wheel, and he wore his usual plaid shirt, jeans, and work boots.

I grinned at him. “Not much, Burger Boy.”

“Kunes is running late. He’s on his way.”

This past summer, Angus had been wrongly accused of a murder, and I’d done my best to get him acquitted. He hadn’t been much help in his own defense, appearing confused, belligerent, and frankly, like he was losing his marbles.

It turned out he was suffering from a brain tumor, which thankfully was benign. Since the surgery and his prison experience, Angus had radically changed his lifestyle. He was still a big guy, but now that he wasn’t drinking, he’d slimmed down and looked younger than his sixty-something years. His cheeks were no longer ruddy from Irish whiskey, but healthy and tanned, and the beer belly was almost gone.

“Thanks for coming, kid. Want some?” He held out a plastic baggie of wheat crackers and carrot sticks. This snack would have consisted of a couple of chili cheese dogs, a large order of fries, and some beef jerky a few months ago.

“No thanks. I’ll wait until I get home.”

“Joe cooking one of his gourmet feasts?”

“Expect so.”

“You’re a spoiled brat, you know that?” Angus punched me gently in the shoulder and shook his head. “My Betty’s taking a knitting class tonight. I hardly ever see her anymore.”

Betty Backstead, always dependent on her husband to take care of everything, had found a measure of independence during his incarceration.

I rubbed at my shoulder and hoped he hadn’t left a bruise.

He pointed a carrot stick at the view through the windshield of townhomes clustered around the golf course. “You know, I remember when all this was farmland. Shame that so much of the open space is gone now.”

In Bucks County, many of the old farms had been sold off for redevelopment. The builders had moved in and offered the farmers what must have seemed like a fortune and an opportunity to leave a hard life of relentless work behind.

At least this one had had some green sensibility in its development. The township had negotiated for a park preserve of fifty acres out of the three hundred.

As we waited, I brought him up to speed on the circumstances of Harriet’s death, the fervent interest in my dollhouse, and how Serrano considered Birch Kunes to be his number one suspect.

Angus grunted. “Speaking of Kunes, where the hell is he?”

At that moment, a white Land Rover came racing up.

Here’s the cheating bastard now.

Angus got out of the truck first, opened an umbrella, and came around to my side. It wasn’t raining hard, just the type of rain that clung to my hair and turned it into a frizzy mess.

Birch Kunes hurried up to us. He was tall, with dark blond hair, and still tanned, even though summer was over. Sort of what the all-American college preppie should look like a couple of decades after graduation.

“God, sorry I’m late. You know how it goes.”

The gorgeous effect was spoiled however by his rumpled shirt, and a stain of what looked like spaghetti sauce on his tie.

At least, I hoped it was.

“I’m not sure how much help I’ll be to you. I don’t know that much about dolls, but I’ll do my best.”

I couldn’t smile back. I could barely look at him.
The boyish charm is wasted on me, pal.

Angus and I followed him into the house. The arched window above the front door that spilled light into the foyer was matched by one at the top of the grand curving staircases. I glanced over at Angus, seeing the same startled reaction in his eyes as I’d had when I first saw the dolls lining every step.

“Right. Well, let me show you around.” Birch coughed. “Um, sorry, I guess you were already here once, right Daisy?”

A faint flush colored his face under the tan. “Let’s start with the garage.” He walked to the right of the foyer and opened a white six-paneled door.

The cavernous space that could have held three cars was completely filled. Stacked from floor to ceiling with a mountain of cardboard boxes and totes. Through the clear plastic sides of the totes, I glimpsed dolls in their original boxes and hundreds of doll accessories and pieces of dollhouse furniture.

I sucked in a breath.
So that’s why Harriet didn’t park inside the garage.

Birch hung back in the house, while Angus and I maneuvered our way into the narrow passageway that led to the garage doors.

“Holy smokes, Angus,” I whispered. “Harriet was a hoarder!”

He stared at me. “Hell, yeah.” He opened a few of the nearby crates. “This is crazy. We’re going to have to move all this stuff to the auction house before we can even begin to catalog any of—”

A phone rang and Birch appeared on the threshold. “Would you both excuse me for a moment?”

He strode off down the hallway toward the kitchen, his voice a soothing murmur to whomever was on the other end of the line.

Angus and I did our best in the garage, but it was only a guess as we couldn’t get to most of it. We then itemized everything in the living room and dining room while Angus scribbled furiously on his pad, and Birch was still missing in action.

Finally we moved over to the study.

I swallowed hard, seeing the space on the rug where Harriet had lain. The display table was empty now, the Tudor mansion taken away to the police station for evidence.

“You okay, Daisy?”

Poor Harriet.

Not even dead for a week, and already the rapacious widower, the one who’d been desperate to be her
ex
-husband, was getting rid of her prized possessions. Not just getting rid of them, but about to make a very nice windfall.

I gritted my teeth. “Yes. Let’s get on with it.”

Angus had filled five sheets on his legal pad, and we’d nearly reached the top of the stairs, counting dolls all the way, when Birch caught up to us.

“Sorry about that. Duty calls, you know?”

I concentrated on examining a pair of vintage Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, awake on one side, asleep on the other. These were the real deal and should fetch a pretty penny.

Angus and Birch reached the top of the stairs ahead of me and I scrambled after them.

The finishes on the second floor were as upgraded as downstairs, with crown molding and five-inch baseboards throughout, or what little I could see of them. I’d thought the first floor was crammed, but it was nothing compared with this. A wide hallway had been whittled down into a slim lane by the dollhouses arranged along its length.

We walked into the first bedroom, with its custom drapes and high-end light fixtures. I trailed my fingers across the brushed nickel handle and glanced back at Angus, catching his almost imperceptible nod. It was like we were picking again, and we could read each other’s minds.

This door handle alone probably cost fifty bucks.

The room was stuffed with dolls. French dolls in gorgeous clothes that would make any collector’s mouth water. There were German dolls, too, but without the same fancy attire. Those were often sold naked or with a simple shift, the idea being that the German child would learn to sew.

I stared at a whole row of French “Bebe” dolls from the 1880s, with their jaunty hats, soulful brown eyes, and bisque heads. There was about thirty thousand dollars sitting on that one shelf alone.

“Some of these are German,” Birch said. “Simon and Halbig, I think? There’s plenty of those, and then she got on a Jumeau and Bru kick.”

Birch actually knew more than he realized. He reminded me of my daughter, Sarah, who professed to have no interest in the store, but unconsciously absorbed information by osmosis when she became immersed in my world for a while on one of her infrequent visits home.

A group of boudoir dolls sat on the bed, as they were designed to do, seeing as they were not meant to be played with by children. I was inspecting a porcelain doll with bushy bangs and a smug expression when Birch’s phone rang again.

“Whoops. So sorry,” he whispered, and disappeared into the hallway.

As I’d told Angus, I wasn’t an expert, but I could tell these dolls were really old and really unusual, which is the key with most collectibles.

“Angus, there’s a
fortune
in this place,” I murmured.

He set the notepad on the bed and flexed his fingers. “This is going to take a couple of weeks to pull together. I’ll tell you Daisy, this could be the biggest auction Backstead’s has ever had.”

I nodded. I could see people coming from hundreds of miles away, eager to add a rare doll like one of these to their collection.

“I’m fairly sure they’re real, but you may want to consult an expert once you get them back to the auction house.” I picked up one of the Bebe dolls. “Look at the body for a start to check for fakes. Someone might be able to duplicate the face, but an older body is harder to do.” I showed him the numbers on the back showing the mold mark and size. “Often the heads and bodies were made in different places and this helped match them up.”

“Yeah, I had one of these at auction last May,” he said as he took it from me.

I smiled at the sight of the fragile figure in his massive, but gentle grasp. “The closed-mouth ones are twice as valuable as the openmouthed,” I said.

Angus nodded. “Yup. I can see why Kunes is anxious to get his paws on the cash from this lot.”

We cataloged the rest of the room and moved down the hallway to the second bedroom.

A veritable sea of dolls crowded the bed and the carpet and ebbed up to about three feet from the door. A multi-faced one sitting on the windowsill seemed like it was staring right at me. A fine sweat prickled my forehead. It wasn’t an especially warm evening, but suddenly I wanted to get this over with as soon as possible.

Angus snorted as we hovered in the entryway. “Damn. Guess ol’ Harriet wasn’t planning on having any guests sleep over. This place is
stuffed
with stuff!”

I steeled myself to edge inside. In this room was more of a variety. Kewpie dolls, Madame Alexanders, and Izannah Walker cloth dolls from the 1870s. I bent and picked up a tiny World War I era doll with a body of papier-mâché, a bisque head, mohair wig, and painted-on shoes.

“Jeez, Angus. Some people are only interested in a certain kind of doll, but it appears Harriet was an equal opportunity collector.”

“She sure knew how to spend money, I’ll give her that.”

There was even a first-edition Barbie doll in her zebra-striped bathing suit, still in the original box. I smiled ruefully to myself as I thought about Sarah’s Barbies; their golden ponytails restyled into choppy bangs with a pair of scissors and barbed wire tattoos added with a black marker.

Angus did his best to make an inventory, and I called out as many different dolls as I could spot.

Next was the master bedroom and adjoining sitting room with their high tray ceilings. There was one very large doll, about three feet tall, sitting in a rocking chair, and numerous others covering the bed. It was tough to see how Harriet could have slid in between them to sleep, no matter how skinny she was. While I inspected a Victorian tin dollhouse near the bathroom, and Angus was busy counting the dolls on the bed, Birch Kunes finally caught up to us.

I didn’t look at him, but I sensed his appraisal.

“I don’t know what you must think of me, Daisy,” he said softly.

Was my contempt that easy to read? And why should he care what I thought of him, anyway?

“I did love her once, you know.” He gestured to a silver photo frame on the dressing table. It was a picture of Harriet, a younger Harriet, and I caught a glimpse of the woman he must have fallen for. She was on a boat, wearing a black maillot swimsuit, her body slender, not yet painfully gaunt. She was laughing at him, her blond Adonis, with her hair swept back in the breeze. Even though she was ten years older than Birch, I couldn’t see much of a difference between them in this picture.

Wow. Harriet had aged rapidly. And badly.

“After we tried unsuccessfully to have a baby early on, she shut me out. She became obsessed with her collecting, with no room for anything or anyone else in her life. Literally.”

Birch ran a hand through the now artificially streaked blond hair. In the unforgiving light shining up from the table lamp, I could see the bags under his eyes, and the lines around his mouth showed his four-plus decades on this earth. He looked more like a distracted scientist than a successful doctor.

He frowned slightly, not from anger it seemed, more like he was pondering a puzzle. “We moved to Meadow Farms about five years ago. I’d hoped it would be a fresh start for us, but unfortunately nothing changed. She managed to fill this place with junk in a relatively short period of time.”

Very expensive, very collectible junk.

Birch sighed and straightened the picture frame. “After a couple of years, I guess I finally gave up. That’s when I met Bettina.”

He brightened at the sound of her name, the lines of exhaustion disappearing for a moment. “She was a patient. She was getting divorced at the time and needed a job. Even though she didn’t have a medical background, she made a great receptionist. Not only was she warm and friendly, but being diabetic herself, Bettina could sympathize with my patients, especially the younger ones who had just been diagnosed. Diabetes is tough for anyone to deal with, but especially kids, when they’re with their friends who want to go to the Dairy Queen . . .”