A Killing in Antiques (25 page)

“Monty wanted that pickle castor, but he didn’t want to buy the doggone thing. He asked me to lend it to him. I hesitated, but before I could make up my mind, he’d reconsidered. He said it would be better if I’d put it aside, then bring it here to Brimfield for the spring event. He said he’d bring me a buyer, and he’d guarantee its sale at my top asking price. The whole thing was odd.

“Monty usually came around to sell me something, not to buy something. I asked why he didn’t just send the buyer up to the shop. He told me he had to witness this sale, and he kept assuring me that his buyer would pay a premium for it. I hate to hold anything for a month, but it’s my off season at the shop right now. I do some business in this mild weather, but my big sales come during the ski season, when the skiers come up from New York City. New Yorkers have a different attitude about money than summer tourists do.”

Shirley again strayed from the story I wanted. I began to see why the police had backed off. Her story is so convoluted that it’s hard to separate the nuggets from the fruitcake. Hard to know if she really knows something.

Then Shirley told me that Monty was supposed to bring that very same buyer to her booth
before
the official opening of the Brimfield marketplace on Tuesday morning.

“Oh, my God.” Now, I saw. She’s right. Monty’s buyer . . . is the killer. No. No, maybe not. But, if not the killer, then he may have seen the killer. He.

“Did he say if the buyer was a man?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I’ve been trying to remember exactly what he said, but I only recall him saying ‘this buyer’ when he was at the shop. Then, the day before Brimfield opened, he called to confirm. He definitely only referred to ‘my buyer’ on the phone.”

“Did you tell the police Monty was bringing an early buyer on opening day?”

“In so many words,” she said.

I’ll bet.

When I asked the price of the pickle castor, it was easy to see why Shirley was still stuck with the doggone thing. Dealers and collectors had been interested in it, but Shirley’s wildly inflated price had driven them away. I asked why she was so rigid, and she told me that it was a museum piece. I grinned and kept my mouth shut. Perhaps she would run into someone who had a museum with just the right spot for it.

I ended up buying the silk hatbox. I could visualize it brimming with freshly laundered linens and laces. A bar of lavender soap in the bottom would fill the box with fragrance and permeate the linens, and its old-fashioned scent would burst into the air whenever the box was opened. People love to open a box and find wonderful things inside. I swaddled the hatbox in an old sheet and tucked it into Supercart. Then I rushed off to see Shirley’s neighbors, none of whom had seen or heard anything unusual around the time of the murder. A variety of theories were offered, but they were the type based on
Law and Order
, rather than on fact or observation.

T
J and Monica were at the Patio regaling Mr. Hogarth with tales of their triumphs. They gloated over their success. When I arrived, Monica dug around in the tote bag she carried and came up with an amber brooch. A beauty, set in gold filigree. The amount of actual gold in the setting was likely to be minimal, but it was a finely worked and well-crafted piece of costume jewelry. And she’d acquired it for a song.

I was impressed and told her she had a good eye.

Mr. Hogarth inclined his hat toward her and explained that I’d just given her one of my highest compliments.

TJ, no longer able to stand all the praise going in Monica’s direction, unsnapped a battered cardboard guitar case, revealing a Martin guitar, a beauty. The instrument, acoustic, was made from a variety of woods. It sported an inlaid mother-of-pearl design in a herringbone pattern around the sound hole and along its neck. A fine piece of workmanship.

“From the fifties,” he said, admiring it. It had no strings.

“I also bought two midcentury chairs,” he said. “We can pick them up when we make the rounds collecting your stuff.”

“Midcentury” is a term taking hold, meaning the fifties. That’s the nineteen fifties. But the sixties and seventies are sliding in under that definition, too. To me, that’s the stuff my grandmother’s house was full of. It held no appeal for me. I asked if the chairs were upholstered in avocado leatherette.

“White with gold boomerangs,” he said. Yuck.

“All in all, a good morning’s work,” Mr. Hogarth said. Then he was off to consult with Baker about the picnic. “Don’t forget,” he reminded us. “We have to get together again at noon. I’ll bring picnic assignments.”

This was a good time to pack today’s collected treasure away in TJ’s rental truck. All three of us got in the truck, and TJ drove us back to the Girls’ Field. Monica pointed out a tent where she saw an amber necklace that really tempted her. She thought it might go well with the brooch she purchased. I told her that now was the time to get it, but she needed to think about it.

Together, we made quick work of picking up the heavy furniture and large pieces I had accumulated. TJ’s chairs were less bulky than mine, and they were in excellent shape. But I still couldn’t see the attraction.

Then we picked up my car and TJ followed me to Al’s, where we packed all we could into the truck for the trip back to the Cape. Since the truck couldn’t hold everything, I picked the items I was willing to leave behind and we settled them back into the storage space.

“We’ll come back one day next week,” I told TJ. “We can pick up this stuff, and anything else I buy over the next two days.” When we finished, we all tramped into Al’s kitchen. It was quiet. Al was not in sight, but she couldn’t have been too far away. The kitchen smelled of recent baking.

I offered to make TJ and Monica a pot of coffee, but they both quickly demurred. Everybody makes a joke about my “bad” coffee. I know they’re just teasing, but sometimes it bothers me. I didn’t have time to be offended, though, because we heard Al coming down the stairs.

She made coffee, but announced that except for a few broken cookies, she had nothing tasty to offer us, as she had just sent several trays of sweets off to the picnic. The broken cookies were wonderful, but the conversation was odd. Al told Monica that she had known Philip from the day he was born, and Monica coaxed her into telling “baby stories” about him. Where was I when these events were unfolding? I had to have been there; Philip was my firstborn, but none of it sounded familiar to me.

The stories went on a little too long, and we had to dash back to Brimfield to meet Mr. Hogarth and pick up our picnic assignments. We were a few minutes late, but Mr. Hogarth was relaxed and in a good mood.

“Have you decided what to do about food?” TJ asked.

“For me there’s no deciding necessary,” Mr. Hogarth answered, “I always have the same thing at this picnic: Canadian pork pie, apple pie, and lemon meringue pie.”

His eyes pulled almost shut and his shoulders shook. “It’s . . . what . . . you . . . call”—and from his carefully pronounced words, his timing, and his not too well smothered snort, I knew the joke that was coming—“a well-rounded diet,” Mr. Hogarth said. The snort collapsed inward and became a cackle. He enjoyed his little joke as much as if he had never heard it before, much less repeated it, thousands of times. “A well-rounded diet,” he repeated happily.

TJ, who has spent a lifetime around politicians, rewarded him with an easy laugh. He also cocked an eyebrow, and glanced sideways at me.

“That’s the menu,” I agreed. “You can have anything else that appeals to you, but pork pie, apple pie, and lemon meringue are always served at this picnic.”

“It sounds majorly excellent,” TJ said.

“All four of us will pick up the pies. We’ll each carry two,” Mr. Hogarth said.

“That’s a lot of pie,” I said.

“Baker is expecting quite a large crowd.”

I turned to him, and he gave me a look that I couldn’t quite read. We all walked over to the Quinsigamond Quilters pie booth. My favorite. Someone in that booth makes a Canadian pork pie that is to die for. It draws me back again and again.

Several booths sell homemade pies during the antiques marketplace. Women’s clubs of one sort or another do this to raise money for good causes. The Quinsigamond Quilters start late. Their booth hadn’t opened yet, but their area was mobbed. We snaked our way in as close as we could to the front of the booth. The crowd that had gathered hadn’t bothered to form a line; they had instead thronged against the counter without pattern.

The ladies seem unaware of their contribution to the congestion around their booth. They stock it after the surrounding booths have been open for a while. They unload their cars with painstaking diligence, one pie, one trip. If a pie lady has baked or collected five pies, she makes five trips back and forth from her car to the pie booth. When she arrives at the booth with a pie, the assembled group makes a space for her to walk through. When she passes, they close ranks in a different order.

Most of the ladies are senior citizens, some extraordinarily senior. They are ladies in an old-fashioned, New England sense of the word. Looking as delicate as feathers, but working with rigorous industry and ramrod dignity. Finally, the booth was stocked.

“Why aren’t they opening?” Monica asked.

“Each lady has to find her knife and her spatula. They all have favorites,” Mr. Hogarth answered.

We all watched attentively as search and discussion groups formed to decide which utensil would be used by whom. I watched the ladies closely, and began to fantasize that they were playing pie lady roulette with me. I wanted to scale the counter, grab a knife, and start cutting the damned pies before midnight. Finally, they were ready. The people in front of us shouted their orders, and the pie ladies cut the pies. Carefully, very carefully.

Knives must be wiped on a damp cloth between each cutting. Paper plates must be separated, pried carefully from the stack. TJ and Monica were doing a little eye rolling as we moved closer to the counter. The fragrance tantalized.

The pies are lovely; they arrive in shades from pale, warm beige to a toasty nut brown. They have crusts that are crimped, fluted, twirled, or sculpted in some way that suits the baker’s idea of pie beauty. Some, direct from the oven, are still warm and redolent of the fruits and spices bursting from within.

Pies are usually sold by the slice here, but an exception is made for Mr. Hogarth, whom the ladies admire greatly. All of a sudden we were there, and all the ladies flocked toward us, fawning over Mr. Hogarth. They handed the pies over to us, not boxed. But they had trouble letting go of Mr. Hogarth until the crowd behind us started rumbling complaints. Then, finally, we were on our way.

We placed all eight of the pies on the van’s floor, empty now except for Supercart, folded into its smallest position. Monica rode with me, TJ followed in the packed rental truck, and Mr. Hogarth followed in his own car, as he was heading elsewhere after the picnic.

Baker had chosen the park at the reservoir, a perfect spot. Remote from the antiques marketplace, it’s usually a nice, quiet place to get away from the crowd. We drove in, and I was surprised to see so many vans and pickup trucks lining the narrow entrance road; it was unusual, because the park has a nice little parking lot just above the dam. But the parking lot turned out to be the site of the picnic, and it was perfect.

There were probably thirty people there, and more were arriving. We descended, carefully balancing our pies, in mincing single file, down to the only level spot in the park.

A dozen tables had been set up end to end down the center of the narrow parking area. They were of different styles—some were antique, some just old. Sturdy old oak rubbed shoulders with elegant mahogany, round ones, square ones, and rectangles, in a variety of heights. A few had tablecloths spread on them.

The two tables in the middle of the line seemed to be where all of the food was being gathered. The pies took up a lot of room, and we edged some over to an additional table. The assortment of food was fantastic, leaning heavily toward desserts. The assortment of chairs was varied, too, not many antiques among them.

Coylie, his orange curls a beacon in the sunlight, stood between his two lawn chairs, waving us over to the table farthest from the entrance, the last table in the line. There was a huge old upholstered wingback chair set up at the end of that table, and he directed Mr. Hogarth into it. It suited him. He gave the appearance of presiding at the head of all twelve tables.

Monica, TJ, and Coylie crowded in close to him. He had certainly made a hit with all three of them, acolytes under his spell, hanging on his every word. They made room for me, too, and I put my sweater on the bench to save the place, but I stood there soaking up the ambience. I watched as two more tables were carried down to the other end of the line.

I decided to sample the food and circulate among the crowd before I settled down. The food offerings had spread to even more tables, and the array was magnificent. The picnic had never approached this variety before, never mind the quantity and quality of the menu. I took a paper plate, filled it with more than it should carry, and strolled over to Muriel, who had waved from several tables away. She smiled and told me it was a wonderful picnic. I admitted that I’d had less to do with it than in any other year.

“Everyone knows it’s your picnic, Lucy. Baker told us we could bring food, or tables, or chairs. This table is mine, and the next one is Mildred’s. We use them to display our wares in our booths.”

So that’s how he arranged it. I had never thought of assigning furniture. With my mouth full, I pointed to the little phyllo-wrapped triangles on my plate. She tried one and grinned. They looked like spanakopeta, but they were filled with sweet custard and sprinkled with pistachio nuts. Heaven.