The Wrong Stuff (10 page)

“If I meet one more person here who is described to me as a ‘master' something or other, I'm going to scream,” Jane whispered to Tim.

Roxanne had moved away with Geoff and Jake, who seemed shaken but not stirred. They had both commented on how painful and disruptive Rick's accident was and would be to their own work, but neither seemed to be particularly sad. Rick Moore's death was a troubling event, but Rick Moore's life didn't seem to be anything people much cared about. Neither the “tragic accident,” which now seemed to be the official title, nor the memorial service had diminished anyone's appetite. Apparently, right after Jane made her exit, Martine wound up her performance and a late cocktail hour began. As soon as Jane had clicked off the phone and moved over to the window, she heard people remarking on the beautiful trays of appetizers being wheeled in from the kitchen.

Jane did not tell Tim that she thought she'd seen Claire Oh's face peeking in at her. She excused herself and went outside, claiming she needed to return the phone call that had come in and needed to search for better reception. She circled the entire lodge, checked the benches in the garden, and walked over to the guest parking area to see if she recognized a new vehicle. She didn't notice any changes. Maybe Claire's face was just a smudge on the window, a passing shadow, “a bit of undigested beef?” Claire Oh starring as the Ghost of Christmas Past?

Jane decided to make a few calls. No answer at the Oh house. No answer on Charley's cell phone, so she left a good-night-and-have-fun message for him and Nick. Too late, after she had hung up, she realized she should have asked about Charley's speech at the museum. Ah well, as soon as she was organized, uncluttered, and the perfect mother, she would work on being a more solicitous wife. How many roles is one woman expected to perfect at a time?

Jane hit number seven on her speed dial and waited for Nellie's familiar snarl.

“Yeah?” asked Nellie, already in the middle of a conversation with Don about whether something should be soaked.

“Mom, what happened?”

“I dropped a bag of onions on my toe is all,” said Nellie, “and your father is acting like I got gangrene or something.”

“Let me talk to Dad.”

“I'm on the other line, honey,” said Don. “Your mother is exaggerating. I just think she should maybe soak it or something.”

“Can't hurt to do that, Mom, why don't…,” said Jane, cut off by Nellie's insistent, “There's not a thing wrong. I've done this before. It turns all black, then the toenail…,” who was in turn cut off by Don's, “Oh, for god's sake, Nellie, spare us the details. I just want it to feel better.”

A moment of silence while everyone decided whom to interrupt next.

“Daddy, has she seen a doctor?” asked Jane.

“I talked to him on the phone and he said if I could move it, it wasn't broken,” said Nellie.

“But you can't move it,” said Don.

Jane wondered if her parents ever talked to each other when she wasn't on the phone and they were on separate extensions. It seemed to her that real communication only took place while she played switchboard operator.

“Now,” said Nellie. “I can't move it now, but I could then. There's the water boiling. I'll be back.”

Jane heard the extension fall to the floor. Was her mother the only person left who didn't walk from room to room with a cordless?

“Jane,” said Don, “are you there?”

“Yes, how bad really?”

“Black and blue, maybe broken. I'll take her in tomorrow. She wanted to slice up the onions for vegetable soup, and I told her to wait until I got the dolly to carry in the bag from the back porch, but you know her, impatient.”

Jane stopped looking behind the bushes and into cabin windows as she was walking, hoping for another glimpse of Claire Oh while her parents used her to witness one of their nightly wrangles.

“A dolly? How big of a bag are we talking about?”

“Fifty pounds,” said Don.

Jane hesitated. She knew her parents were too old to run the EZ Way Inn, to work both days and nights, to cook lunches for the factory workers and run bowling leagues in the winter and golfing leagues in the summer. Her dad, Don, shouldn't be tapping beer kegs and lifting cases of bottles, and her mother, Nellie—well, there were many things Nellie shouldn't be doing, but trying to move a fifty-pound bag of onions was high on the list. As a dutiful daughter, shouldn't she be forbidding them to do such hard work, such heavy lifting? On the other hand, in their few free hours, they fought like cats and dogs. At the EZ Way Inn, they worked like a well-oiled, if often grouchy and cantankerous, machine.

“Where the hell are you anyway?” Nellie asked, back from stirring her cauldron on the stove.

“Mom, don't lift those heavy bags anymore. Get Duane or Carl to carry stuff in the night before.”

“Are you still off in the woods with Tim?” asked Nellie, ignoring Jane's suggestion to use their occasional nighttime bartenders for anything more than verbal abuse.

“Yeah, I'm on a case,” Jane whispered.

There. She had said it. Didn't that make her a real detective?

“Well, stop it. You can't put a round peg in a square hole, you know. Get back to your family. Where's Nick?” asked Nellie, while Don shushed her, telling Jane to be careful.

“He's with the good parent,” Jane said, promising her father to call the next day, not saying anything directly to her mother.

What did Belinda St. Germain have to say about emotional clutter? Jane hadn't read that far, but she wondered if there was a chapter on how to be wife, mother, daughter, picker, and detective all at the same time. It seemed to Jane that if you have to carry around that kind of personal baggage, you ought to at least be able to pack it up in a collection of vintage leather train cases with lovely red or butterscotch Bakelite handles.

Jane was starved, and she knew they must be serving something wonderful over in the lodge. She decided to dash into her cabin, run a brush through her hair, and put on a bit of lipstick. She hadn't brought enough clothes to be able to actually change for dinner, but she thought the celebration of Rick Moore's life might have taken a small but cosmetically repairable toll. When Martine had called on her to speak, she had felt her hair stand on end. Maybe she could calm it down.

The hand-crafted lamp on the dresser was turned on. Its leaded-glass shade cast a soft glow over the cherry surface of the dresser. There was a wooden hand mirror face down next to her makeup bag. She picked it up to check the damage, feeling like she might be grateful that the light was low. She wasn't, though. The dim light might lessen the laughter creases around her mouth and the newest crinkles around her eyes, but it also made it more difficult to read the words printed on the mirror. As neatly and carefully as one can manage using a worn-down tube of Clinique–Angel Red, someone had printed:

 

R.M. MURDERED

 

Jane continued to look into the mirror. Peeking around the lipstick letters were her brown eyes; and since they were hers, had been hers forever, why did they now look so foreign to her? Who was this middle-aged, middle-class woman, middle-of-the-road person who found herself at the center of murders? Okay,
maybe
murders,
possible
murders. Oh, what the hell, couldn't they all forget that alleged-possible-maybe crap? This was a murder. Period.

Jane had known it when she'd seen Rick Moore lying facedown in that stream. He was in his stocking feet, or one stocking foot, at least, and that was enough for her. She had heard Murkel or one of the other police officers say that Rick's lack of shoes showed how desperate he was to get out of the barn and how disoriented, but that isn't what Jane saw. If Rick had been working around all those toxic chemicals and varnishes and finishes that everyone talked about, he would be wearing shoes. Any master carpenter—and god knows, they were all masters around here—knew that you didn't set foot in a workshop without shoes and socks on. Shoes and socks? At least. Steel-toed work boots more likely.

Besides, the mirror said so. Mirrors don't lie. They are the unforgiving reflection of your age, your joys and your sorrows, and they even have been known to mouth off about who is the fairest in the land. Even if it wasn't written here in exactly black and white, it was printed in a decisive silver and red—murder! Claire Oh was somewhere on these grounds trying to clear herself of Horace Cutler's murder because it must be linked to Rick Moore's death, and she was asking for Jane's help. Jane wished that Claire had used her own lipstick, since Belinda St. Germain's packing tips didn't allow for a spare tube and Jane's Angel Red was now a stump of its former self, but she was delighted to get the message. She felt she had known all along.

The real reason that Jane agreed with the sentiments in the mirror were simple. She and Tim had come to Campbell and LaSalle to solve the murder of Horace Cutler. Nobody had thought his death was an accident. No one had suspected that he had broken into the antique mall and fallen against the silver dagger, which had jumped out of the display case. And Horace's murder likely had something to do with the Westman chest, and the Westman chest had a lot to do with Campbell and LaSalle. So if she and Tim were there to investigate a murder and someone else was found dead…?

Didn't anyone watch television? Didn't anyone read mysteries?

Rick Moore was a master carpenter, a sycophantic student of Blake Campbell. Surely he would have known about or even worked on the Westman chest. Jane had to get into the barn workshop and do a little research herself. It would be easier if she could find Claire Oh and talk to her. She had a feeling that now that the stakes were raised, now that Rick had ended up facedown in the stream, that some of Claire's cool, calm superiority might disappear. Murder, suspicion of murder, and fear of murder all had the effect of making someone not quite so tall.

 

Dinner was in full swing at the lodge. Conversation had passed from “So sad about Rick” to “Are you consulting on the Bleakman vanity?” as smoothly as the soup course had flowed into the salad course. Jane slid into the seat next to Tim, realizing that it wouldn't be so easy to bring up Rick or ask about what he had been working on.

“What?” Jane asked, as Tim looked her over and shook his head.

“You were gone long enough, so I naturally assumed…,” Tim said and ended with a shrug.

“What?”

“Honey, a simple comb through and a little lipstick wouldn't have been the end of the world,” said Tim. “That's all I'm saying.”

“Damn right, that's all,” said Jane.

“Is Nancy on the trail of someone?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

Jane smiled and reached for the bread basket. “You have salad dressing under your eye,” she whispered.

 

Blake Campbell was sitting alone in an armchair with a pleasant if vacant look at the group assembled in the great hall of the lodge. The dinner table was still filled with people, but a few were standing, stretching, and beginning the after-dinner mingle.

Jane sat down next to him, trying to keep her wits about her. She was never her best around extraordinarily handsome men. She didn't feel particularly attracted to them, but she did feel something. So many actors and models had come her way when she was producing television commercials that she had begun to see a common need, a similar longing in the beauties, both male and female. Like the very rich who never knew if people wanted them for themselves or their money, she supposed they never knew if someone wanted them for themselves or their incredible looks. And here was Blake, so full of the right stuff—the looks, the money, and by all accounts, the talent and intelligence. He had it all, including that needy, lonely look she'd seen in so many pairs of eyes all wanting her to hire them.

Jane offered her hand and reminded Blake that they had been briefly introduced during the frantic events of the afternoon.

“It's not the way I'd like to see anyone introduced to Campbell and LaSalle,” Blake said with a sigh, “but you seem to have weathered the shock.” He hesitated, then turned up his smile a notch brighter and two degrees warmer. “Quite beautifully,” he added.

Another problem with the chronically handsome—they were so good at acting charming that it was hard to tell when they were simply
being
charming. Jane decided that she should not be a detective at this moment, analyzing every smile and sigh. She would find out more playing the picker-in-training-to-be-a-dealer role.

“I'm wondering if I'll still be able to begin my assignment tomorrow?” Jane asked.

“Assignment?”

“Tim is training me to leave behind my junker ways and become a dealer. He not only wanted to show me around here and introduce me to the best restorers and furniture experts, he gave me a little homework. He wanted me to research a piece of furniture,” said Jane.

“Final exam?” Blake asked, clearly intrigued.

He likes tests,
Jane thought.
He's bored out of his skull.

“Sort of,” said Jane. “I have a small drawer from what might be a traveling desk or maybe even from some type of game table, and I'm supposed to find out everything I can about it. Tim said that between the library you keep and the experts I would find here, I should be able to give him a detailed description of the piece, age, maker, a few of its adventures, even the specifications to have it rebuilt if I wanted.”

“Lowry thinks very highly of us here at…” Blake let himself trail off.

“He said if he was a sick boy he'd go to the Mayo Clinic, but if he were a sick highboy, he'd ask to come to Campbell and LaSalle,” said Jane.

Blake grimaced and groaned, but he was clearly flattered. “As far as I know, Rick's accident doesn't affect access to any part of the facility. I don't want anybody experimenting with the ammonia tent without my supervision, of course. You can use the library in the barn and talk to anyone who has the time and inclination, except during quiet time, of course.”