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  Ivan continued, “This all happened a month after graduation, and a few weeks before Walter and I enlisted in the army—”

  “And me, too,” inserted Harold. “I’ll never forget the day when—”

  I kicked the captain under the table for interrupting, and he growled, “Hey!” What was wrong with these old fools with their short attention spans?

  For a moment, Ivan seemed to lose his train of thought, or else was fortifying himself to continue on with his tale. Then he picked up the thread. “One night before we were to ship out, Walter and I went on a double date with two girls who’d graduated with us from high school. Opal—she was my date—and Ella Jane….”

  Opal I’d barely known back then, but Ella Jane I did, of course. Her mother and I had just spoken at the nursing home.

  “Walter drove,” Ivan was saying, “and we went to a movie, I think…not sure because, well, it was a long time ago…and I guess we’d all been drinking a little. Hitting the ol’ hip flasks?” Ivan smiled briefly, then cast his eyes downward. “The next morning, Ella Jane came around to my parents’ house looking for me. She was upset. She said that after Walter dropped Opal and me off, he…well, there’s no nice way of saying this…forced himself on her.”

  Well, my dears, this news came as a shock to me, especially since I’d had my own intimate encounter with Walter, and only a few months before this alleged assault, and he had been so considerate and tender, his first time and all. But, then, alcohol hadn’t been a factor.

  Ivan was saying, “I…I didn’t know what to do…. I guess I should have confronted Walter….” He hung his head again. “And I was overseas by the time word got to me that Ella Jane had killed herself. So, you see, Vivian, why I—we—didn’t care to have him in our group.”

  I said, “You could have done something when you got back, Ivan.”

  Ivan laughed dryly. “What? Accuse a returning war hero of an assault that may or may not have happened three years earlier, with a girl who was no longer living? Remember, I only got Ella Jane’s side of the story. She killed herself, and that shows a certain instability. Who’s to say her story was even true?” Ivan shook his head sadly. “But bottom line? I didn’t really want to know.”

  Harold and Vern nodded, understanding. Once a boys’ club, always a boys’ club.

  Suddenly, I wondered if Grace Crawford knew that her daughter might have been sexually assaulted—and by whom. Or had the girl kept her terrible secret to the very end?

  What was it Grace had said? Do unto others as they do unto you? Had the elderly woman orchestrated Walter’s death from her nursing home bed? If so, why had she waited so long?

  And was she strictly confined to that bed, or was she mobile? Some old women, even lacking a driver’s license, have been known to jump into a car and go off on one kooky quest or another.

  Then something preposterous jumped into my mind: that the intended victim might have been Chaz! Thus doing to Walter what he had done to her: Take away what he had prized most, his newly found granddaughter.

  I said out loud, “Then, Walter could have been murdered for a different reason.”

  Vern frowned. “Didn’t he get killed for some valuable book? Anyway, that’s what I heard.”

  “Me, too,” Harold said. “That punk of a granddaughter of his did it, they say.”

  Defending the girl, Ivan said, “She did get released from custody….”

  “On a technicality!” Harold barked. “Ekhardt woke up long enough to get her off on a technicality, the old rascal.”

  Vern said, “Well, one thing’s for sure…whoever has that book has to be the killer. It’s worth thousands and thousands.”

  All of this was old news, and getting me nowhere, so I decided now was the time to reinforce my reputation as the all-knowing one around here.

  I said quietly, “Joe had the book.”

  Which shook things up at the table.

  When the Romeos’ utterances had quieted, I told them about visiting Joe at the jail, and how the boy had denied poisoning Walter, but admitted to taking the book.

  Ivan leaned forward thoughtfully. “If Joe is telling the truth, then there’s only one logical conclusion.”

  “Which is?” I asked.

  “Walter took his own life.”

  Harold scoffed, “What for?”

  Ivan smiled sadly. “Guilt, maybe. Who knows how Ella Jane may have haunted him over the years? But the likely thing is, Walter wanted to leave his money to his granddaughter before he ran through it himself. He was pretty sick, you know.”

  Harold said, “I can blow that theory out of the water—I heard cyanide was found in the girl’s room. That’s what the county attorney had on her.”

  Ivan shrugged. “I can’t explain that, other than maybe Walter must have thought nobody would look there. He would’ve been certain his death’d be written off as a heart attack, given his long history of cardiac trouble. And the coroner, of course, having this information, perhaps seeing the pill case on the kitchen counter, would naturally jump to that conclusion.”

  “The coroner has seemed a bit befuddled since his divorce,” I admitted. “Might be doing substandard work.”

  Ivan glanced at his watch, “Oh, hell—I’ve got to be at city hall in five minutes.”

  This announcement broke up our little group, and the men collected their checks. We walked out into the chilly late afternoon air together.

  Ivan’s blue Caddy, parked directly in front, was sporting a bright yellow ticket. He snatched it off the windshield, and said, “That’s what my meeting is about—getting rid of these damn things!”

  “Ah!” I said. “Serenity without parking meters would truly be a paradise.” Plus, I was running out of slugs.

  Harold touched my arm. “I’d give you a ride home, Viv, but I drove the Jeep, and have Vern with me.”

  I assured the captain that I already had a lift home, and hurried off to catch the trolley.

  Once aboard, I asked Shawntea if she would be so kind as to go off-route and take me to the convenience store by the trailer court in South End because they simply had the best day-old donuts, and she willingly complied.

  While the trolley idled in the store’s parking lot, I went in and strode up to the cashier, Claire, a young, weight-challenged girl with pimples, whom I’d talked to last night on the phone (Claire, not her pimples).

  “Do you have my order ready, dear?” I asked.

  She smiled, showing braces, “Yes. It’s right here.” The girl bent beneath the counter, and produced a white sack.

  But as I reached for the package, she pulled it back, saying, “You’re sure you know Justin Timberlake?”

  I gave her my most sincere smile. “Of course, dear…I told you that we’re related. My mother was a Timberlake.”

  She beamed and the braces glinted in the overhead light. “I want the photo to say, ‘Claire darling, I’ll never forget our special night together’…and then he signs his name, okay?”

  “Yes, dear. Justin will write exactly what I ask him to.” I’d forged tougher signatures.

  Then I bopped back out to the trolley with my sack.

  I would like to leave you, dear reader, with one more funny trolley story, involving the town’s little person, Billie Buckly, whose grandfather was a Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz; I’m sure I still have sufficient word count left, and Brandy certainly wouldn’t be so mean as to cut me off in mid—

  Mother’s Trash ‘n’ Treasures Tip

  Possession is all ten points of the law. If someone is holding an item you want, it is theirs to purchase until they put it down. However, if I jostle them, and they drop it, and I get to it first, it’s mine. If it should break, well, who dropped the thing, anyway?

  Chapter Nine

  Insecurity Tape

  Mid-morning, I was released from the hospital with orders from my doctor to take it easy for the next day or two, which suited me fine, because I’d gotten stalled halfway through
a boxed set of the final season of Veronica Mars, so this gave me a chance to finish the series uninterrupted.

  Even though Tina had sweetly offered to rearrange her work schedule at the Tourism Office so she could drive me home, I asked Peggy Sue, who had a bridge game at the country club that she would have to miss. Okay, maybe that was a little vindictive on my part, but I really did want to see if I rated higher with her than cards and social climbing.

  Or maybe I didn’t want to know. Fifteen minutes past the pickup time, Sis still wasn’t there, leaving me cooling my wheelchair wheels curbside. I was getting unreasonably angry when she finally rolled up in her monstrous van.

  “Terrible traffic” was her only excuse. Lots of traffic jams in Serenity, mid-morning. A real madhouse.

  Still, with all due sisterly pleasantness, she put my meager belongings in the backseat while I climbed in front, as an attendant came out to retrieve the wheelchair.

  Then we slipped away in silence.

  After a block or two, however, the strain between us was too great for her (I wasn’t about to speak first) and Peggy Sue began to jabber about family plans for Christmas. Then she was detailing the latest knickknacks she’d bought for the ever-growing Department 56 Christmas Village that consumed one end of her living room.

  “Tiny Tim and his whole family,” she was saying with what struck me as faintly hysterical happiness. “The picture-perfect picture of a perfect Christmas!”

  “Yeah, they had it great back then, in England. Hung holly all over the workhouses.”

  “Well, it’s just a fantasy.”

  “Right. A happy family Christmas. That’s a fantasy, all right.”

  “What is your problem, Brandy?”

  “Were you ever going to tell me you’re my mother?”

  Sis slammed on the brakes, whose screech was like a scream, and the car following us did the same, brakes also squealing, and the car behind it, too. If you slammed on your brakes at the edge of a canyon, the echo effect would have been similar.

  I guess being seated in a moving vehicle, with Peggy Sue behind the wheel, was not “the right kind of time” Dr. Hays had advised in broaching the subject of my true parentage.

  Wearing the expression of a clubbed baby seal, Peggy Sue pulled the van over to the curb—the other startled drivers going by us—and she turned a distressed face toward me. “Who said I was your mother?”

  “We’ll get to that…are you?”

  Peggy Sue’s eyes returned to the windshield, her hands on the wheel, as if she were still driving, but she really wasn’t going anyplace. Then her head slowly bent to the steering wheel, brown arcs of hair covering her face, and her shoulders begin to heave as she sobbed.

  I guess I should have felt something. Compassion, sorrow, anger…anything. And you’d like me better if I had. But the truth is, I didn’t. Maybe it was the antidepressant blocking my emotions, or the residue of the hospital painkiller…but I just let her sit there and sob.

  When Sis finally raised her head, her eyes were smeared with makeup. Which is why, these days, I always use waterproof mascara.

  I said, “Sorry,” and shrugged. “Timing a serious discussion has never been my long suit.”

  Peggy Sue plucked a tissue from her expensive plaid Burberry bag and dabbed her eyes. Then she said, “No, it hasn’t been. But you do have a real knack for picking the most inappropriate moment to go for the jugular.”

  I lifted my eyebrows; it was an effort. “We can do this later, if you like. After all, you’ve waited this long…what’s another day or two?”

  Peggy Sue winced at my remark, but then composed herself and took a deep breath. “No. We won’t wait another moment. And I do understand why you’re so bitter.”

  “Could you just say it? That you’re my biological mother? You can fill in the blanks later, if you like.”

  “I am your…biological mother.”

  A little chill shook me. It was cold out, and the heater was off.

  “As for filling in the blanks?” She shrugged. “I was supposed to go to France to study music after high school, but that summer I guess I was a little wild. Last summer at home, feeling like an adult now that I was out of high school.” She laughed once, a harsh, icy, brittle laugh. “I was adult, all right. I got pregnant just like a grown-up.”

  I was frowning. “What do you mean, you were going to go to Paris? You did go! I saw the old snapshots of the Eiffel Tower and all that touristy stuff.” I’d run across them in an box of family photographs.

  “Yes,” Peggy Sue said. “Most of my pregnancy was spent there. There was a family Mother knew, some theatrical connection, who put me up. Then, just before you were born, I flew back to the States and stayed with a relative in Maine.”

  I was smiling, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “And I suppose, all the while, Mother was back here putting on a show, wearing a pregnancy pillow and flouncing around, letting Serenity know all about her ‘late-in-life’ baby.”

  Peggy Sue actually smiled a little. “At least neither one of us had to see it.”

  “What a performance that must have been.”

  Peggy Sue nodded. “Then, when the time came, Mother came to Maine—”

  “Where she had ‘her’ baby.” My fingers made air quotation marks. I hate it when people do that.

  Sis nodded again.

  “So. Who’s my real dad?”

  Peggy Sue stiffened.

  “Oh, come on.” I laughed dryly. “You had to know that’d be the next question out of me.”

  “He was just a boy.”

  “That much I’d worked out.”

  “A boy from my class. His name was Steve McRay.”

  “Was?

  “He died in Vietnam while I was in Paris, where the peace talks were. He…he didn’t know I was pregnant. Something very wrong about that, me in Paris, him in some awful jungle.”

  “You think? And you never told him?”

  Sis shook her head.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  She blinked at me a couple of times. Then she shrugged. “Because…well, I didn’t love him.”

  “So I was the result of a lousy one-night stand back in hippie days? Make love not war? Or more like, make love, then war?”

  “Please don’t be this way. It’s really tragic—the war was almost over, Steve was one of the last to die over there.” She gave me a sharp look. “Anyway, it wasn’t that way at all….”

  “How was it, then?”

  She fell silent for a moment, then said, “I don’t think I’m going to go there. You know why, Brandy? I don’t think you’re anybody to be judgmental about ill-advised one-night stands. At least I had the excuse of being young.”

  This was an overt dig at the way my marriage had broken up after I made a really dumb, drunken move at my ten-year high school class reunion. She was hitting below the belt, but I probably deserved it.

  So I moved on. “How…how did this Steve McRay die?”

  Peggy Sue swallowed thickly. “He was a gunner in the tail of a helicopter. They had the highest fatality rate in that awful war, tail-gunners. Mom wrote and gave me the news.”

  Peggy Sue’s husband’s face came unbidden to my mind’s eye. I blurted, “Does Bob know?”

  She shook her head again. “Only Mom…and now you.”

  “I beg to differ,” I responded liltingly.

  Peggy Sue raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow. “You mean, Mother didn’t tell you? I know you two have gotten close since you came home….”

  “No—she’s stayed mum, so to speak. But it is impressive—this has to be the longest she’s ever kept a secret! No, Sis—you’d think I might have done the math, and thought about the unlikelihood of Mother having me just about when her menopause should have been kicking in. But I was a blissful idiot.”

  “So who told you?”

  “Somebody sent me an anonymous letter.”

  Sis paled with alarm. “Oh, hell. Who…who do you think it was?” />
  “I have a pretty good idea,” I said, smirking, “that it was your dear friend Connie Grimes. It arrived not long after she and I had that little dustup at Ingram’s department store.”

  The front windows were fogging, so I cracked my side.

  Peggy Sue frowned, saying more to herself than to me, “But what kind of proof could she have…?”

  I grunted a little laugh. “Gee, I wonder. How about your actions around her for the last thirty years?”

  She frowned, truly confounded by my remark. “Whatever do you mean?”

  I snorted once. “Are you kidding? You’ve been her faithful little lapdog for as long as I can remember.”

  Her eyes and nose flared with indignation. “I have not!”

  “Oh, please!”

  Peggy Sue folded her arms, and her chin went up in its familiar defensive posture. “I don’t treat Connie any differently than any of my other friends.”

  I let out another laugh. “Oh, really? What about the time you switched football tickets with her so she could sit on the fifty-yard line? Or when you took back that expensive dress because she wanted it? This was back before she gained a little weight, say, a cow’s worth. And I seem to remember a canceled trip to Bermuda because she—”

  Peggy Sue cut in. “I was just being a good friend!”

  I gave her my best Clint Eastwood squint. “And what has that loathsome monster ever done for you, except make your life miserable?”

  “That’s simply not true!”

  “It’s simple and it’s true…not to mention that that beast treats Mother and me like dirt—”

  Sis huffed her own laugh. “Well, is it any wonder, the way you two act sometimes?”

  “Thanks for making my point. Your ‘friend’ rags on your mother and your sister, or daughter depending on your point of view, and who do you side with? Elsie the Cow.”

  “That isn’t fair.”

  “No. It isn’t.” Then I got back on point, pointing a finger at Sis. “Listen, I don’t want Mother to know that I know…. I couldn’t handle her theatrics. Could you?”

  Peggy Sue shuddered and shook her head, once.