All's Well That Ends (11 page)

But the archeological digging was still fine on the outside of the refrigerator. Angel magnets held calendars, reminders of doctors’ appointments, snapshots, newspaper clippings, and cards from local purveyors of driveway repair, delicatessen, and aroma-therapy.

“Whoops,” Sasha said. “I forgot all about that junk.”

I carefully relocated the surface papers to one of the boxes Sasha had handed me, and made a pile of the fat, thin, ethereal, silly, and cherubic angels.

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Sasha munched salad greens and watched me. “Whatever else, Phoebe answered the age-old question,” she said.

“I give up.”

Sasha gestured at the box on the floor. “Hasn’t mankind always been tormented by the question of how many angels fit on the front of a refrigerator?”

Seven

We settled in to dinner while I half-heartedly clicked my way through Phoebe’s laptop. “You may have

been right about The Shopping Channel,” I said. “She had a real problem. Her bookmarks are for online shopping sites and auc-tions. Look at this—kitchenware, antiques, home furnishings, linens, toys, music, books, art, more antiques, household goods, table coverings, pottery, accessories, original art from—”

“I am not surprised. Think about it. Even her business was about turning dogs and cats into tchotchke collectors—or tchotchkes themselves.”

“Her shopping included the male market. Lots of fix-’em-up sites are bookmarked, but how would I know if she’d enrolled in any of them?”

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“Believe it or not, I have never done online dating.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“True,” she said, nodding for emphasis. “Never.”

“Wait a minute. It’s not about guys or arranged or blind dates with you, is it. It’s about computer illiteracy.”

“Call it what you will,” she said, finishing off a drumstick.

“But the truth is, I don’ need no stinking Internet.”

“Yet,” I said.

“Yet,” she agreed. “Besides, we’re talking about Phoebe, and she was waiting for those photos I took. I think that means she was waiting to officially sign up and put a picture of herself on there. Wherever ‘there’ is. Maybe those bookmarks were more a case of checking out the possibilities.”

There’d be time to find out later. Meanwhile, unless something leaped out wearing neon script that said “This is important!” I wasn’t going to find anything worthwhile, so I moved on to the word processing program. “Oh, wait. Listen to this. It’s in a file called
Shopping.
I thought it would be an inventory or something of her purchases, but I think it’s more a list of future, ah, acquisitions, or a rough draft. She was a funny lady, wasn’t she?”

Sasha looked wistful, and nodded. “She was fun,” she said.

“But what are you talking about?”

“She was getting ready for those photos and a lot of shopping.” I cleared my throat and read, “Interested in a feisty forty?”

“An ad? Her ad?”

“A draft of it, anyway.”

“Forty? Phoebe?”

“—who loves games, hates dishonesty—”

“Forty!” Sasha repeated. “And she hates dishonesty?”

“—interested in art, history, genealogy, movies, sports—”

“She hated sports,” Sasha said. “She’d leave the room when my dad watched football, and never went to the games with him.

How stupid is writing an ad like that? What if it works? And he loves sports and wants somebody forty?”

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“Funnier still if they’d both lied, and they wind up at game after game and are both secretly bored out of their skulls. Anyway, the list goes on. She’s also interested in cooking, old music—”

“I hope she included shoes on that list of interests,” Sasha said.

“—and knowing someone deeply and—”

“Stop,” Sasha said softly. “No more. It’s too sad.” She shook her head and said nothing else.

I agreed. “Maybe this is more than we need to know.”

“Sad,” she repeated. “Lying in a rough draft. Lying to herself.

There’s something funny about an ad called ‘personal’ that isn’t close to the truth of the person, isn’t there? An ad supposedly designed to find your soul mate—and you aren’t truthful about your own interests?” Sasha’s voice was still muted.

“Everybody fudges in these ads,” I said. Sasha looked at me intently. “As far as I’ve heard.”

“Oh,” she said quietly. “I thought maybe you . . . nah.”

I tried to get into Phoebe’s online financial account, but I didn’t have her password. I’d have to leave finding it up to Mackenzie or Ozzie. There wasn’t all that much else. I could go to all the sites and see what she’d bought if I figured out her password, but I couldn’t see the point.

“There’s a calendar program on here,” I said. “That could be helpful. Who was she expecting to see that last evening of her life?”

But it was password protected, and I felt stymied and annoyed at having to make everything wait until I found a computer genius to decipher the password.

I ate my last slice of chicken breast, and looked at the stainless flatware for a moment before I remembered. “Sasha, what was Phoebe’s maiden name?”

She thought for a moment. “Something weathery. Summer?

Winter? Rayne? River?”

“River isn’t weathery. It’s geologically.”

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“Got it— Breeze! She said it had once been French and something like deBreece, but the kids made fun of it and called it

“debris” and then called her ‘Trashie.’ So her mother, who had also hated the name, dropped the ‘de’ part and changed the spelling. Or so the story went.”

Another “B,” so the monograms on the silver could have been from a better day for the deBreece family. Or— “Did your father and Phoebe have sterling silver flatware with their initial on it? Kind of ornate?”

Sasha’s forehead wrinkled. “Can’t remember,” she said.

“Maybe. I do remember her setting what another woman called

‘quite a table.’ The expression stuck because I found it so weird back then. And I do have a memory of helping Phoebe polish spoons that drove me crazy for all the little creases and crevasses in the design. So maybe . . . but all the same, I wouldn’t think so.

When it comes to spending money on wives, as opposed to spending it on fiancées or dates, Dad can be frugal. Why? Did you see something?”

“I heard about it, didn’t see it. Ramona mentioned it. You didn’t run across a set of monogrammed silver? It should still be here.”

“Maybe in the dining room. I didn’t get there yet.” She went to look while I made notes and read a clipping I’d taken off the refrigerator. Apparently,
Antiques Roadshow
was coming to New Jersey, and Phoebe had wanted a chance to be part of it.

Poor woman, so sure the world would appreciate her “treasures” as much as she did.

The laptop glowed, keeping its secrets. Meanwhile, I played with various spellings of “Breece,” “Breeze,” “Debrise,” and “debris.” Caps and lowercase. Frenchified spelling or Anglo-Saxon.

“Here’s the silver, and I do remember it.” Sasha came into the kitchen carrying a large wooden box. “I hated it back then. So clunky and heavy-looking, but aside from needing to be polished, it’s really nice.”

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She was right on both counts. It was lovely indeed, and polishing it would be a bitch.

“You should definitely keep it. It’s beautiful.” I typed another combination on the computer. “Eureka! ‘Breezy’ did it. It’s her password, and I’m in!” I scrolled to the calendar function, then to the month of December. Sasha pulled her chair over to mine, and tilted sideways so she also could view the screen.

That Thursday had only an “M.”

“Her damn shorthand!” Sasha said. “It drove me crazy. ‘M.’

Great. Why couldn’t she for once write something out?”

“It’s something,” I said. “It’s a start. We can go through her address book and find people with that initial and—”

The doorbell rang.

“Nobody lives here,” I said. “It’s got to be somebody selling something.”

“Or good old Not-That-I’d-Pry-But from next door,” Sasha said.

I shut the laptop down, just in case it was Ramona, and put it into the big carton I was taking home. At least partly it was because I didn’t know if going through Phoebe’s private records was the right or legal thing to do. I already felt embarrassed knowing about the false picture of herself she was planning to use as bait.

Sasha and I both went to the door, as mutual protection from whatever we imagined the winter night might reveal, but when it opened, we saw only a tiny twenty-something woman with a mane of dark blond curls that could be described as midway between Botticelli tresses and a fright wig.

She stood in the doorway, the overhead light reflecting off high-heeled boots that covered her calves and disappeared under her suede skirt. She had a burnt-orange-and-forest-green scarf flung artfully over one shoulder of a tight fur jacket. Real fur, I thought, judging by the way the light hit it. The jacket wasn’t even practical, covering a fraction of her body, and it seemed a cruel waste of a soft creature who’d had first dibs on that coat.

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She carried a briefcase that looked too expensive to hold mere paperwork.

“Not a neighbor,” I said softly.

“Saleswoman,” Sasha said. “You were right.”

The petite woman with the huge hair opened the storm door with her eyebrows raised as a way of asking permission, and once there was no more glass barrier between us, only frigid air, she spoke. “I am so glad to find you here! I was afraid the house would be empty. I’m Toy Rasmussen!” She smiled and nodded, as if sure we’d be delighted with that information.

“Miss Rasmussen, we were having dinner, my friend and I,”

Sasha said. “Whatever it is will have to wait for some other time.

And, in fact, I’m not the owner, and the house is actually empty in a manner of speaking, so I can’t buy or rent whatever you’re selling.” She backed up a step to close the inside door.

“No, no, no!” the little woman said with a joyous expression that didn’t match the situation.

Definitely a saleswoman, no matter what she said.

And what she said was: “You’ve got me confused with somebody you don’t want to see—but you
do
want to see me! This is where I belong. You’re Sasha, right? Sasha Berg?” The twinkly woman tapped a long pink nail against her cheek. “Dennis told me you’d be here off and on, but I wasn’t sure when that would be, and he forgot to give me your contact info! I was simply going to leave my card, but this is so much better! Nothing like a face-to-face, is there? So lucky to find you here and all!”

“Dennis?” Sasha echoed.

“Yay-uss,” Toy said, pulling a card out of her briefcase. “Dennis Allenby. His mother owned this house—poor soul, she’s gone now—and the house is going up for sale.”

“Yes, I know that.”

“Of course!” she said with a laugh that sounded like water running over stones. “Dennis didn’t explain your exact connection with the property, but he did say you’d be glad to help me out. Are you a relative as well? I thought Dennis was an only 87

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child, but my condolences in any case. Sometimes friends are as close as family, and all losses are painful. What a pity she was taken too young and so suddenly.”

There are few things more offensive to me than totally insincere sympathy. My personal ad would say, “Loves games; hates cloying, fake new best friends.” I’d rather the person skipped it altogether, or said outright, “I don’t care one whit about what’s happened to you. I’m here for other reasons, which have to do with making money. I’m here for me.” I might be able to be friends with that person.

I wanted to demand that Toy explain why she considered it a pity that Phoebe, a woman whose name she didn’t even know, had died. I expected Sasha to challenge her, but, “What did he tell you?” she asked instead.

“Dennis?” She laughed again before going on. “He agreed with what I told him and am here to tell you. I am the best stager in the tristate area.” This laugh, like the others, sounded like a tiny chandelier’s crystals. She dug into her soft briefcase another time, and whipped out a second card, placing one on each up-turned palm, as if they were offerings, and we each took one. Her business cards showed an open theater curtain on each side mar-gin, and between them, a flat line with a sofa on it, and toy’s staging: this toy’s for real in a fake scriptlike font.

I was freezing. It was not a night for open front doors; yet inviting her in seemed a worse option. Once again I thought about other things I could be doing. Better, more interesting things, like doing absolutely nothing, but in my own home.

“So, long story short,” she said, “he hired me to come stage his mother’s house, and here I am, at your service!” Again her laugh tinkled forth like a child’s xylophone, then it stopped abruptly, and she pointed one leather-gloved finger at me. “We haven’t been introduced, but you know who I am, so who are you, may I ask?”

I wanted to say no, she couldn’t ask, but Sasha had better manners, so she introduced me, and tried to explain what we GILLIAN ROBERTS

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were doing there; and finally, in a resigned tone, she said, “Come in.”

“Well, my oh my,” Toy said as she just about leaped into the house. She pulled off the fur jacket and dangled it from one hand. “She certainly liked . . .” She pivoted, surveying the living room. “Everything. Didn’t she, though? A distinct personality lived here, I can tell, but it means I’ve got my work cut out for me.” She twirled once more. “Some of this is quite nice, but . . .

really. Not for this setting!” She lifted a box with a tableau on it in inlaid woods. “Nice but too small—and too muchness! Way too cluttered. No room for people to imagine their lives in this room.

It’s too full of hers.”

“You’d think a person intelligent enough to have the where-withal to buy a house would have a little imagination, wouldn’t you?” Sasha stood, arms crossed at the chest, looking not at all happy about the twirling, trilling woman. “I mean they’re buying the place from another human being, so why be shocked if its contents reflect who that person was? After all, they aren’t buying its contents. They don’t have to match the buyer’s personality.”