The Ming and I (5 page)

“I see. Why do you think she’s on the board, Mama? Because she’s a lawyer?”

“Undoubtedly. Old Mr. Rose died without a will, which in effect left the plantation to the state of Carolina—”

“Which it in turn sold off to collect back taxes,” I said, proud of my knowledge.

Mama’s look told me to climb down off my high horse. “So I’m sure you’re aware then that Mercedes-Benz was hoping to acquire the property for their second Carolina factory.”

“Uh, no.”

“And they might have, except for Ms. Roach. But she found an old law that required the state to give preference to a historical foundation—even a private one—over a foreign company. She donated her legal services for free.”

“Well, I’ll be.” I could respect the muscled shark, but I didn’t have to like her. “And Red Barnes? What’s he doing on the board?”

Mama shuddered. “That Red should keep his barn door shut. Mattie Markham is still traumatized by what happened to her daughter.”

“Her daughter Phyllis Sue had an affair,” I said. “She wasn’t raped.”

Mama gave me a glare worthy of Gloria Roach. “The only reason Red Barnes is on that board is because he has money. Ill-gotten, of course, but it’s still green. Red Barnes figures he can bolster his social standing by flinging wads of money around. Did you know that Rock Hill Country Club won’t let him join?”

I confessed that I didn’t. “And I can guess why Shirley Hall is part of the team,” I said.

Mama shuddered again. “That woman may be a history expert, but whose history is she an expert on? Did you know she calls it the Civil War?”

I shook my head sympathetically. “And your buddy Anne Holliday?”

Mama grimaced. “Please, Abby, she’s not my buddy. Anne and I play bridge together, that’s all. I hope you appreciate the call I made to her on your behalf to find out about tonight. The meeting date had already been advertised in the paper. Apparently they were looking to train more docents before that unfortunate incident in your shop on Tuesday. I felt like such a fool when she told me that.”

“Thank you, Mama, but you haven’t answered my question. Why is Anne Holliday on the board?”

Mama rolled her eyes for the second time that night, prompting me to ponder the possibility that she was on the threshold of her second childhood. When my daughter, Susan, was a little girl, she rolled her eyes so often that I actually took her to an ophthalmologist for fear that something was wrong. The diagnosis was, of course, simply that Susan thought I was stupid.

“Abby, don’t you know any Rock Hill gossip?”

I knew some. I knew that the frizzy-headed blond author who lives in town supposedly spent Christmas Day with David Bowie on a Bali beach, watching a Hindu cremation.

“Do tell,” I begged.

Mama took a deep breath. “Anne Holliday was Jimmy Rose’s—mistress.” If she had been holding the word, she would have held it at arm’s length, like a dirty diaper.

“What?” I was honestly surprised. James L. Rose VI had to have been in his nineties when he died.

“You heard me, dear.”

“Mistress,” I said maliciously. “So she was his mistress.”

Mama shook her head while her hand reached up to caress her pearls. I had succeeded in annoying her.

“So it’s a courtesy position then, is it?”

Mama continued to caress her pearls in silence.

“But she looks like the Queen Mum,” I said.

A smile tugged at the left corner of Mama’s mouth.

I
woke up flat on my back, with Dmitri on my chest. His right front paw was jammed between my lips. I pushed it away and spat. Dmitri thinks I was put on this earth to feed him, sift his litter, and scratch under his chin. He has learned that a surefire way of getting his chin scratched is to sit on me and pat my face. I like to think he tries to pat my chin and isn’t a very good aim. While I love my cat dearly, a paw that’s been pawing around in a litter box is not welcome in my mouth.

I was out of milk, so breakfast for me was a bowl of Cheerios with half-and-half. I’m one of those people who has to eat the second I wake up. I get the shakes unless I do. Some people have to have their caffeine; I have to have my carbs.

The jitters satiated, I was just stepping into the shower when the phone rang. A saner person would have let the machine pick up, but it was only six-thirty in the morning. It had to be Mama with bad news.

“Is it Charlie or Susan?” I demanded.

There was a long pause, which should have tipped me off. “The vase wasn’t here, so where is it?”

Androgynous again. Maybe I should have hung up immediately. But Mama raised me to be a well-
mannered southern belle, one who answers when questions are asked.

“It’s in the kitchen garbage,” I said, “under the coffee grinds, but above the fish heads.”

“Don’t mess with me!”

“Exactly! I don’t know where the damn Ming is, and if I did—Hey, what do you mean by it wasn’t
here
? Where are you looking?”

The line went dead.

I sorrowfully surveyed the shambles that was my shop.

“He—she—whoever was calling from here,” I said to Greg.

Greg had his arm resting on my shoulder, and he gave it a quick squeeze. It was at least a small comfort to know that his professionalism took second place to his feelings for me. Not that everything was hunky-dory between us again. He was still ticked, I’m sure, as was I, although we were undoubtedly angry on different levels. He was still mad about the Ming, and I was mad about him still being mad, which, at least in my frame of mind, made my anger a little more righteous.

“Did they say they were calling from here?”

I swallowed my irritation. “They didn’t say the name of my shop, but they said ‘here.’”

“We’ll check the phone for prints,” he said casually. Too casually.

I shrugged his arm off my shoulder. “They took the goddamn phone.”

He had the audacity then to walk over to my little desk and check for himself. As if I might have accidentally misplaced a plugged-in phone. It might happen in movies, but I assure you it has never happened to Abigail Wiggins Timberlake.

Greg ran strong fingers through his head of thick brown black hair. “You’re right, it’s gone.”

“No shit,” I said. I don’t usually swear, but under extreme stress I revert to patterns learned during all those years of living with Buford Timberlake. “Whoever it was realized they didn’t have time to wipe off the prints, and just unplugged the goddamn thing.”

“Are you sure—”

“Don’t you dare ask me if I’m sure I even had a phone,” I snapped.

“But there is no sign of breaking and entering, Abigail. Whoever took the phone and did this to your shop had to have a key.”

“Don’t start down that road, Greg. It wasn’t Mama or my friends.”

“Well, it had to be somebody.”

“Exactly. And it’s your job to find out who.”

He raked his hair again, and I found it intensely annoying. “Can you give me a damage estimate?”

It was a fair question. Although my shop was in total disarray, remarkably nothing was broken except for one small Depression glass bowl that had apparently fallen off a shelf. I mentioned the bowl.

“Nothing else?”

“Maybe a few new scratches here and there. Nothing major, although it’s going to take me all day to set things straight again. I told you, Greg, this isn’t a case of vandalism. They want the Ming.”

“Ah yes, the old Chinese vase that I have yet to see—even though there is a direct connection between it and the victim of a homicide I’m investigating.”

“There’s the door,” I said. “Lock it behind you.”

“I don’t have a key—ha, ha, Abigail. Very funny.”

He stayed another fifteen or twenty minutes, dusting the doors for prints and just generally poking around. During that time he completely ignored me, and I was happy to oblige his little tantrum. No doubt he would find a sympathetic listener in
Hooter Fawn, his old girlfriend, provided her attractive parts hadn’t been recalled by the surgeon general.

Abigail Wiggins Timberlake did not need a man in her life to be happy. A pint of Hunter’s Dixie Delight ice cream would do just fine. Chocolate and peanut butter were the only perfect combination.

“Abby, I can’t afford to be your secretary,” C.J. said breathlessly. “I’ve got my own shop to attend to.”

“I didn’t ask you to come running over here with messages,” I snapped.

“Your mother sounded desperate. She said she let the phone ring twenty times and you didn’t pick it up.”

“That’s because I have no phone. Someone stole it.”

“Oh.” C.J. glanced around the room. “That explains the mess.”

I had been slaving all morning to put things back in order, and I didn’t appreciate her observation. But, in deference to her tender age and the fact that I was mad at Greg, not her, I held my tongue.

“Mama’s always desperate about one thing or another. What is it this time?”

“She just said to call her.”

“And the other message?”

“It was your boyfriend. You know, the one with those sexy blue eyes.”

“He’s not my boyfriend anymore.”

Her eyes lit up. “Really? Well, he must have known you didn’t have a phone, because he didn’t sound upset at all.”

“What did he have to say?”

“He wants you to call him back.”

“If he calls again tell him I’ve taken a slow boat
to China. I hear that Beijing is the place to buy antiques these days.”

“Does this mean what I think it means?” She actually sounded hopeful.

“I just found out that, although he’s never been married, he has six children,” I said. “All of them by different mothers.”

Her eyes widened, but she didn’t seem in the least bit deterred. “Oh, my. There was a man back home in Shelby who had ten children by ten different mothers. The Woman’s Club had a fund-raiser and bought him a vasectomy. But during the surgery the knife slipped, and the man could no longer—Well, you know.”

“Imagine that! The very same thing happened to Greg,” I said without batting an eyelash.

C.J. swallowed. “Oh, my!”

“But it was finding out about this secret society he belonged to that really did our relationship in.”

C.J. took the bait. “You mean he’s a Mason?”

“Close,” I said. “He’s a Dixonite. He wanted me to become one, too. Every month I would have had to dress up in a choir robe, wear a colander on my head, and recite the pledge of allegiance in Japanese—in front of four hundred people!”

“You poor dear.” She shook her head in sympathy. “My daddy was a Dixonite—”

“C.J.! Stop it. There’s no such thing.”

“Are you sure? Because if not then my daddy lied an awful lot.”

I didn’t know C.J. had a sense of humor. The woman was good—she wasn’t even cracking a smile—or else she was loonier than a night on a Maine lake.

“Yes, well, finding all that out was painful, but I’ll get over it. C.J., may I use your phone?”

She shrugged. “Why not, if it will save me from
having to run back over here. I’m not as young as I used to be, you know.”

I told her she looked young for her twenty-three years, and followed her back to her store.

“Lord, child!” Mama said. “You had me scared half to death. My nose has been twitching like a rabbit in heat.”

“It was only a glitch in my phone line, Mama. The phone company will have it repaired by tomorrow,” I said. There was no use worrying Mama with the truth. “What is it you wanted?”

“Oh, that. It’s all set for Saturday evening. Here at my house.”

“What?” Now I was scared half to death. Knowing Mama, she had arranged a wedding reception for Greg and me, or something equally as preposterous.

“Why, the soiree, of course.”

“What soiree?”

“For the docents, silly. You said you wanted to meet them.”

“But Mama—”

“Of course I had to invite the board, too. Even that awful Red Barnes and his wife.”

“He’s married?” Do you see how easy it is for me to get sidetracked?

“Some society girl from Chester.”

“I didn’t know Chester had any.”

“Now, Abby, I didn’t bring you up to be catty,” Mama said, and rightly so. After all, who am I to talk? Buford was the muck beneath the ooze beneath the sludge beneath the slime on life’s scummiest pond. That shows you just how much taste I had.

“How many hors d’oeuvres?” I asked.

“A dozen hot, and two dozen cold, just like I promised,” she said indignantly.

“What time?”

“Seven till ten. And Abby, don’t wear that polka dot outfit you’re so fond of—it makes you look short.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Oh, Abby, I took a call for you this morning, since your phone wasn’t working. It was Miss Lilah Greene. I wrote everything down. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, Mama. Thanks. What was the message?”

“She said you could start cataloging tomorrow night, if you want. She said to meet her at the front gate at Roselawn at seven-thirty. If you can’t make it, give her a call.”

“Thanks, Mama. Really.”

“Don’t mention it, dear. But don’t forget the favor you owe me, either.” She hung up.

I dreaded calling Greg. Most probably he wanted to apologize, or he wanted me to apologize. In either case I wasn’t ready. There was only a slight chance it was business, and if so I was sure to be harangued.

“Investigator Washburn here.”

“You wanted to speak to me.”

“I thought you might want to know that we’re releasing June Troyan’s remains to the custody of her daughter.”

“She has a daughter?”

“Lots of folks do,” he said dryly. “This daughter lives in Reno, Nevada. She’ll be flying in tonight, and flying back tomorrow.”

“Oh.”

“That should help some with closure, I guess.” As if he were a psychiatrist.

“Yeah, right.”

“Also, I was able to lift six sets of prints from the doorknobs and two from the phone table, but they don’t match any in our files.” Did he expect my customers to have mug shots?

“Uhn-hunh.”

“There was no point in interviewing any of the other merchants on Selwyn Avenue, since none of them were at work when you got your call.”

“You’re probably right. But back to June Troyan. Can I assume that you have already launched a thorough investigation down at Roselawn Plantation?”

I could hear Greg fiddling with something, probably a chain of paper clips. Thank God he didn’t wear pearls.

“Abby, I did send a man down there yesterday to ask a few questions.”

“And?”

“We didn’t get anything. None of the docents—or board members for that matter—drive a blue van, and no one remembered seeing one around.”

“What does this mean?”

“It means we look elsewhere.”

“Where?”

The paper clips were more annoying than Mama’s pearls. “Abby, let us handle the investigation.”

“Frankly it sounds like you’re stumped. Well, I have news for you, Greg. I want my phone back, I want to stop being harassed, and I want whomever—”

“Abby, unless this thief strikes again, there’s not much we can do.”

“You mean the case is closed? You can’t just close a murder case because the body is being picked up tomorrow! Not when my life is at stake.”

He sighed dramatically. “Abby, you’re being dramatic,” he had the gall to say. “So you had an annoying call, Abby, and someone stole your phone. But there’s nothing substantial enough to tie this in with the hit and run.”

“Oh yes there is, buster,” I said, my dander rising. “He threatened to kill me, too.”

“What? When was this?” I could practically feel
Greg’s energy leap at me from the receiver.

“Yesterday. He said he’d run me over if he didn’t get back the Ming.”

“This happened yesterday? And you’re just now telling me?”

“I was too upset this morning. I forgot.”

“Withholding information that pertains to the case is an obstruction of justice, Abby. Just like when you and your friends cleaned up that vase.”

I slammed down the receiver.

He must have known I was calling from C.J.’s, because he called right back.

As a favor to C.J., who was with a customer, I picked up. “Feathers ’N Treasures,” I said cheerily.

“Cut the crap, Abby. This is serious stuff.”

“I’ve been trying to tell you that.”

There was a long silence. I hoped that he would go easy on the tongue biting, in case we got back together someday.

“Abby, a moment ago you referred to this caller as ‘he.’ I thought you didn’t know the gender.”

“I don’t. That just slipped out. I really couldn’t tell.”

“If anything comes to you, Abby, anything at all, give me a call.”

“I will.”

“And be careful.”

“I promise.”

“Okay, then. ’Bye.”

He took an excruciatingly long time to hang up, during which I was sure he was going to say something else. I’ll confess that when I finally hung up, there were tears in my eyes.