The Poe Estate (3 page)

A Broom and a Pipe

M
y parents and I finished packing the truck and drove down to the city early on Sunday morning, leaving well before dawn. Dad had rented a booth in the flea market in Hell's Kitchen, the one in the basement of a building that used to be a car showroom. Sometimes we go to one of the schoolyard markets in Manhattan or Brooklyn or the big outdoor parking-lot market in SoHo, but Dad thought the snow would keep the customers away this weekend.

Our allotted spot in the flea market was near the door. Scraps of paper and old leaves had blown in, so I got the old broom out of the truck and swept them up before we unloaded the furniture. We set up the long folding tables and unrolled an old tribal rug to make our space look more welcoming.

Mom and I unwrapped the smaller items and set them out. There's an art to arranging a flea market table. You want to space things out enough that people can see what you're selling and imagine the things in their own homes. But you also want enough interesting clutter that they can think they're making a brilliant discovery. Some people like things better when they have to hunt for them.

I covered a little table with a tablecloth and laid out a tea service for two, then stacked linens and china nearby. I lined up the lamps, keeping the pairs together. Mom leaned the
paintings against the wall and put out a box of old frames. We put a big $10 clutter box on the end of each table and seeded the boxes with items from the good-stuff stash we kept under one of the tables, to be replenished throughout the day. The occasional treasure makes the junk look more tempting.

Dad went to say hi to the other sellers he was friends with and see if they had anything he wanted to buy for our customers. And the other sellers visited us, doing the rounds before the doors opened. Mom had saved some scarves for Rosetta, who specializes in twentieth-century vintage clothing; she bought six of them. Mr. Alton offered his opinion on a big, dingy landscape—1880s, not worth cleaning, might have more appeal in Brooklyn—and bought two of the small wooden frames.

The morning was pretty slow. A young woman bought a handful of silver-plate flatware from the 1930s. A man measured the big oak secretary desk and said he would bring his wife to check it out, but he never came back. Everybody asked Mom how much she wanted for the bronze deco box with the greyhound finial, but nobody bought it.

I'd forgotten to bring my homework, so I chose a book from a stack of 150-year-old novels and settled down to read. Just before lunchtime, Dad went off to meet a potential client who was planning to remodel the kitchen in her country house, leaving Mom and me to mind the booth.

A woman stopped to look at a lamp. “That's sweet. How old is it?” she asked Mom. Reaching for it, she knocked over a chipped pink vase. She lunged for it but missed, and it smashed on the cement floor. “Oh, I'm so sorry!” she said. “I'll pay for it, of course.”

Mom smiled tensely. I could see her calculating the potential price of the vase against the goodwill she might earn by not making a fuss. Maybe if Mom was nice about the vase, the woman would feel bad enough to buy something else. “Don't worry about it,” Mom said. “Accidents happen. Sukie, honey, can you reach the broom?”

I swept the broken vase into a newspaper, leaned the broom against a walnut bookcase, and took the fragments to the trash. When I came back, the woman was counting out money and Mom was wrapping up the lamp. Apparently her calculation had worked.

As I returned to our booth, I smelled something unpleasant—dense and smoky, like chocolate doused with sulfur—and found a man eyeing my broom. The smell was coming from his pipe, a fancy one with a painted bowl and an amber mouthpiece.

Some flea market shoppers like to dress pretty wildly. Usually they favor old-fashioned styles: long dresses, maybe, or bell-bottoms and love beads, as if they just stepped out of 1914 or 1967. But this man had on extravagantly fashionable clothing. His suit was clearly new, with a subtle gray stripe shot through with threads of dull purple. He carried an expensive-looking coat over his arm. His tie—a light, bright red that was almost pink—matched his hat. He had picked up the broom
and now turned as if planning to walk off with it.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

Startled, he dropped the broom, then picked it up again. “How much is this?” he asked. His voice had a too-sweet, hissing quality, and he was spreading stinky pipe smoke all over our booth.

“It's not for sale,” I said. “And I don't think you're allowed to smoke in here.”

The man puffed on his pipe and waved the smoke away. “I'll give you fifteen dollars,” he said.

“No,” I said, annoyed. “It's not for sale.”

“Forty?”

“No,” I said again. “It's not even mine—it's my cousin's.” I grabbed the broom by the handle, but he didn't let go.

“A hundred and fifty dollars, and that's my best offer.”

“I said
no
.” I pulled on the broom. He still didn't let go. Were we going to have a tug-of-war?

The man took a deep pull on his pipe, which flared up red, just the color of his tie and hat. Then it went out. His grip on the broom slackened, and he let go. I stumbled back, suddenly off balance, holding the broom.

The man turned his back and bent over his pipe, muttering something. Why had I thought he was so well dressed? Now his suit jacket looked faded and shabby.

Mom finished talking to the lamp woman and came over. “What's that smell?” she asked. “Is something burning? I'm sorry, sir, but there's no smoking here.”

The man straightened up, his pipe lit again. No, I had been
right the first time: His clothing was perfectly new and hideously elegant. He bowed slightly and left, still smoking.

Mom waved away the smoke with the real estate section of the newspaper. “Phew,” she grunted. “What a smell! I hope it doesn't drive away the customers. What did he want?”

“The broom. He wanted to buy it.”

“Really? How much did he offer?”

“Kind of a lot,” I said. “But it's not ours—it's Cousin Hepzibah's.”

“Hm,” said Mom. “A lot? How much?”

“Mom! You promised! And he was really creepy.”

“You're right, Sook. I won't sell it without asking Hepzibah. Even if it's just a broom. I wonder if it's Shaker. Those old Shaker brooms and brushes can bring a good price. We should check it out when we get home. Ready for a slice of pizza?”

“Sure, I can go get it. What do you want on yours?”

“No, you stay here. You know I don't like you wandering around the city by yourself. Will you be okay watching the booth alone? Maybe we should wait for Dad.”

“I'll be fine, Mom. Pepperoni, please.”

Mom frowned. “I'll tell Tom and Tim to keep an eye on you. Shout for them if there's any trouble, okay? Promise?”

“I promise,” I said.

“Okay, back soon.” She kissed my cheek quickly and bundled on her coat.

• • •

I read my book for a while. I'd chosen it partly for the cool cover—faded red cloth embossed with gold arabesques—and
partly because I recognized the author's name, Laetitia Flint, from Cousin Hepzibah's library. It was a gothic story teeming with orphans, shipwrecks, tumbledown mansions, missing wills, and exclamation points. I was pretty sure the mysterious figure swathed in gray was going to turn out to be a ghost.

“Excuse me?”

I looked up. Then I looked farther up. A guy was standing by the table holding a small, dusty old bottle. He looked approximately my age, but twice as tall.

I closed my book on my finger and smiled up at him, telling myself not to be timid. People my age make me feel shyer than adults. I guess because of all the mean kids at school. Besides, he was quite good looking.

“How can I help you?” I asked.

“I'm looking for old bottles like this,” he said. “Could be glass, could be stoneware. Preferably with the original contents. Got anything like that?”

“I don't think so, but you're welcome to look. If we did, they would be in there,” I said, pointing to the clutter boxes.

Leaning down, the guy started rummaging through a box. Drops of water glinted in his hair and on his coat. Raindrops or melted snow? Snow, I hoped—Mom hadn't taken an umbrella. “Hey, what's the weather like up there?” I asked.

The guy straightened up and gave me an exasperated look. “Exactly the same as the weather down there, where you're at. The climate doesn't change a whole lot in a few feet. And please don't tell me I must be great at basketball. I'm not. I never was. I suck one hundred and ten percent, and the next person who gives me a hard time about it, I'm going to
throw them through a hoop. Though,” he added, “I'll probably miss.”

“What?” I said. “Oh, no! That's not what I meant at all! I just meant is it snowing or raining outside? Upstairs, I mean. Because your jacket is wet.”

He looked down at his shoulders and brushed at them with his hands. “Oh. Right. It's snowing. Sorry I snapped at you. Everybody's always going on about how tall I am and it gets real old.”

“I can imagine,” I said.

“You think you can, but you can't. Especially because my big brother—he was a basketball star, so everybody expects me to be too.”

“And you really can't play?”

“Nope. Not basketball, not football, not nothing,” said the tall guy. “Chess. I'm good at chess.”

“Of course you are,” I said. “Tall people are always good at chess.”

That made him smile. “Yeah. 'Cause we get a better perspective on the board.”

“If you're missing a knight or something, I think there are some vintage chess pieces in that box,” I said. “Maybe a whole set.”

“Thanks.” He poked around in the box I'd pointed to, picked something up, and turned it over in his hand. Then suddenly he stood up straight again and yelled, “Libbet! Libbet!”

He waited, but nothing happened. He put two fingers in his mouth and let out a piercing whistle. “Libbet! Libbet!” he yelled again.

Nothing continued to happen. Nothing went on happening for a while. I wondered who he was calling.

He whistled again, and an enormous dog came galloping down the empty row between the sellers' stalls.

Some of the people at the flea market like to bring their dogs with them. Tom and Tim, who sell antiquarian books and maps and antique lab equipment, have a big yellow Labrador retriever named Pauli. He's sweet and sedate and likes to go to sleep with his nose on your shoe. The lady with all the waffle irons has a toy poodle. But I had never in my life seen a dog like this one. It was the size of a sheep—no, a lion. It seemed like an expensive dog to take to a flea market, I thought, remembering the broken vase. Wouldn't it knock stuff over?

The dog skidded to a stop in front of the guy. It leaned down its head and snuffled at the object he was holding. It gave one brief, quiet bark, then insinuated its large body between the tables and snuffled at my legs.

I held out my hand. The dog sniffed, decided I was okay, and gave my hand a gigantic lick. It didn't seem to be knocking anything over. “Hello, Libbet,” I said, scratching behind its ears. They were the size of sweaters, but silkier.

The chess guy cracked up, as if I'd said something hilarious.

“What's so funny?” I asked.

“That's not Libbet,” he said, choking with laughter. “That's Griffin.”

“Oh,” I said. How was I supposed to know that? “Hilarious.”

“Sorry,” he said, “it's just—well, you'll see. Griffin! Griffin, go find Libbet.”

The dog politely removed its head from my hand and
bounded gracefully away. Soon it came back, leading a young woman. She had snowflakes in her light brown hair and was wiping snow off her glasses with a cloth handkerchief.

“That's Libbet,” said the chess guy. “Griffin's a dog. Libbet's a person.”

The woman put her glasses on and held out her hand. “Elizabeth Rew,” she said. She had a nice smile. “Call me Elizabeth—Andre's the only one who calls me Libbet. He's right about one thing, though. I'm a person.”

“Susannah O'Dare,” I said, shaking her hand. “Call me Sukie. I'm a person too.”

Griffin gave another brief bark.

“I know,” said Elizabeth, “but you can't deny you're a dog.”

Griffin tilted its head, and Elizabeth scratched it behind the ears. “Good boy,” she said absently. She blew her nose with her handkerchief, then sniffed the air, frowning.

“Sorry about the smell,” I said. “There was a weird guy here smoking a pipe.”

“Hm,” said Elizabeth.

“Libbet, the reason I called you, what do you think of this?” asked the guy—Andre—handing her the object in his hand. It was an old brass doorknob. It had a swirly pattern, like a new fern leaf before it uncurls.