The Wrong Stuff (18 page)

“Kill you,” Jane finished. “And that's exactly what he was going to do. He was coming to kill you. It wouldn't take much to find out that you brought pieces back to the safe at the antiques mall on your way home from the show. Rick was a clever enough carpenter and handyman to break into the building without tripping the alarm. Horace, waiting in the parking lot to have it out with you, blundered right in behind him, setting off the alarm and still yelling his head off about a fake Westman. Rick
had
to kill him. You were the one Rick was after, though.”

Bruce Oh nodded at Jane. She felt an odd sensation. In another time, in another incarnation, he would be a nun in full habit, sticking a gold star on her forehead. She shook that feeling off and sat down on the bed.

“So who killed Rick?” asked Tim.

“Someone else who wanted the Westman?” asked Claire.

Jane looked back down at her notebook. She had jotted down a lot of events and questions that puzzled her. That warehouse in the woods? The destruction of the table? What was that about? And who had tried to suffocate her with chemicals? The only one she could safely eliminate was the guy too busy with his hammer to even notice. For all of its free artsy laissez-faire here at C & L, both she and Tim had noticed a certain amount of disgruntlement among the old-timers. What was that Tim had said about his talk with Scott…seems “we at Campbell and LaSalle” are in need of a dental plan.

“Possibly,” said Bruce Oh. “Or perhaps someone who didn't want Rick Moore to have it.”

“A lot of people feel the need for some extra money right now,” said Tim. “Scott wants health insurance, and Martine wants a book contract.”

“Silver just wants three squares a day,” said Jane. “What about Mickey or Annie?”

Tim shrugged. He said he thought Mickey might be content as long as he had his tree house to himself. “You're lucky he didn't catch you up there,” Tim said to Claire, “he's pretty protective of his little home away from home.”

“Oh, I moved around, one step ahead of him,” said Claire. “He uses all of them, not just his.”

“‘All of them?'” asked Jane.

Claire told them there were at least eight tree houses on the property. “Maybe more,” she said. “Blake and Glen had a contest one summer. Everybody got to design and build one. Everybody hid them, made secret entrances. Some are quite elaborate.”

“Is there one by the stream?” asked Jane.

“Yes, by Annie's cabin. And one deeper in the woods off the path,” said Claire.

Jane looked at Tim, Claire, and Oh, who nodded to her. “Go on, Mrs. Wheel,” Oh said.

“Rick got hit with the same chemicals I did, or something close. But if he just got out and blindly wandered in the woods, there was a chance he'd get enough air and come out of it. Whoever got to him wanted him dead and led him down by the stream and pushed him under. I mean they'd only need a few minutes for his lungs to fill, wouldn't they? For him to drown?” asked Jane.

Oh nodded. “Three or four minutes at the very most.”

“He'd be so groggy that it wouldn't be a trick to hold him under, but how do you leave the scene without anyone seeing you? If Annie did it, she could just run into her cabin; but if it were anyone else, they'd have to walk past some of the cabins, the barn, even the lodge. Even though it's quiet time, not everybody sleeps or bangs up furniture. So the murderer drowns Rick, then…”

“Climbs a tree,” finished Tim.

“Right,” said Jane, “and waits until we come along and then maybe even joins in to help sound the alarm. Who would notice where anyone came from?”

“Excellent job, Mrs. Wheel,” said Oh.

“But we don't know who,” said Claire.

“I'll bet it was the same person who tried to rag you this afternoon, Janie,” said Tim.

Jane nodded. That's how someone dropped the rag on her, from above, from a tree house. Why, though? Because she saw someone pounding a table?

“Claire, do you know if there's a tree house out by the access road where Rick parked his truck?” Jane asked.

Claire nodded. “A nice one, with piles of cushions and a great view of the sunrise,” she said.

Jane thought she saw Oh's eyebrow go up. As always with him, it was impossible to tell.

“Someone watched me, I'll bet. I searched Rick's truck and found an envelope filled with papers.” Jane walked over to her bag to show them, but stopped at the sound of footsteps on the wooden porch between Jane and Tim's cabins. Claire, understanding that her presence would upset whatever shreds of an investigation they were gathering, quietly went into the bathroom.

Bruce Oh sat down in the desk chair, his face the mask of Mr. Kuruma paying an innocent call on another C & L visitor. Jane started to put Rick Moore's envelope back into her bag, but thought better of it. If someone had seen her take it from the truck, they might be looking for it among her things. “We at Campbell and LaSalle” didn't believe in door locks for the cabins, so she quickly passed her notebook and Rick Moore's envelope over to Bruce Oh. Without any wasted motion, he smoothly slipped them into the worn leather briefcase he was carrying.

Jane was only a foot from the entrance when the visitor kicked the doorframe. Jane jumped, just a little, and looked back at Tim and Oh. Tim raised an eyebrow, and Oh nodded and gestured for her to answer the door.

She hesitated only a second then reached out her hand as another kick was planted and a low voice growled, “I know you're in there. Open up.”

“Did you think you were going to get away with it?” Scott asked.

Scott had the same look Jane had seen several hundred times as she was growing up. Peeking out from the EZ Way Inn's kitchen door, it was the look on a man's face that said, I've put away a lot of alcohol and I've lost every possible control I might have had over my thoughts, my words, and my body. I am capable of anything right now…outrageous lies, outrageous truths.

Most of all, Jane remembered, it was a look that said to others who had the eyes to see: Be very careful. Tread softly. Right now, I laugh with you and love you because you are my best friends. In less than a second, I can, and will, turn on you like a snake because you are my worst enemies. Those were just some of the lessons Jane had learned from the EZ Way Inn, some lessons from the darker text of her childhood.

“Do you have any idea how much this Ciroc cost me?” Scott asked, waving an expensive-looking half-empty bottle. He pronounced the Ciroc with an exaggerated shhhh sound, which led his body into a kind of physical slithering into the cabin.

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to get? Here in the Michigan woods at the bum-fuck end of bum fuck? I mean, my dear people, we at Campfuckingbell and LafuckingSalle are situated, quite appropriately I might add, at the ass-end of nowhere.”

Jane had seen many drunken people in her day, and she rated Scott Tailor as one of the most articulate. You might not approve of the language, but his diction was impeccable.

She hoped that his articulateness was an anomaly, and that his senses were as impaired as they all assumed when they gave their collective sigh of relief. It was only a disgruntled Campbell and LaSalle craftsman, their outtakes of breaths seemed to say. It wasn't the murderous resident who had dropped a chemical bomb on Jane's head and who had led Rick Moore to his drowning after, perhaps, conspiring to kill Claire and/or Horace Cutler. Or was it? Where had their drunken friend Scott been when Tim and Jane arrived? He had told them at the memorial, but Jane couldn't recall. She looked at this reeling wreck of a man, whose face she felt she had rightly appreciated when she had first met him.
He is a warm and kind man,
she had thought. Now she saw him as a bit overdone, his jollity when sober hiding the blur of dissolution when drunk.

Maybe Nellie was right. Maybe drinking was the ruination of all. Even as she served up the beers and shots, Nellie would wag her finger in the faces of factory workers, exhorting them like a Baptist preacher. “You've had enough!” she would shout. “Go home to your wife, and save your paycheck for groceries.”

“That's why all the wives trust us,” she'd tell Jane. “They know, at the end of the day, I'm sending those boys home.”

She would have made a great army commander,
Jane thought, not for the first time; Patton as played by George C. Scott in a helmet, as played by Nellie in an apron.

Jane turned her attention to Tim. It was up to him to get rid of Scott, to appease him and lead him out of the cabin so they could safely send Claire back into hiding. After all, it was Tim who had cracked open the Ciroc. Scott might not know Tim as well as Jane did, but he knew him well enough to suspect him as soon as something fine went missing. Tim's excellent tastes were the first thing people noticed about him. His appreciation for good fabric and well-cut suits, his knowledge of the best chefs and late-opening kitchens in several cities, and his impeccable eye for furniture and china made him a great dinner partner, a swell drinking buddy, and a girl's best friend. On the other hand, he'd always beat you to the last drop of Dom in the best Waterford flute.

Tim accepted his duty. With a smile for Jane and a nod at Oh, Tim put his arm around Scott and suggested they stop by the trunk of his car.

“We might be at the ass-end of nowhere, my friend, but my trunk and its state of the art cooler have been noted as a wonder of the world. Let's go check my roving cellar, shall we?”

As soon as their voices faded, Claire emerged from Jane's bathroom, fully dressed in a Ralph Lauren striped shirt and tan linen pants. She had belted the pants with her own long, silk scarf and managed, between Tim's fine threads, and her own ingenuity, to look radiantly chic. Tim's tall, lithe figure matched Claire's inch for inch. With her hair dry and combed and a slash of lipstick across her mouth, Claire, once again, looked regal.

Jane looked down at her own small body drowning in Tim's clothes. Claire looked like she had been form-fitted, and Jane looked like she had done the best she could out of the Goodwill box on the corner. Oh hell, even if she had brought more than “six easy pieces” à la Belinda St. Germain, her own clothes wouldn't have done for her what Tim's extras did for Claire. Jane swore that when this was all over, she'd cultivate some vertically challenged friends.

In the meantime, what to do with Claire? Even though she was at home in Evanston when Rick was murdered, Murkel would want to know why she had been sneaking around. And neither Jane nor Oh wanted to be compelled to reveal their real reasons for being there either. Since someone had been spying on Jane and might want to track down Rick Moore's “Important” papers, her cabin was no good as Claire's hiding place.

“Why don't I just go back up a tree?” Claire asked. “I can stay out of sight and meet you back here whenever you say.”

Jane was glad to see that the dry, dressed, and coifed Claire had remained warm and approachable. And, Jane had to admit, she was a pretty good sport, heading off to a tree house and leaving her husband and his partner—Jane still loved the sound of the word “partner,” even when she was using it herself and, for that matter, talking to herself—to go off to a gourmet dinner.

“Anything more to share, Mrs. Wheel?” Oh asked, turning away from the door, where he was watching his wife disappear into the woods and/or up a tree.

“Your turn,” Jane said. “What did Blake have to say?”

“A great deal,” Oh said, “but nothing that led to the Westman chest. He is a complex man.”

While Jane waited for Oh to go on, she gathered up the odd bits of paper Claire had taken out of her bag when they were talking and sat down at the desk.

“He is very proud of this place. Proud of the work they do, the quality of the work. Modest, though, about its reputation. Gives all the credit to Glen LaSalle and the artisans who make up the staff—and to Roxanne, who he says makes everything work.

“I asked about having some pieces made, some chairs to match three genuine ones that I have collected. He offered to look at them and take them on if they presented a challenge. If not, he mentioned that Geoff and Jake were wizards at reproduction furniture. He said that their work will be collected in less than a hundred years, and we laughed about what would become my multigenerational collection.”

“You liked him?” Jane asked.

Oh cocked his head slightly and paused before he spoke. “I listened to him, Mrs. Wheel.”

Jane remembered Moore's envelope that they had shifted into Oh's hands when Scott burst in on them. If Oh was going to be the good listener, she would be the good reader.

Looking through them again, she was struck by the intricacy of the sketch. She knew what it meant to draw something lovingly, to embrace a subject. This drawing, on a throwaway piece of lightweight paper, was done with an eye for detail, a complete appreciation of every twist and turn of the legs, every turn in the spindle back. The
B
printed underneath was done in a kind of calligraphy that suggested something to Jane. What was it? How odd. That one letter, a carefully drawn
B,
made Jane think of old parchment, something written on old parchment. The Declaration of Independence?

She tacked the page up on her bulletin board, a small affair above the desk framed in the same rustic twigs that outlined every photo, every mirror in the compound. She checked the nail upon which it hung and felt the round head of a modern nail. Roxanne had been here. The small board would not slide off the wall. Now the sketch was in plain sight, but even if someone came looking for it, they wouldn't expect it there. Besides, Jane had committed it to memory.

The other pages contained nothing but the listing of Web site addresses. No magic had changed them during their short stay in Oh's briefcase into an essay on who murdered Cutler and Moore and why. Even Oh didn't have that power, good listener though he was.

“I have a laptop with me, and the rooms in the lodge are wired. I'll visit these sites as soon as possible,” Oh said.

He looked at the drawing, then at Jane. “What do you see, Mrs. Wheel?”

“Someone who is in love,” said Jane.

“Now you
are
listening,” he said.

Jane, cinched and wrapped in Tim's finery, and Oh, back in his Mr. Kuruma persona, had not talked much at first on their way to the lodge for dinner. Jane was mulling over what Oh had told her about his meeting. Mr. Campbell had been the consummate craftsman, had talked about pieces in which the “hand” was revealed. The mark of the hand was what seemed to intrigue him, and it was what he expected everyone who stayed and worked at Campbell and LaSalle to appreciate. He viewed their enterprise as a return to the Arts and Crafts movement. He told Oh that it wasn't about expensive materials or rare woods or precious metals. It was the
work
that was important, the
hand.

Oh, taking notes as a real editor/feature writer would, confessed to Jane that if he were writing an article for his new phantom publication, he would probably title it
The Mark of the Hand.
Jane agreed it was a good title. She also remembered what Claire had repeated when Jane had first viewed the chest—the carving showed the hand of a master. Perhaps, Jane had suggested to Oh,
A Master's Hand
would be a better title, and for their separate moments of serious consideration, Jane was once again a creative director and Oh a publisher.

Before they reached the porch, Jane confessed that she was disappointed that they had so little information, so little
confirmation
of what they had conjured up and surmised about the Westman chest. Jane had hoped for some indication from Blake that he had made a second chest or even that he enjoyed copying famous works.

Oh was so gentle in his remarks to Jane that it was as if she were thinking of it all herself.

“Mrs. Wheel, I know that in the television program, by now, someone would have blurted out something. A dying man might whisper or a witness on the stand might break down. But,” he said softly, “in my experience, the guilty of the world have nothing to confess. The bad guy in a television program might weep and ask forgiveness, but from what I've seen in the world, those who act badly, evilly even, feel no guilt. They feel that they are right, perhaps even that they are doing a good thing when they fire the shot, drop the bomb. In their own movies of their own lives, they are the confident heroes, not the villains. What have they to whisper or confess?

“That is why we listen to what remains unsaid. Rick Moore was certainly killed because of what he did, what he knew. Horace Cutler, for what he said. And my wife is in danger for what she
might
say. The unsaid,” Oh repeated. “And you, Mrs. Wheel, it is you who have taught me to listen to the objects, also. The ‘stuff' as you call it, that makes up people's lives.”

Jane, thinking back on the past few days—her mistake with Nick, the snippets of the Belinda St. Germain book she had leafed through at odd hours, and the lack of conclusions drawn so far—murmured that she for one had perhaps been listening to the wrong stuff, but her companion seemed not to hear.

Oh stopped for a moment and raised his hand slightly, as if to create a sense memory. “I watched you and my wife touch the flowers on the chest so I, too, touched the flowers,” he said, “but I noticed something unusual. On the left side the flowers were fully articulated, sharp. Standing with pride? Is that how you say it?”

“Proud,” Jane said. “Standing proud. That indicates a left-handed carver. Handedness usually shows in the carving. The side where a carver works backward, with leaves, vines, whatever, is sometimes a bit flatter.”

“Yes, I remembered my wife telling me about another piece,” Oh said.

“So the wood told you we are looking for a left-handed carver?” Jane asked, pleased that she and Oh had both heard the voice of the inanimate object. Thrilled that they were listening to the same station now, she said, “That's great. That's perfect. Now all we have to do…”

“No,” Oh said, holding up his hand again, “I'm afraid that would be that television moment. My hand told me that the right side was equally sharp, equally proud.”

Jane shook her head. “Two carvers? If it's two carvers, they must live inside each other's pocket. Those carvings were perfectly matched.”

“Live inside each other's pocket,” Oh repeated, liking the phrase, “or lived.”