The Wrong Stuff (22 page)

Murkel cut off her explanation. “Mrs. Oh is in your cabin. Her husband told us to get her down before it got too dark,” he said.

“Yes, we know that Bruce Oh is Mr. Kuruma,” Murkel added. “He remains more valuable as Kuruma—someone who arrived after the fact and would be of little interest to me. It isn't so strange if I seek you out, Mrs. Wheel. You found the body, and I might continue to have further questions. If I gather together Mr. Kuruma and Mr. Lowry and you to talk to, you all lose your anonymity and the other residents might treat you a bit more warily.”

Murkel left Jane and went to ring the gong to gather everyone in the lodge. He announced that they would be staying on the grounds, available if anyone remembered anything he or she might have forgotten to mention earlier. Jane, standing in the back of the room, didn't know if she had become paranoid and suspicious as a detective or whether her observations were true and objective, but she sensed that something was going on among the residents. There was a palpable excitement. She noticed Mickey passing a note to Annie, who passed it to Scott. Geoff and Jake were, of course, always passing a paper between them, but this was more unusual behavior on the part of the others. Even Roxanne peered over Scott's shoulder and read the note, slightly smiling when she rocked back on her heels.

Scott whispered to Tim, who grinned broadly and nodded. Martine had tossed her head and looked disinterested when the paper came her way. No one bothered to pass it to Silver.

As soon as Murkel finished his little speech, Tim came over to Jane and escorted her out the door, whispering in her ear. “Go to the cabin and get an extra sweater and make sure you have all your cash with you. Oh says Claire is there, so bring her, too. Walk directly to the visitors' parking lot on the other side of the craft classroom space. Oh and I will be in the car, but we won't have the lights on. We have to get out by the access road on the other side. I'll explain as soon as you get there, but hurry.”

Jane stood still for a moment, thinking that she had just made a tacit agreement to work with Murkel, and perhaps this wasn't the way to keep her end of the bargain; but Tim gave her a push and she knew if she didn't just do what he said, she'd miss out on something good. It was vibrating in the air around him.

Claire was sitting at the desk reading Belinda St. Germain's book.

Before Jane could tell her to grab another sweater, Claire was up and tossing one to Jane. “I know. I've been waiting.”

“Good,” said Jane. “You can tell me what this is about.”

Outside as they ran for the parking lot, Claire pointed up to the sky. “It's a full moon, the harvest moon.”

“Yes?” said Jane.

Jane heard other footsteps. Everyone seemed to be running for their cars in the distant parking lot. Murkel had someone stationed on the main road in and out of Campbell and LaSalle, but not on the access roads or in the parking lots. This was a small Michigan town, and he had a small staff. He couldn't have anticipated a mass exodus on the night of a full moon. Claire had whispered that they'd all be back by sunrise.

“From where?” asked Jane.

They got into the backseat, Tim and Oh were in front, and Tim drove off the road and onto a gravel path that he said connected with the highway in a little less than a quarter mile.

“Moonlight Market,” said Tim.

They bumped slowly along the path, using only the parking lights. Once they were out of sight of the main lodge, Tim turned on the headlights. He was grinning ear to ear as he sped up and jumped them onto the main road.

“It's a tradition,” said Claire. “I've only been to one, about five years ago. I got those two Chinese vases, remember, Bruce? I sold them for a huge profit to that couple from Barrington?”

“Moonlight Market is held all night, starting around midnight, on the night of the last full moon in the fall. Summer season's over, so all the resort town antique dealers drag stuff out that they want to turn over, junkers come from three states, pickers are here from all over, it's the last big score before people go south for the winter and the sales dry up until next spring. People park in the lots at the consolidated high school and sell out of their trucks or the trunks of their cars. Some people set up tables on the grounds with candles or oil lamps. It's fabulous,” said Tim, practically licking his lips.

“What about Murkel?” asked Jane, checking to see how much cash she had in her wallet.

“He's a smart man,” said Oh, “and has lived here a long time. He knows about this market and will figure that people are going—he will expect us to keep an eye on everyone.”

“You've talked to him?” asked Claire.

“I listened,” said Oh.

Pulling into the parking lot, Jane could see that it was every bit as fabulous as Tim had described. Some vendors had set up lights, giving their tables and boxes the look of theatrical set pieces. Others, with their wares illuminated by the glow of candlelight, gave their pieces romantic cachet. Jane fished her flashlight out of her purse, and Tim nodded his approval.

“You don't want to buy a vase that's mint by candlelight and crazed by daylight,” he said, referring to the network of fine lines and cracks underneath the glaze that devalued so much older porcelain and pottery.

Jane and Tim agreed to split up, circling the grounds from opposite directions. Bruce Oh said he'd tag along with Mrs. Wheel, and Claire, already sprinting toward a truck with furniture, said she'd meet them back at the car in a few hours.

“Claire seems to have recovered from all the police business,” Oh said pensively. He looked at Jane, who was already in her flea market trance, carefully using her flashlight to go through two red-haired women's trunkful of vintage kitchenalia.

Jane hit paydirt at the third table. By candlelight she fell in love with a grouping of typewriter ribbon tins. She had a few at home that she had collected accidentally since they were being used to hold pins and hook-and-eye fasteners in an old sewing kit she had purchased. She had realized when she examined them that the small, round tins, with colorful designs and great graphics, were great collectibles in their own right. This sweet old man, wearing a T-shirt that identified him as the “tin man,” dealing out of the trunk of his car, was willing to part with all the tins for approximately four dollars apiece. Jane realized that meant that half were underpriced and half were overpriced. What decided her about the purchase, though, was a small, round, Kelly green “Typ O'Typ” tin that had random letters around the sides of the container. It was a gem, and Jane was a sucker for anything named something o' something. She probably would have paid twenty-five for that one alone, although she would have had to answer to Tim for it later. She counted out Tin Man's money and asked if he would throw in some of the mechanical pencils he had in a jar, and he told her to pick two. Jane was practically dancing, discovering two laminated Bakelite pencils in the jar, both advertising Michigan taverns. She took her folded plaid shopping bag out of her large, leather tote and shook it open.

“I'll throw this in, too, honey; it's a cutie and looks good with the Typ O' Typ. End of the season and all,” he said, handing her a small rectangular tin, green with red corners. It was a tin for 7/16-inch “push thumbtacks.”

It was a cutie. On the bottom was a graphic of a girl in a turn-of-the-century skirt and middy blouse holding a picture she wanted to hang. Jane started. The manufacturer was the Moore Push-Pin Company of Philadelphia. The slogan was “Moore Push, Less Hangers.”

“You think Rick Moore is sending me a message to get back to business?” asked Jane, showing Oh the tin.

“I never dismiss anything, Mrs. Wheel,” said Oh, “not totally anyway.”

They saw Annie and Mickey and Scott making their way around the grounds. Annie was carrying a large, two-handled basket overflowing with ribbons and old packages of rickrack and seam binding. She had a few remnants of fabric or tablecloths in it as well, and Jane asked her where she had found them. A quick gesture toward the other side of the parking lot, and everyone was off again.

This was where all of these junkers, restorers, craftspeople, and recyclers came alive—the marketplace of the forgotten and worn and worn out. From several yards away, Jane watched Glen LaSalle unroll paintings on canvasses that were all jammed into cardboard boxes scattered around a U-Haul truck. They watched Blake hold old wooden-handled tools first in one hand then in another, hefting the weight back and forth, checking for balance and feel. It was a gift, really, to see everyone at their most vulnerable, everyone wanting something.

Jane had filled her plaid bag with silver dessert spoons, crocheted pot holders, the typewriter tins, and two large jars of buttons. She had laughed out loud when she picked up a small wooden box that held at least two dozen elongated pennies, the kind you made yourself in a machine as souvenirs. Jane spotted a Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone picture among them and felt that she might have happened on a collection that belonged to one person, one family. Maybe she would be able to track their every summer vacation by laying out their reasonably priced souvenirs, hand cranked out by the kids at every stop along the way.

Oh wandered over to a food truck where an entrepreneur from two towns over had come to sell coffee and doughnuts when word got out that Moonlight Market was being held. He brought Jane a coffee, and they paused in the middle of the frenzy for a momentary recharge.

A woman with wildly curly hair gathered on top of her head in antennaelike ponytails asked Oh if his tie was for sale. He shook his head.

“I get that all the time,” he said to Jane. “Claire says I should name a price and make some money. She is confident she can always find more.”

“But you don't like getting caught up in the buy and sell?” asked Jane.

“Gifts, the ties are gifts from my wife, so I could never sell them. She says it's the only sentimental thing about me, but it doesn't seem sentimental. Seems impolite to think about not keeping them. Even if they are,” he looked down at the tie he was wearing, “sometimes silly.”

Jane sipped her coffee and looked left and right. This was marvelous, a moonlit madness that everyone here shared. There was the hope of finding your heart's delight, whatever it might be. The one thing you wanted and needed and had to have, and tonight, because you were in the right place at the right time, would have. And for however long it lasted, that romance of the marvelous thing would make you happy.

Jane was about to explain this whole love story to Oh when she looked straight across the field at a truck illuminated by two work lamps clamped to the sides of the bed.

Broken furniture and old air conditioners, alley pickings of every sort, were piled high. Sitting on top of Mount Debris was something else, though. It looked like a well-made table, what once might have been a valuable antique, now a dented and broken throwaway. Tom, of Tom's Trash and Treasures, was lifting it down for two people to get a better look.

Jane hurried across the field with Oh following. She managed to tell Oh that it was the table she had seen earlier. Behind the couple who were looking at the table was another man, pretending to be totally enraptured by an old turquoise high-fi set with detachable speakers, but Jane could see that he was studying the table and listening to Tom and the couple discuss it.

“Nah, it was a throwaway, too. Found it in the alley. It's a good one though. Anyone can see that's solid wood, not one of your new glue-and-sawdust models.”

The couple wandered off, but the dealer who was feigning interest in the speakers and disinterest in the table stayed close. He watched others come and tap the table, look underneath, examine the legs. He was joined by someone who looked like he could be his brother, just a taller, thinner version of the same man.

“Well,” he whispered, “is it a Thornbury?”

“Might could be,” he answered. “If it is, the old man doesn't know it, though. He wants to get rid of it for twenty-five dollars.”

“Buy it,” the tall version hissed.

“I can get it for less,” the other one answered.

“Shit,” said the brother or the partner. He had only glanced away for a moment, but the couple from earlier had come back and given Tom a twenty and were now carrying the table to the parking lot.

“You cheap bastard, now I have to go to work,” the tall man said, following the couple to their van. Jane and Oh followed, too, pausing long enough to look at various tables, hoping to deflect anyone who might suspect them of stalking the table and its buyers. Jane saw Claire a few tables over and asked Oh to go get her so she could size up this piece of furniture.

“Looks like a Thornbury,” she said. “Hard to tell, though, without looking at the construction. It's in bad shape.”

“Would it be worth speculating on for twenty-five dollars?”

“Honey, anything's worth speculating on for twenty-five dollars. Tim's got you on way too small a budget,” Claire said. “If it's the real deal, a Roger Thornbury–made card table, it's worth thirty thousand at auction, even in that shape.”

Jane, Claire, and Bruce watched tall man cajole and wheedle the couple, brandishing a tape measure like a sword. He seemed to be trying to convince them that he had run to measure the space for this old table in his summer cabin; he had an odd, awkward space to fill, and his wife was going to kill him if he didn't come home with it since she had said it would fit—he had been the one who'd insisted on measuring. He didn't know how much they had paid, but he was willing to give them fifty dollars just to spare himself the aggravation.

Jane admired the young couple; they remained impassive during the whole speech. The wife whispered something to the husband, and he told tall man that his wife was suspicious. Was he an antiques dealer who knew something they didn't know? The man laughed uproariously. He was good, Jane gave him that. He insisted he didn't know a Chippendale from a chipmunk; he just knew he wouldn't be out of the doghouse for months if he didn't come home with that table. Would they take a hundred dollars?