The Wrong Stuff (3 page)

“Mrs. Wheel?”

“Detective Oh?”

“Yes,” said Oh.

Jane waited. Oh was always a man of few words and even the few took a while forming themselves.

“Have you considered my offer?”

“Yes, but…,” Jane said, “right now, I…”

“My wife, Claire, is curious about your decision.”

It was unlike Oh to interrupt and also surprising that he brought up his wife. Jane knew that Claire Oh was a highly respected antiques dealer and, according to Oh, quite happy that he had decided to quit the police force, teach courses in criminology and sociology, and open his own consulting business. According to Oh, she was successful enough, her business profitable enough that she would be happy for Oh to teach and not even bother with the
consulting,
which she and everyone else knew was a detective agency and to her was simply police work without the backup.

Since Jane had had a few adventures in her new “picking” career, it seemed that everyone wanted a piece of her. Tim Lowry was ready to make her a partner in T & T Sales, claiming to have trained her eye since they met in first grade. Tim was still Jane's best friend, and she saw him regularly since he still lived in their hometown of Kankakee, Illinois, where Jane went almost weekly to visit her parents, Don and Nellie.

Tim had even introduced her around at his flower shop, another of his many ventures, bragging to his customers that Jane's taste was almost equal to a gay man's, if not quite equal to his. “Because,” he said, waggling his finger at Dr. Bernardo's wife, “I'm not just
any
gay man.” The woman had left the store giggling, buying twice as much as what she had originally intended. Tim explained to Jane that his success as a florist and antique dealer was largely based on the extraordinary stereotypical act he put on. It was, he often told her, the bane of his existence, to be a well-adjusted and contented gay man in a small town whose residents wanted him to be their town eccentric—“Or village idiot, one of the two,” he had added.

Detective Oh's offer was the most intriguing, though, and Jane was still mulling it over. She did love the resolution of solving a crime; the utter satisfaction of it was so intense. As good as finding the Bakelite bracelet in the bottom of the box of junk jewelry? Close, it came close to that.
And besides,
she had been thinking lately,
why do I have to decide? Can't I do both?

“Your wife?” Jane asked. “I'm not sure why Claire would care about my decision, Detective Oh.”

“I am so sorry. I haven't really explained myself. Claire thinks you would be the perfect partner on my new case, so she suggested I call rather than wait for you to call me.”

Curiouser and curiouser,
Jane thought. Although they knew a lot about each other, Jane and Claire had never met.

“Which is?”

“Pardon?”

“Your new case?” Jane reminded him.

“Yes, of course. My wife, Claire, has been arrested.”

“Oh,” Jane said.

“Yes?”

“No, I just mean
Oh,
” said Jane, “like,
oh my
. For what?”

Jane thought she heard a small sigh.

“Oh, yes, of course. What she's been arrested for. Yes,” said Oh, and this time the sigh was plainly audible.

“Murder.”

Jane tried her hardest to compartmentalize as she leafed through Belinda St. Germain's
Overstuffed
. A full-size color cutout of St. Germain herself, hair pulled back in a tidy bun, wearing a lint-free Donna Karan suit with sensible but attractive black pumps, stood in the self-help section. Her cold, cardboard eyes stared at Jane.
Any minute,
Jane thought,
she'll start shaking her fiberboard head and picking dog hair off my shirt.
Jane looked around frantically. Where was that “tsk, tsk” sound coming from? Holy Toledo, did she have an “inner Belinda”?

Hold on. First, buy the book and get a grip on the stuff overtaking the house. Second, be a better mother by never losing anything, forgetting anything, missing anything, or being late for anything ever again. Third, become an ace picker without becoming a muttering bag lady. Fourth, become an ace PI by clearing Claire Oh of murder.

“Hold your horses, Jane, just hold your horses,” Jane muttered to herself, scanning the rest of the self-help section, causing a clerk to respond with a “Pardon me,” and Jane to realize that the muttering bag lady role might already be too ingrained. Jane felt that it was essential she take stock of herself and see if she was up to all this organization and mothering and crime solving. Once again things had turned upside down in her world, a world that should be so much simpler. After all, she was a relatively attractive, healthy, young…well, middle-aged…well, Nick had recently taken to asking, “How old do you think you're going to live to, Mom, because if you're really
middle
-aged…?”

Okay, she was youngish-middle-aged
looking,
had an attractive professor husband, and a smart (if, on occasion,
smart-ass
) athletic son. She was self-employed, albeit with a made-up career as antiques and collectibles picker, and had a happy, stable home—except for that little misstep when Charley moved out for a while. And the murders. Finding her neighbor's dead body had been a tad disruptive. And then there was the murder in her best friend Tim's flower shop. Uncovering all that stuff about her parents, Don and Nellie and their tavern, the EZ Way Inn, had set her on edge for a while. Yeah, and the severed finger. But truly, until today, until misplacing that permission slip for Nick, she had been pretty well grounded. This, she decided, was her personal tipping point.

Today, for the first time, the suitcases full of other people's photo albums, the stacks of torn quilts and happy, dancing fruit tablecloths, the dust mite–chewed old college yearbooks, and the musty old gas station travel maps seemed overwhelming. Yesterday she could cope with a house filled with what others had left behind. Today she was drowning in debris.

But she could change. Jane could read this book by Belinda St. Germain, digest some decluttering wisdom, and simplify her home, order her life. It could happen. She could do it. Where was her wallet? Jane fished through her bag and pulled out a compact crossword puzzle dictionary, dropped it back in and pulled out an Italian phrasebook. Oh sure, to Belinda St. Germain those objects might seem like handbag detritus—but did she ever have to sit in a car for three hours waiting to get into an estate sale? After she had gotten a number? Well, a picker had to pack like a tourist, anticipating being stranded. Any weekend sale could turn into Gilligan's three-hour tour. Diversions, food, water, clean-up supplies, first aid—all handbag essentials. But right now, standing in line at the bookstore, where was her wallet?

Jane could become a zenlike practitioner of the spare and lean. She could organize her work. She could unpack a box of old photos from a garage sale without sitting down to dust each one and make up a story about the family picnic or the crazy uncle at the reunion. She could resist the old and broken stuff that couldn't be resold, that could only take up space in her basement, her attic, her dining room, her heart.

If Claire Oh could be arrested for murder, anything was possible. Yes, if the world turned upside down and an antique dealer wife of a former police detective could be arrested for murder, Jane Wheel could become a clean and mindful wife and mother, perfectly organized. And she could become a detective and solve the crime.

Aha! Jane found her wallet and fished out a credit card from among the ticket stubs and old receipts. Sure, she could solve Claire's problems. She had, after all, found her wallet.

Jane Wheel, girl hero. Yes, she liked the sound of that. She hadn't thought of any of the right questions to ask Bruce Oh when he'd told her about Claire's
situation.
His word, “situation.” Instead of asking the who, what, and where a good detective might ask, she offered to bring her anything she needed. A toothbrush? Was that what women needed in jail these days?

Oh had assured Jane that their attorney was attending to Claire's release on bond. He told her he would meet her at the coffee shop next to the bookstore to fill her in. In fact, he told her, Claire had insisted that Bruce leave her with the lawyer. She'd asked him to go and persuade Jane Wheel to help her.
Nice to be in demand,
Jane thought. Nick sure wasn't going to be asking for her this weekend. Jane settled into a booth with her bag of books—the collected works of Belinda St. Germain—along with several others on organizing closets and simplifying one's life.

Jane stared into her purse, a large bag made out of an old hand-braided rag rug. Yes, she needed a lot of this stuff, but maybe three items could go. There were stubs of old theater tickets, but those came in handy as bookmarks. After all, she had all these Belinda St. Germain books now—she would need to mark essential passages. An old EZ Way Inn key chain that her parents, Don and Nellie, had given out in the early sixties as customers' Christmas gifts. Six pens. Well, you never knew when one was going to go dry. A wrinkled buckeye that Nick had picked up out of a neighbor's yard as a good luck charm a few years ago, then discarded. Jane had picked it out of his wastebasket, just in case there was some luck left. Surely there must be something in here that could be discarded….

“Mrs. Wheel?”

Bruce Oh, who would forever in Jane's mind be Police Detective Oh, even if he had resigned to teach and consult, even if his identification was now the license of a private investigator rather than a police department shield, sat down opposite her.

He smiled, or at least Jane thought he might be trying to smile. He was not a man of easy expressions.

“Botox would be wasted on you,” said Jane.

“Pardon?” Oh signaled to the waitress by pointing to Jane's cup and making a T with his two index fingers.

“You don't frown, you don't furrow, you don't squint, you don't scrunch,” said Jane, “and yet…”

“Yes?” Oh allowed his lips to turn upward a scant few degrees.

“You are not without expression. How do you do it?” Jane asked.

“Claire says that my eyes tell her everything she needs to know,” he said, pouring the hot water in the stainless pot over the tea bag in his cup.

Jane nodded. It was true. At the moment his eyes showed a kind of puzzled pain, as if he was physically hurt but couldn't pinpoint the bruise or break.

“Claire. How does she tell you everything you need to know?” Jane asked.

Jane was looking down at her coffee cup when she asked the question. More precisely, when she heard herself ask the question. How in heaven had she made herself so bold, so prying, so intimate?

Oh seemed more puzzled than put off by the question. “One week ago I'd have told you that Claire spoke directly to me, never holding back.”

Oh thanked the waitress who'd brought him more hot water.

“And now?” asked Jane, wondering how Oh was able to silently request tea, receive it in a timely and civil fashion, then be rewarded with a second cup, when she had been trying for fifteen minutes to snag a coffee refill.

“There is nothing direct about Claire right now. She told me to get you on this case. That was the clearest message she sent.”

Oh told Jane about the case, which was almost literally a case. The piece of furniture that had started all the trouble was a kind of chest of drawers that Claire had found holding old tools in the basement of a house on Sheridan Road. She'd recognized it as a potentially valuable piece, asked about it, the owners had given it to her…

Jane stopped Oh. “Gave it to her? For how much?”

“Nothing.”

“How much nothing?” asked Jane.

Oh stared at Jane, one of his I-hear-you-and-I'm-quite-sure-that-you-are-speaking-the-English-language-but-your-inventive-use-of-said-language-is-a-mystery-to-me looks.

“I tell Charley ‘nothing' all the time when he asks how much I paid for something. ‘How much for that broken lamp with the frayed cord, Jane?' ‘Nothing,' I say, when it's just a little. Nothing used to mean under five bucks. Now I've had to keep up with inflation. Anything under ten is nothing now.”

“I mean zero dollars, Mrs. Wheel,” said Oh. “The person running the sale said she'd check with the owner. It hadn't been priced because they'd thought it was a built-in in the workroom, an old chest holding hammers and nails and brushes. She returned and told Claire that if she hauled it out of the basement after the sale ended that afternoon, she could have it for nothing.”

When Jane met Claire Oh later that day, she picked up the story there, at the most amazing part. The “you can have it for nothing” miracle part. After the greeting at the door, Bruce Oh's no-nonsense introduction—Jane Wheel, Claire Oh—and Jane's momentary distraction with Claire's height—six feet, two inches, at least—Claire led Jane into a large room with rich, apricot-colored walls.

Jane saw right away that each piece of furniture—a standing desk under a west-facing window with nothing on its surface except three cut crystal paperweights catching the rays of the setting sun, the down-filled sofa covered in French toile, the two perfectly proportioned wing chairs, the eighteenth-century English landscapes that flanked the fireplace—was perfect and perfectly placed. Everything was elegant, exquisite, and spare. No extras. No cardboard boxes filled with Pyrex mixing bowls, no stacks of
Workbasket
magazines from the fifties. Had Belinda St. Germain already been here? It was only when Claire began to talk, her voice hoarse, her eyes glistening with a picker's frenzy, that Jane recognized a kindred spirit.

“I couldn't believe my luck,” said Claire Oh, looking around her living room, drinking it in as if she thought she would never see it again.

“They were
giving
me the chest. And I had already bought the top piece. Somewhere along the line, someone had separated the top shelf from the drawers below. They were using it as a makeshift coffee table and had it priced at ten dollars. I was sure it was the top part of the chest. The carving matched up…I…I was beside myself….”

Claire leaned forward toward Jane, sitting in the chair opposite her. She held her hands out, palms facing each other, as if she were measuring a drawer. Her hands were square, her nails manicured, but left unpolished. Her face, although pale now—did someone pick up prison pallor after a few hours in a police station—had clearly seen the sun.
Too many years of it,
thought Jane.

Jane realized that she had never thought about Detective Oh's age. He had a face that could belong to someone forty or sixty or anywhere in between. Jane knew the exact year a certain blue dye lot was used on a tablecloth and she could date a McCoy vase within a year, but she always had a hard time with people. Eyes were often so much younger, or older, than the curve of lips. A wisp of bangs often said one year, while the soft, translucent skin around the eyes argued for another. Claire Oh's eyes had youthful zeal when she spoke, but the sag of her jaw, the weathering around her gray-green eyes told a different story.

“A Westman chest and they were
giving
it to me, thanking me for hauling it out of their way,” said Claire, her hands still outstretched. For a moment, Jane thought Claire was going to grasp her hands and shake them. Jane understood perfectly the depth of her feeling. Finding something was something. Finding something for nothing was everything.

“I knew it couldn't really be a Westman Sunflower Chest. There are only two of those known to exist. But the wood and the carving, I mean it was under two layers of paint and it was pretty gouged out, the finely delineated feet had water damage from being in the basement, there was hardware missing, but I felt it. I felt the hand of the carver. I ran my hand over the sunflower and I thought, What if there are three? What if Mathew Westman made three?”

“The feel of the wood told you?” Oh asked his wife.

Jane and Claire both looked at Oh, then back at each other.

Jane knew how wood felt, what it held, the story it could tell. Her father, Don, had told her a few months ago that he might replace the oak bar in the EZ Way Inn. Jane had grown up in her parents' tavern, the EZ Way Inn, done her homework by the dim light of the hanging fixture over the pool table. When she was old enough, in the eighth grade, Don had taught her to draw a glass of Schlitz without leaving too large a head of foam, and Nellie, her mother, had taught her the right way to wash a glass. Three times up and down, twisting it slightly over the vertical bristled brushes in the stainless wash tank, dunk twice in the rinse tank, then place upside down on a clean bar towel to protect the rim. The EZ Way Inn was where she had learned everything important. She had learned there what Claire knew, too. That you could
read
old wood, that the feel of it could tell you everything you needed to know.

The bar at the EZ Way Inn was a massive stretch of solid oak with a fat, rolled edge where elbows had softened it, fingers had drummed songs into it, heads had rested on hands, contemplating life's mysteries. As a little girl, waiting for her parents to clean the bar at night or in the morning before opening, Jane had walked the length of the bar, running her hand over that warm, worn wood. Every hill and valley softly carved out of that wood told her a story, sang her a song. There was Henry, who'd liked to sit by the window and always had a Hershey bar for her after school, and Barney who, in his broken Polish accent, had emphasized the importance of music education. That bar was the shadow box, the souvenir album of her family, Don and Nellie and her brother, Michael, and all the other extended family members who stopped by every day when the 3:30 whistle blew at the factory across the street. “Don't replace the bar,” Jane had begged her dad.