 |  |
Wednesday, September 25th
It was the concrete truck roaring by that startled her awake, but there was also white noise that tempted her back to sleep. For the first few seconds, she didn’t know where she was, and then, seeing her favorite duvet cover, the familiar folding screens, and her robe hanging from a hook on the closet door, reality fleshed out. It was the apartment in Elm Grove, on the busiest street in town. Her new home. The white noise was rain.
Charlotte yawned and checked her cell phone on the side table. Six a.m. She’d been in bed for at least nine hours. Olivia’s notebooks were still spread on the other side of the bed, along with a patch of dark soft stuff that looked like cat hair. Right. The cat must have come up to sleep on the bed at some point during the night. She smiled.
The usual morning routine felt a little awkward. She was used to having ample counter and cabinet space in the bathroom, but there was almost no place to set anything down here. It made her aware of every movement: hold toothbrush, remove cap from toothpaste tube and set it on small area next to the cold tap, put toothpaste on toothbrush, hold toothbrush in mouth while replacing cap on toothbrush tube and putting tube back in small medicine cabinet, then brush teeth. She did pack her electric toothbrush, but would have to find a place to set the charger. Mental note: bring some kind of bathroom storage or shelf thingy from home. Correction: from house in Lake Parkerton.
Making coffee was a little easier. While it brewed, she opened the window blinds and surveyed the rainy townscape. At this hour, there was light commuter traffic broken by the occasional truck or semi, but almost no pedestrians. She moved the screens away from the bed and climbed back in, this time with coffee in the big red mug and her laptop. From this vantage point, she could see the entire apartment, save for the door to the bathroom.
She recalled Diane’s loose quote of Virginia Woolf over lunch at Cole’s Pub, “money and a room of your own.” Here’s the room, Charlotte thought. In a few days, with any luck, there will be some money. She opened her laptop to write a journal entry.
My new home feels like a cross between a waiting room and a room at the Lotus Spa. It is small, well-lit, airy, and there are very few things in it, but they are good things. It is serene, but it isn’t home. At least not yet. I feel self-conscious in it. I miss having books on the shelves, art on the walls, and yet I suppose the blank walls are soothing in their own way. My closet looks like I’m on a two-week vacation somewhere, but if I’m honest those are the things I usually end up wearing, anyway. I feel like I’m meeting myself as I really am for the first time, yet that can’t be write. Oops, right.
She wrote for another twenty minutes, stopping when the rain stopped and the sunlight broke through the clouds. She dressed for a bike ride, and found just enough money in the bottom of her purse for a bagel and egg sandwich at The Coffee Grove.
Elm Grove was the same as ten years before, yet it wasn’t. Enough time had passed that Charlotte felt herself on a weird cusp between the familiar and the new as she rode her bike around the neighborhood. A familiar figure in a trench coat and fedora was walking with a distinctive lope along the sidewalk on Cortland Street. Was it her old neighbor, Frank? She nearly stopped to say hello, then suddenly remembered that Frank had passed away several years ago. Perhaps it was his son. Or perhaps her mind was playing tricks on her, making similar things seem like things she once really knew. A familiar-looking rusty Volvo station wagon passed by on Sheffield Street, and she expected to see one of her former colleagues driving it, but once again it was a trick of memory. Here among the old houses, the stage had changed very little as the actors came and went.
She shared this observation with Jimmy, who came over with a coffee while she ate her breakfast.
“Will this town always seem full of ghosts?”
He seemed to consider the question, but she had the feeling he was filing it away for later reference, as well—she had come to understand that there was more to Jimmy than met the eye.
“I’m certain it won’t if you open yourself up to it,” he said. “Replace the bad old memories with new good ones.”
She looked at him askance. “Sounds like positive thinking, that I’ll draw new and good things to me if I just have the right attitude.”
Jimmy burst out laughing. “Oh, c’mon, Charlotte. I’m the last person to believe in magnetic nonsense—that kind of lack of reality played a big role in our economic troubles. No, the good things are there, but you have to be open to the possibility, be open and lie in wait for things to reveal themselves.”
“Sounds like wildlife photography,” said Simon, who had walked up with his own breakfast. “Or espionage?”
“Good morning!” said Charlotte. “It’s neither, actually.”
“Charlotte here,” said Jimmy, “is experiencing a sort of Brigadoon in reverse. She’s reappeared in town after a long time and her brain is playing catch-up.”
Simon nodded in understanding as he sat down next to Charlotte at her invitation. “I’ve had that happen a couple of times when I’ve gone back to my old neighborhood. But he’s right. If it is logical that something is there, or that you have it on good authority, then it is reasonable to be open to the possibility and, well, wait for the shot.”
“I guess it’ll just take time. But I’m glad I’m back. I’m seeing a lot of possibilities for how my life here could take shape.”
Jimmy went back to the counter to help out, and Simon ate his breakfast in a hurry.
“Sorry to run, but I don’t want to be late for the faculty meeting this morning. Want to get a proposal in for next semester, and then I need to face the hordes begging for mid-term extensions. Going to Olivia’s today?”
“Yeah, in a little while. I’m actually waiting for Ramona’s Resale to open up, to see if I can find out anything about Olivia’s book collection.”
“Good idea. I’ll be by as soon as I can get away, and maybe we can get the valuation video finished up.”
“See you soon, Simon.”
He looked down at her as he slipped into his leather jacket, with an expression she couldn’t interpret, and then just turned and left.
There had been a dusty, musty, junk shop in the big old three-story building across from the Post Office for at least thirty years. It closed for a while when the owner became too old and ill to operate it, then, according to a newspaper article Charlotte read some years back, Benny Ramona bought it, cleaned it up a bit, brought in some new stock, and named it Ramona’s Resale. He used a red heart as the shop’s logo, not only for the “I (Heart) Ramona’s Resale” bumper stickers and tote bags, but on the spines of paperback books, because he ran a paperback book exchange from the shop, as well. Those stickers were on many of Olivia’s books.
The door at the front of the building was locked, with a sign saying “Entrance in Alley” and an arrow pointing one in the right direction. Charlotte went that way, and walked about a quarter of a block down the brick-paved alley until she reached a heart-shaped sign hanging over the pavement from a bracket. There was a bike rack, which she took advantage of, and with the realization that there were many, many more bike racks around town these days than ten years ago.
The shop door was a cheerful, red-painted new one styled like a full-length French door, and she went in with a more positive attitude than she would have in its previous incarnation. She knew that Ellis and her friends went there to find cheap and unusual clothes and jewelry, but up to this moment she had never had cause to go there herself.
What she saw amazed her. It was as if the owner had taken ten houses like Olivia’s and spread out the contents, from furniture to clothing to knickknacks. The checkout counter was next to the door, manned by a stout, muscular young woman whose bleached-blond hair was swept back off her face in a lion’s-mane halo. Her name tag, appropriately enough, said “Aslan.” Charlotte murmured hello, and Aslan nodded back.
There were several rooms on the main floor, mostly full of furniture and large items like a popcorn wagon and two pinball machines, and a back room with nothing but large appliances. A sign by the staircase said “Books, Clothes, More Furniture,” with another arrow, this one pointing up. Charlotte went that way, too.
The rooms with clothing were distinguished by funky (where several flashy college girls were sorting through the racks and having a laugh), and not-so-funky (where a handful of quiet older men and women did not appear to be shopping for fun). There were two rooms of books, one with mostly hardbacks and the other with all paperbacks. A large handmade sign explained the book exchange regulations in the paperbacks room. The hardback room, however, had no signs other than “Priced as Marked,” and included a couple of old-fashioned horsehair-stuffed armchairs for one’s reading comfort. A curly-headed man in his thirties, wearing tan corduroy trousers and an argyle sweater vest over a pinstriped shirt, was sitting in one of them and reading an old historical atlas. He looked up through thick-lensed glasses as she came in.
“Hello. I’m Benny Ramona. Let me know if there’s anything I can help you with.”
“There might be,” said Charlotte, and she explained her relationship to Olivia and why she was there.
“Oh, yes. I saw the obituary, and of course the article about what happened to poor Olivia,” he said. “I rather liked the old girl—she was one of my first and best customers, and then she suddenly stopped coming a couple of years ago. Probably the stairs were getting to be too much. She bought hundreds of books, including a lot from the old stock that was already here when I bought the place. Two or three times she bought so many that I delivered them to her house, they were too much for her to carry with that wonky arm of hers.”
“Do you know if she purchased any first editions?”
“She might have. She purchased quite a few books in French. There was a whole slew of books here in French and German, a lot of discards from the university library and possibly from retired professors’ stockpiles. I don’t read either language, and my profit margins don’t really allow for appraisals. If it’s new stock, I’ve put a sticker on it, like so, and specify the title on the sales slip.” He pointed to one such book on the shelf next to him. “If it’s from the stock that was already here when I bought the place, I sell it at the price already marked inside the cover, and just write ‘old stock’ on the sales slip.”
“Do you know if she bought any Seamus O’Dair books?”
Benny smiled in understanding. “Like a first edition of Least Objects? Oh, if I knew that she did, I’d be kicking myself right now. But I honestly don’t recall having come across any copies of any of his books, at least not in the new stock.”
Charlotte thanked him for his help, and complimented him on the store.
“Thank you, Ms. Anthony. Please feel free to come back if you have any more questions, or anything you think I could help you with.” He rose and proffered her his hand, and they shook. Then he continued, “May I ask you a personal question?”
Charlotte was surprised, but nodded her assent.
“You look familiar, as is your name. Would you happen to be related to Ellis Anthony?”
“Yes. That’s my daughter.”
He looked thoroughly pleased. “I knew it! Tell her I said hello, and that Aslan and I both miss her.”
––––––––
THINGS HAD DEFINITELY been disturbed in Olivia’s house since they were there two days earlier. Helene shook her head sadly. “I don’t know what to do, Charlotte. Drat Donovan, anyway.” She turned to close the front door, and turned the deadbolt.
“I do,” said Charlotte, determined to keep cheerful and professional. “We’ll pick up where we left off with the notebook clues, and when Simon gets here, we’ll have him take pictures of how things are today and compare them to earlier ones. The most important thing is to try to find the notebooks, and then get out of here for good.”
“I suppose,” Helene sighed, and pursed her lips. Charlotte knew that her friend was not used to having her wishes ignored.
They once again looked at the clue in the most recent notebook: Elle et lui. Charlotte told Helene that she had entered the words in an Internet search and came up with it as a title to the 19th-century author George Sand’s account of her affair with the poet Alfred de Musset. “It’s French and literary,” she explained, “so maybe there is something to it. It looked like the strongest candidate of all the search results that turned up.”
Helene looked genuinely perplexed. “George Sand? Are there any books by her on the shelves?”
They looked along the shelf with 19th-century French writers, and found one book by Alfred de Musset, but no George Sand.
“She was also known for her affair with Chopin,” said Helene. Maybe there are records or tapes of his music somewhere?”
Charlotte wandered through the rooms, but saw no signs of music or anything that played music, other than the radio in the kitchen. A search in and around it proved fruitless, as well.
“There aren’t a lot of homes where there is nothing on hand for playing music, especially if there was once a teenager living there,” said Charlotte.
Helene looked perplexed again. “You’re right, now that you mention it. Olivia was crazy about jazz at one time, as I think I’ve said before. I don’t know if Donnie was a music buff any more than he was a sports buff, though. But I would have thought Olivia would at least have a few jazz albums around, if not classical.”
Charlotte thought for a moment. In her experience, if someone was of a demographic that was highly likely to have a certain product, then there was usually a good reason if they didn’t have that product. “Maybe she did, but she either sold them, gave them away, threw them out—or Donovan got them.”
“Oh, my!” Helene exclaimed. “I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe we should think about what else ought to be here that isn’t here.”
“My thoughts, exactly. There’s so much stuff in this house, so many different kinds of things, that it might be easier. You were looking through an old ledger book the other day. How recent do they run?”
Helene went over to the small bookcase and looked it over. “The last one in here appears to be several years ago—the year Ronson passed away, in fact, but let me see....” She thumbed through the pages of the last ledger, then slammed the book shut. “It goes up to about six months before he died. Simon is right. Ronson was the one who forced her to keep detailed expense ledgers, and when he got too sick to check up on her, she stopped.”
“I think that is when he hurt her arm, and she wouldn’t have been able to write in the ledgers even if she wanted to. Even recently, writing so small would have been difficult for her, if not impossible.”
“How awful. I feel like I’ve failed her by not knowing what was really going on, but I didn’t even know to ask the right questions. She was too proud to tell me on her own.” Helene looked around the room sadly.
“What other things do you think should be here that aren’t?”
“Well, let me see.” Helene sat down on the desk chair and looked around the room. “I know that she loved jazz, and of course to read and write. Ronson was every inch an Army man. He liked sports, in particular baseball. He collected baseball cards. He was a meat-and-potatoes—”
“Baseball cards!” Charlotte interrupted. “I don’t think I’ve seen any baseball cards in the house, at least not yet.”
“There’s something, then,” agreed Helene. “I will go through the ledgers, I can do that sitting down. That might tell us where the missing things have gone if Olivia entered their sales.”
“Good idea. Work backward, from the most recent book. I’ll check the basement and the garage.”
Charlotte went to the basement door in the kitchen, but discovered that the key was no longer hanging on the nail on the trim around the door, nor was it in the lock. She tried the doorknob again, and it was indeed locked. Perhaps Donovan had been down there and pocketed the key.
She then decided to take a look around the garage, and went through the back porch. The oriental rug had been brought in from the back yard and was rolled up and laying across the stacks of plastic containers. She continued into the back yard and then to the side door of the garage, which was unlocked. She felt for the switch and turned on the light.
It was a typical one-car garage for the neighborhood, barely large enough to contain the twenty-year-old beige Ford Taurus that looked as if it hadn’t been driven for the past ten, it was so covered in dust. There was a small workbench along part of the back wall, and tools hanging on the pegboard above it. Everything was typical—lawn mower, garden tools, hedge clippers, partial bags of grass seed, fertilizer, and concrete, a ladder, a rolled up garden hose, and here and there signs that Ronson went on fishing trips, including a small outboard motor lying under the bench and a fish net hanging on a nail by its frame. None of it appeared to have been disturbed in years. There were no boxes that looked as if they could have held baseball cards.
Charlotte returned to the house and thought she heard Helene talking to someone. In the straight shot from the kitchen through the dining room she could see Helene standing near the desk in the living room, one hand on the back of the chair, and looking up and nodding with polite interest at someone Charlotte couldn’t see but whose voice she now recognized: Bosley Warren’s.
A sharp wave of alarm ran through Charlotte’s stomach and throat, culminating in tension, and she rubbed the back of her neck as she tried to think of how to handle this, of what to do. Helene did not look worried or threatened, that was good. There was no other voice than Bosley’s, which indicated he was either alone, or with Donovan. Should she quietly sneak back outside? She didn’t want to leave Helene alone with that ape, but she was afraid that if Bosley Warren saw her, he would erupt violently. And why was he here, anyway? She pulled out her phone and called Detective Barnes, whispering her message to his voice mail.
Helene must have seen or heard her, because she turned, smiled, and beckoned her to join them.
Here goes, thought Charlotte, and she walked toward the living room, ready for a fight.
“Charlotte,” said Helene, “I presume you know Mr. Warren?”
As Charlotte came into Bosley’s view, his eyes widened and betrayed his own alarm, and his knuckles went white as he gripped his clipboard tighter.
“You! What the hell are you doing here?” he snarled.
Helene answered first, with a teacher’s calm authority. “My sister hired Charlotte to find her notebooks and transcribe them, and I’ve kept her on. She has found over half of them, but if your people keep coming here and moving things, it will become incredibly difficult to find the remaining notebooks, and thus fulfill my obligations as the estate administrator.”
Bosley didn’t say anything for a few moments, and looked as if he was trying to decide on the right approach under the circumstances, glancing at Helene, then Charlotte, and back again. Helene remained calm, and kept her gaze on him steady. It seemed to be having an effect, taming Bosley’s inner beast to the point that he let out a deep breath, and set the clipboard down on the coffee table, rattling a set of keys attached to the clip.
“This is real uncomfortable,” he said. “I was just informed this morning that we have a contract to do the Targman estate auction, but I’m not the one who booked it, and I’m usually the one that handles all the auction bookings. I came here to look over what all we were going to have to move to the auction barn, and found you, Mrs. Dalmier, which I’m cool with because it’s your signature on the contract. I also just learned yesterday that my brother was here last week, and was evidently assaulted in this very house, right before he drowned in that pond. Nobody tells me what’s really going on. I’m standing here feeling like a fool, and kinda insulted because everybody treats me like I’m an idiot. And not only do they not tell me what’s going on, they don’t tell me what’s not going on.” He turned to Charlotte. “I asked Ilona if you canceled that sale date I gave you, and it turns out you did. She just didn’t bother to tell me. My brother went missing. I was worried, and trying to handle his side of the business as well as my own. I know I shouldn’t’ve hauled off on you like that. I was there when they pulled his car out of the water. Everything’s spinning outta control.”
Charlotte was taking all of this in, and didn’t get a sense that it was an act. Bosley really was at a loss. She decided to attempt a question.
“When was the last time you were here?”
He shook his head as if the question didn’t compute. “This is the first time I’ve ever been in this house.”
Helene and Charlotte looked at one another. Simon had said he was pretty sure that someone big like Bosley and someone shorter, like Mitchell, were in the house with Donovan the night Charlotte’s Jeep broke down. Could the big man have been Toley Banks’ driver, Doc?
Charlotte looked again at the keys on the clipboard. One of them was an old-fashioned skeleton key, the kind that would fit the lock on the basement door. “So how did you come by those keys?”
Bosley looked at them, then at her. “They were there at the shop, along with this order, signed by Mrs. Dalmier here.”
“I didn’t have the keys,” said Helene. “I just signed a contract with Mitchell Bennett, who said he was authorized to do so for Warren Brothers.”
Some of the mystery was clearing for Bosley, and he nodded slowly. “Yeah, Mitchell. He works for my older half-brother, who has a big stake in the shop. If Toley told him to do it, there’s nothing I can do to say otherwise. But it really messes with the schedule. Wes was the one who kept all this stuff straight between us and Toley.”
“Do you know Donovan?” asked Helene
He shook his head again. “That name isn’t familiar. Doesn’t mean I don’t know him, but I don’t know the name.”
But Charlotte remembered something about the name. “What about Van?”
This time Bosley’s face cleared with recognition. “Oh, yeah, I know a Van, yeah, he’s the skinny guy who—uh, yeah, Van T-something.” He paused as it sunk in, and he picked up the clipboard to read the auction order form again. “Ohhhhh man.” He muttered some invectives and looked at Helene as if he had received more bad news. “He’s the guy whose model train parts I bought at a swap meet. The O’Dair book was in the box.”
Helene’s hand went up to cover her mouth.
Charlotte was astounded. “The book was Olivia’s?” She looked at Helene. Was that what Olivia’s last words referred to, that the rare edition of Least Objects was hers?
Bosley looked confused again. “Who’s Olivia?”
“Mrs. Targman. She was Van’s mother,” explained Charlotte. Bosley looked suitably astounded, as well.
“Well, I’ll be. Maybe that’s got something to do with why my brother was here. Maybe they were trying to get the book back or the money for it, and things didn’t go too well.”
“No, they didn’t, Mr. Warren,” said Helene, who looked at him in grim sorrow. “My sister received the injuries that killed her, too.”
As this sunk in, Bosley pulled himself together. “I got a feeling I shouldn’t be talking about this. I just want you to know, though, that the authentication process was all above board. I told the auction people how I acquired the book and showed them my copy of the sales slip. Van had a box of model train accessories that I bought without looking through it much, because it had a bunch of those crossing signals on top that I wanted, so I made him an offer for the whole box, and he agreed. He seemed happy about it. When I looked through the box back at home, I found the book at the bottom, wrapped in brown paper, and painted to look like a school or a factory or something, real little kid stuff. Anybody else might’ve thrown it out. But in my line of work, you look inside anything that can open and unwrap everything that’s covered, because you’ll never know what you’ll find. It looked like a first edition, and I asked Wes to check out, ‘cuz he’s the one who knows books.”
“Did Donovan realize what happened?” asked Helene.
“I don’t think so,” said Bosley. “At least, he never tried to get back in touch with me.”
Charlotte tried to picture how events unfolded. “Did Wesley approach Mrs. Targman, or did she contact him? Or did he say what it was for?”
Bosley shrugged. “I don’t have any idea who called who. If Wes went out on a valuation, it woulda been for books. We got another guy who appraises everything else for us. ‘Cept trains. I do trains.”
Charlotte recalled her trip to the pawn shop. Toley Banks appraised the silverware, but it was the man called Doc who appraised the jewelry. She was about to ask if it was Doc when there was a sharp rapping at the door, and she went to see who it was.
It was Barnes—and Simon.
There was considerable tension at first, as Barnes had been prepared for trouble. But in the course of questioning him, Barnes relaxed slightly as he realized that Bosley was cooperating, and no longer a threat to Charlotte. Simon was less relaxed, but said nothing. He pulled together the pictures and videos he made to show the detective how things had been moved out of place—and how some things were even missing, particularly from the dining room and the curio cabinets. Since there was no sign of a break-in, and the door was locked when Charlotte and Helene arrived, someone had to have had a key, which implicated Donovan.
Barnes was satisfied with the results of his questioning, and Bosley agreed to leave the basement key on the premises for Charlotte’s use. After they left, Helene sank down on the sofa with relief.
“Oh, my word,” she sighed. “I was so startled when that huge man just let himself in the door like he owned the place!”
“I couldn’t tell you were frightened at all,” said Charlotte.
“Good on you for keeping your cool,” added Simon.
“Thank you very much. It seems we now have more information than we did be