Another Man's Treasure (a romantic thriller) (Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series Book 1) (11 page)

I’m so wound up after my date with Cal that it takes until two AM for me to fall asleep.  Consequently I don’t arise on Sunday until nearly ten, when a frantic Ethel leaps onto the bed and walks across my kidneys.  Staggering into the bathroom, I look in the mirror.  My hip new haircut is flat on one side, cow-licky on the other.  My eyes are ringed with black mascara.  A pillowcase wrinkle imprints my cheek.  Princess Audrey has disappeared; scullery-maid Audrey is back.

“C’mon Ethel.  We’ll take our walk, swing by Sol’s Bagels, then head out to visit Dad, okay?”  I haven’t been to the nursing home all week, and the information Mrs. Olsen gave me about the possibility that my mother was pregnant when she disappeared has been floating around me, like something I glimpse from the corner of my eye but can’t quite bring into focus.  I want to find out things only my father can tell me, although I dread asking.

Ethel embraces my plan wholeheartedly, as I knew she would.  I take a quick shower, mindful of poor Ethel’s urgent biological needs, then we head down to the bagel shop.  A Palmyrton landmark, Sol’s sells the best bagels south of Fort Lee and west of Newark.  The place is always hopping, and Sunday mornings are busiest of all.  I invariably run into someone I know there, but I’m praying today it won’t be Cal.  I’m not yet ready to see him again; I know I’ll have to work too hard to pull off a “fancy meeting you here.”  Besides, my jeans and UVA sweatshirt are a far cry from the slinky little black dress of last night.  Seductress is not a role I can maintain 24/7.

Ethel strains on her leash as we walk the three blocks to Sol’s.  She knows when we head off in this direction she’s about to get her favorite treat, a salt bagel stick.  “What do you think, Ethel, should we get a bagel for Dad too?”  Pre-stroke my father disdained bagels as carbohydrate bombs, but he looks terribly frail now and given the slop they serve him at Manor View, I think he might appreciate seven hundred kosher calories.  Ethel whines and pulls harder. 

When we arrive at Sol’s the line spills out the door.  The five or six sidewalk tables are all occupied and I can’t bring Ethel inside, so I tie her leash to a lamppost and get in the queue.  Used to total freedom, Ethel can be a little testy when restrained, but she clearly knows what’s coming her way so she lies down patiently to wait.  It shouldn’t take long—Sol’s countermen are famously efficient, and they don’t encourage idle chit-chat on Sundays.

I make it up to the bagel bin and practice my order: two everything bagels with cream cheese, two coffees and a salt bagel stick.  The counterman hands over one order, then makes eye contact with the woman ahead of me on the line.  This is her cue to speak, but she hesitates.

“Next!” he barks at her.

“Do the everything bagels have garlic?” she asks.  “I don’t like garlic.”

“Everything is everything!” the counterman shouts.

“Didn’t Nietzsche say that?” the guy behind me mutters. “Or maybe it was Kurt Cobain.”

“They have garlic,” I tell her, thinking to move things along.  Big mistake.  Now she’s agonizing between sesame and poppy.  I shift restlessly and crane my neck to look at Ethel.  I can only see part of her tail.  It’s not moving, so she must be fine.

Finally it’s my turn and I place my order. While I’m paying, I hear a crescendo of furious barking. “Shit!  That’s my dog,” I say as I slap ten bucks in the counterman’s hand, grab my order, and rush for the door.

“Hey, lady—your change,” he calls but I’m already darting through the crowd.  Ethel’s quite the libertarian canine—you do your thing and let me do mine—but when someone pushes her buttons she can turn fierce.  The tone of her barking worries me. I have visions of bratty kids poking their fingers in her ears and getting bitten for their efforts.

When I finally make my way onto the sidewalk, I see a crowd forming around the lamppost where I left Ethel tied.  A skinny woman in black leggings that accentuate her bow-legs is screeching while trying to pull a big bearded collie away from Ethel.  Ethel lunges at the hairball on four legs and succeeds in pulling out a good mouthful of gray and white fur. Maybe the big oaf tossed some doggy insult in Ethel’s direction.  She’s not one to turn the other whisker. Before I can reach Ethel, a powerfully built man in basketball shorts and a T-shirt grabs each dog by its collar and separates them by the span of his long arms.  Now the bearded collie owner is able to drag her dog away, so by the time I reach Ethel she has given one last “get lost, fatso” yelp and is wagging her tail sweetly at the towering referee.

“Thank you so much,” I say, taking Ethel’s leash.  “Ethel, what’s gotten into you?” I’m so busy scolding Ethel I barely glance at the man who broke up the fight.

“Trouble seems to follow you around, Ms. Nealon,” he says.

I stop fussing with Ethel to really look at him.  Short red hair, bright blue eyes, a neck as thick as my thigh.  I definitely know this guy, but from where?  Customer? Neighbor?  And what did he mean by that crack about trouble?

He unties Ethel from the lamppost and hands me the leash.  “There’s an ordinance against this, you know.”

Now it clicks.  Detective Coughlin.  I haven’t seen him since I was in the hospital, addled on painkillers. Looking at him in the cold light of sobriety isn’t making him any more appealing.  I remember what Cal said about police brutality.  Yeah, I can picture this cop knocking people around.

“I hear you called 911.  Someone broke into your condo?”

Crap—does he know everything?  “A misunderstanding.  No one broke in.  My assistant, Jill, has a key.  She moved some things without telling me.”

“Does Griggs have a key to your place?”

“No!  Why are you asking me all this?  I thought you were off my case.”

“Oh, yeah--how’s your string-pulling friend over at Democratic Headquarters?”

“What charm school did you graduate from, Detective?”

“It lost its accreditation.” 

I hand Ethel her bagel stick, effectively rewarding her for her bad behavior.  She settles down on the sidewalk with the chewy bread between her front paws and starts working it over.  What was I thinking? Now I’m stuck here with Coughlin. We both stare at the dog.

“You been okay?” Coughlin asks. “Nobody hassling you?”

“I’m fine.  Detective Farrand told me I can call to request a patrol car to escort me to the bank after my sale this week.”

“Good.  I told him to do that.”

Good grief, how childish men are.  Coughlin’s like the star quarterback who pouts when the promising sophomore gets put in the game.

“When’s the sale?  Where?” he asks.  His eyes, startlingly blue, lock with mine.  I hold the stare for a moment, until a strange uptick in my heart rate makes me look away.

Annoyed, I consider telling him it’s none of his business.  But Tyshaun will put up signs advertising the sale all around town and the ad will run in the paper and online, so Coughlin can certainly figure it out.  After all, he is a detective.  So I tell him about the Reicker sale.  While I’m talking, my gaze strays from Ethel to Coughlin’s gigantic basketball shoes.  I don’t think I’ve ever known a man with feet that size.  It’s hard to imagine how he can maneuver with those things.  The very act of walking must be like steering twin ocean liners.

“You expecting a big crowd?” he asks. He stands with his hands clasped behind his back, his legs slightly spread, like an at-ease soldier.  But his voice never loses that interrogator’s intensity.

“Yes.  Mr. Reicker had some nice antiques.  This will be a bigger sale than Mrs. Szabo’s.”

“That punk still working for you?”

I stare him down. “I don’t have any punks on my payroll. I’m lucky—if it hadn’t been for Tyshaun and Jill, I wouldn’t have been able to get my business back up to speed so soon after the accident.”

“Accident? What happened to you was no ordinary push, grab and run.  Someone’s angry at you.  Someone wants you dead.  You got any psycho boyfriends?”

“I went over this with Detective Farrand,” I say.  “Believe me, I’m not the type to inspire insane jealousy.”

Coughlin snorts.  “I saw a guy beat the crap outta someone over a three hundred pound chick with a mustache thicker than mine.  You never know.” 

“Gee, thanks for sharing.  I guess there’s still hope for me.”

Coughlin actually blushes.  “C’mon—you know what I mean.”

Ethel is busy licking the last crumbs of her bagel stick off the sidewalk.  Coughlin reaches down to scratch behind her ears.  Immediately she puts her paws on his waist to make his job easier.

“This is a good dog,” Coughlin says.  Then he looks at me.  “Keep her with you all the time.”

I can only imagine that, once inside a dog’s stomach, a bagel stick must inflate to monstrous proportions because Ethel is quite subdued on the ride to Manor View.  We arrive to eerily empty halls and a deserted rec room. Most of the inmates are down at the chapel for the weekly non-denominational service.  I guess having one foot in the grave must make everyone more religious.  Not my father, though. He’s never embraced what he calls “spiritual claptrap” and his stroke hasn’t changed that. I’m sure we’ll find him in his room, staring at the wall.  Ethel charges ahead of me, but before I get to the door of Dad’s room, she has already popped back out again.  That’s odd.

I step into his room and find it empty, the bed made, the lights all extinguished.  Where could he be?  I’m pierced by a shaft of panic. Could he be…dead?  Surely someone would have called me?  I scramble for my cell phone.  Maybe it’s out of juice.  Maybe I didn’t hear it ringing during the Ethel confrontation.  But it’s on and shows no messages or missed calls.

Just then an aide passes by.

“Excuse me—where’s my father?”

She looks left and right as if she expects him to be running laps around the nurse’s station.  Then she snaps her fingers.  “Oh, that’s right.  He’s out.”

“Out?  Out where?”

“He had a visitor who took him out for brunch.”

“Visitor?  Brunch?”  I couldn’t be more incredulous if she’d told me Dad had hopped in his car and driven to Atlantic City for an afternoon of blackjack.

“He’s allowed to leave,” the aide says.  Her tone implies she thinks it’s nice someone has taken him somewhere, since I never do.  Frankly, an outing has never occurred to me.  Why go to all the trouble of hauling him to a restaurant to sit in stony silence?  We can do that right here.

“Who took him out?” I ask.  So far as I know, no one visits him but me.  The aide points me to a visitor’s log book at the nurse’s station.  Someone named Brian Bascomb signed my father out at 11:00 AM and has indicated 12:30 as his estimated time of return.  That’s only half an hour from now. Ethel and I sit down in dad’s room to wait.

Brian Bascomb?  Is that name familiar? In the weeks after his stroke, Dad received a few get well cards from colleagues at the university, but the trickle of mail has stopped.  Seems strange that one of his co-workers would show up to take him out to lunch now that so many months have passed by.  Maybe Brian Bascomb is a long-lost friend from the early days of my parents’ marriage, back when Dad was some other man, brimming with sunshine and charm.  I hope Brian, whoever he is, is prepared for the Roger Nealon of today.

I eat my bagel and drink my tepid coffee and think about my father and mother. According to Mrs. Olsen, my mother had a job she loved. This is the first I’ve ever heard that my mom was at all career-driven.  To hear Nana and Pop talk, my mother was one hundred percent devoted to me.  June Cleaver, Princess Diana and the Virgin Mary rolled into one—that was the family party line.  Dad had never contradicted their portrayal.  But now that I really think about it, he never talked their talk either.  In fact, he was always stubbornly silent on the subject of my mother.  Pop said it was because talking about her was too painful for Dad.  And answering my questions about her was too painful for Nana.  And my being too curious “stirred things up.”

Pop was adamantly “anti-stir.”  I adored my grandfather.  As the family’s tidal wave of love, he compensated for my mother’s absence, my father’s coldness and Nana’s bouts of despair.  All he asked in return was that I not stir things up.  How could I refuse?

I glance heavenward.  Pop wouldn’t like what I’m about to do today.  Stick a giant spoon in the pot and stir, stir, stir.

“Look who’s here!”

I jump at the sound of a high-pitched voice fluting in from the hallway.  Dad is being pushed in his wheelchair by another of Manor View’s fleet of aides.  No Brian Bascomb to be seen.

“Two visitors in one day!  Aren’t you
lucky
?”

Judging from the expression on his face, Dad doesn’t feel he’s hit the jackpot. With a little effort, I can convince myself his wooden demeanor is due to the stroke.

Ethel trots over and gets as much of herself into the wheelchair as caninely possible.  Dad’s features soften as he strokes her velvety brown ears. 

“So,” I begin once the aide has left us, “you had a brunch date.  Did you have a nice time? Who’s Brian Bascomb?”

Dad shoots me a stealthy glance, but of course he can’t answer.  I retrieve the pen and pad from beside his bed and hand them to him.  He keeps his hands sunk into Ethel’s fur so I have no choice but to dump the pen and pad into his lap.