A Killing in Antiques (9 page)

And I was right, so the day turned a little better, and I did fairly well at the one o’clock opening. No one-ofa-kind treasure fell into my hands, but I did acquire some first-quality stuff that suited my shop perfectly.

My second run-through was also productive, and it took the curse off the rest of my day at Brimfield. I had acquired far less than usual for the first day of the spring show, but the worst was behind me, and I could now concentrate on the treasure hunt.

 

I was back to Coylie before two, and helped him finish consolidating things in his truck. He packed it right up to the roof. My role was merely to hold a stack in place while he fastened it with straps and netting to keep it from falling when the truck moved. This arrangement opened up plenty of space.

“Is this yours?” I asked, as he stacked some of the inventory in the truck.

“The painted woodenware is Frankie’s. It’s not his thing, but he carries it because it’s available, and it sells. Artwork is what he likes to carry. Southwestern art. That’s packed tight at the other end of the truck.”

I took a close look at the woodenware, signs, decorations, and weather vanes painted in what must have once been bright colors. The even patina didn’t look right to me. It looked “antiqued.”

“Is this old?” I asked.

“It depends,” he said. “The wooden pieces are old, but the paint is new.”

I wondered how the folks that run May’s would like that. With all of their rules, they’ve fought the good fight to keep it an
antiques
marketplace. At one time, there was more effort to keep the whole Brimfield market vetted. To keep the goods sold here if not antique, then at least collectible.

Though their efforts were not completely successful, it has kept out most of the tube socks people and their ilk.

He showed me some of his inventory, and would have showed me more, but he was concerned about the time.

“So, what happened? Why’d Frankie have to rush home?” I asked.

“He didn’t say,” Coylie said. “But it was probably lady trouble,” he said. “Frankie has a lot of lady trouble.”

The truck was organized, and we had plenty of free space ready, so we set out to collect the items I had waiting around the fields. We made such quick work of it that Coylie insisted on driving over to show me the field where “our” space would be on Thursday morning.

That field is surrounded by chain-link fence, but today it was a simple matter to drive in. There were no guards, no paperwork to show, just a large empty grassy field with a few small outbuildings on it. He pointed out the spot where we would set up on Thursday. It was a great location, on a main path, not too far from the back gate, on the parking lot side.

We both admired the spot, and we agreed that if Thursday was a clear day, we wouldn’t even bother putting up the tent until after the first rush was over. We’d just pull the stuff out of the truck and put it on the ground, maybe lay it out on his Navajo rugs.

“Okay, Coylie, let’s go see Al Finn,” I said.

A
l Finn. She hated “Althea” and had us call her Alyssa, Athena, Tina, and who can remember what else. I’ve known her since grammar school. I can’t remember the precise year we met, but I’ve known her longer than anyone who’s not a member of my family.

“An old friend,” I said.

Except that I hadn’t felt too friendly toward her back then. As a matter of fact, if I were forced to tell the truth, I’d say that I was more than a little bit envious of her. But who’s going to force me to tell the truth?

“I was a little envious of her when we were young,” I said.

Coylie grinned, slammed the van door shut, and said, “You were young.”

I nodded and eased the van out to the edge of the driveway, where I waited until he pulled up behind me. Then we drove toward Al’s B&B, just over the town line. The van hummed, and as we turned off the highway I thought about Al.

By high school, she had become a willowy, honeycolored wisp, with huge liquid brown eyes. “Ethereal” would have described her had I felt comfortable using the word back then. Friends were enthralled, and adults were warmed by her sunny countenance. She was everything I was not. While she drifted here and there on a cloud, I thundered from place to place, a stampede of one.

I too had developed. But my metamorphosis came later and was more sudden than Al’s. One morning I was still the family’s little cannonball, the next I was the object of adolescent male references to a pair of bowling balls.

It was a stressful time for me, but soon after that I met Hamp. He bowled me over. He was a handsome college man serving as a teaching assistant while acquiring a graduate degree. Ten years older than me, he was a man among the boys that I knew. Our relationship calmed my postadolescent anxieties.

Coylie and I arrived at the road leading to Al’s place and turned onto a narrow lane. Old maples formed a dappled canopy, the road climbed steeply, and then the maples gave way to a tall evergreen hedge. At a break in the hedge, a pea stone driveway tumbled out to meet us. A nondescript aluminum mailbox planted at the junction disclosed that we’d arrived at “Al’s B&B.”

We turned our overstuffed vehicles onto the driveway, and once past the thick hedge took in the full view of the house, a big old Victorian on the crest of the hill. When I first saw it, years ago, it was a nightmare of decayed ostentation. Chipped and peeling paint covered the old ornate gingerbread. Moss coated the north-facing clapboards.

Al had inherited the house and some farmland on a wonderful old country road. It came with a barn that was in far better shape than the house. Best of all, it came along with a healthy purse. To everyone’s surprise, she chose to throw herself into the task of returning the house to its original beauty.

I think of Al’s house as the first significant disagreement between Hamp and me. I loved the place. Hamp hated it.

“She might as well throw her money out the window,” he said, often. “No matter how much time and energy she puts into that place, she’ll still end up with a dump.”

But when she was finished, he grudgingly admitted that she’d done a first-class job. I wonder now if he was fearful that I’d want such a grand place, too. But he did point out something I’d missed. He noted that during the renovations, which had taken almost two years, Al had changed. She, too, had gained substance as the house had taken on its rejuvenated form.

He was right. She’d handled the job skillfully, shaken off a mantle of inexperience, and taken on a more seasoned composure that’s hers to this day. Then she’d turned her thoughts to the rest of the property and to creating the business that had taken shape in her mind.

She still calls it a bed-and-breakfast, but I’m not sure that’s what it really is. It’s open fewer than thirty weeks a year. The rest of the year is her own. During the three separate weeks each summer that the Brimfield Antiques Show is open, individuals who have made reservations a year in advance can stay in the guest rooms, or in the small dormitory housed in the old barn. At any other time, the entire B&B must be reserved.

Her idea was a success from the start. She had a new building constructed, designed to look like another barn and suiting the location perfectly, but it’s not a barn at all. It’s a mini conference center with meeting rooms, a communications room, and all of the showand-tell space that businesspeople seem to need. That’s the segment she went after: corporations.

Al’s B&B is also a lovely place for a club or church group to rent while visiting nearby Old Sturbridge Village, or when leaf peeping in the fall. But it’s become a haven for corporate leaders and their minions to escape their glass and steel towers. Al gives them shelter from their inbred, confined community. Shelter that allows a quiet look at new ideas. She calls that a corporate retreat.

I love to visit the place. Coylie and I drove up the driveway. Halfway to the house the driveway splits into two spurs. One part loops by the front door, then curves back again toward the road, in a giant horseshoe.

We took the road more traveled, cruising by the side of the house and beginning a gentle descent into the backyard, where I drove directly to the older barn. This is where Al lends me storage space.

I pulled the van out of the way. Coylie backed his truck up to the door and jumped out. The door was locked. I didn’t have a key, but before I could walk up to the house and buzz myself in, Al emerged. She waved and called out from the porch, and I waved and helloed back to her. She stepped back inside, and in seconds we were buzzed in.

Soon everything was unpacked and stacked neatly in the storeroom. We’d emptied Coylie’s truck back to his own things, and the van was down to a few packing blankets, a carton of odds and ends, and Supercart. The whole job took less than twenty minutes.

Coylie and I walked up the hill to the back of the house. When I climbed the few stairs to the back door, I turned and pointed toward the west. Coylie, following me, turned back to look. I heard the intake of breath as he caught the panorama now visible above the trees that had screened our view down at the barn. A stunner.

Inside, the kitchen smelled wonderful, and Al offered us coffee and warm gingerbread. I introduced her to Coylie, and while she puttered with the coffee things I showed him around the first floor of the house, which wowed him.

“I’m never comfortable with Victorian,” he said. “But I’ve never seen it done like this. I could live with this.”

I grinned. “She doesn’t tolerate anything fussy. I think this is what you might call a minimalist’s interpretation of Victorian,” I said as we circled back into the kitchen.

“Enough about the Victorian furnishings,” Al greeted us. “Have some gingerbread, and tell me about the murder.”

“Bad news travels fast,” Coylie said. “Did you know Monty?”

She knew neither Monty nor Billy, but she suspected that I would.

“You know everyone in antiques.”

I rolled my eyes. “Not quite, but antiques is a small world, and a tight one. You probably know as many antiquers as I do, from your guests here.”

“Not even close. I have the same guests year after year, and they’ve gotten quite clubby. They come from some distance for the antiques show. But I did hear that Monty is from your old stomping grounds nearby.”

“True,” I said. Worcester, where I’d opened my first shop. “I still belong to the Dealers Association there, though we’ve lived on the Cape for eight years.”

“Well,” she said, “I knew that if there was a murder, you’d somehow get yourself involved in it.”

“I’m not involved,” I said. She always jumps to conclusions. But Coylie and I did tell her what little we knew about the murder and Billy’s arrest. I also explained that I had no intention of getting involved.

“There are people who might think that your trip to the police station was ‘getting involved,’ ” she said.

“There are people who are beginning to sound a little prissy,” I said.

Coylie was shoveling gingerbread into his face, but he was absorbing the conversation at the table, his eyes shifting back and forth between Al and me. Al had served the gingerbread warm, with warm applesauce over it, and a dollop of something that seemed like whipped cream on top of that. It was better than cream. Could anything be better than cream? It had a golden cast to it, and it melted on contact with the tongue, or the finger.

“What is this?” I said as I swiped my finger across the cream, and tasted it without the flavors of gingerbread or applesauce.

“It’s Maya Angelou’s recipe for Golden Whipped Cream,” she said.

“Oh? Did she drop by and give it to you?” I said.

“It’s in her cookbook. If you ever decide to read something, I’ll lend it to you,” she said.

“I read books,” I said.

“I mean other than the annual antiques price lists,” she said.

Coylie stood up, held his dish close to his face, and scraped the last of the gingerbread into his mouth.

“You ladies seem to have some issues, so I’ll just be getting on back to Brimfield, and I thank you for the fine gingerbread,” he said, nodding at Al.

Al and I looked at him. Often, people don’t get our relationship. We have no issues.

I was saved from trying to explain when Al said, “Lucy and I have always been as critical of each other as sisters, since neither of us has any real sisters to criticize.”

It was a brilliant explanation, and truer than anything I’d have thought up. Coylie laughed and said that he had plenty of sisters, and that we hadn’t even come close to sister-style criticism. Nevertheless, it was time for him to leave, and Al sent him back with a chunk of gingerbread for later.

Al and I visited through another cup of coffee.

“Do you ever come across rocking chairs that would suit the bedrooms here?” she asked.

“They’re all over the place, almost any style you’d want. How many do you need?” Long before I opened my first shop, I helped Al furnish the place with suitable antique furniture. Through the years she has asked me to help her upgrade items that were showing wear and tear, or sometimes just to provide some visual change.

“Sooner or later, I’ll probably want them in all of the rooms, but for now, two, or even three will do,” she said.

“Have I missed something? Did rocking chairs suddenly become hot items when I blinked?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “But a CEO who brings me lots of corporate business mentioned, in front of his subordinates, that the rocker I had in his room had helped him solve a problem that had been gnawing at him for some time.”

“Did he say what the problem was?”

“No, but almost as soon as he turned his back, one of his minions came to me and asked if he, too, could have a rocker in his room. And five minutes later another made the same request.”

I rolled my eyes, and asked if she had any price guidelines in mind.