Another Man's Treasure (a romantic thriller) (Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series Book 1) (2 page)

“Why’d she live in this shitty house if she had all that up in the attic?” Tyshaun asks.

Getting down on my knees, I sift through the jewelry. “I’ve seen it before—rich old people to living like they’re poor.”

My fingers trace a gaudy garnet and topaz bracelet big enough to encircle a gorilla’s wrist and a delicate strand of opals that would barely fit a child.  Two men’s watches, a strand of pearls, an ornate brooch, some gold door-knocker earrings: Even without a jewelers loupe I can see that much of it is average or low quality. Still, there’s too much of value to put out in the general sale.  I’ll have to get it appraised.

I sit back on my heels.  Drugs in the kitchen, jewels in the attic—Mrs. Szabo’s house is turning out to be far from the standard Number One.  I reach for my cell phone to call my client, Cal Tremaine, when something in the trunk catches my eye.

A ring, pearl and ruby set in a twist of yellow gold.

I pick it up and stare. The ring was designed to twine around a slender finger like a delicate flowering vine.  Very unusual. Very familiar.

Jill and Tyshaun and the hole in the ceiling recede to the distance.  The entire world rests in my palm.

The ring was made for a hand I know I once held. A hand whose touch I can’t recall.  A hand that took this ring to the bottom of a cold, cold lake.

Or so I’ve been told.

“Audrey?  What is it?”

“Yo, Audge—should I sweep this up or what?”

“What should we do with the trunk? ”

Their questions bring me back into Agnes Szabo’s bedroom. I take a deep breath and start barking out orders.  “Sweep up this mess.  Make sure all the jewelry goes back in the trunk.  Then bring it down and load it in my car.”  I have my phone pressed to my ear as I listen to the recorded voice of Mrs. Szabo’s nephew. “Mr. Tremaine, this is Audrey Nealon.  Please call me at your earliest convenience. We’ve encountered a problem at your aunt’s house.”

Then I head downstairs with the little ring folded in my fist. I sink into the lumpy depths of the sofa and study the ring some more.  There is a framed photo that sat on our piano my whole life.  An arty, black and white that shows a child’s hand clasped in a woman’s hand.  No faces, no bodies, just the two hands.  The child’s hand is mine.  The woman’s hand is my mother’s.  And the woman’s hand wears this ring, I’m sure of it.  The delicate leaf design etched in the gold, the flowers made from tiny rubies and pearls—exactly the same.  My work has taught me enough about jewelry to know this piece is no mass-produced shopping mall trinket.  What are the chances a ring just like my mother’s would be in Mrs. Szabo’s attic?

Slim.

I don’t know who gave my mother the ring; I never asked.  But I always assumed she must have been wearing it thirty years ago on Christmas Eve, when, despite a snowstorm, she went out to buy some last-minute gifts.  The next morning, when I came down to see what Santa had brought, I found policemen standing around the tree.  I was only three and there’s a lot I don’t remember.  Try as I might, I can’t summon up a clear memory of my mother that’s mine, and not some lore passed on to me by my grandparents.  But one memory is true in my mind: my father’s gray face and wild red eyes that Christmas morning as he paced around the house and pleaded with the cops.

They found her car later that day, covered with snow, the driver’s door open, twenty feet from Heart Lake.  The police speculated that she skidded off the road and slid down a short embankment.  Disoriented in the storm, she must’ve stumbled into the partially frozen lake instead of climbing back up to the road.  The snow—the biggest Christmas Eve snowfall on record in New Jersey—obliterated all tracks, so it was impossible to know for sure.  In the days following her disappearance, the weather got colder and colder.  The lake froze solid.  When spring came, they sent a couple of divers in.  Her body was never found.

I open my clenched fist. Thirty years without a body, but now her ring.  I contemplate what that means.  Her flesh rotting away, the ring sliding off the bare bone.  Jesus, this is morbid!  But I force myself to think it all the way through.  The ring somehow washes onto shore, even though nothing else of my mother’s—shoes, clothes, bones—has ever made that trip.  And Mrs. Szabo, sometime between her fifty-seventh year and her eighty-seventh, finds it.  Does that make sense?

No.  Back up, Audrey.  Apply a little logic here.  Maybe my mother wasn’t wearing the ring that day.  Maybe she left it behind in her bedroom, from which it was taken, sometime, somehow, by one Agnes Szabo, a woman I’ve never heard of until I was hired to clean out her home.

I hear Jill and Tyshaun clomping around overhead and I know I’ll have some explaining to do if they come down and find I haven’t inventoried a thing in the living room and dining room.  I slip the ring into my jeans pocket and pick up my clipboard. Moving around the room, I compile a list, but my concentration is shot.  I stare at a shelf full of books, but all I see is the rocky, overgrown shores of Heart Lake.  And the bare, ascetically tidy top of the dresser in my father’s bedroom.

No one found my mother’s ring in either place; I’m sure of it.

“Okay, Audrey, we’re done upstairs.”  Jill pops into the living room, still dusty but back to her chipper self.  “There are some vintage linen tablecloths in the hall closet.  Should I list that in the ad?”

“Huh?  Oh, sure, good idea.”

“What about the dining room?  Anything worthwhile in there?”

“Uh…I’m not sure.  I haven’t gone through it yet.”

Jill tilts her head and furrows her brow.  She’s not used to me slacking. 

I flounder for an explanation, then realize I’m not obliged to offer one.  I started Another Man’s Treasure so I could work entirely on my own.  No boss.  No staff. Success forced me to change my ways.  Usually I like Jill’s company but sometimes I feel crowded by her presence, her questions, her needs.  “Go ahead and start loading the van.  It’ll only take me a few minutes to finish up.”  When I hear the door shut my mind returns to the idea I was considering when Jill interrupted.

What other path could the ring have traveled from my mother’s hand to this attic? 

An answer looms in front of me, demanding my consideration, as pushy and hard to dodge as a street-corner prophet passing out tracts. 
My mother survived.

Can that be? 

As a child, I daydreamed that my mom would one day walk back in the door, carrying a shopping bag full of those Christmas presents she’d popped out to buy.  “Whew, sorry that took so long!” 

But as I grew older, that daydream lost its appeal.    If she were alive, why didn’t she come back? 

So by the time I was ten or twelve, I had firmly rejected the fantasy of the still living mom and replaced her with the frozen mermaid/angel mother dwelling forever at the bottom of Heart Lake.  Very occasionally she’d splash up to the surface, visible out of the corner of my eye.  When I spun around to catch a glimpse, back to the bottom she’d go. 

Eventually, she stopped rising.

Until today. 

Physically and mentally exhausted by my workday at Mrs. Szabo’s, I stagger through the door that leads from the garage into the kitchen of my condo, lugging the trunk of jewelry. It’s my house all right, but it’s never felt like home. 

Like so many of my possessions, my condo once belonged to a client, a young school-teacher who died tragically in a skiing accident.  I’ve never handled an estate sale that involved more crying relatives.  The sale was postponed three times, then cancelled altogether because her family couldn’t bear to part with a single thing that had belonged to her.  They cherished her books and clothes and pictures, even her paper towel dispenser and her doormat.  Their level of devotion made this condo seem bursting with warmth and energy.  If I were to live here I would surely launch my “real” life.

So I bought the walls that surrounded the young schoolteacher, but I didn’t buy her life. No cooking.  No entertaining. No seasonally adjusted welcome mat. I’ve never even hung curtains.  But life in my condo does offer one big advantage over the shared apartments and group houses of my twenties. Dogs are allowed.

Ethel comes charging out of my bedroom and dances around me on her hind legs. As I move into the livingroom, we fall onto the sofa for a protracted love-fest.  She shoves her pointy brown snout under my hand, demanding to be petted, while her brown and white tail rotates around and around in her signature circular wag.  Burying my head in her silky fur, I inhale her doggy aroma and thank my lucky stars, as I do every day, that I rescued her from the gas chamber at the shelter. 

And that she rescued me with her unconditional love.

I want to believe her affection is completely attributable our all-day separation, but face it—six-thirty is dinner time and Ethel can smell Kung Pao chicken a block away.  I sprinkle some Chinese carry-out over the kibble in her dish, but before I eat my share, I cross over to the bookshelf in the living room.

Staring at the framed photo of two entwined hands, I pull the ring out of my pocket.  The delicate vine, the flowers crafted of tiny rubies and pearls: identical, as I knew they would be. I swear I feel my mother’s cool soft hand on mine.

The ring of my cell phone drives the past away.  Mrs. Szabo’s nephew, returning my call.

“Cal Tremaine here,” the voice on the phone barks.  “What’s the problem?”

What a pussycat this guy is.  “I’m sorry to bother you at work sir, but we encountered some uh…irregularities… at your aunt’s house.”  My account of the pink pills in the kitchen is met with an annoyed grunt and the clatter of rapid-fire keyboarding in the background.

“High blood pressure medication,” Tremaine the multi-tasker says.

“I’m afraid not, sir.  These are street drugs.  Ecstasy.”

“But that’s absurd.  How would my aunt—”

“That’s not all.” The sound of typing has stopped. I’ve got his attention now.  “We found a chest full of valuable jewelry in the attic.”

“Jewelry?  My aunt never wore anything more than a wedding band and a Timex watch.”

“So you didn’t know about the jewelry?”  I feel my mother’s ring radiating heat in my jeans’ pocket. Will Cal Tremaine know how it came to be in his aunt’s attic? “I think I should have it appraised so we can get the best price-- “

Tremaine cuts me off. 

“Where is this trunk right now?”

“Here in my apartment.”

“Give me your address.  I’ll be right over.”

Ethel watches with head cocked and brow furrowed as I race around the condo, pitching shoes and sweaters and junk mail into my bedroom, while spritzing air freshener in a vain attempt to banish the Kung Pao aroma.  I’m not sure why I care what impression I make on this guy.  I guess I have a need to present myself as a legit grown-up, not some rootless girl living in grad-student squalor. His office is only a few blocks away, so the doorbell is ringing as I yank off my dusty sweatshirt and shrug into a v-neck sweater.

I fling open my door without even looking through the peephole.  What I see on the threshold blows me back a few steps.

Michaelangelo’s David in a thousand-dollar suit.

I’d been expecting someone like my lawyer—fussy and spongy with a comb-over and horn-rim glasses.  The disconnect is so great I lose the power of speech.

“Ms. Nealon?”  He smiles with considerable dazzle and extends his hand.  “Cal Tremaine.”  The annoyance he projected on the phone has been replaced with megawatt charm.

Reluctantly I offer my own hand, acutely aware of my ragged cuticles and broken nails.  We stand there mutely until Ethel bustles over and plants her paws on his thighs.  Sweet Jesus, she’s shedding dog-pound fur on his Armani pants.

“Ethel!  Off!” 

Stunned by my tone, her wagging tail droops and she slinks away.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Tremaine.  Please come in.”  

He follows me into the living room, where the chest sits in front of the sofa. Tremaine stares at it. I stare at him.  I realize now that he’s really not
that
good-looking, just well put-together.  On the phone he projected a “when-I-say-jump, you-say-how-high” confidence, but this seems to have abandoned him.  Gingerly, he reaches down and lifts the lid as if he’s expecting a wild animal to pop out.  The glittering snarl of necklaces, watches, rings and brooches winks at him.

A muscle in his jaw begins twitching. “You say you found this in the attic?”

I explain Jill’s trip though the attic floor and the scattering of the trunk’s contents.

His mouth tightens.  “So your assistants know what’s in this?”

“Yes.”

Tremaine sinks onto my sofa, props his chin in his hands and gazes at the trunk.  I want to ask him where the jewelry came from, how my mother’s ring happened to be in there, but I keep my mouth shut.  The minutes tick by.  Even Ethel finds the silence oppressive and lets out a little whimper.

When I can’t bear it any longer I say, “Look it’s no trouble for me to get this appraised.  I work with a very goo—”

“No.”  The single word is so loud that Ethel counters with a bark.

Cal swivels away from the trunk and meets my eye.  “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to sound so harsh.” He smiles, and this time it’s not the power-broker beam he gave me when he arrived, but a sweet, slightly rueful grin.  “I’ve been under a lot of stress lately. I’m the county chairman of the Democratic Party and I’ve been working what amounts to a second full time job on Spencer Finneran’s campaign for governor. You’re probably going to think I’m heartless for saying this, but Agnes’s death couldn’t have come at a worse time. The election’s only a month away.”

“In my experience, there’s really never a
good
time to die.”

He hangs his head, then looks up at me through his now-tousled hair. “Honestly, I’m not a horrible human being. Agnes was my great aunt, my grandmother’s sister.  I only saw her a few times in my life, at weddings and funerals.  Since I’m the family lawyer, I helped her draw up her will and she made me her executor.  She never had kids. This jewelry is a little…uh… family complication I wasn’t expecting.  I’m not sure I’ll be selling it, so I don’t want to appraise it now.  But I can’t deal with it until after the election.”

  In my line of work, I’ve learned all about family complications.  Relatives can come to blows over a hideous cuckoo clock or a chipped turkey platter, never mind a pile of jewelry. Even without knowing the backstory of Agnes Szabo’s treasure chest,  I can believe that straightening it out might cost Cal Tremaine hours of aggravation that he can’t afford right now.  And sparing my clients the agita of dealing with their dead relatives’ stuff is what my business is all about.  “I understand, Mr. Tremaine.  Would you like me to hang on to the trunk until after the election?  I could have it appraised once you’ve had time to consider your options.”

“That would be ideal, Ms. Nealon.” He hesitates on my name.  It’s pretty ridiculous to keep calling each other Ms. Nealon and Mr. Tremaine when we probably both watched the A-Team and Three’s Company growing up. 

“I’m Audrey,” I say.

“Cal,” he answers.

He smiles.  His two front teeth have a very slight overlap.  “Thanks, Audrey. I really appreciate it.”

I feel the ring in my pocket, a tiny little bump that’s pressing into me tormentingly, like the Princess and the pea.  I should pull it out right now, explain that I think it was my mother’s, ask if he has any idea how it came to be in his aunt’s house.  I glance over at the photo on my bookshelf.  The proof of my right to the ring is there, but who is more likely to claim that possession is nine-tenths of the law than a lawyer like Cal Tremaine?  I can’t risk losing the ring, not before I show it to my father.  If Cal’s leaving the trunk with me anyway, what difference does it make if the ring is in my pocket or thrown in with the rest of the stuff?  When Cal’s ready to deal with the jewelry, I’ll be ready to ask him about the ring.

In the meantime, I need another answer.  “What about the drugs we found in the kitchen?  How do you want to handle that?”

The smile disappears like someone pulled a plug and the hard-assed lawyer returns.  “You’re not suggesting an eighty year old woman was dealing drugs out of her kitchen?”

“Has her house been unoccupied for a while?” I ask.

“About two months. She was in the hospital before she died.”

“My assistant thinks a dealer may have been using your aunt’s place as a stash house,” I explain. 

Cal opens his mouth, then shuts it.  He sits on my sofa as motionless as a mannequin, but I can practically see the gears spinning beneath his perfectly trimmed brown hair.  Something seems to click and he focuses on me again. Now his smile seems a little forced.

“You found the pills today but you haven’t called the police yet?”

“I would’ve called right away, but I got distracted by Jill falling through the ceiling and the discovery of the trunk.” 
And my mother’s ring.
 

“So, the drugs are still in the kitchen?”

“They were when we left.”  I glance over at my phone.  “Do you want to call the police right now?”

He holds up a restraining hand.  “I can’t deal with the police right now--I have plans tonight that can’t be cancelled. Tomorrow morning is soon enough, don’t you think?  I’ll take care of it—you’ve already done so much.”  He pulls out his Blackberry and sends a text message, his thumbs flying over the tiny keys. A second later the thing beeps and he reads the incoming message.  Whatever it says relaxes him because the smile returns.  Then he springs up and holds his right hand out to me.  “I’ve been so rude, intruding on your evening like this.  Let me take you out for a drink and a bite to eat.”

Caught unaware, I immediately start floundering like the fat kid in swim class.  “Oh!  Oh, I don’t know…I’m not dressed.  I already had some Chinese—“

“You look fine.”  He grabs my hand and pulls me to my feet.   “We’ll just go to Hennessy’s. I’m meeting some people there.”

“Just Hennessy’s” is an oxymoron.  Ostensibly an Irish pub, Hennessy’s is actually a Manhattan interior designer’s fantasy of a place Dubliners might go to drink Guinness and sing weepy songs about the potato famine.  A million dollars worth of brass, glass and mahogany transformed an old beer garden into the hot gathering spot for Palmyrton’s movers and shakers.  I would need to spend a week at the mall, the salon and the manicurist before I would ever dare meet Cal Tremaine and his friends at Hennessy’s.

I pull my hand from his firm grasp.  “No, seriously—I have a lot to do tonight.  Quarterly tax filing due.  The IRS waits for no woman.”

“If you insist.”  He flashes that smile again.  “I’m not accepting this as a no.  I’m simply giving you a rain check.”