Another Man's Treasure (a romantic thriller) (Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series Book 1) (5 page)

Meatloaf and canned gravy.  Mashed potatoes. Overcooked peas.

My head turns away from the smell.  My eyes struggle to open but something holds them shut.  I wonder why I’m sleeping in a cafeteria.

“Reduce the morphine.  Keep an eye on her vitals.”

“And the shunt?”

I want to know who’s talking, what they mean.  I try raising my eyelids again but it requires too much effort.  Maybe later….

A cool dry hand holds mine.  “Audrey, Audrey—can you hear me?  Wake up, honey.”

Slowly, I drag my right eye open.  The left stays stubbornly shut. Pain radiates from the spot where someone seems to have hammered a spike into my temple.  A woman with short brown hair and a very ugly necklace is hovering right over me.  I struggle to bring her into focus.

Her face is friendly but not familiar.  The ugly necklace resolves into a stethoscope. I try to speak but my mouth is parched and my lips feel three times their normal size.

“You had an accident, Audrey.  You’re in the hospital.”  She swabs my lips with water.

An accident?  My mind struggles to process the information.  I remember working at a sale.  Yes, the sale at Mrs. Szabo’s house.  Taking the deposit…driving to the bank…looking for a parking spot.  What happened after that?  I look out the window.  The sun is shining brightly.  But wait, when I was looking for that parking spot it was dark.  How long have I been here?  Ethel.  My god, Ethel has to be fed, has to go out.

I struggle to sit up.  Pain knocks me back.

“Ethel,” I croak.

“Ethel?  Who’s Ethel, honey?”  The nurse is taking my blood pressure and writing notes on a chart.  “Is she someone you want me to call?”

“My dog.  She’s all alone. What time is it?”

“You’ve been here four days, Audrey,” the nurse says.  “But your friend visits every day.  She talks to you and I heard her say she’s got the dog and she’s taking care of it.  Don’t you worry.”

Four days?  I’ve been in here four days and Jill and Tyshaun have been alone in the office all that time? “I have to make a phone call,” I announce, struggling to sit up, ignoring the pain.  The room tilts and spins.

“Whoa, whoa.”   The doctor steps forward, easing me back onto the pillows.  “You were brought in with severe head trauma.  I had to drill a hole in your skull to relieve the pressure of your brain swelling up against the bone.”

“Wait—say again?”

The doctor launches into some long diatribe, of which I understand only every fourth word or so.  But I’m getting the picture.  I had brain surgery.
Brain surgery
.  The urge to struggle ebbs out of me.  I want…I want… I want someone here holding my hand.  Who wakes up alone after four days in a coma and a drill bit through the skull?  A tear slips down my cheek. I want my Nana.

The doctor pauses in his poking and prodding.  “Does that hurt?” 

I shake my head no, so he shines lights in my eyes, taps me with his little hammer and quizzes me on current events.  When I correctly identify the capital of New Jersey and the occupant of the White House, the doctor grudgingly admits my brain seems to be functioning. Impressed, he allows the nurse to disconnect some of the wires and tubes tethering me to the bed.

While they work on me I replay Saturday over and over, but each time

the movie in my head ends with me staring at an elderly couple getting into their car as I wait for their parking spot.  It’s like I’m watching a scratched DVD that’s stuck forever on that scene.

“How did my head get hurt so badly?” I ask.  “I was wearing my seatbelt.  Didn’t my airbag deploy?”

I watch as the doctor and nurse exchange a glance over my bed.

“Severe trauma erases your short-term memory.  Sometimes it comes back, usually it doesn’t.”  The pager on his belt goes off and he heads for the door.

The nurse straightens my covers and puts the TV remote within reach.  “It’s a blessing you can’t remember.  Nature’s way of protecting you.”

“Protecting me from what?”

She doesn’t answer, just follows the doctor out the door. 

Left alone, I go back to piecing together my memories.  Since I can’t get the tape to move forward, I scroll backward through last Saturday.  I replay Mrs. Szabo’s estate sale, from end to beginning: counting the profits, cleaning up, haggling, selling, setting up. And that makes me think of what I was doing right before I opened the door to the early birds.  I remember putting Mrs. Sazbo’s picture in my fannypack.  And I remember feeling for my mother’s ring in my jeans pocket.

The ring! I look down at my hospital-gowned body. Where are my clothes?

I struggle to sit up and am immediately felled by scorching pain.  Breathless, I search out the nurse call button and press frantically.

After an eternity, the same nurse reappears.

“What’s the matter, hon?”

“My clothes,” I croak.  “What happened to my clothes?”

“They were cut off you in the ER.”

“But where are they?” I ask again.

She takes my hand and pats it reassuringly. “The staff had to throw them away, hon.  They must’ve been soaked with blood. When you get out of here, go out and treat yourself to a nice new outfit.”

“Don’t care about the clothes.  My pocket.  There was something important in my jeans pocket.”

“Oh, that’s right here.”  She opens the drawer in my bedside table and holds up a sealed plastic bag.  All I can see is loose change.  Although I’m not in pain, my eyes well with tears.

“Here you go, hon.” She drops the bag on the bed and heads to the door.  “Everything they took from your pockets is in there. Except your keys.  The police took those.”

I snatch up the bag and stare.  A hair scrunchie, a linty cough drop, three quarters, two pennies, a dime.  And my mother’s ring.

Finally able to relax, I fiddle with the buttons on my remote control until I succeed in raising the head of the bed and switching on the TV.  Scrolling through the channels, I stop at the local news.  Maybe this will help me reclaim the days I lost.  A fatal fire in Paterson.  A tax protest march in Trenton. Some kids in Summit win a science award. 

The anchorwoman lifts a hand and adjusts with the earpiece feeding her instructions from the director.  “It appears that we’re going live to the courthouse.  Perhaps that indictment is about to be handed down.”

  The camera switches to on- the-scene coverage.  A crowd of burly cops surrounds a tall black man who ducks his head to evade the flashing cameras.  The cops push the prisoner forward. He looks up, apparently in response to some shout from the crowd.

Tyshaun’s eyes meet mine through the TV screen.

“You begin losing muscle tone within twenty-four hours of becoming bedridden.” 

I’ve spent the afternoon pushing an aluminum walker with Larry the physical therapist, an earnest young man with early onset male pattern baldness and a PT aphorism for every occasion. Shaking off his supporting hand as I head to the blessed solitude of my room, I sway and stagger like a drunk on a three-day bender.  Larry catches me.

I’ve taken an irrational dislike to Larry, blaming him for my inability to walk a straight line and for what I saw in the mirror when he took me into the bathroom. I look like the after picture in an exposé on botched plastic surgery.  A clump of hair has been shaved off the side of my head, my lips are purple and lumpy—forget bee-stung, they look tarantula-stung.  Both eyes are black and a long zipper of stitches runs across my forehead and down my temple.

As Larry and I turn the corner on the final leg of our journey around the fifth floor, I see a familiar black crew cut protruding from a giant, furry purple mohair sweater/sack.

“Jill!”

I shuffle toward her. 

“Ohmigod!  You look great!”  Her purple arms are outstretched and she’s jumping up and down in her gladiator sandals.  “I mean, you look terrible but great because you’re alive.  Oh, God I’m so relieved, I thought you were going to die for sure and I didn’t know what to do about the office and the customers and the next sale and your dad and Ethel and ..oh thank God!”

Jill is trying to fling her arms around me, a process made difficult by the walker rolling around between us.  Tears stream down her face, leaving long tracks of black eyeliner in their wake.

“Okay, okay, don’t cry.  It’s all going to be all right.”  Abandoning Larry, we make it into my room, and manage to sit down beside each other on the bed.  I put my arm around Jill and wait for her to stop sobbing.

“How’s Ethel?” I ask to distract her.

The question sets off another torrent.  “Ohmigod, it was so sad.  She was starving and frantic to go out and so glad to see someone she knew.  She drank all the water out of the toilet and knocked over the trash and ate some stuff she found in there and pooped in the laundry room but I cleaned that up.  She looked real guilty about it but I said look Ethel it’s not your fault you were stuck in here for almost two full days and you did what you had to do, know what I mean?  So she’s been coming to the office with me every day and I tell her how you’re doing and she says hi.”

Breathless, Jill scrubs at her teary face with the sleeve of her sweater, spreading eyeliner and purple fuzz from ear to ear.  A gush of affection wells up inside me and for the first time since I woke up in this hospital I think everything will be all right.  I feel able to tackle the tough question, somehow convinced Jill will be able to explain everything.

“What really happened to me, Jill?  Why have the cops arrested Tyshaun?”

“Ooohmyygaawd, I’m sooo sorry.  It’s all my fault…if only I hadn’t said that but I was so mad and I just said to the cop this would never have happened if Tyshaun had gone to the bank with her and the next thing I know they’re arresting—“

“Jill.  Stop. Right. Now.”  I take her snotty, smeary face between my hands and turn her head to look at me.  “Get a grip.  Slow down.  Start at the beginning and tell me everything.”

So she does.  Jill explains it was late Monday afternoon before she connected my failure to show up at work with the nameless beating victim featured on the news. She called the police and they took her to the hospital to identify me.  She says my face was so battered she only knew it was me was because she recognized my hair and my hands.  Then they questioned her for two hours at the police station.  Tyshaun wasn’t around for any of this because Monday is his day off.

“They asked me the same questions over and over again,” Jill says, cradling her head in her hands.  “Who owns the house?  How did we arrange the sale?  Who bought stuff?  How much money was in the deposit?  And I was so upset, I could hardly think straight.  I kept getting confused and forgetting and repeating. So they told me to walk through the entire day in my mind and tell them every detail.  And I did.  Because I wanted to help them catch whoever hurt you.” 

Jill bites her lower lip, her teeth clashing against the silver ring piercing it.  “I did something really stupid, Audrey.  I got to the part where we were counting the money and getting ready to go to the bank.  And I got mad because I thought, if only Ty or I had gone with you, none of this would’ve happened.  So I told them how Ty usually goes with you, but how he was in a rush to go somewhere else on Saturday, and how you let him off early.  And they made me say that over, like, three times.  And I didn’t realize what they were getting at.”

Jill’s eyes well up with tears.  “And then they went to Ty’s house and they asked him questions and searched his room and they arrested him and it’s all my fault.  I didn’t say I thought he did it, I just said he should’ve gone with you to protect you.  And I don’t know how everything got so messed up.  But now that you’re better you can tell them what really happened, and they’ll let him go, right?”

“I was going to ask
you
to tell
me
what happened.  Because no one in this hospital will give me a straight answer.”

“You mean you don’t remember?”

“The last thing I recall was waiting for a parking spot on Elm Street.”

“Elm? No, you parked in the municipal garage.  That’s where they found you…in the elevator.  And your car was on Level 3.”

I close my eyes and try to picture myself winding up the ramps in the garage.  Nothing.  I try to force an image of myself pushing the elevator button.  Nada.

“So someone grabbed all the deposit money from me in the garage?”

“And they took your fannypack too,” Jill says.  “You had no ID on you—that’s why they were calling you the Mystery Woman on the news.”

And I had no plans for the weekend, so no one missed me until Monday.  How sad is that?

Gingerly I touch the long track of my stitches.  “What did the mugger do to me, Jill?”

“They didn’t tell me anything when I came in to identify you, but the next day, when I was here visiting, a doctor came in with a whole group of medical students, just like on TV.  And he told them you were a case of blunt force trauma to the head with multiple lacerations. Those were his exact words.  And then he said a lot of medical stuff I didn’t understand, but one of the students asked what caused the trauma and the doctor said your injuries were consistent with being kicked in the head.  Several times.”

Jill pauses and stares at me anxiously.  I know she’s looking for some sign that all this information has started the projector rolling somewhere in my memory.  I’d like to reassure her.

But the screen remains blank.

I feel like I’m riding the waves on a rough surf day at the Jersey shore.  Every time I stand on the beach, a wave knocks me flat, turns me upside down and forces me to kick frantically to get my head above water.  But even when I’m rightside up, the painkillers I’m on encase my brain in sand.  I can’t think, can’t reason.

Was I the victim of a random mugging, or did someone follow me from Mrs. Szabo’s house, intent on stealing the money from the sale?  Is that someone Tyshaun?  Alone in my hospital room, I see Tyshaun’s restlessness on the day of the sale in a whole new light.  Rob me…maybe. He is, after all, a convicted thief.  Stomp on my head like he’s playing Whack-A-Mole on the Boardwalk?  I touch the bald spot on my head and lick my swollen lips.  No, it can’t be.  Never.  The brutality of the attack simply doesn’t jibe with the Tyshaun I know.  Funny.  Charming.  Hard-working.  Eager for a new start.  And yet…

“Detective Coughlin, ma’am.” 

A very large man has materialized at my bedside. Hard to believe a person this big could enter my room so silently.  “I’m the detective investigating your attack, Ms. Nealon.”  He extends a spade-sized hand but I have no desire to sustain further injuries and keep my hands under the covers.  “Do you feel well enough to answer a few questions?”

The truth is I feel absolutely exhausted.  The combination of my fifty-foot stroll with PT Larry and my visit with Jill has left me totally enervated.  How will I ever be able to go back to work lifting boxes and moving sofas when I barely have the strength to raise my hand?  But I can’t send this cop away.  I need to know what happened to me.

“Why did you arrest Tyshaun Griggs?”  I ask.

Detective Coughlin gives me one long, unblinking look, then pulls out his notebook and begins making name, rank and serial number queries as if I had never spoken. 

“Your home address? “

“419 Bishop Street. Did you find the money that was stolen?”

“The location of your business?”

“6312 Aspinwell Avenue.  What about my fannypack?”

“Make and model of the car you drive?”

“Green Honda Civic.  Who’s got my car?”

Coughlin takes notes methodically.  His huge hand hides the page as he writes.  His face is equally hard to read.

Finally he looks up.  “Tell me about Saturday.”

“My memory is a little spotty,” I explain.  “The doctor says that’s normal.”

“Do your best.”

There’s something irresistible about this cop, and I don’t mean in a sexual way because I’ve never been attracted to the burly football player type.  I mean he exudes a magnetic force that draws out information as if each fact were made of metal.  I want information from him, but I find myself talking to him about the sale, the deposit, the drive to the bank, my trouble finding a parking spot.

I leave out Ty’s eagerness to be gone at the end of the day.

“Was there anything unusual about this sale?” he asks. “Anyone acting funny, asking a lot of questions?”

Nothing unusual about the sale itself, but plenty of weirdness before the sale.
I’d honestly forgotten about the drugs in the kitchen drawer until just now.  I should tell this cop about the Ecstasy, no?  Maybe my beating has something to do with the drugs. But if I tell him about the drugs, I might have to explain the trunk and the ring I took from it and why that drove every other thought from my head.  Shit, this is so confusing!  I need to wait until I can think straight before I say anything more.

“Unusual about the sale?”  I hear my voice ascending in an Alvin the Chipmunk squeak.  “No-o-o, this was one of my smaller sales.  Some of the buyers were regulars, some were people I’ve never seen before. No one dangerous looking.”

When I finish, silence descends.  Coughlin sits tranquilly, like some meditating yogi.

And even though I know it’s a trap, I fall right into it.

“I know Jill told you that Tyshaun didn’t want to go to the bank with me. But you’re taking that all wrong. Tyshaun had a date, he was eager to get going.  I told him I didn’t need him to come with me.  I’ve made the deposit by myself many, many times.”

Again, that long, unblinking look.  “Did he tell you he had a date?”

This is tricky, because Tyshaun didn’t tell me anything.  I simply assumed sex was the draw pulling him out the door last Saturday. 

“He’s not in the habit of confiding his personal plans to me,” I tell the cop, aware that I sound like some tight-ass librarian. “What makes you think he didn’t have a date?”

“He has no alibi for the time of your attack, Ms. Nealon.  If he was with a woman, all he needs to do is give us her name so we can establish his whereabouts.  Can you think of a reason why he’s not willing to do that?”

Coughlin is waiting.  Waiting and staring like a cat who’s seen a mouse disappear into a crack.

I lean forward and stare back at him.  I see a man about my own age, with pale blue eyes and freckles that ought to make him look friendly, but don’t.  He has a neck as thick as a telephone pole and biceps that warp the pinstripes in his jacket.  I’m not afraid of him—why should I be?  But I can see he’s used to instilling fear in others. I don’t like that. 

I can think of plenty of reasons why Tyshaun doesn’t want to say who he was with on Saturday night.  Maybe he was out with a girl whose other boyfriend is even tougher than this cop.  Maybe he doesn’t want Coughlin hassling his friends.  Jail has taught Tyshaun that safety hinges on keeping your mouth shut.  He figures I’ll wake up and tell the cops who attacked me.  I can’t do that, but I can do the next best thing.

“Tyshaun doesn’t need an alibi, Detective. I don’t remember much about the actual attack.  But I do remember this: when I was already down on the floor of the elevator and the person was getting ready to kick me again, I saw the skin of his leg.”  I look boldly into Coughlin’s eyes.

“ It was white.”