Antiques Roadkill (26 page)

For a moment, Jennifer had the stunned expression of a clubbed baby seal. Then she laughed, trying a little too hard. “I’m
sure!
Brandy Borne—undercover airhead!”

So I unbuttoned my shirt, exposing the tiny microphone taped to my bra.

“There’s a mike in the flowers, too,” I said, nodding toward the vase.

With a savage cry, she sprang to her feet, lurched across the table, upsetting the vase and the flowers and the drinks, long fingernails clawing at my blouse.

I slapped her face.

She pulled my hair.

I kicked her in the shins.

She jabbed a salad fork in my side.

It wasn’t very dignified, even as catfights go, and a kind of small-stakes payoff for a murderess who’d taken three lives and blown up a house. But we were both ad-libbing, and—off-script—you can only accomplish so much.

Joe Lange reached us first—which was a good thing because Jennifer, in her psychotic fury, was besting me. With some difficulty, Joe pulled us apart, then got her in a head-lock, and frankly he seemed to me to be enjoying himself just a little too much.

A plainclothes Brian Lawson, who had rushed in when the fight broke out, slapped handcuffs on Jennifer.

Mother, on the heels of Lawson, was ecstatic. “Oh, that was just
wonderful,
Brandy!” she trilled. “Your acting was
superb.
… You were so utterly, believably
pathetic.”

Peggy Sue, attending to my superficial side wound by applying pressure with a napkin, said wryly, “A little too believable, if you ask me.”

I looked at her and at Mother. “Well, it wasn’t a stretch. Anyway, I wasn’t really acting.”

Mother waved her hands as if they were pom-poms (or is that pons?) and pshawed. “Nonsense, dear! It’s in the DNA—the scene called for tears, and you summoned them up from sense memory. You had a
part
to play—to goad that woman into baring her horrid soul—and you performed it to perfection.”

Tina, who had also been offstage (so to speak), where she had made the phone call to Jennifer, appeared to give me a gentle hug and asked, “Are you all right, honey?”

I gave my best friend a mock-hurt look. “You said I stole
money
from you?”

She responded sheepishly. “Hey, I was supposed to gain Jennifer’s confidence, wasn’t I? And she never seemed to have
any
trouble believing
anything
bad I had to say about you!”

Jennifer, having been read her rights by a uniformed officer who’d materialized, glared at us as she was walked out of the restaurant. Even going out the door, her hard, hating eyes shot their green laser beams at me.

I shuddered—being hated that much was unsettling … particularly by a sociopathic killer.

Mother clapped her hands loudly. “Everyone! Everyone, please! May I have your attention?”

The room settled and all eyes went to Mother.

“I don’t believe individual notes will be necessary,” she said grandly. “But I do want to thank all of you for being a part of this production … which was, by any measure, a
complete success. And I look forward to seeing all of you at the cast party this afternoon, held at my daughter Peggy Sue Hastings’s home.…”

Sis goggled at her. “The what party? … Excuse me! Wait a minute …
What
party?”

“… So I hope you can
all
come, and we’ll wait together for the reviews.”

The reviews?

Had Mother finally lost
all
her marbles? Then I noticed a camera-toting, notebook-scribbling reporter from the
Serenity Gazette.
And on the periphery, a video cam was on the shoulder of a local TV cameraman, a good-looking female reporter at his side, her notebook at the ready, too.

Mother had arranged coverage for her directorial debut in the reality TV arena.

Officer Lawson was at my side, and touched my arm. “Are you sure you’re all right? We should have that looked at.”

I pulled the shirt up. “No, it’s fine … see? Stopped bleeding. Must’ve been a dull fork.”

He smiled at me—all the irritation gone. A nice, warm, maybe-something-more-than-a-friend kind of smile. After all, this time I’d been sleuthing and snooping with police permission.

I asked him, “You got it all on tape?”

“Every word.” Then: “Thank you.”

“Any time.”

He frowned. “No, Brandy …
not
any time. Promise me.”

“Well,
I
can promise you,” I said. “For my part—but with Mother? You never know.”

He glanced over at her, surrounded by friends and press and general admiration, and from his defeated expression, I knew he knew exactly what I meant.

A Trash ‘n’ Treasures Tip

If you see an item that makes your heart skip a beat, and the price is right,
grab it;
it may not be there ten minutes, or even ten seconds, later. At a flea market, Mother spotted an autographed photo of Errol Flynn, turned around to get my attention, and another lady stole it out from under her.

S
ometimes, at night, when sleep won’t come, I find myself going to a bad place where I think about everything that snowballed from my one night of irresponsibility. In this place, much of what Jennifer said to me, and accused me of, makes perfect sense.

And, sometimes, at night, when sleep won’t come, I wonder if Jennifer’s husband, Brad, finds himself in that same bad place, going through those same sad thought processes.

Thankfully, my medication doesn’t let me wallow there for long. And the odds are excellent that Brad and I will never compare notes on this subject.

About a week after the improvised one-act “play” at the Grist Mill Restaurant, a letter addressed to Vivian and Brandy Borne, in care of my sister, arrived … from the Serenity Safety Building, Police Department.

Mother—not waiting for me—opened it, then came running downstairs to my sewing-room hideaway, where I was playing with Sushi on the daybed, one hand under the protection of the blanket, pretending to be a striking snake, while Soosh didn’t pretend at all as she attacked it with her sharp teeth.

“Brandy!”
Mother’s face was flush with excitement, her eyes behind the glasses comically huge. “Chief Cassato has been kind enough to send us information about our antiques.”
She had to pause to catch her breath. “They’ll
all
be going up for auction tomorrow morning!”

I jumped off the bed, peered over her shoulder at the letter, and read the important part aloud: “‘Be at Klein’s Auction House at six
AM
sharp. Good luck, Tony.’”

I looked at Mother. “Where’s that?”

“About an hour’s drive from here.”

“Well, what are we waiting for? We’ve got to rent a trailer!”

“Can we afford anything?”

Mother had come clean with the insurance company about the contents of the house, so the two hundred grand for contents had been knocked down to about twenty thousand.

“We have to refurnish, don’t we?” I asked. “We have some insurance money to play with.… Certainly we can get
some
of our memories back!”

“Yes!” she said, and began to hop up and down. “Yes!
Yes!”

I resisted hopping up and down myself, but just barely, and off we went to rent our trailer.

That night Mother and I sat up late at the kitchen table trying to devise a game plan. We had lots to think about:
How many of our prized possessions would be auctioned? What dollar limit should be bid on each? Who should do the bidding—me or Mother? Would our emotions run amok? Would we overdo our bids on a few pieces and lose out on many other, more precious ones?

Peggy Sue and Bob weren’t going with us; Bob was leaving for a weekend business conference, and Peggy Sue said she had a social obligation she just
couldn’t
get out of (while this was true, I knew Peggy Sue could not face an antique auction with Mother and me) (could you?).

But the Hastingses didn’t hesitate to give us their opinions.

Bob: Keep within your budget, and don’t expect to get every single piece.

Peggy Sue:
Mother, the actress, should weep and moan whenever one of our items comes up for bid to get the sympathy of the crowd
(great advice coming from somebody who wasn’t going to have to witness that!).

In the end Mother and I arrived at the same conclusion: we were willing to spend all of that twenty thousand in insurance money to get back everything we could, however much, however little.…

It seemed like my head had barely hit the pillow when one of the two alarm clocks I’d set trilled on my night-stand. The other, across the room on the sewing machine table (a strategic placement that would force me to get up to shut it off), sang out shortly thereafter.

Four
AM
and all was well.

So far.

Mother was already up, and dressed.

Don’t ask.

All right, all right—as Lady Macbeth. I only hoped she could be as devious and cunning as her wardrobe; I was certainly willing to help wash any blood off her hands. I wore a sky-blue Grist Mill Restaurant T-shirt (they’d earned the publicity) and jeans and Rebox, wanting to look vaguely well off to an auctioneer but not threatening to other buyers.

After stopping for coffee and messy donuts, we headed north along the scenic river road, the pink sunrise magnificent, shimmering with promise on the Mighty Miss. Mother seemed lost in her thoughts, perhaps beating herself up a little for losing this stuff in the first place, but probably also girding her loins to make up for that lapse; I was concentrating on keeping my protesting car and the attached fish-tailing trailer on the road, peeved that I couldn’t go any faster than fifty-five.

At a quarter to six, however, we pulled into the gravel lot of the auction house, a large, tan-metal, no-frills affair set off between cornfields.

Except for a van parked along the side of the building, we were the first ones there. That was good—Mother and I exchanged greedy-little-kid looks. Then the Borne girls got out, stretched, and headed to the front door, which we, unhappily, found locked.

We glanced at each other, puzzled.

Was this the right day? The right time? Maybe
PM
instead of
AM?

Mother was digging the chief’s letter out of her purse when the gunmetal-gray door cracked open and an old man poked his head out.

“Are you girls the Bornes?”

The Borne girls nodded.

“Then come on in. Come on in!”

We followed the toothless gent inside—and it must in fairness be noted that this man who considered us “girls” looked like Gabby Hayes on the Western Channel—where he handed us a booklet listing the items that would be auctioned today. Then he ushered us over to a disturbingly large area of folding chairs, placing us in the first row, directly in front of a podium, and disappeared.

We were still the only ones there.

Mother whispered, “The auction must not start until seven.”

I grabbed her arm. “Mother!
Look!”

Among the vast assortment of items up for bid around the perimeter of the floor, I spotted our furniture, grouped together. We sprang out of our chairs and ran like the idiots we were, arms waving.

Standing in front of our roped-off antiques—labeled as Lot Number One—Mother clasped her hands.

“I … I believe everything’s here,” she exclaimed.

I consulted the booklet. Lot Number One was on the auction block first.

Showing the entry to Mother, I asked, “Does this mean our things will all be auctioned
together?”

Mother nodded, frowning. “It appears so, dear.”

“Then … then … we’ll being going home with everything, or … or—”

“Nothing.”

My heart sank into my stomach. So much trouble, so much excitement, and now … so much pressure. Glumly, we returned to our seats to wait.

But not for long.

At six-fifteen, a woman wearing a plaid shirt, tan slacks, western boots, and wielding a gavel, stepped to the podium.

I looked behind me.

Our butts remained the only ones in these chairs. Mother and I stared at each other with raised eyebrows.

The lady auctioneer dispensed with the microphone since we were six feet away, and announced, “Now auctioning Lot Number One.” She then read the contents of our former living room, dining room, and china cabinet, concluding with, “Do I have an opening bid?”

I was so flabbergasted, I couldn’t find my voice.

Mother, however, had hers and shouted, “Twenty thousand dollars!”

I stomped on her foot as if I’d spotted a particularly nasty-looking spider. Not acting at all, Mother screamed.

I recovered from my muteness. “Mother didn’t mean that! What she meant was
one dollar!”

Mother, aghast, cried, “Brandy! Our things are worth much more than that! Why, the Chippendale chairs alone are—”

I clamped a hand over her mouth. “One dollar!” I repeated to the auctioneer.

Mother bit my hand. And, not acting at all, I screamed.

But what I screamed was:
“One dollar!”

The lady auctioneer came to my rescue by breaking protocol and slamming down the gavel.

“Going, going, gone—sold for one dollar! Pay the man at the front desk.”

And, with a tiny smile, she exited the podium.

Mother and I sat in stunned silence.

Then Mother asked, “What just happened there? Other than you stomping on my foot, and me biting your hand—that Polident is a wonder, by the way.”

“I … I …
think
we just bought everything back—for one dollar.”

And then we threw our arms joyfully around each other and began to shout and babble in joy.

At the front desk, Officer Brian Lawson was lingering nearby, in plainclothes—wearing a yellow Polo shirt and black jeans and an elfin smile.

“Did
you
arrange this?” I asked, as Mother stepped up and paid Gabby Hayes one dollar.

“I’d like to take credit,” Brian said, “and maybe get on your good side. But our resident hard guy, Chief Cassato, bless his soft heart, arranged this private presale … just for you.”