Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954) (13 page)

“Here’s as good a place to start as any,” Abbott said.

They followed him single file into the falling-down house. As Abbott began to look around the piles of stuff that had accumulated
over the decades, Lauren stole a glance at Will. She liked to watch him work; his face was a mirror of the things he saw. A look of barely contained excitement came over him as he scanned the heaps and piles that, to Lauren’s eye, were merely old junk. She liked that these things—so dilapidated and without function—thrilled him. Looking at him made her share some of that thrill.

“Here we go.” Abbott cleared an old lamp and a kid’s racetrack off a big, solid-looking dresser. “This here’s an item I think you’d be interested in.”

Lauren moved closer. The dresser was a warm, chestnut brown. The handles were so simple they almost couldn’t be called
handles
. And the lines were smooth and clean—not an embellishment to be seen.

Abbott leaned a hip against the dresser and crossed his arms. “My granddaddy worked the dockyards in Massachusetts, round about 1910. His buddy come from a family of Shakers, and before they parted ways, the guy gave him this.”

Will pulled out a drawer and peered inside. “It’s in perfect condition.”

“Sure is,” Abbott said. “It’s a family treasure. But I’m fixing to clean out the place now. So it’s got to go.”

“Do you have kids?” she asked him.

“Two sons,” he said. He sounded tired. “They don’t live around these parts anymore. Both moved up north to New York City.”

She kept him talking about his sons and listened closely, all her senses attuned. Beneath the faint scent of engine oil on his skin, there was something else—vitamins. No, more than that. A medicinal sweetness. She wondered if he was sick.

Will, who was on his knees with his face nearly pressed to the floor, redirected the conversation back to the old dresser. “Got anything to prove the provenance?”

Abbott looked down at him. “Just my good word.”

“How much?”

“Fifteen hundred.”

Will laughed. “I meant how much for the dresser.”

“Twelve hundred,” Abbott said.

“This isn’t worth eight hundred bucks . . . even if it is what you’re saying it is.”

“You got reason to doubt me?”

“Where did you say your grandfather worked?” Lauren asked.

“Marblehead, Massachusetts. But then he come back to run a theater in Fredericksburg.” Abbott slanted his eyes at her; his expression wasn’t suspicious, just resigned. “I’ll let you think it over. I’m going back in the house to watch the race. C’mon in when you decide what you want. Then we’ll talk.”

Lauren watched as Abbott left. And then she was alone with Will. The quiet of the room settled between them.

She started forward.

“Let me see—”

Her ankle turned. She felt herself losing balance, the moments stretching out long. Will moved fast, two hands jutting out to steady her. They gripped her hard enough to hold her up. In a split second she’d glanced down to see that she’d tripped on an old toy fire truck. And by the time she’d raised her eyes to his, her equilibrium had returned.

“Thanks,” she said.

He looked into her face, holding her arms above her elbows. His eyes—his face—filled up her whole field of vision. Heat flashed through her. Her cheeks burned.

“Are you . . . 
blushing
?” Will asked, mystified.

Her face grew hotter. “It happens.”

“Why?”

She tried to tap into her most clinical poise. “Scientists aren’t sure exactly. Maybe we blush to show apology—so our bodies
prove that we mean what we say. Or maybe we blush because we’re angry at ourselves for something we did wrong. There’s lots of theories.”

“But you blushed ’cause you almost just fell.”

“True,” she said.

“God knows I’m the last person you should ever feel embarrassed around.” His hands were warm on the bare and sticky skin of her arms. “I like when you blush. You look . . . well . . . you look real. Not like how you look on TV.”

“How do I look on TV?”

“More fake.” His gaze wandered over her face, her neck, her shoulders. “I like you better this way.”

He let her go, and she felt a new kind of vertigo at the loss of his hands. She’d always embarrassed easily—since she was a child. She was even embarrassed by her embarrassment. But Will was right—he wasn’t the kind of guy who judged a woman for being what she was.

“Anyway . . . ” She tucked her hair behind her ear. “I think the chest’s a fake.”

“You know about Shaker carpentry techniques?”

“No. But I know about people. And I don’t think Abbott’s telling the whole truth.”

“Okay.” Will crossed his arms. “Spill.”

“You first. How did you know it was a fake?”

“Well.” He crouched down and ran his hands along the old chest of drawers. “There are a couple of signs here. First, there’s the wood. Wood warps and shrinks as it gets older, especially if it’s been left out in an old house like this. But here the joints aren’t raised at all, so I can tell the body’s the same now as the day it was made.”

Lauren looked closer. He was right. The wood was perfect. Too perfect—not a warped grain in sight.

“Second, it’s distressed, all right, but the distressing is a little too uniform for my taste. When furniture wears down, it happens in certain spots—not all over, all at once. This looks like somebody dirtied it up on purpose, but they didn’t think about
how
a thing gets dirty. The places that wood wears and doesn’t wear.”

Lauren crouched next to Will, her ankle giving her a slight pain. She was only beginning to realize that for all her skill in reading people, Will had spent his life learning to read objects. They talked to him, told him things they didn’t tell other people. Lauren was fascinated, not by the old dresser, but by the man.

“What made you get into antiques?” she asked.

He stood, and she thought he sneered slightly. “You mean you can’t just read my thoughts and know it?”

She straightened beside him. “You’re avoiding the question.”

“True.”

“Why?”

He paused for a long moment, then turned to look at her. His eyes were not accusing, not at all mean. But when he spoke, he hurt her—whether he meant to or not. “I’m not sure I want you to know.”

She kept her face as still as possible. She’d thought, over the last couple of days, that she and Will had been . . . establishing something, if only because they were spending time together and working toward one common goal: Arlen’s rehabilitation. Last night on the phone with him she’d told him things about herself that she’d been embarrassed to remember in the morning. But now she realized what a fool she’d been—to think that sharing a goal could make them friends. Will was civil to her, but he didn’t
like
her.

“How about you tell me something,” he said. “What exactly do you do these days? Because you’re not a lawyer, right?”

“Yes and no,” she said, and to her surprise her breath was shaky. She wanted to be as honest with him as possible. Any question he
asked, she would answer. He deserved that much. “Obviously I tried Arlen’s case. But after that, I got offered a job as a jury consultant. I help other lawyers pick juries and construct arguments.”

“What do you mean, you pick juries?”

“I guess it’s not really picking the ones we like so much as rejecting the ones we don’t. I research potential jurors. Then we reject the ones that we think might be biased against our clients.”

“You research people? Like a private investigator?”

“It rarely comes to that. Hiring a PI is the hard way of doing things. I like the easy way.”

“Which is?”

“The Internet,” she said. “We gather all the information we can from various social networks—you can tell a lot about people by who they follow on Twitter or what groups and organizations they ‘like’ on Facebook. Then I put the pieces together based on the composite profiles. Nine times out of ten, I can predict how a juror will vote even before the trial begins.”

“That’s why I used to see
you
on TV every six months, as opposed to some other jury consultant.”

“Yes. But I don’t really do TV spots anymore. It seemed—I don’t know—gross after a while. I didn’t get into people-reading for the publicity.”

He leaned against the dresser, crossing his arms. “So why did you get into it?”

She was quiet.

“Tell me the biggest reason.”

“The biggest reason?” She dragged a fingertip along a dusty mirror beside her, leaving a clear swirl. She understood now why Will had been so hesitant to talk to her about his love of antiques. Telling him about the facts of her job was one thing. But telling him why she did it . . . that opened a door she wasn’t sure she was ready for him to walk through. And yet, after everything she’d
done to Arlen, she had no right to hide. “Part of the reason is probably because of my brother.”

“Go on.”

“He’s got BPD. Borderline personality disorder. He spent some time in jail before we knew what was going on with him, which—of course—made the whole thing worse. Then when they let him out, my parents insisted he go into a private care facility for a while. But these days he’s doing okay.”

“Why was he in jail?”

She toyed with a clothbound book perched on a pile of boxes; it was soft with dust. “My mom got in a car accident with him the year he turned eighteen. I think I was twenty at the time. Anyway, he was fine except for a couple scrapes and stuff, but my mom was in pretty bad shape. My brother beat up a medic when they tried to put her in the ambulance.”

“Couldn’t they have used an insanity plea?”

“He hadn’t been diagnosed at that point. Plus, people often think that insanity means being crazy. But that’s not true. A schizophrenic can be declared totally sane.
Insanity
just means whether or not you can tell the difference between right and wrong.”

“In that case, I think we all have moments that we’re insane.”

She smiled bleakly. “They locked my brother up for five years. Five years of his life, gone. Wrong jury, wrong lawyer, wrong crime. It was the perfect legal storm—and my brother took the brunt of it.”

“And that’s why it hurt you so much to find out Arlen wasn’t guilty. Because of your brother.”

She rubbed her forehead. She thought of how strange it was to hear Will explain her to herself. And how strange it made her feel to know he wasn’t wrong. “All right, I confessed. Now it’s your turn. Are you going to tell me why you got into picking?”

He shrugged and smiled—a smile that didn’t entirely reach his
eyes. “I’d tell you ‘I do it for the money,’ but you know that’s not true.”

She smiled. “But the money’s not bad.”

“It’s helpful,” he said. “When I was in high school, I started picking and trading real hard. I made some lucky finds. I saved up enough to buy my building at a foreclosure sale. And that’s all she wrote.”

“That’s all?”

He shrugged. “I like old things.”

“I can understand that,” she said. He seemed uncomfortable, so she let it go. She felt pleasantly exhausted—refreshed, even—as if she’d just run a few miles. Talking to Will had felt good.

She walked back to the dresser and touched the smooth wood. “I hope you weren’t planning on buying this.”

“And why not?”

“Because I’m going to,” she said.

“But it’s not real.”

“I know. But I like it. And besides . . . ”

“Besides what?”

“Abbott needs the money.”

Will peered at her as if he couldn’t quite make out what was right in front of his face. “You just keep surprising me.”

She smiled. “What’s eight hundred bucks between friends?”

Arlen had seen the lawyer from his trial—his first trial—standing outside his building looking like a lost puppy, and since that moment, he’d been wrestling with a kind of surliness that had clenched him like an alligator doing a death roll with his mood between its teeth. Customers came into the store, one by one, and Arlen wasn’t the friendliest to them—the fact of letting them through the door struck him as friendly enough. He thought he
must have had on his death-row face, because a few people who wandered in made halfhearted attempts to bargain, then left with empty hands.

Now Arlen was alone in the shop—thank God. Men in suits were talking about sports on the television that Will had jury-rigged to sit on a platform near the ceiling, but Arlen hardly listened. The antiques store bored him; he preferred to be actively working, doing something or fixing something—as opposed to babysitting a pile of junk. He didn’t like being surrounded by so much stuff—so much of the past—as if the tide of clutter was growing and growing and would one of these days drown him.

He had to get out of here—he knew that. He needed to pick himself up. To get a job that wasn’t a handout. To start paying some rent. But now his name had been in the paper for last night’s unfortunate incident, and he’d be hard-pressed to find work outside of Will’s antiques store.

He was half watching a commercial for toilet bowl cleaner when the door opened and who should walk in but a preacher. He didn’t have the white collar or the getup of a minister or priest, but Arlen could tell right away that the guy was a man of God because of the way his eyes didn’t so much as touch any of the junk in the store, but instead landed right on Arlen and then lit up like Christmas morning. Arlen braced himself.

“What’d you want?” he asked.

“You must be Arlen. I’m Pastor George Scott.”

“Do I know you?”

“No. Well, not yet. Do you have a moment?”

Arlen sighed. “You don’t need to convert me or save my soul. I already believe in Jesus.”

“Glad to hear it.” George’s laugh was a little self-conscious. “But I’m not here to save your soul. Actually, I wanted to offer you some assistance. Of the financial variety.”

Arlen picked up the remote control and turned off the television. “I’m listening.”

The preacher walked up to the counter. He had sandy-colored hair that was thinning, and friendly, hazel eyes. His skin was pale white and had only just started to show its first wrinkles.

“We’ve got a fund,” George said. “Our parishioners are good people—generous people. And we’ve got a fund that helps convicts get back on their feet after doing their time. It’s wrong the way the system just drops them after all’s said and done.”