An Uncollected Death

by Meg Wolfe

shelf with 19th-century French writers, and found one book by Alfred de Musset, but no George Sand.

  “She was also known for her affair with Chopin,” said Helene. Maybe there are records or tapes of his music somewhere?”

  Charlotte wandered through the rooms, but saw no signs of music or anything that played music, other than the radio in the kitchen. A search in and around it proved fruitless, as well.

  “There aren’t a lot of homes where there is nothing on hand for playing music, especially if there was once a teenager living there,” said Charlotte.

  Helene looked perplexed again. “You’re right, now that you mention it. Olivia was crazy about jazz at one time, as I think I’ve said before. I don’t know if Donnie was a music buff any more than he was a sports buff, though. But I would have thought Olivia would at least have a few jazz albums around, if not classical.”

  Charlotte thought for a moment. In her experience, if someone was of a demographic that was highly likely to have a certain product, then there was usually a good reason if they didn’t have that product. “Maybe she did, but she either sold them, gave them away, threw them out—or Donovan got them.”

  “Oh, my!” Helene exclaimed. “I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe we should think about what else ought to be here that isn’t here.”

  “My thoughts, exactly. There’s so much stuff in this house, so many different kinds of things, that it might be easier. You were looking through an old ledger book the other day. How recent do they run?”

  Helene went over to the small bookcase and looked it over. “The last one in here appears to be several years ago—the year Ronson passed away, in fact, but let me see….” She thumbed through the pages of the last ledger, then slammed the book shut. “It goes up to about six months before he died. Simon is right. Ronson was the one who forced her to keep detailed expense ledgers, and when he got too sick to check up on her, she stopped.”

  “I think that is when he hurt her arm, and she wouldn’t have been able to write in the ledgers even if she wanted to. Even recently, writing so small would have been difficult for her, if not impossible.”

  “How awful. I feel like I’ve failed her by not knowing what was really going on, but I didn’t even know to ask the right questions. She was too proud to tell me on her own.” Helene looked around the room sadly.

  “What other things do you think should be here that aren’t?”

  “Well, let me see.” Helene sat down on the desk chair and looked around the room. “I know that she loved jazz, and of course to read and write. Ronson was every inch an Army man. He liked sports, in particular baseball. He collected baseball cards. He was a meat-and-potatoes—”

  “Baseball cards!” Charlotte interrupted. “I don’t think I’ve seen any baseball cards in the house, at least not yet.”

  “There’s something, then,” agreed Helene. “I will go through the ledgers, I can do that sitting down. That might tell us where the missing things have gone if Olivia entered their sales.”

  “Good idea. Work backward, from the most recent book. I’ll check the basement and the garage.”

  Charlotte went to the basement door in the kitchen, but discovered that the key was no longer hanging on the nail on the trim around the door, nor was it in the lock. She tried the doorknob again, and it was indeed locked. Perhaps Donovan had been down there and pocketed the key.

  She then decided to take a look around the garage, and went through the back porch. The oriental rug had been brought in from the back yard and was rolled up and laying across the stacks of plastic containers. She continued into the back yard and then to the side door of the garage, which was unlocked. She felt for the switch and turned on the light.

  It was a typical one-car garage for the neighborhood, barely large enough to contain the twenty-year-old beige Ford Taurus that looked as if it hadn’t been driven for the past ten, it was so covered in dust. There was a small workbench along part of the back wall, and tools hanging on the pegboard above it. Everything was typical—lawn mower, garden tools, hedge clippers, partial bags of grass seed, fertilizer, and concrete, a ladder, a rolled up garden hose, and here and there signs that Ronson went on fishing trips, including a small outboard motor lying under the bench and a fish net hanging on a nail by its frame. None of it appeared to have been disturbed in years. There were no boxes that looked as if they could have held baseball cards.

  Charlotte returned to the house and thought she heard Helene talking to someone. In the straight shot from the kitchen through the dining room she could see Helene standing near the desk in the living room, one hand on the back of the chair, and looking up and nodding with polite interest at someone Charlotte couldn’t see but whose voice she now recognized: Bosley Warren’s.

  A sharp wave of alarm ran through Charlotte’s stomach and throat, culminating in tension, and she rubbed the back of her neck as she tried to think of how to handle this, of what to do. Helene did not look worried or threatened, that was good. There was no other voice than Bosley’s, which indicated he was either alone, or with Donovan. Should she quietly sneak back outside? She didn’t want to leave Helene alone with that ape, but she was afraid that if Bosley Warren saw her, he would erupt violently. And why was he here, anyway? She pulled out her phone and called Detective Barnes, whispering her message to his voice mail.

  Helene must have seen or heard her, because she turned, smiled, and beckoned her to join them.

  Here goes, thought Charlotte, and she walked toward the living room, ready for a fight.

  “Charlotte,” said Helene, “I presume you know Mr. Warren?”

  As Charlotte came into Bosley’s view, his eyes widened and betrayed his own alarm, and his knuckles went white as he gripped his clipboard tighter.

  “You! What the hell are you doing here?” he snarled.

  Helene answered first, with a teacher’s calm authority. “My sister hired Charlotte to find her notebooks and transcribe them, and I’ve kept her on. She has found over half of them, but if your people keep coming here and moving things, it will become incredibly difficult to find the remaining notebooks, and thus fulfill my obligations as the estate administrator.”

  Bosley didn’t say anything for a few moments, and looked as if he was trying to decide on the right approach under the circumstances, glancing at Helene, then Charlotte, and back again. Helene remained calm, and kept her gaze on him steady. It seemed to be having an effect, taming Bosley’s inner beast to the point that he let out a deep breath, and set the clipboard down on the coffee table, rattling a set of keys attached to the clip.

  “This is real uncomfortable,” he said. “I was just informed this morning that we have a contract to do the Targman estate auction, but I’m not the one who booked it, and I’m usually the one that handles all the auction bookings. I came here to look over what all we were going to have to move to the auction barn, and found you, Mrs. Dalmier, which I’m cool with because it’s your signature on the contract. I also just learned yesterday that my brother was here last week, and was evidently assaulted in this very house, right before he drowned in that pond. Nobody tells me what’s really going on. I’m standing here feeling like a fool, and kinda insulted because everybody treats me like I’m an idiot. And not only do they not tell me what’s going on, they don’t tell me what’s not going on.” He turned to Charlotte. “I asked Ilona if you canceled that sale date I gave you, and it turns out you did. She just didn’t bother to tell me. My brother went missing. I was worried, and trying to handle his side of the business as well as my own. I know I shouldn’t’ve hauled off on you like that. I was there when they pulled his car out of the water. Everything’s spinning outta control.”

  Charlotte was taking all of this in, and didn’t get a sense that it was an act. Bosley really was at a loss. She decided to attempt a question.

  “When was the last time you were here?”

  He shook his head as if the question didn’t compute. “This is the first time I’ve
ever been in this house.”

  Helene and Charlotte looked at one another. Simon had said he was pretty sure that someone big like Bosley and someone shorter, like Mitchell, were in the house with Donovan the night Charlotte’s Jeep broke down. Could the big man have been Toley Banks’ driver, Doc?

  Charlotte looked again at the keys on the clipboard. One of them was an old-fashioned skeleton key, the kind that would fit the lock on the basement door. “So how did you come by those keys?”

  Bosley looked at them, then at her. “They were there at the shop, along with this order, signed by Mrs. Dalmier here.”

  “I didn’t have the keys,” said Helene. “I just signed a contract with Mitchell Bennett, who said he was authorized to do so for Warren Brothers.”

  Some of the mystery was clearing for Bosley, and he nodded slowly. “Yeah, Mitchell. He works for my older half-brother, who has a big stake in the shop. If Toley told him to do it, there’s nothing I can do to say otherwise. But it really messes with the schedule. Wes was the one who kept all this stuff straight between us and Toley.”

  “Do you know Donovan?” asked Helene

  He shook his head again. “That name isn’t familiar. Doesn’t mean I don’t know him, but I don’t know the name.”

  But Charlotte remembered something about the name. “What about Van?”

  This time Bosley’s face cleared with recognition. “Oh, yeah, I know a Van, yeah, he’s the skinny guy who—uh, yeah, Van T-something.” He paused as it sunk in, and he picked up the clipboard to read the auction order form again. “Ohhhhh man.” He muttered some invectives and looked at Helene as if he had received more bad news. “He’s the guy whose model train parts I bought at a swap meet. The O’Dair book was in the box.”

  Helene’s hand went up to cover her mouth.

  Charlotte was astounded. “The book was Olivia’s?” She looked at Helene. Was that what Olivia’s last words referred to, that the rare edition of Least Objects was hers?

  Bosley looked confused again. “Who’s Olivia?”

  “Mrs. Targman. She was Van’s mother,” explained Charlotte. Bosley looked suitably astounded, as well.

  “Well, I’ll be. Maybe that’s got something to do with why my brother was here. Maybe they were trying to get the book back or the money for it, and things didn’t go too well.”

  “No, they didn’t, Mr. Warren,” said Helene, who looked at him in grim sorrow. “My sister received the injuries that killed her, too.”

  As this sunk in, Bosley pulled himself together. “I got a feeling I shouldn’t be talking about this. I just want you to know, though, that the authentication process was all above board. I told the auction people how I acquired the book and showed them my copy of the sales slip. Van had a box of model train accessories that I bought without looking through it much, because it had a bunch of those crossing signals on top that I wanted, so I made him an offer for the whole box, and he agreed. He seemed happy about it. When I looked through the box back at home, I found the book at the bottom, wrapped in brown paper, and painted to look like a school or a factory or something, real little kid stuff. Anybody else might’ve thrown it out. But in my line of work, you look inside anything that can open and unwrap everything that’s covered, because you’ll never know what you’ll find. It looked like a first edition, and I asked Wes to check out, ‘cuz he’s the one who knows books.”

  “Did Donovan realize what happened?” asked Helene.

  “I don’t think so,” said Bosley. “At least, he never tried to get back in touch with me.”

  Charlotte tried to picture how events unfolded. “Did Wesley approach Mrs. Targman, or did she contact him? Or did he say what it was for?”

  Bosley shrugged. “I don’t have any idea who called who. If Wes went out on a valuation, it woulda been for books. We got another guy who appraises everything else for us. ‘Cept trains. I do trains.”

  Charlotte recalled her trip to the pawn shop. Toley Banks appraised the silverware, but it was the man called Doc who appraised the jewelry. She was about to ask if it was Doc when there was a sharp rapping at the door, and she went to see who it was.

  It was Barnes—and Simon.

   

  There was considerable tension at first, as Barnes had been prepared for trouble. But in the course of questioning him, Barnes relaxed slightly as he realized that Bosley was cooperating, and no longer a threat to Charlotte. Simon was less relaxed, but said nothing. He pulled together the pictures and videos he made to show the detective how things had been moved out of place—and how some things were even missing, particularly from the dining room and the curio cabinets. Since there was no sign of a break-in, and the door was locked when Charlotte and Helene arrived, someone had to have had a key, which implicated Donovan.

  Barnes was satisfied with the results of his questioning, and Bosley agreed to leave the basement key on the premises for Charlotte’s use. After they left, Helene sank down on the sofa with relief.

  “Oh, my word,” she sighed. “I was so startled when that huge man just let himself in the door like he owned the place!”

  “I couldn’t tell you were frightened at all,” said Charlotte.

  “Good on you for keeping your cool,” added Simon.

  “Thank you very much. It seems we now have more information than we did before.”

  The three friends considered the implications of the book having originally been Olivia’s. Helene thought it likely that Olivia would have tried to get it back—if she knew it was gone in the first place. But Olivia gave no indication in the weeks before her death that she was missing that book. Helene said her sister’s focus was on the notebooks of her own writing, and on eventually publishing them. If her copy of Least Objects was something Donovan used as a child to make a prop for his train set, she apparently didn’t value it enough to keep it out of his hands. Or perhaps she didn’t know he took it, and considered it lost or permanently misplaced. If the book was at the center of whatever altercation caused the deaths of Olivia and Wesley Warren, there were still a lot of unknowns, including who was the third party.

  Nonetheless, it appeared more than ever that Donovan was that third party. He was much more likely to realize he’d given away the find of a lifetime, if he had followed any of the articles and reports on how Bosley had acquired the book. If he was angry enough to throw a fit at Helene’s house, there was no reason he couldn’t get angry enough to do damage at his mother’s. Barnes had made it clear that, between Donovan’s outburst and the proof that things were going missing with no evidence of a break-in, there was sufficient cause to get a warrant for Donovan’s arrest.

  “What it doesn’t explain, though,” said Charlotte, who was slouched down on the wingback chair, “is what they’re still looking for. They’re taking random objects out of the dining room and curio cabinets. There’s no pattern there. But they’re moving a lot of stuff around without taking them, as if they’re looking for something in particular.”

  “Maybe it’s a smokescreen, or something to throw us off the track,” added Simon.

  “Well, if Donovan is arrested,” said Helene, “I will go to the jail and ask him myself. Besides, I think I know where Olivia got the money for his car—she and Ronson sold some baseball cards for several thousand dollars in 1998.”

  Nineteen

  Also Wednesday, September 18th

   

  Simon wanted to get on with making the rest of valuation video, and Charlotte wanted to see the basement before continuing working on the clues in the notebooks.

  The key to the basement door had a long shank and scalloped bow, which Charlotte grasped as she turned it in the old brass lock. The dark stairwell sent up a whiff of stale basement air mixed with moth balls, but it didn’t smell of anything that suggested excessive damp, mildew, or decaying mice. Charlotte could not abide the smell of a dead mouse stuck somewhere out of reach in a house. She tread down the stairs carefully, hanging onto the wood rail, into a cla
ssic old basement of the kind she hadn’t seen since early childhood. At the bottom, she pulled on a string that turned on a bare overhead bulb.

  A forced-air furnace on the opposite wall was new enough to gleam here and there in the light. There were stacks of cardboard and wooden boxes on pallets, a pair of workbenches with tools hanging on pegboards, a laundry area with a washtub and an avocado green washer and dryer set from the late 60’s, and a table made out of sawhorses topped with a sheet of plywood supporting stacks of more boxes and large items like a 50-cup coffeemaker. There were also dry-cleaning type bags filled with curtains and bedspreads, and a few boxes of toys from the 60’s, building block sets, and boxed games that were popular at the time, many of which Charlotte once played herself. Two medium-sized containers held several vintage model railroad cars in original orange Lionel boxes. Neither container was full, and Charlotte supposed that Donovan had been raiding it a few cars or props at a time.

  A darker area closer to the center of the house held the remains of an old boiler, which was near a raised area in the floor that ran all the way to the outside wall. There were cobwebs here and there, but nothing too awful.

  Simon had to stoop occasionally to avoid hitting his head on various pipes and beams. “Well,” he said, looking around slowly, “it’s not as bad as I feared it would be. Probably only because it was hard for Olivia to get up and down these stairs.”

  Charlotte nodded. “I don’t think anyone’s been down here for a long, long time, either, maybe not since her husband got sick.”

  “I’ll bring down the camera and stuff. Might as well get it over with.” Simon went back up the stairs.

  The basement really did look as if it were frozen in time. Some of the boxes on the pallets looked out of alignment, but it was impossible to say how, when, or why. Charlotte thought of her own basement, and how easily things got out of place when one searched for something that had been stored in a stack of boxes. Olivia’s boxes were labeled, for the most part. Some were even the colorful printed-cardboard storage boxes that were popular back in the 70’s and 80’s, which were labeled with writing on masking tape on the ends: Blue Bedroom Set, Pink Bedroom Set, Ron’s Uniforms, Coats, Tablecloths and Towels, Donnie’s Clothes, etc. Charlotte lifted the lid on one of the ones on top of the stacks, labeled Tablecloths and Towels, and saw nothing special, just various cloth and vinyl tablecloths and placemats with various kitchen towels and hot pads that coordinated with them, the vast majority in the green, yellow, and orange colors popular in the 60’s and 70’s. These were the things that Olivia and her family had used themselves, not things that she had collected just to collect them,