An Uncollected Death

by Meg Wolfe

animals, which were bought and sold for strangely inflated prices for a number of years before petering out as the market became saturated. She checked the ledgers for that time period. There they were: three lots of the stuffed toys sold for thousands of dollars, and two individual ones that sold for several hundred dollars each. The Targmans had unloaded their stuffed toy collection before the market for them crashed.

  Other items did not seem to do as well, and in fact some, such as Hummel figurines, were entered as sold for far less in the last two ledgers than they did in the earlier ones. Because the ledgers stopped before Ronson’s death, there was no way to tell for certain if Olivia had continued to sell off valuable collectibles in the past several years, or which ones were still valuable. Perhaps Detective Barnes could find out if Wesley Warren left any record of why he was going to visit Olivia that fateful night. Maybe whatever it was he was looking for—and didn’t get—was what everyone else was looking for? Yet nothing suggested itself. Charlotte made notes of what she found, in the event that she and Simon would find something of Olivia’s for sale at the pawn shop.

  Shamus suddenly reappeared, and Charlotte realized she hadn’t even noticed when he’d left. The big cat leaped up onto the table, rubbed his chin on the corner of her laptop monitor, then sprawled out on his side and began to give himself a wash. The night was chilly and windy, with a bit of a draft coming through the north-facing windows. She grabbed the throw off the sofa and wrapped it around her shoulders, and cobbled together something to eat while she sat and considered the entire Olivia problem.

  Was there any connection between Olivia’s hidden notebooks and whatever it was Donovan, Mitchell, the Warren Brothers, and Toley Banks were looking for? She was stumped. Then the thumb drive Simon brought over caught her eye, and she decided to take a look at it. If she could identify anything that was missing, they would know what to look for at the pawn shop, assuming Donovan took things to convert to quick cash, or someone else just plain stole them and the shop was fencing them.

  She had already seen the early pictures, the ones that showed Olivia prostrate on her living room floor. Then came pictures Simon took of each room on the same day, followed by the still shots taken on the day he made the first valuation video, and then the video itself. Some things were immediately evident—missing vases and serving pieces from the dining room, and a bit of thinning out on a couple of shelves in the curio cabinets.

  She made more notes and closed the video file, thinking that was everything, when she spied another file on the drive: “charmove.” Curious, she opened it.

  There were dozens of still shots, all taken on the day she moved. Shots of the house at Lake Parkerton, clowning around with Diane, Hannah’s painting hanging above the fireplace, Ellis’ piano, other works of art, her neighbors Ernie and Lorraine, Martin and Josh, and several of herself talking with Diane, standing alone on the deck with her red coffee mug, and getting into the Jeep for the drive to Elm Grove. There were actually quite a few shots of her that captured the mixed mood of that morning, looking forward and backward at the same time.

  There were several pictures of the drive to Elm Grove, including Bosley Warren’s billboard. At the apartment, there were funny pictures of her furniture being unloaded and brought up, quick snapshots. More refined ones came later, no doubt after Simon himself was done helping with the move. One shot caught her pensive mood, when she felt anxious about things getting out of her control, the mood she tried so hard to hide from others. Her favorite was a shot of herself and Helene watching the video Ellis had sent. Helene’s expression revealed her love for Ellis, something Charlotte hadn’t seen before.

  But Simon had noticed.

  Twenty-One

  Thursday, September 26th

   

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Charlotte!” said Helene, with a motherly sigh of exasperation. “If you needed a loan, you should have asked me, not pawn your lovely things!”

  This time Charlotte was in the brown leather armchair in Helene’s sitting room, somewhat slouched down, hair hanging limply on either side of her face, and looking not unlike Tenniel’s famous illustration of a sulking Alice in Wonderland at the Mad Tea-Party. She started to explain herself, but Simon, who was leaning against the archway to the kitchen with his arms folded across his chest and looking like he was trying not to laugh, jumped in first.

  “I can see why she didn’t, Helene. One doesn’t want to be a bother, especially if there are options, and especially when there’s actual cash money involved. Wouldn’t do to have it go sideways.”

  “I just hope it hasn’t gone sideways at that shop,” Helene retorted. “Charlotte, dear heart, I don’t mean to sound like a scold, I’m just worried for your sake, and the Warren Brothers are such bad news, as we all know now. Please let me loan you the money so you can get your jewelry and silver back.”

  “It’ll be a good cover story when we go and have a look around,” added Simon.

  “Okay, I’ll do it,” said Charlotte, nodding in resignation. It would be good to get the things back, even if she ended up turning them over to Martin Stanton to sell. “I spent a lot of time looking at the ledgers and the videos, and I have some idea of what objects are missing from Olivia’s house.” She looked up at Simon. “I’m glad you’re going with me, though.”

  “I was wondering,” added Helene, “if you should tell Detective Barnes what you’re about to do.”

  “I’ll call him and tell him on the way there. I need to give him an update, anyway.” Charlotte took a deep breath. “I need to give you an update, as well, some things I figured out last night.”

  Simon began to go into the kitchen. “I’ll put some coffee on, if that’s okay?”

  “Thank you, Simon,” said Helene, who then turned to Charlotte. “What have you learned?”

  Charlotte told her about the likelihood of a relationship between Olivia and Seamus O’Dair, and of Donovan being O’Dair’s son, supported by corresponding dates and the anecdotal references to O’Dair in Olivia’s notebooks.

  “This is the great secret of the notebooks, why they were hidden in the first place. I strongly suspect that Olivia did not read Least Objects until nearly ten years after its publication, when she received the boxes of books from your parents. It triggered something in her, causing her to write again. But of course,” she concluded, “the story she had to tell had to remain a secret.”

  Helene sat in silence as she absorbed this information. Finally she spoke. “Donnie does look just like O’Dair, doesn’t he?”

  Simon came in with coffees. “I’m wondering if anyone else has noticed this. But there’s a lot of people who think all redheads look alike.”

  “True. Anyway,” continued Charlotte, “I kept reading the notebooks. Olivia’s style is to replay certain key scenes, changing just a few words or details in each version in order to say something new about it. Some of the passages felt familiar, or some of the story did, especially about things that happened in France. Then it dawned on me, in one of those middle-of-the-night bursts of insight, why that was. They’re passages from Least Objects, except told from Margot’s—the main female character’s—point of view. And her point of view is very, very different than O’Dair’s.”

  “Oh, my word,” whispered Helene.

  “How do you mean, exactly?” Simon asked. “Is it a word-for-word sendup, or what?”

  Charlotte shook her head. “No, the familiarity is in the story told. The words are Olivia’s own. There’s a copy of Least Objects online at Project Gutenberg, so I was able to compare, and not just rely on memory.” She took a sip of coffee before proceeding. “Now, Olivia has also written many passages in French, which I can translate just enough to know that they, too, follow the pattern of retelling with small changes in words or details. What strikes me most, though, is that the story feels real, like autobiography.  In O’Dair’s version, Margot was caught in a lie about being part of the French Resistance, and was not only castigated,
but outcast. A lot of horrible things happened to her as a consequence. Olivia writes about the story of her marriage and life here in Elm Grove as if it were the same sort of cold horror, as if she was Margot.”

  “It sounds dreadful,” said Helene. “Perhaps we shouldn’t pursue this project, if my sister was delusional?”

  Charlotte shook her head quickly. “No, no, no. Don’t get me wrong. We might know that she thinks she’s writing about her own actual life, but as a novel, it stands on its own. There’s craftsmanship there. It was deliberate, not delusional—she knew what was fact, she understood that she was being relentlessly subjective—but she knew it could hurt. She didn’t actually want to hurt anyone, even though this was the story she had inside her to tell.”

  “Now I’m feeling sorry for her again,” said Helene. “So it is worth doing, then, this project? Is it worth transcribing and publishing?”

  “No doubt in my mind,” Charlotte asserted. “In fact, now I want to find that last notebook more than ever, both to confirm the reason she resumed her writing, and to add the critical first passages and chapters.”

  “That means keeping Donovan and Mitchell out of that house at all costs,” said Simon. “We can’t take the chance that they’ll do something to mess up finding that