Treasure Built of Sand (Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series, #6)

by Hubbard, S. W.

  “Yes, but here in Palmyrton. Not with the Ocean County Sherriff’s department that’s got Trevor’s case.”

  She’s thinking. I can practically see the wheels turning under her tousled, wavy hair.

  “Someone did kill Trevor.” I speak softly. “Who do you think it was?”

  Jeanine falls silent and studies her folded hands. She has a theory, I can tell. Will she share it with me?

  I wait.

  “Trevor’s grandfather. He was the last person to see Trevor alive.” She speaks so softly I have to lean forward to catch her words. “When he turned eighteen, Trevor was due to inherit money from his father’s estate. It was supposed to be used for his college education, but who knows if Trevor would have been well enough to go to college? Trevor’s grandfather was ashamed of him. He kept saying no one in the Finlayson family has ever had mental health issues. Ha!” Jeanine bangs the table with her fist. “That’s only if you don’t count being mean as a snake as a mental illness. Anyway, Arthur Finlayson had already started contacting lawyers to keep Trevor from getting the money on his birthday, but he wasn’t having much success.”

  “Whoa—you think Trevor’s own grandfather killed him for money? I thought the old man was already rich.”

  Jeanine picks at the cuticles of her bitten nail. “I told you—Trevor embarrassed him. And it’s not that Arthur wants the money for himself. He just wants to keep us from having it. That’s how spiteful he is.”

  “Who is us?”

  “The trust says that in the event of Trevor’s death the money would go to his siblings, and if he had no siblings, would revert to his grandfather. But the daughter I have with my husband Ken is Trevor’s half-sister.”

  “But Grandpa Finlayson doesn’t see it that way?”

  “He says Roxie isn’t a Finlayson. He’s afraid his precious money will go outside the family. The trust was set up at Trevor’s birth.” Jeanine turns her palms to the sky. “Who could have foreseen that Trevor’s father would die just a few years later? I got remarried—I was only thirty-two.”

  Jeanine bangs the table with her clenched hand. “The money should go to Roxie, Trevor’s sister. For years we spent money we didn’t have to get Trevor the best treatment possible. We sent him to Bumford-Stanley while Ken’s kids went to public school. We took things away from the others because we felt Trevor needed the resources more. That inheritance is a way to pay the other kids back.”

  “But that’s why the cops suspected your husband. Have you told them your theory about Arthur Finlayson?”

  “Yes, but they don’t think the old man was strong enough to kill Trevor.” Jeanine’s eyes dart from side to side. Her voice contains a frantic urgency. “But he could have paid someone to help him. And he has so much influence and power in Ocean County—it’s no wonder the police are ignoring him as a suspect and focusing on Ken and me. He’s poisoned their minds against us.” She falls back in her chair, exhausted.

  Jeanine is unraveling right in front of my eyes. I’m not sure what to do for her. Luckily, two women emerge from Caffeine Planet and come over to our table. One of them looks familiar from the funeral. She puts a hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Come on, Jeanine—we’d better get you home.”

  The other woman makes eye contact with me. “Jeanine saw you out here and wanted to talk to you. We’ll let you get back to your work now.”

  “Tell your husband what I said,” Jeanine says to me as she rises from the table. “See if he can help us.”

  The friend nudges Jeanine toward the sidewalk, then looks over her shoulder at me. “Sorry,” she mouths.

  Chapter 24

  Geez! That was some encounter.

  I wonder if the Ocean County Sherriff’s department is taking Jeanine’s theory seriously despite what she says about the cops? After all, she’s not the only person in Sea Chapel who thinks Mr. Finalyson is ruthless. The old codger used his influence to get his way in the dune construction debate, but that doesn’t mean he has a goon squad at his disposal. Sophia didn’t seem to think Grandpa Finlayson was dangerous even if he was disapproving. I really wish I knew what she told those cops.

  Stop it, Audrey! I give myself a virtual slap upside the head. I need to focus on my work, not my never-ending curiosity.

  When I pick up my iPad and try to resume my tasks, I see I’ve missed a text from the school resource officer. Fly showed up late for school today. I told him the woman who was with Sophia at the funeral was worried about her, and he says she went back to Sea Chapel this morning. But he also says he wants to talk to you. Can you drop by the high school?

  I clear my table with a sigh. The day’s already shot to hell. What’s one more distraction? Maybe if I finally get to the bottom of Sophia’s motivations, I can set my mind at ease and stage the Gardner sale with no further complications.

  Still carless, I start the five-block walk to my alma mater, Palmyrton High School. As I walk, a huge Lexus SUV slows beside me and the passenger window powers down.

  Immediately, I step away. Could this be Ray-Ray in a new vehicle?

  But a woman’s voice calls out to me. “Hey!”

  I peer into the SUV. It’s one of Jeanine’s friends from Caffeine Planet.

  “Did you tell Jeanine that you’re organizing a sale at Brielle’s house?” Her face is scrunched in doubt.

  “Yes, that’s what I do. Another Man’s Treasure Estate Sales.” I pass my business card through the SUV window.

  She studies it like it’s a scroll of ancient hieroglyphics. “Like the kind of sale where people come and walk through the house and buy stuff?”

  “That’d be it.”

  “Brielle? Is going to let strangers? Walk through her house?” The woman shakes herself like Ethel after she’s gotten caught in the sprinkler. “Brielle never even lets people she knows come inside her house! What day is the sale going to be?”

  “October 1 and 2.”

  “Wow, I’m marking my calendar. I’ll drive down to Sea Chapel just to see that!”

  She floors her powerful SUV and zooms into traffic.

  I don’t encounter anyone else I know on the final couple blocks of my walk. I turn the corner, and there it is: Palmyrton High School.

  The school has changed very little since the days I last haunted its halls seventeen years ago. The same big pile of dirty yellow brick, the same beaten down grass, the same double glass doors. Except, of course, today the doors are locked, and I have to be buzzed in by a security guard. Once I’m inside, the smell—sweat, floor wax, French fries—takes me right back to those four years of academic success and social misery. A shiver passes through me. Thank God I can’t be dragged back!

  The school resource officer meets me in the lobby and leads me to his small office. “Send Frankie Kelso down to me, please,” he says into his phone. We sit and wait for the boy to arrive. The cop is young enough and buff enough to impress teenagers, but old enough and tough enough to lend some gravitas to his role. I suspect he’s very good at keeping the peace and steering wayward teenagers away from a life of crime. We chat amiably as we wait.

  And wait.

  A look of annoyance passes over the resource officer’s face. “Maybe the teacher didn’t release him right away.” He picks up the phone and calls the classroom again. He doesn’t like what he hears.

  “Wait here,” he tells me, and strides out into the lobby. He’s gone for a good ten minutes.

  When he returns, his face is dark with annoyance. “The little weasel sneaked out the gym door. I found it on the security camera footage. What the hell is he playing at, telling me he needed to talk to you and then running off?”

  What indeed? What could have changed in the forty-five minutes between Fly’s expressing his desire to talk and my arrival? While the cop is angry, I’m worried.

  “Where do you think he went?”

  The cop holds out his hand and begins ticking off possibilities on fingers large enough to break Fly’s neck: the fountain
in the green, the duckpond in Weston Park, the train station, and the ever-popular Burger King parking lot.

  I’m not spending the rest of my day searching for the kid, and neither is the school resource officer. We agree that he’ll call me when Fly returns to school.

  “Leaving school in the middle of the day without permission—Frankie is looking at a good week of after-school detention for this stunt,” the cop grumbles.

  His words make me think of Sophia. “What would happen to a kid at Palmyrton High School who put a firecracker in a locker and injured another student?”

  The cop’s eyes widen in shock. “These days, anything even remotely resembling a bomb is a huge deal. Some kids were suspended for a week for planting alarm clocks around the school that rang at different times as a senior prank. Something that actually exploded would get a kid arrested and sent to juvie.” He squints at me. “Why do you ask?”

  “Just curious.” I thank him and leave his office thinking about how different Sophia and Austin’s world is from Fly’s. She did something that would’ve got her locked up in public school, and she was punished, or maybe I should say rewarded, by getting to spend her senior year at home drawing pictures and pretending to study physics.

  And between the two extremes stood Trevor, a kid with a foot in each camp.

  The big clock above the main door reads two o’clock as I leave the school building. I’ve managed to squander half the day. I vow to go directly to the office and work straight through until it’s time to meet Dad and Natalie for the Gregory Halpern performance tonight.

  My phone chirps. Sophia.

  I’m home now. Nothing to worry about. Can I still work at the sale this weekend? I really want to ☺

  I stare at my phone screen and feel my heart rate accelerate in aggravation. I can spend the next hour in pointless texting and unanswered phone calls seeking an explanation, or I can do my job.

  Fine. See you Friday.

  Chapter 25

  The Drew University auditorium is packed to the gills.

  In an impressive burst of afternoon efficiency, I managed to send out enticing emails to my customer list promoting both the Freidrich and the Gardner sales, while finding an early buyer for Brielle’s creamy leather sofa. I’m ready for a guilt-free evening of entertainment with Dad and Natalie.

  The audience surrounding us is a testament to the breadth of Gregory Halpern’s appeal: college students rub shoulders with people my parents’ age, and Jersey City hipsters mingle with staid suburban couples. There’s not an empty seat in the house.

  Soon the lights dim, the crowd hushes, and a single spotlight illuminates a wooden, straight-backed chair on the otherwise empty stage. As the theme music from The World in a Week plays, a tall, lean man with a mop of wavy dark hair lopes across the stage and into the beam of light.

  “Isn’t he handsome?” Natalie whispers to me.

  It cracks me up to see my dignified stepmother gushing like a middle-schooler at a boy-band concert. I wouldn’t say Gregory Halpern is handsome in the conventional sense. He’s too lanky and his nose is kind of beaky, but he certainly projects an aura that grabs our attention, even from ten rows back.

  For the next hour, Halpern holds us in thrall. He tells about his narrow escape from marauding Boko Haram extremists in Nigeria and his encounter with an isolated tribe who’d never seen a person in western clothes in the jungles of Borneo. Sometimes he perches on the edge of the chair; sometimes he spins it or crouches behind it. When he talks about eating locusts, I feel like I’m crunching them in my own teeth. When he describes a slum in Mumbai, I can smell the filth. His long-fingered hands are so expressive. He stretches them wide and gazes up at the ceiling when he wants us to ponder the diversity of the universe. He steeples them under his chin when he wants us to focus on a small point.

  Halpern ends with a quiet story about a 101-year-old woman in a Vietnamese rice paddy. The spotlight goes out. The theatre plunges into darkness.

  When the house lights come up, the stage is empty. I feel unwillingly jolted back to reality. The colorful market stalls and frigid icebergs and lush jungles fall away, and I’ve crashed-landed back into a scratchy tweed lecture hall seat in New Jersey. The audience sits in stunned silence. Then a man leaps up and begins applauding. Soon the entire audience is on their feet, clapping, cheering, hollering.

  “Encore!” someone shouts. But Gregory Halpern knows how to maintain his magic. The only person who comes on stage is an employee of the university who thanks us for coming and directs us to the exits.

  “Wow! That was amazing.” I follow Dad and Natalie out of our row. “Thanks for inviting me.” I had considered taking two cars to the event because I didn’t want to get stuck at the afterparty, but now, I have to admit, I’m keen to go and meet the star of the show.

  “The party is in a reception room on the second floor of this building,” Natalie tells us. “I think we have to take the stairs on the far side of the lobby.”

  We mosey along with the departing crowd, then break free when the masses head out the main door as the select few head upstairs. At the door of the reception room, we join a queue waiting to show their VIP passes to a university employee who checks names off a list. Dad, Natalie, and I chat as the line shuffles forward until a commotion at the head of the line halts all conversation.

  “This is bullshit,” a young man shouts. “I paid fifty bucks for my ticket, and I pay a ridiculous amount of tuition here, and I deserve to get in.”

  “I’m sorry.” The woman at the door maintains a polite, patient tone. “As I explained, this is a private party. Admission is by invitation only.”

  “I left my invitation at home.”

  “Young man, your name is not on the guest list.”

  “That is such elitist crap! I need to meet Gregory Halpern. I have something important to tell him.” In his agitation, the kid knocks his backpack into the lady behind him. His Adam’s apple jumps up and down in his long neck.

  A burly security guard shows up beside the door monitor. “Step out of the line, son. Let’s talk about it over here.”

  The kid follows the guard into a corner, gesticulating and arguing every step of the way. My father shakes his head. “Students today have such an air of entitlement. That’s one thing I don’t miss about teaching.”

  After the incident, the line moves quickly and we’re soon inside. Gregory Halpern stands surrounded by a gaggle of admirers. They push their programs at him and beg for autographs. This is what I dreaded. I’m certainly not going to elbow my way through that crowd just to gush at him.

  “There’s Gregory’s mother, Lorraine.” Natalie waves and moves purposefully to the opposite side of the room toward a tall, slender woman her own age. Dad and I follow, and we’re soon chatting with the star’s mother and father. “Gregory gave a fabulous performance.” Natalie kisses her friend. “You must be so proud.”

  Lorraine beams. “Every time he does a show in New York or New Jersey, his father and I go. I’m always a nervous wreck when he walks on stage. I feel like I used to when he played for the high school baseball team. I’m praying he won’t strike out!” Her laugh peals out. “And at every show, I simply fall under his spell and forget he’s my son. I say to him all the time, ‘How in God’s name did you learn to do that?’ Right, Stuart?”

  Mr. Halpern, who’s got the same beaky nose as his son, shakes his head. “The kid spoke about ten words total in four years of high school. Maybe twenty in college. We don’t know where this comes from. I just pray it lasts.” He rolls his eyes. “Podcasting! It’s a fad.”

  Lorraine shoots her husband a dirty look. “Let’s celebrate our son’s success, Stuart, instead of waiting for him to fail.”

  I suppress a smile. Given that Gregory Halpern is in his mid-forties, this parental argument must have been going on for decades. Their son is a late bloomer, and the father hasn’t accepted that his son’s success will last. “Is this performance part of a tour?�
� I ask to change the subject.

  “A short tour.” Stuart takes a slug of wine. “Gregory has three weeks of podcasts recorded, then he has to go on the road again. Next stop is Nepal.”

  “Nepal! How exotic!” Natalie’s eyes open wide in wonder.

  “They have terrible earthquakes there.” Lorraine gazes across the room, where Gregory is listening intently to a pretty young woman. “If only he’d meet a nice girl and settle down.”

  Given that the secret to his success hinges on traveling to a new location every week, this seems highly unlikely. Parents’ dreams so often are out of alignment with the dreams of their kids. It took my father a decade to accept that I’ll never give up Another Man’s Treasure to get a PhD in math.

  “Ha! Don’t count on grandchildren from Gregory,” Stuart says. “By the time he gets around to it, we’ll be cold in our graves.”

  Man, Mr. Halpern is a real ray of sunshine!

  “I wish he could stay home longer.” Lorraine bites her lower lip. “He’ll be here in New Jersey for a week, with shows at Princeton, Monmouth University, and Villa Nova.”

  Natalie pats her friend’s arm. “Enjoy him while you can.”

  Lorraine cranes her neck to catch sight of her son again. The crowd around him is thinning, and he breaks away to come over to us. He hugs his mom and kisses her cheek, slaps his dad on the back, shakes hands all around. “Thanks for coming tonight.” His smile is warm and genuine.

  My father dips his head. “We’re happy to be here. We enjoyed the show very much.”

  Gregory won’t realize it, but that right there is a twelve on Roger Nealon’s one-to-ten scale of effusiveness.

  “Your show seems so spontaneous,” I say. “Is it different every time you perform it?”

  “Yes, I have a general idea of what stories I’ll tell, but each crowd has its own vibe. I read the room and change up the show as I go.”

  “Fascinating,” my father says. “I understand your next stop is Nepal.”