by John J. Lamb
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
A TEDDY BEAR ARTISAN PROFILE
Afterword
One Hot Teddy
Uncle Dorsey was vague about how he’d obtained the Mourning Bear, saying he’d “found” it while on duty somewhere in Germany. Call me suspicious, but I can’t tell you the number of thieves I met during my police career that, when arrested for possession of stolen property, claimed that they’d “found” the hot goods.
Once Ashleigh was free to talk, I asked, “Hey sweetheart, do you know who owns the Mourning Bear they’re auctioning today? Elizabeth Ewell. Recognize the name?”
Ash’s lips tightened slightly. “I know of her. Liz Ewell is very wealthy, so she didn’t come into town very much to associate with us rabble. Thinks she can get whatever she wants.” Ash’s voice became increasingly surly. “Back in 1972, she decided that she wanted some land my daddy owned but didn’t want to sell, so she got a Richmond lawyer and went to court. She won only because she had so much money that she could have bankrupted us just by keeping it in the courts.”
There was an unholy light in Ash’s eyes and a dormant Virginia mountain accent emerged in her voice. “She called my daddy an ignorant hillbilly and said she hoped he’d learned his lesson not to cross his betters.”
“Maybe she’s changed. After all, she’s donating the auction proceeds to charity.”
“More likely trying to buy her way into heaven.”
“Want to hear something else interesting?” I lowered my voice. “As of about an hour ago, the Mourning Bear wasn’t here yet . . .”
Praise for John J. Lamb’s Echoes of the Lost Order
“Mystery fans, meet John Lamb, a former Southern California homicide detective turned author . . . you’re in for a real treat . . . Full of suspense, plot twists, well-crafted characters, and fun.”
—Martha C. Lawrence
“[A] compelling mystery by a dazzling new talent.”—P. B. Ryan
“Intriguing . . . a rip-roaring, rebel yell of a read.”
—Tracy Dunham
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
THE MOURNFUL TEDDY
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / August 2006
Copyright © 2006 by John J. Lamb.
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eISBN : 978-1-101-01060-0
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Dedicated with love, to our dear friend
Frankie Uchimura.
We treasure her unfailing friendship and
support, are inspired by her strength and
cheerfulness in the face of adversity,
and thank her for bringing sweet Bear into our lives.
Chapter 1
It was just before dawn on Saturday morning, the first day of October, and I again awoke to find myself in a strange bedroom . . . only this time my wife, Ashleigh, was gone. The background racket of Bay Area suburbia was also conspicuously missing: no omnipresent hum of vehicle traffic, no clatter of police or air ambulance helicopters, no sirens, and no popping sounds that left you wondering whether they were a backfiring truck or someone resolving a thorny personal problem with a gun. Instead, I heard a meadowlark trilling “hello-good-bye” and the robust rushing hiss of the South Fork of the Shenandoah River as it flowed past the front of our new home. The serenity was more than a little disturbing. Even though we’d lived in Remmelkemp Mill, Virginia for three-and-a-half months, the house and the region still felt alien to me, which I suppose, was to be expected since I’d spent the bulk of my life in San Francisco—the world’s largest unfenced lunatic asylum.
I wasn’t surprised that Ash had gotten up so early. Today was a big day for her because in a few hours we’d be driving halfway across the valley to the Rockingham County fairgrounds in Harrisonburg to exhibit her menagerie of stuffed bears, tigers, and lions at the Shenandoah Valley Teddy Bear Extravaganza. And, by this afternoon, we’d know whether her Miss Susannah S. Seraphim—a twenty-four-inch-tall pink German Schulte-mohair bear wearing a handsewn Victorian dress, straw hat, and wire-framed glasses—would be awarded the first prize in the artisan bear category.
Ash had collected and made teddy bears for years, but it wasn’t until we moved from California that she’d grown confident enough in her work to exhibit them for sale and enter them in a professional competition. I’m beginning to become somewhat of an expert on teddy bears myself and I think hers are appealing. More important, I’m damn proud of her for being brave enough to submit her work for critical inspection. Most people go through their entire lives fearfully dodging that sort of opportunity. It’s just one of the nine hundred or so reasons I’m madly in love with her.
I rolled over onto my back and considered trying to catch another hour of sleep, but then I smelled the delicious aroma of hot chocolate and my left shin began to throb as if someone was playing the boom-boom-boom rhythm that opens Queen’s “We Are the Champions” on my rebuilt bones with a ball-peen hammer. Half a dozen doctors have assured me that—after over a year—the pain is psychosomatic. Maybe they’re right, but that doesn’t make it any less real. Considering that Ashleigh and I have been married twenty-six years—and she knows me better than I know myself—I think I’ve done an excellent job of keeping my painful reaction to the scent of all things cocoa a secret from her. She loves her morning hot chocolate and I won’t be the one to take that pleasure away from her.
My name is Bradley Lyon and I spent twenty-five years with the San Francisco Police Department, the last fourteen as an Inspector in Robbery/Homicide. I’ll be forty-eight years old in July and, considering I had one of the most stressful careers in the world and we’ve just undergone one of the toughest years of our lives, I look about as well as can be expected. I’m a shade under six-feet tall, could lose about twenty pounds, and up until recently my hair was auburn. Now it’s mostly silvery gray—so much so that I’m often asked if I want the senior discount when Ash and I go shopping. I suspect the person who originated the myth that gray hair on men looks distinguished was a middle-aged guy whistling in the dark.
As I mentioned a moment ago, Ashleigh and I have been married for over a quarter century. That’s a geological epoch by today’s standards of matrimonial duration. We met back in 1977 in Northern Virginia. She was a student at George Mason University in Fairfax, and I was finishing up my three-year army enlistment as a battlefield intelligence analyst at Fort Belvoir. We fell in love, and although she’s smarter than almost anyone I know, she left school and followed me to the West Coast when I began to pursue my lifelong dream of being a San Francisco cop. Our marriage produced two children, both now grown and doing well. Christopher got his degree in viticulture and enology from UC Davis and works at a winery, in of all places, Missouri. Our daughter, Heather, continued the family tradition and is a patrol officer with SFPD, assigned to the Mission district.
The story behind why the odor of chocolate makes my leg ache is brief: Back in the early spring of 2003 my partner, Gregg Mauel, and I chased a murder suspect into Ghirardelli Square, a reasonably pleasant tourist trap featuring a large ice cream parlor and candy shop operated by the chocolate conglomerate. The plaza was crowded and we didn’t dare risk taking a shot at the guy, but he wasn’t real worried about where his bullets were going. His second shot pretty much obliterated an inch of my fibula and tibia as it tore through my left calf. I crashed to the pavement and Gregg did the right thing—he kept chasing the crook and eventually ten-ringed him. Meanwhile, I waited for the paramedics and writhed in agony while sucking down huge gulps of obscenely rich chocolate-laced air.
From that instant forward, I couldn’t endure the aroma of chocolate. I don’t care whether it’s a stale Hershey’s Kiss left over from last Halloween or a four-dollar Go-diva truffle—one whiff of the stuff and I’m transported back in time to that moment when a bullet shattered my shinbones like pretzel sticks. The ironic postscript is that the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company feels so bad about my being shot and crippled in front of their store that they send me a five-pound sampler box of their merchandise every month. Ash loves the hot cocoa mix.
Realizing that I’d never go back to sleep now, I climbed out of bed and got dressed in sweatpants, a plaid flannel shirt that Ash repeatedly threatens to throw away because it’s so threadbare, and tennis shoes. I glanced at my Irish blackthorn cane leaning against the wall in the corner of the bedroom and decided I’d leave it there for now. Then I stumped toward the stairway and began a slow descent down the steps.
Our new home was built in 1899, but it’s in excellent shape. It used to belong to Ash’s paternal greatgrandparents and it stands about twenty yards west of the river at the bottom of a wooded ridge. The house is constructed of brick painted white, is two-storied, and has a tin roof that, when it rains hard, makes a sound like the tap dance recital from hell. Upstairs, there’s our bedroom, bathroom, a sewing room, and what someday may be a guest room once we clear it of the boxes that we still haven’t unpacked. Downstairs is composed of a snug kitchen, dining nook, and living room. The house sits on the east edge of a 700-acre expanse of farm and pastureland jointly owned and worked by various elements of the Remmelkemp family, who’ve occupied this portion of the Shenandoah Valley since shortly after the Revolutionary War. And, as you’ll have deduced by now, the town is named after my wife’s family.
Our home looks like a teddy bear museum—not that I’m complaining, because I think it creates an atmosphere of warmth and welcome. Maybe I appreciate those things more than most men since twenty-five years of police work had taken me inside some pretty dreadful homes. Anyway, we own about 500 bears and at any given time about 300 are on display throughout the house.
Ash was so absorbed in her work that she didn’t hear me clump downstairs. She was wearing my flannel robe and sitting at the dinner table fiddling with a knotted blue fabric bow that adorned a brown bear togged out in an old-fashioned sailor’s uniform. As I scanned the living room, I could see she’d been busy. When we’d gone to bed last night, the thirty or so bears we were taking to the show were carefully packed in plastic crates, but now they were scattered on every horizontal surface in the living room and dining nook, evidence that Ashleigh had taken each stuffed animal out for yet another final inspection.
Even after being with Ash all these years, she’s still so lovely that sometimes the mere sight of her is enough to make me catch my breath. Yeah, I know that sounds like overripe dialogue from a romantic movie that ought to be accompanied by a rising swell of violins, but it also happens to be true. In her youth, Ashleigh was a knockout and she still draws ill-concealed and admiring stares from men. Her strawberry blonde hair is long and wavy; her skin is flawless, like a porcelain doll’s, and her eyes are an almost incandescent bluish-green that reminds me of the Pacific Ocean on a sunny summer afternoon. She’s got a Junoesque figure, which, as far as I’m concerned, is how a real woman looks. Those anorexic TV actresses and fashion models that are supposed to be the epitome of modern feminine beauty look like androgynous famine victims to me.
Finally I said, “Good morning, my love.”
Ashleigh looked up and showed her sweet smile that never fails to make my heart skip a beat. “Morning, sweetheart. How are you?”
“Wonderful.” I hobbled over, kissed her on the forehead, and did my best not to inhale the steam rising from her mug of cocoa. “How long have you been down here?”
“Since about three-fifteen. I woke up and just couldn’t go back to sleep.”
“Excited?”
“Nervous. Almost every major teddy bear collector and manufacturer in the world is going to be there today.”
“For the auction of that Titanic bear, right?”
“The Mourning Bear.” Ash made a frustrated sound and untied the fabric bow.
I remembered her telling me about the Mourning Bear almost a month earlier when the news first broke that one was going to be auctioned for charity at the teddy bear show. The black mohair bear was produced in 1912 by the German toymaker Steiff to commemorate the sinking of the Titanic and there were only 655 ever made. It was one of the most rare and valuable stuffed animals on the globe and that meant collectors from all over the world would be at the bear show.
“And they really think the thing is going to go for over one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand?”
“Oh, easily more.” Ash carefully retied the bow. “Three years ago, a Mourning Bear was auctioned in England and sold for ninety-four thousand pounds.”
“That’s . . .” I tried to do the math in my head. The last time I looked at the newspaper, the exchange rate was right around a dollar seventy-nine to the British pound. Then I g
ave it up and pulled the calculator from a kitchen drawer. A moment later I whistled and said, “That’s over one-hundred-and-sixty-eight-thousand dollars. Honey, you just keep right on making those teddy bears.”
She smiled and held up the bear so that I could examine the bow tie. “Does this look okay?”
I peered at the knot and decided it looked fine and told her so—but then again, I thought the first bow had looked fine too. However, I also knew that, regardless of my answer, she was going to keep retying the bow until she was completely satisfied that it was perfect.
Ash put the bear down and went into the kitchen. “Can I make you some coffee?”
“That’d be nice. Where’s Kitchener?” I asked, referring to our Old English sheepdog.
“Outside exploring.”
“You mean outside searching for something dead to eat. The Shenandoah Valley has turned our dog into a ghoul.”
This was new behavior for our dog—not that he’d ever encountered any carrion in our boxing ring-size back-yard in San Francisco. But now Kitch had three acres to wander in a place teeming with wildlife. Two weeks earlier, I’d interrupted him before he could dine al fresco on a dead groundhog and a few days after that he’d proudly trotted into the kitchen with a headless goldfinch in his mouth. Ash was horrified and I—the hard-boiled former homicide detective—was queasy over handling a dead bird.
Once the coffee was brewing, Ash asked, “You need some ibuprofen?”
“No. Sometimes it’s just a little tweaky in the morning. Maybe it’s the dampness.”
“Are you going to be okay today? I mean, if you want to stay here, I’ll understand.”
“Are you kidding me?” I took her hand. “I wouldn’t miss our first teddy bear show for the world. Besides, if I don’t go, who’s going to take the pictures of you when Miss Susannah wins first prize?”