I bit my bottom lip skeptically as Monty pulled the door shut and leaned against the cashier counter. He coughed lightly into his flattened palm. “I’ve polled almost all of the members of the board about your renovation proposal.”
He waved his hand in the air, dismissing the look of protest he anticipated on my face. “Don’t worry, they’ll be fine with either an antiques shop or an accounting office.” He pumped his eyebrows up and down. “Or—a combination of the two.”
I stared at him sternly, my hands on my hips, as he sauntered around the counter and hopped up on a stool.
“The thing is, it’ll be best if you can get it over with at the meeting this coming Tuesday. Frank Napis—,” he paused for effect, “is out of town.”
I looked up at the ceiling, at a loss for words. Tuesday was only two days away.
“And, this will be the last meeting for the chairman. Gordon Bosco’s about to step down. Who knows how the dynamics will change once they bring in someone new?”
A cool breeze ruffled the curls on the top of Monty’s head as the front door re-opened. He whipped around, nearly falling off of the stool as he leapt up to greet the new arrival.
“Ivan Batrachos,” Monty gushed, jutting his hand out, “so good to see you.”
I was standing midway towards the back of the store, still hip deep in the pile I’d emptied from Isabella’s box. I could just make out the solid shoulders of the man anchoring Monty’s bouncing torso. I wound my way towards the front of the store to get a better look at Harold’s assistant as Monty continued to pump his arm up and down.
Ivan was the physical opposite of Monty. His hulking form loomed like a giant next to Monty’s slim figure. Rich, olive skin glowed with the same confidence as his smile, which he turned in my direction as soon as I stepped out from behind Monty’s springing frame. A narrow scar ran down the left side of his face, curving underneath his square jaw, the slight disfigurement only enhancing his machismo.
“Ivan Batrachos,” he said in a deep, movie actor’s voice, offering me the hand he had just pried loose from Monty’s clinging grasp.
I shook his hand, taking in the earthy smell of new construction and freshly cut, redwood planks.
“So, I hear you’re taking over the place,” Ivan said, the deep, dark wells of his pupils flickering with a thinly veiled intensity. “I was so sorry to hear about Oscar’s death. You’re his niece aren’t you?”
I nodded, surveying his brawny physique. Ivan was neatly dressed in a workingman’s uniform. A clean, white T-shirt poked out of the neck of his plaid, button-down shirt. His carpenter-style work pants were constructed of a riveted—seemingly bulletproof—canvas fabric, a fitting match to his steel-toed, combat-ready, work boots.
“You know, your uncle talked about you all the time.”
The comment knocked me off guard, and my throat caught, delaying my response long enough for Monty to barge back into the conversation.
“Ivan, I had no idea you worked for Harold Wombler,” Monty said brightly, desperately seeking Ivan’s attention. “Well, I’d heard rumblings of that, but, honestly, I refused to believe it.” Monty leaned forward conspiratorially. “You’re far too skilled to be indentured to that man.”
Ivan chuckled good-naturedly. “Oh, I’ve learned a lot from Harold—and he gives me free rein on my projects. I’ve got no complaints.”
“Perhaps I could give you a quick overview of our plans,” Monty offered, flushing giddily. He pulled out some of his sketches from a parchment tube, flourished the roll proudly in the air, and took them over to the counter near the cash register.
I leaned against the dental chair, watching the amused look on Ivan’s face as he followed Monty over to the counter. The turn revealed a thick mullet of golden brown, sun-licked hair that flowed over Ivan’s shoulders and swished several inches down his back.
“Oscar and I had discussed some renovation ideas not long before he died,” Ivan said casually as he leaned over the counter, waiting for Monty to unfurl the sketches on its surface.
Monty’s shoulders stiffened like a clothes hanger had been inserted underneath his shirt. His ears turned an abashed red.
“Oh?” His voice squeaked with strain. “You don’t say.”
“Oscar was going to fix up the Green Vase?” I asked, incredulous.
Ivan shrugged his loose, limber shoulders, causing a temporary rapid in the waterfall of hair. “Sure. He’d asked me to come by and look at the storefront. He wanted to do something simple to make it acceptable for the board and get Napis off his back. We tossed around some ideas—drew up a couple of tentative plans. It hadn’t gone very far.”
Ivan turned his head to look at Monty’s face, which had suddenly gone abnormally pale. “Let’s see what you’ve got,” he said encouragingly.
“Oh,” Monty said as if he’d punctured a lung. His long, sweating fingers clamped down tightly on his rolls of sketches. “You put together some proposals for Oscar?” he gulped, his voice pitching higher and higher.
“Yeah, but they were preliminary really,” Ivan said, flicking his hand dismissively. “Go ahead. I’m interested to see what you two have come up with.”
I tilted my head, puzzled at Monty’s sudden panic to show off his work.
“Look,” Ivan said consolingly, “I’m no Picasso.” He pulled a folded square of butcher paper out of one of his pockets and smoothed it on the counter. “Here’s what we came up with from before.”
I stood on my tiptoes to look over Monty’s frigid shoulder and Ivan’s firm, muscular one. With one glimpse I understood Monty’s paralysis.
Ivan’s sheet of sketches was almost identical to the ones Monty had created for me two nights earlier.
Chapter 8
“PERHAPS,” MONTY SAID painfully, struggling to clear his throat as he turned around to face me. “I should explain.”
Ivan glanced up from the sheet of sketches he’d spread out on the counter. From the quizzical expression on his face, he seemed unaware that his work had been pirated.
I sat down in the dental chair, a wave of suspicion surging over me. Monty approached me apprehensively, his face strobing blotchily from an embarrassed violet red to a colorless gray ash. He pulled a trembling hand through the curls on the top of his head.
“You see,” Monty gulped, beads of sweat glistening on his forehead, “it all started at the last board meeting.” He stuck a finger into the snug space between his neck and bow tie and tugged to loosen it.
“You know your neighbor, Frank Napis?” Monty tipped his head towards the southeast wall. “He’s the guy who runs the shop next door.”
I nodded, my expression still stoic, as Monty stepped closer to the dental chair.
“For the last several months—ever since Frank moved in there—he’s been petitioning the board with complaints against the Green Vase. He brought another one at the board meeting last week.”
Ivan cut in, his voice solemn. “There’ve been rumors that Frank was building a case to have the Green Vase condemned—so it could be seized by the city and put up for sale.”
Monty waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, Miranda would never let him get away with that, I’m sure.” He smiled reassuringly at my concerned expression. “Look, once you start work on the renovations, Frank won’t have a leg to stand on.”
I felt a worried tension winding around my shoulders. “So what happened at the last board meeting?” I asked.
“Right,” Monty said, slapping his hands together. “This time, Frank was complaining about Oscar’s gutters.”
Monty began to circle the room, the soles of his shoes clacking softly on the wood floors. “Everyone was there—except Oscar. I’ve never been able to figure out why Miranda let him get away with that.”
“And Gordon,” Ivan piped in. “The board chairman, Gordon Bosco, wasn’t there, either.”
“Oh, yes, I forgot about him,” Monty said, tilting his head thoughtfully. “He hasn’t been to a meeting
in ages—he’s been too busy. I guess that’s why he’s stepping down.”
Monty aimed a raised eyebrow towards the dental chair. “Gordon invested in a biotech start-up a while back. I think they made him CEO of the company. I hear they’re about to announce progress on a huge milestone. It’s all very hush, hush, of course.”
Monty thumped the rubbery cartilage on the end of his nose as his eyes glassed over. “You know, I’ve been wondering who they’re going to pick to take Gordon’s place. I’ve been thinking about tossing my hat into the ring.” His head swung hopefully back and forth between Ivan and me. “I’d make an excellent choice, don’t you think?”
Ivan averted his eyes from Monty’s questioning look; I stared up at the ceiling, the corners of my mouth curling skeptically.
Monty cleared his throat and resumed his pacing. “So, Frank claimed he’d suffered water damage in one of the back rooms of his building, because the water wasn’t draining properly from Oscar’s gutters.”
Monty streamed around a pile of boxes to give a knowing look at Ivan. “Mold. Nasty stuff—especially for old buildings.”
“Mmm,” Ivan hummed encouragingly, amused at the spectacle unfolding in front of him.
Monty turned back in towards the center of the room. “It was the same old song and dance—Napis whining that the Green Vase is a pit, it looks bad for the whole neighborhood, and Oscar never does anything about it.”
Monty skated through the room as he spoke, skidding to a stop in front of a gold-plated saddle Oscar had mounted on a sawhorse. He swung a long leg over it as he continued.
“Nobody was really paying any attention. They’d seen it all before.” Monty leaned forward in the saddle. “But not me. I keep a close eye on things.” He paused dramatically, swinging his leg up high in the air as he dismounted his wooden horse. “Alert and ready for action, that’s Montgomery Carmichael.”
Monty picked up a gold-headed cane from a nearby display case and began swinging it in front of him like a baton. I winced as the twirling cane narrowly missed a pair of fragile glass lamps. “Frank gets this facial tic when he’s worked up about something. The whole time he was speaking, his mustache kept jerking back and forth. I thought it was about to jump right off of his face.”
My forehead crinkled involuntarily. I was certain Frank Napis had not had a mustache the night I’d seen him closing up his store.
“Napis has a mustache?” I asked as Monty crept around the back of the recliner.
I heard the tip of the cane punch a lever on the back of my chair. A startled Rupert shot out from underneath as the chair kicked back. I found myself lying on my back, staring up at Monty’s pale face and froth of brown curls.
“Oh, he’s got a mustache,” Monty assured me. “A fabulous one,” he said wistfully. “It curls out on the ends and everything.”
I fed my arm through the slats on the side of the chair, trying to reach the lever to right it. Monty stared off into space, absentmindedly stroking the sides of his mouth, thinking about Frank Napis’s mustache.
“Moving past the mustache . . . ,” Ivan prompted.
“Right,” Monty said sharply, breaking out of his trance. He pushed in the lever, and the dental chair popped up, slamming me back into a seated position. “Frank left the meeting right after he made his complaint. He didn’t even wait to hear the board’s ruling. I thought that was kind of strange.” He shrugged. “They sided with Miranda, of course.”
Monty started another tour of the room as he continued. “Miranda slipped out of the boardroom not long after Frank. I had the suspicion that something was up, so I followed her outside.”
Monty paused, his eyes ping-ponging back and forth between Ivan and me. “You’ll never guess who was waiting for her.” He licked his lips and said in a lofty voice, “Oscar.”
I collapsed back in the dental chair, exhausted by Monty’s antics.
“They stepped away from the boardroom and walked down a side hallway. I slid around the corner and snuck into a room that runs parallel to the corridor where they were standing.” Monty’s eyes were ablaze, reliving his moment of espionage. “I crept into a broom closet and climbed up on a bucket, so I could see out of a vent. I had a perfect view—I was almost right on top of them!”
I gripped the armrests tightly as Monty passed behind my chair. He glided over to the cashier counter next to Ivan and hopped up on it, crossing his legs in front of him. “That’s when I heard Oscar tell Miranda that he’d found it.” He paused, a jubilant expression on his face.
“Found what?” Ivan and I asked in unison.
Monty cleared his throat. “Well, Oscar didn’t spell it out, exactly. But,” he paused, raising his forefinger in the air. “I have a theory,” he said smugly.
I sighed loudly.
“The tunnel,” Monty said proudly. “I think Oscar found the entrance to the tunnel.”
“Tunnel?” I asked, confused.
Ivan explained. “There’ve been rumors around here for years about a tunnel running underneath one of these old buildings—something dug out back in the Gold Rush days. If it exists, it’s probably just an entrance to the sewer system.” Ivan tilted his head in Monty’s direction. “Some people are obsessed with the idea, but no one’s ever found any trace of it.”
Monty nodded furiously up and down, his top leg swinging wildly back and forth off the edge of the counter. “Oscar told Miranda he couldn’t believe it had been right under his nose all this time.”
Ivan shook his head in disbelief. “You think Oscar found the entrance here? In the Green Vase?”
Monty leapt down from the counter, raced to the back of the room, and hopped up and down on the closed hatch. “The Green Vase has a basement! I never knew it had a basement. It’s not on any of the planning maps for Jackson Square. I checked this morning!”
Ivan raised a skeptical eyebrow at the bouncing Monty.
“Okay,” Monty spluttered defensively. “Oscar didn’t specifically say the word ‘tunnel,’ but what else could it be?”
Monty flounced his way back to the front of the room. “That’s not all—while Oscar and Miranda were talking, he took something out of his pocket. It was a gold metal piece, about four or five inches long.”
I eased myself up onto the edge of the chair. “Did it look like a key?” I asked softly.
Monty’s eyes bulged affirmatively. “Yes. Yes, now that you mention it, I’m almost certain it was a key!” he exclaimed, nodding his head up and down. He whispered excitedly, “Probably the key that opens the entrance to the tunnel!”
I tensed in my chair, wondering if there was any truth to Monty’s ridiculous story. His tale seemed as over the top as the rest of him.
Ivan looked perplexed. “What did Oscar do with the key?”
Monty’s voice dropped to a more solemn tone. “Oscar took out a small, white envelope, dropped the key into it, and sealed it.”
Monty’s watery, green eyes stared into my bespectacled ones as he gulped and pointed at me. “The envelope had your name on it. Oscar told Miranda to give it to you . . . in case something happened to him.”
Chapter 9
EVERYTHING WAS QUIET as the room swayed around me. Oscar’s envelope burned in my pocket, the heavy, metal key weighing me down like a stone.
“Happened to him?” Ivan repeated Monty’s last phrase. “What did Oscar think was going to happen to him?”
“Well,” Monty stammered. “I didn’t quite get to find out. You see, there was a disturbance . . . and then Oscar and Miranda left the building.” His eyes shifted downward, studying his left cufflink.
“What kind of disturbance?” I probed sharply.
A telltale blush rose up on Monty’s face. “Oh—well,” he shrugged in an unconvincingly offhanded manner. “Someone may have fallen off a mop bucket . . .” he said, his voice trailing off.
Ivan chuckled, the sound puncturing the stifling vacuum that had clamped down on the room. He held up his square of b
utcher paper. “I don’t understand what all of this has to do with my sketches.”
Monty shuffled around the cashier counter, avoiding eye contact with both of us. “I haven’t completely finished my story. You see, the last bit happened two days after the board meeting.”
Monty flopped dejectedly onto the stool and sighed. “I was working in my studio that night when I saw Oscar leave for his dominoes game. He used to play every other Thursday.”
Monty rested his chin on the edge of the cash register, his hound dog eyes beseeching us for understanding. “The front door to the Green Vase—it called out to me from across the street. I tried to ignore it, but it kept on tempting me.”
Monty stood up from the stool, his gaze lost in the rafters. He sang out in a high, falsetto whisper, “Mon-tee, Mon-tee, the tunnel’s over here. Come and check it out.”
I rolled my eyes, but Monty seemed oblivious. He trotted around the dental chair, his voice pitching with excitement. “So, I walked across the street—just to take a look. I was only planning to peek in through the glass.”
Monty placed his hand horizontally across his eyebrows as his eyes narrowed into slits. “But, when I put my head up against the door, it creaked open. It must not have latched properly when Oscar pulled it shut.”
Monty pushed one of his long, bony fingers into the air as if prodding a pillow. “I poked it—gently—and it swung open!” His arms flung outward, nearly knocking the glasses off my face. “Well, then I had to go in to look for the entrance to the tunnel. Imagine what might be down there!”
“Rats,” Ivan answered, ticking off a list on his fingers. “All kinds of insects, spiders, probably a homeless person or two.”
Monty circled Ivan and hopped back on the stool behind the counter, the obsessive light in his eyes undiminished. “If you think about it, since I was looking for the entrance to the tunnel, I wasn’t really breaking and entering.” He raised a forefinger towards the ceiling. “More like, cutting through. That’s hardly a criminal offense.”
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