by Medora Sale
Jeff came into the room, quietly, and sat on the floor beside his mother’s chair. “Agnes is asleep,” he said.
“That’s wonderful, dear,” said his mother. “You know,” she said, turning back to Harriet, “we’ve been thinking of adopting Agnes. Before Jane swoops down and takes her away to live with some hippie—”
“There aren’t any hippies anymore, Mom,” protested her son.
“Well—people like them. She’s very happy with us, isn’t she, Jeff? Babies need to be surrounded by familiar people, don’t they?”
“What would your daughter be doing in Skaneateles, New York, Mrs. Sinclair?” said Sanders, opening his mouth for the first time since they arrived. Everyone jumped and turned in his direction.
“Good heavens. Where’s that?” asked Mrs. Sinclair, wide-eyed with amazement. “Is it somewhere near Buffalo? She used to go down to Buffalo to shop sometimes.”
“No,” said Harriet. “It’s in the Finger Lakes.”
“I have no idea. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it.”
“Is there any other place that Jane might have gone to?” Sanders asked again. “Some place she liked, or felt safe in.”
Mrs. Sinclair shook her head. “I really can’t think of any place. I’m sorry I can’t be more help.” She paused, frowning. “You know, she left a couple of boxes here when she came to drop off Agnes before she went to London. You can look through them if you like. I don’t think there’s anything real confidential in them. That was quite a day,” she went on. “She just turned up and said could she store some stuff in the garage and by the way did we mind if she left Agnes with us? The way she might have left a kitten she’d found somewhere. You know—here, Ma, can you look after this for us? I was so startled I could hardly speak. Fortunately for me, I had the good sense to make her sign some papers: an authorization letter, saying I was the baby’s guardian, things like that. I could just see trying to take her to the hospital some night and being refused because I wasn’t her mother.”
“Now where?” said Harriet, getting up stiffly from her knees and looking down at a run in her second to last pair of panty hose. “I wish I’d worn my jeans,” she added ruefully.
“The restaurant for an early dinner, don’t you think?” John looked around the garage as if he expected more information to come popping up from the containers of weed killer and lawn fertilizer. “Just in case? It might be illuminating.”
“Not Mrs. Sinclair again. Still, it might be more illuminating than those damned boxes,” said Harriet, who had not as yet succeeded in getting the dust and grime off her most expensive set of “official business woman” clothes, spring and summer version. “I had hoped for something more fascinating than old high school yearbooks and letters. And at least we’ll get something to eat along with the eternal monologue.”
John shook his head. “The letters might have been more useful if you didn’t have all those endearing scruples about reading other people’s mail.”
“Not mail,” said Harriet, indignantly. “Love letters. I refuse to read love letters sent by my lover to the woman he—he was committing infidelity with at the time he was supposed to be faithful to me.”
“Committing infidelity with? Really, Harriet.”
“You know what I mean. Anyway—you could have read them.”
“No, I couldn’t. I’m just a driver and bodyguard, remember? Anyway, let’s go eat.”
The Sinclair family establishment was not the neon and fluorescent burger palace that Harriet had been expecting after seeing the house. It was located in an old commercial building that had been renovated some time ago, and referred to itself as the Meadows Inn. “It has pretensions,” said Sanders, looking at the menu in the window. “And a wine list.”
“Now I understand why Jane always gravitated toward restaurants to pick up a job. I thought she was just heading for the unskilled labor pool. My God,” whispered Harriet somewhat heatedly as they walked in. “It suddenly occurred to me. All those meals I threw together for everyone, and she can probably cook rings around me. She certainly never told me she knew one end of the kitchen from the other.”
“Conned, that’s what you were,” said Sanders. “But be charitable, Harriet. Maybe she was sick of cooking.”
The restaurant was empty of customers when they walked into the dining room. It was quiet, except for muted thumps from the back. Helen Sinclair was sitting behind the cash desk, entering figures into a large calculator. “Good heavens,” she said. “How nice of you to drop in. It’s early for most of our business, but I suppose you have to get back to Toronto tonight. Sit anywhere you like,” she added, grabbing a couple of menus and coming around to the other side of the desk.
By the time their orders had arrived, a few more people had trickled in, and the inn had lost its sepulchral emptiness. A waitress had turned up to relieve Mrs. Sinclair and background chat had begun to liven up the atmosphere. “It’s not a bad sort of place,” said John, looking around him, “but if I were Mr. Sinclair I would close the whole operation down for a day or so and put a coat of paint on everything. It’s getting scruffy around the edges, wouldn’t you say?”
“The washroom could use some upgrading,” said Harriet, with feeling. “Actually, it could use some cleaning too. I’m surprised. Mrs. Sinclair seems to be such a fanatic at home. People are strange, aren’t they?”
“Maybe Jane used to clean the toilets, and now that she’s left—”
“What a ghastly thought,” said Harriet, giggling. “So how many years would that have been?”
Their crude speculations were cut short by the arrival of the main course. “Nouvelle cuisine,” remarked John, looking down at his prettily garnished plate.
“Alas, yes,” said Harriet, trying a piece of the veal she had ordered. “It’s good, but it does carry the notion of delicate portion size to new heights, doesn’t it? No wonder poor Jane was so thin. Years and years of insufficient food—”
“—and hard manual labor.”
“It’s cruel to laugh,” said Harriet. “Maybe they’re on the edge of bankruptcy.” And with that they settled down to finish their delicate repast.
Lesley Sinclair double-locked the door of her New York hotel room and slipped the chain into place. It didn’t help the unpleasant pounding of her heart nor the heaviness in her chest and stomach. Nor did it drown out the sound of phantom footsteps pursuing her along hotel corridors. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and tried to calm herself the way she’d been taught. “The room is safely locked,” she murmured. “The hotel is guarded. I can walk to wherever I want to go.” Then, breathing deeply and evenly, she repeated, “I am safe in this place,” over and over until her terror was reduced to a tiny manageable lump in the back of her brain.
She shook herself like a dog coming out of the water and settled down to business. Yanking her cotton shirt out of the waistband of her skirt, she undid the flesh-coloured money belt concealed beneath it. She unzipped it and pulled out a stack of US currency. With grave concentration she counted it, slipped it back into the belt, and put it back on.
Once she had readjusted her clothes, she opened up the attaché case and took out the manila envelope. She slipped it into a plastic bag, folded over the top with great care, and taped it shut. That was the easy part. With the envelope in her hand, she began to look for a place to put it. All the locations that sprang to mind—taped to the underside of a drawer, taped to the back of a mirror, taped to the inside of the toilet tank lid—seemed to have serious drawbacks, not the least of which was that they would spring to the mind of anyone else looking for it as well. She bit her lip in anger and frustration, tasted blood, and reached for a tissue to mop it off her lip. With her hand on the flimsy paper, she stared at the tissue dispenser sitting in the wall.
She took hold of the metal framing and gave it a tentative pull, and then a strong tug. It cam
e away in her hand, revealing a neat metal-lined space, just large enough for a small box of standard-sized tissues. This metal-lined space, moreover, seemed to be fastened to the inside of the wall by a pair of Phillips-head screws. Back in the bedroom she grabbed her little tool kit from the suitcase and it was the work of a moment to extract the screws, tape the package to the inside wall, replace the tissue dispenser, and return the bathroom to normal.
Now she could consider going out to get herself something to eat.
The next morning, Lesley walked carefully along Thirty-seventh Street glancing up at the numbers on the buildings as she went. The morning sun had found itself a slot through which it could pour down on the buildings, picking out a railing here, or a particularly finely crafted shop window there, and coating the street in a golden light that turned the bits of paper skittering about in the breeze into part of the decoration.
She stepped delicately around a torn-up piece of pavement, looking elegant and self-assured, holding her attaché case firmly in her hand. She felt giddy with relief. After all, here she could be anyone. A lawyer, carrying million-dollar contracts to be signed; an editor with the manuscript of a potential bestseller in her hand. As long as no one mugged her—and even to her that seemed a remote contingency on this bustling narrow street on a sunny morning—she was safe in her anonymity. Anyway, she had to carry it around. What else was she going to do with it? Photocopy it? She glanced up at the numbers again. It had to be in the next building.
Then her fragile sense of security shattered with the rapidity of a fist through a window. Ahead of her, a man was leaning against the narrow strip of brick beside the shop window, her shop window, the one she had driven so far to reach. He was yawning widely. Suddenly she knew he had caught sight of her. He whirled around and began to stare, fascinated, at the dusty exhibits behind the glass. Why should someone be waiting, so obviously waiting, in front of this particular shop on this particular Monday morning and then seem to be so anxious to avoid her notice? Of course, there could be thousands of reasonable explanations. She couldn’t think of any, not at the moment, but there had to be thousands. She clicked past him on her city shoes to see if he would follow her. At the window of a bookshop she stopped to examine the terrain behind her. He had disappeared. Clearly it had been a false alarm. Still, it had been a useful one. She was going to have to find means of protecting herself. And a more secure place to store it than either in the attaché case or behind the tissue dispenser.
She stopped at what passes for telephone booths in New York City and set her attaché case on the tiny shelf in front of her. From her new, capacious shoulder bag she extracted a pair of running shoes and effected a rapid change of footwear. Now unhampered by delicate heels, she turned and strode swiftly in the direction of Eighth Avenue. At the first place she came to that had the right jumble of camouflage jackets and khaki equipment in the window, she walked firmly in. “I need a good hunting knife,” she said, with the unmistakable air of someone who knows what she’s talking about. “What do you have in stock?”
She stepped confidently out of the store and checked her map of the city before turning in the direction of Times Square. She didn’t notice the footsteps moving behind her this time.
“I hope you understand that I am going to be working while you’re just lounging about my apartment,” said Harriet severely. “One of us has to do something commercially useful. In fact, you can help me. I’ve got a rush project on.”
“Then why aren’t you rushing to do it?” asked Sanders sleepily. They were sitting on the deck over the remains of breakfast, and the morning sun sinking into his winter-weary back made him feel very unlike work. “More coffee?” he asked as he headed inside to get it.
“Sure. Well—they have to finish the building first. It’s a massive renovation that keeps falling behind schedule. The project is already five months behind and the firm that’s going to be the major tenant has been packed and ready and living out of boxes for at least three. Anyway, I get eight hours—in theory—between the movers and the distraught employees. So be prepared.” Whatever else Harriet might have said was cut off by the ringing of the telephone. “My turn,” she said, and uncurled herself from the chair she was in. “It’s for you,” she called, dragging the long cord out through the sliding doors. “Ed. Thank God. I was afraid it was my project.”
The telephone conversation dragged on interminably, and there were no clues to its content in John Sanders’s monosyllabic contributions. He replaced the receiver and carried the phone back inside. Harriet collected their breakfast dishes and dumped them in the kitchen, got more coffee, and leaned expectantly on the counter.
“It’s about your friend, Peter,” he said, looking slightly puzzled.
“What about him?”
“He rang up in the small hours of the morning, apparently, claiming to have been attacked by a knife-wielding maniac with an English accent. Whom he managed after heroic endeavor to eject from his apartment.”
“Peter? Heroically ejecting someone? Was he hurt?”
“Mussed up a bit. His favourite leather jacket was sort of damaged by knife cuts, and he has a shallow cut on his arm. His left arm. The apartment was tossed. Sort of.”
“John, what do you mean by those ominous ‘sort ofs’? That our Peter would lie about something like that?”
Sanders shrugged his shoulders. “Ed sounded suspicious, that’s all.”
“I’m not surprised. But if he was attacked—”
“Or if he is so scared that he faked an attack to the point of—”
“—wrecking his best leather jacket,” added Harriet slyly.
“You can be nasty, can’t you? I had been going to say, slicing open his own arm, then, surely—”
“For our own preservation, it’s time we figured out what those people were looking for. Because it’s beginning to make me a little bit nervous.”
“Right.” John sat down again, with his back to the sun this time and raised his hand. “What do we know about it besides its probable shape and size?”
“Oh, goody. I get to answer the questions this time, do I? So all the dumb mistakes are my fault?”
“Something like that.”
“Well—we know that it is connected somehow to Guy and/or Jane,” said Harriet. “Since Guy is no longer with us, that leaves Jane.”
“As an opening premise,” agreed John solemnly.
“Now I get to ask,” said Harriet. “Why did Jane go to Skaneateles? And more particularly, why did she go to that art and antique place?”
“Very good,” said John approvingly. “She wanted to buy or to sell something which was either antique or classified as art.”
“Or both,” said Harriet.
“Indeed. Or both.”
“Or she was looking for a job,” pointed out Harriet.
“Or she wanted some specialized information,” said John.
“That’s too broad to be helpful. Let’s try something easier. Why did she ask me to bring down a macro?”
“Because she wanted something copied. I take it it’s not much use for anything else.”
“Well—no,” said Harriet. “But why did she want something copied that beautifully? Which it would have been if I had taken a picture of it.”
“I love your modesty and humility, Harriet. But I would say, because she didn’t want to have to risk using the original for whatever purpose she had in mind. This way she could show people the copy.”
“And that means that she was in Skaneateles to sell something flat which is between eight by ten and eleven by fourteen in size. You know, I could have told you that before breakfast.”
“So could I, but this is so much more fun. But the only real question is why Skaneateles and not New York City or Chicago? Or Toronto, as far as that goes.”
“I would hazard a guess that the person in Skaneat
eles is famous for something or other—like maybe feeding stolen masterpieces into the art underworld or something. Who would know about that?”
“Why don’t we ask someone who owns an art gallery?”
“Always going for the obvious solution, that’s your problem. No imagination.”
The Christopher Ellis Gallery spread itself comfortably across the ground floor or semibasement of two Victorian houses on Hazelton Avenue, sharing the premises with a jewelry shop, a dealer in antique furniture, and a pair of architects whose reputation was riding very high at the moment. The atmosphere was downright jolly with good taste and excellent profit margins. The doors opened with an expansive, friendly sigh, one that was repeated by Mr. Ellis himself. Mr. Ellis was not foolish enough to attempt to judge his patrons by their show of outward wealth. He had once in his youth, in the shop where he had learned the business, sold a half a million dollars’ worth of art to a man dressed in mud-stained, torn corduroy trousers. From that occasion he had learned a lesson never to be forgotten. Overextended credit comes in a Jag and expensive tweeds; you can never tell what real money is going to look like. Now his thick white hair shone with friendliness; his bright blue eyes spoke eloquently of honesty; he greeted John and Harriet as if they were his oldest friends. At his elbow, a pleasant-looking young woman hovered discreetly.
Had he ever heard of Richard Harmon, of the Harmon Gallery in Skaneateles, New York? Of course he had. He looked as if he had been waiting breathlessly for weeks for someone to ask him about Richard Harmon.
“An odd sort, in some ways,” said Christopher Ellis. “But he does an excellent business.”
“Do you have any idea why someone from Toronto might go to him to buy or sell—particularly sell—something?” asked Sanders. “After all, there are a lot of galleries here in town.”
“You never really know what it is that makes people do things,” said Ellis cautiously, “but if that particular person knew what he was doing—and that’s a very big if, you understand—I would guess that he had a map he wanted to sell. Harmon is known in the trade to deal in rarish maps. They’re his thing, you might say. In addition to the junk he sells to tourists in the summer, he has an international business in maps. He puts out a good catalogue every couple of years—and knows just about everyone and everything in the field.”