Junkyard Man

by Libby Howard

  I hid a smile. “Auctioneer or florist. Get used to the idea.”

  He sighed. “Okay. Tell Henry he needs to work out the payment amount and a tentative schedule, then he needs to stick to it and work hard. I’m expecting him to treat this as if it’s his first job.”

  I hopped up the stairs, oddly excited. This would be a great opportunity for Henry to see if this was a hobby he might enjoy, or possibly a vocation. He’d earn some summer spending money and be able to practice early work skills. Bert could use the help. Actually, Bert needed a whole staff of Henrys.

  I found Henry upstairs with Sean, playing some fantasy game where they were looking for treasure and killing ogres. Sean. I remembered that Henry said his friend was more interested in the cookies Mr. Peter served than in the antiques he was showing them, but maybe he’d be willing to sort through boxes and do some of the basic cleanup for pay.

  “Hey guys,” I said, knocking on the door jamb to get their attention. “Are you at a stopping point in your game? I’ve got some questions I want to ask Henry.”

  They paused the screen right before one of them launched an arrow at a large, green, warty-looking creature, then turned to me. “Yeah, Miss Kay?”

  I outlined Bert’s proposal, as well as the points that Henry’s father had made, then waited for the boy’s reaction.

  He grinned. “I’d love that. Maybe I can take my laptop over so I can look stuff up. I’ll write it all down in a notebook. Like cataloguing museum pieces.”

  “More like an archeology dig,” Sean complained. “That place is a mess.”

  “I like the idea of an archeology dig. Come on, Sean, it’s fun. Maybe Mr. Bert will hire you, too.”

  Sean didn’t look thrilled at that idea. “How much? Because I’m not going to sit in some hoarder’s house all summer opening boxes for a few dollars.”

  “Just a few hours here and there,” Henry pleaded. “I’m sure it won’t all be plates and bowls and stuff. Mr. Peter did have that cool sword you liked.”

  “He showed you the sword?” Not that I thought Sean snuck over and stabbed my neighbor, but the mention of the murder weapon had thrown me.

  “Yeah. It was pretty cool. I think he said it was a replica of something people used in Renaissance Italy. A rapier. We took it into the kitchen where there was more room, and Mr. Peter let me try to stab a melon with it.”

  The stabbing-melons-in-the-kitchen story was making me nervous. “Did you guys take it back up front when you were done or leave it in the kitchen?”

  “Oh, we left it in the kitchen. Mr. Peter said he needed to clean the melon juice off the blade.”

  “See?” Henry elbowed his friend. “That was fun. What if he’s got more swords? Or maybe one of those old video game systems? I’ll bet if you find an Atari, Mr. Bert will let you have it as part of your payment for helping.”

  Now that got Sean’s attention. “Do you think if we found an Atari, it would be working? Lots of stuff at Mr. Peter’s house didn’t work.”

  “And lots did,” Henry told him. “Remember the toasters? They all worked. Kind of, anyway. There were things he fixed up years ago and meant to sell, but never got around to it.”

  All this was making me wonder how much time Henry really had spent at Mr. Peter’s house.

  “Shall we go over now? Mr. Bert would really appreciate it if you can show him where his uncle kept the more valuable items and what they were.”

  Both boys got to their feet and I led the way down the stairs and across the street. Bert was still on the porch, his food and tea finished. As we approached, he looked up from a glass vase. There was a smudge of dirt across his forehead that made him look as if he had a particularly menacing unibrow and line of dark grime smeared from his mustache to his ear. I introduced them, and the man shook each boy’s hand.

  “Know what this is?” Bert picked up the vase he’d been holding and extended it to Henry. The boy took it and turned it over in his hands.

  “That’s Fostoria Americana. Mr. Peter had a lot of it. He was trying to complete a set he got from an estate auction twenty years ago.” Henry looked up at the man. “Are these boxes from the front room?”

  Bert nodded. “Just inside the front door. I thought I’d start there and work my way back so I had more space.”

  “Most of what’s in the front room are recent purchases,” Henry told him. “He’d stack them there until he was able to go through them and put them with the others. Except for the display case and bookshelf. Those pieces he rotated, showing off his favorite ones.”

  Bert stood and we followed him in. “These?”

  “Yeah.” Henry frowned. “He must have been in the middle of changing them out because these empty spaces used to have knife rests.”

  I felt suddenly chilled and looked up, noticing that the shadow was back, this time in the corner where there previously had been none. “Do you think he just hadn’t gotten around to putting new pieces up here? How long did it take him to replace stuff on the shelf?”

  And had someone, namely the murderer, stolen these?

  Henry lifted his chin, narrowing his eyes as he thought. For a second, his resemblance to his father was striking. “When I saw him rotate these displays, he always replaced the pieces he removed right away. But maybe he got interrupted.”

  I knew what he meant—maybe Mr. Peter got interrupted and died before he replaced the pieces. But I still was concerned that we could possibly be looking at a theft. I’d scoffed at the idea of someone robbing a hoarder, but maybe I was wrong. What if the person knew that Mr. Peter rotated the display of his favorite pieces in these cabinets in the front room? It would be a lot easier to snatch things off these shelves than wind through a maze of boxes stacked four-high to find a treasure to take. That would be like finding a needle in a haystack, but these items were right here, by the front door in plain sight.

  People who knew they were here included a delivery person who had to step inside while Mr. Peter signed for something, or a repair person, or… I looked over at Bert. Although why would he steal?

  “Why does a man proudly display a few pieces every week or two in a room that’s cluttered with junk?” Bert waved his hand in frustration. “Who would see them? He had no visitors, beyond you two boys and Mrs. Carrera, evidently.”

  “I think he just liked getting some things out and seeing them,” Henry replied.

  The shelf was dust-free, which was a miracle in this house. I wouldn’t have known pieces were missing if I hadn’t seen the shelves before with every square inch covered.

  “Do you know where he kept the knife rests?” I asked, curious to see if they were back in their boxes, or if robbery somehow played a role in the murder.

  “No, but he had some faience in an upstairs bedroom that he said was important. Some of it was Quimper pottery, but he had some older pieces from other makers, too. He claimed there was a silver soup tureen that was really valuable in the basement, but I didn’t ever see it. He said the steps were dangerous. He’d need to fix them before anyone went down there.”.

  I immediately envisioned something that was the equivalent of a priceless Ming vase in a dirt-floor basement next to eighty cases of drain cleaner and a rotted wooden staircase.

  Bert looked taken aback. I wondered if he was imagining the same thing. “Let’s go upstairs first and see this pottery. Then, if you don’t mind, I’d like to check for this vase in the basement while you all are here to call for an ambulance if the staircase gives way under me.”

  At his words, the shadow detached itself from the corner and headed, unimpeded by the stacks of boxes, to the right side of the house. We had to follow Bert through the winding maze, me bringing up the rear. The stairs were equally difficult to negotiate as they had towers of papers and books on each tread—magazines, newspapers, old bills, and even sale fliers. I brushed the dust off one and wasn’t surprised to see it was a circular from a five and dime dated twenty years ago. Wow, I’d forgotten how inexpe
nsive three-subject notebooks were back then.

  “The third door on the right,” Henry called. Bert pushed a heavy box aside and opened the door. Actually, he tried to open the door, and discovered that it was stuck. Putting his shoulder into it, the man managed to push it open wide enough for us to enter.

  The room was floor-to-ceiling with storage tubs and boxes. A few looked like they’d fallen over, and four boxes were open and empty, the cardboard tossed aside along with crumpled tissue and newspaper.

  “They’re gone,” Henry said, his voice low with shock. “Gone. They should either be on the shelves downstairs or in the boxes here.”

  “He wouldn’t have moved them to another room?” I asked.

  The boy shook his head. “No. Everything had a place. It looks disorganized, but Mr. Peter had a system and knew where everything was. He knew exactly what he had, which box in which room he kept it, when he bought it, and how much he paid in addition to the history of the item. It’s how he was.”

  “Do you think you could write down what was up here?” Bert asked.

  Henry shrugged. “I could try. I remember a few pieces that I thought were kinda cool, but the rest…I don’t know.”

  “I’d happily pay you to do an inventory of what you saw—describe each piece, list what you remember Uncle Harry telling you about it, where it was located, when you saw it last. That sort of stuff.”

  The boy nodded. “I can do that.”

  Bert sighed. “Thanks. Now, let’s tackle the basement. Keep those cell phones handy, finger on the emergency button, just in case.”

  There were a few new treads on the wooden stairs heading into the basement, which made me realize that Mr. Peter really had been trying to fix things and keep his head above water. Sadly, it was a losing battle.

  “They’re safe,” Bert called up. “Come on down if you want to.”

  Before I could say a word, Henry was down the stairs, Sean following him and muttering something that sounded like “there better be a sword down here”.

  There wasn’t. There wasn’t much of anything down there. It was surprising, given that the rest of the house was stuffed full. Had Mr. Peter just not gotten around to filling up the basement as well? Was he holding off on storing things down here until he’d fixed the steps?

  “Is there some stuff back in that corner?” Sean asked, clearly still hoping for a sword or two.

  Bert walked around and pulled a few hanging chains, filling the basement with light. That’s when we saw that the stuff in the back corner was a collection of rakes and shovels. Beyond a washer and dryer that, I hoped, actually worked, there wasn’t much else in the basement. Old paint cans. A stack of wood and trim leaning up against a wall. A broken window.

  A broken window. Why would Mr. Peter fix the treads on his stairs and not at least nail a board over that? Or clean up the glass on the floor? I walked over and looked at it closely while Bert and the boys were checking to see if the soup tureen was in an old cooler or a metal locker.

  Glass wasn’t the only thing on the floor. The basement was dirty, and there were obvious somewhat cleaner square marks on the cement floor that showed where boxes had until recently been placed. I thought of Mr. Peter with his arthritis, how he’d most likely unpacked the items he wanted wherever he’d stored them and carried them individually to the display shelves rather than attempt to lug a seventy-pound box of china down, or up, stairs.

  I walked over to the other set of stairs—the ones that went to the back yard as opposed to the interior ones. Reaching up, I pushed on the wooden doors, expecting them to be either stuck as the one off the dining room had been, or padlocked. I nearly fell over in shock when it swung easily open, clattering loudly as the wood door smacked against the backyard patio.

  The noise got everyone’s attention.

  “You might want to call and file a police report,” I told Bert. “I’m pretty sure that soup tureen, along with a lot of other things, has been stolen.”

  “Mr. Peter was afraid of that,” Henry told us, his voice wavering. “He’d heard noises at night and told us that there were valuable antiques here.”

  But he didn’t install decent locks on the door, or invest in a security system. All the money he’d spent on his hobby, and he hadn’t bothered to secure these precious items.

  “He was going to buy a security camera,” Sean chimed in. “He said that it came with the delivery of those salt shakers last week.”

  Bert and I exchanged a puzzled glance, then we all followed him upstairs, looking around the ceiling for any sign of the security camera.

  “I opened all the boxes closest to the door,” Bert said. “It wasn’t there. So I’m assuming he at least unpacked it.”

  Where would Mr. Peter have put the camera? He was in his eighties, and had arthritis. I couldn’t see him climbing up a ladder to mount them up near the ceiling.

  There was no security camera, but there was an old video recorder on top of the fridge. Unlike most of the things in the house, it wasn’t covered in an inch of dust.

  I waved Bert over and pulled the camcorder down, rewinding the footage. Then I hit play. After ten seconds, I started fast-forwarding the tape. It was mind-numbingly boring. There were long stretches of darkness, the only illumination the numbers on the wall clock. Mr. Peter shut it off each morning, then clicked it on each night. From this video footage, I wouldn’t have believed that there was a theft if I hadn’t seen the empty basement, and had Henry’s reassurances that there were things missing from the house. I was about ready to call it quits when a blur of motion appeared on the camera.

  “Wait. Back it up. What was that?” Bert asked.

  I looked over to the kids who were looking through the contents of a box in the other room, then rewinded the tape, hoping that I wasn’t about to see a murder. As much as I wanted to see Mr. Peter’s killer caught and prosecuted, I didn’t want to see the actual crime in all its horrible details.

  It was dark. An odd sweeping light came into the kitchen, and right behind it was a man holding a cell phone. He was a tall, thin man, well dressed, with light-colored hair in a man-bun. I held my breath, my suspicions confirmed as the man turned around and the edge of the cell phone light caught his face.

  The intruder on the video recorder footage was Will Lars.

  Chapter 14

  Once again there were police cars on our street, only this time they were out front of the Lars’s house. Kat’s eyes were puffy, and she had a trembling hand clasped over her mouth. Will was pale and defiant as he spoke with Officer Adams. And half the neighborhood watched and listened in because this was all happening right on the front lawn of their house.

  “You need to come down to the station,” the officer insisted, not for the first time. “At a minimum, we can arrest you for breaking and entering. But Mr. Peter’s nephew thinks there are items missing from the house, so you might be facing theft charges at some point. Four nights of footage are on this tape, and you’re the only one on it besides the homeowner.”

  The officer hadn’t mentioned the gigantic gorilla in the room—that Will might be under suspicion in the murder of his neighbor. The video footage ended the night before Mr. Peter died .No doubt it hadn’t yet been turned on, as Mr. Peter hadn’t retired to bed. Still, Will had been in the house, and, given their prickly relationship, I doubted he was there late at night with permission.

  But in spite of the incriminating evidence, I just couldn’t see Will Lars as stealing from his neighbor. Unless he was trying to drive the man to a psychotic break by sending his paranoia over theft into overdrive and get him committed, I couldn’t see a motive. Will wouldn’t have wanted any of the things Mr. Peter collected. And I couldn’t see him hauling boxes of things from the basement in the middle of the night.

  Of course, I couldn’t see him stabbing an old man with a sword, then shoving it through a box either.

  “Why, Will?” Kat wailed. “Why were you in his house? What were you trying
to do?”

  Her husband, for a brief moment, looked both guilty and ashamed, then he straightened up to his considerable height. “I was returning some mail. We’d gotten it by mistake, and he wouldn’t answer when I knocked. The door was unlocked. I just wanted to put it on the kitchen counter.”

  Even though I couldn’t see his face, I could imagine Officer Adams’s expression. “We really should do this down at the station, Mr. Lars.”

  Both Kat and Will ignored him.

  “Oh, for goodness sake, Will,” Kat shouted, taking her hand from her mouth and waving a finger in her husband’s face. “You couldn’t leave the mail on his front porch? Or put it in his mailbox? Or let the mailman redeliver it? What. Were. You. Doing?”

  Will sighed, smoothing back a lock of blond hair that had come loose from his man-bun. “I just wanted to see inside. He never let me in, and the complaint I made to the city health and safety inspector had fallen on deaf ears. I thought if I could find a collapsed ceiling, or mold everywhere, or eighty dogs in filthy cages, that they might do something about the guy.”

  I’d been sympathetic toward Will’s dilemma, but he’d really crossed the line. Let’s just say I was glad that he wasn’t living next to me where he’d no doubt have complained about the overgrown herb garden, the untrimmed hedges, and the hot tub that had sat like a piece of junk in my backyard until last week.

  “Do you want to press charges?” Officer Adams asked Bert. The man looked from the police to Will, shifting from foot to foot nervously. No one wanted a neighbor on his bad side, especially when the house would remain unoccupied until Bert could get it all cleaned up and listed for sale. Still, Will was, at the very least, guilty of trespassing, possibly breaking and entering, and potentially theft or even murder.

  “No. I mean, if there are things missing…”

  “Then that’s a different matter,” the officer told him. “Right now, I’m just asking about the breaking and entering.”

  “The door was unlocked,” Will insisted.