Silent Auction

by Jane K. Cleland

  I approached the back door and knocked. The latch hadn’t quite caught, and the door swung wide. I stepped into the mudroom. In front of me, the inner door was ajar. Little hairs on the back of my neck rose as disquiet grew into fear.

  “Frankie?” I called, expecting no reply and getting none. My voice cracked as alarm closed my throat. I stood for a moment taking deep breaths. “Frankie?” I repeated, and I was pleased to hear that despite the sharp barbs of anxiety that stabbed at me, I sounded calm and in control.

  I took a small step forward and entered the kitchen. I was standing on ceramic tiles the Whitestones had imported from Italy. It was cold, too cold, much colder than outside. It was quiet, too, the thick solitary sound of emptiness. I took another step, then stopped short.

  There, sprawled on the floor, partially hidden by the central island, lay a body.

  My heart stopped, then began beating too fast. My mouth went dry. One blue-jean-clad leg was bent, the other straight. Whoever it was wore dirty and scuffed work boots. Streaks of sunlight crisscrossed pools of blood that had streamed like rivulets toward the cabinets. A wooden rolling pin streaked with mahogany-colored stains and a white dish towel smeared with dark red lay near the body’s thighs.

  I wanted to run away, but I couldn’t. I needed to see if the person was alive, to see if I could do something to help, CPR maybe, or by applying pressure to a wound to stop the bleeding. I stepped forward and saw a hand, its fingers curled like talons, clutching something pale and wispy. The skin was flour white. I squatted and touched a finger—it was cold. I stood, took another deep breath, and forced myself to walk around the island and view the face, knowing before I looked what I would see.

  Frankie.

  “Oh, God,” I whispered.

  His eyes were open and staring at the ceiling.

  I couldn’t move. I could barely breathe. My first thought was that just this morning Frankie had stood in my office, joking, and now he was dead, and from the ghastly dent in his skull, I could tell that he’d been murdered. My second thought was for Zoë. She’d be shattered, just crushed. As far as I knew, besides her kids, Frankie was her only family.

  The soft hum of a car engine broke the silence. A vehicle was approaching. The sound grew louder, then stopped. The killer, I thought. My eyes lit on the rolling pin and towel. He’s come back to clean up. I’d read that killers were often drawn to the scenes of their crimes. I heard a car door slam; then, seconds later, the ship’s bells sounded. Still I couldn’t move. Someone jiggled the front doorknob, and as if the sound released me from a trance, I flew across the room and fled.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I sprinted across the clearing. As I approached the Chinese troughs, I lengthened my stride; I cleared them by two feet, landing hard, jarring my right ankle. I scrambled up and kept running until the cliff’s edge loomed in front of me, then braked and whipped around to face the light house. I leaned over, pressing my hands into my thighs to catch my breath, while trying to look everywhere at once.

  Stop. Think. Breathe. Stop. Think. Breathe. Stop. Think. Breathe. Repeating my father’s advice on how to maintain my cool during a crisis worked now as it always had in the past, and I felt myself regain my equilibrium. Stop. Think. Breathe.

  I had to get out of the open. I had to assume that if I was seen, I’d be killed, and I couldn’t depend on my ears to warn me of an approach—I couldn’t hear anything but the booming ocean waves far below. I didn’t know where to go. The cabana by the trees could be a sanctuary—or, since there was only one door, it could be a trap. Then I saw the answer. A boxwood hedge fronted the woods to the left. It would conceal me, but it wouldn’t pen me in. I ran for it.

  Reaching the protection of the hedge, I sank to the ground and forced myself to be still, to breathe evenly. After several seconds, I pried apart the dense growth, trying to see through to the other side. Twigs and prickly bits poked at me, nicking my fingers and cheek. I didn’t care—I was out of sight but able to see the rear of the lighthouse and part of the front drive. For the moment, I was safe. Keeping my eyes on the clearing, I rooted through my tote bag for my phone, and when I found it, I dialed 911.

  I gave the operator my name and described the nature of the emergency. She told me she was notifying the police, then began asking me questions I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know if the killer was still in the light house. I didn’t know if there were additional victims. I didn’t know who’d driven up. I didn’t know anything beyond what I’d told her.

  For six minutes that seemed like six hours, I sat on dirt and fallen leaves. I was cocooned by a mantle of sound as the unrelenting waves thrashed the barnacle-covered rocks. I clutched the phone to my chest, stricken and disbelieving. Gulls swooped over and around me, spiking into the water, then soaring up and away. How could Frankie be dead? I kept asking myself.

  Frankie was more than just another part-timer to me, more than Zoë’s nephew. When he’d first arrived in New Hampshire, just out of jail, with a chip on his shoulder the size of Montana, Ty Alverez, my boyfriend, and I had helped him, and I’d been proud of his success.

  From far away, I heard a buzz. Within seconds, I recognized it as a siren. Peeking through my eyehole, I watched a black Rocky Point police SUV pull up, its lights flashing. The siren stopped abruptly, and without giving myself time to think, I ran like a deer toward the front. Two men stood on the circular drive. I recognized one of them—Officer Griffin.

  “Griff,” I shouted.

  “You okay?” he asked, jogging to meet me.

  I nodded, breathing hard from the run and the relief. “I’m sure glad to see you,” I said.

  The other man was a stranger. He was tall and broad and older than me by a decade or so, in his midforties, I guessed. His hair was dark brown and cut short. His nose was crooked, as if it had been broken a long time ago and never properly realigned. He had a small jagged scar near his right eye. He wore a brown wool blazer, a blue shirt, a blue and brown striped tie, and khakis. He looked like a nice guy.

  “I’m Chief Ellis Hunter. Rocky Point police,” he said as he approached. He flipped open a leather case to display his badge and ID card.

  Until a couple of years ago, my boyfriend, Ty, had been the police chief. Now he was a Homeland Security regional director, and evidently the town had finally hired his replacement. “I didn’t know they’d hired a new chief.”

  “Today’s my first day. And you are?” he asked.

  “Oh, sorry. Josie Prescott. I called in the emergency.”

  “Where’s the corpse?” he asked.

  “Inside. In the kitchen. The back door’s open.”

  “You said you heard a car drive up. One of these?” he asked, looking from my sedan to Frankie’s Jeep.

  I shook my head. “No. That’s Frankie’s—the victim’s,” I said, pointing. I paused to take in a deep breath. “This one’s mine. I didn’t see the car that drove up; I just heard it. I was in the back, in the kitchen.”

  “Was there anything unusual about it? Did it sound like a truck, maybe making a delivery?”

  I shrugged helplessly. “It was just an ordinary engine sound, followed by a door slamming. Then the bell rang and someone tried the doorknob. That’s when I ran out the back.”

  “Did you see or hear the car leave?”

  “No … but I doubt I would have—I was behind a hedge close to the ocean within a minute or so. From back there, the light house blocked most of the driveway, and all I heard was waves crashing.”

  “No one came around back?”

  “Not that I saw, and I think I would have.”

  He nodded. “Okay … I’ll just be a sec.”

  He turned his back and took a couple of steps away from me to make a phone call. It’s too late to set up a roadblock, I thought. From the light house to the mainland took no longer than five minutes flat. He flipped his phone closed, told me to wait where I was, signaled Griff to follow him, and set off at a trot.

  I l
eaned against my car and closed my eyes. A slide show of gruesome images played in my mind’s eye, each picture more disturbing and bloodier than the last, a repeating loop of horror. There’d been so much blood. I opened my eyes, and still the images came flooding back. I hugged myself and rubbed my arms for comfort.

  Chief Hunter appeared from the far side of the light house, a notebook in hand.

  “I know you’ve had a shock,” he said as he walked toward me, “but I’m hoping you can answer some questions. The quicker I can get information, the better. I gather you knew the victim?”

  “Yes. His name is Frankie Winterelli.”

  He wrote the name in his notebook. “How do you know him?”

  “His aunt Zoë is my friend. He works for my company sometimes. He’s the caretaker here.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “Today.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Standing in the dappled sunlight filtering through the trees, my hands deep in my pockets, I closed my eyes for a moment. I repeated Frankie’s jests about my tiger face, my arrangement to meet him at his cottage, and my hunt for him that culminated in discovering his body.

  He nodded. “Can you give me a quick character sketch about him? What’s his background? What’s he like? Is he married?”

  “Frankie’s great—he was great. He was friendly and funny. He’s single.”

  “And his background?”

  I looked out over the endless ocean. I didn’t want to tell.

  “I’ll find out soon enough,” Chief Hunter said. “You can help speed the investigation along by telling me now.”

  I nodded. “Frankie served time in prison.”

  “For what?”

  “Drugs, mostly,” I said.

  “More than once?”

  “Maybe half a dozen times all told. He was a stupid kid—I think he was twelve the first time. I’m telling you, though, he’d really straightened himself out.”

  Chief Hunter kept his eyes on my face. “Any arrests for something besides drugs?”

  I hated telling tales out of school, and this one was especially shocking. “Yeah. It’s bad.” I looked away, out over the ocean, then back. Chief Hunter’s eyes were fixed on mine, but I sensed no impatience or condemnation. He just wanted to know the truth. “Frankie mugged an eighty-year-old woman walking with a cane, can you believe it? He ripped her purse from her hand and flung her aside like she weighed nothing. She broke her leg. He served eigh teen months of what I think was a three-year sentence, and still has—had—about six months left on his parole.” I shrugged. “When Zoë told me she’d agreed to let him move in—this was about two years ago—I was worried. She has two young kids, and he had a violent past. But Zoë said she had to let him in—he was family and he had nowhere else to go.”

  “It worked out all right?”

  “At first, Frankie was surly as all get-out, but he got over it.”

  “How?” he asked.

  I shrugged again. “I don’t know. I mean, I’m no expert. I guess he was ready to change. For sure, Zoë never gave up on him. My boyfriend, Ty Alverez—he used to have your job, by the way—he helped him in a man-to-man sort of way. I deal in antiques, and I gave him a job. He helped us with outdoor work. That was all I could offer, since with his record, he couldn’t hope to pass my insurance company’s background check, and no one is allowed past the ware house door who hasn’t. From that he got a position with Jackson’s Landscaping. He worked there for over a year until he got this job.”

  “Any bumps in the road?”

  “No. We were all pretty surprised, to tell you the truth, but Frankie was a model employee from the start. He never missed a day’s work for me, not one, and I think he had the same great record with Jackson’s. He was diligent. He showed initiative in suggesting shortcuts, like blowing fallen leaves aside rather than sweeping them from the parking lot, which is what we had been doing.”

  Chief Hunter nodded and surveyed the grounds. “How did he land this job, do you know?”

  “He got it on my recommendation. When the Whitestones mentioned they were looking for a live-in caretaker, I suggested him. It was a perfect fit. Frankie got to do work he liked and was good at; he had his own cottage on the property, loads of scheduling flexibility, including the ability to help us out, a good salary and benefits, and most of the time, he was his own boss.” I gestured, palms up. “I’m not exaggerating if I tell you he was in heaven. He loved his work. He was really happy.”

  “So you don’t think he was back doing drugs.”

  “No way. Part of his deal with the Whitestones included random drug testing.”

  “What can you tell me about them? All I know is what I’ve seen in the papers.”

  I wondered which ones he read. It could be anything from a daily newspaper or monthly business magazine to a tabloid gossip sheet. Guy Whitestone, the legendary New York City financier, and his wife, Maddie, the Europe an beauty, were media favorites. While Guy’s Midas touch was fodder for business sections in major newspapers and serious finance journals, Maddie’s style and charitable good works received nearly constant coverage from lifestyle publications worldwide.

  “I met them when they attended one of my company’s auctions last June,” I explained. “They’re clients—and they’re really super people. They were the successful bidders for a scrimshaw tooth showing the ship Susan. It had been carved by a famous nineteenth-century scrimshander named Frederick Myrick. They also bought an anonymously crafted nineteenth-century boat-in-a-bottle.”

  “Scrimshaw … ivory, right?”

  “Usually. Scrimshaw refers to objects with designs etched onto ivory or bone, then stained with dark coloration. The antiques were mostly scrimmed by sailors at sea.”

  “Valuable?”

  I shrugged. “Everything is relative, right?”

  “Give me context,” he said.

  “The Whitestones paid $82,500 for the tooth and $4,800 for the boat-in-a-bottle.”

  Chief Hunter’s eyes opened wide. “That qualifies as valuable,” he said, jotting something in his notebook. He looked up at me, and I could almost see the wheels turning. “If they’re both nineteenth century, why the price variance?”

  “The scrimshaw came with a meticulously researched provenance. The boat, while an excellent example of American folk art, did not.”

  He nodded. “Gotcha. So Mr. Whitestone called today and asked you to appraise his collection?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Two reasons. He wanted to learn whether the objects he and Maddie had bought on their own were good buys or not, and he wanted to update his insurance coverage.”

  He glanced at his watch. “A detective will be here soon. Then you and I can go to the station.”

  “The station?” I asked. “How come?”

  “Just routine,” he said.

  His response sent a shiver down my spine. Maybe it was routine to him, but even though I’d been interviewed about murders in the past, it wasn’t routine to me. I didn’t want to go.

  “I want to go to Zoë’s, to tell her what happened,” I said. “I know her—she’s going to be beside herself.”

  Chief Hunter nodded. “We’re checking with his employer now about his next of kin. Is she it?”

  “Yes. I mean, I don’t know, but I think so.”

  “Is her last name Winterelli, too?”

  “Yes. Zoë’s divorced. Winterelli is her maiden name. Frankie is—was”—I corrected myself again, swallowing hard—“her sister’s son.” I took a breath. “Her sister and brother-in-law, Frankie’s parents, died in a car crash about ten years ago, a drunk driver. After the accident, Frankie moved in with his grandmother, Zoë’s mom. She had a heart attack and died while Frankie was in prison. That was when he was nineteen or twenty.” I paused again. “Can I be the one to tell Zoë? Or at least, can I be there when you tell her?”

  “Yes,” he said.

 
“Thank you. I can come to the station later.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” he said, which didn’t reassure me at all.

  A patrol car drove up. A young police officer I didn’t know sat behind the wheel. Detective Claire Brownley was in the passenger seat. She was about my age and striking. She was also smart and methodical and nobody’s fool. Her skin was creamy white and her eyes were sapphire blue. She had a new hairdo since the last time I’d seen her, about a year earlier. Her luxurious black locks had been cropped short. It suited her.

  I stood by my car, watching as Chief Hunter spoke to her, gesturing first toward the light house, then to me, then listening to her for a minute. Detective Brownley mouthed hello to me as she walked by heading toward the rear, and I nodded back.

  “Detective Brownley will take charge of the crime scene,” Chief Hunter told me. “I need to look at Mr. Winterelli’s house for a minute and talk to anyone else who might have been on-site. Does anyone else live on the property?”

  “Ashley Morse, the house keeper. She lives in the cottage next to Frankie.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll ask you to show me the way. We can pick up your car as we’re leaving.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, and we climbed into the SUV. “The road’s just past that big tree over there,” I said, pointing. He started the engine and headed in that direction.

  The wind had picked up, and the ocean was dotted with white-caps. A large brown bird with a white belly glided across the water and up over the clearing, disappearing on the far side of the forest. A squirrel darted into the woods and scampered up a tree.

  “Was he killed with the rolling pin?” I asked.