Silent Auction

by Jane K. Cleland

  I smiled. “Shall I call him or do you want to?”

  “Would you mind?”

  “Not a bit.”

  We promised to talk later, and I decided to call him right away. I reached him on his cell phone.

  “I’m having a barbecue a week from Saturday for Zoë’s birthday,” I said. “I hope you can join us.”

  He accepted, sounding really pleased at the invitation. As I hung up, I thought how funny life was—in the midst of loss, gain.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  After Frankie’s funeral on Monday, Chief Hunter, Ty, and I went back to Zoë’s. The kids were upstairs playing, and occasional shouts and shrieks and giggles reached us as we sat in the kitchen sipping tea.

  “Do you think it’s going to rain?” Zoë asked, her hands cupping her mug for warmth. “For a warm September, it sure got cold quickly.”

  “Naw,” Ty said. “The clouds are breaking up. But you’re right about the chill. If you ask me, it’s cold enough for a fire. I’ll make one if you want.”

  “Thanks,” she said, nodding.

  As we made our way into the living room, I asked Chief Hunter, “Has either Ashley or Greg filled in any blanks?”

  “I’ve explained to Zoë that I can’t discuss the details of an ongoing investigation, but I can say that both of their attorneys are instructing their clients to stay mute.”

  Zoë sat on the couch, staring into the fire, her tension evident in the set of her jaw. Chief Hunter sat next to her, gently rubbing her arm. I sat on the floor near the hearth, glad for the fire’s warmth.

  “I thought the eulogies were beautiful,” she said. “I was really touched by what Ellen said about how much Frankie added to the singles group. Maddie wrote me the nicest note, too, saying how much they valued Frankie, and how sorry they were that they couldn’t attend the funeral.”

  Ty added a log, and within seconds sap popped, sending orange embers shooting into the screen. Another burst of sap sent sparks arcing up the chimney. I swallowed a sudden rush of tears as I remembered where the wood came from—Frankie had chopped up a limb from an old maple last spring after a storm felled it. Pepper-red flames teased the bark, then caught, flaring up and spreading the length of the log.

  Ashley had a fire going the day Frankie died.

  I looked toward Chief Hunter, still sitting on the sofa comforting Zoë. He met my eyes and saw stunned urgency.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  Could it be? I asked myself. It seemed impossible, yet I knew the answer. Yes.

  I stood up. “We need to go.” I looked into Chief Hunter’s eyes. “You and me.”

  I turned to Ty, then Zoë. “I’m sorry. We’ll be back.”

  Ashley wasn’t home, and I hoped we weren’t too late.

  I rode with Chief Hunter. Officer Meade followed in a patrol car. The chief used a tool I’d never seen, a kind of spinning wrench-looking thing, to open Ashley’s front door.

  He and Officer Meade removed the firewood from Ashley’s built-in cubbyhole one piece at a time, placing the logs on a plastic drop cloth she’d spread over the floor.

  When the pile was half empty, I saw a sliver of blue. My pulse spiked. “Look,” I said, pointing.

  “Yeah,” Chief Hunter said.

  Thirty seconds later, enough wood had been removed to show the tub’s placement. He took some photos, then shook his head ruefully. “I can’t believe I looked for false bottoms in drawers but missed the woodpile. Jesus H. Christ. Sometimes I think I’m getting too old for this work.”

  They continued removing wood one piece at a time. On the floor, the stack of splintered logs and shredded bits of kindling grew higher. When the tub was completely visible, sitting on a two-log-deep layer of wood, he took additional photos; then, using only the tips of his gloved fingers, he moved it to the floor and thumbed open the plastic latch. I held my breath. He raised the lid. Inside was a chamois-covered object. He flipped the chamois aside with one finger, revealing a scrimmed tooth.

  “Is this the missing tooth?” he asked me.

  Using the loupe and small flashlight I keep hooked to my belt, I squatted to examine the coloration and fracture lines.

  “This appears to be the tooth that was stolen from the light house,” I said. “Without further analysis, I can’t positively ID it.”

  I stood up as Chief Hunter slipped the tooth into a large plastic evidence bag and sealed it up. As he dropped the chamois into another bag, I gasped and pointed to a cordovan-colored stain in the middle and a frayed area near the bottom.

  “That looks like dried blood. And look at the bottom—it’s torn. Frankie was clutching a sliver of leather when he died.” I looked at him. “Chamois is leather.”

  He held my gaze for a long three-count. “At the time, you said you saw something wispy in his grasp. I’m not going to ask how you know that the something wispy you saw was in fact leather,” Chief Hunter said dryly.

  I looked down and felt myself blush.

  “Take a photo of it for him if you want,” he offered.

  I looked up. “Thanks.”

  I used my cell phone camera to snap photos of the tooth, the chamois, the plastic box, and the cubbyhole, then froze at the sound of a car engine. I looked at Chief Hunter. He gestured that he wanted me to move toward the middle of the room, then turned to face the door. Officer Meade stood next to him, and from the tilt of her head, I could tell that she was listening, too.

  The door opened. Ashley stepped inside, taking in the scene in one sweeping glance. Her eyes paused at the wood strewn across the drop cloth, then swung to the nearly empty cubbyhole, the opened plastic tub, and the bagged tooth and chamois. She backed away from us one slow step at a time until she ran into her worktable. She reached in back of her, finding the table’s edge with her hands, one on each side, holding herself up.

  “Are these yours?” Chief Hunter asked, holding the two evidence bags.

  She gasped for air, hyperventilating, then began to tremble. It was horrifying to watch. She spun around, as if she couldn’t bear us seeing her disintegration.

  “We found the tooth, probably the missing Myrick, in your wood-pile,” Chief Hunter told her back. “Want to explain how it got there?”

  She bellowed, a guttural sound of despair, then twirled to face us, her arm arched high above her head. I saw a flash of silver as she catapulted herself up and over the love seat, flying toward Chief Hunter.

  “She has a knife,” I yelled, instinctively stepping back and stumbling into the coffee table. I tumbled, then scrambled to my knees.

  Chief Hunter grabbed Ashley’s arm while she was still midair, twisting it hard, and the knife, an échoppe, clattered to the ground. Ashley screamed and clutched her arm to her chest as she landed in a heap at his feet.

  “You broke my arm!” she screeched.

  I scampered up, panting, staring, horrified. Officer Meade had drawn her weapon and held it steadily, pointing it at Ashley’s midsection.

  “You attacked me!” Ashley yelled, then moaned while rolling side to side as if she were in mortal agony.

  “Stay still,” Chief Hunter told her, his calm, cold tone contrasting with her hysterical ranting. To Officer Meade, he added, “Call an ambulance.”

  Ashley lunged for the échoppe. He kicked it aside and held her in place by pushing against her shoulders and thighs. She kept screaming and thrashing about, until finally she wore herself out and her yelling faded into pitiful and unintelligible mewling. I looked away, shaken at seeing such raw emotion. It was half frightening and half nauseating, and even after Ashley had been strapped to a gurney and wheeled away, her wordless shrieks echoed in my ears.

  Officer Meade accompanied Ashley to the hospital, and Chief Hunter transferred the evidence bags to his vehicle, sealed her cottage with police tape, and said, “Ready?”

  As we drove, I e-mailed the photos to Wes, saying only that we’d found the missing tooth in Ashley’s cottage and that I’d explain everythi
ng later. When he got a gander at those photos, he’d be doing a happy dance for sure. Not me. I still felt sick, as if I’d been punched in the gut and hadn’t fully recovered from the blow.

  Chief Hunter drove straight to my house. He rolled to a stop in front of the hedge.

  “Thank you, Josie,” he said.

  “She grabbed a knife and swung it at you,” I said, still quavery, “just like she must have done with the rolling pin at Frankie. She tried to kill you.”

  “If you see Zoë, please tell her I’ll call her as soon as I can with an update.” He paused. “I’d appreciate it if you let me fill her in. There are still a lot of loose ends.”

  “Like why Ashley killed Frankie.”

  “Like loose ends.”

  “Like blackmail.”

  “Thanks again,” he said, and then he was gone.

  I stood on my porch watching Chief Hunter until he disappeared around a curve in the road, and then I stood awhile longer. Ty was still at Zoë’s.

  I turned on my home computer. I needed to update the stolen object reports I’d filed about the missing Whitestone tooth, and I needed to call Mr. Yamamoto with the bad news about the supposed Myrick he was appraising in Hawaii. Instead, I sat looking out my window over the thick privacy hedge, past the stone wall, trying to catch my breath, trying to compose myself, seeing nothing, taking in only the colors and the shapes, an abstract tapestry of life.

  I felt as if I were on a ship without my sea legs, woozy, as if my emotional upset were affecting my balance. I wished I had a talisman or knew an enchanted phrase that would allow me to magically alter myself from fretful to serene, but I didn’t. All I could do was breathe and wait and hope this discombobulating distress would pass. It didn’t, but neither did it worsen, and finally, after several minutes, I turned back to my computer, ready to do what needed to be done.

  I went to each stolen antiques site and wrote that the missing object had probably been found, and asked that any possible sightings still be reported since there might be additional fakes in the marketplace. After I’d finished, I called Mr. Yamamoto and got his voice mail. I left a message explaining why I thought his tooth was probably a fake, then sent his contact information to Chief Hunter.

  Wes called just as I was ready to call Ty and ask him to come home.

  “So how did it go down?” he asked. “Tell me everything.”

  “Not now, Wes.”

  “Why not?” he whined.

  “I can’t. Not today.”

  “When?”

  “Did you get the photos?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Thanks. They’re awesome.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, and at his request I helped him draft captions, a mental task that helped calm my turbulent emotions.

  “Can we talk tomorrow? I need the info, Josie. I really do.”

  “I’ll see.”

  “Josie!”

  “I’m hanging up now, Wes. I’m sorry.” I knew I’d disappointed him, and I knew he wasn’t being completely unreasonable. He was a reporter on deadline, and we had a deal. Still, an “I’ll see” was the best I could offer at the moment. I needed time to distill everything I’d witnessed, to find context, to assimilate the horror of what had transpired. I needed time, and I needed Ty.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Ty sat beside me on my sofa, holding my hand, as I recounted what I’d seen and heard.

  “It’s so sordid, Ty,” I said. “Frankie died for no reason. None.”

  He leaned forward and kissed the top of my head.

  “The only lesson I can take away,” I continued, “is not to overlook the obvious. It took me days to recognize the significance of Ashley’s having a fire on a warm day. It’s like the time I came into work to find that Gretchen had hung wind chimes on the inside of the front door. I asked her why, and she looked at me as if she thought it was a trick question. Finally, she said, ‘Because they sound good.’ Frankie’s death should have more significance than teaching me a lesson I shouldn’t need to relearn.”

  “Sometimes there’s no lesson at all, Josie. There’s just the sad reality of loss.”

  I pressed my face into his chest, and he wrapped his arms around me, and we sat there, curled together, for a long, long time.

  “Chief Hunter is here,” I said later, as I glanced out the window toward Zoë’s and saw his SUV.

  “Good,” Ty said.

  “Why good?” I asked.

  Ty shrugged. “It’s his job to tell Zoë what happened. Knowing is an important part of healing.”

  She called soon after and asked us to join them, and Ty and I went right away.

  She and Chief Hunter were sitting in the kitchen. In the distance, I heard the chortling of animated characters. The kids are watching a movie, I thought.

  “Thank you for coming with no notice,” Zoë said, her eyes red and moist. “Ellis has filled me in. I have some questions for him, but I know myself—no matter what the answers are, I figured I’d be needing your shoulders.”

  “Of course,” I said, touching her arm.

  She turned to Chief Hunter. “I’ve been trying to picture what happened, to understand, and I can’t. I mean … I get it that as soon as Ashley learned that Josie had been hired to conduct an appraisal, she called Greg, worried that Josie would discover the Myrick tooth was a fake. I can see that Greg would have told her to get the tooth out of there immediately.”

  “And the corresponding receipt,” I interjected.

  “Right. What I don’t get is how Frankie could have interrupted her. Didn’t she know he was in the light house?” she asked. “His car was there.”

  “Some of what I can tell you is fact, some is still under investigation, and some is speculation,” Chief Hunter said. “This falls into the latter category—logic-based speculation. Probably she did, in fact, recognize Frankie’s car. When she entered, she called to him. If he was upstairs but outside, checking on whether the gutters on the widow’s walk needed cleaning, for instance, he wouldn’t have heard her. When he didn’t reply, she probably assumed that he was doing outdoor work in the back. She wouldn’t have worried about getting caught unawares, because she figured she’d hear him if and when he came inside. Except that he didn’t come in from the backyard like she expected, he came down the steps. If that’s what happened, Frankie might have caught her dead to rights with the Myrick tooth in her hands.”

  “I still don’t get how that led to murder. Why wouldn’t she have lied and said she was dusting it or something?” Zoë asked.

  “Maybe she did. Or it’s possible that she’d already packed the tooth up and he caught her slipping it into her tote bag or something. What ever happened—whether he ended up accusing her of stealing the tooth or she just went nuts because she was afraid he was going to—she flipped out.”

  Like today, I thought.

  “Based on what I witnessed today,” Chief Hunter continued, “if Frankie told her he was calling the cops or the Whitestones, there’s no question in my mind that Ms. Morse would have lost it. She would have charged him and knocked his cell phone out of his hand. My guess is that he ran to the nearest landline, which is in the kitchen. If she realized that she’d just made a bad situation worse, she would have dashed after him and tried to reason with him, to convince him that she only wanted to dust the tooth, like you said, Zoë, or to study it back at her place, or to simply hold the master’s work in her hands, but Frankie wasn’t buying it. When he reached for the light house phone, Ashley wrenched open the drawer looking for a weapon and found one—the rolling pin. She wrapped it in a handy dish towel, maybe for a better grip, or maybe because she had the wherewithal to worry about fingerprints. And she attacked.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment, the horrendous images of blood and death that had haunted me from the moment I’d found Frankie’s body flooding my consciousness again.

  “How could Ashley have overpowered him?” Zoë asked, sounding sick. “He was as strong as an ox!
”

  “She was in the throes of panic-induced strength. You know how every once in a while you hear about a small woman lifting a two-ton car off her child or her husband? I think what comes over her is similar. Today, when she attacked she flew. I’m not exaggerating—she literally launched herself and went airborne.” He shrugged. “Plus, she’s taller than Frankie was, she weighs more than he did—and don’t forget, she used a weapon.”

  Tears ran unchecked down Zoë’s cheeks. “Go on,” she murmured. “What do you think happened next?”

  “They struggled, and somehow Frankie got hold of a sliver of chamois—probably she had a piece in her hand or tucked into her belt. I’m guessing it was old and already frayed. At this point she was truly crazed. She swung and she connected. And then she was covered in blood and Frankie was dead. She dropped the rolling pin and towel. She might have been horrified at what she’d done.” He shrugged again. “Who knows what she was feeling? It’s enough to know what she did … what she must have done. She opened the window, hoping to confuse the time-of-death calculation. She ran back to the display case to shift the other artifacts around so there wasn’t an obvious empty space. She scooped up Frankie’s cell phone, maybe with the chamois so she wouldn’t leave any fingerprints, and stuffed it in his pocket. Then she bolted. Back at her cottage, she made a fire and burned her bloody clothes. Probably she showered, then scoured the tub with bleach, hoping to eliminate all traces of Frankie’s blood. She hid the tooth in her woodpile, as good a hiding place as any, and better than most.” Chief Hunter nodded in my direction. “That’s when we got there. After the fire was out, she cleaned the fireplace, throwing away the ashes, maybe scrubbing the masonry with bleach, too. The next day, after the initial shock wore off, she realized that in her rush to get out of the light house, she forgot to get the receipt for the tooth. She had to destroy it before Josie saw it. From what I understand from Josie, she probably thought that if she could destroy the receipt, there was a better than even chance Mr. Whitestone wouldn’t even notice the tooth was missing.”