Another Man's Treasure (a romantic thriller) (Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series Book 1)

by S. W. Hubbard

  But looking at the pile of leaves on Birch Street gives me an idea. Mrs. Olsen knew both my mother and my father. The two of them must have met shortly after my mother received the ring from my dad. Mrs. Olsen lived through my mother’s disappearance, but she wasn’t destroyed by it. I can ask her things that I could never have asked my grandparents or my father.

  I hurry Ethel along. “C’mon baby, I have a lot to do today.” Put in a full day organizing the Reicker estate sale. Pick up my mother’s re-sized ring from the jewelers. Buy a dress for my date with Cal. And pay a visit to the Olsens.

  On my way to the Reicker sale I make a quick detour to Parkhurst Avenue. In the disruption following my assault, our ESTATE SALE BY ANOTHER MAN’S TREASURE sign has been left stuck in Mrs. Szabo’s yard for two weeks. I need it back for this sale.

  I park my van at the curb and survey the house for a moment. Unraked leaves fill the yard. A Chinese food menu, faded and tattered by the weather, peeks out from under the door mat. A rude dog-walker has deposited a blue New York Times home delivery bag full of poop on the driveway. The hole in the attic floor, through which the trunk dropped, must still be there since it doesn’t look like anyone’s been here since Jill, Ty and I left. How did my mother’s ring end up in this forlorn little house, in a part of town where our family knows no one? Who was Mrs. Szabo? Maybe I can find out more from Cal tomorrow night.

  I cross the yard to retrieve the sign, but it’s so firmly anchored in the dry ground of the front yard that I plop on my butt when I finally yank it out.

  “Oh, dear! Oh heavens! Are you hurt?”

  Heaving myself up, I see a thin woman walking an ancient pug. She and the dog have stopped on the sidewalk to stare at me. I spring up and dust the dry leaves off my jeans.

  “Are you all right?” the woman quavers. Her wispy hair whips around in the breeze. The dog strains on his leash, emitting coughing sounds. As small as he is, he looks capable of pulling her over.

  “I’m fine.” And then, as she shows no inclination to move along, I add, “Just taking my sign back.”

  “Are you the one who ran the estate sale here?”

  A regular Sherlock Holmes, this one. Nevertheless, I smile patiently and extend my hand, “I’m Audrey Nealon. I own Another Man’s Treasure.” Never know where my next client might come from.

  She backs away from my hand. “I can’t shake. I have fibromyalgia. And carpal tunnel.”

  “Sorry.” She’s really not that old—maybe fifty—but she’s what my grandfather used to call “nervous,” an all-purpose adjective that covered everything from jumpy to schizophrenic. Still, she seems to want to talk. “Did you know Mrs. Szabo?”

  She shakes her head. “Not very well. BoBo and I would say hello when we saw her in the yard. Right BoBo?”

  BoBo refuses to confirm or deny. “Did you come to the sale?” I ask.

  “No, but Vera told me there were a lot of people.”

  Vera. “Is Vera Mrs. Szabo’s neighbor? The thin lady with the gray bun?”

  Her eyes, the pale, pale green of pond water, open wide. “BoBo and I better get on home.” She tugs the little dog, and heads down the street, glancing back over her shoulder as if she expects me to follow her waving an ax. I toss the sign in the back of the van and watch as she and BoBo disappear into a house four doors down. Of the three houses between hers and Mrs. Szabo’s, only one has a neat garden and a well-swept walk. Not much to go on, but I’ll take my chances. If Vera doesn’t live there, maybe whoever does will be more willing to talk than BoBo’s owner.

  I’m knocking on the door before I’ve given myself time to change my mind, or think of what, exactly, I’m going to ask. The door opens quickly, and the little woman from the sale with the glasses and bun looks me over, almost as if she’s been expecting me. Pulling her cardigan around her shoulders, she steps out on the front porch.

  “I saw you on the news.” Vera squints up at me. “You got robbed of all the money from Agnes’s sale. What else did he get?”

  This is weird. I came to ask her questions, and she’s grilling me. “Nothing. Well, my fannypack, with my keys and my license—that was a hassle. But nothing else of value.”

  She stares at me long and hard with those lashless gray eyes.

  “Look, I know you think your friend left you something in the house, but everything she had was in the sale except this trunk full of old jewelry that we found in the attack. That has to be appraised, so—”

  Vera’s eyes light up. “Oh, so you found that didya? That was Agnes’s retirement fund. She took it from the people she worked for.”

  Am I hearing right? Did Vera just tell me that the jewelry is stolen? “What do you mean? Who did she work for?”

  “All kinds of people. She cleaned houses and watched kids.”

  My ears perk up. Growing up, my father and I always had household help, a steady stream of women from the Maid for You agency who kept our rugs vacuumed and our clothes laundered. Some lasted for a few years, others stayed only a couple of weeks. My father barely acknowledged their existence. Could Mrs. Szabo have been our housecleaner at some point?

  Vera continues, almost chatty. “When Agnes got too worn out to chase after toddlers, she started taking care of old people. She always worked off the books. No benefits, no pension. She didn’t even pay into Social Security. She’d always say to me, ‘Who’s going to look after me when I get too old to work?’ She knew her sister’s children and grandchildren wouldn’t do it.”

  That would be Cal and his family. This makes sense. Agnes would take a brooch here, a watch there; that’s why the stuff was all different sizes and styles. Cal must’ve guessed that it was stolen when he saw it. No wonder he didn’t want to deal with it.

  “No one ever suspected her?” I ask.

  Vera’s crooked brown teeth appear in a satisfied grin. “Nope. She knew how to take things that wouldn’t be missed. Those rich people had more than they could keep track of. But in the end, her plan backfired on her.”

  “How so?”

  “She hid the trunk up in the attic while she was taking the stuff, but then when she needed to start using it, she couldn’t get to it. She was too old and weak to push herself through that trap door into the attic. She spent all her time worrying about it. ‘I need to get it down…how am I going to get it down?’”

  “She couldn’t find anyone to help her?”

  Vera waves a bony hand. “I made suggestions, but she wouldn’t listen. To tell the truth, Agnes was starting to get a little strange. When her faucet started leaking, she couldn’t decide what plumber to call. When her podiatrist retired, she couldn’t figure out how to find a new one. That’s what happens when they get old.”

  They? Vera looks to be pushing a hundred herself. “So, did she really need the money from the jewelry?”

  Vera shrugs. “She just kept saying, “I need to get into that trunk. I need something in there.’ I tell you, I got tired of hearing it.”

  “Did Agnes ever tell you about the families she worked for? Did she ever mention a Roger and Charlotte Nealon?”

  “She’d tell me the things those rich ladies said to her. The way they treated their kids, their parents. But I don’t remember those names.”

  Did my father mistreat Agnes Szabo? Would she have considered a widowed math professor a rich oppressor? Yes, he’s aloof, but I don’t remember him ever speaking harshly to any of the women who cleaned for us. Would Agnes have felt she “deserved” my mother’s ring?

  Vera folds her brittle arms across her chest. “I went to visit Agnes in the hospital before she died. All drugged up and stuck full of tubes. I could see in her eyes she had something to tell me, but she couldn’t get it out.” She shakes her head. “I would’ve helped her if I could. But Agnes waited too long to tell me what she needed me to do.”

  “What do you think it was? Was she just worried that she’d need the money from the jewelry to pay her medical bills?”

  Vera’s h
ard, little eyes narrow to slits. “She knew she was dying.”

  Poor Agnes. Dying all alone, worried, and no one but this flinty old gal to offer her comfort. What had she wanted Vera to do? “Could it have something to do with me getting robbed?”

  As a cool breeze whips leaves across the porch, Vera turns to go back into her house. With her hand on the doorknob, she shoots me one last keen look. “Maybe what happened to you was just a coincidence.”

  Chapter 17

  In the twenty-odd years since I’ve last been here, the Olsen’s house has shrunk while their trees have grown. The center hall colonial, which I recall as large and rambling compared to our older, quirkier home, now seems like a standard-issue suburban four-bedroom. Meanwhile, the little sapling in the front yard, which we kids did our best to trample, has matured into a 25-foot shade tree. The clutter of bikes and trikes and sports gear is gone, as is the swing set Melody and I used to leap from. But in the large side lawn I can still see the bare patch that served as home base for so many games of kickball and wiffle ball. I can’t conjure up many purely joyful moments from my childhood, but swinging the yellow plastic bat and knocking the ball clear out to the curb here is one of them.

  A pleasant warm glow fills me up as I ring the doorbell. Even if Mrs. Olsen can’t tell me anything about my parents, it will still be nice to see her and find out how Melody and her brothers are doing. Within moments of the chime’s sounding, the door flies open and I find myself engulfed in her cushiony bosom.

  “Look at you!” Mrs. Olsen squeals. “You’re so lovely, all grown up from the shy, skinny little girl I used to know.”

  “You haven’t changed a bit,” I answer, and in this case, it’s absolutely true. Always a little matronly, Mrs. Olsen never looked young in her mid-thirties and she doesn’t look old now that she’s over sixty. Her tendency to plumpness and her sunny disposition have kept her face smooth. Her only wrinkles are the laugh-lines crinkling the corners of her blue eyes.

  “Come on back to the kitchen. I made oatmeal raisin cookies because they were always your favorites.”

  I have no recollection of this; as far as I recall, all Mrs. O’s cookies were equally good. “That’s so sweet. You didn’t have to go out of your way like that.”

  She directs me into a chair at her big kitchen table, then pauses in her bustling for a moment. “It’s so good to see you.” Her kind eyes search my face. “I’ve thought of you many times over the years. I really should have gotten in touch. Then, last week, to see you in the news, the victim of a terrible attack—” She shakes her head, her frizzy gray-brown curls bobbing. “I’m so relieved that you’re okay. You are okay, aren’t you?”

  Am I? I’m jumpy and suspicious and a little too in touch with the dark side of human nature. But my headaches are mostly gone and my stitches are out. “Yes, I’m fine,” I assure my old friend. “Tell me about Melody and the boys.”

  We spend the next twenty minutes catching up. Melody is a biologist in Montana; her brothers are all in New Jersey, although not in Palmyrton. Mrs. Olsen chats on about their many accomplishments and tells me that she’s now taken a part-time job as a social worker at the Midtown Community Center. I tell her about Another Man’s Treasure, and about my father’s stroke.

  “A stroke? Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry.” Mrs. Olsen reaches out to pat my hand. As she does, she notices the ring. I only picked it up from being resized a couple of hours ago, and it still feels strange on my finger. Her face lights up. “You’re wearing your mother’s ring—how nice! She loved that ring.”

  I straighten up in my chair. All the family chat has been nice, but this is what I came here for. Suddenly the ring feels like a heavy weight. I need Mrs. Olsen to help me carry it.

  “Did she always wear this ring?” I ask.

  “Oh yes. Her wedding band was on her left hand and that ring was always on her right.”

  I look Mrs. Olsen straight in the eye. “Then why wasn’t she wearing it the night she disappeared? I found it recently, not at my father’s house, but in a trunk of jewelry in the attic of an old woman whose house I was clearing out.”

  “Really? How odd.” Mrs. O looks genuinely perplexed. “What was the woman’s name?”

  “Agnes Szabo.” I say the name slowly and clearly, hoping for some start of recognition.

  “Never heard of her.”

  “She worked as a housekeeper and a nanny. She stole this jewelry—one or two pieces from each employer—as a kind of nest egg for her retirement. So I was thinking she might have worked for us at some point. But our family always used an agency, Maid for You. I checked, and they have no record of an Agnes Szabo in their files. Yet somehow this woman stole the ring. From my father…or from my mother.”

  Mrs. Olsen starts fussing around, straining and pouring the tea. “Maybe your mother took it off in a restroom, and this woman found it. Or maybe it slipped off her finger. What does your father have to say about it?” She gasps and covers her mouth. “I’m so sorry. I forgot you said he’s not able to speak.”

  “He couldn’t tell me anything about the ring. But it upset him, Mrs. Olsen. You’d think he’d be happy that I found it, but seeing it made him angry.”

  Her gaze is focused on the green pottery sugar bowl on the table but I can tell she’s looking far back in time.

  “Why is my dad so cold?” I ask her softly. “Why is he angry at me? Was he ever happy?”

  Her thick, strong fingers interlace with mine. “Oh my dear, yes. He adored you. When you were born he was brimming with wonder and joy. You were fussy at first and I remember your mother used to tell me that you’d cry all day until your Daddy came home, then you’d settle right down as soon as he took you in his arms.”

  It’s as if I’m listening to her recite a fairy tale. This can’t be my father she’s talking about. “He held me?” I ask. I don’t remember ever sitting in my father’s lap.

  “Oh yes, he was willing to sit with you for hours. In fact, he was good with all babies. I think it was because he had such deep inner reserves. Your mom and I would talk about how lonely it could get being home with a baby all day, but your dad never felt that way. He was content with his own company. I envied him that.”

  “You make it seem like a positive thing. But to me, he’s always seemed like a recluse, walled off from the world.”

  Mrs. Olsen nods. “All he ever truly needed was Charlotte and you, but he still enjoyed other people’s company. That’s what changed when your mother died. Once she was gone, not only did he not need anyone else, he couldn’t even tolerate anyone else.”

  I take a deep breath and squeeze her hands in mine. “What do you know about the night she disappeared, Mrs. O? Do you really think her car slid into that lake while she was out Christmas shopping?”

  Mrs. Olsen squirms in her seat, the way Melody and I used to squirm when she interrogated us about large quantities of missing cookies. Finally she speaks, looking past my right shoulder.

  “Well, it must’ve happened that way. That’s what the police said.”

  “I know the official story. But what do you think? If she ran out to go shopping, why wasn’t she wearing the ring she never took off?” My eyes lock with Mrs. Olsen’s and she’s the first to look away. She knows something; I’m sure of it.

  I force her to look at me. “Tell me. Please.”

  She sighs. “I don’t know, Audrey. It’s probably nothing. But, well, your mom didn’t seem herself for a few months before…before Christmas. We weren’t spending as much time together--she was busy with her work and I had my hands full because the twins had just been born. But when we would see each other she seemed—” Mrs. Olsen searches for a word. “…keyed up. Like she was about to burst.”

  “And you didn’t ask her what was going on?”

  “Oh, I did. She’d laugh it off. Say life was good and she was happy, that’s all.”

  “But you didn’t believe her?”

  “At the time I did. I figured I w
as a little envious of Charlotte, which isn’t a nice feeling to have for a friend. I was feeling fat and exhausted and zoned out on Sesame Street and your mom was getting her life back together. She had this great new job that she loved at a small PR firm, and a husband who was willing and able to help out with child care. Not like me. My poor George would catch the 6:16 train into the city and not make it home again ‘til eight at night.” She shudders as she glances around her cheerful kitchen. “Sometimes I wonder how we ever made it through those years.”

  Maybe she’s seeing herself trapped in here from sun-up to sundown every day of her kids’ toddlerhood. It’s hard to connect this tale of maternal discontent to the jolly, loving uber-Mom of my childhood memories. And it’s hard to figure out where she’s going with this story. It seems like yet another page in the “Charlotte Perry had a perfect life” book. But Mrs. O. must have a reason, so I sit quietly and wait. It worked for detective Coughlin; why not for me?

  After a protracted silence, Mrs. Olsen starts talking again. “Your mother and I were from the generation of women who were taught we could have it all: career, kids, marriage of equals. We started our careers and married our true loves and had a baby and then we hit the wall. We found out it wasn’t so simple. Bosses were demanding, childcare was unreliable, husbands only supported equality if there were clean socks in their drawer. So we made sacrifices. I gave up my career when I realized I couldn’t do a good job at work and at home with three kids under the age of three.” She pauses and strokes my arm. “Your mom made a different sacrifice.”

  “What?”

  “She decided she was only going to have one child. She loved you dearly, but she knew she wouldn’t be a good mother to a bigger family. She worried that she’d be resentful if she had to give up working to take care of another child. Plus, she was sick as a dog when she was pregnant with you, and I don’t think she could’ve faced going through that again. We used to joke about ‘the final solution’—making our husbands get vasectomies.”