Treasure in Exile (Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series, #5)

by Hubbard, S. W.

  With all the love my heart can hold,

  Lawrence

  “They look so happy in the picture. The letter is so optimistic, like they were sure everything would turn out all right.”

  I close the frame gently. “They were wrong.”

  As we work, I’m struck again by how little trash we’re discarding. “I gotta hand it to those old gals—they sure didn’t hoard. I thought we’d find closets and drawers with seventy years’ worth of crap, but most everything is empty.”

  “Here’s some junk.” Donna tosses a stack of yellowed papers into the trash. “Wonder why Vareena would have kept that.”

  I peer into the trash bag, then dive after what Donna discarded. “Whoa! Bruce Strickler will go crazy for this!”

  Donna’s face collapses in contrition. “What? What did I do wrong? I thought it was just old newspaper ads.”

  I pull a handful of the papers out of the black Hefty bag. “They are old newspaper ads. That’s what makes them valuable. Advertising memorabilia is a popular collectible, and we have a regular customer who’s passionate about it.”

  “I’m sorry! I didn’t know. How will I ever get the hang of all this?”

  I pat Donna on the shoulder. “Don’t stress. You can’t be expected to know that there are people in this world who collect antique junk mail. Where did you find it? Is there more?”

  Donna points me to the top drawer of a huge chest of drawers across from Vareena’s bed. When I look inside, there are stacks of the ad fliers. All of them feature a slightly demonic whirling dervish zipping around kitchens and over gleaming floors while a smug looking woman sits with her feet up. Scour-Brite Does the Dirty Work of Making your Home Shine reads one headline. Scour-Brite Works Hard so You Don’t Have To proclaims another. Hmm—advertising copywriting has come a long way since the 1940s.

  “I think my grandmother used to clean with this stuff when I was a kid,” I say. “Do they even make it any more?”

  “It’s probably toxic.” Donna rubs lemon oil into the dry wood of the chest, bringing out a nice sheen in the wood. “Wonder why she saved them? They’re not even funny or anything.”

  Who knows? I’ve long ago given up pondering why people save the things they do. “Let’s put it all aside for Bruce and I’ll send him an email about it tonight.”

  Donna finds a small box and moves the advertisements out of the drawer. “Hey, look at this little guy!” She holds up a plastic model of the whirling dervish character that stands on two feet. “He’s like the Ronald McDonald of cleaning.”

  I stuff him in the box facedown. He’s got creepy eyes.

  After we catalog the contents of two more bedrooms, these with no clothes or personal items, there’s only one room left. Donna opens the last door on the right and stops in her tracks. “Oh, my! A nursery!”

  I crowd in beside her. The room contains a crib, a rocking chair, and shelves full of toys and books. Was this Lawrence’s room when he was a child? I cross to the shelves and remove a book. Rhymes for Boys and Girls, copyright 1945. A toy car is a replica of a late forties roadster.

  Lawrence was born in 1915. This room held a baby born in the forties.

  Lawrence and Vareena’s baby?

  Did she get pregnant in their brief weeks of marital bliss? How come none of the articles I’ve read mentioned that they had a child?

  An heir.

  Where is he now?

  Chapter 26

  DONNA AND I SPEND OUR last hour of work talking about the possibility of a Tate heir.

  “If Vareena has a son, wouldn’t all this go to him?” Donna pauses with a painted wooden train in her hand. “Unless she fought with him and cut him out of her will.”

  “He can’t still be alive. None of the articles I read even mentioned him.” I open the dresser drawers, but they’re empty. “And there’s no bedroom with a young man’s possessions. He must’ve died as a baby. Or maybe she had a miscarriage. She fixed up the room when she found out she was pregnant and then....”

  Donna’s face crumples. “Stop! That’s too sad. First her husband, then the baby.”

  I can see I’m upsetting my new assistant, so I keep quiet, but my mind continues to churn with theories. The miscarriage idea would explain why the articles don’t mention a child, but the nursery is definitely decorated for a boy. There were no sonograms in the 1940s, and parents of that era didn’t fight gender stereotypes by giving trains to girls. Was Vareena simply convinced she’d produce a male heir? Or had a son actually been born?

  At five-thirty, Donna and I call it a day. I’m still pondering the notion of a Tate heir. The best way to satisfy my curiosity is to do the good deed I’ve been putting off—return the library books I found downstairs and take the ledger to the local history room. I can stop there on the way home tonight.

  The library books are still in my tote bag. But the ledger? I shut my eyes trying to remember where I put it. The last time I saw it was in the van.

  Crap! That’s been lost too.

  But wait. The picture is starting to fill in with more details. The ledger was on the front console the last time I saw it in the van. But it wasn’t there on the trip to Newark.

  Now I remember! Ty told me to clean out the van so Donna wouldn’t toss it. I took the ledger out and put it...where?

  I picture the stiff brown leather and the crumbling gold embossing of Accounts. I see it on top of something white. My dryer! I dumped a load of stuff on top of the dryer when I came into my house through the laundry room the night before the Armentrout sale.

  So I can’t stop at the library on my way home. I’ll have to go tomorrow.

  Thinking about the van makes me wonder if Sean had any success questioning Crawford. I’ve been so busy, I haven’t even tried to text him.

  When I pull out my phone, I see I’ve missed a text from him.

  Following a lead on the van. Home late. Talk when I see you.

  I feel a birthday-gift surge of excitement. Of course, I’m dying to call him right now for details. But “talk when I see you” means “I’m busy and it’s complicated so wait.”

  So I drive home and wait.

  After walking Ethel, I spend an hour emailing photos of Tate mansion antiques to dealers whom I think might be interested. One of the emails is a photo of the Scour-Brite ad memorabilia, which I send to Bruce Strickler. Not ten minutes after I hit SEND, my phone is ringing.

  “Audrey, what a fabulous find!”

  “Hi, Bruce. I thought you might like it.” I get a kick out of Bruce. He’s a retired business executive. I’m sure in his professional life, he must’ve been a tough negotiator, but when it comes to his collecting passion, he’s as transparent with desire as a kid in the Target toy aisle.

  “You say you found it at the Tate Mansion? Fascinating!”

  “Yes, I’m curious about the connection. Was Edgar Tate’s metal fabrication business connected to Scour-Brite in some way?”

  “Doubtful. Scour-Brite was founded by Julius Crawford.”

  “Crawford? Any relation to Loretta Crawford Bostwick?”

  “The woman who was murdered at the 1740 Club? Yes, Julius would have been her great-grandfather. Loretta inherited all the family money. She saved Heatherington, the ancestral Bostwick home, from going on the block.”

  “Whoa—you mean the Bostwicks are broke?”

  “Well, broke is a relative term, isn’t it?” Bruce laughs. “Frederic Bostwick had the pedigree, but Loretta had the big money. Frederic is a direct descendent of a Revolutionary War officer. Loretta is the heiress to the Scour-Brite fortune.”

  “Was,” I correct. “I wonder if her son Crawford inherited it all?”

  “I have no idea. All I know about is the history of where the money came from.”

  “Tell me about that. I’m interested.”

  “The original company was started by Loretta’s great-grandfather, Julius Crawford. People used to clean everything with lye soap. He came up with a better
product. But more important, he found a way to make women want to pay more for this green liquid in a bottle. The not-so-subtle message was that if you unleashed the dervish in your house, your cleaning would be done in record time and you’d be able to put your feet up and relax for an hour before your old man got home. Scour-Brite was one of the first consumer products promoted with mass advertising to women.”

  “Cleanser and floor-scrubbing soap are enough to make you a billionaire?”

  “Scour-Brite is now SB Enterprises, a publicly traded company with five billion in revenue. They have their hands in all kinds of businesses, from industrial solvents to bio-medical solutions. But it all started with Julius Crawford’s green soap in a bottle and his whirling dervish mascot.”

  “Why would Vareena Tate have saved the ads and the mascot figurine?”

  “I’m sure the Tate family and the Crawford family moved in the same social circles, back in the day. I guess she must’ve been friends with one of the Crawfords.”

  “I suppose.” Bruce and I settle on a price for the memorabilia, but I continue to dwell on the items. Why did Vareena keep these when she kept nothing of sentimental value except the photos and letter from her husband?

  Chapter 27

  THUMP.

  My eyes open and squinch shut again. The house is quiet and dark except for my bedside lamp. The book I had been reading has slid to the floor, and Ethel is at the bedroom door with her nose pointed into the hall, her entire rear end wagging.

  “Sean?”

  He slips through the door, patting Ethel on the head as he makes his way to our bed.

  “Why are you so late?” I reach for him groggily. The alarm clock reads 3:50. I’m pretty sure my mother-in-law never fell asleep until she was sure her cop husband had returned safely from his shift. I feel neglectful.

  He sits beside me on the bed and dangles his phone before my nose. On the screen is a photo of a chipped red Jersey Devils key chain.

  My sleepy brain can’t process the significance.

  Then I jolt up and snatch it from him. “My van keys! You found my van?”

  He groans and stretches out beside me. “Not quite yet. Cops in Sister Alice’s precinct arrested a junkie this morning on shoplifting charges. When they were processing him, they found these keys. By some miracle, the guy at the desk remembered your description. They called me in to help question him.”

  “How old is he? What did he look like?”

  “Short and chubby and middle aged. Not your gunman. He found the keys in a trashcan in front of a bodega a few blocks away. And it seems like the guys who hang on that corner might know the kid with the new Jordans.”

  “Great! Who is he? Did you catch him?”

  Sean pats my leg. “All in good time, my sweet. The citizens of Sullivan Street don’t snitch unless there’s something in it for them.”

  “I’ll bribe them,” I offer. “It’s gotta be cheaper than buying a new van.”

  “Not necessary. The van can’t be far from the keys. We’ll search in the morning. But in the meantime, you’ll be interested to know I had a conversation with your pal, Crawford.”

  I prod Sean to get the details coming faster. “He hired the kid?”

  Sean shakes his head. “I don’t think so. At first, Crawford seemed genuinely puzzled by my questions, then bored and annoyed. But when he finally understood that your van was stolen when it was full of stuff from Birdie’s sale, he lit up like Times Square on New Year’s.”

  Ethel jumps on the bed and settles between us like she wants to hear this too.

  “Crawford wanted to know what was in the van. I asked why he cared, kept pressing him about what he was looking for when he came to Birdie’s house.” Sean scratches Ethel’s head, then grimaces at the big tumbleweed of fur that lands on the duvet. “Finally, he said I was harassing him and he was going to call his lawyer. I reminded him that he was free to leave at any time. We were just having a friendly chat. And that really pissed him off. He left, but I could tell he really wanted to know what was in that van. Poor Crawford’s not used to having civil servants get the best of him.”

  “What does it all mean? Crawford didn’t hire the carjacker but he still wanted whatever he thought was in the van?”

  “Two people are after the same thing. I’d say the other guy is more determined than Crawford.”

  “But if it’s the photo they’re after, maybe having it is putting George in danger. We should warn him.”

  Sean turns out the light and pulls up the covers. “I plan to talk to him tomorrow.”

  Chapter 28

  IN THE MORNING, SEAN leaves me with a promise to bring home my van by nightfall.

  I head out after him. The weight of my tote bag reminds me of the errand I need to do before work—drop off the library books I found at the Tate mansion.

  And bring the ledger to the local history room. Sure enough, it’s right there on the drier where I left it. I jump in my car and go.

  As I walk into the Palmyrton Library, I can see my favorite librarian at the circulation desk. Her round, sweet face lights up when she sees me. She’s worked here since I was kid, but she has the ageless demeanor of a woman who’s spent her life in service to books instead of clothes and cars and other trappings of status. I still think of her as Miss Joan although she’s probably only in her fifties.

  “Audrey! How nice to see you.” She glances at the copies of Hamilton and The Nightingale in my hands. “Those don’t look like the epic fantasy novels you usually like to read.”

  How well she knows me. “You’re right. These aren’t mine. I found them at the Tate Mansion.” I explain in greater detail as she checks them back in. “I thought I’d do a good deed and bring them back.”

  “Of course, I read about their deaths in the paper, but you’re right—I wouldn’t have noticed the account if you hadn’t pointed it out. Thank you. I’ll just close this account down. My goodness! Maybelle Simpson was a member since 1944 and never an overdue book until now!”

  “Did she come in often?”

  “Once a week on Tuesday morning ever since I started working here—regular as clockwork.”

  “What was she like? Did you talk to her?”

  “Very reserved. Always pleasant, but not very chatty.”

  “Were the books she checked out for her or for Vareena Tate? I found such an odd mix of books in their sitting room.”

  “Sprawling family saga novels and romances,” she holds up The Nightingale, “and biography and nonfiction like this,” she holds up Hamilton. “Right?”

  “Yes! Who read what?”

  “I suspect Mrs. Tate read the novels. Once when Miss Simpson was checking out Lonesome Dove I mentioned that I had enjoyed that novel very much, and I hoped she would too. She smiled slightly and said it wasn’t for her. Then she pushed her nonfiction forward and said, ‘These are mine.’”

  “Did Vareena Tate have a library card?”

  Miss Joan taps a few keys, then shakes her head. “Maybe she did at one time, but our system deletes accounts that have been dormant for ten years or more.” She looks at me with childlike wonder. “I’ve seen your ads for the estate sale. Is there a fabulous library in the Tate Mansion? Maybe I should come.”

  “Actually, there’s not. All the books the ladies read are paperbacks that Maybelle—Miss Simpson—seems to have bought at the thrift shop. Edgar Tate had some shelves filled with leather bound classics that were there for show. But if you’re in the market for some monumentally massive Victorian furniture, we can fix you up.”

  “All that money and no real library?” Miss Joan shakes her head as I walk away.

  The mysteries of human nature are too much for her.

  Next, I head upstairs to the Local History room. I don’t know the librarian here, an earnest bearded man about my age wearing wire-rim glasses and sandals with socks. I pull out the ledger and explain how I came to have it. He listens with his eyes focused over my left shoulder. When I
end with, “so I thought you might be interested in having it,” there’s no response for a full ten seconds. I feel like I’m a live TV show with a tape delay.

  Finally, he says, “Fascinating.” He slides the ledger toward himself and opens it like a new mother counting her baby’s fingers and toes. He studies each page silently, and I feel he’s forgotten I’m still here.

  “I thought it was interesting to see how prices changed over the years.” I speak to remind him I’m alive.

  He startles and looks over my shoulder again. “Thank you very much for bringing this in. It will be invaluable to my research. Palmyrton in the Gilded Age is a special interest of mine.”

  “You’re doing research on the Tate Mansion?” This guy could be a gold mine of info for me. “Do you know whether Vareena and Lawrence Tate had a baby? I didn’t read anything about a baby in any of the recent news articles, but yesterday we discovered a room decorated as a nursery with toys dating from the 1940s.”

  The librarian grimaces. “Those reporters take shocking short cuts. I gave them reams of information they didn’t bother to use.”

  I can’t help smiling at the thought of a New York Times reporter on deadline having to wait for information from Mr. Slow Talker here. “So there was a baby?”

  “Yes, Lawrence Tate, Jr., was born in 1943 after his father had already been killed in the war. His grandfather died the day after the baby was delivered.”

  Long pause. I’m dying here.

  “So what happened to the baby? Lawrence Tate, Jr. isn’t still alive, is he?”

  “He died before his first birthday. No record of the cause of death. He’s buried in the Tate family plot behind St. Stephen’s Episcopal.” The librarian’s watery blue eyes blink behind his thick lenses. “And Vareena Tate, daughter of Portuguese immigrants, became the wealthiest widow in Palmyrton.”

  “How sad. I guess that’s why poor Vareena became a recluse.” Then I think of another question I had. “Let me show you something. The handwriting in the ledger changes in 1964. It seems like Vareena kept the books until then, and suddenly turned the responsibility over to Maybelle. Do you have any idea what could have happened in ’64?”