Scary Stuff

by Sharon Fiffer

  Tim continued to explain the spirit-family concept, but Jane drifted in and out. On the one hand, she could see how one needed to balance out the self with these “others.” Jane herself could point to those who balanced her life—Charley was a great partner, Nick the questioning child. And she could even see, with Nick off with Charley, how Q filled in and made the scenario complete. And Tim was the friend—all-purpose—and who could ask for a better teacher figure than Detective Oh? And her dad, Don, made a good elder. Nellie . . . just how did Nellie fit into the spirit family tree? Jane could not shake the image of a real tree, with her mother perched on a high branch like a vulture, waiting to swoop down and feast on Jane’s entrails . . . that is, shortcomings. Too harsh, Jane knew, but the image felt too accurate to shake. So what was Michael in her spirit family tree?

  Jane loved her brother—she knew that. But if Tim’s latest mumbo jumbo had any merit, and let’s face it, the mumbo jumbo almost always did, even if it eventually went one “mum” and one “jum” too far, in order for Michael to have a real place in her life, she had to choose him as part of her family. Had she? She barely visited, barely knew him. Maybe he needed her, and without her, he had fallen out of synch with his spirit family and filled in all those slots with bogus Hall of Fame baseball cards?

  “Blood isn’t enough,” said Tim. “You choose your family in this life and they change all the time.”

  “Except for you and me,” said Jane.

  “Yes,” said Tim. “Except for you and me.”

  “You are always my spirit friend,” said Jane at the same time Tim said, “I am always your spirit god.”

  Tim suggested they check the classifieds to see if there were any house sales over the weekend that made it worth his while to stay over. Jane had finished unpacking and was rummaging in her purse for Ralph Mowbry’s business card. He’d had nearly twenty-four hours to sober up. Maybe he could give her names and addresses so she could move forward in her search for Michael’s twin.

  “Pioneer Press doesn’t get here until late, dinnertime,” Jane said. “With the mail.”

  “I’ve already got the classifieds up, sweetie, looks like a good weekend around these parts,” said Tim, calling to her from the sun-porch where Jane kept her desk, her computer, her files . . . among so many other essentials

  Jane, holding Mowbry’s card in her hand, paused in the doorway. As much as the room screamed at her to be organized, to be decluttered, to be “groomed” in some way, the space never failed to make her smile, to welcome her with some kind of secret handshake. Yes, she did have pillars of cigar boxes that reached to the low ceiling as she had confessed to Q, but she also had an old oak desk that held surprisingly organized files of receipts and client “want” lists and descriptions of annual rummage sales, complete with her notes on where to park and maps of labyrinthine church basements that led to the “treasure rooms.”

  Jane moved the overflowing box of old gas station road maps that she had fished out of someone’s basement just before the whole California debacle and sat down next to Tim.

  “I always forget that you can check online. Isn’t that weird? I guess I love the rush of getting the paper and turning to the classifieds, tearing out the page and circling and highlighting . . .”

  “Yeah, but if you check in the morning, you can sometimes do some early alley picking . . . I like to think of it as a prequel to a good sale,” said Tim.

  “I thought your days of shopping in the ‘big store’ were over, Mr. Quality Dealer, Mr. Time to Trade Up,” said Jane.

  “L.A. sent me back to my roots,” said Tim, clicking the mouse next to the sales that interested him. “Stuff was so overculled . . . and overpriced. It made me feel nostalgic for the old days, you know? Of course, you know, you’re still living them,” Tim said, electronically flipping to the next page.

  “Does this mean you’re staying for the weekend?”

  “I’ll stay tomorrow, anyway. We could shop and then I could cook up some food for you for the week. When do Charley and Nick get back?”

  Jane looked at the wall calendar pinned to a giant oak-framed classroom bulletin board. “A week from next Sunday. They’ve been gone for three weeks. This is the longest I’ve ever been separated from Nick. I feel like he’ll have actually grown and changed and—”

  “Yeah,” Tim said, “look at this one. Three generations worth of stuff! Collectors, crafters, hobbyists—wear your grubbies and come prepared to dig. That’s what I’m talking about. Back to our roots!”

  Jane waited until Tim had printed up their sale list and gone off to inventory the kitchen before making her call. Although filled with the most charming collectibles—Bakelite-handled utensils, jolly print tablecloths, and collectible dishes from Deco to Depression to Homer Laughlin and Russell Wright, Jane’s kitchen, even when she wasn’t just returning from a trip, often lacked food. When she heard Tim opening and closing cupboards, swearing and lamenting, she dialed the phone.

  “Mr. Mowbry, this is Jane Wheel, we met last night at Eden? The restaurant, where you mistook my brother for ‘Joe’?”

  Ralph Mowbry was between meetings, or so he said, but he found the address to which he had sent his check to Honest Joe. No last name—the check had been made out to Honest Joe, Inc.

  “Herscher, Illinois?” Jane said, unable to stop herself from laughing.

  “Yeah, I thought it was Hershey, I guess, like the candy. Funny, huh?”

  “It’s just that it happens to be a town I—” Jane hesitated to say that it was a town just outside of Kankakee, a town she knew well since childhood, since it probably wouldn’t be smart to place Michael anywhere near a location Mowbry had for “Joe.”

  “May I also ask how you knew you were mistaken about my brother? You got close to him, then realized that he wasn’t Joe.”

  “Yeah, it was the eyes, Old Honest Joe has him some crazy eyes . . . listen, I’m being called in for this conference, so I’ve got to go. Sorry again about last night.”

  Mowbry hung up.

  Jane ignored Tim’s questions from the kitchen about the age of her condiments and the expiration dates on boxes of couscous and Googled Honest Joe.

  247,000 hits.

  Honest Joe’s Used Cars and Honest Joe’s Pawn Shop were in the family of what she might be looking for, but sifting through all the references to politicians, Web sites, blogs, and Myspace pages seemed inefficient at best. Jane typed in Honest Joe’s auction sites.

  77,800 hits.

  Jane typed in Online auction sites.

  3,000,000 hits.

  Jane typed in Herscher, Illinois.

  1,553 pop.

  Finding Honest Joe, who might be one of the 1,553 who lived in and just outside the village of Herscher, on foot seemed a lot more promising than letting her fingers do the walking. Might as well score a few more points with her spirit brother, too.

  “Hey, Timmy, how about after the sales this weekend, I give you a ride back to Kankakee?”

  4

  For dinner, since neither of them had the energy or will to visit the grocery store, Tim invented—with assistance from Jane—a new dish that they dubbed chisotto— a chili-and-cumin-laced black bean soup, using some withered-but-forgiving carrots, celery, garlic, and onions, a bag of black beans, a can of diced tomatoes with Arborio rice stirred in slowly at the end, risotto fashion. Jane’s contribution was shredded cheese she found in the back of the refrigerator and a dollop of spicy salsa topping each serving.

  “This is one of the better ‘animals in the jungle’ dinners to come out of this kitchen,” said Jane. “With fresh cilantro, this would be fit for company.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t use your ‘you find it, you kill it, you eat it—animals in the jungle’ method of feeding your family to describe my expertise at the stove.”

  “Pantry supper?” asked Jane.

  “That makes me want to strangle you with my calico apron strings.”

  After they finished, J
ane let Tim map out their route for Friday-morning sales. She called and left a message for Charley on his cell phone—even though she knew he wouldn’t get the message until Sunday, when he came into an area that had any kind of service.

  “I’m home. Tim’s here with me until Saturday or Sunday, then I’ll go to Kankakee with him and visit, then back here, I guess, counting the days until you and Nick get back.” Jane grimaced at her own words. If she had known how to erase the message and start over, she would have. And no one could have been more surprised than Jane herself, when she heard her voice break, saying she missed them, she loved them, and wished them “such a good night.”

  Jane was so used to their being apart during her travels and Charley’s fieldwork, she thought she was immune to any kind of sentimental longings. She and Charley had worked out their deal long ago—they would have much more to offer each other if they pursued individual lives as well as their married family life. It had been the only kind of agreement that would have allowed Jane to overcome her fear of marriage, family, husband, child, one house, one street, in sickness and health, for better or worse, one life forever and ever. And although it had been mostly Jane’s deal at the beginning, Charley had come around, Jane knew, to her way of thinking. He was happy with his globe-trotting freedom; he was grateful that his field-work and fascination with relics much older than the ones Jane dragged through the door were understood and appreciated.

  Jane shrugged off her embarrassing lapse. When she was busy, this wash of emotion never rolled over her. She needed a giant daylong rummage sale or an estate sale at an old Chicago bungalow. Or, she admitted to herself, a case to solve. Jane had learned that nothing took her mind off her own troubles like mucking about in someone else’s messy life. And hadn’t brother Michael handed her a lovely gift-wrapped problem? So she could start out with the mistaken identity, find Honest Joe, and maybe find a nice little case of fraud and who knows what else? What was it Oh had told her when he was still with the police department? “Nothing like a murder to put one’s own small life in perspective.”

  Jane planned to spend Thursday night wrapping some packages to mail out to Muriel, a dealer in Ohio for whom she found the occasional relish dish, silver spoon, general odd and end. It drove Tim crazy that Jane still worked for Muriel, since he had offered her a partnership in his own house-sale business and shop and wanted her talents used exclusively for the benefit of his own customers.

  “Muriel took a chance on me when I was just starting out. She gave me tools and taught me how to tell the difference between bone and ivory. She—”

  “I’ll give you a hammer and a cat’s-paw so you can tear walls apart and yank on nails at a demo sale, too, honey, if that’s all it takes,” said Tim, removing his laptop from a padded leather case. “I mean, if you’re going to be wrapping up stuff and sending it, and not sending it to me, you should be selling online yourself. Why should you be the middleman?”

  “Show me,” said Jane.

  Tim flipped open his Macbook, signed in to his eBay account, and showed Jane the list of items he had up for sale. She was shocked to see that some of the items he had purchased last weekend at a California flea market were already photographed, described, and sported bids.

  “How did you do it all so fast?”

  “It takes a digital camera and fingers to type with,” said Tim, clicking rapidly from item to item, checking the bids and the bidding history.

  “No, I mean—” Jane stopped. What she meant was, how did Tim know he would be able to part with those items? He had just bought the cool transistor radios, one red and white, one a perfect turquoise gem; Jane had watched him bargain for them along with a box of radio knobs and dials. Didn’t he want to put them on a shelf somewhere, get to know them first? See if he might want them for his own collection?

  “Honey, I know what you’re thinking, but I don’t collect transistor radios. I don’t collect any electronics, so what’s the big deal?”

  “How do you know?” asked Jane. She looked around her office. So many of the items that were gathered here were not necessarily objects that she knew she collected. Not until she found one or two. Take the pins for example. Industrial pins—big giant safety pins hung from old square nails pounded into the bottom slat of a primitive wall cupboard. She found her first pin at the Chelsea flea market in New York City. She didn’t know what made her pick it up out of a pile of trinkets on someone’s card table, but when the seller asked for fifty cents, it seemed more than reasonable. It seemed handy and functional and clean lined and well designed and . . . in some way impossible to describe . . . it seemed beautiful to her. She found a few more at rummage sales, in thrift stores. That first pin, though, the one that winked at her in the sun on a beautiful Saturday morning in Manhattan, that pin had started her search for locker pins, laundry pins—anything that looked remotely like an oversized safety pin and all the better if it had a number or letter on it. Why did she love them? She had no idea. But how would she have developed the relationship with them if she hadn’t brought the first one home, allowed it to get comfortable.

  And that, she supposed would be Tim’s whole point if she recited this story to him. All the more reason to slap up the photos on eBay ASAP and commit to selling your lucky finds rather than adopting them.

  “Tim, can you look up auctions by seller?” Jane rarely dipped into the tempting waters of eBay. She knew how dangerous it could be. Once, in an antique mall, in eBay’s early days, a chatty shopper next to her in line at the checkout described the phenomenon to Jane. “You know how sometimes you just have to go to an antique mall because it’s a Tuesday afternoon and there aren’t any house sales or rummage sales or garage sales or flea markets or auctions or anything? Well, with eBay, you’re covered any day of the week at three A.M.”

  So dangerous.

  “Natch.” Tim clicked over to advanced search and asked for the name she wanted him to check out.

  “Honest Joe.”

  “Original. Nope. Nothing listed for sale by Honest Joe.”

  “Do you use any other auction sites?” asked Jane.

  “I’ve dabbled,” said Tim.

  “Will you look at others you know of for Honest Joe while I check in with Bruce Oh and”—Jane sighed—“Nellie. I owe Nellie a call.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Hello, Mom,” said Jane. Her mother’s phone manner never failed to astonish and appall her.

  “It’s about time.”

  “For what? I got in this afternoon and just—”

  “How’s the baby?” asked Nellie. “I know, Don, I’ll tell her, give her a chance to answer, for God’s sake.

  “How’s the baby?” Nellie repeated.

  “Jamey is great, very cute, active, brilliant, all the things one could want in a baby,” said Jane, “and Q is magnificent. She’s smart and funny—I can’t believe how big she is already—”

  “What’s the surprise for? If you don’t go out and visit your brother and his family more than once every five years, do you expect kids not to grow?”

  “When was the last time you visited, Mom? I forget,” said Jane.

  “That’s different,” said Nellie.

  “Right,” said Jane, “you have all those surgeries to perform, all those rockets to launch.”

  “We got a business. Leave a tavern for a few days and a bartender will rob you blind. Close a tavern, and your guys’ll find a new place and get comfortable. Besides,” Nellie yelled, answering a challenge that Jane had not even voiced, “we don’t have that much business anyway. Think these idiots will believe we’re coming back? If we close for a day, we’re done. They get in a habit, these guys, and as long as we got a few crawling in here every day, we got to keep ’em coming.”

  “Don and Nellie’s version of ‘keep the customer satisfied’?” said Jane.

  Jane’s dad picked up the extension. “Hi, honey.”

  “Hang up, Don, it makes it hard to hear when you’re in there wit
h the TV on.”

  “How were Michael and Monica doing? And the kids?” asked Don.

  “Good, Dad, they send their love.”

  “That Q sends me letters, writes them all by herself. She’s quite a girl,” said Don.

  “Hey, I was getting to all this,” said Nellie.

  “We should go out there and spend a little time with them,” Don started to say.

  “Oh yeah,” Nellie cut him off, “and who’s going to keep the place open?”

  “Carl, maybe, could—”

  “Oh jeez, Carl. He’s got more aches and pains . . . you think he could load the coolers? Write the orders? I wouldn’t trust Carl—”

  “Mom? Dad?”

  “How about Carl at night and Johnny during the day? The two of them—”

  “Want the place to burn down? Remember when Johnny emptied the ashtrays into the wastebasket without checking to see if there were cigarettes still burning?”

  “How about—?”

  Jane hung up. It would be several minutes before her parents realized she was no longer participating in the conversation. The phone call had served its purpose. They knew she was home. She knew they were still alive.

  “Oh.” Bruce Oh answered the phone in his customary style to which Jane would never grow accustomed.

  “Oh. I mean, hello. I expected the machine. I thought you would still be in California.”

  “We arrived home an hour ago. What did you plan to tell the machine, Mrs. Wheel?”

  “Let’s see. That I’m home and that I have a case to work on—just a little case, really—my brother’s been mistaken for someone who seems to be cheating people on the Internet and I thought maybe I could find him, maybe we—”

  “And politely ask him to stop looking like your brother or ask him to stop cheating people?”

  “I really haven’t planned very far ahead,” said Jane. Oh always asked honest, direct, if sometimes puzzling, questions, but Jane thought that these queries were a wee bit sarcastic. They sounded more like Tim than Oh.