Scary Stuff

by Sharon Fiffer

  Jane stood at the sound of a car pulling into the drive. From the kitchen window she could see it was Don and Nellie arriving, and Jane realized Michael was about to pay triple for any idiotic act he felt he committed. Nellie would be relentless when she saw that black eye. When Jane once experimented with an extremely short haircut, Nellie never left her alone about it. A black eye would, as Don might say, wind her up like an eight-day clock.

  Rita, who had been standing watch on the porch, ran over to Nellie, and Jane watched her mother crouch down like a woman half her age and give the dog a thorough rubdown. Nellie was full of surprises, Jane thought, as she watched her parents making their way to the door. Nellie walked three steps ahead of Don, talking to him over her shoulder the whole time. Rita walked at Nellie’s heel.

  “Michael, have you talked to Mom and Dad?” asked Jane.

  “Not yet. There was no answer at the house or on your cell so I called Tim’s store and the girl who answered the phone said you and Tim were working out here and gave me directions to this place. I figured you and I could cook up a story to satisfy Nellie,” said Michael, still sitting with his back to the door.

  “Start cooking then, because I’m ready to hear it,” said Nellie, pushing open the screen door.

  Jane got up and went over to give her parents, her dad anyway, a hug. They looked like two people who had been keeping a vigil at a hospital, tired and spent. Don returned the hug, but Nellie bobbed and weaved away from Jane like a featherweight boxer and eyed her son, Michael. She showed no surprise at his appearance at Swanette’s farm.

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  Don came around and patted his son’s shoulder, giving Michael’s eye a quick glance and wincing. Jane understood the language of that wince. Whenever Nick scraped his knee, jammed his finger, twisted an ankle, or was on the receiving end of a rough foul in a soccer match, she felt the same physical recoil from her son’s pain. She actually felt herself physically caving in to the blow when she saw him struck. She could see Don was experiencing the same sensation.

  Nellie, however, had a different method for dealing with the illnesses and injuries of and to her children. For as long as Jane could remember, when either she or Michael had a fever or a banged-up elbow, Nellie would stare them down, daring them to feel the pain. She battled their aches with a fierce anger. If Jane said her leg hurt, Nellie’s reply was always the same.

  “Everybody’s leg hurts.”

  Nellie would perform the required bandaging with a gentle hand, but her eyes stayed angry. When she was small, Jane thought her mother was angry at them when they allowed themselves to get hurt or sick, but she realized now, watching Nellie, that her mother’s quarrel was with something much larger. She was a tigress defending her young from a hurtful world, a cruel universe. That pothole in the street that had knocked them off their bicycles? Nellie would smooth it out with her bare hands if she could, and beat the daylights out of the city worker who had not made a proper job of fixing it the first time around.

  “Who did that?” asked Nellie, staring at his eye.

  Michael hugged his mother even though she never unfolded her arms to hug him back. Bruce and Claire Oh made themselves busy clearing away the cups and tea things, but Tim stayed planted right where he was. He loved each and every episode of the Nellie show and wasn’t going to move from his front-row seat for what promised to be a memorable viewing experience.

  “Michael was a total idiot, Mom. He was carrying the baby and ducking low into a doorway to protect Jamey and didn’t notice a low beam over the door after passing the baby under. He wanted me to cook up a story that was more exciting and heroic, but I told him honesty’s the best policy. So what if you seem clumsy, right? Better just to spit it out and get on with things. Let’s just be thankful he still got to make the trip out here for work, so we all get to be together,” said Jane.

  Tim looked just like a judge at an athletic competition, ready to hold up a card marked with a very low number.

  Michael nodded, content to let Jane take the questions. They both knew there would be questions.

  “What the hell kind of doorway? Were you visiting midgets?” said Nellie.

  “Little people,” said Tim, unable to stop himself from the automatic correction.

  “Should stay out of other people’s business,” said Nellie, dismissing Tim. “What the hell kind of a doorway—”

  “That’s enough, Nellie. It’s been a hell of a morning. Let’s have some coffee and figure out what everybody’s doing next. How long can you stay, son?” asked Don, putting an end to the awkward tension.

  Everyone got busy then. Jane made a pot of coffee. Tim dug out the few snacks he had packed. Nellie filled a bowl with water for Rita and set it out on the porch and Don explained what he and Nellie had been doing all morning at the hospital. Sitting, waiting, and more sitting.

  “So Swanette’s sale and accident and . . . everything . . . has taken over here, hasn’t it?” asked Michael. “I can see there’s been no time for any progress on Honest Joe.”

  “Not an accident,” said Jane, “and I wouldn’t say no progress. I know that Honest Joe is somehow working out of Cousin Ada’s house; I saw his mail there. I just don’t quite know whether he’s a he I haven’t seen or he’s the woman who pretended to be looking in on Ada yesterday or someone else entirely,” said Jane. “Everybody seems to know that they can go in and out of Ada’s house at will, during the carving season anyway.”

  “Who’s Honest Joe?” asked Don, at the same time Michael asked, “Who’s Cousin Ada?”

  Explanations were exchanged and Jane saw that Michael was as befuddled by the news that Nellie had somehow managed to hide a first cousin from them all these years as she had been. Nellie ran water into the sink, preparing to wash dishes, and listened to Jane explain Ada then allowed Michael to give a short history of his mistaken identity without interrupting with any questions.

  Bruce Oh asked for paper and Tim pointed him to his box of supplies. Oh took out a blank piece of paper and began carefully drawing what looked like a map of Swanette’s property.

  “We only have the rest of today to accomplish what we need to do, since by tomorrow morning we will need to cooperate with the police. I believe by tomorrow they will agree to open an investigation and our opportunities here will be limited.”

  Everyone nodded and all except Nellie gathered behind Oh to hear his plan. Nellie kept her silent post at the sink, washing out the cups and saucers.

  “If you and your wife are willing to help,” Oh said, looking at Don, “I think you would be most useful beginning the inventory in the outbuildings. You can leave the objects there, but take down their numbers and descriptions and any dates, and Mr. Lowry and I, here in the house, will use our computers to look up these numbers, seeing if we can link them to auctions. Claire will continue going through items in the house . . .”

  “Bruce, I’m happy of course to do whatever you need me to do, but I’m noticing a pattern here that’s very strange. For every set of vintage linens, there’s—”

  “Some inexpensive country-look set from Target or somewhere, right?” Jane interrupted. “Tim and I noticed the same pattern. We think somebody, probably the caretakers here, the health-care worker and the handyman, maybe together, were selling off the real stuff and supplying Swanette’s mother-in-law with cheap knockoffs. That way she didn’t know she was being robbed and her real vintage goods supplied a steady stream of income. Since she was old and frail, it was only a matter of time before they’d get to move out the bigger pieces, the real antiques. In the meantime, they could keep her trust, and take stock of all she had. They could even run their business out of the outbuildings. And if, together, they’re Honest Joe, they could be stealing from Ada, too. Some of those tags could have referred to Ada’s things,” said Jane, remembering “A’s Attic” and “A’s trunk” written on some of the identifying note cards. “As long as they stoked Swanette’s mother-in-
law’s anger and paranoia, which kept Swanette out of the house, they could run the show here.”

  “You think the two people here were Honest Joe?” asked Michael.

  “It’s possible,” said Jane. “Probable. But I think they were inconsistent. I think sometimes they confused the phony goods, the contemporary stuff, for the real items and when those got sent out to the winning bidders, those people felt tricked and cheated. They worked on an auction site that provided an option for the seller to provide a photo, and somehow, they used a photo of you or someone who looked enough like you to be your twin. Who knows how they got it or why? They could have lifted it from a box of photos at Ada’s house. Maybe it was just a joke or something. But those customers who bought fakes from the sites where your double appeared? They were the ones that confronted you, Michael.”

  “Inconsistent? Confused? Why do you think they were so innocent?” asked Tim. “I think they knew what they were doing, just got greedy and decided they could sell fakes as well as they could sell the real stuff.”

  Jane nodded. She was trying to make it sound less ominous in front of her parents, but she believed the same thing. Whoever was stealing from Swanette’s house got greedy . . . so greedy that when Swanette was on the verge of finding a stash of valuable objects in the outbuilding, Honest Joe had knocked her out and left her for dead.

  “You got one part of your story screwed up,” said Nellie.

  Her mother had been quiet for so long, Jane thought she had stopped listening. Nellie had, in fact, finished the cups and saucers and had moved over to a shelf next to the kitchen window. She had taken down a photo album, one of several that were lined up together, and was paging through the old book, seemingly lost in her own thoughts.

  “First of all, they weren’t just stealing from Swanette’s mother-in-law.” Nellie grabbed a napkin to mark her place in the photo album and moved back to the sink where many of the dishes she had washed and dried the day before were still piled up on the counter.

  “Sixty, seventy years ago when people were collecting plates like this out of their laundry detergent boxes or sending away for stuff or using their trading stamps to get stuff, people were brand loyal. Pattern loyal. They had their favorite and stuck to it. They didn’t collect one of everything; they tried to collect a set. I remember my own mother, trudging from store to store trying to find certain brands that would sell out when a special piece of china she didn’t have yet was included. Not everybody had a car back then, so she’d be walking twelve, thirteen blocks out of her way to find the right box of soap. This junk here in this house? There are partial sets of a bunch of stuff. It’s not the new stuff, either; it’s all really old. It’s just that one person the age of Lee’s mother wouldn’t have stood still for all this stuff . . .”

  “Swanette said that her mother-in-law was the caretaker of things from her whole family, that she had her aunt’s stuff and her own mother’s . . .” said Jane.

  “Nope,” said Nellie. “I saw some of them boxes upstairs. They were labeled as coming from different relatives and the stuff inside all made sense, it went together. But all these different patterns of glass and such? These people were stealing from all kinds of other people.”

  Jane looked at Oh.

  “This is what I was talking about with the boxes in the shed. Different handwriting, different types of boxes, different tape and packing styles even. It’s as if they just took one box off the back of every moving truck,” said Jane.

  Michael stood, and when he scraped his chair back, Jane looked up and noticed for the first time how tired and pale he looked. Before, concentrating on the deeply colored bruise, she hadn’t really paid attention to how fragile her brother appeared.

  “Michael, you must be starving. You were at that card show yesterday and took the red-eye, then drove here from O’Hare? How long has it been since you’ve eaten a meal?”

  Michael shrugged. “Weeks?” he asked.

  “We’ll go into town and get food and bring back sandwiches from Edna’s Diner,” said Jane. “Everyone can get started here and we’ll be back quickly. In fact, I want to time the shortcut using the service road anyway,” said Jane.

  Oh nodded. He had completed his map and Jane saw that he had rendered Swanette’s farm in a charming freehand style, listing everything he remembered from this morning’s tour. He had only spent minutes in two of the outbuildings, but he was able to list the types of items and the manner in which they were coded and inventoried. Jane was sure that by the time she and Michael returned, those who were working here at the farm would have clear connections to auction sellers.

  “Michael, you took those baseball cards off eBay, right? Those phonies?” asked Jane.

  “Canceled the auctions before I left town.”

  Jane and Michael started for the door, but as if both were taken with the same thought, they each turned to Nellie.

  “You’re not mad at me, are you, Mom?” asked Michael. She had said very little directly to her son as she listened to all the explanations and speculations, except for pointing out to the group what had seemed obvious to her about the thousands of items crowding the house.

  Jane also asked a question, although she had decided long ago that Nellie was always mad at her, so that was an obvious query she never bothered to voice. “What’s so interesting in that album, Mom?” Nellie rarely sat still for long. But during the entire process of Claire angling for a peek out at the shed and Tim trying to keep her in the house so he could watch her and Don conferring with Oh about the way he wanted the item numbers recorded, Nellie had continued to sit in the old mission-style rocker and page through the worn old photo album.

  “Mom?”

  “I’m just looking at some old pictures,” said Nellie. “Don’t you always say that old pictures deserve to have some attention paid?”

  Jane did always say that when she was explaining why she brought home old family photos of people she had never met, but she had hardly expected her mother to have listened to her let alone remembered her words.

  Michael was still watching his mother when she finally looked up and gave him half a smile. “No, I’m not mad. I’m glad to see you, but I want to see the kids, too. They all right?”

  Michael nodded and bent over his mother to kiss her cheek.

  Jane smiled, oddly able to enjoy one of the rare tender glimpses into her mother’s heart, even though it wasn’t directed at her. She forgot to be jealous and was simply pleased to see her brother and her mother pictured, for a second, in such a warm tableau. She wasn’t prepared, however, to see what most people would identify as a tear in her mother’s eye. Nellie wasn’t someone who produced tears. Nonetheless, Jane was sure she saw it. It was minute, but it was a tear. As quickly as Jane registered the sight, Nellie blinked hard and bent her head back over the album, refusing to look up again as Michael took Jane’s elbow and steered her out the door.

  16

  Jane backed out of the parking place she had claimed between Tim’s truck and Michael’s rental and drove around all the cars to the barn, turned behind it, and drove down the service road, slowly and quietly at first, then, once clear of Swanette’s house, she stepped on the gas, kicking up gravel into the cornfield.

  “I’m not that hungry,” said Michael.

  “I just want to see how much time I can take off in getting to town the back way,” said Jane. “I’m just curious. If I’m right about this, Honest Joe and/or Honest Joanne have been working their business between Ada’s and Swanette’s places. I’m guessing they did the paperwork at Ada’s since the post office is in town, unless they drove to another town for mailing out stuff. Might make somebody suspicious if someone kept mailing stuff out in a little town like this . . . the postal workers would know who was dealing on auction sites . . . and . . .” Jane’s voice trailed off, but it was clear she hadn’t really been talking to Michael. She was just trying to work it all out.

  “Janie, I’m sorry I busted in here wi
th my hard-luck story at a terrible time.”

  “Why, Michael? You can probably help, it’s going to take all of us tonight to carry out—”

  “I mean right after Swanette died. Makes my stuff seem even stupider. Tim told me when I got here what was going on. . . . Mom and Dad had just called him. I’m sorry, that’s all. I know you were trying to help her.”

  “Yes. I still am. I’ll explain just how we’re going to do that when—”

  Jane turned onto the main road and looked at her watch. She set her tripometer and nodded at Michael. “This is going to cut off more than half a mile. Someone could have been at Ada’s the whole time I was there yesterday with Mom, listening to everything that was going on, left the same time as we did, and beat us here with minutes to spare. It doesn’t help that I stopped at the stupid minimart.”

  “Hey, you can’t blame yourself for Swanette . . .”

  Jane shook her head. “I don’t. I’m just always amazed at the minute or two-minute decisions that change everything. Let’s get those sandwiches, then maybe we can take a few minutes for you to meet your second cousin, Ada.”

  Michael started to ask Jane about their newfound relative as they entered Edna’s Diner. A few people sat at the counter, a family with two small children occupied one booth, and another table was filled with men playing cards. Michael picked up a menu and began to study it. Jane walked over to the cardplayers.

  “Bill?” said Jane, standing next to the old man she had met on Friday. “Bill, I met you in here on Friday, day before yesterday, and showed you a picture. Remember?”

  “I’m old, but I ain’t stupid, honey. I remember,” he said, laying down his cards. “Gin.”

  There was some grumbling from the other men and a few quarters changed hands. Bill’s card partners got up to stretch and left their friend alone with Jane. Bill looked Jane up and down. “Got more pictures to show me?”

  Jane waved at Michael to come over. “I want to introduce you to someone.”