by Tamar Myers
“You think so?”
“Well I should hope so. You favor her, don’t you? Yeah, I know you don’t dress like you’re the Beave’s mom, but you share the same features, and the same nice proportions—uh, but of course you look younger and nicer. Don’t they always say that you should look at a woman’s mother to see how she’ll look in twenty years?”
I asked for my Pom-Pom back, and then downed the glass in two gulps. “Make me another please.”
“Whoa, are you sure?”
“Quite.”
It was quarter past eleven, and I was sitting on the front steps (it was so warm that I needed only a light sweater) when I heard a woman’s voice approaching from my left. Ours is a very quiet street, and since there are no bed and breakfast establishments anywhere near, a human voice at such a late hour is quite the anomaly. The speaker was either talking to her dog or speaking into her cell phone. In either case, she was not from around here, because behavior such as this was just plain rude, and my neighbors are all very polite people.
“No, I will not free them; I don’t care what Mr. Lincoln says!” There was something odd about her accent, something I couldn’t put my finger on.
I stood quietly, hoping to spot her.
“In case you have forgotten, sir,” she said, her voicing rising, “it was my father’s money that bought them. It is his largesse that we depend on even now. And it would be my father’s wish—were he here—that I continue to be cared for in the manner in which I have always been accustomed.”
Okay, now it made sense; the woman was an actress rehearsing a scene about the emancipation of the slaves. We have several theaters in town, and Hollywood loves to use our colonial and antebellum homes as backdrops for their movies. In fact, great chunks of the film The Patriot were set here, just two blocks from my house.
“If that’s how you feel, Mr. Broderick, then perhaps you should return to Illinois.”
There! At last I could see her. She was much taller than I—but who wasn’t—and wearing a period costume. Under the streetlights the dress appeared to be a rich blue, perhaps silk, and the skirt ballooned in all directions, no doubt supported by barrel hoops. She wore her dark hair swept up off the nape of her neck, and atop it a blue-feathered hat that matched her dress.
“Sir, do you jest? Benjamin and Alice are my children! You are but their stepfather; you cannot take them to Illinois with you.”
I stood very still. The woman was now passing just inches directly in front of me, but she seemed totally unaware of my presence. I could hear the rustle of her dress and smell the combination of old sweat and lavender water.
“No, sir, you cannot make me choose! You cannot!”
It was then that I noticed that the woman in blue was too preoccupied to duck, or sidestep, the overhanging bough of a live oak tree. She walked right into it—and then through it. I mean that literally! Leaves, twigs, even wood as thick my wrist, passed right through her head, neck, and chest.
“If I give up my slaves,” she cried, “then I shall have to give up this grand house, for we will never be able to afford so many servants—not on your salary, sir!”
I sat back down on the steps. I wasn’t afraid, mind you, just somewhat entranced. For some reason Charleston has more than its fair share of Apparition Americans. As one local medium expressed it: unhappy people here don’t die; they just become invisible part of the time. Of course not everyone is misfortunate enough to see those who have only partially passed from this life—nonbelievers seldom do—but at the same time, there are those among us who are particularly sensitive to their continued presence. I just happen to be one of them. And although this was by no means my first encounter with an Apparition American since moving to the Lowcountry, it was by far my longest.
“Abby,” another voice said, “what’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost?”
I looked up to find Mama standing so close that I could see my reflection in her black patent leather shoes. “Mama! Where did you come from?”
“From across the street; my date dropped me off.”
“Aha, so he was your date!”
“He was my dinner date, dear. Although frankly, the exact terminology for my evening’s companion is none of your business.”
“The heck it isn’t. Mama, what did you—”
But Mama had swept past me and was on her way into the house. Extracting any more information from her on the subject was going to be as futile as the press trying to get the truth from the White House. I was going to have to wait until either she tripped herself up or felt the need to gloat.
Tomorrow I would start my unofficial undercover work. It was time for me to go to bed.
7
When The Singing Panda opened its doors, it was an instant success. The name alone elicited a good deal of press, but the higher-end Asian goods seemed to really hit the spot with the nouveau riche who were flocking onto the Lower Peninsula and buying homes south of Broad Street. S.O.B.’s, we call these folks. South of Broaders. To be honest, I am one of these.
While a pleasing aesthetic can be achieved by mixing quality Asian pieces into a traditional decorating scheme, quite often designers are asked to incorporate mass-market resin pieces that are commonly available at home decorating stores. The truth is that many of these fake antiques are more attractive and durable than the real thing. A hundred years from now these resin beauties will take on a value of their own—perhaps—but they won’t be traditional Asian antiques. For the real thing, go to The Singing Panda; there, you’ll find treasures that managed to escape the Cultural Revolution.
As I pushed open the door of The Singing Panda, my senses were immediately confronted by two things: loud Italian opera and thick Chinese incense. I glanced around through the haze, and thankfully, rather quickly, spotted the owner down an aisle to my right. He was dusting with a feather duster.
Can you turn down the volume? I mouthed, without uttering a sound. This is a little trick I play on Mama when she starts pretending she can’t hear something. The fact is, she could hear a frog fart in Fargo—if she wanted to—pardon my indelicate language. Since Mama’s ear pans work extremely well, this sudden “glitch” sends her into a panic.
Apparently Eric Bowfrey was a pro at lip-reading. Mind-reading too. He not only turned off the music, but he made a show of carrying a bowl of lit joss sticks into the back room, and then closing the door on them.
“How may I help you?” he said when he returned. As usual, he was dressed in a lightweight green burnoose, the hood up. His face had all the serenity of a sitting Buddha, yet his vivid green eyes managed to sparkle. As for his dimples, they were every bit as deep as I’d imagined, so I did a little more on-the-spot imagining, and pressed some finely cut Colombian emeralds into them.
“My name is Abilake Timbergail,” I said. “I mean, it’s Abigail Washburn, but Timber Snake is my business name—please, just call me Abby.”
“I’m Eric,” he said softly. “I know who you are, Abby. You have that fabulous shop: the Den of Iniquity.”
“Uh—it’s the Den of Antiquity. Iniquity is my a vocation, not my vocation.”
His face didn’t change. “Are you serious?”
“Are you stoned?”
“I’m at peace with the world, Abby. I speak only the truth. This makes me vulnerable to sarcasm and the butt of jokes, but I have worked hard to be where I am. This where I wish to stay.”
“I’m not trying to dissuade you—Never mind; it’s an admirable state of affairs. Eric, can we talk?”
“Aren’t we talking now?”
“Yes, but a customer could walk in any minute. I mean, like, can I take you to dinner after work? Can we meet for a drink? That type of thing?”
“Abby, I eat only raw organic produce that was picked at midday when the plant is least likely to be actively growing and thus the least likely to experience pain. Did you know that most plants grow at night?”
“No, I didn’t. How
fascinating.”
“At any rate, everything I eat, I have to grow myself, or else have it especially shipped into Charleston; long story short, I can’t eat out. And of course, I don’t drink. Yes, I know that red wine is supposed to be beneficial, but in the making of most commercial wine, grapes are tortured.”
I thought of Lucy and Ethel stomping on the grapes in an old I Love Lucy episode. I could just hear the grapes shrieking in pain as the pair clowned around. What an absolutely insensitive person I was. Could this soft-spoken man be right? And what if it was just a matter of time before scientists proved that it was only a small step from being infruitane to being inhumane?
“But,” Eric, said, his voice barely above a whisper, “this shop is mine, and I am free to do with it as I please. And what I please is to close now for a few minutes so that we can talk here—if that suits you.
“It suits me to a tea.”
The tea wasn’t jasmine, but English breakfast, and served in hand-painted porcelain as light as paper and as transparent as Greg’s mind the week before Christmas. Pottery might have gotten its start in the Near East, and glorious glazes perfected in China, but it was an Englishman by the name of Josiah Spode II who thought of adding powdered animal bone as fifty percent of his porcelain component. Eric also brought a plate with warm blueberry scones and a glass bowl filled with clotted cream.
“Have you ever had clotted cream?” he asked.
“Never.”
“Spread it on your scone like butter. I picked that up at the Mount Nelson Hotel in Capetown. Believe me, it’s worth the calories.”
“Eric, you shouldn’t have.”
“It was no trouble. I bake my own scones every morning before I come to work.”
“No, I meant you shouldn’t have brought out just two. I skipped breakfast and I’m hungry enough to eat both.”
He laughed. “There are two more back there; I never know who’s going to drop in. So, Abby, what’s on your mind?”
“Before I get to that: aren’t scones made of wheat, and isn’t wheat thrashed?”
“The word is ‘threshed,’ and this wheat isn’t, it’s handpicked. Mozart is played while the milling takes place, to ease the pain of the grain being crushed. However, the cows much prefer the Beatles. Abbey Road is their favorite album.”
His green gaze never wavered, which meant he was telling the truth—at least in my book. What a peaceful face! What was it that drew one in? Was it the perfect skin, or the slight smile that tugged at the corners of his full, bow-shaped lips? Forget about putting emeralds in his dimples. Fill them up with clotted cream and—
“Abby. Are you all right?”
“Never better. Why?”
“You look sick. Perhaps you should stick to the tea. And without milk.”
“I’m fine. If you think I’m going to pass up the chance to eat a nontraumatized scone, then you’re crazy—uh, nothing personal.” I took a deep breath. “But about why I’m here in the first place—you did hear about my arrest, right?”
“No.”
“What do you mean by ‘no’? Of course you did! It’s all anyone in Charleston could talk about for days—correction, it’s all they still can talk about.”
His eyes never flickered. “I don’t listen to gossip.”
“But surely people say things—”
“I ask them to stop.”
“No radio? No TV?”
“I play music, Abby. Only music. I don’t have time to listen to the commentary other people want to impose on me.”
“You’re either too good to be true or too true to be merely good. Would you like to meet my daughter? She’s twenty-five, has straight teeth, and good breeding hips.”
He grinned wide enough to show me that his own teeth were rather nice. “Thanks, but no. I’ve taken a vow of celibacy.”
“Well, it was worth a try. Anyway, I was arrested because a rosewood commode that I ordered from Hong Kong turned out instead to be a shipment of illegal ivory.”
“I may have a partial explanation,” he said, his voice as calm and soft as pillow talk. “Please, follow me.”
I carefully set down my delicate cup and did as bade.
Eric Bowfrey’s storeroom was disgustingly organized and clean. Susan and Eric would not have been compatible.
“Here,” he said, stopping at a neat row of small tables and chests. “Is this what the commode was supposed to have looked like?”
“Why yes, that’s it!”
“For some reason it was sent to me.”
I admired the beautiful chest of drawers; the craftsmanship was superb. “If this isn’t what you ordered, then what was?”
“Black lacquer tea tables—three of them. With mother of pearl inlay. One was already spoken for.”
“Ouch. Do you suppose that this commode will work as a substitute?”
“I doubt it; this client is very specific. Abby, since the commode is what you ordered, why don’t you take it off my hands? At cost, of course.”
“Well, I—”
“I insist, Abby. He leaned toward me and lightly touched my arms with fingers that were as long and slender as tapers. And even though my arms were covered, his fingertips felt like flames. I jumped. “I’m sorry, Abby, did I startle you?”
“No, no—I mean, yes. I’m just a silly old woman, I guess.” The heck I was; I was only forty-eight.
“You’re not old at all, Abby. You remind me very much of my mother, and she won’t turn sixty until September twenty-first.”
I swallowed enough foolish pride to add a dress size; it was a good thing I was wearing slacks with hidden stretch panels that morning. “You seem to be a very knowledgeable young man, Eric. What do you know about the ivory trade?”
“I know that the ban has been so effective in some of the countries that have enforced it that elephants have become a problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you been to Namibia, Abby?”
“I regret to say that I have not.”
“Chobe National, which is right on the Zambezi River, is one prime example. It is chock full of elephants. There simply isn’t enough for them to eat, so they strip the bark off the trees and eat that. But trees have to have bark that extends contiguously around them or they die. The place is full of bleached trees—but lots and lots of elephants. For now.”
“So what is the solution? To kill some of them?”
“That—or relocation. The problem, for the elephants, is that the human population keeps growing and expanding its range. Finding areas large enough to support breeding populations of elephants is becoming more and more difficult. They’re having the same problem in India with tiger preservation.”
“So that’s the story in the countries that lived up to the ban. What about the countries that didn’t participate?”
“You mean like the Congo? And some of the West African countries? Their elephant populations really took a beating. You see, African elephants are different from Asian elephants in that the females have tusks. An entire breeding population can be wiped out just because somebody wants a fancy carving or real piano keys.”
“What about trophies?”
“Not surprisingly, the ban makes an exception for trophy hunters.”
“What do you mean by ‘not surprisingly’?”
“Gun lobbyists.”
As a daughter of the South, I’d been raised with the belief that hunting was an inalienable right, because the pursuit of game and the pursuit of happiness were one and the same thing. Since then I’d become intellectually opposed to the unequal match of bullets versus beast. But early culturally conditioning was a powerful force to be reckoned with, and I knew that the best thing for me right then was to change the subject.
“Eric, do you get a lot of your merchandise from Golden Tiger Exports?”
“Come again?”
“The company in Hong Kong; the one that mistakenly sent you the rosewood commode intended for my mama’
s birthday.”
“Oh. To be honest, Abby, I don’t do any of the ordering. My aunt handles all of that; this is really her shop. I’ve got a forty percent interest and I sell and manage the employees—we have two shop assistants, and a pickup and delivery man.”
“What days does your aunt come in?”
“She doesn’t. She’s able to keep track of inventory by computer codes. When something sells, she knows about it immediately.”
“Who usually picks up the shipments? And who unpacks them?”
Eric grinned sheepishly, which was the closest yet he’d come to losing his cool. “The delivery man almost always picks them up, and Tina and Marisa unpack them. I’d like to blame it on a bad back, Abby, but I’m a terrible liar; you’d see right through me. The truth is that I’m the laziest man this side of the Mississippi, and possibly the other side as well. If it wasn’t for the money my grandfather left me, I’d be living on the street somewhere.”
“And not with your aunt?”
“Lady Bowfrey is poison.”
“Lady? Does she really have a title?”
“Titles aren’t recognized in America.”
“And since your name is Bowfrey, then you have one too, don’t you?”
“It’s a silly, antiquated system, based on whose ancestors were historically the most brutal. And the answer is no, I don’t have a title.”
“Aha, but you still haven’t denied that she has a title. Come on, Eric, give us the royal scoop.”
“Let’s just say that if she did have a title, it would most certainly not be royal, but minor aristocracy.”
“Then give us the aristocratic scoop.”
“Abby, it’s unhealthy to gossip.”
“But it can be so much fun.”
“Only in the short run. You still have to answer for it; maybe just not in this incarnation.”
Until that morning I hadn’t a clue that I could find green eyes so tantalizing. I also hadn’t fully appreciated just how irritating a moral extremist could be. Even if I wasn’t a happily married woman, and even if I was twenty years younger—I would still enjoy a good steak and some chitchat with my friends.