Feta Attraction

by Susannah Hardy

  “The day before he died.”

  “Where is the ring?”

  “I keep it here.” She patted her heart.

  She was not generally a sentimental woman. “No, I mean where is the actual ring?”

  “Right here.” She reached into the neckline of her blouse and pulled out a rose gold chain on which hung a platinum ring. A dazzling white central diamond of at least two carats was flanked by two smaller sparkling yellow stones—canary diamonds? Her metals didn’t match, but who cared? I was skeptical that that ring could have been bought in Watertown, which was a very small city. A ring of that quality and size would have to come from Syracuse or Manhattan, I would think.

  I had been standing over her this whole time but now I sat down on the edge of the bed. I reached over and held up the platinum ring to the sunlight. I was rewarded with a stunning prismatic display that literally took my breath away. I did love jewelry, but I bought all my own now that my husband no longer felt the need to show me how much he loved me.

  “Sophie, you must keep this ring hidden for now.”

  “Why?” She bristled, though I felt sure that was what she had planned anyway, since she was wearing it inside her top and had not seen fit to mention that she had been proposed to.

  A thought struck me. “You didn’t tell Marina or Dolly about this, did you?” That was all we needed. The place would be swarming with police and gossips and lookie-loos and I would not be able to protect her, or find the thing hidden in the house. Damn, the treasure.

  “No-oh.” She drew the syllable out and I knew there was more.

  “Did you tell, or not?”

  She played with the pillow fringe some more before she answered. “I tell them I have a secret, but I no tell what it is.” She loved to torture people, so she was most likely telling the truth.

  I had to ask. “Did you love him?”

  “No. But I was thinking about loving him.” So she was not completely repulsed by Big Dom, and would have considered the marriage. She had taken the ring. “A woman my age has needs, you know.” She looked up at me defiantly.

  Please, don’t tell me about your unfulfilled needs, I begged silently. I had plenty of my own, and I was decades younger than she.

  “I’m still a young woman. Basil died too soon and left me alone.”

  I was still married yet I was alone too. I could certainly understand how she might want some male companionship. I was surprised that she wanted to have it with Big Dom, though.

  “I think he kill himself over me,” she reminded me.

  “Sophie, I’ve heard that the police suspect murder.”

  “Oh.” Her face fell. I guess it would theoretically be rather romantic, in a Shakespearean sort of way, to have someone commit suicide over you. “Who offed him?”

  I suppressed a snort. “I don’t think anyone knows yet. Can you think of a reason someone would want to kill him?” I figured it was worth a try—she’d been secretly texting him for who knew how long now and might know something.

  “He was talking about getting some money soon.”

  “From where?”

  “He no say.” Extremely unhelpful.

  “How much money?”

  “A lot of money. Georgie, I hear something.”

  Oh, for crying out loud. She was always hearing something. “What is it?”

  “Listen.” She leaned toward one wall and put her finger to her lips.

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  She let out a wail. “It’s Spiro. He’s dead!”

  My heart started beating wildly. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I just hear his ghost! He said, ‘Mana.’”

  THIRTEEN

  “What do you mean, his ghost?” You heard about these things happening all the time, people knowing the exact moment of a loved one’s death, even from many miles away, but somehow you don’t expect it to happen with people you actually know.

  “I just hear him. He say, ‘Mana.’ Oh, he’s dead. I can feel it.” Her big eyes filled with tears.

  I stared at the wall and listened, but heard nothing but Sophie’s sobs. My eyes drifted downward and fell on the floor, which had some wear. I’d have to get this floor done too. Could she have some maternal sixth sense connecting her to Spiro? Had the kidnapper done away with him before the deadline? Which was tonight. That wave of panic washed over me again and I took a deep breath to calm myself. No, I thought. The kidnapper had nothing to gain by killing him—Spiro was his bargaining chip in exchange for the supposed treasure. Still, Spiro might have angered this guy enough that he didn’t care and killed him anyway. I know I’d wanted to, often.

  I listened again. And heard something this time. A soft, muffled noise coming from the direction of the wall adjoining Spiro’s room. I shushed Sophie and hustled over to the wall. I put my ear up to it but heard nothing more. I raced out the door and into Spiro’s room. I checked under the bed and inside the closet and bathroom, screwing up my courage and pulling aside the shower curtain, half expecting to see some crazed monster drooling rabidly in the tub, but it was empty. I ran to the window, which was locked from the inside. I’d intended to open it up this morning but had never gotten to it. It was at least a thirty-foot drop. No one could have left that way. No one human, that was. If someone had been here, he or she would have had to have been extraordinarily fast and quiet to get out the door in the couple of seconds between the moment I’d heard the noise and the time it had taken me to get out into the hallway.

  Sophie came to the door. “Georgie, I hear him again! My son is dead! He is afraid and wants me! Say a prayer with me!” She got down on her knees and grabbed my hand.

  “Sophie, get up. We need to figure this out. We can pray later.”

  I pulled her up, not as gently as I could have. “Let’s not lose our heads here. We heard a noise in your room, right?”

  “Yes, my dead son!” she wailed.

  “And it came from this direction, right?”

  “Yes, it is coming from this room. The dead come back to the place they know.”

  “But you heard the voice again while I was here, in Spiro’s room.”

  “He was here,” she said with awe. “I no feel him now.”

  “I don’t think there was anybody, living or dead, in here with me, Sophie. There has to be an explanation for this. I don’t know what it is, but I am going to find out. Spiro isn’t dead. I’m going to find him.” I hoped I sounded more confident than I felt.

  I waited with her while she put on her shoes, splashed water on her face, and ran a comb through her hair. We headed downstairs. I installed her, shaking, in her chair by the cash register and went down to the bar, where I poured a tall glass of orange juice over ice.

  I scanned the bottles behind the bar, each marked with a series of black lines showing the level of liquid inside and the initials “SN” on each line. It was a low-tech system Sophie used for keeping track of our liquor inventory. She knew pretty much to the ounce how much alcohol we sold, and since we made a lot of money on drinks, she didn’t like to see any of our booze being stolen by our employees.

  I located the brand of vodka Sophie liked and poured some into the glass of juice, giving it a stir with a long plastic straw. As I replaced the bottle, I frowned. Something didn’t look right. Hmmm. Where was the bottle of Ouzo? We didn’t sell a lot of it to customers, but we sometimes had a shot with the employees on Dolly’s birthday, whenever it happened to fall, and Spiro and Sophie had an occasional glass. An uneasy feeling settled into the pit of my stomach. There were a lot of bars in town, but Ouzo probably wasn’t a big seller anywhere. My thoughts went back to the bottle I’d seen floating near Dom’s body. Had it had hand-drawn black lines and Sophie’s initials on the label? I couldn’t remember.

  Back in the kitchen I handed Sophie the glass and told her
to drink up. The first lunch check of the day had just come in. The waitress gave the check to my mother-in-law with a stack of cash. This, combined with a couple of sips of the screwdriver, seemed to restore her to some semblance of her normal self. She handed the change to the waitress and pocketed the money.

  “Sophie, I’m going back upstairs.” I looked at her significantly. “Stay here,” I ordered in what I hoped was a nonnegotiable tone. She nodded and rearranged her apron over her knobby knees.

  I raced back upstairs and looked through Cal’s room. I didn’t take time to pick up the mess, figuring that if an item was on the floor, it had been searched already. I checked the walls, under the bed, and in the closet for any possible hiding places. I made sure the bedroom door was closed and locked from the inside, as I should have done before so Sophie wouldn’t be able to get in and see the mess. I went through the bathroom door. I’d already searched here, since she and I shared this bath, and came out back in my own room.

  I scanned the damage. I did not even know where to start. I had so much more stuff than the other members of my family that it was going to take much, much longer to put things back together. I resolved then and there that I would clear out my clutter once this ordeal was over. The chances of the treasure being in this room were pretty remote, I thought, since I’d occupied it for a lot of years and I knew the contents. I closed my eyes and tried to clear my mind. I opened them back up and looked about with what I hoped was a fresh perspective. Walls painted a soft spring green, white sheer curtains, white bed linens. I’d had the walls painted last year and was pretty sure that I would have heard about it if any secret wall safes had been discovered.

  I looked down at the floors, which seemed to be in excellent shape, and inspected the areas that weren’t covered by the large floral area rug and the mess of my personal belongings. I kicked through the clothes on the floor, feeling simultaneously sad and angry that someone had treated me and my family with such disrespect. I toed my overnight bag, which had been overturned and its contents spilled, clothes and papers everywhere.

  I moved the bed away from the wall and lifted up all four corners of the rug, checking for secret compartments. I was pretty sure there weren’t any. Besides, Spiro had said the thing was “hidden in plain sight.” To me that pretty much ruled out my having to look too far under or into anything. I didn’t even bother to examine my drawers or the closet. On a whim I lifted the bottom of the reproduction Monet from the wall and didn’t see anything behind that. I almost laughed—that would have to be a flat treasure, now, wouldn’t it? Well, I guess it could have been cash or stock certificates taped to the back or something, but somehow I felt that what I was looking for was a valuable object of some kind, not money.

  I took one last look around but didn’t see anything promising. No need to search the kitchen, I felt—there were so many people in and out of the kitchen, if the object had been hidden in some fairly obvious place, it would have been found by now.

  There was only one area of the house I hadn’t searched—the cupola.

  I closed my bedroom door and locked it, putting the key into my pocket. I moved around to the staircase and began the climb up and around the helix that would lead me to the highest point of the house. I didn’t look down. I hadn’t had any lunch and it had been what seemed like a lifetime ago since my breakfast with Keith. If I looked over the railing I would have gotten dizzy, perhaps sick.

  My upward trudge ended at a small landing. The cupola was quite large, almost like an observatory, about ten feet in any direction from the central opening of the stairway. It was filled with stunningly bright light entering from the four windows facing the sun, illuminating a shower of dust motes suspended in the air. It was stiflingly hot up there—only the first-floor restaurant was air-conditioned—and I fanned the bottom of my T-shirt to try to get some air circulating on the exposed skin. I began to sweat nonetheless. It would have been much more comfortable to have come up here after the sun went down, but I didn’t have that luxury.

  I took a deep breath. That damned treasure, whatever it was, had to be here. Now that I thought about it, this was the most likely place and I would have saved myself a lot of time and worry if I had just come up here to begin with. Sophie and Spiro had told me many times that Basil had loved this spot. If he was going to hide something, this would almost certainly be where he’d do it. Cal and I had spent many happy hours playing up here when she was small, and I smiled even as my eyes teared up. I missed those magical days with my little girl. I shook it off. No time for sentimentality now.

  I started at the wall to my left, looking up toward the Pancake Heaven. Aunt Jennie was lit up and smiling. There were no curtains on these windows. I ran my hands along the entire surface of the window frame, hoping to find a hidden catch or spring that might open a secret compartment like in a Nancy Drew story. I moved counterclockwise around the octagon and checked each window in turn, including the wall space in between, coming up empty except for some sticky cobwebs that I wiped on my shorts. I got down on my hands and knees, wincing as I kneeled on the grit on the floor. Dolly’s daughter Brandy came in to clean for us once a week, but I sent her up here only at the change of seasons since we used this room so infrequently now. I wished I’d brought a towel to kneel on.

  I examined the ancient wood paneling underneath each window, feeling for loose moldings, wobbly panels, metal pieces, but came up empty again. I went to Cal’s old toy box and poked around. She had saved a few of her stuffed animals, including that dinosaur the Ghost Squad had been messing around with. I squeezed each toy—limbs, head, and tummy—but didn’t feel anything unusual inside.

  Next I moved to the small wooden table adjacent to Basil’s old chair. No drawers, just a central wooden spindle supporting a smooth top on which someone, probably one of the TV guys, had written “clean me” in the dust. Hysterical. There was a basket next to the table on the floor containing some old paperbacks and a cylindrical metal object, which I picked up. Now I remembered what this was. It was the other thing those ghost hunters had been playing with that night. It looked like a telescope but was in fact an old Victorian-era kaleidoscope. Cal and I had played with this many times on sunny days up here. I pawed through the basket but didn’t find anything else. I returned the kaleidoscope to the basket and turned my attention back to the chair.

  The chair was upholstered in a faded 1950s floral pattern, not slipcovered, and I didn’t feel any loose spots that might hide something. I armed some sweat off my face, tipped up the chair, and examined the bottom cambric. It was old and dusty but intact and didn’t look as though it had been recently disturbed or replaced. I sneezed at the dust I had released and set the chair upright.

  I turned toward the table. I tipped it upside down and felt under the legs. They seemed to be solidly attached and could not be removed without tools. I checked the connection between the top and the turned wood spindle connecting it to its three legs, and found that it was similarly tight.

  I froze. Could it be this simple? A frisson of excitement ran through me. I’d been thinking in terms of gold bars or bundles of cash. But what if this table was the treasure? I’d seen television shows about pieces of supposedly junk furniture being bought for a few bucks at garage sales and then turning out to be priceless early-American antiques. I looked at the table again. It was definitely very old. There was some wear but the wood glowed, deep and ancient.

  The more I thought about it, the more I knew this had to be it. If this was some colonial-era table made by a famous carpenter, it could be worth a fortune. A check under the top revealed no signature that I could discern.

  I realized that I had stopped breathing. I filled my lungs and felt a huge weight lift off my shoulders. I’d found the treasure.

  FOURTEEN

  Whoever had searched the house hadn’t known what to look for either, and certainly hadn’t been looking for furniture. I could exchan
ge the table for Spiro and we’d sort out whatever money mess he was in, he could tell the police what, if anything, he knew about Big Dom’s death, and everything would get back to normal. Sophie would never have to know. I doubted she’d miss this table. Despite her professions of infirmity, she was quite spry for her age; but it required a heck of a lot of steps to get all the way up here and I felt sure she almost never made the trek. In a couple of months, after we got everything fixed and I sent Sophie and Spiro back to Greece where they’d be out of harm’s way, I would alert the authorities to be on the lookout for the seller of a valuable antique table, and we’d be able to bring the kidnapper/extortionist and whatever else he was to justice, and get the table back too.

  I needed a short-term plan. The table was unwieldy but not too heavy, so it would be easy enough to get downstairs. I’d have to avoid being seen, though, and there was only the one central staircase, which was visible from most angles of all the downstairs dining rooms. My only choice was to send Sophie out to Marina’s again, close up early, and get the thing out of the house when everyone was gone. I’d need to get the table down to the water without damaging it and onto a boat— rather a large hurdle since I didn’t own one. Nor did I know how to operate one.

  But first things first. I wiped the dusty surface with my arm, obliterating the love note the ghost hunters had left me. I carried the table over to the open stairway and maneuvered it down the stairs to the second floor. Since it was now the peak of the lunch hour and Sophie would be managing the dining room and the kitchen without my help, it didn’t seem likely she would come upstairs, but I looked around me to be sure. I set the table down in front of my door, fumbled in my pocket for the key, heart racing, and set the table inside.

  I grabbed a random sock from the pile on my floor and gave the whole table a quick going-over. I’d definitely seen a table just like this on Antiques Roadshow and it had been appraised at several hundred thousand dollars. I extricated a blanket from the tangle of linens at the foot of my bed and wrapped it up. Digging through the mess, I found what I was looking for—an old army green web belt with an adjustable buckle. Ugh. Had I ever really worn this thing? I secured the belt around the central spoke of the table, making sure all the loose edges of the blanket were secured in it and all the surfaces of the table were covered. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do.