“Just a curious onlooker. How ’bout yourself?”
“I live over there.” She pointed at her house. “I saw you here yesterday.”
“You did?”
“It’s a small town. You tend to notice strangers.”
“Grand Marais is a tourist town. It’s loaded with strangers.”
“Very few of them wander away from the lake and almost none this deep into the residential areas.”
“Okay.”
“I know what you’re thinking. I’m either a conscientious community watcher or a notorious busybody. You can take your pick.”
“Since I’m not from around here, I’ll let you decide.”
“I’m Peg Younghans.”
“McKenzie.”
I shook her hand. Her grip was firm. I guessed she was fifteen years older than me which made her about sixty, Louise Wykoff’s age.
“Younghans,” I said. “There’s a St. Paul boy named Tom Younghans who played pro hockey for the Minnesota North Stars back in the day.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Okay.” I gestured at the church. “Do you know what’s going on?”
“These people?” She made it sound as if they were rowdy fans of a visiting sports franchise. “They rolled in at about seven o’clock this morning. Loudly. I don’t know what you’re used to but seven o’clock in Grand Marais is supposed to be quiet. The little girl you were talking to before, when I came out to complain she told me they were filming a documentary about the paintings that guy did of Louise years ago. Other than that…”
“I take it Louise didn’t tell you they were coming, either.”
“She’s very secretive that one. I don’t blame her. Back when the paintings were done the media hounded her relentlessly. It was one of the reasons she escaped to Grand Marais, I guess. Personally, I don’t see what the big deal is. Nude paintings. I have some nude photographs I could show you that are a lot more enticing.”
I couldn’t tell you why I thought that was funny, yet I laughed anyway.
“Maybe later,” I said. “Tell me—have you seen any other strangers lurking about besides me?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Someone broke into the art academy and stole a few things.”
“When?”
“Louise isn’t sure.”
Peg stared at me for a few beats.
“Kids,” she said.
“What makes you say that?”
“If you were a teenager growing up in Grand Marais wouldn’t you want something that belonged to That Wykoff Woman? Her panties, maybe.”
Oh my God.
“They stole a couple of her paintings,” I said aloud.
“Oh. Never mind, then.”
Geez, lady, my inner voice added. Get out much?
“Why would someone steal her paintings?” Peg asked. “What could they be worth?”
“Depends on who you talk to. Louise thinks they’re worth a lot.”
“She would, wouldn’t she?”
“Don’t you work for an art gallery that sells her paintings?”
“You’d be amazed what tourists buy while on vacation that they would never buy when they’re at home. Are you a policeman?”
“I used to be back when I was young and impressionable.”
“What are you now?”
“A friend of a friend.”
“Are you trying to get them back, the paintings? Is that why you’re hanging around?”
“Something like that.”
“Makes sense then, you being here. I was wondering before. Louise doesn’t get many visitors, you see, at least not male visitors. For a while I thought she might be gay only she doesn’t have many female visitors, either.”
“Who does visit her?”
“Wannabe painters I guess.”
“Is she a good teacher?”
“I’ve never taken a class so I couldn’t say. The courses she teaches—she conducts daylong, weekend-long, and even full weeklong seminars and they always seem to fill up. She gets students from all over, too. Even Duluth and Thunder Bay up in Canada. If someone broke into Louise’s place, why didn’t she call the sheriff’s department?”
“My understanding is that she’s afraid of bad publicity. ’Course, now that you know…”
“I’m not a gossip, McKenzie. I can keep a secret.”
I bet.
“Does Louise have any enemies?” I asked aloud.
“None that I’m aware of.”
“Anyone who might be jealous of her celebrity?”
“McKenzie, in a small town like this, you’re a celebrity for about a month. After that you’re just a woman who teaches art classes in an old church.”
A flurry of activity near the entrance of the church attracted our attention. Jeffery Mehren had emerged along with Jennica and a couple other minions. Words were spoken, gestures were made, and the minions disappeared back into the church while Mehren moved to a parked SUV, climbed inside, and did nothing that I could see. A few moments later, the minions started carrying equipment out of the church. Most of it was returned to the van while the rest was moved to the intersection in front of the SUV. Jennica supervised set up while Mehren watched.
“I wonder what they’re doing,” Peg said.
“Getting ready to film a walk and talk, I’m guessing.”
“Walk and talk?”
“You know, where characters in a movie or TV show have a conversation while walking somewhere.”
“There’s a name for that?”
A moment later, Louise appeared. She had changed her clothes, exchanging her skirt and sweater for jeans and a button-down shirt designed to accentuate her breasts.
“McKenzie,” she said. “They told me you were here. Margaret.”
“Hello, Louise,” Peg said.
Louise handed me a white number ten envelope.
“We need to talk,” she said.
“Yes, we do.”
“I don’t have much time. They’ll want to start filming soon. Excuse us, Margaret.”
Peg didn’t budge, so Louise took my arm and led me away from her and the camera crew. Peg called to me.
“Don’t forget those photographs,” she said. “I’d be happy to arrange a private showing.”
“I’ll consider it,” I said, but I didn’t mean it.
When we were well out of earshot, Louise said, “What were you talking to Margaret about?”
“She told me her name was Peg.”
“That’s what her friends call her, I suppose.”
Okay, not a friend, my inner voice said.
“I think your neighbor is a pervert,” I said aloud.
“Well, the winters are pretty long up here. The envelope, McKenzie, it contains the list of students and other people who have been in my house that you asked for. It also—McKenzie, I started thinking after you left. I never actually looked to see if anything else was taken once I realized that the paintings were missing, that was so traumatizing to me. Besides, my computer, my TV, the little jewelry I have, the obvious stuff was still there. After you left, though, I searched more carefully and I discovered that the silver tea set my mother left me was also gone and so were two antique brass candlesticks that my family had brought over from the Netherlands in the 1880s. I have no idea what they’re worth. I kept them in a drawer so I didn’t realize that they were missing until I actually looked.”
“Do you have photographs of them?”
“No, but I have photographs of paintings of them. In the envelope.”
I looked.
“I use them sometimes in a class I teach about still life techniques,” Louise said.
I studied the photos and announced “Good enough.”
“This is great news, isn’t it?”
“It gives us something to work with that we didn’t have yesterday.”
“No, what I mean—doesn’t this confirm that the thief might not have known the paintings were there? Th
at he just came into my house to steal whatever?”
“Possibly. We’ll see.”
Louise glanced over my shoulder. I followed her eyes. Jennica was waving at her. Apparently, they were ready to resume filming.
“You’ve kept such a low profile about your involvement in the Scenes from an Inland Sea, why agree to do this now?” I asked.
“Mary Ann McInnis asked me to. She and a man named Bruce Flonta had agreed to do the documentary, they might even be financing it, I don’t know. They both called and asked me to participate. I told them that if I did I would tell the truth. Mary Ann told me to say whatever I wanted. ‘The truth can’t hurt me any more than it already has,’ she said. McKenzie, these people can’t know about the paintings.”
“They won’t hear about them from me. Louise, I wish you would have said something.”
“I was afraid you wouldn’t have agreed to help me if I had.”
“Okay.”
“Would it have made a difference?”
“Probably not.”
“Perrin Stewart was right. You are a knight in shining armor.”
“Stop it. You’re embarrassing me.”
Still, I was smiling when I said it, so …
FOUR
Once I returned to my Mustang, I glanced at Louise’s list. She had written down about twenty names complete with addresses and phone numbers. I spent more time studying the silver tea set, though. There was a teapot, creamer, and sugar bowl with a small spoon on top of a rectangular tray with handles. They were fairly plain in appearance and whoever painted it gave the set a faintly yellow tarnish. Yet there was enough ornamentation around the handles and feet to make it easily identifiable. The brass candlesticks should also be clearly recognized, I decided.
I accessed my smartphone and surfed for the names of pawn shops in the area. I found only two. There were, however, a boatload of antiques stores located up and down the North Shore. I figured they were my best bet. I had to decide though, should I go north into Canada or south toward Duluth, checking every store along the way? The answer was easy—south—yet only because I neglected to bring my passport. There was a time when you could cross the border with just a driver’s license, but an irrational fear of immigrants had changed all that. The way things were going in Washington, more and more we were headed for a strict federal ID card to be carried by every citizen at all times. Any day now I expected guys in dark trench coats to start patrolling the streets, stopping people at random and demanding “papers please” like they do in all those Nazi spy movies—for our own protection, of course.
* * *
I worked my way south, stopping to examine every antiques and collectibles store in every town along Highway 61—Lutsen, Tofte, Schroeder, Little Marais, Silver Bay, Beaver Bay, Castle Danger. It was a glorious drive and I highly recommend it if you’re not in a hurry. Three and a half hours after I started I got lucky in a town called Two Harbors.
Originally, it was two separate towns located on Lake Superior, Agate Bay and Burlington, which were located on Burlington Bay. They merged and became Two Harbors at the turn of the last century and like many communities in northeastern Minnesota, it flourished while the iron ore industry did the same. When it faltered, so did the town. Still, it remained a vibrant community with several tourist attractions, a couple of nice restaurants, and three antiques stores.
One of them was called Second Hand Treasures. It wasn’t much different from the other antiques stores I had already visited except that instead of an electronic ping that sounded when I opened the door, I was greeted with the tinkling of a bell. Still, no one rushed to see if I needed assistance. I had never been in an antiques store that wasn’t laid-back and Nina and I had been in a lot of them.
I made my way to a desk situated in the middle of the store. There was an older man sitting behind the desk and reading a Brian Freeman thriller. I said, “Good afternoon.” He waited until he finished a passage before looking up. Can’t say I blame him. That Freeman is a spellbinder.
“How can I help you?” he asked.
“I’m looking for a silver tea set.”
“I think I might be able to help you out.” He stuffed a page marker into the book and set it down as he rose from the desk. “In fact, I got something in just this morning that you might want to take a look at.”
He led me deeper into the store to a section that seemed devoted to kitchen supplies including dinnerware, silverware, glassware, serving platters, and pitchers. I saw it even before he pointed it out—teapot, creamer, and sugar bowl with a small spoon on top of a rectangular tray all with a faintly yellow tarnish. I didn’t need to compare it to the photograph to know it belonged to Louise, yet I did so anyway.
“You have a picture of it?” the store owner asked. “What’s going on? Oh my God, was it stolen? All the years I’ve been in business I’ve never bought anything that was stolen. That’s the truth, Officer.”
“I’m not a policeman.”
“What are you?”
It was a question I’ve been asked many times. I have yet to come up with an adequate response—unlicensed private investigator, semiprofessional busybody, unabashed kibitzer, bored rich jerk. An acquaintance had recently called me a “roving troubleshooter.” I liked the label very much but I sounded like an idiot saying it out loud.
“I’m doing a favor for a friend,” I said. “Here.”
I gave him a good look at the photograph of the brass candlesticks.
“Oh God,” he said. “I have these, too.”
“Show me.”
He did, leading me to a section of the store that was devoted to lights and lanterns. A $135 price tag had been tied to the base of one of the candlesticks with a blue thread.
“Oh God,” he said again.
“You say someone brought these in this morning?”
“Yes. He was, oh God, he was waiting for me outside the front door. It was just before ten A.M. I open at ten and he was already here.”
How convenient, my inner voice said. And considerate, too, waiting until this morning to fence his ill-gotten gains.
“Do you know who sold them?” I asked aloud.
“Yes.” He seemed happy to say it. “Yes, of course I do. At my desk.”
I picked up the candlesticks and followed him there. Along the way we stopped to retrieve the silver tea set. Its price tag read $379.
He kept a metal box in a drawer. He pulled it out, set it on top of the desk, and opened it. Inside was a large collection of handwritten five-by-eight index cards, some new and some that had faded over time.
“I’ve always followed the rules that pawn shops are supposed to follow even though I’m not a pawn shop,” he said. “Here it is.”
He pulled out a card and handed it to me. It contained the name, address, and phone number of the man who had sold the tea set and candlesticks to the antiques store, including his driver’s license number and physical description, as well as a complete description of the property, and the date and time of the transaction.
“I didn’t know the property was stolen,” the man said.
“Can I keep this?” I asked.
“Yes, but no, here.”
The shop owner took the card and scanned it into his computer before returning it to his metal box. He printed the scan on an 8½-by-11 sheet of paper and gave that to me. I asked him why he didn’t just write down all the transaction information into his computer instead of using an index card and he looked at me like I was kidding him.
“I guess I’m old-school,” he said.
“Old-school is a good school.”
“Who are you, anyway?”
I told him. He wrote it down.
“I don’t want any trouble,” he said.
“Neither do I.”
“Can I see some ID?”
“Sure.”
He transcribed that information, too. Afterward, he gestured at the tea set and candlesticks.
“Take these, t
oo,” he said. “I don’t want them if they’re stolen.”
“Let me pay you.”
“No, no…”
“At least let me give you what you paid for all this stuff.”
He thought about it for a moment and offered me a price—$125.
Nice markup, my inner voice said.
After paying, I took the tea set and candlesticks to my Mustang and set them on the floor behind the driver’s seat. Once inside the car myself, I found the list Louise Wykoff had given me and checked it against the name on the index card. David Montgomery, third from the top. Louise had indicated that he was a former art student. The address put him on the far side of Grand Marais.
It couldn’t possibly be this easy, my inner voice announced.
* * *
The end to daylight savings time was still a month and a half away, yet it was already dark by the time I turned onto Eliasen Mill Road. There were no streetlights on the road, which made travel a little dicey, especially when it converted from worn pavement to packed dirt. Finding Montgomery’s house, though, turned out to be an easy matter because it was lit up like a shopping mall. Every light had been turned on inside and out, including the yard and garage lights.
I had decided during the drive over there to keep my pitch simple. Return the paintings of That Wykoff Woman and we’ll forget all about this, give me an argument and I’ll see you go to prison for five years. I was practicing the speech in my head when I knocked on the door. There was no answer, so I peeked through a window and promptly forgot about the speech.
I returned to the door and twisted the knob. It opened easily. I stepped inside. I was immediately assaulted by the smell of iron and copper. Or maybe it was just the smell I had expected when I saw the pool of drying blood on the floor around Montgomery’s head. I based my identification mostly on the size, weight, and hair color that the proprietor of Second Hand Treasures had given me. There wasn’t much else to go on.
I kept clear of the blood as I squatted next to Montgomery’s body. I didn’t touch him but it seemed to me that he had been dead for at least a few hours. Much of the top right side of his head was shattered. I examined the side of his head where the bullet had entered. There was a lot of searing around the hole in his temple and a deep abrasion ring, which told me that the gun had been pressed against the side of his head when it was fired.
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