Scary Stuff Read online

  SCARY

  STUFF

  ALSO BY SHARON FIFFER

  Hollywood Stuff

  Buried Stuff

  The Wrong Stuff

  Dead Guy’s Stuff

  Killer Stuff

  SHARON FIFFER

  SCARY

  STUFF

  MINOTAUR BOOKS NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  SCARY STUFF. Copyright © 2009 by Sharon Fiffer. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y.10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fiffer, Sharon Sloan, 1951–

  Scary stuff / Sharon Fiffer.—1st ed.

  p.cm.

  ISBN 978-0-312-38778-5

  1. Wheel, Jane (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—Illinois—Chicago—Fiction. 3. Antique dealers—Fiction.

  4. California—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3606.I37S33 2009

  813'.6—dc22

  2009012740

  First Edition: October 2009

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  TO STEVE, KATE, NORA, AND ROB . . . FOR GETTING

  ME THROUGH THE SCARY STUFF

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writers seldom ask innocent or random questions. I have an indulgent circle of friends and family who answer the strangest queries from me as well as share their stories and advise me on medicine, mystery, murder, collectibles, life, spelling, and comma usage. I would like to thank a few of those people by name: Dr. Dennis and Judy Groothuis, Walter and Rosie Chruscinski, Jane Baker and the entire crew of New Trier Sales, Steve Fiffer, Susan Phillips, Laura Brown, Catherine Rooney, Keiler Sensenbrenner, Gail Hochman, Kelley Ragland, Matt Martz, Ragnhild Hagen, and all librarians everywhere.

  SCARY

  STUFF

  1

  Jane Wheel, gripping the arms of the uncomfortable seat, closed her eyes. The woman in the seat directly in front of her had a lot of blond hair piled up on top of her head secured by purple butterfly clips. Violet cubes and stars dangled from her ears. Jane did not want all of those twenty-first-century plastic accessories to be her last earthly image.

  She imagined her best friend, Tim, in the seat next to her furiously whispering, Your plane is going down and you want to tell a stranger that a cherry-red Bakelite barrette would be more flattering? No. She would not let imaginary Tim distract her from the terror of this dropping, lurching plane. He should be here, hysterical and panicky, beside her. When he had insincerely offered to go with her to visit her brother, why had she not pretended to believe that he really did want to go? Jane and Tim had an enduring friendship based on real, true, honest dishonesty. They faked stuff all the time. Why had she chosen that moment to tell him she appreciated the offer, but knew he’d love a little more time in L.A. while she went to see Michael and his family?

  “No,” she whispered out loud. Inhale and exhale. Think about good things. Any normal person would conjure their loved ones—son, husband, parents. Jane rejected that thought. Too painful. If she pictured Nick’s grin, Charley’s hands, Don’s wink, Nellie’s grimace, she would be too overcome to remember any survival techniques that might be required.

  Jane Wheel, girl detective, could review her cases. Ha! Jane Wheel, accidental private eye, finder of dead bodies, spotter of antique forgeries, champion of the innocent . . . wait, was that Detective Oh’s voice in her ear? Mrs. Wheel, are you not equally a friend of the guilty?

  Jane hardly expected her messy life to flash before her eyes. She doubted the whole life-flashing cliché. It couldn’t be true, and yet how in the world had it become a cliché? Whose life was simple enough, straightforward enough, coherent enough, to form itself into a slide show and flash before his or her eyes?

  Nonsense. Life was a crooked path, a roller coaster, a corn maze, a garage sale of the cast-off and formerly beloved. It was a stew of desire and joy and disappointment and confusion. It could no more flash before one’s eyes than . . .

  The plane then leveled as planes, more often than not, do, finding its way into a welcoming and amenable altitude, and the debate raging in Jane’s panicky head—all about the right way to panic—ceased.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to begin our descent . . . attendants, please ready . . .”

  Jane’s life, after adamantly refusing to flash before her eyes, stretched out once again before her. The sheer terror of being inside a small prop jet being dribbled like a basketball by thermal currents gave way to the everyday annoyance of passengers ignoring the pilot’s admonitions, unfastening seat belts, and rummaging around for their carry-on baggage. When the woman seated in front of her began the sideways wriggling half-stand that signaled her desire to get out first, one of her hair clips fell and landed in Jane’s lap. Since the woman had already made it into the aisle, Jane didn’t bother to call out her loss. Instead, Jane, the magpie, slipped the purple clip into her pocket, bestowing upon it the cachet of a good-luck charm, which meant she would have a difficult time ever ridding herself of it, always remembering how it somehow kept a plane aloft on a breezy California day.

  Pulling down her own beat-up leather carry-on, Jane found herself smiling at her seatmate, a young man in a USC sweatshirt who had slept through the turbulence. She was happy to be alive in this cramped little plane and delighted that she wouldn’t have to hug her seat cushion or breathe normally into a mask or slide down some plastic tube into darkness. Jane simply had to deplane, retrieve one other bag with gifts for her niece and nephew, and walk out into the oppressive desert heat where she would spend two days with her little brother, Michael, whom she hadn’t seen in two years.

  Family. Memories. Old wounds. Bitter arguments. Unexpected joys. Unrealistic expectations. Inevitable disappointments. Perhaps this trip was slightly similar to sliding down a chute into the unknown. Scary stuff.

  “Aunt Jane, this is the most special one. Don’t you think so?”

  Jane’s niece bent her head down close to the table where a gold and red stamp lay under a glass dome magnifier, a hefty vintage paperweight that Jane had found at the Pasadena flea market and gift wrapped for her niece.

  “If you say so, Q, it must be,” Jane said, “but I admit it, I am out of my depth.”

  Jane collected Bakelite, buttons, sewing tools, measuring tapes, yardsticks, cigar boxes, flower frogs, anything with letters and numbers, kitchenalia, Catholica, old spice jars, maps, ephemera, wedding photos, crocheted potholders, autograph books, high school yearbooks, old fabric, scissors, knitting needles, vintage office supplies, wooden boxes . . . among other things. When Jane was faced with a row of coins in a glass case or an array of colorful stamps, paper-hinged or never-been-glued, however, she was befuddled. Collections that were somehow meant to be collections eluded her. She seemed to feel only the pull of th
e used and worn; the “mib” (mint-in-box), or “uncirculated,” designation was one she respected, but did not covet.

  “They are beautiful, though,” Jane said, moving the magnifier over the row of tiny works of art Q had laid out for her inspection. “Miniature paintings . . . or when all together like this . . . a paper quilt?”

  Q, whose given name “Susan,” after a beloved maternal grandmother, had been shortened to “Suzie” by a former nanny, then further trampled on as “Suzie Q” by a nursery school teacher, and been thrown out with the bathwater and shortened permanently to Q. It suited her. She twisted her long open face into a question mark as soon as she opened her eyes in the morning.

  “If you like collecting stuff so much, why don’t you have stamps?”

  “I have marbles,” Jane said, mentally reviewing the old Mason jars on the shelf above her kitchen window, “and tons of jacks and red rubber balls.”

  “What does that have to . . . ?” Michael began to ask, folding up the newspaper he had been reading.

  “Yeah?” said Q, understanding the mysterious connection her aunt was making even if her father did not. “See, you like little stuff . . . stuff with colors, so why not stamps?”

  “I don’t know really. I resist collections that need to be fussed over, maybe?” Jane asked.

  “Nope. You send me letters and pictures all the time of your stuff and it’s all neat and tidy and lined up and stacked and arranged and all that. You fuss, Aunt Jane.”

  “Stamps can be valuable, right?” Jane asked.

  Q nodded so hard that her blond ponytail bobbed up and down.

  “That’s it, then. I never collect anything that I actually might make money on,” said Jane. “I only accept poor stuff, old throw-aways and castoffs,” Jane said, picking up a stamp hinge, licking it, and sticking it to her niece’s forehead.

  “No you don’t. Why—”

  Michael stopped Q’s grilling by reminding her she had to change her clothes before they took Aunt Jane out to dinner. Jane picked up the stamp album and the envelopes of loose stamps and replaced them in the drawer of the large square coffee table, eyeing the table carefully. She liked it. It was a large solid square with a roomy drawer to stash whatever needed stashing. But she was aware, even as she admired the piece of furniture, that she didn’t love it. She never intended to apply a test to every object that fell into her path, but it often happened anyway. Like it, but don’t love it, said that inner voice—the one that made itself heard most frequently at shopping malls or in the homes of people who bought retail. Jane could like new things, but without any backstory—the faint coffee-cup ring branded into the oak of her used desk, for example—a piece of furniture was just a piece of furniture. No drama, no romance, no—

  “Baseball cards?” Jane asked, reaching for a cardboard shirt box in the back of the drawer.

  “Yeah, I didn’t know where to keep them once the baby was born and I lost my home office. Not that I’m complaining—a nursery is a much better use of the space since I never get any work done when I’m home,” said Michael, laughing and picking up all of nine-month-old Jamey’s toys at once by gathering corners of a pale green blanket and holding it hobo style, an elephant rattle still making a faint rain-on-the-roof sound as the bundle swung from Michael’s hand.

  “But how do you have them at all?” Jane asked. “Didn’t Nellie whisk them away in the night? I mean, how did you manage to hold on to your baseball cards?”

  Jane looked straight at adult Michael, holding his own son’s toys, but only saw little brother Michael—ten years old—sprawled out on the floor sorting his cards, much like Q had been studying her stamps. Jane remembered their mother Nellie’s complaints about his stuff scattered all over the place.

  “If I find those damn baseball cards on the floor, Michael, they’re going straight into the garbage,” Nellie would say. “Mooning over these damn collections is the ruination of getting you to do any work around here.”

  Nellie must have thrown out Michael’s baseball cards. Every mother threw away her son’s baseball cards. It was the rule. It was the very thing, the unforgivable act, that made sons leave the homes of their mothers! Lamenting all the things your parents did to you was part of generic adulthood—but the specific crime committed by parents was what they made their kids throw away. Hopes, dreams, self-esteem were all important enough; but what Jane preferred to focus on were the moth-eaten stuffed animals, fractured dolls, scribbled coloring books—the possessions of their offspring that they didn’t value enough to save. Jane, until recently, had thought Nellie threw out everything, swept away Jane’s and Michael’s childhoods with a few brisk arcs of her wicked broom, but Jane had been wrong. She had discovered her mother’s secret closet of memories—never mind that those souvenirs weren’t the ones that Jane had really wanted. The whole incident had made Jane rethink what childhood memories amounted to anyway—do they belong to the child or the parent? Both, of course, but whose are the truest? Jane longed for her first rock collection, but Nellie thought her little plaid wool coat and hat from toddlerdom was the relic worth packing into mothballs.

  “I don’t understand how you could have those cards, Michael, when she threw everything away that I cared about.”

  Michael laughed and put his hand on top of his sister’s head. Six years younger, six inches taller, he was the poster boy of the successful junior partner. Of anything.

  “C’mon, Jane, you know why,” Michael said, half whispering.

  “Why?”

  “She liked me best,” Michael said. “Now go get ready. We like to get out the door as soon as the babysitter gets here. Big night for Q being included and baby brother staying home. Monica is really good about this stuff, figuring out how to make Q the big deal, even while everyone is making such a fuss over Jamey all the time.”

  Jane dressed quickly in a light cashmere skirt and short-sleeved sweater, the only matching outfit she had brought to Michael and Monica’s house. She had traveled light to Los Angeles from Chicago, and even lighter from L.A. to Palm Springs, leaving most of the contents of a large suitcase with Tim Lowry to send home. He was shipping back several boxes of flotsam and jetsam he had picked up at the flea markets and shops in and around Los Angeles for his own business in Illinois. As picker and dealer, Jane and Tim had had a productive trip. Maybe their adventures would not make it to the big screen any time soon, maybe their lives would not be turned into a movie script as they had been falsely promised, but they had found vintage treasures. Oh yes, and they had successfully caught a murderer. Lured out to L.A. by a producer who showed interest in turning Jane’s recent PI adventure into a movie, Jane discovered that although Hollywood had its charms, she was far from ready for her close-up. Jane hadn’t wanted that so-called fame and fortune anyway—the satisfaction of settling into her new career, as former police detective Bruce Oh’s partner, now with another case solved so far away from home, too—was justification enough for her West Coast trip.

  And now she was reconnecting with family; her brother, Michael, and his lovely wife, Monica, their precocious daughter, Q, and perfectly adorable baby boy, Jamey, whom she was meeting for the first time. Talk about the perfect cliché! Michael was a successful lawyer at a large commercial real estate firm, whose business, according to Michael, was surviving the economic downturn surprisingly well. Monica worked part-time as an art therapist, and the children, although spaced slightly farther apart than they had planned, according to Monica, were smart, sweet, perfect—practically ordered from a catalog.

  Jane brushed her lashes lightly with mascara and dug around in her purse for a lipstick. Looking in the mirror, she made a face, exaggerating a frown. She didn’t want to be the jealous older sister. She herself had a handsome husband and a darling son. They just might be catalog worthy themselves! She had a career. Two careers! She wasn’t just a picker; she wasn’t just a detective. She was Jane Wheel, PPI—Picker and Private Investigator. She had a great adult life, t
oo, damn it. Okay, so Charley, a geology professor, traveled a lot, sometimes seeming to prefer spending weeks at a dig site out of the country to making his way through the maze of boxes and bags of stuff Jane “picked” from estate sales, rummage and flea markets to resell to dealers. And sometimes Nick, a clever and smart middle-schooler, seemed to prefer Charley’s digs, discovering dinosaur bones, to Jane’s treasure hunts for Bakelite buttons and McCoy flowerpots. And didn’t Jane choose to live in Evanston? Close to Chicago and close to Kankakee where her best friend, Tim, lived, where she and Michael had grown up, children of Don and Nellie, owners of the EZ Way Inn? So not only was Jane enmeshed in her own satisfying—in its own way—family life, but she was also close to Don and Nellie, practically a phone call away.

  Oh, damn it all, Jane thought, trying to coax her frown into a relaxed pout so she could apply lipstick. Not only does Michael have his life figured out, he figured out how to get away from Kankakee, away from the EZ Way Inn, away from Nellie. And, somehow, he even managed to keep his baseball cards.

  Q, almost ten years old, was thrilled to be going out to dinner with her parents and mysterious Aunt Jane. She had other aunts . . . her mother had two sisters and both of them lived in California, so Q saw them regularly. They were friendly and they gave her lovely clothes on her birthday, or the newest toys and games, and Q was always properly grateful. But it was Aunt Jane who sent her the packages wrapped up in brown paper that thrilled her. Sometimes the packages didn’t even arrive on or near a birthday. Aunt Jane would write a note on the back of an old postcard with a picture of a place like Paris or London or Amsterdam or Budapest that Q already wanted to visit someday. Aunt Jane would write, “Shall we visit the Tower of London together? Love, A. J.” and Q would tape the cards up above her bed, imagining a trip with her aunt that would zigzag all over the world. One of Q’s favorite presents from Aunt Jane was an old metal globe. Stuck to its surface was a tiny gray airplane with a magnet glued to its belly. With each new postcard, Q would move the plane to the next city to which her aunt had introduced her. They were going to have fine travels together, she and Aunt Jane.