Scary Stuff Read online

  “Is anything wrong?” she asked.

  “Mrs. Wheel, when were you going to tell me that you did not show up for your licensing exam last month? Because, you see, if you continue to avoid taking that exam, you will only be able to make these polite inquiries and not really conduct yourself as a professional. If that is your wish, to be my assistant, I understand. I would, however, as I told you before, like to offer you a partnership.”

  Jane had meant to tell Oh about missing the exam.

  “I’m sorry.” The reason she missed it, the amazing sale that she attended that day instead, the multilayered excuses for not telling him she had chosen the sale over the exam—all of that melted away. She could have explained it, in a carefully punctuated run-on sentence left on his answering machine, but not while talking to the man himself. Bruce Oh was a man whom she didn’t fully understand, but she knew that he was someone to whom she could neither lie nor ply with excuses. His success as an investigator could be attributed to intelligence, deductive reasoning, instinct, but Jane knew that the real reason he succeeded was because he asked the right questions, the ones to which you had to give honest answers.

  “Lawyers often say, Mrs. Wheel, that you should never ask a witness on the stand a question to which you do not already know the answer,” Oh had told her when they first met. “In my business, I feel it is essential to ask the question to which someone cannot help but answer truthfully. Even if it seems somewhat unrelated to the case at hand. Once you get a person in the habit of telling the truth . . . they often continue in spite of themselves.”

  “Detective Oh, I do wish to take the exam. Apparently I didn’t want to do it more than I wanted to attend the sale that was happening at the same time. I should have told you immediately. I serve two masters . . .” Jane said.

  “At least two, Mrs. Wheel, but I hope I am not one of them. I am sorry for acting in any way that made you feel obliged to apologize to me. I received a notice from the exam board that I just this past few minutes opened, that’s all, and I was surprised. But you are a PPI . . . as you have reminded me. The sale was part of your professional life, too. We will put this aside and you can tell me more about your brother and his twin.”

  Jane told Oh what had happened at the restaurant, and repeated her conversation with Ralph Mowbry.

  “And this Herscher, Illinois, is near your childhood home in Kankakee?”

  “Just west. Even though the address was a post office box, I can’t imagine that it would be hard to find this guy Joe. I mean, it’s a small town, he has to use the post office all the time for payments and mailing out packages, and apparently, he looks just like Michael.”

  “And your brother has asked you to do this for him?”

  Jane tried to remember the exact words of her conversation with Michael.

  “He didn’t ask me not to,” she said.

  “Definite progress, Mrs. Wheel. Although the path from being asked not to do something to being asked to do something is not always a direct path, it is, nonetheless, a path. This sounds very much like the beginning of a real case.”

  “Hey, Janie,” Tim shouted from the kitchen, “I think I found Honest Joe.”

  Jane promised to keep Detective Oh in the loop and hung up. She wanted to find Honest Joe, sure, but in some ways, she hoped that Tim hadn’t beaten her to it—without even leaving the house. Now that she was on a bona fide path, according to Oh, she wanted to be able to actually tread on it a bit. If Tim had just a hit a few keys on the computer . . . what kind of mystery adventure would that be?

  “Boom’s On-Line Auction?” asked Jane.

  “Who knew? I can’t even remember the route I took to find this site, I just kept clicking on links from auction to auction. Boom’s had a seller listing for Honest Joe,” said Tim.

  “What’s he got for sale?” Jane pulled out an old piano stool from the corner, gave it a twist to bring it up to the right height, and cozied up next to Tim, settled in at the kitchen table.

  “Had a listing for Honest Joe. Nothing current. I searched by past auctions and he ran three or four that closed a few weeks ago for, let’s see . . . marbles, old marbles, clay, glass, yeah, okay, he sold those. Some pottery . . .”

  “Roseville?” asked Jane, recalling Mowbry’s passion for the stuff.

  “Nope,” said Tim, “unmarked. A lot of restaurant ware . . . some creamers and sugar bowls, look at these flips . . . hey, Bakelite . . .”

  “Where?”

  “No picture here, this one’s too old. But listen to the description:

  I don’t know for sure how to test Bakelite, but my sister said this stuff smells right—whatever that means. I found this at a sale in an old Woolworth’s box and “junk jewelry from grandma” was written on the cover. Remember, I sell old stuff that’s used. I don’t guarantee anything, I just do my best to tell you what I see. No returns—just bid what you want or sit on yer [sic] hands, but no complaining to me later. Here’s & ve bracelets, all kind of mustardy-colored, four of them are one inch wide and the other one’s about an inch and a half. They’re thick and just slip on. There’s also some red dangly earrings and a necklace with the red and yellow beads.

  “The bidding started at one dollar and it sold, after a five-day auction, for forty-three dollars?” said Tim. “A sucker born every minute.”

  “Why? That Woolworth box? That’s where Bakelite came from, dime-store jewelry, that’s a—”

  “Honey, that’s a ploy. Old ‘aw shucks, I’m just old Honest Joe’ knows what he’s doing. No guarantees, no returns, he just drops enough hints to make you think you see something that you don’t see at all. The pictures aren’t posted anymore, but there are pictures of the restaurant plates and they’re just enough out of focus to make you wonder. He gives you a song and dance about being a country-boy scavenger, but come on, he’s on the Internet and he knew enough to say Bakelite so this would come up on a keyword search—even though he doesn’t guarantee it to be Bakelite or old—just says it’s labeled junk.”

  “Which is enough for some people . . .” said Jane.

  “Yeah . . . some people,” said Tim, punching her arm.

  Tim took Jane on a little mouse tour of the site, pointing out that there was no reliable feedback system as there was on eBay. Honest Joe’s location was the Midwest, but there was no easy way to e-mail him unless you were a registered Boom user. Jane wasn’t ready to feed her own e-mail address into the gaping maw of Boom quite yet.

  “What about pictures? Is there a picture of Honest Joe? Why would someone put a picture up anyway?”

  “No, all of his merchandise pictures are down and there’s no current auction running. But look at this,” said Tim. He showed her a current auction, this time for a wire egg basket. The site had a kind of inset with a seller’s panel with a space for a picture. This seller was a very reliable-looking middle-aged woman with graying hair and wire-framed eyeglasses. “Doesn’t Maude look trustworthy?”

  “I guess,” said Jane. Knowing how many times in her haste to get to a lot of sales in one morning she had overpaid sweet little old ladies for boxes of dishes, all cracked below the first layer of plates, and stacks of books that allegedly had never been stored in a damp basement, she didn’t really want to commit to trusting someone on appearance alone. “I guess just the fact that she’s willing to put her picture up . . .”

  “Exactly,” said Tim. “That’s the trick here. Seeing a nice old face like that? You think maybe it is a basket from the thirties, the one her mama collected eggs in, instead of a piece of ‘vintage-inspired’ junk she bought at T.J. Maxx last weekend. But I’d bet my own antique wireware collection that it cost somebody a couple bucks new at a dollar store and she got it for a quarter at a garage sale. Put up a photo and tell a story and ‘Maude’ will sell that stupid thing for over twenty dollars, plus shipping and handling for which she’s charging ten dollars! Maude’s probably some old grizzled picker . . . more like you. Look, the bid’s already
at fourteen something.”

  Jane looked closer at the woman’s picture. She could see, faintly, two diagonal marks on the bottom corners of the photo. Photo corners. This picture had been taken out of a photo album. Jane supposed someone could remove a picture of herself from a family album to use as an auction ID, but if you were already digitally photographing your merchandise . . . and this egg basket was a digital image . . . why would you scan in an old picture like that? You’d do it to create a persona. You might find a picture of a stranger, one who presented the right image. You’d do it to look reliable, just to make someone who wanted to see a vintage wire basket instead of a cheap imitation, who wanted to believe the description, trust enough to see his fantasy.

  “These people aren’t vintage dealers, they’re creative writers,” said Jane.

  “They’re crooks,” said Tim.

  “Honest Joe—” said Jane.

  “Is a crook,” finished Tim.

  “—stole my brother’s face,” said Jane.

  5

  Tim had only found two sales that were must-sees—he had five or so backups just in case they didn’t fully sate themselves at the ones he had earmarked as winners. While drinking her 5 A.M. coffee, Jane read the classifieds he had pulled out and agreed with his choices. Both sales claimed that the owners were moving into retirement villages and they had to downsize. Listings included cupboards full of dishes, closets full of clothes, and one of them claimed a library of four thousand books stored in a dry basement.

  The plan was to drive to the sales together, stop back at Jane’s house, drop off any of Jane’s large purchases, then leave for Kankakee. Jane had planned on driving the two of them, forgetting that Tim had left his Mustang in Jane’s garage while they were in California. Instead of driving together, they would convoy—for about two minutes—until Tim took off, speeding on his merry way, returning to his own house and successful estate sale business, T & T Sales, in Kankakee. Jane, arriving at least thirty minutes behind Tim, would drive directly to her parents’ less than thriving business, the EZ Way Inn.

  Since both of the sales required entry numbers, which wouldn’t be given out until 8:30 for their 9 A.M. and 10 A.M. openings, Jane offered to go by both addresses at 5:30 A.M. to sign up on the list that one of the regular pickers, dozing in his car, would be keeping. There was always a picker who got there first, clipboard or old notepad in hand, making sure that the first twenty or so early birds signed up in order of arrival for numbers. Jane signed herself and Tim up as numbers 7 and 8 at the first house and 10 and 11 at the second, where the sale would open an hour later. Perfect. Since the person who handed out numbers and was in charge of guarding the door usually admitted around twenty or thirty at a time, depending on house size, Jane and Tim would be into both houses, if they moved fast enough at the first one, in the first wave of shoppers.

  Jane didn’t mind doing the early round of signing up while Tim slept in. She wanted to make a stop to visit her dog, Rita, who had been staying with Miles, an Evanston police officer. Jane had met Miles when she worked for Bruce Oh when he, too, was still with the department. A single woman in her thirties, Miles moonlighted as a dog trainer and it was she who had convinced Jane to adopt Rita when the shepherd mix had shown up at Jane’s house a few years earlier.

  “I’m not really a dog person,” Jane had protested, all the while rubbing Rita’s ears and looking into her brown eyes.

  “Who is until they actually own a dog?” asked Miles. “Besides, Rita picked you. If she could, she’d take care of you, so you have sort of an obligation, don’t you?”

  Nothing convinced Jane of an obligation faster than to have it suggested that it might be an obligation. She was just guilt-ridden enough to take on all comers when it came to the needy, the broken-down, and in Rita’s case, the sad-eyed, hungry, and homeless. Besides, it’s a lot easier to take on the responsibility of a pet if one is given the open offer of free and unlimited dog-sitting. Miles had a tiny house with a huge yard, fitted out with a kennel, a dog run, and space for training and play. Her dream was to work exclusively with the police canine corps, but so far, no positions had opened. She did, however, use her many opportunities with Rita to practice her training skills.

  “Watch this,” she said to Jane. “Rita. Dinner.”

  Rita, miraculously, Jane thought, picked up a bag and shook it out over three small dishes. Miles had put the puppy chow into a reinforced oilcloth bag with a Velcro flap sewn onto the bottom that Rita somehow managed to open and close. Some kibble didn’t make it into the dishes, but for the most part, a meal for the three puppies that Miles had recently decided to keep for herself out of her Lab’s litter was served. The most amazing part of this exercise, to Jane’s mind, was not the manipulation of the flap on the bag, but the fact that Rita didn’t eat any of the food herself—not what was in the dishes nor what had spilled between them.

  “I was going to apologize for leaving her another few days, but now I’m excited. When I come back to pick her up she’ll be able to do the ironing.”

  While they played with the dogs out in the yard, Jane told Miles about her brother’s mistaken identity, her plan to go to Herscher and find the dishonest Internet dealer.

  “So you park in front of the post office and wait for a guy who may or may not look like your brother to show up?” Miles asked.

  “I haven’t worked out my plan exactly,” said Jane, who had indeed originally planned to park in front of the post office and wait for a guy who looked like Michael to show up.

  “Then?” asked Miles, throwing an orange squeaking pumpkin for Rita to catch in midair.

  Jane realized at that moment why she loved having Bruce Oh as her mentor. He asked her questions, but they were so mysterious and open-ended that she didn’t mind being confused. And the confusion often led her directly to where she was supposed to be. Or so it seemed. And if Oh’s questions did not lead her in a straight line to a solution? Well, after all, the questions themselves were fairly circular in nature. But these direct queries from Miles? Jane found herself giving circular answers.

  “If I see the guy, I guess I will approach him and ask him in a nonthreatening—”

  “Look, I know Detective Oh is training you and he’s the best, and I would never want to intrude, but if this guy is ripping people off and selling fake merchandise, or damaged goods or whatever he’s doing to make his customers so mad that they actually approach your brother in a public place and threaten to knock his block off, this guy—”

  “Honest Joe?” Jane offered.

  “Yeah, Honest Joe. This guy, despite the fact that he looks like your brother, might be dangerous. Or at the least, not want to be approached.”

  “It does make sense,” said Jane, “that if my brother is mistaken for the guy, that the guy himself might have been approached and be a little wary . . .”

  “Wary, yeah, he might be wary,” said Miles.

  “So I’ll approach with all due caution and . . .” Jane hesitated. “I guess I’ll just figure it out when I get there.”

  Perhaps that is why, because of that nondecisive answer, Jane found herself, six hours later—after two semi-interesting house sales where she bought very little if you don’t count out individually the five bags of old mystery books with names like The Old White Hag and The Golf House Murder, having no idea whether or not she’d ever read them, but knowing she’d love to see them lined up on her bookshelf; and where Tim grumbled the whole time about people’s poor taste and what design on the cheap was doing to furniture construction in general, not to mention any kind of middle-class appreciation for craftsmanship, and where she found an old desk which she did not want, but whose drawers had not been emptied, and for a very few dollars she filled a bag with all of the drawer detritus, which included some very cool old office supplies, an excellent paper punch, and four wooden advertising rulers—driving to Kankakee, Illinois, with Rita, her large panting shepherd mix, sitting in the backseat of her car.


  Even thinking that sentence silently made Jane catch her breath.

  Miles had carefully packed up Rita’s toys, rawhide bones, and a few dozen plastic bags, all the while fielding protests from Jane, who, at first, thought Miles didn’t understand that Jane had not come to pick her dog up, but to visit before making one more trip.

  “I won’t be more than a few days and unless you really—”

  “I would keep Rita here forever, except for two things: She’s your dog and wants to be your dog, and secondly, you need her.”

  “No, no I don’t,” said Jane, “I’ll be staying at my parents’ and—”

  “Jane. You need to have Rita with you. If you are going to approach anyone and ask any questions, you will be so much safer if Rita is by your side. Or if she’s growling through an open car window while you stop this guy on the sidewalk to ask him a few questions. And by the way, I wouldn’t launch into anything right away, I’d just ask for directions or something so you can size him up, look into his eyes,” said Miles.

  “That’s excellent advice, since I really need to look into Joe’s eyes and see why everyone knows Michael is Michael once they get up close,” said Jane, “but as far as Rita—”

  “You need her,” said Miles, slipping the handle of the leash she had just attached to Rita’s collar into Jane’s hand.

  Jane shrugged. She loved Rita, she really did, but she still didn’t believe she was a dog person. “Does she really growl if you leave her alone in the car?”

  “If you tell her to,” said Miles.

  Jane had packed light for her trip to Kankakee. A few changes of clothes, a box of old advertising ashtrays, mostly for whiskey and beer, to add to Don’s collection, and an old happy halloween crepe-paper streamer/sign, that Jane thought Nellie might be willing to hang up over the dining room of the tavern. Nellie didn’t care to admit it, but she liked holiday decorating at the tavern—not at home, but at the EZ Way Inn, where it gave the dark interior a spark of festivity. Or maybe it just suited Nellie’s dark sense of humor since the tavern remained a kind of seasonless cave for most of its customers.