Scary Stuff Read online

  “And now, I have followed my love of antiquing and foraging for valuables and I’m a picker,” Jane said. Six absolutely blank faces stared up at her. “I find treasures for people.”

  “Like on Antiques Roadshow?” asked one of the women Jane had not known before.

  “Sort of,” said Jane.

  “She finds junk for people who’ll pay a lot of money for it,” said Nellie, bringing over a large paper plate covered in aluminum foil. It was the rest of the pie, Christine’s favorite, for her to take home. “And she solves murders.”

  Now those blank faces brightened.

  “You sell the stuff of people who are murdered?” asked Zarita.

  “No,” said Jane. “I . . . well, actually, I guess I . . . it’s two careers. I am a picker and I also work as a private investigator.”

  “Here’s her card,” said Don, coming over. He had asked Jane the last time she was home if he could have a few, just in case, and Jane was shocked to see him whip out her JANE WHEEL, PPI card and lay it on the table.

  “It’s like meeting Sherlock Holmes,” said one of the girls.

  “More like Watson,” said Jane.

  “More like Sanford and Son,” said Nellie.

  “No,” said Christine. “Like Jessica on Murder, She Wrote.”

  Swanette had been quiet the whole time Jane had been standing there. Jane remembered almost nothing about her. She had never talked to her, but her name, Swanette, had stuck with Jane. Now she pushed back her chair to get a better look at Jane.

  “You always were a collector. I used to bring you interesting rocks I’d find on the farm.”

  Now Jane remembered. Swanette was the youngest of the group, a secretary at Roper Monday through Friday, but on the weekends, she helped her husband on the farm they owned. She remembered Don saying he heard she could drive a tractor like a man . . . whatever that meant.

  “I remember. I actually still have part of that rock collection.”

  “Sure you do. That’s what you acquisitive collectors do,” Swanette said. “I was just telling the girls. I’m moving into a retirement apartment, and I don’t have any family to take my things. And my late mother-in-law’s things . . . I have to find a place for those . . . I’ve got so many things to get rid of . . .”

  Jane picked up her card and wrote Tim’s number on the back.

  “If you want to have a sale, he’s your guy,” Jane said.

  “I want you.”

  Jane smiled. “I’ve never done a sale by myself. I wouldn’t . . .”

  “Here’s the deal. You come out to the farm tomorrow morning and look over my things. Give me an idea of what they’re worth, what you think I should do. Then if you think this Tim is the man for the job, I’ll give him a chance. I’ll write down the directions.”

  “I hate to turn this down, because it’s right up my alley, but I’m here on business already. I have to—”

  “The farm is just west of here, in Herscher, and it’ll only take you twenty minutes to get there. Here.” She handed Jane a napkin with carefully printed directions.

  “Is nine A.M. okay?” asked Jane.

  After the girls left, Don patted Jane on the back and told her what a good daughter she was.

  “Yes, I am, but what in particular am I being good about today?”

  “Swanette’s had a hard time of it. Her husband was a sonofa . . . a bad guy. Drank a lot, left her with all the work. Swanette was a beauty . . . and a brainy woman, too. Always doing the crossword puzzles and using the big vocabulary. Her husband was a brute. Moved his mother into the house and Swanette had to take care of her, too. Then he died, and she was left with the mother who was an invalid. And that niece of hers lived with her for about five years, too. Christine stopped in here last month for a cup of coffee on her way back from Swanette’s after the mother-in-law finally died and she said you could hardly make it through the house.”

  “My specialty,” said Jane. She began clearing the plates from the table. “Where’s Mom?”

  “Out playing with your dog,” said Don.

  “Yeah, right,” said Jane, walking over to the window. But her father was not joking. Nellie had taken out one of Rita’s rubber toys from the backseat and was throwing it high and wide. Rita was jumping and catching it, wiggling with delight while in the air.

  “Sometimes I think everything I remember from my childhood is wrong,” said Jane to Don, returning to the table for the last of the dishes. “And sometimes not,” she said. Under each plate was a quarter.

  After Jane helped Nellie finish cleaning the kitchen, Jane pried Don out from behind the bar and persuaded them both to leave the EZ Way Inn in the capable, if shaky, hands of their elder ly bartender, Carl.

  Back at the house, Jane sat Don down at the kitchen table in front of her laptop. She inserted the photo CD Monica had given her. With a click of what seemed to Don a magical button, a slide show of Q and Jamey began. Q laughing, Q bent over her stamp collection, Q holding her brother on her lap, hardly able to fit her thin little arms around him, Jamey sleeping, Jamey awake, Jamey in the stroller, Jamey and Q lying on a blanket. After it had cycled through three times, Jane asked Don if he knew which of the photos he’d like her to print.

  “All of them,” he said

  Nellie, pretending not to have time to sit down and look at any pictures, no matter who they were, had found one excuse after another to stand behind Don, pausing long enough to glimpse each photo at least twice.

  “Print up one of them on the blanket,” said Nellie. “I sent them that blanket.”

  Jane selected the shot and put it up on the screen.

  “This one?”

  “Yup. I bought that quilt at the church sale last spring and sent it to them for the baby.”

  “They must like it,” said Jane. She could see that the quilt in question had beautiful appliqués of fruits and vegetables. Jamey appeared to be drooling over a ripe tomato.

  “Yeah?” said Nellie. “Enough to get grass stains on it.”

  Monica might not have intended to pay her this compliment, but by photographing the children on Nellie’s gift, she had elevated the humble handmade blanket to iconic status. Nellie talked tough, but was, for Nellie, tickled pink.

  Nellie was, for Nellie, also showing signs of becoming a loving caregiver. Not to Don, who was told repeatedly he had not been firm enough with Carl the bartender about keeping the rinse tanks clean; nor to Jane, who was roundly scolded for allowing Nick to miss so much school—with permission or without—and for repeatedly letting Charley leave the country. No, Nellie’s warm beating heart, so long encased in permafrost, was being thawed by none other than Lovely Rita.

  Like Miles, Nellie seemed to communicate naturally with the dog. Jane watched her mother raise a hand, lower it, palm down, or beckon with a crooked finger and Rita, seemingly, did everything that Nellie desired.

  “Does Mom know what she’s commanding the dog to do, or is she just adjusting what she says to what Rita is doing?” Jane asked her father.

  “The old chicken and the egg,” said Don, not looking up from reading the Kankakee Daily Journal.

  Jane wasn’t sure if this really was the old chicken and the egg question, but it was a puzzle. Since Jane and Michael had never really had a pet—too hairy, too smelly, too dirty were just a few of the excuses—Jane had never seen this dog-whispering side of Nellie. Michael had once brought home a free puppy from a friend’s house. After two days of untrained puppy in Nellie’s immaculate house, the puppy had disappeared.

  “It wanted more space. It wanted to live on a farm,” Nellie had told them.

  Even at a young age, Jane suspected this farm for puppies was a euphemism for something terrible, but two days later, Fuzzy Neilsen, a long-time EZ Way Inn customer who did live on a farm, told Jane that the puppy had adjusted very well to country life.

  “Happy as a pig in sh . . . slop,” said Fuzzy.

  Now, witnessing Nellie carry on some sort of
a conversation with Rita—and it did seem to be two-way, since Nellie was doing a lot of emphatic nodding as if Rita were filling her in on many secrets of the canine universe, many of which Nellie seemed to approve, Jane thought that just maybe, the puppy really had requested a transfer to the farm and Nellie had obliged.

  Jane planned to leave early in the morning to drive out to Herscher. She would meet Swanette at her house, do a quick inventory of her stuff, and bring along a better picture of Michael that she could, if necessary, show around town. Edna’s Diner would have more customers . . . perhaps even Edna herself would recognize the photo. She might not even have to ask random passers by questions if someone at the haunted house opened the door to her. Jane was ahead of schedule. If all went smoothly, she could set Swanette up with a T & T Sale, meet Honest Joe and have a stern talk with him, eat Saturday-night supper with her parents and Tim at Pink’s Café, and be back in Evanston on Sunday to receive her weekly call from Charley and Nick.

  How lovely when things just fall into place!

  7

  Nellie didn’t go into the EZ Way Inn on weekends. She might have agreed thirty years ago to help her husband out in the business, even though she barely approved of taverns, but she put her small square foot down firmly when it came to weekends. Saturdays and Sundays belonged to her to do with as she saw fit. House work, laundry, yard work, shopping, church were her usual choices. Nellie explained all of this to Rita who sat at respectful attention, watching her as she moved back and forth in her kitchen.

  Jane had slept surprisingly late—Saturdays were usually predawn wake-up calls for house sales—and when she awoke in her childhood bedroom, she felt oddly well rested. Rested and . . . what was this other feeling? Starving. She was ravenous. Something smelled delicious. She grabbed the robe hanging on the door, one of Nellie’s terry-cloth rejects that she left for Jane to use when she visited, and noted that Rita had already deserted her post at the foot of the bed.

  When she got to the kitchen door, Jane not only smelled the bacon but also heard the delicious sizzle. Nellie, already dressed for the day in slacks and a gray sweatshirt, was flipping pancakes and nodding at Rita, who sat watching every move.

  “That’s right, I could tell this is what you liked,” said Nellie, pausing as she collected the food to transfer it to the table.

  “I’ll help,” said Jane, grabbing the pitcher of warmed maple syrup. She wanted to pretend her mother was talking to her, but she could see that Nellie had directed the remark to the dog.

  Nellie put two pancakes on a plate, crumbled two pieces of bacon over the top, and set it on the floor for Rita, who waited. Nellie nodded and said, “It’s okay, you can start,” and Rita, Jane was almost certain, smiled before falling to her food.

  “I don’t usually give her table food,” said Jane. That was a lie, since she always gave Rita anything she thought she might like—and she was still so surprised that she had a dog that she often forgot to buy actual dog food.

  Nellie didn’t dignify Jane’s remark with any indication that she heard it.

  “Another one?” Nellie asked.

  Jane nodded. Nellie had already put three pancakes on her plate. Four seemed about right. Jane had forgotten how much she had loved weekend breakfasts. Nellie always cooked, and it was all new and just for them, not leftovers from the tavern.

  During the week, before school and work, Nellie never had time to make a hot meal, so Jane and Michael were on their own. Powdered-sugar doughnuts, the kind that came in a package and made you cough if you inhaled, and even cookies and coffee were acceptable before-school nourishment. A glass of milk or juice might be encouraged but never required. There was just no time to worry about the basic food groups or a mid-morning drop in blood sugar. But on the weekend, when there was no EZ Way Inn calling, Nellie sectioned grapefruit with surgical precision, stirred up lemonblueberry muffins, fried bacon expertly, and poached, fried, and scrambled eggs to everyone’s taste. Some mornings, she slowly fried potatoes in butter until they were brown and crispy on the outside, soft and salty on the inside.

  Jane watched a pat of butter melt over her pancakes and marveled at how much one meal could bring back an entire childhood. Marcel Proust had his cookie and it might have been a damn fine one, but Jane Wheel preferred Nellie’s pancakes.

  Although she and Charley and Nick normally eschewed red meat, Jane helped herself to three slices of bacon and, chewing carelessly and talking with her mouth full, asked her mother, “What’s the occasion? I didn’t think you and Dad made big Saturday breakfasts anymore.”

  “Dad never made them. I did,” said Nellie. “I just thought you two might be hungry, that’s all.”

  “Where is Dad?”

  “He’s at the tavern. He always opens up on Saturday mornings. I meant you and the dog.”

  Jane ignored Rita’s elevation to being her equal.

  “Do you have a picture of Michael, Mom,” asked Jane, “as an adult? From the last few years or so?”

  “You’ve got all the pictures on your computer,” said Nellie.

  “No. I don’t want one with him and the kids. Just Michael.”

  Nellie rose and crossed to a small shelf over the sink where a few old cookbooks rested. Since Jane had never seen Nellie consult a recipe, she assumed these had been handed down from Nellie’s mother or had been gifts from someone and that Nellie had decided to use them as decorative kitchen artifacts.

  Cracking open an ancient copy of The Joy of Cooking, Jane watched her mother remove a photograph of her brother. It was fairly recent. Michael wore a suit and smiled in a loose, easy manner at the photographer.

  “Your dad took this when Michael stopped here on his way home from a business meeting last year,” said Nellie.

  “You keep it in a cookbook?”

  “Why not?” asked Nellie. “I keep you in here, too.” Nellie flipped to desserts and took out a picture of Jane and Nick in front of a papier-mâché volcano Nick had built for the school science fair two years earlier.

  “I got my mother and father, too,” said Nellie, removing a fragile snapshot from the casserole section. Two young people looked straight at the camera with serious expressions. All business, each held a baby, bundled up against what Jane assumed was an autumn chill since the trees were nearly leafless.

  “Is that you and Aunt Veronica?” asked Jane.

  “Nope. Look at how young Ma and Pa were. I think Ma wrote on the back. It’s faded. Nineteen thirty-something . . . thirty or maybe thirty-nine . . . that’s a three, right? I’m old, but I’m not that old.”

  “Can I take this?” Jane asked, holding up the picture of Michael. “Just for today. I’ll bring it back.”

  “What for?”

  Jane knew better than to talk to her mother about any of this—Michael, Michael’s evil twin, Internet scams—because none of it would make sense to Nellie, and all of it would cause worry and angst that might manifest in several unpleasant displays.

  Then again, Jane could see no convenient lie or plausible excuse.

  “Someone who looks like Michael has been cheating people over the Internet and whoever-he-is apparently lives in Herscher.”

  Bruce Oh had advised Jane to acknowledge her own action . . . to stop minimizing her own involvement . . . to own her new profession.

  “You might have stumbled across your first body, Mrs. Wheel, but ever since, it seems the mysteries have sought you out. You might try to stop seeing yourself as the accidental detective,” Oh had told her.

  “I’ve traced him to Herscher,” Jane said to her mother, correcting herself. “I thought after meeting with Swanette, I might show this photograph around town to see if I could find him.”

  “Then what?” asked Nellie.

  “Ask him to stop?” said Jane, realizing full well that she wasn’t exactly sure what, if any, crime Michael’s twin had committed.

  “Okay,” said Nellie.

  “Okay?” asked Jane.

  “Ok
ay,” said Nellie. “Sounds like you got a full day ahead.” Nellie bent down to get Rita’s plate. She cleared the rest and ran a sink full of soapy dishwater. “You liked that, didn’t you?”

  Jane caught herself before she answered. Her mother was talking to Rita.

  An hour later when Jane was showered and dressed and ready to meet Swanette, she couldn’t find her mother in the house.

  The kitchen was unoccupied, clean and shiny as a domestic museum, as though no one had ever cooked a meal there. Jane walked through, grabbing her bag, figuring she’d find Nellie and Rita out in the yard.

  Close. Nellie was sitting in the front seat of Jane’s car talking to Rita who was sitting in the rear. Although the windows were closed, Jane could see her mother’s lips moving. She was conversing again with Rita.

  “Mom?” said Jane, opening her door.

  “I’m going.”

  “Not a good idea. I have to work with Swanette—”

  “I can help. Swanette knows me better than you and she’ll trust me to tell her what’s what. She’s got so much damn junk. Christine told me, you can’t even move in her house.”

  “But I have other work to do while I’m in Herscher. I told you,” said Jane.

  “Yeah,” said Nellie. “I can help with that, too.”

  Jane slid into the driver’s seat. She knew already it would take a crowbar to remove Nellie from her car. There was no use arriving late to her meeting with Swanette. She had a twenty-minute car ride to convince Nellie to wait at Swanette’s while she visited the haunted house to see if old Bill’s old Jim was old Joe. Old Honest Joe.

  “What the hell is that?” asked Nellie, when a loud ringing started as Jane backed out of the driveway.

  “Hello,” said Jane, trying to cradle her cell phone while straightening the steering wheel. “Hang on, Tim, until I’m on the street. . . .”Jane placed the phone on the seat next to her.

  “Hello,” said Nellie, picking up the phone. “What do you want, Lowry? Why’re you calling when she’s driving?”

  “Mom! Give it!”