Out of Time Read online

  “She was lovely,” I said, a strange choice of words for me, a phrase I’d rarely used before. The ambience seemed to call for it.

  “She looks a lot like Aunt Lucy,” she noted further. “Especially around the eyes. But the mouth is different. Mother’s thin lips were the bane of her existence.”

  I nodded and drank my coffee, the cup making a tiny tinkle in the silence as I brought it down to the saucer.

  Suddenly, she said, “Why did you come?”

  I swallowed hard and looked startled. She had caught me completely offguard. “Well,” I said, “it seemed to be more your idea than mine.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, “that’s true. But why did you come?” she repeated as if this were a test and I’d given the wrong answer.

  “To thank you?” I asked. “For, you know, the book and the photo and the pin.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said. “But you could have done that in a note. I did leave you my address.”

  “Yes,” I faltered.

  “So, Miss Van Dine, why are you here?” she persisted, a look of intensity on her face.

  I deflected the question, composing myself and trying to take control. “If I tell you the truth, will you answer some questions for me?”

  “It depends,” she said, looking off into the other room as the front door bell rang. “Excuse me,” she said, getting up.

  I could hear her voice and that of a customer muffled through the damask curtain. There was a lengthy exchange, the bell tinkled again, and she had returned within a few minutes.

  “Sixties memorabilia,” she said with a disapproving nod. “I won’t carry it. I won’t pander to such tastes.” She sat on the sofa again, at the far end from me.

  “What is it you want to know?” she asked.

  “Why you sent the presents,” I said quickly, “and how you knew Out of Time was my store.”

  “It’s a small world of antique dealers,” she explained, ignoring the first question. “Word gets around. I heard about Marjorie’s tragic death. And though your store is hardly an antiques shop,” she said with a disdainful look, “we are sort of in the same business. I must say you’ve improved the quality of merchandise tremendously.”

  “And the presents,” I continued, suddenly disappointed that she hadn’t just known telepathically. “Why did you send them, after I took your scrapbook?”

  “The more interesting question, don’t you think, is why did you take the scrapbook?” She peered at me over her cup. “And why are you here now?”

  “How did you know I’d come today, just now?”

  “A hunch,” she said, smiling vaguely.

  There was a long silence, during which she sipped her coffee and offered me some oatmeal cookies. She was not about to ask her question again, but something made me answer it anyway.

  “I came because Lucy Weir and Harriet Timberlake are haunting me,” I blurted out, fully aware of how ludicrous it must have sounded. I suddenly remembered I was a rational thinker, a woman with advanced degrees, at least one of which, the M.B.A., should exclude me from a belief in ghosts. But Beatrice didn’t look startled in the least. She set her cup down carefully and wordlessly.

  “They’ve haunted me from the first day in this shop,” I continued, a panic in my voice. “They pop out of pictures, they talk to me, they send me postcards. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Does it frighten you?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, after a moment’s thought. “Not really.”

  “Do they do you harm?”

  “Of course not,” I laughed.

  “And would you like them to stop?”

  I hesitated again, thinking of how my life had changed since that first rainy afternoon. Aside from the separation from Catherine, my life had become fuller and taken on more meaning. Parts of it were almost exciting. “No,” I answered.

  She brushed some cookie crumbs from her skirt. “Then what do you want?” she asked, more with concern than irritation.

  “I want to know why,” I said. “Why me. What they want. Where this will lead. What I’m to do. If I’m some special person picked out by them for something, I have to know why.”

  “That’s a big bill,” she said. The bell in the front room sounded again. This time she was gone for ten minutes or more. I got up, stretched, perused the bookshelves, fingered a few papers on her desk. On it was a copy of Photoplay magazine from 1927. As I was picking it up, she reentered the room.

  “Take it,” she said, as I was dropping it back to the desk. “It may help.”

  I was about to say “With what?” when she got my umbrella from the corner and handed it to me. “It’s stopped raining,” she said. “I have to spend some time with these particular customers. But please feel free to come again. I’ll think about your questions.”

  But I had another confession to make, and it couldn’t wait. “Your aunt’s papers, her journals and such . . .”

  “I don’t have them,” she frowned, in a hurry to get rid of me.

  “I know. I do.”

  I guess nothing much surprised Bea Best. “And how did you do that?”

  “I bought them from your sister,” I answered. “I didn’t know then how to reach you. If you want them . . .”

  She glanced anxiously towards the shop. “They belong with the scrapbook,” she snapped. “And we both know who has that.”

  She held the damask curtain open for me. In the front room a man and woman were inspecting jewelry in the case. They smiled at me as I passed behind the counter. Outside the air after the rain was thick and muggy. The thought of riding the subway in the heat made me feel claustrophobic. As on that first afternoon, I took a cab uptown.

  • • •

  I was very confused. I replayed the scene in the shop over in my mind as I stood amid the historic debris in my living room. Although Beatrice had seemingly summoned me, had expected me, she had nothing really to tell me and even looked a little put out by my presence. She dismissed me as casually as she might have brushed some dust from her merchandise.

  I had expected something different, some startling revelations, or some help in figuring out what I had become a part of. Instead, she was as controlling and evasive as Harriet. It was clear that I’d been given only a puzzle, in a thousand pieces, without the accompanying picture to show what the finished product looked like. With my time as minimal as it was, I could continue to piece it together for years without knowing exactly what I was doing.

  I sat down heavily on the sofa. I could not open the scrapbook on the table. I couldn’t stand to see the beckoning eyes, the almost taunting smiles. Why me? What did they want of me? If I chose, couldn’t I just walk away from the whole thing—pack up all my material on Lucy and Harriet and send it downtown to Bea? This had crossed my mind more than once. In fact, in mentioning the box to Bea, I had half hoped she would request that.

  I picked up the phone and dialed Catherine’s number. We were supposed to call less, under our new arrangement, but I hadn’t been good at honoring that.

  “Hi. This is Catherine’s answering machine. Catherine can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message for her after the beep.”

  I sat with the phone to my ear, listening to the long beep and the stillness that followed. I breathed softly into the phone, picturing Catherine out on a date, or worse yet, in the middle of sex. Too much soft breathing had gone by, and now I was too embarrassed to admit who it was. I hung up quietly.

  Then I suddenly remembered my bag. I’d stuffed the old Photoplay into it without looking at it. It couldn’t hurt to see what was in it. Maybe Bea had put it out on purpose, to give me the key to the whole mystery. Or maybe if it wasn’t exactly a pass-key to all the closed doors in front of Lucy and Harriet, it would be like a file to pick the locks with.

  I read it cover to cover. The truth is, I kind of enjoyed it. I’d spent so much time being a serious student of literature that I’d missed the things popular culture is made o
f—things like Photoplay, True Confessions, Modern Romance. I read or glanced over every bit of it. I found out where, in 1927, you might send for a pattern to make a dress like the one Louise Brooks wore in Love ’Em or Leave ’Em. I read all about “It,” a euphemism for sex appeal, and why Clara Bow had so much. Her new movie by that name had just been released. Even the ads used movie stars: “When Constance Bennett dashes out into the pouring rain to keep a location date for Into the Net she finds complete protection in the donning of her Radio Oiltex Slicker.” And there was a minor article about an innovation that no one believed would amount to much—the introduction of sound to silent films, making them “part-talkies.”

  As quaint and interesting as it was, there seemed to be nothing pertaining to my particular interest. It was all motion picture gossip, nothing about stage actors and actresses. I briefly considered selling the magazine in the store, but then remembered Bea’s “It may help” and thought better of it. What it would help with, if anything, remained to be seen.

  16

  I had every intention of spending a day and a half on the road, mostly in the Woodstock and New Paltz area, looking for bargains for the shop. So the intentions were there. I even spent almost a day doing just that. I hit every junk shop that looked like it was run by a close friend of Margielove’s—people for whom time, after the Nixon reelection, was irrelevant. They had lots of interesting things at prices I could afford—stoneware jugs, washing boards, country cookware—all things I knew New York yuppies loved to decorate their apartments with. It was ironic, because these were items the middle class of one hundred years ago would never have owned—they would have considered them too countrified. Now, at a safe distance of time and place, the middle class wanted to recapture the roots it never actually had.

  One of the shopkeepers recognized me from Margielove’s funeral. He had heard about it through the grapevine and had ventured into New York for the service we held at her apartment. I had assumed by their appearance that most of the people at the service were street people, but it turned out this was incorrect.

  “You’re the one she left everything to,” he said, remembering the events of the day. I was suddenly afraid, alone in an old barn with a guy who had not shaved or had his hair cut since 1970. There was some innocence in his eyes, though, or maybe it was the glassy look that comes from drugs. It was difficult to distinguish in the dim lighting of the barn.

  “Yeah,” I said in a low voice, checking over my shoulder so I knew exactly where the door was.

  “Man, you’re lucky,” he smiled. “She was some rich chick.” He looked down at his feet, chuckling to himself. “It’s funny, huh? She had this rich old man she didn’t want any part of, he was some nuclear physicist or something. She split that whole deal, split the rich bitch college he sent her to. But he left her a lot of bread anyway. What a trip. And now,” he laughed, “it goes to her old lady! What a joke on him, huh?”

  I started to explain that I wasn’t her “old lady,” but there seemed to be no point to that. Let the hippies think she’d had the last laugh on her wealthy, establishment father by leaving his money to her lesbian lover. Laughing with him at the irony of it, I bought a few crocks, an old quilt that would need cleaning, and a couple of tin mechanical banks. Out of some duty to Margielove, I left him my card, in case he was ever in New York.

  “Hey, thanks, man,” he said, but I doubted, by the way he stuffed it into his jeans pocket, that he’d ever find that card again.

  • • •

  I don’t know why my car headed for Saratoga, but it did. It was not as if it were a stone’s throw away; it was more like a two-hour trip from where I was. It was a decision I made without thinking, almost as if I got on the Thruway heading in the wrong direction and never corrected the situation. I didn’t stop till I reached the information booth in downtown Saratoga Springs.

  “Do you have a phone book?” I asked. The attendant pulled out a slim volume and I thumbed through it quickly, my finger running down the columns of “T’s.” Quickly I jotted down a name I found on Union Avenue, thanked the information clerk, and picked up a city map. Then I strolled across the street to the hotel and made a phone call.

  • • •

  Mrs. Roger Timberlake was not that happy to hear from me, but she agreed to let me stop by her house on Union Avenue. It was an elegant, slim, three-story frame house with delicate gingerbread carving under the cornice. Like many structures in town, it had been built over a hundred years before, during Saratoga’s heyday, but had been maintained so well it still looked new.

  “Come in,” she said, rather crisply, but politely just the same. She was a small, neat woman in her sixties, with dark hair that had just a hint of grey at the temples. Her parlor was impeccably furnished in the Queen Anne style. At the picture window was a baby grand piano, top heavy with family photographs. I did not see any of Harriet.

  “What sort of research did you say you are doing?” she asked, with a thin, Nancy Reagan kind of smile.

  “On early twentieth-century actresses,” I lied, so adept at it by now it came out without a moment of thought or hesitation. “I found a reference to Harriet Timberlake in some newspaper articles I was reading.”

  “That was my husband’s aunt,” she said. “I don’t know much about her. She was sort of the black sheep of the family. Ran off to New York at nineteen or twenty. To be with another woman,” she said, with emphasis, but lowering her voice at the same time. I thought we were alone in the house, but she continued to whisper. “You know what I mean. Broke her mother’s heart. She used to come back to Saratoga, sometimes to be in plays, and sometimes just on vacation, and always tried to get back into her family’s graces. They never really reconciled. I heard she eventually started seeing men, straightening out a little, but I couldn’t swear to it. She was an actress, and who knows what kind of wild things they do?”

  Men? I almost choked, but I regained my composure beautifully. “Do you know what happened to her?” I asked.

  “She was just a minor actress, I’m surprised you’ve heard of her. Did summer stock here and other places, a few movies. I can’t remember. She never became a star, anyway. I seem to recall she was going to go to Hollywood but something happened. She got killed in an accident when she was still in her twenties.”

  “Would your husband know more details?” I ventured.

  Her face suddenly clouded over. “He would. But my husband died last year.” The pain, I could tell by her look, was still close to the surface.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, then I didn’t know what else to say.

  She ran a hand over her cheek, smoothing the skin, pushing the tears back in. “He was the last of the Timberlakes up here. Harriet had only one brother, my husband’s father. My husband was an only child. We had four girls, all married now.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, realizing it sounded like I was sorry they had four girls.

  Her face brightened a little. “There was a scrapbook my husband kept when he was a little boy about his aunt. He adored the movies and apparently thought it was romantic to have an aunt who was an actress. She wrote to him, too, but I think his mother eventually got rid of the letters. The scrapbook, though, I’ve seen that.” She looked perplexed. “I’ll have to think about where it is. I haven’t seen it in a long time.”

  “If you remember where it is, maybe I could visit again,” I said, handing her my card. “I’d love to see it.”

  She took the card hesitantly, probably not sure she should get involved. “Yes,” she said.

  I thanked her and left. And then my car started heading south, out of town.

  • • •

  Only a day and a half had passed since I had left but it felt longer, probably because I had packed a lot into such a short time. Driving across the George Washington Bridge, back to Manhattan, down the Henry Hudson Parkway to the Seventy-ninth Street exit, I had a sudden feeling of panic and nausea. I had done this before, come back
from a hectic trip to find the shop closed and Margielove dead. I had a clear image of Tuttie, smiling and waving half a tuna sandwich at me as I entered the store, then a sense of dread that I should have never left her alone.

  But as I pulled up in front of the store with my heart pounding, the fear subsided. There was Tuttie in the window, with a feather duster in her hand.

  “Hi, boss,” she said with a big grin. “So how’s the North Country?”

  “Swell,” I said, my vocabulary oddly resembling hers. “So how’s the junk business?”

  “Darling, it couldn’t be better,” she said, earnestly. “Yesterday was busy, busy, busy.” She waved her arms as she spoke, a cloud of dust flying off her feather duster back onto the merchandise. “Thank God you got more stuff,” she said, glancing out at the filled station wagon, which I was watching too, for vandals. “I sold those pressed back chairs and the overstuffed chair and the little round mahogany table,” she continued, hardly breathing. “So guess how much I got for the table?”

  She ran down a short list of other bulky items; in glancing around quickly I noticed a certain emptiness to the room. I was glad I hadn’t hesitated over a humpback trunk that was a bit overpriced: it would take up some of the floor space.

  “Oh, and lovey, I was right about that onyx pin!” she almost squealed. My heart sank, remembering I hadn’t put it away or instructed her not to sell it. “Seventy-five dollars! I’m becoming a real dealer, huh?” She looked so proud of herself, I couldn’t tell her. But I felt a little woozy, like I’d come home to find my Lucy Weir collection distributed to the highest bidders.

  “That’s great,” I said weakly. Noticing some young boys eyeing my car, I decided to unpack. “You are quite a saleswoman.”

  Tuttie and I spent the next couple of hours logging in the new merchandise and pricing it. Then we arranged the larger items in the blank spaces left by Tuttie’s phenomenal selling day. We finally finished a little after closing time, and Tuttie, who wasn’t used to working full-time, looked haggard. I offered to buy her dinner after we locked up. To my surprise she chose a vegetarian restaurant in the neighborhood, and then picked an avocado and sprout sandwich from the menu and vegetarian chili. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to tease her.