Out of Time Page 9

  “Surprised?” Harriet said.

  “Well, yes, I guess a little,” I said aloud, even though she was only thin air.

  I carefully withdrew the next letter from its envelope. It was similar to the first in its tone. Harriet went on for two pages thanking Lucy for answering her first letter. At the end her voice dropped to a confidential whisper.

  “I was pleased to see,” she wrote, “that you recognized the pen. I will use it now always when I write.”

  They made a date to meet in New York for lunch. My imagination raced, trying to fill in the details of Lucy’s letter and anticipating what that luncheon must have been like. Did they rub knees under the table? Stare at each other longingly? Suddenly, I felt cheated. I wanted to be with them during lunch. I willed myself there, but it didn’t work. I didn’t know where it had taken place and couldn’t picture the setting.

  Even ghosts, I suppose, have to have some privacy.

  • • •

  That night, before I went to bed, I did two things. I called Catherine, and I looked through the scrapbook for the first time in weeks.

  The call to Catherine went like this.

  “Catherine?” I always said it as a question, even though I knew her instantly by her hello.

  “Hi there,” she said, also a routine of hers.

  “What do you think is happening to me?” This was not a usual question.

  “I don’t know,” she faltered.

  “Do you think it’s crazy to believe in ghosts and things like that?” This was another unusual question. “I mean, really crazy?”

  “I don’t know,” she said again, and there was a long pause. “I guess in certain cultures.” It was unlike her not to have a more elaborate opinion.

  My stomach turned over suddenly. “Is this a bad time for you?”

  “Sort of,” she hesitated, a nervous quiver to her voice. “A friend came over for dinner and we were just talking. Can I call you tomorrow?”

  Tomorrow, she said, not later. The difference was not lost on me.

  “Anyone I know?” I asked, ignoring her question.

  “No,” she said firmly. “Listen, we may be up late talking. I’ll call you tomorrow. Okay?”

  Now my imagination was working overtime. I knew all her friends—why didn’t she mention a name? Catherine hadn’t wasted any time finding another love interest. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours.

  So I did the only thing I could. I pulled out the scrapbook, leafing through the pictures till I came to the most haunting one of Harriet, the one that had first caught my attention in the antiques shop.

  “Harriet,” I said, “do you believe in ghosts?”

  She waited till the morning to come to me. I was gently rustled out of sleep by a warm body crawling under the sheets with me, by a soft mouth pressed to my own, slightly tremoring at my touch. I was fully awake when her hand coaxed my willing thighs apart and pushed several long, graceful fingers inside me. I was not startled in the least. I had, in a way, requested it.

  And when I came, loudly and resoundingly, it was the single word “Harriet” that left my lips.

  • • •

  Of course, ghosts don’t stick around for coffee and bagels. They are part of a different dimension. If they eat and drink at all, it is not because they have to. When my alarm woke me late that morning, I was alone, with a headache, lying in a wet spot on the sheets.

  I immediately went to the living room. The box was as I left it, with the contents spilled out on the floor around it. At first glance anyway, it did not look like Harriet had “borrowed” anything. But when I peered into the box, I saw something that had not caught my eye before, if in fact it had been there before. It had rolled to the side and rested there in the shadows. Only a glint from the overhead light made it catch my eye.

  It was an exquisite black and gold fountain pen.

  I lifted it carefully from the box and ran my fingers over it appreciatively, as I had that morning over Harriet’s cool skin. They had an amazingly similar feel.

  Was this the pen Harriet had written about in the letter? The more I touched it, the surer I felt.

  But the voice I heard then, surprisingly, was not Harriet’s. It was deeper, older, Lucy in her prime. “Write me something beautiful with it,” she said, quoting her own book. Or had her book imitated life?

  I could think of nothing to say but “I will.”

  14

  Now that I had a business, with an employee, I was no longer the carefree graduate school dropout. I opened the store at ten, as I always did, and worked a slow morning till Tuttie arrived at noon. I studied the inventory and realized I would have to go on a buying trip soon or resort to the unethical tactics of some other antiques store owners. There was a network of shopkeepers who sold antiques only because there was a market for them, and who tomorrow might be opening a chocolate chip cookie franchise, if that seemed more lucrative. They preyed on older people, women mostly, by visiting the recently widowed or those whose families were packing them off to nursing homes on Long Island. Valuable antiques could be had for a song that way. Margielove had told me a horror story of a shop owner who bragged he had gotten a Tiffany lamp from a woman for two hundred dollars, then turned around and resold it for twenty times that much. The older woman had then introduced him to some of her friends. And so on. Sometimes I wondered if the whole antiques business wasn’t unscrupulous. It was not much better for me to travel upstate, buy things from country folk, and bring them back to mark up for the yuppies.

  Tuttie arrived with her lunch sack, a worn brown bag she carried every day and folded up to take home at night.

  “They don’t give these out much anymore,” she told me the first day. “Everything’s plastic now. So I save ’em.” I had switched to plastic bags at the store, too, so I was a little embarrassed. Her lunch, as always, was homemade tuna salad on white bread with an apple. She ate it when things were slow. Sometimes it took her hours to finish; sometimes, like today, she ate it all in one sitting.

  “Tuttie,” I said, “I’m going to have to go away soon, on a buying trip. Will you be able to work full time? It’ll be just a few days.”

  “Sure, hon,” she said, cheerfully. She had already told me I was the best boss she had ever had, not like the stuckup young buyers at Macy’s. “Where are you going?”

  “Probably upstate.”

  “Oh, that’s nice. I went upstate a couple of times when I was younger. I liked that resort, what’s it called, Lake George. You probably didn’t guess this, but I was a pretty good swimmer.”

  “No,” I smiled, “I didn’t.” It was hard to imagine Tuttie in a bathing suit.

  “That’s how I kept my girlish figure,” she chuckled, smoothing her skirt across her flat stomach and hips. It was quite a sexy movement. Blushing a little, I turned away and started paying some bills.

  But Tuttie, as always, kept talking. “So how’s that gorgeous girlfriend of yours? What’s her name again?”

  “Catherine Synge. We had a nice time the other night,” I admitted but blushed again, uncontrollably, at the memory of this morning with Harriet. “But things between us aren’t that good. I think we’re going to separate for a while.”

  “Sex problems?” she asked bluntly, taking a crisp bite from her apple.

  “No,” I said, “never that. It’s other things.”

  “Different backgrounds maybe?” she asked.

  When we were first together, we’d had problems stemming from my ignorance of the world in which Catherine had grown up, where concern about money and the lack of it played a big part. But that was not really our problem.

  “No,” I said, dismissively, “that’s not exactly it.”

  Tuttie didn’t pry further, though she probably would have liked to. My tone clearly said we should drop it.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, sweetheart,” she said, with genuinc sympathy. “You make a gorgeous couple.”

  While she chomped her a
pple, I asked, suddenly, “Tuttie, do you believe in ghosts?”

  “So what brings that up?”

  “Just making conversation,” I said. In my mind, the question followed from the mention of Catherine, but Tuttie could not have understood how.

  She swallowed a bite of apple and put the half-eaten, browning core down behind the counter. She was thinking it over very seriously, trying to remember if she had an opinion on the topic.

  “There was my aunt Esther, of course,” she said. “She died tragically, when she was a young girl, about twenty or so. I don’t remember exactly. She never got married or moved from my grandmother’s house. She drowned in a rowboat accident in Central Park. Hard to believe, huh? People said it was no accident. She was with her jealous sister Rachel at the time. The story was that they were both in love with the same man, but he wanted Esther. Then there was this mysterious accident with Rachel on the lake in Central Park. Rachel survived, but poor Esther went under. And then Rachel married the man.” Tuttie shook her head sadly. “After that, people in my grandmother’s house claimed Esther’s ghost was there. They actually heard her crying ‘Why? Why? Why?’ and ‘Harold.’ That was the boyfriend’s name. My uncle Mordecai used to say he saw her, too, but he was just a kid then, and you know what imaginations kids have.”

  “I know a lot of people who claim to have seen ghosts,” I said. “That story of yours sounds like ones I’ve heard in other families. You know, about the relative who came to a bad end or left something unfinished and now roams around, dissatisfied, as a ghost. I remember my mother was terrified when she buried her mother that if the funeral wasn’t according to Grandma’s wishes, she’d come back to haunt her.”

  Tuttie had resumed eating her apple. “I don’t know what I think, lambchop. But then I’ve never seen a ghost myself.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I guess that makes a difference.”

  • • •

  The words I’d spoken to Tuttie kept echoing in my mind. “Someone who comes to a bad end or who’s left something unfinished.” I had often wondered why Sarah Stern and Elinor Devere had left me alone. At first I thought the pull to Lucy and Harriet was stronger because it was Lucy’s scrapbook I found. Sarah and Elinor looked attractive enough from the pages of the album, but I reasoned that they just hadn’t caught my fancy, that there was no chemistry between us. But as I became more deeply involved with Lucy and Harriet, I wondered if it were not something more profound than that.

  I looked up Sarah Stern’s dates again, the ones Roz at the Archives had dragged out when Catherine and I visited. 1890–1964. She probably died of some normal disease of old age. Seventy-four was a respectable number of years to live. I had nothing about Elinor, but I was developing a shaky theory anyway. What if they’d lived to ripe old ages, and Lucy and Harriet had not? Letty King had told me that Lucy had a breakdown when Letty “was a girl,” after Harriet . . . died. Well, it was still difficult to think about the two of them in terms of death. I liked the ambiguity surrounding the end of Lucy’s life—1890–? A bit like King Arthur, maybe she just went off quietly somewhere and was destined to return at the proper time.

  As for Harriet, I had romantic images of her dying tragically, maybe even violently, at a young age. Never becoming a great actress, maybe never even getting to Broadway.

  The questions began to mount up. And for some reason, I thought the answers would be clearer if I got out of the city.

  • • •

  The day I was packing for my short trip upstate, a package arrived in the mail. I recognized its source immediately. It had the same heavy brown paper, the same sealing with waterproof tape, and the same method of address as the first package I had gotten like it. It was a flat parcel with considerable padding, marked FRAGILE right next to my name. Inside, beautifully framed in elegant, hand-tooled leather was a portrait of Lucy Warner Weir, from the shoulders up.

  It was a hand-colored sepia, the kind my mother had told me was popular when she was young. An artist had actually painted the photograph, adding a blush to the cheeks and a hint of blue to the eyes. The whole effect was soft, hazy, glowing, and a bit haunting. By Lucy’s flat, broad-brimmed hat, I guessed the photo was taken later than the twenties. Under the hat showed the edges of a marcel hairstyle. Catherine could have told me which year exactly, but I suspected it was the thirties. Lucy’s face, too, looked older, more careworn, accented at the eyes with a web of character lines. The photo showed the top of her dark grey suit, with a silky white blouse fastened at the neck with a pin. The pin was distinctive, a long, sleek onyx and marcasite one that resembled a man’s tie clip. The style was enjoying a revival. The framing of the photo was obviously original. A tattered and yellowed label on the back read, “L. B. Andrews & Sons, London.”

  With the photo, as with The Intrepid Ones, came a note on elegant linen stationery, not dissimilar to the kind Harriet had used to write to Lucy.

  My dear Miss Van Dine,

  With my compliments. It is about time we met again.

  Best regards,

  Beatrice Best

  But there was no phone number or return address, and the phone book listed only B. Bests who weren’t the one I wanted. I spoke to an annoyed Benjamin, Barney, and Bertha before giving up the search in that manner.

  She didn’t want me to find her, I concluded. Like everyone else involved in this game, she would find me when the time was right. After all, she said only that it was “about time.” I put the photograph in my bedroom, on the dresser, and finished packing for Saratoga.

  On my way out of town, I stopped off at Out of Time to check on Tuttie. There was really no reason to check on her, but it was the first time I’d left the store for more than a day. She was finishing her tuna salad sandwich when I arrived.

  “Hi, boss,” she said with a smile. “Wanna bite?”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “Then can I interest you in some tuna salad?” she giggled, and I smiled. She had trapped me in bad vaudevillian jokes before.

  “Very funny,” I laughed. “But seriously folks . . . ” I noticed a wad of tissue paper on the counter and started to crumple it up to throw away, when a pinpoint inside the wrapper pricked me. “Ouch,” I moaned, leaving a dot of bright red blood on the paper.

  “Uh-oh,” Tuttie said, jumping up and wiping her hands on her skirt before touching the paper. “Careful, sweetheart. There’s something gorgeous inside. My first purchase for the store.” She looked suddenly embarrassed. “I hope it’s okay, hon. I wouldn’t have done it but believe me, baby, I know jewelry and this was a buy.”

  She carefully unfolded the paper to reveal a long, sleek onyx and marcasite pin, a carbon copy of the one in Lucy’s portrait.

  “Where’d you get this?” I practically shouted.

  “A gal brought it in here, looking to sell,” Tuttie explained. “Only wanted ten dollars for it. Can’t figure it. She was a dealer, too. You can easily sell it for fifty, maybe even seventy-five. My mother gave me a pin like this when I got my first job, at a dress shop downtown. Girls are wearing them again.” She was holding it delicately, so I could see the workmanship. “Nice, huh, lambchop?”

  I nodded weakly. I held onto the counter for support. “Who,” I began shakily, “who was this ‘gal’ you bought it from?”

  “Oh,” she hesitated, not sure of her memory, “an older girl, not as ancient as me, not as young as you. A ladylike little thing. Dark suit, I think, looked hot as hell. Hair done up in a bun. Yes, a bun. Kind of salt-and-pepper hair.”

  “She didn’t leave her name?” I ventured.

  “As a matter of fact,” Tuttie said, first consulting her notebook, then reaching under the counter to a box where we kept customers’ business cards, “she did.” She held it out to me, and I took it with trembling fingers. “Hey, cupcake, you better sit down, you look all white . . . like you’ve seen a ghost,” she chuckled.

  The card read, “The Best Years of Our Lives, Antiques and Collectib
les,” with the address. Underneath, it said, “Beatrice Best, Proprietor.”

  15

  Needless to say, I postponed my trip. I felt I had been summoned. It was funny, but seeing the shop again, facing my crime, possibly having to return the scrapbook did not frighten me as it once had. Beatrice Best, who sent presents in the mail and sold my clerk merchandise for way below its value, suddenly felt like a friendly figure.

  I went the next day, and appropriately, it was raining. The scene felt decidedly like a case of déjà vu, except that this time I carefully noted the sign above the door, a hand-painted one with the words written in an elegant script. I had to tilt my umbrella to look at it, and it occurred to me that was why I hadn’t noticed it the first time.

  The interior had changed only slightly—the settee had not been sold, but the clothing on it had changed to a beaded flapper’s dress with a feather boa. The bell tinkled in just the same way as before, but Bea Best was different than I remembered. There was more grey in her hair, her frame was slighter, her fingers looked less nimble. It took her longer to come from the back room. When she smiled, it almost seemed to hurt her.

  “Oh,” she said, without greeting, “I see it’s still pouring.” She came right out into the middle of the store and took my hand. “Let’s go into the back,” she said simply.

  The back room was a combination office and storage room. The walls were lined with dark bookcases, and there was a humpback sofa that matched the settee in the outer room. A beautiful oak roll-top desk held a prominent place against the nearest wall. Above it hung an oil painting of someone who looked amazingly like Lucy Warner Weir, but was not her. The room, unlike the back rooms of many shops, was neat and attractive enough to have been the actual sales area.

  A lamp on the portrait was one of the few lights in the room. We sat on the sofa in shadows, behind a table where coffee for two had been arranged. It was hot, as if Beatrice had been expecting me.

  “The woman in the portrait was my mother,” Bea explained, though I hadn’t asked. “That was painted in 1923, before I was born. In fact, she was probably pregnant with me at the time she sat for it.”