Crimes by Moonlight Page 5

  “Hey! Where’d she go?” I heard one of the panting boys ask when he turned the corner and saw the empty sidewalk ahead.

  “There’s her book bag,” said another. “She must be in the bushes.”

  I froze as they pushed aside the flowering twigs. One acne-inflamed face was so close to mine, I could have spit on it, yet he didn’t seem to see me.

  “What do you boys think you’re doing?” a woman suddenly screeched from her doorway. “Is that you, Thomas Bertram? You break any of my bushes, and I’m calling your mother.”

  Tommy’s mother is built like a Humvee, and it’s rumored that she keeps a leather strap hanging in her kitchen. The speed with which Tommy took off down the sidewalk behind his friends makes me believe the rumors.

  When the woman walked out into her yard, I wanted to run, too, but every instinct told me to stay still, don’t move. To my surprise, the woman didn’t seem to see me either. Muttering to herself about destructive kids today, she pushed aside the twigs and azalea flowers to look for damage. Her frown deepened. “That’s odd,” she said. “I don’t remember a white azalea here.”

  I winced as she put out her hand to me and plucked a flower. It felt as if she had pulled out some of my hair, but I managed not to yelp.

  When she walked away, I tried to leave, but I couldn’t move. To my horror, I was no longer flesh and blood. My fingers were leafy twigs. My curly hair, ruffled white flowers. I tried to scream, but I had no voice. No mouth. No larynx.

  Eventually, panic gave way to despair. The legend of Daphne and Apollo was familiar to me because of my name: Daphne had turned into a laurel tree to escape being raped by a horny god whereas I, Laurel Hudson, had changed into an azalea to escape that bunch of adolescent jackals. But Daphne had wanted to become a tree while I—?

  I suddenly realized that yeah, okay, when I dived into this clump of bushes, I did want to merge with them and disappear. There was nothing in the legend to suggest that Daphne ever regretted becoming a laurel tree and wanted to be human again, but if I wanted it as desperately as I’d wanted to hide—?

  “I want to be a girl again. I want to be a girl again,” I chanted mutely.

  Nothing.

  I was still an azalea.

  “It’s pretty, Jean,” said a voice above me, “but I don’t recognize this variety. You really need to water it, though. It’s starting to wilt.”

  “I watered this whole bed last night,” said the woman who had chased away my tormentors. Evidently she had brought a gardening friend out to see me. “Maybe it needs more water than usual. Tomorrow I’ll dig it up, prune it back, and move it around to the patio where I can keep an eye on it.”

  Dig me up? Prune me back?

  As soon as they went back into the house, I concentrated on skin, hair, teeth, toenails—summoning up all the pictures of blood veins and nervous systems in my health and science textbook. To my total relief, my twigs abruptly became fingers again, my flowers were hair, my branches arms and legs. I scrambled out of the bushes, grabbed my book bag, and ran to the shop. Dad was too busy with a customer to notice that I was almost an hour late.

  I was stunned by what had happened to me, but I was still a kid, and over the next three days, I almost convinced myself that I had imagined it all.

  Then it happened again.

  I was polishing a Victorian armchair that Dad had recently acquired. As I ran my oiled cloth over the carved filigrees, working the cloth into every dusty cranny, I suddenly heard the voice of doom from the front of the store.

  Aunt Verna. Dad’s older sister. Twice a year she passes through town on her way to and from her summer house in Maine, and she always stops by the store so that we can take her to lunch where she spends the whole meal telling me to sit up straight, not to talk with my mouth full, and to “speak up, child. I asked you a question.” She finds fault with everything I do or say or wear, and to make matters worse, the last time she was here, she saw that I had taken to wearing a bra and she leaned over the table to ask in an arch whisper if I’d had a visit from my “little friend down south” yet.

  I pretended I didn’t know what she meant, and when she noticed Dad’s puzzled look, she let it drop. “Just remember though, Laurel. I’m your only female relative, and if you have any questions, you can always come to me.”

  As if.

  I so wanted to avoid another lunch with Aunt Verna, that before I knew it, I had changed into a duplicate of the chair I had been polishing.

  “That wasn’t very kind of you to disappear like that and leave me to face your aunt alone,” Dad told me later.

  “Sorry,” I said and tried to look contrite.

  I spent the whole weekend experimenting with my strange new talent, and it didn’t take me long to figure out how to get even with Tommy Bertram. He and his two pals usually stopped at Elm and Madison every afternoon before splitting off to their own houses. They would lean against a lamppost or on the sturdy blue and red steel mailbox that stood on that corner and snicker about which girls had the biggest “racks” or how studying was for nerds. So juvenile. So stupid. They never noticed when a second blue and red steel mailbox appeared beside the first one.

  Next day, I slipped notes into the lockers of a couple of eighth-grade boys whose girlfriends I’d heard them trashing, and guess what? After school, those three got their butts kicked big time.

  Oh, and guess what else? Ten minutes into the unit test, our history teacher found the cheat notes Tommy had taped to his arm, so it was a real bad day for him all around.

  WHILE my new talent was useful for avoiding unpleasant aunts and getting back at obnoxious boys, I didn’t see any real benefits until this winter when things started to go missing from the store. Dad owns the store, but he rents space to several other dealers and takes the money for them when they’re not there.

  As the economy got worse, more and more people came into the shop offering quality heirlooms, but fewer and fewer of the walk-ins were buying. Without our Internet website, Dad might have had to close the store. As it was, three of our dealers had to pack it in, and for a while their rental spaces stood empty.

  Just when trade dropped off to its slowest after Christmas, someone came in to ask if we would sell some things she had recently inherited. “It’s stuff my mother’s great-grandfather acquired when he was in the China trade back in the 1890s.”

  Dad tried to explain that he knew very little about Chinese antiques, but the woman wouldn’t take no for an answer. Next day, she arrived with a pile of cartons, some odd pieces of furniture, and a document that authorized him to sell everything for a generous percentage of the net.

  “You’re sure about this?” Dad asked dubiously as the movers stacked the boxes in a room near the front counter that serves as both a workroom and temporary storage.

  “I’m positive. I need the money.”

  “But what about an inventory?” Dad said. “Do you even know what’s here or what the pieces are worth?”

  “I’m not worried,” the woman told him. “You sold some things for a friend of mine, and she says you’re the most honest man she ever met.”

  AS soon as she left, we opened a couple of cartons at random. Inside were amazing porcelains, bronzes, and stone animals. Tucked in among the boxes were several lacquered chests and screens. Everything was meticulously documented in an old ledger book, which also held the original bills of sale.

  While Dad gave himself a crash course on Chinese antiques, I took pictures and uploaded them to our eBay account. We put a dozen decorative items up for auction right away; and at the end of two weeks, we were both astonished to see the prices they brought, mostly from people with Chinese names.

  “They’ve got the money now,” said Mr. Fong, one of our new dealers, as he watched me pack up a small stone Fu dog to ship to the West Coast. He shook his head enviously. “A few years ago, it was the Japanese. Now it’s the Chinese who want to buy their history back.”

  COULD Mr. Fong have
been the second person in the SUV? Was he the one who cautioned the woman to be careful with me? Our shoplifter?

  Dad may not deal in museum-quality antiques, but he does have high standards, and he requires that our dealers meet those standards by frequently refreshing their displays. Some of them rent space in three or four different stores, which means that they’re constantly moving things in and out and that they’re not always clear about what’s where. When we take a customer’s money, we save the tag that was on the item because it has the dealer’s ID number and the asking price. That goes into the till with the customer’s payment, whether cash, check, or plastic, and that’s when a dealer will delete it from his inventory list.

  It was Martha Cook, a dealer who’s been with Dad for years, who first noticed that she was missing a small occasional table. Mass-produced, mid-twentieth century, but made of solid mahogany and in beautiful condition. Good value for the $75 Martha was asking.

  Then Jimmy Weston reported that a pair of bronze bookends had vanished from his space. “Who the heck steals twenty-dollar bookends?” he asked indignantly.

  “A klepto?” wondered Jane Armstead, the part-time clerk who covers for Dad when he’s on a buying trip and I’m in school. “There’s no other logic to what’s being taken.”

  Jane’s a divorced freelance artist who’s put on a few pounds over the years. Her long hair is streaked with gray now, and she just coils it around and secures it to the top of her head with hairpins and a couple of ivory chopsticks. Her clothes used to be shabby chic; now they’re just shabby because her commissions have fallen off. Even though she’s worked here off and on since I was in kindergarten, Jane is a little ditzy and no expert in antiques, but she was right about the illogic of the thefts. The only thing Jimmy Weston’s bronze bookends had in common with a trio of 1930s lead soldiers, a chipped Art Deco vase, and a pair of Kendall Loring’s silver-plated candlesticks was their portability. Nor were they worth much. Except for Martha’s table, nothing was priced at over fifty dollars.

  “They took your candlesticks and left the sterling toast rack that was sitting right beside it?” said Jane. “Weird.”

  “Indeed,” Ms. Loring said crisply. “Especially since the toast rack is Georgian and worth five times the candlesticks.”

  Dad started listing the Chinese things on eBay in the middle of January, three new dealers joined the store in February, and the shop-lifting began soon after that.

  IT has to be one of those three, I think as my eyes adjust to the darkness. Is it coincidence, or did they suddenly show up because they saw those Chinese things on eBay and thought they could come clean us out? I see a paper-thin line of light where the door doesn’t fit the sill completely. No real help. There’s nothing I can change into that would let me move through such a narrow opening. As the March chill penetrates my prison, I move farther away from the cold metal roll-up door and fumble around till I find a second padded blanket to insulate me from the concrete floor while I think about those new dealers.

  Thomas Fong is from San Francisco. Late forties. Married, though we’ve never seen his wife. With that name, you’d expect someone small, dark, and inscrutable. You’d be wrong. He’s tall, blue-eyed, and four generations removed from the mainland, but his Chinese roots led him to an appreciation of classical Chinese antiques, and he specializes in decorative pieces of Asian origin. “Unfortunately, they’re mostly things that were made for export and not very old,” he told me. “Post-1945.” Very nosy. Forever trying to get a look inside the storage room. Even though he’s not there every day, he always seems to be around when I photograph a new batch of items.

  Next comes Kendall Loring from Detroit. Mid-thirties. Still single. Skinny. Brown hair that’s curlier than mine, and she’s even nosier than Mr. Fong. First day in the door, she’s asking questions about school and who my friends are and what my mom was like and if I think Dad will ever get married again. Sort of cute, but way too young for Dad. If I were on Facebook, she’d probably be banging at the electronic door begging to be my friend. Says she doesn’t like Chinese arts and deals only in estate jewelry and silver. Could she have been the second person in the van? Maybe her candlesticks weren’t really stolen. Maybe that was to keep us from suspecting her when other things disappeared.

  Last is a youngish widow from New York City. Neva Earle. Forty and fighting it. Friendly enough, but more reserved than either Fong or Loring. Her space is an eclectic mix of porcelain and ceramics, everything from Staffordshire dogs to beautiful Dresden plates. Would she—Omigod, what’s that noise?

  It sounds almost like someone’s touching a sheet of bubble wrap. Mice? Rats? I squint through the gloom, but it’s too dark to see anything distinctly. I flounce my blanket to flush whatever creature it is and to get a fix on its location, but all is silent again. “Nerves,” I mutter to myself. Eventually I relax and go back to analyzing the situation.

  DESPITE all our care in watching our customers like a hawk, occasional small items continued to walk off. Jane started asking customers to leave their tote bags at the front counter when she was covering the store for Dad, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  “It’ll look like we don’t trust them,” he said.

  “We don’t,” Jane and I chorused.

  Things finally came to a head last week. My fault. We keep the storeroom locked, of course, but once an item’s been listed online, I’m not as careful as I should be about putting it back under lock and key. When Dad went to crate up a lacquered chest that had sold for well over its $2000 reserve, it was gone. I had covered it with an old patchwork quilt and left it on the floor beside the table I use as a staging platform for my camera. Instead of the Chinese chest, the patchwork quilt covered a plain oak chest of our own that was worth only a fraction of the other.

  The police came and poked around, but what could they do? No door had been forced, and taking fingerprints in such a public place would have been useless. “We’ll file an incident report so you can put in an insurance claim,” they told Dad, “but you might want to change your locks. Looks like an inside job by someone with a key.”

  “Well, that’s stupid,” I told Dad when they were gone. “You and Jane have the only keys, and Jane hasn’t been in since I left the chest out.”

  “Of course, it wasn’t Jane,” said Dad. “I hate to say it, but I’m afraid it must be one of the new people. All three of them restocked their booths this week, so they were back and forth with dollies. If you could remember when you last saw the chest—?”

  But I couldn’t. This was Thursday. I knew it was there last Saturday morning because a customer had been interested in the quilt until she realized that one end of it had been damaged in a fire, but the chest could have been taken twenty minutes later, and who would notice?

  Dad was due to be out of town all weekend for an antique fair. I had finally convinced him that I was old enough to stay home alone, but as soon as he left Friday morning, I ditched school and headed for the shop.

  Jane was behind the counter and surprised to see me. “No school?”

  “Teacher workday,” I said glibly. “I’m going to take pictures of another box of stuff in the storeroom.”

  No sooner had I unlocked the door and switched on the light inside than Mr. Fong was right there at my elbow. He insisted on helping me carry things out to my tabletop photography studio. This time, I didn’t discourage him. He wasn’t particularly interested in a tall ceramic statue of a goddess—“Early twentieth century, made for export and a dime a dozen,” he said dismissively—but a Ming dynasty vase with a scaly blue dragon prancing around the flared bowl really made him salivate.

  “Lovely,” said Neva Earle on her way in with a heavy box of English stoneware strapped to her dolly. She held a Blue Willow platter next to the vase and said ruefully, “You can certainly see the difference in quality, can’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Martha Cook. “I have a weakness for Blue Willow. You ought to let me
display that platter for you on one of my sideboards.”

  They walked away together, and a customer called Mr. Fong back to his booth to discuss a Korean screen.

  I finished photographing the Ming vase and moved on to the ceramic goddess. She might not be valuable, but her serene face, half the size of my own, appealed to me, and I took several pictures of her from all angles.

  “You have a nice touch with the camera,” said Kendall Loring, who had suddenly appeared from nowhere. “I checked out your website. Good crisp pictures.”

  “Thanks,” I muttered.

  “I guess you got your eye for form from your dad,” she said. “What about your mom? Was she a photographer, too?”

  I shrugged. “Dad never said, Ms. Loring.”

  “Please. Call me Kendall. You don’t look much like him, so I guess you must take after her.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “She didn’t like to have her picture taken.”

  “No pictures at all?”

  “Just a snapshot he took when she wasn’t expecting it,” I said grudgingly.

  “Was she as pretty as you?”

  Oh please, I thought to myself.

  “Does it still hurt for him to talk about her?”

  God, she was nosy! But her questions made me realize how little I knew about my mother. Could she have been a shape-shifter, too? Even though he never brought her up, Dad certainly answered every question I’d ever thought to ask. They had met in college. The only child of two only children, her father died when she was in college and her mother three years later. As the only grandchild on both sides of her family, she had inherited a ton of beautiful old pieces, which is how she and Dad started the store. No other family that he’d ever heard about. But where she was born? Her maiden name? Her favorite songs and movies? I’d never thought to ask. And there was no way I could say, “Hey, Dad, Mom ever change into a rocking chair when you weren’t looking?”