A Fatal Appraisal

A Fatal Appraisal

Copyright © 2011 by J. B. Stanley

Original Copyright © 2006; Published by Berkley Prime
Crime

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

This story is a work of fiction.  Names, characters,
places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or,
if real, used fictitiously—and any resemblance to actual persons, business
establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

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For My
Grandfather, Louis C. Winters

It's been over
twenty years since I sat on your lap and we wrote a story together on that old
typewriter, but I still feel your hands beneath mine each time I reach for the
keys.

Indeed there
can
be no more important branch of art than that which regulates the forms of the
furniture among which our children grow up, for such forms, according to their
good or bad taste, their harmonious or their crude lines, their satisfying or
their poor proportions, their skillful or their careless craftsmanship, must
inevitably leave their impress on the minds of the young people who develop
under their silent, but nonetheless eloquent, influence.

—Arthur De Bles,
Genuine
Antique Furniture

Williamsburg, Virginia 1776

Thomas Fleming was bent over, robustly sanding a long
yellow pine board with a piece of sharkskin until his forearms were flecked
with wood dust. The boards were neatly joined using animal glue and thin wooden
dowels until they had formed a perfect rectangle. This box would become the
bottom case of Captain Tarling's new slant-front desk. Thomas ran his hands
over the smooth wood. He loved the large knots and the shadows of dark grain
within the yellow pine. It was a wonderful material to build with, subtle and
malleable, unlike the inflexible and short-tempered man who had commissioned the
desk.

As if summoned by Thomas's thoughts, the silhouette of
Captain Edward Tarling suddenly filled the doorway of Samuel Chauncey's
cabinetmakers shop.

"Mr. Chauncey?" Captain Tarling called in his
abrasive voice as he swept a white-gloved hand in an arc as if leading a
parade. "How is my cupboard coming?"

Samuel put down the plane he was using to even out a
thick plank of mahogany and turned to greet his client.

"Coming along very well, sir," Samuel answered
amiably. "I've placed it first above all my other orders. The carcass is
done and I am working on the doors myself."

Captain Tarling seemed mollified by this explanation.
Samuel was the most sought after cabinetmaker in Williamsburg, and only
colonists desiring fine furniture made in the latest styles placed their orders
with Samuel Chauncey.

"That is well indeed, but I need my desk completed
now—even before the cupboard," the captain announced with authority.
"My wife and her china can wait. My business requires the desk most
urgently."

"Yes, sir. I will see that it is finished by the
week's end." Samuel offered a slight bow and the captain responded with a
grunt, after which he swept from the workshop and climbed ungracefully into his
open carriage, pausing long enough for the carpenters to note the run in his
fine silk stockings. A stunning pair of gray mares with braided manes and tails
pulled the carriage forward in a cloud of dust, but not before a young lady
with honey hair turned her fair face toward the workshop and smiled demurely.

"His wig was crooked," Samuel mused to himself
as he tugged on his gray beard. Then he turned to Thomas, who was rooted to the
ground gazing after the captain's carriage.

"Lad, never you mind that pretty face. Miss Tarling
is well out of your reach. Now, as we have discussed, your apprenticeship has
come to its end. I have nothing more to teach you, but before I let you go, I
shall have you complete Captain Tarling's desk. This is a rare opportunity, my
boy, to illustrate your talents. You see, the captain has requested certain,
ah, novelties be added to this desk."

"Novelties?" Thomas asked, uncomprehending.

"He wants three secret compartments built large
enough to hide—now what did he say?—ah yes, big enough to hide a handkerchief
within."

Thomas raised his brows. "Three secret compartments
to hold handkerchiefs? How odd. I’d wager that dandy of a man is only concerned
with the cut of his coat. How can a man who grows rich trading in molasses
instead of picking up a musket against the redcoats have any secrets worth hiding?"

Samuel took up his plane and resumed his work on the
mahogany. "People fight in different ways against the Crown, Thomas. Keep
in mind how much we depend on our sea trade for life's little luxuries. The
captain has gotten ships through more than one blockade, providing our town
with much-needed supplies."

"If I didn't have this crippled leg," Thomas
muttered angrily for the hundredth time, "I'd do more than run some
blockade! The captain could be attacking the British with his ships, not
running to the West Indies for sugar cane and indigo. And it strikes me as odd
that his are the only ships that return unharmed."

Samuel's weatherworn face wrinkled sternly. "Mind
what you say about Captain Tarling. His hat may be worth more than my entire
shop, but his finery conceals a sharp mind and a long memory for those who
insult him. And he's a patriot, else he'd have run back to England with the
rest of the cursed Loyalists."

"Not all of them went back," Thomas muttered
under his breath and returned to his sanding. He worked long after the others
had gone home, as he was a bachelor whose only love was for the wood he
crafted. The weak light of two candles set in shallow bowls allowed him to work
in blissful solitude.

"You're the last piece I shall make beneath another
man's sign," Thomas whispered to the desk case. He retied his loose
ponytail of ginger-red hair with a leather string and began to place the dadoes
inside the case. Using a hacksaw, chisel, and molding plane, Thomas spent
several peaceful hours attaching the bearer rails and drawer runners. He
tightly clamped the pieces of glued wood and then straightened, examining his
work. Today's labors had created the frame for the four graduated drawers,
which Thomas would fashion tomorrow out of black walnut.

Flipping through the book containing Mr. Chippendale 's
most popular designs, Thomas decided to replace the desk's typical ball and
claw foot with a simpler style. Captain Tarling had asked for an unadorned,
functional desk and, despite his dislike of the wealthy patron, Thomas approved
of the captain's willingness to allow the beauty of the wood to speak for
itself without gaudy carving.

As Thomas sketched the plain curve of what he thought the
foot should look like, he found his eye wandering to Chippendale's drawings of
pigeonholes. The possibilities for adding hiding places among the pigeonholes
were numerous. What did Captain Tarling have to hide? And from whose eyes?

Thomas shrugged aside such aimless musings and prepared
to leave for the night. First he would head home to the boardinghouse for
supper and then perhaps grab a pint in the tavern afterwards. After all, there
was cause for celebration. In a fortnight, he would be the proprietor of his
own shop in Fredericksburg and men the likes of Captain Tarling would become an
insignificant memory.

~~~~~~~~~~

Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a
patina, old furniture, grandparents' pots and pans—the used things, warm with
generations of human touch . . .

—Susan Sontag,
On Photography

It wasn’t everyday that Molly Appleby found herself
driving behind a dilapidated brown pickup with a bumper sticker reading EAT MY
GRITS. A minefield of rust patches on the truck's body gave it a diseased look
as it rattled noisily forward. The rear window of the old Chevy was covered
with the washed-out design of a Confederate flag. Molly had spent the last two
hours on Interstate 85 heading north for Richmond while staring straight
through the faded film of red and blue at the back of the heads of two men in
baseball caps. In between them perched a large dog with long, floppy ears who
occasionally stepped over the man in the passenger seat so that he could stick
a furry head out the window, his pink tongue wagging ecstatically in the wind.

Molly glanced down at her speedometer. She was doing eighty,
fifteen miles over the speed limit. Apprehensively, she slowed down to
seventy-five, craning her neck to see if the gap in the trees would reveal a
state trooper, waiting to pounce upon unsuspecting speeders. The highway
stretching from the North Carolina border to Petersburg, Virginia, was a
notorious speed trap. The niche in the trees was fortuitously empty, so Molly
picked up speed again, unable to resist getting closer to her canine friend in
the pickup.

Molly turned up the radio and sang along to "Son of a
Preacher Man." Unlike most thirty-year-olds, she loved oldies and knew the
lyrics to almost every song that came on her favorite station. As Molly bobbed
her head in time to the music, she wondered what her trip to Richmond would be
like. She was driving the two and a half hours north of her home base in
Durham, North Carolina, in order to spend a week documenting the hit TV show,
Hidden
Treasures
.

As a staff writer for
Collector's Weekly
, Molly regularly
covered the auction beat, visited tag and estate sales with high-quality items,
and interviewed collectors living mostly in Virginia and North Carolina, but
she sometimes traveled to Tennessee or South Carolina as well. Her region
covered a triangular area. Nashville was the western point, Alexandria,
Virginia, Matted the northern border, and Charleston, South Carolina, formed
the southern point.

Molly felt as though she had spent the last month in her
car. First, she had driven to Charlottesville for a well-established antique
show featuring country furniture. The exhibit on loan at this year's show had
been called, "Southern Quilts: Stories in Thread." Molly had
interviewed booth dealers, customers, and the show promoter before paying a
visit to an elderly woman named Nancy Coleridge who had loaned a portion of her
quilt collection to the show. In addition to her generous loan of fifty quilts,
Mrs. Coleridge still had over two hundred vintage southern quilts as well as
numerous coverlets displayed in her mansion on the outskirts of the city.