Elaine Orr - Jolie Gentil 06 - Behind the Walls (2 page)

“A little hostility on the horizon?” He easily avoided the limp glove and stuck his head in the small refrigerator that sat on a card table and pulled out a bottle of water.

Scoobie and I didn’t really see each other after eleventh grade until just before our tenth high school reunion, which was eighteen months ago. But if we hadn’t been good buds before last October, protecting the Cozy Corner B&B the night Hurricane Sandy landed in New Jersey would have bonded us for life.

He sat in one of the two canvas chairs, the only furniture in the small living room besides the rickety card table, and looked down to where I was sitting cross legged on the floor. “How come I never knew you could do practical work like this?”

I tucked my shoulder-length hair behind one ear, and then studied the goop on my fingers. No doubt some was now in my hair.
Oh well. Maybe my brown hair will have some highlights.
“You know I didn’t know. Aunt Madge and Harry have been teaching me the easy stuff.”

Aunt Madge has always done her own maintenance at the Cozy Corner. Her new husband and my boss in his appraisal business, Harry Steele, has spent almost two years refurbishing a Victorian style house that used to belong to his grandparents.
They are patient teachers. That’s good, because my living room was a hodgepodge of remodeling efforts, with the only original wall being the one with the cursed wallpaper. That wall was as solid as the concrete used for the post-hurricane boardwalk pilings in Ocean Alley.

“Hey, can you help me with one thing?
There’s some wallboard that’s still attached, and I want to check behind it to make sure there’s no more mold. I couldn’t pull hard enough to get it off.” The bare studs in other places along the wall were testament to at least some arm strength, despite my having had a broken wrist a few months ago.

“As long as I don’t get too dirty. It’s my night to work in the college library.”

This is a perfect job for him, since he doesn’t always like to have a lot to do with people.

I stood up and brushed off my tattered jeans. “You won’t.”

Scoobie followed my gaze to the other side of the room, picked up my heavy-duty work gloves from a window sill, and put them on.
“This is worth two cups of coffee at Java Jolt.”

“Three if we don’t find any mold.”
The house had been thoroughly cleaned after its bout with the storm last October, but the heat had been off all winter and the humid beach air was perfect for mold growth.

There was just enough of a hole in the board at about the height of Scoobie’s head, which was about eight inches higher than my five feet two.
Scoobie got a grip and pulled hard. The wallboard made a sound like ripping heavy-duty cardboard, and generated a lot of dust. “One more tug ought to finish it,” he said, as we both stood back to avoid some dust.

I nodded and sneezed.

Scoobie pulled hard and the wallboard split and broke. When we had brushed dust off our clothes we peered at the studs. “I don’t see mold, do you?” I asked.

“Nope.”
He picked up a small draw-string canvas sack. “What’s this?”

We both looked at the contents as he spilled them into his hand.
Scoobie held a bunch of shiny stones that looked like diamonds and three bracelets that appeared to be gold, and two that looked like heavy-duty, rust-colored plastic.

Our eyes met.
“This is worth at least ten cups,” he said.

CHAPTE
R TWO

“WOW.” I bent to pick up a bracelet that had dropped on the floor and Scoobie dumped the rest of the bounty on the card table.

“Wonder how long it’s been there?” he mused.

I glanced back at the wall. “It’s newer wall board than the rest of the house. That’s why I was having trouble pulling it down all the way. Still, it’s probably been there two or three decades, at least.”

We stared at the jewelry. “Who owned this place?” he asked.

“Same woman who had stuff in the auction, Moira Peebles. She hadn’t paid taxes for the eighteen months before the hurricane. That’s why the house was in the tax sale so soon after Sandy.”

Aunt Madge told me that Mrs. Peebles had deemed herself fed up with tourists tromping through her yard and had moved in with her daughter in
Newark. I also knew that the house’s value would have declined when the real estate bubble burst, so the storm could have been simply one more reason to let go of the house.

“Yeah, I remember now,” Scoobie said.

“I looked at the first few pages of the title search. She owned it for less than twenty years. Before that, the woman who owned it had it for maybe thirty-five years.” As an appraiser, I’m used to looking at all kinds of documents related to real estate. But while I’d glanced through all the paperwork at settlement a couple of weeks ago, my focus had been more on all the work to do before I could move in than on a pile of papers.

Scoobie’s eyes went to the shell-shaped, battery-operated clock that hung crookedly on the wall that separated the living room from the kitchen.
“I’d like to stay and play bob for baubles or something, but I have a couple of things to do before I go back to campus.”

“You want a ride?”

“Nope. Bus as usual. You okay with having this stuff here?”

“Probably better if I take it to Aunt Madge’s.”
I grinned at Scoobie before my eyes went back to the jewelry. “She’ll probably know about somebody who had stuff like this stolen thirty years ago, and maybe she even knows the person who owned this house back then.” Aunt Madge is a walking local historian. On the other hand, she prides herself on not being a busy body, so there was a chance she wouldn’t know any really good gossip about possibly stolen jewelry.

“It might not be something sinister,” Scoobie said, and I detected his smile before I looked at him.
“Could be an eccentric homeowner hid it and her descendants have been looking for it for decades. They’ll be happy it never made it to the landfill. If you get another reward you can actually furnish this place.”

As I waved goodbye to him from my front porch—my porch! —I reflected on the last few months.
It wasn’t just the hurricane and Aunt Madge and Harry’s wedding that cluttered my thoughts.

My boyfriend George Winters, local reporter and a good friend to Scoobie, broke up with me, and it was pretty much my fault. Not that I’d tell him that.
I’d also helped solve a murder that happened not long after Sandy, and the victim’s parents had insisted I take the reward they had offered. That’s why I had money for the down payment.

I can hardly wait to move in.
Only the volume of dust and general look of a construction site are keeping me, and my cat Jazz, at the Cozy Corner a little longer.

I thought for a moment about the luxury condo Robby and I had owned in
Lakewood. He hadn’t been able to do a large refinance on it, but he’d gotten a small home equity loan with my forged signature. That money had made its way to casinos along with any other cash he could lay his hands on.
And some people wonder why I don’t trust easily.

I walked back into the living room and looked at the pile of jewelry.
I appraise houses, not jewelry, but even with my limited knowledge I knew this could be some serious booty. I had no thought of keeping it. Even though I had bought the small bungalow at a tax sale, I did not think something seemingly this valuable should fall under the finders-keepers-losers-weepers code of conduct.

Any appraiser worthy of the job keeps a digital camera close at hand, so I dug mine out of my purse and separated the individual pieces to get better photos.
When held as a group, the three gold bracelets were heavy. One was just a quarter of an inch wide and was limp. Another was very wide and stiff. It reminded me of something I thought Roman soldiers wore, except there was a kind of feathered pattern. The third looked like a bunch of tiny squares strung together and was not as shiny as the other two.

The two that weren’t gold were a color between cinnamon and rust, and at first I thought they were hard plastic.
The more I looked at them the less I thought they were typical plastic. I shrugged and photographed them separately.

After I photographed the bracelets I lined up the diamonds by size, smallest on the left. There were nine of them. The one my ex-husband gave me for our engagement was half a carat.
Robby later hocked it and convinced me I must have lost it, which had me apologizing and crying for weeks. I judged two or three of these to be roughly the same size and a couple smaller. The others were larger, perhaps as much as a carat. I took several pictures of them, and in each one there was a glare on some of the diamonds. I gave up on snapping one without any glare.

The more I thought about it the odder it seemed that there were so many loose diamonds.
They could have been removed from older pieces of family jewelry, but it seemed unlikely. The words
jewelry heist
came to mind and I almost giggled.

I took a closer look at the canvas bag. It was similar in size to a cosmetics pouch or the plastic case of drill bits that Aunt Madge has in her tool box. The bag wasn’t ancient, but it wasn’t new, either. I turned it over, wishing it would have the name of a jeweler on the other side, so I would know how to start looking for the former owner.
Nada.

I was about to take a picture of the bag when my cell phone chirped.

“May I speak with Joe-Lee Gentle?” the man’s voice asked.

When people mangle the pronunciation of my name it’s a clue we don’t know each other.
“This is Jolie Gentil,” I said, pronouncing it correctly.

“Gosh, I guess I said that wrong.”
He laughed.

No kidding.

When I didn’t respond, he continued. “I’m thinking of buying some property in Ocean Alley, kind of a hurricane bargain thing.”

I fumed inwardly.
The vultures swarming the shore to take advantage of the despair some people feel are no different than carpet baggers after the Civil War. I still didn’t say anything.

In my mind I saw a cigar-smoking, middle-aged guy with a ten-gallon hat, feet propped on a huge wooden desk.

He seemed to sense I did not like what he said, because his voice became less certain.
“So, uh, I wondered if you could show me around town?”

I let his words hang there for about three seconds.
“I think you may have me confused with a real estate agent. I’m an appraiser. After you sign a sales contract, the prospective mortgage company hires me to establish what the property is worth.”

His tone became impatient.
“I know the difference. I was told that you were a go-to person, someone who could help me know if a property’s a steal, or if it’s priced too high. Real estate agents collude on prices, you know.”

“Somehow I missed that.
Let me give you the name of someone who knows this market like barnacles know boat bottoms.” The man sputtered a little while I recited Lester Argrow’s name and number, but then I could hear the scratching of a pen and he was silent for a few seconds.

Lester Argrow is Ramona’s uncle.
He is the biggest pain in the backside in the Ocean Alley real estate cadre. Maybe in all of the Jersey shore. But he knows how to sniff out good deals and he sends a lot of appraisal work to Harry and me.

“How about just a ride around town?
I’ll buy you a cuppa joe.” The man had regained his bluster.

“Thanks, Mr…” He had not given me his name, so I let the words hang between us as I buried the canvas bag, with the jewelry in it again, in the bottom of my purse.

“Dorner. Clive Dorner. I’m not talking about formal showing, you see…”

“Mr. Dorner, I’m in the middle of tearing down walls at the house I just bought, and I’m late for an appointment.
Lester knows me well. If you two find a property that suits you, he’ll very likely come to Harry Steele and me for the appraisal.”

“Who’s…?”

“Thanks for calling.” I hung up, shaking my head at the man’s arrogance.

AUNT MADGE WAS intrigued by the jewelry, but she had no thoughts about anyone who had it or pieces like these stolen.

Harry nudged her elbow with his.
“Sounds as if they placed them there deliberately.”

Puh-leeze
. They’re pretty good about not doing constant mushy stuff, but it still seems weird to see them practically sitting in each others’ laps. They have only been married about six months, but they act like a couple who have been together for decades.

Aunt Madge is only a few inches shorter than Harry’s five-ten, and she looks his age of almost seventy rather than her own of early eighties.
They are both very fit-looking, Aunt Madge from climbing stairs many times a day and Harry from almost two years of hammering, sawing, and painting at his house. It used to belong to his grandparents and is his retirement hobby.

Aunt Madge and Harry were next to each other on the loveseat in her great room, or sitting room, as she calls the L-shaped area that has her living room at one end and kitchen/dining room at the other.
I was in a high-backed chair across from them and the jewelry was on the coffee table between us.

“I want to tell the police about this, but I don’t want it in my house overnight.
You don’t care if we put it in your fire safe, do you?” Aunt Madge has one of those small metal boxes that’s not much bigger than a shoe box. It wouldn’t keep much protected if there were a fire, but she reasons that it’s better than putting B&B guests’ checks under the mattress before she gets to the bank.

“Of course not,” Aunt Madge said, and she began to pick up the diamonds to put them back into the bag.

I begged off having dinner with her and Harry by saying I was going to meet Ramona, and then high-tailed it to the office supply store where she works. The Purple Cow is open until six, and I knew she worked until then today. I like spending time with Aunt Madge and Harry, but a threesome dinner requires a lot of conversation, and I was tired and achy after a day of scrubbing and sanding.

As I drew close to the store, I saw the white board on its easel on the sidewalk just outside. Ramona writes sayings on the board every day that she’s working, and she has begun to suspect that Scoobie is the one who rewrites them now and then. She isn’t sure, though, and I’m not about to play tattle tale.

Today the sign said, “Learn to be patient in the presence of your own thoughts,” and was attributed to Verlyn Klinkenborg. Under the name someone had written, “Klingons live!” That was x’d out and under it was, “Resistance is futile.”

I was chuckling as I walked in, and tried to hide it when I saw Ramona.

“Don’t bother, Jolie,” she said in her usual dreamy voice.

“Don’t bother?”

“I have a new policy. I’m going to leave up whatever they write.” She said this as she set a couple of boxes of pens on a shelf, rather harder than necessary.

“Not going to let it bother you?”

“Not going to let anyone know it bothers me,” she said. “I still think it’s Scoobie, but he’s usually working now.”

I wouldn’t touch that if someone offered me two bushels of crabs.
“You haven’t talked to him, have you?”

“He called a few minutes ago and said you had big news.
He wouldn’t tell me what it was, of course.”

Ramona looked at me. Her large eyes behind over-large glasses complement the hippie look she cultivates. She makes her own clothes, beautiful clothes, because she likes the kind of gauzy fabric and tie-dye look of the 1970s.
She blends with the small store’s vintage look. It has hardwood floors and some of the wood bookshelves that are for sale have older, leather-bound books on them.

We stood next to the cash register and I lowered my voice to tell her about the jewelry. Though Ramona continued scanning the store for customers who might need help, I knew I had her full attention.

“How old are the bracelets?”

I shrugged. “How would I tell?”

“The diamonds would be really hard to date, but if you bring the bracelets in I could probably tell you when the style was popular.”

I started to tell her I’d do that tomorrow when the bell above the door opened and we turned to look at the customer.
Except it wasn’t a customer, it was George. My stomach muscles tightened and I consciously relaxed them.

“Hey, you two,” he said, in the casual tone he uses to greet me these days.
George was in his typical khaki shorts and collared Hawaiian-style shirt, his uniform except in deep winter, when he wears long khaki pants.