Gilt by Association

T
he invoice from the estate auction read as follows:

one Louis XV armoire

one Louis XV desk

one small Louis XV table

one carved and gilded mirror

It said nothing about a body. I read the invoice one more time just to be sure.
No body
.

I sat down rather heavily on a sturdy Victorian side chair. Finding a corpse in a closet is not a daily occurrence at the Den of Antiquity. One should excuse me then for stopping to catch my breath before I called the Charlotte police. I'm sure you will understand as well when I tell you that it took me several minutes to catch that breath.

My name is Abigail Timberlake, and the Den of Antiquity is all that I have. Three years ago I was a happily married woman, mother of two almost grown children, library volunteer, and president of the Episcopal Church Women. I even had a dog, Scruffles, and a cat, Dmitri. But that was then, and this is now, as my children used to say.

Buford Timberlake changed all that. As ex-husbands go, Buford is the sludge at the bottom of the pond. Timberlake the Timber Snake, I call him. Of course some of the credit should go to the blond puffball who used to be
his secretary and now is his wife. Tweetie Byrd—her real name, I kid you not—insinuated herself into my husband's lap, and then his life, with the rapidity of a striking snake, so maybe she's part reptile, too. At any rate, Tweetie is now mistress of the manor, and stepmother to my son, Charlie. Thank God, my daughter, Susan, had already flown the nest when The Byrd took over.

That Buford had been awarded custody of everything near and dear to me (with the exception of my shadow) has nothing to do with my competence or moral track record. It is simply because Buford is a lawyer. A damn good lawyer. Maybe the best. Buford is capable of convicting Pollyanna of a bad attitude, and once he decided to go for Tweetie, who was twenty, and cast me aside, it was all over except for the pain.

I am lucky to have escaped with my antique shop. I can only guess that Tweetie presumed the Den of Antiquity was a geriatric sex club, and being so consumed with Buford, hadn't enough energy left over to take that on as well. I would like to think that the shop would have remained mine no matter what, since I stalled it from scratch. Of course I started my children from scratch as well, but that didn't stop Tweetie Byrd from taking over my nest and stealing my remaining fledgling.

None of that has anything to do with the price of antique silk in China, or what I'm about to tell you. I just wanted you to know that I didn't have it “made in the shade”—to quote The Byrd—and I still don't. The fact that my dearly departed Aunt Eulonia (herself a murder victim) left me a considerable estate last year, and I finally have some financial stability, is none of Tweetie's business. The point I'm trying to make is that my shop has come to fill a tremendous void in my life. Outside of my loved ones, it is my life.

So I hope you can understand how it was that finding a corpse in a closet was threatening, to say the least. I
realize now how callous this must sound to you. How shocked you probably are that I didn't immediately respond to the corpse as a person. But I was in shock myself, you see. After all the stress I'd been under, something had simply shorted out in my brain. Even now I cringe when I say this, but I was far more concerned about what the body would do to my business than about the body itself. I wish now that I had felt differently.

I also wish that I had called 911. Unfortunately, someone else beat me to the punch.

“Well, well, what have we here?”

I jumped several inches off the chair. There are eight sleigh bells attached to my front door, but I was so distraught I had not heard anyone enter. In my frame of mind, it could well have been the corpse conversing. I whirled and faced the speaker, a middle-aged police officer in a blue uniform.

“He isn't on my invoice,” I said stupidly.

“Ma'am?” Charlotte police are invariably polite.

“He wasn't part of the lot. I only bid on the desk, the table, the mirror, and that!” I pointed to the armoire, in which the body sat, slumped in a heap.

“Name?”

“I don't know his name!” I wailed.

“No ma'am, your name.”

“I have a right to remain silent, and refuse to answer questions,” I began. “I have a right to call an attorney. If I—”

“I'm not arresting you, ma'am,” said the man in blue. “I just want to ask you a few questions. We can do that here, or down at the station. Take your pick.”

That was like asking me to choose between liver and boiled turnips. Following Aunt Eulonia's murder, I spent more than my fair share of time hanging around the police station. For the record, allow me to stress that all of my hanging around was in front of the bars, not behind them.
Still, police stations give me the heebie-jeebies. On the other hand, I had been dating—on and off—a very handsome police detective named Greg Washburn who had recently been promoted (demoted, he claims) to a desk job downtown. Unfortunately our relationship was now in its “off” stage, and until Greg came up with a satisfactory explanation for why I saw him at Hooters in the company of a redhead with humongous hooters of her own, I didn't want to see him. Reluctantly I chose the boiled turnips.

I stood up. I've seen newborn foals with sturdier legs. “I'll go to the station.”

“Then excuse me, ma'am,” the officer said, and he began talking into his cellular phone.

There was a lot of static, and he conducted his business several paces away, but I still managed to hear words like “victim” and “perpetrator.” My blood ran cold. It was clear to me that there were two victims in the shop right then, and no perpetrator. Unless I could convince him otherwise, I would have to kiss my career as an antique dealer good-bye. After all I'd already been through, I didn't think I had it in me to fight my way through the jungle that is our justice system.

Faced with fight or flight, I fleetingly considered fleeing. Frankly, it crossed my mind to fling a cranberry glass vase at him, and then make a run for it. I keep a lot of room open on my credit cards, and I had just filled my gas tank that morning. But I was never good at throwing things, and had, in fact, been passed up by the girls' soft-ball team in college. Twice. Besides which, the cranberry glass vase was exquisite.

The officer stepped back into grabbing range. “I've called for assistance.”

I took a careful step backward. “There's no need for that,” I said quickly. “I'll go peacefully. I promise.”

He smiled. “I was counting on that, ma'am.”

This time I heard the bells and was not surprised when
a pair of men stepped in. I mean that literally. Rob Goldburg and Bob Steuben are life-partners who own the shop next door. Ever since my Aunt Eulonia was murdered, the two of them have been clucking over me like mother hens. Rob is a handsome, robust man in his fifties with a thick head of hair just starting to gray at the temples. He has a temper. Bob is a spindly man almost twenty years younger. His face is too narrow to be handsome, and his hair is mousy. He does, however, possess a voice that could calm the Bosporus Straits.

“Everything all right?” Bob asked in that wonderful voice. “We saw the car outside. There hasn't been a robbery, has there?”

“Damn bastards should be shot for robbing antique stores,” Rob said. “Either that or lock them up and throw away the key. No parole, that's for sure.” Their shop had been robbed twice, and he meant every word.

I pointed to the armoire.

“Holy moly!” It was Bob's turn to sit on the Victorian side chair. He's not as tough as Rob, and his face had turned to white porcelain.

“What a waste of a perfectly beautiful armoire,” Rob moaned. “Eighteenth-century French?” Either he was even tougher than I thought, or he was in shock as well.

“From Lula Mae Barras's estate,” I said. “I bought it for a client, but now it's ruined. You don't know a good way to lift bloodstains from wood, do you?” Thinking about the armoire was much easier than thinking about the body.

“I'd try a teaspoon of baking soda with an ounce of clear ginger ale. Make sure it's mixed well and apply it with a cotton swab. They should lift right off.”

“Does diet ginger ale work?”

“Excuse me,” the officer said, “but this isn't home ec class. We have—”

The bells jangled again and I could see that his backup
had arrived. He intercepted his reinforcement at the door and the two officers conferred with each other. They nodded in my direction. I could feel them talking about me. Handcuff size, leg irons, that sort of thing.

“I didn't do it,” I said to nobody in particular. I think I repeated it several times. No doubt I was beginning to sound like a broken record, or was that a chipped CD?

Bob got out of the chair and gave me a quick hug. “You're in shock, dear. Is there anything we can do?”

“Yes, anything,” Rob said. “I could even pinch-hit for you here, as long as they remove
him
.”

Bob flashed his partner a warning look. Offering to tend shop for me was going too far. The two of them are never more than an arm's reach apart, and they had their own shop to run. Despite their obvious differences, I had long since thought of them as a single unit, the “Rob-Bobs.” Married couples, even newlyweds, are seldom that attached at the hip.

“Well, we could do things for you at home. You know, bring in the paper, feed the cat, that sort of thing,” Rob said.

“Yes,” I heard myself say. “Please bring in the paper, and the mail too. Dmitri is all out of food—I meant to buy some on my way home tonight. Would you mind terribly?”

“What kind?” Bob asked.

“Dry. Any brand. But fish-flavored.”

“Consider it done,” the Rob-Bobs said in unison.

“Oh, and one more thing.”

“Yes?”

I spoke quickly. “Whatever you do, don't call Buford. He can't find out about this. If he does, I won't see Charlie until he's eighteen. And I can kiss this shop good-bye.” I looked around sadly.

The Rob-Bobs exchanged glances. “Sweetheart,” one of them said, “you positive you don't want us to call
Buford? He's bound to find out anyway. Surely he wouldn't want the mother of his children going to jail.”

I couldn't help but laugh. “Buford would send God to jail if the Tweetie Byrd asked him. No, I swear Lake Norman will freeze over solid before I ask Buford Timberlake for any help. Whatever trouble I'm in, I'll get out of by myself.”

The Rob-Bobs nodded.

“You always did look good in stripes,” one of them said kindly.