PW02 - Bidding on Death

Bidding On Death

Copyright 2012 Joyce Harmon

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The prologue and epilogue of
Bidding On Death
takes place in the present, but the main body of the story occurs in 1998. I mention this because the late ‘90s was the dawn of internet commerce, and Cissy and her fri
ends become involved
with on-line auctions and buying and selling collectibles. There are mentions of values, and the reader should be advised that these are values current in 1998. A common misapprehension among collectors is that if something was worth a certain amount years ago, that item must be worth more than that amount now. This is not always the case. Collectibles are not nece
ssities. They are worth what
buyer
s are
willing to pay
at that time, and specific
collectibles and whole classes of collectibles come into fashion and also go out of fashion.
It is not at all uncommon to see items that once went for hundreds of dollars now going for ten or twenty dollars.  The values expressed in the novel should not be taken to indicate current value of the items under discussion.

PROLOGUE

The mailbox for Passatonnack Winery and the Rayburn residence was located at the side of the black-topped county road, but the Postal Service truck turned up the gravel driveway. It was a long driveway, and Tyler Bishop knew that Mrs. Rayburn was just back from knee replacement surgery. Walking on gravel was a chancy business, in Tyler’s opinion, calling for a degree of stability that he wasn’t sure Mrs. Rayburn had regained. Better to bring the mail up to the house.

And there was the lady herself, seated in a rocking chair on the front porch. She had a cat in her lap and a
walker positioned beside the rocker.
The late spring day was warm, but not hot. Perfect porch-sitting weather.
Tyler pulled up and got out of the truck
, smoothing his light brown hair back and wondering if it was getting too long
. “Afternoon, Mrs. Rayburn!” he called up to her, heading toward the porch. “Thought I’d bring up your mail, save you the walk.”

“Why, thank you, Tyler,” the silver-haired woman in blue jeans said. “Can I get you something? Iced tea?”

She made as if to heave out of the rocker
and the cat hopped out of her lap
, but Tyler waved her back. “No, ma’am, you stay sat! I didn’t drive up here to have you hustle around waiting on me. I’m trying to save you the steps, not add to them.”

Mrs. Rayburn subsided back into the rocker. “Well, then. How’s your mother?”

“Pretty fine,” Tyler said, leaning back on the porch railing. “Doctors are after her to get her hips done, but she says she’s not ready yet. How are your knees doing? I know she’ll want to know.”

Mrs. Rayburn patted her knees carefully. “They tell me they’ll soon be good as new – better than new. But we’re not there yet.”

“You’ll get there,” Tyler assured her. The huge black and white cat twined around his ankles and he bent down to stroke its ears.
He held up two rubber-banded bundles of mail. “Want me to take the winery mail to the office for you?”

“No need,” Mrs
.
Rayburn said. She fished around in the basket of her walker among the books and newspapers and pulled out a cellphone.

“I didn’t know these things came with baskets,” Tyler said. “Handy.”

“They don’t,” Mrs. Rayburn said. “That’s a bicycle basket. It was Danny’s idea, said my hands would be full with the walker, but this would allow me to carry things around with me.”

She flipped easily through the cellphone screens and hit a button, then put the phone to her mouth. “Hi, it’s me,” she said. “I’ve got the winery mail up here on the porch, come by when you have a minute.” She snapped the phone closed and patted it affectionately. “I love these things,” she said.

Seeing Tyler’s puzzled look, she chuckled. “That probably sounds to you as odd as someone loving a pencil. But you don’t remember the world without them, do you?”

“No, ma’am, can’t say as how I do. Well, I’d better be getting back to the route.” Tyler handed Mrs. Rayburn the large bundle of winery mail and started to hand her the smaller bundle of personal mail, but stopped, surprised by the return address of the top letter.  “Greensville? Mrs. Rayburn, who do you know in prison?”

Mrs. Rayburn took the bundle and looked at the top letter. She sighed and said sadly, “A murderer.”

ONE

I’ve always thought of myself as thoroughly up to date in matters of technology, but the truth is that I’d never heard of on-line auctions before Julia took me to Lacey Beaumont’s estate auction.

I’d never been to an estate auction, either, though I’d seen them occasionally, driving down a country road on a weekend and seeing the lines of parked cars and the crowds and the large striped tent set out in the yard or field of some elderly neighbor, now gone presumably to a better place.

“Come on, Cissy, it’ll be fun!” Julia insisted. Julia is always telling me that things will be fun. Sometimes she’s right.

But I was doubtful. “Rummaging around in a dead person’s belongings? That just seems sort of grisly to me.”

We were in my kitchen, drinking our usual coffee. Julia brought the coffee pot to the table and shrugged. “They can’t take it with them, right? What do you think ought to be done with a dead person’s belongings? Should they be buried with the stuff like those old pharaohs? Anyway, Lacey’s not dead, she’s moved to an assisted living place in Alexandria. The real estate is already sold, this will be the stuff she’s not taking with her.”

“What do you expect to find there?” I asked.

“You never know,” Julia said. “That’s the beauty of it. It’s like a treasure hunt.”

“When I go shopping, I like to know what I’m shopping for,” I objected.

“Oh, please, Cis! Bob is going to be out in the manly sections all day; he’s had his eye on Paul’s power tools for twenty year
s now. I want some company scaven
ging the household stuff.”

Bob is Julia’s husband. They’re both retired and Bob makes wooden toys to sell at craft fairs.
Julia and I had been friends since Jack and I bough
t the then-di
lapidated farm almost twenty years ago as a summer place, but since Jack retired and we became full-time residents, Julia has been my best buddy, closest confidante, and co-conspirator.

Julia continued her sales pitch. “The weather is going to be ideal, sunny and mild, a beautiful fall day.”

“A beautiful fall day in the middle of harvest,” I reminded her.

“Exactly,” she said significantly.

“Oh.”

Back when Passatonnack Winery was young and I was younger, I was out helping with t
he harvest right alongside Jack
because there was nobody else. Now the winery was larger, and so was the harvest. But Jack had Craig the handyman
now
, as well as a handful of teenagers he’d been training for several seasons, so in theory he didn’t need my help.

In practice, though, I seemed to wind up running harvest-related errands all day long. Suddenly a
day spent in a
folding chair in a tent started to sound more attractive.

“Tom Barnes always brings the BBQ Hut,” Julia added enticingly.

I capitulated. “Okay, it’s a date.”

So on a bright and sunny Saturday, Julia rolled into the yard to pick me up. She’d recently traded her land yacht for an Expedition, and looked like Patton taking Sicily. I hauled myself into the passenger’s seat, and saw Beau the Labrador sprawled across the back seat. 

“We’re taking Beau?” I asked.

“Sure, he’ll be fine.”

“But – not Bob?”

“We’ll meet him there; he’s taking the pickup. He’s hoping to get that table saw.”

So the Barstows would be there with two large veh
icles. Should civilization fall into
a dystopian post-apoca
lypse, they already had the nucleus of a roving nomad band.
I should stay on their good side.

I eyed Julia curiously. She seemed to be dressed for post-apocalypse as well. Sure, it was LL Bean, but LL Bean of several long hard decades ago. She even had a scarf over her grey curls; it looked like a babushka. I was in jeans, tee-shirt, and flannel jacket; Julia had warned me not to wear anything nicer than gardening clothes.

The Beaumont farm was ten miles from our place. In addition to the farm acreage and a nice bit of woods along the river,
there was a large old 19
th
century
farmhouse, rather like ours before we updated it, a barn, several outbuildings, and an impressive workshop.

Today there was also a large tent, a recreational vehicle with a window counter, serving as the auctioneers’ office, and the promised BBQ Hut.

Men in Lundgren’s Auction
s
vests waved us to parking in the field beside the house. We clambered out and Julia opened the back of the SUV, hauling out empty boxes and
old
newspaper
s
.

“You came prepared,” I observed.

“They usually have boxes and wrapping,” the knowledg
e
able Julia explained. “But not enough.”

She opened the back seat and Beau jumped down, sat obediently and allowed her to attach his leash. “He doesn’t really need it,” said Julia, “but it makes people feel better.”

I tried to imagine my Polly in this environment and suppressed a shudder.

“So – we go find seats?” I asked.

“First we check in, have to get registered and get our bidder numbers.”

We lined up at the RV’s window behind a heavy-set
gray-haired
woman whose purse began to yap furiously at us.
I gave a startled jump. The woman patted the purse absently; looking closer, I realized that a chihuahua’s head was peeking out of the top. “Hush, Paco,” the woman said, but Pac
o glared down at Beau and continued
to threaten to tear him limb from limb just as soon as he had the opportunity.

Beau’s only response was a silent, regal sneer. Julia gave me a significant look. The woman took her bidder card and headed toward the tent. Julia approached the window, saying over her shoulder, “Keep an eye out for where Rose sits so we can sit on the opposite side of the tent. Otherwise that little rat Paco will keep that up all day.”

“You know her?”

“Not really,
just to say hi to,
but she’s a regular at these things. And Paco.”

“Oh, Paco!” said the woman manning the counter. “We all know Paco.” It sounded as if to know him was not to love him.

Julia gave the woman her name and got her bidder card. I was new and had to show my driver’s license and have my name and address written down for the auction house records. “It will be easier next time,” the counter woman told me brightly.

We headed toward the tent. It was light-jacket weather and the tent was open-sided. Between the RV-office and the tent were boxes, lined up in several rows on the ground. I slowed down to scan them. They seemed to contain, well, stuff. Julia had been forging ahead but saw she’d lost me. She turned back. “We’ll check those out later. Come on, seating is at a premium at these things.”

We passed into the tent. The center of the tent was lined with folding chairs facing a large platform for the auctioneer. In front of the platform were tables crammed with wares, and other tables flanked the two sides of the tent.

Julia scanned the growing crowd, saw Paco’s owner e
n
sconced to the left, and found us some seats on the right. “Here we are!” She placed boxes on two seats to save them, then looked around appraisingly.