The Diva Digs up the Dirt (32 page)

We walked into an overwhelming assortment of architectural artifacts, old furniture, linens, knobs, and light fixtures.

“Well!” said Natasha. “At least it’s not too dirty.” She hurried down an aisle of broken chairs.

I wandered aimlessly, wondering what someone might do with a garden umbrella whose crank had broken or a chair missing two legs.

“Sophie!” I could hear her shouting across the massive hall.

Natasha found me and tugged me to a worn-out rubber mat on which many people had wiped their shoes. “It’s perfect! We’ll paint it purple, and gild these ridges with sheets of that sticky-tacky gold stuff. Then a good coat of polyurethane, and we can hang it as outdoor art.”

“I hope they have a mangled steel car bumper to go along with it.” Apparently she didn’t recognize my sarcasm.

She screeched and hugged me. “I’m so glad you’re getting into the spirit of this. That’s very clever.”

It was neither clever nor original, but the idea made her happy. If she bought a car bumper, would the regular trash people pick it up, or would I have to schlep it somewhere to get rid it?

“Excuse me, ma’am,” trilled Natasha. “Do you have any steel car bumpers?”

A tall, thin woman wearing makeup that looked like it had been applied with a spatula drifted over to us. “They fly out the second we get them. I can put you on a waiting list, but I have to warn you that they aren’t cheap.”

Natasha frowned at her. “Used. You do understand that we want something that has been thrown out.”

“They’re very hard to come by. Vintage car collectors and sculptors fight for them.”

“Sophie, I believe you’ll have to come up with another ingenious idea.” Natasha clasped her hands. “This bed! I love it. Don’t you want this, Sophie? Imagine it filled with plants. It would be a—
flower bed
!”

Wanted
was the wrong word by a mile, but I moseyed over. She had her eye on an old wooden bed that had clearly been dragged out of a junkyard.
Mangled
was the only
word that came to mind. It probably hadn’t been much to speak of when it was new. I was not having that thing in my garden.
Not!

“Couldn’t we do something with a broken stained-glass window?”
Or anything else!

“Stained glass.” Natasha said it under her breath like it was a novel new concept.

She took off and I followed, passing a stack of yellow gingham napkins displayed in a fan. I backpedaled, and I swear my heart skipped a beat.

I picked up one of the napkins. Someone had embroidered a ladybug on a daisy.

“Those are hand-embroidered,” said the saleswoman.

I opened one, searching for a name or brand. “Are they vintage?” I held my breath. They didn’t look vintage to me.

“No, I’m afraid not. I have some lovely vintage linens over here.”

My heart was pounding. I would have to compare it to Wolf’s pillow to know for sure, but the embroidery on the napkins looked just like the embroidery on Anne’s yellow gingham pillow to me. Unlike the one I had seen in the children’s store, this looked hand-embroidered. The stitches were skilled, but they didn’t have that machine-stitched tightness. I tried to speak calmly. “Where do you get these?”

“From a supplier out in the country. He brings those wonderful baskets, too. They’re all woven by hand, not too far from here.”

“Do you have anything else like this? With embroidered ladybugs?”

She dipped into a large pile of cloths. “Here we are. A matching tablecloth. You know, I really should put this on display—”

“I’ll take it.”

“Wonderful. The napkins, too?”

“Yes. I’d like to locate the woman who does the embroidery. Could you call your supplier, perhaps?”

Her smile and cheery tone vanished. “No.” Her voice
had turned hard and huffy. “I’m sorry. If you want to buy more, I can place an order for you.”

I waved my hands nervously. “I’m not trying to cheat you out of your cut. You don’t understand. I think I recognize the work. I’ve been looking for this person.”

She tucked her chin in. “And you think you can recognize the stitches?” Her voice dripped with sarcasm.

“No, it’s the motif.”

“Because ladybugs and daisies are so original?”

“Could you cut me a little slack here? I might be very wrong about this, but there’s a lot at stake.”

“What’s her name?”

“Anne Fleishman.”

She pulled out her cell phone and made a call. “Bobby, I have someone here who wants to know if the lady who embroiders the daisies is an Anne Fleishman.”

As soon as she uttered Anne’s name I realized I had made a huge mistake. If the guy called Anne and told her someone was making inquiries, she might take off.

The saleswoman hung up. “Sorry, it’s not her.”

My hope deflated like a pricked balloon. “What is the name? Maybe she’s using an alias.”

“If she’s using a different name, then maybe she doesn’t
want
to be found.”

“Please? This is a matter of life and death.” Well, it was—sort of—Anne’s life or death in a weird way.

“I suppose you need a kidney from her?”

At that moment, I wished I was tall and macho and could grab her by the throat and make her choke out the information like they would on TV. But I was neither tall nor macho, and she would have me arrested if I did that.

Natasha chugged up, dragging along three industrial garbage bins, a piece of the bed, a small bookshelf, and a stained-glass window. “Do you deliver?”

The saleslady, clearly eager to be done with me, turned her back to me and apologized to Natasha for not having a delivery service. Natasha chattered about sending Leon
and someone from the production crew over to pick up the items she was buying.

Holding the napkins and tablecloth, I pawed in my purse for my wallet and promptly dropped it. I bent to pick it up and saw a corner of a picture propped up on the floor behind the counter, a picture of… a duck? Still hunched over, so they wouldn’t notice me, I shuffled forward for a better look. No doubt about it—I had located Roscoe’s mallard print.

Grinning ear to ear, I placed the linens on the counter and handed cash to Natasha. “Ring those up, too, please.”

“What are we going to do with these?”

“I think they’re cute.”

“Oh.” Her tone indicated her disagreement on that subject.

When she finished paying, I stepped behind the counter and lifted the mallard print.

The saleswoman glared at me. “That’s quite expensive. Please be careful.”

In a hushed voice, I said, “I happen to know the value because this print was stolen from the home of my friend earlier this week.”

“Put that down this minute and leave my shop. I don’t carry hot merchandise.”

I calmly took out my cell phone. “No problem. I can call the police from your parking lot.”

“Maria Delgado.”

“In… ?”

“Durbin.”

“Thank you.” I motioned to Natasha, who looked on, appalled. “Let’s go.”

The saleswoman hustled around the counter and latched onto the print in my arms.

I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t think so.” I kept going, waiting for her to tackle me from behind. But she didn’t. I had a hunch it wasn’t a coincidence that Heath knew about this place.

Natasha demanded explanations on the way home, but I
was so engrossed in finding Durbin and Maria Delgado on my phone that she didn’t get much information from me. Durbin turned out to be a tiny town in West Virginia with a population of less than five hundred people. Unfortunately, although there were tons of Maria Delgados on the Internet, I wasn’t finding any in Durbin. I was excited, nevertheless. In a town of fewer than five hundred residents, they all probably knew each other.

I asked Natasha to stop in front of my house. I unloaded the print and thanked her for the ride.

“Wait! Soooophie,” she whined, “we have to get to work repurping now. I’m going to send the fellows over in the pickup to get everything.”

“Okay. Call me when you have the stuff.”

Natasha called an hour later, complaining that nothing had been delivered. I had to tell her I’d been called away the next day. I supposed it wasn’t nice of me, but I felt compelled to follow up on the possible lead to Anne. Nina agreed to leave at the crack of dawn the next day.

It was ten in the morning when we rolled into Durbin, West Virginia. It turned out to be an adorable little town with a railroad theme in the mountains near a state park. Not all that far from Old Town, yet a world apart. We passed a feed and hardware store, a dress shop, and a diner. At the end of the block, we spied a coffee shop.

“What’s our best bet?” I parallel parked Wolf’s car. “The coffee shop?”

“You go there, and I’ll work the feed store.”

I lowered my sunglasses to look at Nina. “You? In a feed store?”

“You don’t think I can flirt?”

“I’m sure you can. Have at it.”

She jumped out of the car. “We should have brought Daisy, she would have helped us break the ice. Wait here.”

Instead of waiting, I visited the coffee shop. The sole employee, a middle-aged woman with kind eyes, recommended the homemade ham biscuits. I bought two, along with two iced coffees, though it did seem considerably cooler and less humid than Old Town.

When I paid, she asked, “Are you from out of town?”

“How could you tell?”

“Everybody knows most everybody around here. What brings you to Durbin?”

Perfect. I couldn’t have asked for an easier opening. “I’m looking for Maria Delgado.”

The woman behind the counter took a hard look at me. “Are you now?”

Uh-oh.
I didn’t know what Anne had done, or if Maria Delgado even
was
Anne, but I knew a suspicious face when I saw one. “I hear she does some amazing embroidery.”

“That she does. You looking to buy? I have a few of her pieces right there on that table.”

I picked out two linen hand towels embroidered with blue delphiniums and ladybugs. “Does she always put in a ladybug?”

“Pretty much. I’ve never seen anything she embroidered without at least a teeny one.”

I couldn’t stop grinning. The woman probably thought I was deranged. Maria
had
to be Anne. I paid for the towels, and the woman gladly gave me directions to Maria’s house. I met Nina on the sidewalk, lugging a forty-pound bag of dog food. Biting my lip to keep from laughing, I opened the back hatch for her.

She heaved it in. “Stop that!” But she couldn’t help laughing, either. “Be glad I didn’t make up a story about needing a salt block for my horse.”

She’d obtained the same directions. We hopped into the car and attacked our lunch. The ham was nicely salty, the biscuits still warm and melt-in-your-mouth flaky. If I lived around there, I would be a regular at the coffee shop for lunch.

We drove out of town, made a couple of turns, and
found ourselves on a two-lane road lined by farms, fields, and forests.

“We should be there by now,” Nina complained. “I bet we took a wrong turn.”

“That’s it.”

“How can you tell? I don’t see a name on the mailbox.”

“The garden.” I didn’t have to say more. Flowers in a riot of colors surrounded the tiny bungalow. A vegetable garden grew off to the side, with eggplants and tomatoes waiting to be picked. An old pickup truck was parked on a gravel driveway. I pulled in behind it.

I couldn’t recall ever having been so nervous. This was it. Either Anne was alive or I’d been about as wrong as a person could be.

Nina and I walked to the front door.

“Are you about to jump out of your skin like I am?” she asked.

I held out my trembling hand to show her.

“Me, too. Knock already!”

I rapped on the door.