Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
We didn’t talk much on the way up. Jill had her reading glasses on the top of her head the way she always did, a habit I suspected she was no longer aware of. She had the particular focused quiet of someone who had thought through a situation in advance and was now simply moving toward it.
Voss Fine Antiques occupied a narrow storefront on a side street two blocks off the Camden waterfront — the kind of location that said the owner knew her clientele well enough to know they would find her.
The window held three pieces, arranged with the spare confidence of someone who did not need to try hard.
A tilt-top tea table. A document box with original red paint.
A small oil painting of the Maine coast that might have been nineteenth century and might have been last Thursday but looked right either way.
Jill pushed the door open and a bell rang once, cleanly, and Maggie Voss looked up from behind a partners desk near the back of the shop.
She was exactly as she’d been at the preview — dark coat traded for a charcoal sweater, the same composed sharpness, the same quality of a woman who assessed things quickly and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
She looked at us the way she’d looked at the desk twice — efficient, thorough, deciding.
“Help you,” she said. Not a question.
“I hope so,” Jill said pleasantly. “My friend is looking for an antique server for her dining room. Georgian, if possible. She has a very particular room.”
I had not been told I was playing the role of woman with a very particular room, but I adjusted without difficulty. “The proportions are the challenge,” I said. “I’ve looked at several pieces that were right on paper and wrong in the room.”
Voss looked at me for a moment. Then she came around the desk. “What are the dimensions?”
For the next ten minutes I asked questions and let Voss answer them.
She knew her business and she warmed to anyone willing to listen to her talk about it, which I was.
She was good. She knew what she was talking about in the precise, unsentimental way of someone who had spent thirty years handling objects and had developed opinions about all of them.
She warmed slightly — not warmly, but slightly — as it became clear that I was at least listening to what she said rather than looking for something to agree with.
Jill, meanwhile, drifted. She looked at things. She picked up a small piece of scrimshaw and set it down. She paused in front of a Federal card table with the expression of a woman considering it seriously. She was giving me room.
“I was at the Halverson preview two nights ago,” I said, in the tone of someone making conversation. “Looking at Constance Waverly’s estate. Terrible news this morning.”
Voss went still for just a moment. Then she set down the catalog she’d been consulting and looked at me directly.
“Terrible,” she said. The word had an edge on it.
“Edmund Halverson was about to undersell a lap desk that I’d identified as Henry Cushing’s work.
Regional craftsman, top of the market in Boston.
You know what that lot was estimated at?
” She said a number. It was low. “Do you know what it would have brought in a proper Boston sale?” She said a second number. It was considerably higher.
“That’s a significant difference,” I said.
“It’s an embarrassing difference.” She crossed her arms. “I told him. Twice. He said he’d look into it.
” She said look into it with the tone of a woman who had heard that phrase used as a way of ending a conversation many times.
“Edmund Halverson was many things, not all of them admirable, but he knew his business. Something was distracting him.”
“Distracting him how?” Jill asked. She had drifted back, the card table apparently decided against, and was standing near the partners desk with her hands in her coat pockets and her reading glasses on her head and the expression of a woman with no particular agenda.
Voss looked at her. Then back at me. Something in her face shifted — not opening exactly, but the particular expression of someone who has been carrying something and has decided, for reasons they may not fully understand, that this is the moment to set it down.
“He called me last week,” she said. “Thursday. He said he was getting nervous about one of the buyers for that desk. And he mentioned something about someone who was being pushy insisting on an appointment Friday. He was annoyed as it was out of his way and late in the afternoon.” She laughed but it sounded bitter.
“He did like to have his Friday afternoons free. Anyway, he told me to come early the morning of the auction and we could talk privately. He didn’t say who the buyer was.
” Another pause, shorter. “But he was scared. I’ve known Edmund for twenty years. He didn’t scare easily.”
The shop was quiet. Outside, a truck went past on the street and the window pieces trembled slightly in their arrangement.
“Did you come?” I asked. “The morning of the auction?”
“I drove down from Camden at seven,” Voss said.
“Found the place closed and police vehicles on the street.” Something moved in her face — not grief exactly, but the complicated expression of someone processing the loss of a person they had not liked but had known for a long time.
“I spoke to an officer briefly. Then I came back.”
“Did you tell the police what you told us?” Jill asked.
“I told them Edmund had called me about a buyer he was uneasy about. They took my number.” She looked at the window. “Whether they called it, I couldn’t say.”
I looked at her for a moment — at the crossed arms and the sharp face and the controlled expression of a woman who had driven forty minutes to find a dead colleague and had come home and opened her shop anyway, because what else do you do.
She was not the killer. Whatever she knew about the desk was market knowledge, craftsman attribution, the professional satisfaction of being right about a thing.
She had been angry about the undersell. She had been scared, in her contained way, when she found the police outside. She was telling us the truth.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry about your colleague.”
She looked at me. “Find a better word than colleague.” She said it without heat, just accuracy. “Find who did it. Edmund was difficult and vain and he called women my dear in a way that made me want to throw things. He didn’t deserve what happened to him.”
We left without the server. Jill held the door.
On Route 1 heading south, the ocean appearing and disappearing between the trees to our left, I called Tony.
He picked up on the second ring. “How was Camden?”
“Useful,” I said. “Voss didn’t take the desk.
She drove down the morning of the auction and found the police.
But Halverson called her last week — he was scared of one of the buyers.
Someone pushing too hard, someone he didn’t trust. He was going to refuse the sale.
” I paused. “She said he didn’t scare easily. ”
Tony was quiet for a moment in the way that meant he was adding something to something.
“His calendar,” I said. “Is there anything in the last week that —”
“I’m bending a rule here,” Tony said. “Not breaking one.”
“Understood.”
“Friday. Three days before his death. An appointment. Late afternoon.” A pause. “Pastor Pruitt.”
Jill’s hands tightened on the wheel. I watched her profile — the small controlled reaction of a woman who had been in that man’s congregation for six years and was now recalculating something.
“Pruitt went to see him?” I said.
“Looks like he went to see Pruitt,” Tony confirmed. “Whether he was the buyer Halverson was scared of, or something else entirely, I can’t say yet. But they had a meeting.”
I looked at the ocean between the trees — gray-green, indifferent, the same water it had always been. “Thank you,” I said.
“Be careful,” he said, and hung up.
Jill drove. The road curved south along the coast and the trees thinned and the sky opened up wide and blue over the water. After a moment she said, “Looks like our investigation is falling right into place.”