Damaged Goods (13 page)

Hershel sipped coffee at the breakfast table, spying an oil painting at the bottom of the stairs in the other room. He half listened to Silvie talk about the greenness of Oregon. She was charmed by it in a childlike way. The painting, an Impressionistic view of a canal and a fishing boat in muted colors, had been in his family and it was Rachel’s favorite. A Dutch painter, he thought. Six thousand dollars? That appraisal seemed right. His sister had wanted it, but he’d gotten it. How?

Silvie rambled almost nonstop about the camellia bush outside his kitchen window and how pretty it would be when it bloomed, making him question whether he even knew what a camellia bush was. Could he see the buds already forming there? He turned and gazed out the window at the bush. She wanted to know if it was pink or white, but he couldn’t remember it at all.

“Pink,” he said. She wouldn’t be here long enough to know if he was right.

He experienced a flash of Rachel’s anger over the painting, but he couldn’t bring the memory together. Tears. Shouting. Name-calling. He thought she’d sell it; that was why he’d taken it. It was a glaring lie. He was the one who would sell it. He simply hadn’t yet come into the right situation to catch top dollar. It suddenly seemed like the most precious thing he owned. It connected him to his family, however tenuously.

“Have you called Kyrellis yet?”

Hershel snapped back to Silvie. “I’ll call him now.” He’d been putting it off, hoping she’d decide to just leave on her own.

“Swift, is that you?” Kyrellis answered.

“Yeah, it’s me. We need to talk.” He glanced at Silvie, then stood and walked into the living room for privacy.

“Did she tell you about the pictures?”

“That’s why I’m calling. What do you want with them?”

Kyrellis sighed into the phone. “How much do you think a man would pay to keep these pictures quiet? I mean, if it were you in one of these shots, how much would you pay?”

“I wouldn’t know. It’s not me.” Numbers had flashed through his mind, but this was one object—or collection—that he could not appraise. And Hershel’s dislike of this man, despite his refined mannerism, was growing more precise. Whatever they had been to each other before the accident, he wanted nothing to do with Kyrellis now.

“Well, that’s how we’re going to determine the value, so think about it.”

“Let it go. You got the gun. I offered to pay you for your trouble. Why are you doing this?”

“Why did this man take these pictures? Why did you sell your Charger? Why didn’t she put oil in her car?”

“She’s a victim. She was twelve when those photos were taken.”

“Mmm, that young?” He was quiet for a moment. “Yes, she
is
a
victim. She is indeed.” Kyrellis whistled to himself as if amazed by something he saw.

“C’mon, Kyrellis, you want me to call the police?”

“I don’t think that would be a wise move on your part, Swift.” Kyrellis’s voice went suddenly hard. “You really don’t remember where you were the night of your accident, do you?”

Hershel’s scar prickled.

“Does the name Albert Darling ring a bell?”

The prickle turned to pain, and a man’s face flashed through his mind, then was gone just as quickly. He couldn’t recover the details.

“Think hard on that before you get the police involved. You wouldn’t want to bite off more than you bargained for.” Kyrellis hung up, leaving Hershel standing in the living room with the name Albert Darling bouncing through his brain, seeking recognition, begging for a home.

“What did he say?” Silvie asked from behind him.

Hershel didn’t answer straight off, but worked at recalling the face that had faded back into his muddled past.

“Is he going to return the box?”

“Not that easily, it seems.”

“What am I going to do?” Her eyes remained on Hershel, as if he could fix this for her if he would just try a little harder.

Hershel rubbed his hand over his head and stared at his feet. He couldn’t stand the way she looked at him. Like he’d disappointed her. “I don’t know.”

“How much money does he want?”

“He hasn’t said. But … I can imagine it’ll be a lot.”

She watched Hershel, and he wondered if she was figuring his net worth. Would she expect him to pay Kyrellis’s price?

“How much are these photos worth to the man who took them?” he asked.

Her face went dark. “He won’t be blackmailed. That’s where Kyrellis is wrong.”

“He’s the sheriff. Would he rather the media got hold of them?”

“No. He’ll find Kyrellis and kill him. Then he’ll kill me. And maybe you, too. That’s the way he works. He won’t be blackmailed.”

“Listen,” he said, “why don’t you take that job down at the South Store?”

She looked up, astonished by the sudden change of subject.

“I think it’s going to take some time to work through this. It’ll give you something to do, and you can earn some money.”

She simply stared at him as if he spoke in a foreign tongue. Finally she said, “How will I get there?”

“Well, it’s not far to walk from the sale barn. You can stay there.”

“Oh,” she said, as if suddenly understanding that she was the butt of a joke. “You want me out of here.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, but it’s what you meant.”

“Wait, be fair. I … you’re welcome to stay here. I just thought, well, it’s closer. That’s all. I wasn’t asking you to leave.”

She eyed him suspiciously. “I can’t stay there. It’s scary. I’ll go. I’ll find a place to stay somewhere.” She disappeared, and he heard her footfalls on the wooden stairs.

Hershel rubbed the pain in his scar and struggled with letting her just leave with no place to go. She wasn’t his responsibility. Wasn’t it enough that he’d offered her a place to stay?

“Goddamnit!”
He walked to the bottom of the stairs and hollered up. “Silvie, I didn’t mean for you to go.”

She emerged from the bedroom with her backpack over one shoulder and the laundry basked with her folded clothes on the other arm.

“Put that stuff down. You’ll stay here until we get this mess sorted out.”

Without a word, she returned to the bedroom.

Hershel heard a backpack hit the floor, followed by a basket. He sighed, vacillating between relief and irritation.

By noon Carl had inventoried and organized three large deliveries for the upcoming sale. The first two consisted of various farming implements: ladders, pruning tools, and tractor parts. One cider press that was old, but still in good condition, and several boxes of household items. Boxes that Hershel would probably sell off for a buck or two for the entire contents of each one in a “take one or take ’em all” deal. But the third load had been full of antique radios and televisions from the estate of a man who had made his living repairing and selling them. Carl had spent twenty minutes trying to tune in the AM country-and-western station but, losing patience, ended up listening to Clark Howard instead. He liked Clark’s philosophy about money, but not the calls from people who were on the brink of investing everything they had in scams that played on their desires to be rich. He knew it was easy to criticize other people because he’d never had any money of his own to invest or lose, but this didn’t stop him from shouting “You idiot” at the radio every once in a while.

Hershel arrived shortly after lunch and silently went to work marking lot numbers on pieces of masking tape and putting the radios into the order in which he wanted to sell them—least to best. Sometimes with specific collectibles he could frenzy the crowd, like sharks after meat. Another load from an architectural salvage yard came in at about two o’clock, and they worked side by side, moving the nicest items, like the brass andirons in the shape of eagles, to the front of the staging area, where people could look them over and see other people looking them over, too. Hershel was a master at fostering competitive wars among bidders. He had an innate understanding of human nature and had once told Carl that most people will pay more than an item is worth, and often more than they can afford, simply to make the others around them believe they’re well-off. Ego. Everything was driven by ego. All he had to do was tap into it. That same night
he’d sold a Mission-style library table with fake-wood veneer for six hundred dollars. It might have been worth that had it been oak, but the two bidders were inexperienced at assessing antiques and had behaved like sparring roosters. One man surely awoke the following morning relieved, despite the momentary sting of defeat. Hershel laughed about and retold that story for weeks.

“You remember anyone by the name of Albert Darling?” Hershel asked, breaking the silence and startling Carl.

“Yeah,” he said cautiously. “He came round here looking for you a couple of times.”

Hershel paused in his work and waited for Carl to elaborate.

“Didn’t we liquidate his storage unit over in Sherwood for nonpayment?” At times it felt as if his boss was testing him, checking to see if
he
remembered. Of course he did.

“Sherwood,” Hershel mumbled, and returned to his work.

“Yep.”

Hershel placed the stained-glass pieces behind the auctioneer’s podium in the grimy window, where they might catch a little light. But the dusty cobwebs and dead flies made them seem more like junk than treasures, and Carl climbed up after him and wiped the debris away with a dirty rag.

As he unpacked a box of nineteenth-century door knockers, Carl sensed Hershel’s eyes on him. “Need something, boss?”

Hershel shook his head and ripped the tape from another box, revealing tin ceiling tiles with Victorian-era stamping.

“I think he was in prison or something.”

Hershel scowled.

“Albert Darling. Claimed you sold a gun that was his while he was in the big house.”

Hershel squinted at Carl. “What do you know about the guns?”

“I don’t know anything about that, boss.”

Karen Gibbs put Silvie to work that afternoon on a trial run. “Things start to pick up on Fridays,” she said. “But Saturdays are downright busy. If I like what I see, you can do the lunch shift from eleven to two.”

Though Silvie hadn’t waitressed much, she’d spent long hours at the bar watching her mother. She donned an apron, slipped a new pad and pen into her front pocket, and hoisted a fresh pot of coffee off the burner. She greeted her first customers, a couple wearing matching fleece vests in bright orange. The man had on a flannel button-up shirt and jeans. The woman wore a turtleneck and leather ankle boots. Her straight blond hair was trimmed to a perfect blunt line, and she wore expensive sunglasses tilted up on her head even though it was pouring rain outside. They looked so freshly scrubbed that Silvie was afraid to stand too close.

When she slid the couple’s order into the queue, Karen smiled approvingly. “So far so good,” she chirped, and began grilling onions for the patty melt.

After three hours, Silvie had collected twenty-two dollars in tips and her feet were beginning to throb.

“That’ll do for today,” Karen said after Silvie had wiped all the tables and started a fresh pot of coffee. It had been a half hour
since the last customers left, and things seemed to be slowing. “My sister is coming over to help with the dinner shift. But I’ll expect to see you tomorrow.” She smiled warmly. “You did great. I’m glad to have the help.”

Silvie grinned, feeling suddenly needed and useful. “Tomorrow, then.”

As she stepped toward the front door, Karen called her back and tossed a bag of Kettle chips at her. “Come take a scone, too. It’s not much. I should’ve fed you. Tomorrow you’ll get lunch. Come thirty minutes early and eat before you start. You can have anything on the menu, but if you want something else you’ll have to cook it yourself.”

“Thanks.” Silvie pocketed a lemon–poppy seed scone wrapped in cellophane and tore open the bag of chips. She hadn’t felt hungry all morning, but now she was ravenous.

Outside, she paused on the walkway in front of the South Store and watched a woman at the Berry Barn across the road placing fresh fruit out on the covered front porch. Rain was still falling, though lighter now, and Silvie realized that she would have to buy an umbrella if she planned to stay in Oregon very long. She started walking toward Hershel’s auction barn.