The Case of the Angry Auctioneer (Auction House Mystery Series Book 1) (2 page)

Driving away in her secondhand Ford that she’d gotten from a choir member for a song - $550 from her personal savings account - Jasper couldn’t help but glance in her rear view mirror again and again as she neared the edge of Truman the village and entered the countryside of Truman Township. Would Tim come after her? Or, more like him, send an emissary like the Youth Services Director to make sure she was calm enough to drive away safely with Tim’s latest sexual secret intact. But nobody followed. No church bus. No holier-than-thou gray Buick. No earnest Subaru wagon.

The Midwestern countryside in the early spring appeared moist and bruised to Jasper. The plants and ground either dead from last year’s season of growth or birthing into small greenery and the mud of raw fields, not yet put to order by farmers and their machinery. Old oak trees twisted and reached out from their century-old cores. The sky, a tender blue protected by a screen of clouds. You knew it was daytime but you couldn’t pinpoint the sun. A good day for driving. No need for sunglasses. A good thing too. Although Jasper always kept the public rooms of the manse – it was just a plain old ranch next to the church but Tim always liked to call their homes “manses” - in company-ready condition, she let her indifference toward housekeeping show in the messiness of her car’s interior. Thank heavens for tinted window glass. Her new old car had its perks.

Up ahead some large dark object suddenly showed on the side of the road. Garbage bag? It moved. Jasper braked. “Thank you, angels, for driving my car,” she said, her faith being an on-again, off-again thing that cropped up during moments of high stress or drama. She’d been driving on automatic pilot, half her mind still back in the Truman Free Church hall kitchen, watching Pastor Tim waxing amorous amidst the leftovers.

The garbage bag alongside Highway X, closer now, showed itself to be what it was in reality, a wild turkey. Even with her finely tuned contact lens prescription, Jasper remained near-sighted. She could never achieve her twin’s near perfect vision. She waited for the turkey.

The big tom gave her and her car a sidewise glance, then led his flock from the wooded side across the two-lane road to the wide open field all gold stubble from last fall’s corn harvest. It was too early to plant this year’s crop. Jasper counted each of the iron-colored birds, some only slightly smaller than the feathered parade major, others inches shorter and smaller boned, as they followed their leader. She sure did enjoy watching these strange creatures. Jasper was a born-and-bred Midwesterner. And although she had visited several important American cities, and while in college, even enjoyed a semester living in London, she remained at heart, a Midwest girl with a liking for the changes in the seasons and an appreciation for empty country roads and prehistoric-looking birds that kept to their mission in spite of human presence.

Two, four, seven, eight…
The turkeys kept coming like cars on a freight train which she also enjoyed watching pass whenever she got stopped at a railroad crossing and didn’t happen to be in a hurry. Jasper was the sort of dreamy, patient person who liked contemplating the lives of turkeys and train engineers alike. They probably both – the turkeys and the engineers – saw a lot of the country. Arkansas probably and Indiana at least.

There on the quiet Highway X with her Ford pointed west, Jasper sat still, daydreaming for several minutes after the turkeys were safely crossed. She pictured the colorful tags on the sides of the boxcars. They’d read something like “Hobo Stew” and “Metro Retro.” Tim had told her they were gang signs and irreligious symbols. And he objected to the property damage. But Jasper wondered what all his fuss was about. She couldn’t see the graffiti as blemishes on the tame old boxcars. What was the harm in admiring someone else’s handiwork, their art and the only canvas they had maybe, their wild scrawl and design of pride? There was no law against looking and marveling, was there?

Jasper rummaged at the foot of the passenger’s seat in the cooler she’d packed last night back at the manse in Truman. She felt the bottle of water, but opted for the less healthy but perkier tasting diet soda. She popped the lid and sipped.  Wasn’t there some kind of hypocrisy in Tim’s inability to enjoy a display foreign to his own life? She couldn’t work it out logically. She had never felt particularly logical in spite of her years spent in serving out her term as the wife of a minister with lots of dirty secrets. Being able to be practical and appear respectable was not the same as being logical. Tim’s attitude was,
If it ain’t mine, it ain’t right
. Not a point of view Jasper had ever shared.

The turkeys off to her right were having a field day, oblivious now to her presence. Even with her myopia, she spotted the leader – the big tom who had led the exodus. Were all those not-so-big turkeys his hens? Would one male turkey get to have a dozen hens to himself? Maybe some of the smaller birds were other toms. Did the big tom have rights to them as well? Or didn’t turkeys fly that way? Maybe younger males hung around their role models before mating season arrived full on and set them into rivalry one against the other.

Jasper shook her head, focused forward, and started driving again. Probably I’m just run down, she said to herself.

She popped an auctioneering instructional CD she’d ordered from Worldwide College of Auctioneering in Mason City, Iowa, into the car’s player, and chanted along as she drove. “One-dollah-bid. Now two-dollah-bid. Now three-dollah bid and four.” The instructor’s voice at the beginning had told her to relax her diction, to let herself go Southern even if she wasn’t from the South, to let her Midwestern twang melt into honey, so that the distinctions between words and numbers slurred. The practiced auctioneer on the CD even said to take bids off the telephone poles. Jasper liked the sound of that, “Taking Bids off Telephone Poles.” But she didn’t quite get it. The telephone poles were bidders? Or was she supposed to sell the poles? She slurped her pop, and carried on as best she could.

The telephone poles went by and her bid-calling went on. “Five-dollah-bid, now six-dollah-bid, now seven-dollah bid, now eight,” she sang as the miles and the poles went by.

Three hours later she was closing in on Forest Grove when she saw a car pulled over on the gravel shoulder just ahead. A person stood behind it. The car was a rusty orange color. The person – it was a woman, she could see now – wore all black, slacks and long-sleeved shirt. She turned to the side, waving, and Jasper could see the bulge of a baby-to-be. Jasper checked her rear view, signaled and pulled over alongside the woman. She cut her engine so the woman could hear her easily. “Need some help?”

“I’m due soon.”

“I see!”

“I mean at work, at the restaurant where I work,” the woman said. She was laughing and so was Jasper.

“Hop in. Or rather, get in slowly, then rest,” Jasper said. “Where’s your restaurant?”

“Over in Forest Grove. Right downtown.”

“I’m going to Forest Grove! If you give me directions, I’ll get you there right away.” Jasper moved the cooler out of the way.

The woman exhaled a big sigh as she released the seat belt, and adjusted it for her extra bulge up front. “I’m so relieved. You’re very nice to do this.”

Jasper smiled over at her reassuringly. “It’s no trouble. But what about your car?”

She sniffed. “My boyfriend will take care of it. I’ll call him from work, and he’ll come over to get it started. Again. It’s really his old junker. Let him take care of it.”

“Okay, then,” Jasper said. Today she felt reluctant to hear someone else’s troubles.

With the passenger door secured, Jasper turned the key in the ignition and the auctioneer’s rhythmic chanting sounded. “Five-now-ten-now-fifteen-twenty…” Jasper pushed off the sound.

“I love auctions!” the woman said. “You must like ‘em a lot to listen to them in the car.”

Jasper glanced over at her new traveling companion. The woman was younger than Jasper, she could tell that. Her red hair and freckled face gave her a pleasant farm girl charm, like an old painting of a little Dutch girl or maybe an Irish lass from days past.

“I’m studying to become an auctioneer.”

“Huh. I didn’t know you had to study to be an auctioneer!”

“It’s one way to do it. Is this your first baby?” Jasper asked pleasantly.

“I dated one once.”

“What?”

“An auctioneer. Ted Phillips? Maybe you know him. He’s at – “

“Biggs Auction House,” Jasper said. “That’s my stepfather’s place. That’s where I’m going to work.”

“Oh-oh. I don’t know about your stepfather. But watch out for Ready Teddy.”

Jasper cringed. “One of those, huh?”

“You’ll be okay. I’m just saying. Oh, it’s my third,” the woman said.

“Pardon?”

The woman patted her expanded tummy. “My third baby! I have two girls already. Maybe number 3 will be the lucky charm. I love my girls, but I s’pose a boy would be nice for a change. I’m Molly by the way.”

“Candy – I mean ‘Jasper.’”

“Hi, Candy, I mean Jasper.” Molly giggled. “Are you a spy? Witness protection? That sort of thing.”

Jasper looked again at young Molly’s face. So young, with three children, a broken down car, a boyfriend and working as a waitress, and amazingly cheerful. “Well, I’ve just left my husband and I’m on my way to my new life.”

For a few key seconds, Molly said nothing, and Jasper feared that she had shocked her into silence. Jasper felt woefully out of touch with social mores when it came to truth-telling.

But then Molly said, “It happens. We have about 20 minutes here. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

So Jasper did. By the time they reached the outskirts of Forest Grove, Pop. 7,830, then drove through the college town with its industrial overtones, she had unburdened herself – revealing the years of covering up her husband’s misbegotten romances, just leaving out the fact that some of them had been with men. A philandering minister was bad enough. A philandering minister with multi-sexual tendencies might shock her temporary car guest. Jasper found that her feeling of being wronged didn’t require her to exact revenge on screwy Pastor Tim. He’d have enough to deal with just because of her absence and the forthcoming news of their legal separation. Then the big D that would follow.

She left Molly outside the door of The Forester, a posh looking place next to the Forest Grove Inn. The young waitress invited her to come there for dinner sometime. “You bring a friend – anybody but that bad husband of yours – and just ask for me. I’ll treat you.”

Jasper thanked her. The offer was so warm-hearted that it brought tears to her eyes. It gave her hope for her new life in Forest Grove. “And you’ll have to stop by Biggs Auction House. You can see a lady auctioneer in training.” They waved good-bye.

Jasper pulled away, heading confidently in the direction she thought would take her to her apartment.

Owing to her poor sense of direction, Jasper made a wrong turn off Riverside Avenue where The Forester and the Forest Grove Inn backed up to the Honey River, then another wrong turn meant to correct herself, and ended up driving across one of Forest Grove’s three main bridges from the more prosperous East side of town to the West.

What would make it so she knew from Cookie’s and Jimmy’s citings of local history. Although their differences and vocal arguments were the stuff of family legend, Cookie and Jimmy had found common ground in their love of local lore. When Eastern industrialists and Western pioneers with inventive spirits created their millworks, their foundries and machining works (paper making machines and corn curls came later), they needed housing for the scores of late 19
th
, early 20
th
Century blacks and poor whites they induced to come north and work in their factories.

The one-story, two bedroom homes all made from the same plan sprang up across the west side of the prospering town. They weren’t slums. Rather, working class homes with tidy yards front and back. Individual families had altered the fronts of their cottages. Some trimmed the front windows with maroon shutters, or painted the wood blue or yellow instead of the original white. Gingerbreading decorated the overhang above one front door.

As she drove up 4
th
Street, then back down 6
th
, Jasper could easily picture a young couple, he in suspenders, she in housedress with a babe in arms, proudly surveying their new home. “Well, sweetheart, it ain’t much but it’s all ours,” the man would say. “Why, dear, I think it’s sweet,” his bride would reassure. And they’d go in and set to making their own Brasstown Cottage all their own.

Jasper’s cell phone brought her back to real time. From its entombment in her purse which she’d shoved under the driver’s seat, it sang out, “Alleluia!” Time for a new ringtone.

She pulled over and scrambled but missed the call by a heartbeat. It was Cookie. She quickly found Cookie under Favorites and called her back.

Cookie didn’t say hello. She said, “What do you think?”

Jasper smiled. It was simply reassuring to hear her sister’s voice. “About what?” she asked. Out her window, some kids were bouncing and missing and bouncing and missing baskets with the ball they flung toward a garage hoop. It should be lower for such little children, Jasper thought, but the kids were better than she would have been.