He chuckled wearily. “What I’ve got is an old house full of junk.”
I found a way to ask him if he had a wife, or children.
“I guess that’s the other thing I inherited from him,” he said. He heard what he’d said and laughed. “I don’t mean his gay gene. I mean his loner gene.”
I assured him I knew what he meant. “So what exactly do you do in Harper’s Ferry?”
“At the moment I’m going broke teaching people how to kayak.”
“The funny little Eskimo boats?”
“Yup. The funny little Eskimo boats.”
I maneuvered the conversation back to Gordon’s estate. “I guess you’ll have to sell the house.”
“It’s a great little house,” he said. “I wished there was some way I could zap it down there-or zap the Potomac River up here.”
“Well, I don’t think you’ll have trouble finding a buyer.”
He nodded with his eyebrows arched high and happy. Clearly he figured to make a pretty penny on Gordon’s house. “Getting rid of his stuff is the problem,” he said. “He’s got ten tons of rubble that could be worth a lot or nothing.”
“I wouldn’t give you a dime for this old couch,” I said. “But some of this other stuff looks like it might be worth something.”
“I’m not talking about his furniture. I’m talking about all that stuff from his archeological digs.”
I finagled a tour of the house. It was indeed filled with, well, junk: old bottles and cans and boxes, tools and toys, kitchen gadgets, kitschy wall plaques and dime store paintings. “I suppose you could hold a tag sale.”
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” Mickey said. “But not up here.”
“You’re hauling all this stuff down to Harper’s Ferry?”
“Summer’s coming fast. I’ve got a barn full of kayaks to get ready. And Harper’s Ferry is pretty much the flea market capital of the world.”
“I think the Hannawa Chamber of Commerce would challenge you on that,” I said.
We squeezed into Gordon’s small downstairs office. There were bookshelves on all four walls. “Boy, I bet our old friend Effie would love these for her shop,” I said.
“She’s been bugging me since the funeral,” he said.
“Since the funeral? You were there?”
He shook his head, sourly. “She called me down in Harper’s Ferry. About six times. A very persistent woman.”
“Yes, she is-you’re going to sell them to her?”
“At some point maybe,” he said. “But I’m going to take them back to Harper’s Ferry with everything else. I need to evaluate what I’ve got. Think things through.”
“That’s wise,” I said.
Effie’s eagerness to buy Gordon’s books didn’t surprise me at all. Effie had known Gordon forever. She’d undoubtedly rummaged through his library a thousand times. And she was a businesswoman. Collections like that didn’t come on the market every day.
We snooped around the kitchen then headed down the basement steps. I spread my fingers across my face. “Oh, my!” The basement walls were lined with crudely constructed shelves, all stuffed with junkyard treasure.
“It’ll be a bitch hauling this stuff out of here,” he said. “But it’ll make my creditors happy. One or two of them anyway.”
I circled the basement like a visiting head of state reviewing the troops on the White House lawn. I stopped in front of the shelves next to the furnace. I studied the rows of cocoa cans. I struggled to remember my conversation with Andrew Holloway, and the catchy little question Gordon always asked his students at the dig: “Anything interesting today, boys and girls?” he’d ask. “Old soda pop bottles? Betsy Wetsy Dolls? Perhaps an old cocoa can or two?”
Without appearing too nosy, I scanned the other shelves in the basement for old bottles or dolls. There weren’t any. I motioned for Mickey to join me. “You wouldn’t want to sell me these old cocoa cans, would you?”
He did want to sell them to me. For five dollars a can. There were twenty-two of them.
So I wrote Mickey a check for $110.00 and felt like an absolute fool carrying them out to my car.
I drove away with more than a back seat full of cocoa cans. I also had a brain full of unanswered questions: Did Gordon save those cocoa cans for a reason? Did they have a story to tell?
Was Mickey really surprised to learn that he was Gordon’s heir? And just how far in debt was his kayak business in Harper’s Ferry? Why hadn’t he come to Gordon’s memorial service? Harper’s Ferry isn’t that far from Hannawa. And why did he sneak into town to bury him now? The minute the coroner released his body? Without a minister for a graveside prayer? Without inviting any of Gordon’s friends?
And what was that crack about his not inheriting Gordon’s gay gene?
I drove home for what I planned to be the most boring evening of my life. I was going to eat popcorn and suck on peppermint swirls, and watch six or seven hours of old sitcoms on Nickelodeon, until Gordon’s murder, and David Delarosa’s murder, were no more a bother to me than the dust bunnies under my bed.
But when I pulled into my driveway, Jocelyn and James were waiting on my porch. Jocelyn’s usual happy-as- an-apple face was puckered with anguish. I struggled toward her with my three shopping bags of old cocoa cans. The first words out of her mouth were not exactly promising: “Oh Maddy, I don’t know how to ask you this.”
I put down my cocoa cans and scratched James’ ping-pong paddle ears. He reciprocated by slobbering on my elbows with his big pink tongue. “How long?” I asked.
Jocelyn pulled in her neck, as if I was about to pound her with a sledgehammer. “Five months?”
The last time she asked me to watch James it was for three days. “Five months?”
She started to cry-the kind of crying that includes a lot of shoulder shaking and throaty moans that sound like mating whales. She told me her daughter Deena’s husband had been swept into the Pacific Ocean while collecting mussels for a paella, for their fifteenth wedding anniversary dinner, and now Deena was going to be a young working widow with three daughters at that awkward age. Jocelyn was going to spend the summer in Eureka, California, while the kids were out of school. “I don’t know what’s going to happen after that, Maddy,” she said, “but if you could take in James until the end of August-I’ll pay for all his food, of course.”
I loved James. But I didn’t want to love him that much. But heavens to Betsy, what could I do? “When do you have to leave?”
“The funeral’s on Wednesday,” she said. “I was hoping you could drive me to the airport tonight.”
And so instead of watching old sitcoms on Nickelodeon, I was starring in a brand-new sitcom of my own: James amp; Me. My only hope was that it would merely be a summer replacement and not picked up for the fall.
Chapter 12
Friday, April 6
I had a nice, peaceful lunch at Ike’s and then took my good old time walking back to the paper. It was only fifty degrees outside but the sun was shining like it was the middle of July. I didn’t dare do it, of course, but I felt like whistling that peppy theme song from The Andy Griffith Show.
On my way through the newsroom I wiggled my fingers at Louise and Margaret and even Ed Boyer in sports. Two out of three wiggled back. Then the second I lowered my happy behind into my chair, Suzie appeared out of the ether. “Mr. Averill wants to see you,” she whispered. “Immediately.”
