“Yes, the preview is still on,” she said. “No, absolutely no change. Uh-huh. Right. Registered bidders only. Right. Yes, sir. The auction is on Saturday, starting at two.”
Listening to Gretchen’s cheery words reminded me of the first time I met her. It was a Thursday, the day after I’d closed on the warehouse. When I drove up at eight in the morning, she was waiting at my front door wearing a navy blue suit, white blouse, and heels, clutching a
Seacoast Star
opened to the classifieds with my ad circled in pink highlighter. Observing her as I walked from my car and noting her outfit, I’d hoped she was a prospective client. She gave me a dazzling smile, and said, “Hi, are you Josie Prescott? I’m here for the job. I wanted to be first. Am I first?”
I hired her forty-five minutes later, an oddly impulsive act for a systematic, research-oriented sort like me. Especially since she was reticent to the point of mysterious about her background. She volunteered that she moved to Portsmouth from a small town upstate, but when I asked which one, she rolled her eyes, and said, “Oh please, I escaped, let’s leave it at that.” And gave me another blinding smile.
Awed at her dictation and typing skills as much as her light-hearted, engaging charm, and her can-do attitude toward customer service, I speculated on whether she was too good to be true. I told her that I would certainly want to invite her back for a second interview while thinking that I needed to check her references. “I’ll look forward to seeing you next week,” I started to say.
She stopped me cold when her smile faded away. Her eyes became mournful, and she reached across the desk and touched my arm. “Hire me. I’ll help your company grow. Really. I will. I’m honest and hardworking. You won’t be sorry. Offer me the job now. Please.”
“Why? What’s your hurry?”
“I’ve just moved. I need a job and this is the one I want.”
I paused, thinking. She seemed perfect. “Why did you move, Gretchen? Is there something I should know?” I asked quietly, watching her for any sign of deception.
She shook her head. “No, nothing. It’s just that I need a fresh start.”
“Why here? I’m an antique appraiser. Not the best place for a fresh start.”
“Why not? Why isn’t it a good place for a fresh start? You’re starting a new business. It’s a perfect place for a fresh start.”
Warning myself that I’d probably regret it, I offered her the job and she accepted it. Two years later, I knew that hiring her was one of the best decisions I’d ever made. And I still didn’t know where she’d lived before she’d arrived on my doorstep.
She hung up the phone.
I said, “Hey, kiddo. How are you doing?”
“I’m fine. How about you? Are you okay?” she asked me.
“A little the worse for wear, but okay. How are things here?”
Gretchen smiled a little. “Busy. In a good way. Sasha’s done with the catalogue and wants you to review it so we can get it copied and bound.” She reached to a corner of her desk and handed me a thick document held together with a black clamp. “We have more than a hundred people registered for the preview and the phone keeps ringing with inquiries.”
“More than a hundred?” I asked, slightly awed. “That’s almost double the number we had last time. Wow. The Wilson stuff is good, but it’s not that good.”
Gretchen nodded and looked away. “I think there may be a curiosity factor at work here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, several reporters are among the registered bidders. I’m guessing it’s about the, you know, the Grant situation.”
I froze for a moment, then brushed hair out of my eyes. I nodded. “Yeah, probably that’s it. Have any reporters called to talk to you?”
“Yes. I keep saying ‘No comment,’ and eventually they go away.”
“Good,” I responded. “Keep it up.” After a pause I added, “Thanks, Gretchen.”
She waved her hand dismissively. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Change of subject. We lost two regular part-timers for Saturday. The tag sale. Mae and Gary.”
“Why?”
“The flu.”
“Oh, boy. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”
“I’ve already called Peter at Temp Pros.”
“Thanks, Gretchen. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
She looked embarrassed. “It’s nothing,” she said. “So. What’s the latest news?”
“Well,” I said, trying for light and frothy, “let me put it this way ... it’s pretty clear that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
She nodded with a sympathetic grimace, but before she could comment, the phone rang.
“Where are Eric and Sasha now?” I asked as she reached for the unit.
“Helping with the auction setup. Along with the temp guys. They’ve been at it since about noon.”
“Good. I’ll go there now. Anything else I should know?”
She shook her head as she picked up the phone and answered with her usual upbeat “Prescott’s. May I help you?”
It was another inquiry about attending the auction. Under normal circumstances, I’d be thrilled at such a stellar response. But the circumstances were anything but normal. Instead of pride and pleasure, I felt edgy discomfort. Some of the people coming to the auction preview tomorrow would be there not to buy but to judge me, and maybe even to intrude. I could picture ambitious young television reporters, with their earnest crews wielding spotlights, pushing microphones in my face. It made me feel anxious, vulnerable, and cranky.
I walked across my warehouse to an area on the left, passing the sliding dividers that, with a push of a button, would segregate the far corner from the rest of the space. When the partitions were in place, it became an elegant, spacious room, not a concrete cavern. The design and layout were my own, and I thought it was a clever way to transform an oversized industrial space into an attractive and utilitarian venue on an as-needed basis. Clever, but expensive.
I stepped onto the maroon industrial carpeting that covered the concrete floor and served to subdue the sounds that echoed through the rest of the warehouse. I made my way to the low platform at the front, skirted in black polyester. A podium faced the seating area. The outside concrete walls, to my right and ahead of me, were whitewashed. Acres of burgundy brocade hung from big black wrought-iron rings dangling from two-inch pipes I’d had painted black and that stretched from the stage to the far back wall and along the back wall from the far corner to the divider. Tomorrow, we’d slide the dividing walls into place, converting this section of the warehouse into an antique haven, suitably decorated and appropriately quiet. Everything looked fine, except that we’d need to add more seats.
I spotted Sasha directing Eric and three temporary helpers as they positioned the Wilson goods into numbered, roped-off areas against what would be, once the dividers were in place tomorrow, the inside wall of the room. Looking at it now, the placement seemed arbitrary, a fifteen-foot-deep channel filled with antiques, positioned some fifty feet in from the outside wall.
“Over here.” Sasha directed two of the men, pointing to a space labeled 12. They carried a heavy, Russian-made, nineteenth-century cedar hope chest fitted with brass hardware into the area. Sasha consulted a three-ring binder containing, I knew, a copy of the Wilson listing, confirming that the hope chest’s placement in area 12 matched its catalogue entry as lot 12.
Waving hello, she closed the binder and joined me in an empty aisle as Eric ensured that the chest was plumb to the line where the wall would be. “We’re making good progress,” she said.
“I can see you are,” I said with a smile.
Eric took a lighthouse quilt from the chest, a remarkable work dating from the eighteenth century, probably crafted by a local teenager, and draped it over a black metal free-standing rod. Sasha went over and smoothed it out so the bits and pieces of cotton resolved themselves into a landscape of accurate perspective and awe-inspiring detail. Tiny seagulls, created from peanut-sized white and gray scraps of cloth and sewn with nearly invisible stitches, seemed to flutter across the pale blue sky. It made a dramatic backdrop for the hope chest.
My mother would have loved it. She admired excellence in craftsmanship in all things. I learned business from my father, but I gauged quality with my mother’s eyes. Well could I remember the hours we spent at museums.
I could picture us as we stood together in the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, gazing, speechless, at the glass flower collection. At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, we whispered about the odd, eclectic mixture of treasures on display. And when I was eleven, we traveled to New York to visit museums. We spent the first two days at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I stared, awed and thrilled, at one after another masterpiece.
I recall pointing, excited, to the cat in George Caleb Bingham’s 1845 painting
Fur Traders Descending the Missouri
; remarking on the vivid yellows and reds on the earliest-known Nepalese painting on cloth, dating from around 1100; and wondering how a statue created almost five thousand years ago could still exist. Every moment was filled with wonder, but it was on the third day that my life was changed forever.
With a wintry wind blowing from the east, we kept our heads down and hurried along the Midtown streets until we reached the Museum of Modern Art.
“Oh, Josie,” my mother had said, staring through moist eyes at Picasso’s
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,
“wouldn’t it be wonderful to spend your life surrounded by such magnificence?”
“Yes,” I answered, and then and there, I silently vowed that I would find a way to work with items of great beauty.
Looking again at the quilt, I felt a spurt of pride.
If only my mother could see me now
, I thought, and smiled.
“Hey, Josie,” Eric called, and walked toward me. “Doesn’t it look great?”
“More than great,” I said. “You guys are incredible! How much more do you have to do?”
“Four more lots,” Eric said, dragging his arm along his forehead, catching dripping sweat. “Not bad.”
“Not bad at all. Good job, guys.” I added the instruction about the chairs, gave Eric a thumbs-up, promised Sasha I’d sign off on the catalogue ASAP, and left.
As I approached the spiral staircase that led to my private office, an area once used to monitor manufacturing processes, Gretchen paged me.
“What’s going on?” I asked as I walked into her office.
“Max Bixby wants you on line two,” she said.
I picked up the phone, and said, “This is Josie.”
“What’s your fax number?” Max asked without even saying hello.
I told him, adding, “What’s the big deal? Gretchen could have told you the number.”
“Epps faxed something over to me and I want you to see it right away. For your eyes only.”
“Okay,” I responded, attentive and worried. I heard the fax machine kick on. “Do you want me to call you back after I’ve looked at it?” I asked.
“No,” Max said. “I’ll hold.”
The phone rang in back of me and Gretchen answered it as usual. It was another inquiry, but I barely registered the interchange. I stood silent and intent, watching the fax machine drop a one-page document into the receiving tray.
I was holding a copy of a letter, dated Friday of last week, the day after I’d shared Bundt cake with Mr. Grant. It was signed by Britt Epps, written on his law firm’s letterhead, and my heart skipped more than a beat as I read the text introducing Barney Troudeaux to Nathaniel Grant.
“I’ve read it,” I said.
“Do you know Barney Troudeaux?” Max asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “Of course.”
“He’s an antique dealer based in Exeter, right?”
“Right.”
“What do you know about him?”
I forced myself to ignore my personal feelings about good ol’ Barney and his bitch-queen wife. Instead I reported the truth as perceived by the vast majority in the industry. “Barney is very well respected. I mean, he’s the head of the NHAAS.”
“That’s that industry association you mentioned?” Max asked.
“Right,” I said, and shrugged. “It’s pretty prestigious.”
“So Epps recommending him wouldn’t be out of line?”
“Hell, no. It would be an obvious choice. Not a good one, necessarily, but certainly it would be low risk.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, between you, me, and the gate post, Barney is lazy. His research is cursory, so he misses a lot of opportunities to maximize his clients’ profits.”
“So he’s reputable but incompetent?” Max asked.
“I wouldn’t say he’s incompetent. He’s knowledgeable and a terrific negotiator. The problem is he’s lazy. He delegates research to other people, usually his wife, who knows nothing but acts as if she knows everything, and he never checks or corrects her work.”
“How do you know?”
“Because on two separate occasions I’ve bought items he’s sold, not because they were sort of a bargain and I knew I could mark them up and make a decent profit but because they were inaccurately described in his catalogues, and I got killer deals. I sure wouldn’t want to be a client of his, but I doubt you’d find a client who’d say so, or even one who discovered the truth. He’s great with people. His clients love him. But from where I sit, it’s as if he doesn’t care as much about the value of the items he’s entrusted with as he does about getting the deal.”
“Why would Epps recommend him?”
I made a noise involuntarily, a small snort of contempt. “Because he’s low risk. Don’t you see? He’s the prez of a major industry association. He’s personable. Forgive my cynicism, but from a lawyer like Epps’s point of view, it doesn’t matter how good a job an appraiser does. All that matters is that his client never comes back with a complaint. But I got to ask you, Max, what does all of this have to do with the price of eggs in China?”
“Well,” he said after a pause, “here’s the thing, Josie. Epps told me that Grant asked him to recommend a reliable dealer. This letter shows that Troudeaux’s the dealer he selected. It might imply that, in fact, you’d lost the deal—or that you were about to.”