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  To the Manor Dead: A Janet’s Planet Mystery © 2010 by Sebastian Stuart.

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  First e-book edition © 2010

  E-book ISBN: 9780738727394

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  It was raining, pouring, cascading down the front window in gray sheets—cats and dogs and lions and tigers and bears. Fine with me. Less chance that some member of that overrated, self-obsessed, narcissistic species—the human race—would darken my shop door. I could hang out with Sputnik, Lois, and Bub, get a few lamps rewired, frame a picture, wax a table, and get going on hiring someone to help out on weekends, when the place actually pulled in a few customers.

  I made myself a pot of coffee. Out of a can, thank you—this whole mocha-latte-Sumatra-chino thing bugs me. Does everything have to have five-dozen goddamn pucci-gucci variations? If you ask this gal, too many choices equal one thing: a tension headache.

  While it was brewing I made up a small sign reading “Part-Time Help Wanted—Weekends.” I put it in the front window, slipped in a CD—French cocktail pop—filled my mug, and headed to my workshop, a big room at the back of the store. Sputnik followed me on foot, Bub flew down and hitched a ride on his rump, and Lois just lay there curled on her favorite spot, a ratty old armchair with great bones that I would have loved to get rid of, but was afraid to sell. I’ve seen too many psychotic cats in my day. And psychotic people.

  I’ve seen way too many psychotic people.

  Just as I was about to start cutting a mat for a circa-1920 photograph of a bearded circus lady playing hopscotch, the bell jangled out in the shop. What fresh hell is this? I went out front to find an enormous umbrella—a fancy-ass one, all floral, one spoke bent—facing me across the store. The umbrella closed halfway, then jerked back open; this happened several times, accompanied by murmurs of frustration.

  I crossed the store. “Need a hand?”

  The umbrella moved down, revealing a woman I pegged on the far shore of seventy. She looked at me and, like a switch, her face softened, got all dreamy and ethereal, like she was channeling Blanche Dubois. “Why, aren’t you kind,” she said in this upper-crusty voice. She had good bones and pale blue eyes, had probably been a beauty once, but she’d hit a few landmines on her detours and had ended up with a haunted, ravaged look. I got a whiff of expensive perfume, but it smelled a little stale.

  I took the umbrella from her and wrestled it closed.

  She looked around the store, filled with the outflow of my twenty-five years of obsessive-compulsive collecting. She looked sort of taken aback, but said, “What a charming shop.”

  “Thanks.” Even though 75 percent of my stuff was borderline junk, I hoped the place had a certain funky charm. I got a lot of help putting it together from my pal George, who lived down the street and had that gay-gene thing happening.

  “Is there any leeway in your no-smoking policy?” she asked.

  “Go ahead,” I shrugged.

  She took out a pack of convenience-store generics and lit up, sighing with relief on the first puff. She was gaunt-skinny, wearing a long, belted raincoat—dingy, the belt was frayed—and scuffed-up black flats that were soaked; her hair was hidden under a silk scarf that sort of matched the fancy umbrella. Her beauty was a memory, but it lived on in the tilt of her chin—slightly upward, as if to show off her best angle—and the way she handled her cigarette, like she was in a ballet or something. The bitten nails were a classy touch.

  “May I sit down?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said, gesturing to a 1950s sofa upholstered in a black-and-pink boomerang print. It was a flea-market find I’d put out the week before, sure it would get snatched up by one of the downtown hipster-artsy types who, in the years after 9/11, had bought up every shack here in the Hudson Valley and up in the Catskills.

  She sat, pulled off her scarf, and shook her head like she was in a shampoo commercial—too bad her pale hair was thin, brittle, and stuck out like loose straw from a bale. She crossed her legs, took a deep pull of her cigarette, lowered her voice, and said, “I have something that might interest you.” Then she looked out the window at the rain—was that fear in her face?

  “I’m listening.”

  She looked at me with watery, beseeching eyes. “I’m terribly thirsty.”

  “Would you like a glass of water?” Her look stayed the same. “How about a glass of wine?”

  She smiled. “How thoughtful.”

  Hey, it was eleven in the morning.

  “Some weather,” I said, heading over to the half fridge. “I’ve got a bottle of white open.”

  “Sounds enchanting.”

  I didn’t tell her it was Chateau Plastique, pulled from the two-dollar bin at the Liquor Locker. I filled a New Orleans souvenir glass half full and handed it to her.

  “Thank you,” she said, taking a long sip, smiling. “I love the rain. It feels safe, as if one can hide.”

  You didn’t need my psych degree to know that something had gone south big-time in this gal’s life. I felt my old curiosity itch flare up—I wanted to know everything about her.

  Cool it, Janet, you’re an antiques-collectibles-whatever dealer now. Not a psychotherapist. You closed your practice in the city and moved the hell up here to get away from other people’s problems, and as soon as one lost soul walks in the door, you’re hooked. You owe this lady nothing. Nada. Zip. You owe yourself a life.

  “So, I’m guessing you have some stuff you want to sell,” I said, walking back to my desk and sitting behind it, like the professional I was pretending to be.

  “I do, yes.” She took another long sip of wine and settled into the sofa. Her eyes were getting glassy, her smi
le wistful. Classic fallen-angel drunk: soulful, sensitive, mucho screwed-up. Just the type that could suck me in like a vacuum cleaner if I let them. “By the way, my name is Daphne … Daphne Livingston.”

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Janet Petrocelli.”

  “Ah, Italian.”

  “Half.”

  “Trieste is magical.”

  “Never been.”

  “Oh, but you must go.”

  “It’s on my list. Now what’s on yours?”

  “Well, I have some … things … I would like to sell. Some of them rather … quickly, if possible.” She clutched the collar of her coat around her neck. “I want to get away … for a while.”

  “Are we talking furniture, art, rugs?”

  “A little of everything. Well, actually, quite a lot of everything. I’ve brought a few photos. I thought that might well help.”

  “It might well.”

  She looked at me, and then down at her empty glass. I walked over and refilled it. She took a sip, opened her purse—black leather, scuffed up—and took out an envelope. “Here you are.”

  I sat back at my desk and took out the pictures, fanned through shots of Oriental rugs, graceful old chairs and tables—the kind with inlay and carvings—oil portraits and landscapes in heavy frames. This was serious stuff. It wasn’t for me, way too much money, not to mention expertise. I was a bottom feeder—a flea market, yard sale, and junk shop junkie doing her bit for recycling.

  The phone rang.

  “Janet’s Planet.”

  “Good morning, starshine.”

  It was Zack, no surprise. My boyfriend/whatever of five months, a laid-back landscape “architect” who operated on Rip Van Winkle time. Zack had come into the shop one day claiming to be looking for garden furniture. What he was really looking for was to get laid. Well, he did. Guess what—so did I. A gal’s got needs. Zack could be fun, he could be annoying, but he was easy and hunky and supportive—and he was definitely not get-serious-with material. Thank God. After two dismal marriages, getting serious was the last thing I wanted.

  “What’s up, Zack?”

  “I am—wish you were here to help me out with it.”

  “Okay, I’m going to hang up now.”

  He laughed. “Oh, come on, baby, I can’t work in this rain, you won’t have any customers, why not close up the shop and come on out here, we can be little snuggle bunnies, just spend all day in bed listening to the rain on the roof.”

  “Actually, I’ve got a customer here right now.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’ll talk.”

  “Have a snuggle-bunny day.”

  “Yuk.” I hung up and went back to Daphne’s photographs. “I think you came to the wrong place. I’d advise you to take these pictures over to one of the high-end shops in Hudson.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that. You see, I live over on that side of the river.” That didn’t surprise me—the east side of the Hudson was fancy-pants central. “I have to be … discreet. I’m sure you can understand.”

  “I’m sure I can. But I think you’re out of my league.”

  I stuffed the pictures back in the envelope.

  “Janet, I find you … sympathique. Your face, your eyes. And I love your taste in music. It takes me back to St. Germain—long gray afternoons filled with wine, men, and … longing.” She did that Blanche Dubois thing again, eyes unfocused, all dreamy. Then she looked at me and smiled; there was kindness in her eyes, spiked with resignation and sadness. “I know that some of my possessions are quite valuable. But I’m looking to establish a relationship with someone who can help me sell them. Someone like you.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because I can tell you’re trustworthy. And could probably use the business. I stopped in at that charming little boite across the street for a piece of lemon meringue pie. It’s the only thing I’ll eat for breakfast. I asked the owner if she might know someone who would be interested in buying a few things. She steered me to you.”

  That’s Abba—meet a freak, send her to Janet. Actually I owed her thanks—I did some quick calculating and realized I could keep myself fed and clothed for a decade just acting as a middleman for Daphne’s stuff. Do a little research, take the pictures to a high-end dealer down in the city or over in Hudson, make sure she got a fair price. I could handle that. Probably.

  “Listen, maybe we can do some business together. Why don’t we start slow? Maybe with one or two pieces?”

  “That sounds wonderful.” She looked down at her hands. When she looked up, there was that hint of fear in her eyes. “I would like to begin as soon as possible.”

  “Name your time.”

  “Can you come over to my house tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  Lois got down from her armchair, walked over to the sofa, leapt up, and rubbed herself against Daphne. This was rare. Lois appeared on my fire escape one day—filthy, with half her left ear missing—to claim me as her slave. She deigned to accept my food and shelter, and let me scoop up her shit, but made damn sure I didn’t expect anything—like, say, a little gratitude or affection—in return. She had less truck with the human race than I did. So I took her cozying up to Daphne as a sign that she was one of us, the sisterhood of wounded chicks.

  Daphne petted Lois and when she looked up at me those pale blue eyes were filled with tears. “I’ve made a terrible mess of my life.”

  My first instinct was to say “Tell me all about it.” But those days were over o-v-e-r over. I took a sip of coffee and said, “You’ve got a lot of company.” We just sat there for a minute, with the jazzy, melancholy French music as accompaniment.

  “It’s my own fault,” she said, still petting Lois. “When you’re young you think you can just shrug off your mistakes—la-di-da—but you can’t. They stay with you. Always.”

  Didn’t I know it? And I didn’t just learn it from the parade of messed-up, whacked-out, screw-loose clients I’d seen during the fifteen years I hung out my shingle. Me and mistakes had been acquainted for a long time. And I had the scars to prove it. There were the two marriages, the second of which had curdled like rancid milk just before I moved up here. It feels pretty lousy when you misjudge someone as totally as I did, when you think a person is solid and honest and cares about you, and then he turns out to be a dipshit fuckwad from hell. Not that I have any residual anger toward the Asshole. But that wasn’t even my worst wound—nope, numero uno was still fresh after twenty-five years, still too fresh, in fact, to talk about.

  Our fuck-ups and losses, the big ones, become part of our psychological DNA, integrated into our emotional wiring. That’s what bugs me so goddamn much about the psycho-pop gospel of “get over your pain”—like tsunami-sized sadness and grief and regret were pesky little pebbles in your shoe that you could just shake out and keep on trucking. Bullshit. The trick is to take it from acute agony to it’s-not-fucking-up-my-head-and-making-me-act-like-a-needy-dweeb-on-a-daily-basis. It was my credo with my clients: let’s talk about your traumas, understand them, make some kind of peace, and then move forward with them. ’Cause, baby, those suckers ain’t going nowhere.

  “It’s been men,” Daphne said. “I was born into great privilege, but under the privilege there were a lot of secrets and … ugliness. I fled. Into the arms of men. You see, I wanted the stars and the moon, too. Well, I almost got them …” She let out a rueful laugh.

  “Yeah?”

  Cool it, Janet, no way are you going to be Daphne’s shoulder, especially not at these rates.

  “So, about tomorrow,” I said firmly.

  She polished off her wine and put out her cigarette in a cool Deco standing ashtray that I was having a hard time selling. Nobody smoked anymore, and those who did kept quiet about it. I figured my best shot was some rich Woodstock
pothead.

  Daphne stood up and put her scarf back on, tying it under her chin like she was Audrey Hepburn or something. “My address is Westward Farm, on River Road in Rhinebeck, about a mile north of the bridge. Come in the late morning, around this time. It’s the main house, at the end of the drive. I’m on the left side of the house. Just come in, the door is always unlocked. I’ll be upstairs, in my bedroom. You’ll find me. It’s been such a pleasure, Janet. I look forward to our partnership.”

  Then she stepped out into the monsoon. She opened her umbrella and it immediately got whipped inside out. She gasped and let it go, it skittered away. I grabbed an umbrella and went out. I opened it and held it over her. She looked at me as if I had just saved her life.

  “Where’s your car?”

  She pointed up the street, to an old Mercedes. She slipped her arm through mine and I escorted her to her car, and around to the driver’s side. She opened her purse to get her keys, then stopped. She looked at me, took my free hand, and held it to her cheek for a moment.

  Then she got in her car and drove off.

  “Janet!” I looked across the street—George was poking his head out of Chow, Abba’s restaurant. “Come here!”

  “My shop’s unlocked!”

  “In this weather, baby, the worst that could happen is a fish swimming in!”

  I crossed the street and followed George inside. Chow was an old luncheonette and Abba had pretty much left it “as is” since she’d bought it five years ago. The place was between breakfast and lunch, but there were still customers. Abba pulled them in no matter what the weather. It was partly her chill-pill atmosphere, but it was also her cooking—a pungent, fearless fusion that reflected her years of traveling the world with fifty bucks and a backpack. Her talent had earned her a growing reputation and she ran a small catering business on the side. There were about a dozen characters hanging out, the kind of people who have no place to go and all day to get there—over-the-hill hippies, artists real or imagined, folks who got out of the frenzy with just enough dough, boozers and reefer-heads, retirees, lowlife skanks living just this side of legal.