He nodded. She assumed he felt sorry for himself, too.
"Life sucks. Especial y in this rinky-dink place."
“It must seem smal after living in Richmond. That was where you were, right?"
“Yeah. Richmond was okay. The best place was where we lived before my real father died. Outside the city"
“There are a lot of good kids here, though. I've been coming every summer since I was born and I know everybody. You could come to the movies with us next week if you want." Samantha had no idea why she proposed this. Arlene would kil her.
“I don't need your friends. I've got plenty of my own"
She should have saved her breath.
“Wel , that's great. Now I'm going to go get some thing to eat before I starve." Enough was enough. "Plenty of friends. We even have our own club.”
“Club? That sounds like fun," Samantha commented perfunctorily. She was picturing a steaming red-hot lobster.
“Maybe you'd like to join." Duncan's tone was mocking.
Samantha resented the implication—that she was too good for his little club, or whatever.
“Maybe I would—and maybe I wouldn't," she said in as even a voice as she could manage. He real y was irritating.
She stood up to go. Duncan got up, too. He seemed to have sprouted during the conversation and stood only a few inches from her face. He had a sour smel and the skin on his face was oily. She took a step backward. He fol owed.
“Naaah, I don't think you could get in.”
Suddenly, she had to know.
“So what do you have to do to be a member of your club?" she said slowly, moving away from him. "You have to kil something.”
Five
Jil and Earl had joined the Mil ers, bringing cups of fresh-brewed coffee for everyone. As soon as the sun had gone down, the air had assumed some of its more characteristic Maine snap and the sight of the steaming cups was a welcome one.
“You take yours with milk and Sam doesn't take anything, right?" Jil had an amazing memory. Pix could barely recal the preferences of her immediate family, let alone friends. This was why she made lists. But then, Jil might get lost on the intricate carpool routes Pix routinely negotiated without a second thought.
“Thanks," Sam said. "When I find the energy—which could be sometime next week—I'l make a pie run.”
They talked about the summer. Jil bemoaned the economy; Earl bemoaned the increase in the island pop ulation—it doubled during these months---and Sam bemoaned the fact that he wouldn't be back again until August. It took a while for Pix to steer the conversation around to antiques.
“We had a good time with Valerie the other day exploring the antique stores in Searsport. She has a wonderful eye. Plus, having an expert along was insurance against getting duped by fakes. Have you heard much about antique fraud along the coast?" She addressed Earl directly, evidently striking a nerve.
“Have we! It's big business. I went to some seminars last winter in Augusta on this very subject. The Sheriff's Department has a special unit that does nothing else but deal with these scams."
“What kinds of things are being faked?" Pix asked in as idle a way as she could muster, aware that her mother had joined them, slipping quietly next to Sam.
“You name it. Toys are big." Earl started to warm to his subject. He must have been a star pupil. "One way is to make them from scratch, putting cel uloid or bisque into molds from originals to imitate things that are popular col ectibles, like Mickey Mouse figures. The modern ones are easy to spot once you know how—different colors, obvious brushstrokes, but even dealers get fooled.
Especial y if they're made by joining a new toy with an old one, it's cal ed `marrying.' "
“What do you mean?" Pix was glad to hear the word introduced, yet this sort seemed more likely to be headed for divorce.
“Wel , you might have a part missing from an original and you substitute a fake, but often these two never left the factory together. Like Mickey in a car becomes Minnie at the controls. That sort of thing. Then they even forge Steiff buttons and insert them in the ears of new stuffed bears or other animals that have been made to look worn. Another thing we learned is that both fake and genuine toys are put into òriginal' boxes printed by color laser to increase the values. The boxes are the easiest to detect. You just need a good magnifying glass, my dear Watsons. You should see dots, not the paral el lines the laser produces.”
Pix remembered that Valerie had a whole battery of devices tucked into her jaunty Pierre Deux bag when they had gone off yesterday: a fancy kind of flashlight, a Swiss army knife with more than an extra blade and toothpick, plus a magnifying glass.
“This is amazing," Ursula commented. "I had no idea things were so sophisticated. Tel us more.”
Pix looked at her mother. Ursula's face showed nothing other than sincere interest, but it was almost as if she was in on the plot. Whatever the motive, Pix silently thanked her for keeping the conversation going.
“Oh, I could talk al night about this," Earl said jovial y.
"There's nothing I hate more than a fraud, and these crooks are accomplished ones”
Jil , oddly enough, since antiques were a current and growing interest, did not seem as fascinated. "I'm sure we al do, but I think Louise is cutting the pies."
“Oh, she's barely started, and I can't eat anything yet, anyway," Pix said quickly. "Do tel us some more, Earl"
“Part of the problem is that some people pay such fool prices for things that even legitimate dealers get itchy. Take a painting, for instance. You might think it's old, but you get tempted to sweeten the pot a little by rubbing some dirt and grime on it, tucking it under the cobwebs you don't sweep away in the back of your shop for some tourist tòdiscover.'
A real con man—or woman—takes what he or she knows is a new painting, maybe even painted it him or herself, and does the same thing. Just now, the unit is getting a lot of cal s about paintings—and photographs, fake tintypes and ambrotypes."
“What's an ambrotype?" Sam asked. "Is that anything like a daguerreotype?"
“Yup, daguerreotypes are older and they were more expensive. Ambrotypes used a glass plate to capture an image. And tintypes were obviously on metal. They were the most common, relatively cheap compared with the other two. The thing is that now al three methods can be duplicated using the old cameras or even doctoring a modern image with the right emulsions. So you get a friend to dress up as an Indian chief or a Civil War soldier—this is what people want—and lo and behold, in a few months you've made enough for that condo in Florida."
“I had no idea you were learning so much at those seminars," Jil remarked a bit tartly. "Do you think it has much relevance for law and order on the island?”
Earl frowned. Her tone was decidedly un-Jil -like.
“Maybe not, although what with everyone and his uncle putting some thundermugs in the shed and cal ing it an antiques store, it wil probably pay off one of these days."
“Are you by chance referring to my decision to carry antiques?”
Pix was not happy with the turn the conversation was taking. Not only were they veering from the topic but it seemed that Jil and Earl were heading for a quarrel and about to topple off the top of the cake.
“Of course he isn't!" she said in what she hoped was a lighthearted tone. "We're just gossiping. It's fun to hear about how other people get fooled, so long as you're not one of them."
“Exactly." Ursula came to the rescue again. "Like the Pilgrim chair hoax."
“What was that?" Earl asked eagerly, slipping his arm around Jil in an attempt to make up—for what, he knew not.
She sat stiffly but didn't shrug him off.
“This al happened about twenty years ago and it was big news. Our forefathers and mothers didn't have dining sets—they were lucky to have a crude trestle table and a few stools; however there were exceptions. These few people, men, of course, had imposing throne like chairs with elaborately turned spindles at the back and below the rush seat. You can see the one said to have belonged to Elder Wil iam Brewster at the Pilgrim Hal down in Plymouth. Sometimes the chairs are cal ed `Brewster chairs,' and nobody had to remind you to sit up straight in one. It must have been pure torture for them, and perhaps why they always have such sour expressions in the paintings. Now, where was I? Oh yes, in the 1970s, a Rhode Island furniture restorer concocted one of these chairs and aged it by, among other things, putting it in a steel drum with a smoky fire to get the right patina, if that's the right word, on the wood. He then al owed the chair to surface on a porch here in Maine."