Dead Reckoning(39)

The small man was crouched before it now, his head in the kneehole.

“You’ve got a secret compartment, Miss Stackhouse,” he said, and he inched backward on his haunches. “Come, let me show you.”

I squatted down beside him, feeling the excitement such a discovery naturally aroused. Secret compartment! Pirate treasure! Magic trick! They all trigger the happy anticipation of childhood.

With the help of Donald’s flashlight I saw that at the back of the desk, in the area where your knees would fit, there was an extra panel. There were tiny hinges so high up a knee would never brush them; so the door would swing upward when it was open.

How to open it was the mystery.

After I’d had a good look, Donald said, “I’ll try my pocketknife, Miss Stackhouse, if you have no objection.”

“None at all,” I said.

He retrieved the pocketknife, which was a businesslike size, from his pocket and opened the blade, sliding it gently into the seam. As I’d expected, in the middle of the seam he encountered a clasp of some kind. He pushed gently with the knife blade, first from one side and then another, but nothing happened.

Next, he began patting the woodwork all around the kneehole. There was a strip of wood at both points where the sides and top of the kneehole met. Donald pressed and pushed, and just when I was about to throw up my hands, there was a rusty click and the panel opened.

“Why don’t you do the honors,” Donald said. “Your desk.”

That was both reasonable and true, and as he backed out, I took his place. I lifted the door and held it up while Donald held his flashlight steady, but since my body blocked a lot of the light, I had quite a time extracting the contents.

I gently gripped and pulled when I felt the contours of the bundle, and then I had it. I wriggled backward on my haunches, trying not to imagine what that must look like from Donald’s viewpoint. As soon as I was clear of the desk, I rose and went over to the window with my dusty bundle. I examined what I held.

There was a small velvet bag with a drawstring top. The material had been wine red, I believed, once upon a time. There was a once-white envelope, about 6 × 8, with pictures on it, and as I carefully flattened it, I realized it had held a dress pattern. Immediately a flood of memory came undammed. I remembered the box that had held all the patterns, Vogue and Simplicity and Butterick. My grandmother had enjoyed sewing for many years until a broken finger in her right hand hadn’t “set” well, and then it had become more and more painful for her to manage the tissue-thin patterns and the materials. From the picture, this particular envelope had held a pattern that was full-skirted and nipped in at the waist, and the three drawn models had fashionably hunched shoulders, thin faces, and short hair. One model was wearing the dress as midlength, one was wearing it as a wedding dress, and one was wearing it as a square-dance costume. The versatile full-skirted dress!

I opened the flap and peered in, expecting to see the familiar brown flimsy pattern paper printed with mysterious black directions. But instead, there was a letter inside, written on yellowed paper. I recognized the handwriting.

Suddenly I was as close to tears as I could be. I held my eyes wide so the liquid wouldn’t trickle, and I left the living room very quickly. It wasn’t possible to open that envelope with other people in the house, so I stowed it in my bedside table along with the little bag, and I returned to the living room after I’d blotted my eyes.

The two antiques dealers were too courteous to ask questions, and I brewed some coffee and brought it to them on a tray with some milk and sugar and some slices of pound cake, because I was grateful. And polite. As my grandmother had taught me . . . my dead grandmother, whose handwriting had been on the letter inside the pattern envelope.





Chapter 5




In the end, I didn’t get to open the envelope until the next day.

Brenda and Donald finished going over all the attic contents an hour after he’d opened the hidden drawer. Then we sat down to discuss what they wanted from my miscellaneous clutter and how much they’d pay me for it. At first, I was minded to simply say, “Okay,” but in the name of my family I felt obliged to try to get as much money as possible. To my impatience, the discussion went on for what seemed like forever.

What it boiled down to: They wanted four large pieces of furniture (including the desk), a couple of dress forms, a small chest, some spoons, and two horn snuffboxes. Some of the underwear was in good shape, and Brenda said she knew a method of washing that would remove stains and make the garments look almost new, though she wouldn’t give me much for them. A nursing chair (too low and small for modern women) was added to the list, and Donald wanted a box of costume jewelry from the thirties and forties. My great-grandmother’s quilt, made in the wagon wheel pattern, was obviously worth a lot to the dealers, and that had never been my favorite pattern so I was glad to let it go.