Jennie Bentley - Spackled and Spooked

“That might look nice. Or I can do some other funky wall-covering. One of my friends in New York did her living room in brown grocery bags once. It looked great.”

“Brown grocery bags?” Kate repeated. I nodded.

“You tear the bags into pieces and crumple them, then straighten them back out and glue them to the wall with wallpaper paste. Gives a lot of texture, and looks something like suede or leather. Then you can paint or faux finish over top. Very cool.”

“Huh,” Kate said, obviously not convinced. I shrugged.

“For the other bathroom, I’ll have to do a complete makeover. There was nothing there worth saving, so it’s all gone, or will be.” I explained my concept for the main bath, ending with, “What do you think?”

“Sounds good to me,” Kate said. “What do you want to put the salad-bowl sink on?”

“That’s part of what I’m looking for.”

“An old chest of drawers would work. As long as it wasn’t too tall. An old desk. A makeup table. Even a potting bench.”

I shook my head. “Not a potting bench. Not in that house. If we were redoing a Victorian cottage or something, that might look cute, but here I need something more streamlined. Like…” I stopped, distracted by the nearest shop window. “Oh, wow, look at that!”

Kate followed the direction of my finger. “That?” she said doubtfully. I nodded. “The dresser thing? But that wouldn’t look good in a white bathroom full of Mary Quant daisies.”

I cocked my head. “I guess maybe it wouldn’t. But look at it; it’s so ’60s.”

“It’s brown,” Kate pointed out.

“Teak. They used a lot of teak in the 1960s. What do you think-maybe it’d look good in the other bathroom? The brown and blue one? With a funky vessel sink on top? Glass, maybe, with colored speckles? Come on, I have to see how much it is.”

I pushed open the door to the shop, with Kate trailing behind, lugging her shopping bags. It wasn’t until I was inside the gloomy space, breathing in the dusty atmosphere of old furniture and antiquated knickknacks, that the name of the shop computed in my sluggish brain. The faded gold letters on the front window said Nickerson’s. Peggy Murphy had worked for a man named Nickerson, who had a business on Main Street. This could be where Peggy Murphy had worked. Mr. Nickerson could have been her boss… and possibly even her lover.

Or not. The man behind the counter wasn’t the type to set anyone’s heart aflutter, especially compared to the strapping Irish lad Brian Murphy had been seventeen years ago. Small and spare, his silver hair combed back in an early-Elvis ducktail, he was dressed in pale blue 1960s garb, complete with skinny lapels and a skinnier tie. “Help you ladies?” he asked, looking up.

“Mr. Nickerson?” I said. “My name is Avery Baker.”

“Nice to meet you, Miss Baker. John Nickerson. New in town?”

I explained that I’d been here since early summer. “My aunt died, and I inherited her house.”

John Nickerson nodded sagely. “The old Morton place, right? I drove by there the other day. Looks good.”

“That’s Derek’s doing. Do you know Derek Ellis?”

“Course,” Mr. Nickerson said. “Everyone knows everyone in Waterfield. Or used to, anyway. How are you, Kate?”

Kate said she was fine, and the two of them small-talked for a few minutes about how the summer’s business season had been for them both. I took the opportunity to look around.

There are all sorts of antique stores in the world, from your basic junk store, where the owner has no idea what he or she has, to the snobby and upscale places that are more like museums, which specialize in a certain era or type of thing, and where glass cases preclude you from picking anything up even if you dare. Nickerson’s was somewhere in between. John Nickerson had a little bit of everything, but if he had a specialty, it seemed to be midcentury modern: post-WWII up to about the 1980s. There was a ton of 1950s and ’60s kitsch sitting around: a tall, hooked, shag rug with a giraffe hung on one wall, while a pristine dinette set with a yellow Formica top and four yellow and white Naugahyde chairs had pride of place in the back corner. Under the giraffe sat a couple of orange scoop chairs and a glass table with a lava lamp on top, while a few framed examples of that big-eyed art that was so popular a generation ago hung above the dinette set. Everything was accessible and touchable, except for very few pieces of custom jewelry and other small items under the counter.

On a whim, I pulled the earring I had found out of my pocket. “I don’t suppose you have another one like this, do you? I lost one, and now I can’t wear them anymore.”

He took the earring from me with fingers that trembled slightly. I wondered if it was significant or if he always trembled. After a moment of peering myopically at it, he shook his head. “After my time, I’m afraid.” His voice was perfectly even and his face unexpressive; so much for trying to startle him by showing him Peggy Murphy’s earring.

“After?” I had thought the earring looked 1940s or thereabouts. Of course, Shannon had already confirmed that hers were reproductions, so maybe I should have considered that this might be, as well. Then again, that meant that someone must have lost it over the past few years, while the house had been empty.

He nodded. “It looks vintage, but it’s actually a modern reproduction. See the back? No soldering? It’s been made in a mold in the past few years. Sorry I can’t help.” He handed it back.

“That’s OK,” I said, tucking it back into my pocket again. So it wasn’t Peggy Murphy’s after all, or her mother’s, either. Maybe it had belonged to one of the teenagers that Venetia Rudolph had seen in the house a few years ago. “I was actually interested in that chest of drawers you have in the window.”

“The Fredericia? Beautiful, isn’t it?” He jumped down from the tall stool he’d been sitting on, and started toward the display window. His bearing was almost military, straight and tall, but he had a pronounced limp, as if one leg was shorter than the other. “ Vietnam,” he said briefly when he caught my reaction. I blushed.

“Sorry.”

“It’s been forty years. Don’t worry about it. This?” He pointed to the chest of drawers we’d seen through the window.

“That’s the one.”

“Nineteen sixty-five Danish Modern, teak, made in Fredericia Møbelfabrik. That’s the Fredericia Furniture Factory to you. Still in operation today. Give it to you for five hundred fifty dollars.”

“I don’t know…” I said, biting my lip. Five hundred fifty dollars was more than I wanted to spend, especially considering that I’d have to do modifications to turn it from a dresser into a sink base. The top drawer or two would have to be glued and nailed shut and the bottom of at least one of them removed to make room for the plumbing, and I’d have to cut holes in the top for the drain and waterlines, as well as the faucet. Lots of room for error in doing all that, and if I messed up too badly, the piece would be useless. On the other hand, it would look fabulous in the brown and blue bathroom. “What’s that?” I pointed. “A chip?”

Mr. Nickerson bent down. “A small one. I’ll knock off fifty dollars.”

“I don’t know. Five hundred dollars is still a little more than I’m comfortable with. See, I can go to the home improvement center and buy a sink base that’ll look OK for a lot less than that. But because it’s a 1960s ranch, I thought an authentic dresser would look good. With one of those vessel sinks on top, you know, like a bowl. There’s this little brown and blue bathroom that my boyfriend won’t let me tear out, because the tile is perfect…”