Flying Solo(80)

Chapter Twenty-Seven


Laurie startled awake the next morning when there was a sharp knock on the door. She dragged herself out of bed, pulled her hair back, and called out that she would be just a minute, then she pulled on soft pants and her Springsteen shirt. She opened the front door and found Matt Pell on her doorstep, shifting back and forth on his feet. “Matt,” she said.

“I need to talk to you.” His smile was gone, he was wearing a plain gray shirt, and suddenly, she believed that she was actually seeing who he was.

“That’s great,” she said. “Because I need to talk to you, too.” She stepped aside, and he followed her in. She shut the door behind him and said, “I’m going to go first. I want you to look at something.” She went to her bag and found the fake appraisal. She pushed it into his hand. “This is fake. It’s fake, and it’s not even a good fake.”

She half expected that he would defend it, that he would start to tell her that this was a completely legit document, and that the auction house was lying or denying their work, or maybe that there was some big misunderstanding, and couldn’t they listen to some Natalie Merchant and talk about it? So she was surprised when he frowned at the paper. “I’m sorry, tell me what this is again?”

She laughed. “This is the ‘appraisal’ you gave me, and I know it’s fake. I talked to Wesson & Truitt. I called them on their real phone line. I know this number—this number you put here—rings that insufferable hipster phone in your store that you don’t answer. They told me this isn’t from them. It’s not their document number, because they start their document numbers with a letter. It’s also got dummy text on it, and they never looked at a duck that was supposedly a Kittery. They didn’t make this.” She grabbed it back from him and flapped it in the air an inch from his face.

“This what?” He took it from her and turned it over and over in his hands. “I don’t know what this is.”

Her ears started to ring. “This is the paper you brought me. This is the…the thing you gave me. This is the thing you gave me that was the entire reason I sold you the duck. This was your proof that it wasn’t worth anything. This was the appraisal you promised me.”

He held it in his hands. He looked at it. He looked, for whatever reason, at the back of the sheet, as if he barely understood what paper was to begin with. “I don’t recognize this,” he said.

Laurie felt something in her chest start to expand like a balloon full of lava. “You gave this to me in this living room,” she said. “You gave it to me over there.” She pointed. “We were right there, and you came in, and—”

He shook his head. “This can’t be a W&T appraisal. It would start with a letter. Plus that’s dummy text at the bottom. I wouldn’t have given you this.”

“Why are you repeating what I just said? Of course it’s not a real number. But you certainly did give it to me. You brought it over, you said ‘Oh, I’m going to let you read this for yourself,’ you said you were sorry it wasn’t the news I wanted—you even gave me a pep talk about how good I was being to my aunt.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think I could have done that.”

She stepped back from him. “Are you a game show host? Is there a hidden camera? Is this Memento? Are you heavily sedated? What are you doing?”

He held out both hands. “I think it’s some kind of a misunderstanding,” he said. He dug in the messenger bag he was carrying and pulled out a sheet of paper. He handed it to her. “This is the receipt I got from you when I paid you for the piece. It says here you sold it to me for fifty dollars, you were transferring ownership of it to me—this is what I’m going by, this is what I remember,” he said, speaking to her slowly and gently, as if she were a frightened toddler.

“This is fraud,” she said, holding out the paper toward him. “This is literally fraud. You can’t do this. What do you think is the point of sitting here and pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about? Do you think I’m going to reach the conclusion that I was imagining it, or that you have an identical twin?”

“I’m at a loss here,” he said. And then he focused his eyes on her a little more intently. “I don’t know how you’d prove that I gave you that. You could have drawn that up as easily as I could.”

She very slowly nodded. “You are a game show host,” she said. “You’re the host of Who Wants to Steal from Little Old Ladies and Go Directly to Hell on a Pair of Sparkly-Ass Roller Skates? You’re an absolute garbage can, you know that?”

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” he said. “But I’m pretty sure you did.”

She looked right at him. “Oh, I did? What does that mean?”

“After I bought this piece from you, completely legally, I had an associate who was going to sell it for me.”

“Oh,” she said. “Right. An associate. You mean your friend who might actually dislike you more than I do?”

“Someone stole the piece from him,” Matt said. “Someone took it, saying they were going to help find a buyer for it, and then that person disappeared with it. It’s vanished.”

Laurie nodded. “That’s sad for you.”