True to its name, La Juntique was mostly junk, with just enough antiques scattered around on the shelves and cabinets to keep me browsing.
Daniel followed me through the narrow aisles of the shop, studying me as I studied the merchandise. “What’s that?” he’d ask as I picked up a pressed-glass fruit compote or a Victorian beadwork pillow. “Is it any good?”
He was starting to wear on my nerves. Maybe it had been a good thing that Tal avoided junking with me.
At the back of the shop was a large roped-off area. A cardboard sign taped to the back of a chair said “No Admittance. Employees Only.”
A jumble of stuff; furniture, boxes overflowing with packing paper, wooden crates full of dusty books and old record albums, took up most of the space. Standing out like a diamond in a can of tenpenny nails was a small, square table.
It was made of cherry, with neatly tapered legs and a top inlaid with ebony.
I stopped and stared. Daniel was breathing down my neck. “Are you ready to go yet?”
“Not yet,” I said, stepping over the rope.
“The sign says No Admittance,” Daniel said. “Come on, Weezie. You want to get arrested again?”
I squatted down on the concrete floor and poked my head underneath the table. I ran my fingers over the dusty tabletop.
“What’s so special about that table?” Daniel asked, looking around for the armed guards he obviously expected to descend upon us at any minute.
“It’s an Empire card table,” I said. “The nicest one I’ve ever seen. That’s what I thought the last time I saw it.”
“Huh?”
“At Beaulieu,” I said, walking slowly around the table to get a look at it from all sides. “This table came out of Beaulieu. I’m positive of it.”
I went up to the front of the shop, where a young woman of about eighteen sat concentrating on the latest issue of People magazine.
She looked up at me. “Yes, ma’am?”
“There’s a table back there that I’m interested in,” I said, pointing toward the back of the shop. “But it isn’t priced.”
She chewed her gum. “You’ll have to talk to the owner.”
“All right,” I said pleasantly. “Where is she?”
“At home.”
“Can you call her?”
“I guess.”
She put the magazine down and picked up a cell phone.
“Liz? It’s Catharine. There’s a lady here with a question about a table.”
“Tell her it’s the Empire card table,” I said. “In the employee area.”
The girl frowned at that, but repeated it.
She listened and hung up the phone. “The owner says to tell you that table is not for sale.” She looked at me accusingly. “You weren’t supposed to be back there. It’s private.”
“Call the owner back, please,” I said.
“Weezie,” Daniel tugged at my elbow. “She told you it’s not for sale.”
“I just want to talk to her,” I said. “To ask her where it came from.”
The cashier rolled her eyes, but she punched in the number again. “I told her that table wasn’t for sale, but now she wants to talk to you.” She handed the phone to me.
“This is Liz Fuller,” the woman said, her voice annoyed. “As Catharine explained, the card table is already sold.”
“I understand,” I said. “But I was wondering where the table came from. It’s really an exceptional piece. Do you know anything about the provenance?”
“No. I bought it from one of my pickers because I have a customer who was looking for a piece of that description.”
“But it’s Empire,” I said. “And it’s really exquisite. Surely you know something about it. What’s the picker’s name? I’m a picker myself, and I’d be interested in seeing anything else that might have come out of the same house.”
“I never share my resources,” Liz Fuller said. And she hung up.
“Anything else?” the girl asked, smirking.
I took a business card out of my pocketbook and scribbled a note on the back, then handed it to the girl. “Give that to the owner when she comes in,” I said. And I turned and stomped out of the store.
Daniel caught up with me at the truck. “What’s with you?”
I looked down along the shop fronts in the strip center and saw that there was another antique shop at the far end.
“That table came out of Beaulieu. I saw it the night I was there, when I found Caroline. They canceled the estate sale, and supposedly it’s been re-scheduled for this weekend. But I’ve been hearing rumors that the best pieces from the estate have already been sold off.”
“So?”
“I told you about that cupboard, the Moses Weed. I need to know who is selling off those pieces from Beaulieu. If I knew that, I could approach them before the sale about buying the Moses Weed cupboard.”
“Can’t you just wait until Saturday?”
“I’m not the only one interested in the cupboard. There’s a big-deal antique dealer, Lewis Hargreaves. He’s interested in it too. And the rumor is that he’s already bought some pieces from Beaulieu. I want to get to the Moses Weed piece before he does. If it’s not too late.”
“What did you write on your business card?”
“Just that I’d be willing to pay a finder’s fee for information about who sold her the card table.”
“Will that work?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Dealers can be very closemouthed about this kind of stuff. They want to protect their sources, and the names of their pickers, to keep the best stuff for themselves.”
“Are you ready to go?” he asked. “The rain’s stopped. We can still get some crabbing in before it gets dark.”
He saw the direction I was looking in.
“Just one more shop? Just a quick look-see?”
“Fifteen minutes,” he said. “I’ve got to get the coals going for dinner.”
“Deal,” I said.
The shop was called Annie’s Attic. Looking through the window, I could see it was a fussy little place, full of crystal and porcelain, with lots of frilly pseudo-Victorian reproduction pieces mixed in with candles and soaps and high-priced teddy bears and dolls. It was really not my kind of place at all…But I wasn’t about to give up another fifteen minutes of junking.
The shop smelled like cinnamon potpourri. The displays were the opposite of La Juntique’s. Everything in Annie’s Attic was organized and displayed on pristine glass shelves lined with paper lace doilies.
I wrinkled my nose.
“Now what’s wrong?” Daniel asked.
“Nothing. It’s just a little too foo-foo for my taste.”
“Foo-foo?”
“You know. Prissy, sissy. Fixed-up. Fancy.”
“Not cruddy?”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “I like my antiques to show their age. I don’t trust anything too gussied-up. I think it smacks of pretense.”
“That’s why you like me,” he said, a little too smugly.
“That and your chocolate seduction.”
A display along the front of the store caught my eye. Unlike the shop’s other pastel and lace offerings, this was an almost masculine vignette of wicker fishing creels, wooden duck decoys, old leather boxing gloves, and three majolica oyster plates.
The plates were wonderful, glazed in exuberant yellows and blues and greens, each of the oyster depressions glazed pink on the inside to look like a stylized oyster shell. Two of the plates matched. They had a raised seaweed border, with another border of tiny scallop shells along the very edge of the plate.
“This stuff doesn’t look too foo-foo,” Daniel said, picking up the pair of boxing gloves. “My dad gave my brother and me a set of gloves just like these when we were kids. We used to beat the crap out of each other with them.”
I picked up one of the pair of matching plates and turned it over. The marking was what I’d expected. Minton.
“That’s the first time I ever heard you mention your father,” I said, looking at the other plate to make sure it was also Minton.
“My dad is dead,” Daniel said, his voice flat. “He died when I was four. That’s why I don’t talk about him. There’s nothing to say.”
I gave him a thoughtful look. My great-grandmother had been dead since I was four. I thought about her and talked about her all the time. Maybe it was different with men.
I held up one of the plates for Daniel to see. “Aren’t these great-looking?”
“You like oysters?” he asked, perking right up. “I’ve got a killer oyster stew I do in the fall, when they get sweet again.”
“I love oysters,” I said.
He took the plate from me and looked at it. “Cool.” But he winced when he saw the price sticker. “Wow. Three hundred fifty dollars for a plate to eat oysters off of?”
“It’s three hundred fifty for the pair,” I said, picking up the matching plate. “This is English majolica. Minton, which is the manufacturer, is very desirable. I’m not an expert on majolica at all, but these look pretty early, probably 1860s. And I could swear they’re the same ones I saw at Beaulieu.”
A pained expression crossed his face. “Again?”
“At least these are apparently for sale,” I said.
I took both plates up to the front counter, where a white-haired woman was sorting and pricing sterling silver flatware.
She looked up at me and smiled when she saw the plates in my hands. “Aren’t those lovely? Do you collect majolica?”
“They’re wonderful,” I said. “Are you Annie?”
“Yes, I am,” she said. “Shall I wrap those up for you?”
“Not just yet,” I said. “What can you tell me about them?”
“They’re Minton, of course, and really, the color and modeling is exceptional on these plates. Anyplace else you’d buy these, you’d pay double the price I’m asking.”
“Where did they come from?” I was smiling too, just a friendly, curious collector.
“England.”
“No. I meant, where did you buy them from?”
Her sunny smile suddenly took on a layer of frost. “An estate. I buy things all over the Southeast. And I do a buying trip in New England every summer.”
“Did these come out of a local estate? Maybe over in Savannah?”
She picked up a silver soup spoon and pasted a price tag on the handle. “I really don’t remember.”
“They look exactly like a set of Minton oyster plates I saw at an old plantation house outside of Savannah. Called Beaulieu. Did these plates come from Beaulieu?”
Her blue eyes glittered dangerously. “I’ve never heard of Beaulieu. I’ll have to ask you to leave now, I’m afraid. We close early on Wednesdays.”
I looked pointedly at the sign on the wall behind her, which said “Open Weds., Noon–9 P.M.”
She saw where I was looking, and didn’t blink.
“Summer hours.” She walked around the counter and held the shop door open. “Good-bye.”