Antiques Con PDF
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Also by Barbara Allan: ANTIQUES ROADKILL ANTIQUES MAUL ANTIQUES FLEE MARKET ANTIQUES BIZARRE ANTIQUES KNOCK-OFF ANTIQUES DISPOSAL By Barbara Collins: TOO MANY TOMCATS (short story collection) By Barbara and Max Allan Collins: REGENERATION BOMBSHELL MURDER—HIS AND HERS (short story collection) Antiques Con A Trash ‘n’ Treasures Mystery Barbara Allan KENSINGTON BOOKS http://www.kensingtonbooks.com All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected. Table of Contents Also by Barbara Allan: Title Page Dedication Chapter Two - Con Fusion Chapter Three - Con Seat Chapter Four - Con Found Chapter Five - Con Traption Chapter Six - Con Nected Chapter Seven - Con Tact Chapter Eight - Con Game Chapter Nine - Con Grats Chapter Ten - Con Fur Chapter Eleven - Con Fine Chapter Twelve - Con Clusion Chapter Thirteen - Con Tinued About the Authors Copyright Page For Kathe Brandy’s quote: In human history, the desire for revenge and the desire for loot have often been closely associated. John McCarthy Mother’s quote: By the pricking of my thumb something wicked this way comes. (that Scottish play) Chapter Two Con Fusion N o, your eyes are not deceiving you, nor has the publisher made a printing error by beginning this book with chapter two. Rather, chapter one has been omitted, having been deemed by our esteemed editor as inconsequential to the murder mystery about to unfold. But Mother and I beg to differ! Mother being Vivian Borne, seventies, bipolar, widowed, Danish stock, local thespian, and amateur sleuth; and me, Brandy Borne, thirty-two, Prozac popping, divorced, and frequent reluctant accomplice in Mother’s escapades since coming home to live with her in the small Mississippi River town of Serenity, Iowa, bringing along only a few clothes and my little blind shih tzu, Sushi. The following is our defense for writing chapter one, however bereft of mystery content it might be. Several loyal readers have written to inquire as to whether we have as yet found poor Aunt Olive. Olive—actually my great-aunt—wasn’t “missing” in the face-on-a-milk-carton manner, since she was, after all, deceased, her ashes encased in a glass paperweight and entrusted to Mother for safekeeping. Unfortunately, during a well-meaning flurry of downsizing our antiques- cluttered home, Olive had gotten herself mixed in with a collection of paperweights and erroneously sold at a garage sale to Fanny Watterson, a third- grade teacher visiting Serenity from Akron, Ohio. But, as Mother would say, I digress. Thanks to the prodding of our readers, we—that is, Mother, Sushi, and I—set out by car on an eastern trek to the Buckeye State to retrieve her/it. But, in Akron, we discovered that the third-grade teacher who had purchased Auntie had done so with a paperweight-collecting friend in mind, to whom Olive had been mailed as a birthday present, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Then, upon our arrival in Scranton, we were told by said friend (a fourth-grade teacher) that she had found the paperweight rather unattractive and possessed of “an odd vibe,” so she’d regifted it to a sister (presumably not her favorite one) in Hackensack, New Jersey. Now, just how Aunt Olive ended up in a torpedo hole of the USS Ling at the New Jersey Naval Museum in Hackensack is a fascinating, amusing, and remarkable set of circumstances, but—and here we must reluctantly bow to editorial wisdom—wholly inconsequential to the mystery at hand. (Chapter one will be available for your reading pleasure on our website, www.BarbaraAllan.com.) Just the same, Mother and I would like to point out that if it hadn’t been for the quest to recover Aunt Olive, she (Mother) and I would never have considered incorporating into our plans a trip to New York City, where we became innocently involved in yet another murder, giving us material for this, our eighth book. So forget Akron and Scranton and Hackensack and, for that matter, Aunt Olive (meaning no offense to those cities nor our beloved late relative). Our story proper begins in Manhattan, in late March, where we were on our way to attend a comic book convention, to sell a rare Superman drawing by creators Siegel and Shuster that we had found in a storage locker won in auction last October. (We refer you to Antiques Disposal, available from your favorite bookseller.) Still with us? Specifically, we were traveling south by car on the Henry Hudson Parkway, having just crossed the George Washington Bridge, when the old burgundy Buick that had done amazingly well for us on our travels thus far began to shudder violently. Luckily, I was able to ease the car over to an emergency lane before it shuddered its last shudder, dying with a long, mechanical death rattle, punctuated by a final conk! and one last steam-heat sigh. After using my cell to summon help, I was informed by a dispassionate dispatcher (did my lack of a local accent brand me as an outsider?) that our situation was not worthy of a 9-1-1 call in the city, and not to bother her again. No, Toto (that is, Sushi), we were not in Serenity anymore. Quiet Serenity, where a police car would have been dispatched to assist us toot-sweet. Sweet Serenity, where Mrs. Clyde Martin—monitoring a scanner in her kitchen— would begin preparing an apple pie to present us on our doorstep, in a few hours, as a consolation for our travails. But no such assistance (and certainly no pie, apple or otherwise) had been dispatched to aid us here on the HHP, where cars cruelly whizzed by two helpless women and a blind dog next to an obviously broken-down car in the late afternoon March wind. Mother was still quite attractive at her undisclosed age—porcelain complexion, straight nose, wide mouth, large eyes admittedly magnified by her
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