“Told you he’d try to pull a fast one,” the ghost in the suit hissed in my ear. “He does it all the time. You shoulda been here the day some dame waltzed in with a musty old book of poetry. Studebaker turned up his nose, all right, and offered the babe five smackers. She refused, and I was glad. If Studebaker woulda taken a closer look, he woulda seen there was a letter tucked in the pages of that there poetry book, signed by that Hemingway guy. Wish I could tell him. That would teach him a lesson!”
I tuned the ghost out and turned back to Ted. Truth be told, I wasn’t surprised that the newspaper page was practically worthless. Marjorie had come right out and told me she wouldn’t dare entrust me with much of anything that was valuable. Still, I couldn’t let on. “I thought it might be worth a little more,” I said. “It’s pretty old.”
“Oh, darling! Everything in this place is pretty and old. Including me! That doesn’t mean anyone’s going to pay big bucks to take me home.” Studebaker’s laugh boomed through the store.
My smile was anemic. But then, I was playing hard to get. “But you’ll turn around and sell it for more, right? I mean, that is your business. So if you’re going to sell the newspaper and get more for it than you gave me, I thought . . . well, I thought maybe you could up your offer a little.”
I think he was just trying to let me down easy when he gave the framed newspaper page another look. “I’m being honest here,” he said, at the same time the ghost at my shoulder muttered, “Don’t believe it, sister. He don’t know the meaning of the word.”
“I’ll need to have it looked at by an archivist to see if there’s anything that can be done to preserve the old newspaper,” Studebaker said. “And it will probably need to be reframed. Even once all that’s done, the most I can ask for it here in the shop is sixty dollars or so. So you see, I’m being as generous as I can possibly be.”
I pretended I was disappointed and scooped the newspaper page off the counter. After all, I couldn’t really sell it. Somewhere along the line I had to get it and all the other nonvaluable stuff Marjorie had saddled me with back to Nick.
Studebaker watched the newspaper page disappear back into the tote bag. “You have more?” he asked. “At home? More old newspapers? More Garfield collectibles? The president was from this area, you know. There’s a great deal of Garfield memorabilia left in northeast Ohio.”
“I might have a little more. I used to think it was valuable, but after what you’ve told me, I guess none of it is worth very much.” Rather than stand there and clutch the tote bag, I set it on the counter. “Tell me, Mr. Studebaker, what kinds of things are valuable? Are some presidential antiques worth more than others? And why?”
“Ah, you’re being sly!” He shook a finger at me. Not like he was mad, more like he knew I wasn’t as obtuse as I was pretending to be. I wasn’t. But not in the way he thought. “You do have more collectibles at home. Tell me about them.”
I thought back to Marjorie’s house and how it had been neat and organized one day, and completely trashed the next. “All the obvious stuff couldn’t be that valuable, because all the obvious stuff was overlooked,” I mumbled. “And Nick—”
“Nick? Nick Klinker?” Studebaker threw back his head and laughed like a jolly Santa Claus. “Now I see what you’re up to. You’re Nick’s fiancée, aren’t you?”
Though I’m not sure what it means and I don’t know who would want to look inside an animal’s mouth in the first place, I am a firm believer in never looking a gift horse in the mouth. I stuck out my hand and shook Studebaker’s. “You can call me Bernadine,” I said. “I know you’ve been to . . .” I coughed, but then, it was kind of hard to get the words out without gagging. “To dear, sweet Aunt Marjorie’s house to look things over. But really, Mr. Studebaker . . .” I leaned closer. “I’m sorry to be so secretive, but Nick has been acting so strange. He says not much of what dear Marjorie had is very valuable. I just can’t believe that’s true!”
He hesitated, weighing the wisdom of getting in the middle of a family argument. I liked to think it was my winning personality that helped him make up his mind. “Nick is right. About some of it,” he finally said. “But Marjorie had a good eye when it came to Garfield collectibles. That tile from the railroad station!” His eyes glowed. “Now there’s something I’d love to get my hands on. I saw something similar once on the wall at Lawnfield. You know, the president’s home.”
“And the tile?” I did a sort of slow-mo rerun through my last visit to Marjorie’s. As far as I could remember, the framed tile was right there on the floor with everything else that had been left behind. “Is that tile especially valuable?”
