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10

Briar

1942

I burned the classified documents in Gram’s fireplace and headed out, eager to get to Island Treasures to see Sandra. I’d even dressed up a little, in my best dungarees, a plaid shirt, and one of Tom’s ties. I caught a ride with a fisherman who was on his way to Vineyard Haven. We’d had to cut back our driving, since gas and tires were rationed. Seventy-five tons of rubber went into making a battleship, not to mention the life rafts, gas masks, and tank tracks being manufactured for battle. I was happy to ride with a neighbor if it meant Tom might benefit.

The fisherman dropped me at Sandra’s house, and I walked around back and into her shop, the scent of mildew the dominant fragrance of that place, with underlying notes of stinky feet and clam chowder. There was only room for maybe two customers at a time—not that I’d ever seen another soul in Island Treasures—and two dirty old curtains led to some sort of back room. Most of the space was taken up by three glass display cabinets crammed with Sandra’s collections. It was so dark and cluttered, it gave me the creeps, the type of place where they’d find human remains in the basement someday and everyone would pretend to be surprised.

The proprietress, octogenarian Sandra Granger, lay on her bologna-colored faux-leather BarcaLounger, legs up, munching on oyster crackers from a little cellophane bag. She napped and ate her fried-clam meals while lying in that chair, and I tried not to think about the amount of tartar sauce spilled on it.

She glanced up at me. “Close the door—the flies are driving me bonkers.” Sandra had a great voice. You could hear every cigarette she’d ever smoked in each gravelly word. And, as Gram would say, she had a Massachusetts accent “as thick as a truckman’s wrist.”

“Haven’t seen you since Mr. Schmidt’s funeral,” I said.

Sandra dropped the BarcaLounger footrest, struggled to her feet, and stood at her main display case, silhouetted against the closed venetian blinds behind her. “I still expect to see him walk through that door.”

A former hardware-store employee turned antiquities dealer, Sandra wore her salt-and-pepper hair in a short style she said she cut herself, over the kitchen sink, and men’s bifocals. Her face was remarkably unlined, probably from setting foot outside only when forced for her entire life.

“Nice outfit,” Sandra said, through an inhale of cigarette smoke.

She was a big fan of my wardrobe.

I perused the glass cases. “Where did you get all this new stuff?”

“For God’s sake, you know I don’t share my sources. But let’s just say I have some pickers with important friends, who like a little sexy time. I still got it, ya know.”

I wasn’t sure what “it” was and didn’t want to think too much aboutit.

“You just here to talk, Briar, or you going to buy something?”

A dedicated grouch, Sandra had a demeanor that’d been imprinted on her after many years at Abby’s Hardware, which Cadence called Crabby’s on account of the gruff staff. In the long New England tradition of cantankerous hardware salespeople, they gave every lucky customer a generous helping of contempt along with their deck screws. Sandra had also picked up another habit at that store: a pretty loose way with the profanity. This caused Gram to avoid her on Main Street, but she took it easy around me, maybe because of my age.

Sandra suffered from severe epilepsy, and fainting was a real concern. She probably shouldn’t have been smoking or on her feet so much. At eighty years old, she got most of her exercise by knocking back her anti-seizure drugs with her regular coffee.

Sandra rubbed smoke out of her eye. “Or maybe you brought me something good that I can actually sell?”

I’d found lots of old stuff, which she’d sold for me—no big money, but it kept me in modeling supplies. An authentic Nazi fork I’d found on South Beach, probably off a downed U-boat, was my biggest score. A helmet liner I first thought was a horseshoe crab was another find. Sandra had also sold a gold tooth I’d found in the pocket of a sport coat from the dump; that seventy-five dollars went straight to Gram.

I stepped to the main case. She had some pretty cool things, especially the war paraphernalia. I bent to examine a couple of nice German World War I knives and a helmet, then continued on to the scrimshaw in the next case: an enormous whale tooth etched with a whale hunting scene, and part of a jawbone with lines of ye olde poetry in curlicue script carved into it. The whole scrimshaw thing, which everyone on the island seemed to love, saddened me. Whalers chased down some poor sperm whale minding his own business, boiled his blubber, and then etched pictures of his violent death into his own bones. All for lamp oil when a candle would do.

“Ever wonder if sailors went on those two-year whale hunts just to get away from their families?” I asked.

“I’d sail to Madagascar to get rid of my husband,” Sandra said. “If he hadn’t died already.”

I smiled. She was one of the funniest people on the island.

I slid Mr. Schmidt’s photos out of my pocket. “I wanted to ask you about these. Promise me you won’t tell anyone?”

“I’ll be as quiet as the grave.” Sandra adjusted her glasses and examined the pictures. “You should be paying me for this, you know.”

I waved toward one of the people with arms raised in a Nazi salute. “Recognize where this is in Germany? I found them at Mr. Schmidt’s house.”

She shook her head. “No clue. Just another bunch of Krauts partying in the fatherland. So what else is new?”

“Look closely at the street sign in the other. It says Adolf Hitler Strasse. ”

“They love that friggin’ lunatic back there. Do you know how many babies have been named after that sick bastard?” She handed the photos back to me. “Probably Conrad’s family snapshots.” She pulled an NS Frauen-Warte magazine from under the counter. “These magazines are more valuable than caster sugar right now. Have a supplier out of Boston. Brings ’em back from abroad. They’re full of pics like those.” She opened to one black-and-white photo of Germans on a street saluting as Hitler’s motorcade went by. “Hailing their führer. It’s all over the newsreels, too. Makes me wanna puke.”

“But Mr. Schmidt was no Nazi.”

“So far as we know. Just because you two made models and drank schnapps together doesn’t mean he didn’t have some skeletons in that closet. He’d read Mein Kampf. ”

Why had he never told me?

Sandra took another drag of her cigarette. “That book was a slog, I tell you.”

She’d read it, too? Where did a person even get a copy?

“What about Mr. Schmidt’s grandson, Tyson?” I asked.

“Never met him,” Sandra said, pinching a piece of stray tobacco off her tongue.

Something about the way she said it seemed less than truthful.

I picked up the photos and started saying my goodbyes. Naturally she tried to buy the pictures, but I told her they weren’t for sale.

“It’s like I’m the public library or something,” she said. “Folks bringing things in here for info but never selling.”

I patted my pocket. “I might have something else you’d like.”

“Oh, yeah?” From under the counter she pulled her little black receipts book, which was held closed with an enormous rubber band, trapping in what must’ve been fifty old receipts. Always her opening salvo to a sale.

I slid the ring from my pocket and offered it to her. “Found this in his house, too.”

She looked at the ring for a moment, as if frozen. “Holy shit,” she finally said.

I tried again to hand it to her.

“God no,” she said, waving it away. “Take it and go.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

She stepped back from the counter, barely able to take her eyes off the ring. “That didn’t wash up on any beach.”

“You have to tell me why you’re acting this way,” I said.

“Just get it out of here. And don’t tell anyone else you have it. Or neither of us will be around much longer.”