Page 52 of The Shop on Royal Street
“Was anything missing?” I asked.
He shook his head. “We always take our tools with us, and there’s nothing here worth stealing except for these floors, so nothing we could tell.”
The mention of his tools reminded me about his missing hammer. “What about your hammer—did you ever find it?”
“Yes, ma’am. That was real strange, too. It just showed up on the front porch here the next morning when I got here for work. And IknowI didn’t leave it there. I wasn’t even working outside, and I remember leaving it in the kitchen, and when I went to get it,poof—it wasn’t there. Really freaked Jorge out and I gotta admit I was a little bothered by it, too. But at least whoever it was gave it back. It’s not like it’s expensive or anything, but just the bother of it, ya know?”
I nodded, thinking of my missing hairbrush and making a mental note to stop by a drugstore before birds began mistaking my hair for a nest.
“It could be the neighbors playing a joke to welcome you to the neighborhood,” Beau suggested, his tone lacking conviction.
“The neighbors across the street are organizers of the Krewe of Barkus parade during Mardi Gras, where the dogs are all in costumes, as well as a lot of their humans, so that says something, right?”
Beau and Thibaut stared silently at me for a moment before Beau said, “It definitely says something. I’m just not sure what.”
“Whatever.” I blew a tangled knot of hair off my forehead. “But my point is that it’s not inconceivable that a neighbor could have done it for whatever reason. Maybe they just needed to borrow a hammer and you weren’t around to ask.”
“Sure thing,” Thibaut said, nodding his head enthusiastically. “Me and Jorge were upstairs working on pulling out that plumbing, so someone could have easily come through the unlocked front door and then returned it at night when everything was locked up tight.”
“Great,” I said. “Glad we solved that mystery.” Before anyone could contradict me, I said, “I’d like to see the closet. Beau said you finally managed to pry the door off.” I headed toward the stairs, Beau and Thibaut following.
“Sure did, but not without a lot of resistance from the door. It was like someone from the other side was hanging on to it just as hard as I was pulling. I managed to remove it in one piece, but I’m afraid I did some damage to the wood surround. Don’t worry, Miss Nola—I’m a master carpenter and I’ll fix it so it’s as good as new.”
“Thanks, Thibaut.” My steps slowed as I approached, the damaged door lying against the wall, the frame splintered in places, the remaining nails bent in all directions, as if they’d been caught in a tug-of-war between two equally fierce opponents. I looked nervously at Thibaut’s bulging biceps, then into the black chasm of the unlit closet. Although it was at the top of the stairs, across from one of the dormer windows, no sunlight penetrated the black interior. It looked like a giant mouth swallowing any light that attempted to cross its threshold.
I’d left my phone in my backpack downstairs, so I turned to Beau to ask him to shine his phone flashlight into the closet, but I found he wasn’t behind me. Instead, he’d stopped halfway up the stairs, looking down as if studying something on the ground, and snapping the rubber band on his wrist.
“Beau?”
It took a moment for him to look at me, and when he did it seemedas if he was fighting to keep his eyes focused just on me. It reminded me of a birthday party for JJ and Sarah where we’d had two performing clowns (Melanie’s idea, of course). While one juggled, the other made balloon animals, and JJ kept putting his hands over his eyes because it was too hard for him to keep them focused on one thing. Except here, there were no balls flying in the air and no distracting colorful balloons. Just Thibaut, me, and an empty closet that might have been sealed since the sixties.
Beau slowly climbed the rest of the steps before pulling out his phone and aiming the light into the closet while I held my breath. I almost expected it to throw the light back at us, or at the very least reveal some horrible creature from my childhood nightmares staring back at us.
Instead, we were greeted with the smell of mothballs and by heavy coats and long-sleeved dresses neatly hung. Several hatboxes sat on the upper shelves, and rain boots and evening shoes from a different era were placed carefully on a shoe rack on the floor. “Can you lower it a bit?” I asked.
The beam shot across the pristine wooden floor, and I was excited to know that we would have a sample to match when we redid the rest of the floors. I leaned closer to get a better look, automatically cringing as I inspected the corners and the edges near the walls for the carcasses of cockroaches or rodents or both. But only a heavy coating of dust lay undisturbed across the floor, except for a trail of a woman’s high-heeled shoe prints starting at the back wall of the closet and heading toward the doorway until they disappeared. There was no dust on the prints, as if the person who had made them had left just minutes ago. It almost seemed as if whoever she was had been inside the closet for decades, waiting to be let out.
“Well, don’t that beat all?” Thibaut said. “I swear those weren’t there earlier, but no one’s been in the house.”
“Maybe she’s the one who took your hammer,” I suggested.
He nodded, ignoring the fact that there was only one set of footprints and they exited the closet without entering, but it was clear he thought my idea was as stupid as I did.
“Is that a Mr.Bingle?” Beau directed the beam of his flashlight to a space between two hatboxes to illuminate what looked like a stuffed animal. He stepped forward, avoiding the footprints, and pulled the toy down from the shelf.
I could see now that it was a plush toy in the shape of a snowman with an upside-down ice-cream-cone hat, a red bow tie, and red-and-white-striped gloves, with a candy cane in one hand, and what appeared to be wings made of holly leaves. “What on earth is a Mr.Bingles?” I asked.
“Bingle,” they said in unison as if I’d just mispronounced the name of the Saints quarterback.
“Jingle, jangle, jingle: Here comes Mr.Bingle,” Thibaut sang off-key.
“Something like that,” Beau said, looking at the toy. “Mr.Bingle was the Maison Blanche Christmas icon—a part of most people’s childhoods. At least from the forties until the late nineties, when the Maison Blanche building was sold, and the trademark for Mr.Bingle, too.” He grinned. “I had one when I was a kid—no idea what happened to it. But if this is an original from the sixties or earlier, it could be pretty valuable, especially in this pristine condition.” He thrust it into my hands. “You definitely shouldn’t leave it here since we have proof of at least two break-ins.”
The stuffed snowman looked up at me with bulgy blue eyes, its button nose and yarn-sewn smile almost cute enough to make me overlook the fact that it had come from the dark closet with the unyielding frame and disembodied footprints. Almost.
“All right,” I said, gingerly holding it away from my body. I looked back inside the closet. “I’ll go pick up a few storage boxes and come back with Jolene to clear everything out of here and remove it so nothing gets damaged. Then we can go through everything back at the apartment and see if there’s anything worth donating. Or maybe selling to one of the local vintage shops. I mean, it all belongs to me now, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” Beau said a little too quickly. “Possession of everything in the house transferred to you upon closing. Even Mr.Bingle.”
