Crimes by Moonlight

“I want to be a girl again. I want to be a girl again,” I chanted mutely.

Nothing.

I was still an azalea.

“It’s pretty, Jean,” said a voice above me, “but I don’t recognize this variety. You really need to water it, though. It’s starting to wilt.”

“I watered this whole bed last night,” said the woman who had chased away my tormentors. Evidently she had brought a gardening friend out to see me. “Maybe it needs more water than usual. Tomorrow I’ll dig it up, prune it back, and move it around to the patio where I can keep an eye on it.”

Dig me up? Prune me back?

As soon as they went back into the house, I concentrated on skin, hair, teeth, toenails-summoning up all the pictures of blood veins and nervous systems in my health and science textbook. To my total relief, my twigs abruptly became fingers again, my flowers were hair, my branches arms and legs. I scrambled out of the bushes, grabbed my book bag, and ran to the shop. Dad was too busy with a customer to notice that I was almost an hour late.

I was stu

Then it happened again.

I was polishing a Victorian armchair that Dad had recently acquired. As I ran my oiled cloth over the carved filigrees, working the cloth into every dusty cra

Aunt Verna. Dad’s older sister. Twice a year she passes through town on her way to and from her summer house in Maine, and she always stops by the store so that we can take her to lunch where she spends the whole meal telling me to sit up straight, not to talk with my mouth full, and to “speak up, child. I asked you a question.” She finds fault with everything I do or say or wear, and to make matters worse, the last time she was here, she saw that I had taken to wearing a bra and she leaned over the table to ask in an arch whisper if I’d had a visit from my “little friend down south” yet.

I pretended I didn’t know what she meant, and when she noticed Dad’s puzzled look, she let it drop. “Just remember though, Laurel. I’m your only female relative, and if you have any questions, you can always come to me.”

As if.

I so wanted to avoid another lunch with Aunt Verna, that before I knew it, I had changed into a duplicate of the chair I had been polishing.

“That wasn’t very kind of you to disappear like that and leave me to face your aunt alone,” Dad told me later.

“Sorry,” I said and tried to look contrite.

I spent the whole weekend experimenting with my strange new talent, and it didn’t take me long to figure out how to get even with Tommy Bertram. He and his two pals usually stopped at Elm and Madison every afternoon before splitting off to their own houses. They would lean against a lamppost or on the sturdy blue and red steel mailbox that stood on that corner and snicker about which girls had the biggest “racks” or how studying was for nerds. So juvenile. So stupid. They never noticed when a second blue and red steel mailbox appeared beside the first one.

Next day, I slipped notes into the lockers of a couple of eighth-grade boys whose girlfriends I’d heard them trashing, and guess what? After school, those three got their butts kicked big time.

Oh, and guess what else? Ten minutes into the unit test, our history teacher found the cheat notes Tommy had taped to his arm, so it was a real bad day for him all around.

WHILE my new talent was useful for avoiding unpleasant aunts and getting back at obnoxious boys, I didn’t see any real benefits until this winter when things started to go missing from the store. Dad owns the store, but he rents space to several other dealers and takes the money for them when they’re not there.

As the economy got worse, more and more people came into the shop offering quality heirlooms, but fewer and fewer of the walk-ins were buying. Without our Internet website, Dad might have had to close the store. As it was, three of our dealers had to pack it in, and for a while their rental spaces stood empty.

Just when trade dropped off to its slowest after Christmas, someone came in to ask if we would sell some things she had recently inherited. “It’s stuff my mother’s great-grandfather acquired when he was in the China trade back in the 1890s.”

Dad tried to explain that he knew very little about Chinese antiques, but the woman wouldn’t take no for an answer. Next day, she arrived with a pile of cartons, some odd pieces of furniture, and a document that authorized him to sell everything for a generous percentage of the net.

“You’re sure about this?” Dad asked dubiously as the movers stacked the boxes in a room near the front counter that serves as both a workroom and temporary storage.

“I’m positive. I need the money.”

“But what about an inventory?” Dad said. “Do you even know what’s here or what the pieces are worth?”

“I’m not worried,” the woman told him. “You sold some things for a friend of mine, and she says you’re the most honest man she ever met.”

AS soon as she left, we opened a couple of cartons at random. Inside were amazing porcelains, bronzes, and stone animals. Tucked in among the boxes were several lacquered chests and screens. Everything was meticulously documented in an old ledger book, which also held the original bills of sale.

While Dad gave himself a crash course on Chinese antiques, I took pictures and uploaded them to our eBay account. We put a dozen decorative items up for auction right away; and at the end of two weeks, we were both astonished to see the prices they brought, mostly from people with Chinese names.

“They’ve got the money now,” said Mr. Fong, one of our new dealers, as he watched me pack up a small stone Fu dog to ship to the West Coast. He shook his head enviously. “A few years ago, it was the Japanese. Now it’s the Chinese who want to buy their history back.”

COULD Mr. Fong have been the second person in the SUV? Was he the one who cautioned the woman to be careful with me? Our shoplifter?

Dad may not deal in museum-quality antiques, but he does have high standards, and he requires that our dealers meet those standards by frequently refreshing their displays. Some of them rent space in three or four different stores, which means that they’re constantly moving things in and out and that they’re not always clear about what’s where. When we take a customer’s money, we save the tag that was on the item because it has the dealer’s ID number and the asking price. That goes into the till with the customer’s payment, whether cash, check, or plastic, and that’s when a dealer will delete it from his inventory list.

It was Martha Cook, a dealer who’s been with Dad for years, who first noticed that she was missing a small occasional table. Mass-produced, mid-twentieth century, but made of solid mahogany and in beautiful condition. Good value for the $75 Martha was asking.

Then Jimmy Weston reported that a pair of bronze bookends had vanished from his space. “Who the heck steals twenty-dollar bookends?” he asked indignantly.

“A klepto?” wondered Jane Armstead, the part-time clerk who covers for Dad when he’s on a buying trip and I’m in school. “There’s no other logic to what’s being taken.”

Jane’s a divorced freelance artist who’s put on a few pounds over the years. Her long hair is streaked with gray now, and she just coils it around and secures it to the top of her head with hairpins and a couple of ivory chopsticks. Her clothes used to be shabby chic; now they’re just shabby because her commissions have fallen off. Even though she’s worked here off and on since I was in kindergarten, Jane is a little ditzy and no expert in antiques, but she was right about the illogic of the thefts. The only thing Jimmy Weston’s bronze bookends had in common with a trio of 1930s lead soldiers, a chipped Art Deco vase, and a pair of Kendall Loring’s silver-plated candlesticks was their portability. Nor were they worth much. Except for Martha’s table, nothing was priced at over fifty dollars.