Dipped, Stripped, and Dead (7 page)

However, I never repeated that mistake. For one thing, E depended on me, thank you very much. Besides, I thought, considering Ben’s shock at the idea that I wouldn’t call the police immediately, if Ben didn’t have me around to shake him up now and then, he’d probably turn into granite. And then somehow, sooner or later, a high school student would put pink lacy panties on his head. Bound to happen.

I set the little table down on my worktable. The worktable was nothing fancy. Two sets of kitchen cabinets someone had been throwing away made up the base, surmounted by a thick broad piece of plywood. I put little projects on top of it to allow me to work more easily. The other furniture, like the dresser that sat—in pieces—in a corner, I worked with on the floor. That dresser had been put out on the curb for trash pickup, because it was literally in its constituent parts. However, from the style and the veneer, I thought I was dealing with an empire piece, and I was almost sure it had all the bits there. Or close to it. It was just going to be a bitch and a half to assemble and would have to wait for my three days without E, so I could do it a little at a time.

Against the other wall, next to the disassembled dresser, were the pieces that were ready. Not many, but the kind that were too good to sell in Goldport—at least if I wanted real money for them. There was a little walnut bookcase with a glass door. When I’d gotten it, the glass door and all had been covered in white paint. A couple of
nice solid end tables. One of those reading desks where you stood up to read. I had to get them all to Denver, somehow.

Before I did anything at all, I put on my coveralls, which were hanging from a hook at the entrance. They were thick, and the fabric was supposedly chemical resistant. Of course, if you knelt on a patch of solvent, it was still going to stain your jeans. On the other hand, the coveralls never let enough pass through for me to feel it on my skin, for which I was grateful. The few times I’d gotten some solvent on my skin, I’d had to wash immediately. With the liquids I worked with, there was no such thing as dropping some on your skin and not knowing.

Then I put on my goggles and mask. Again, it was not worth it to skimp on this stuff. Yeah, the goggles would end up fogging when it was hot, particularly if I was working with the heat gun. And yes, the mask was a pain and I never felt like I was breathing enough. But inhaling particulate from sanding or getting anything in your eye would be far more uncomfortable than that. Seriously uncomfortable. As in, you could end up blind or dead.

I pulled on the chemical-resistant gloves. With all this, I was fairly aware I looked like an alien. If you added the noise-canceling headphones that I used while sanding, I really looked like I’d just landed from outer space. A couple of months ago, a delivery man had knocked at this door after trying the house, and when I opened it in this attire, he’d backed away really quickly.

He’d never delivered whatever it was, and never told me what he wanted. For all I knew he was probably in Wyoming by now, still running and screaming that the aliens had landed.

Properly attired for work, I frowned at the table. Right. What I needed to know was what time period it was likely to be, which in turn would tell me if I was dealing with a
fine piece made by relatively primitive methods, or with a shoddy modern piece.

First, I thought I’d take a look at the inscription. From the drawer in the cabinet at the end, I fished out my notebook and one of the flat pencils that you can buy at the refinishing store. A handyman had once told me that they were flat so you could get them in narrow spaces to mark things. I had never had a need for that kind of precision, but frankly the narrow pencil was easier to put behind my ear, which meant I was less likely to put it down somewhere and forget it.

So I grabbed it and the notebook, and copied the note from the bottom of the table. I didn’t intend to hurt it at all, but you never knew.

The beginning was in fact a
B
and the word seemed to be
Botched
. Well, either that or
Before
or
Because
, or probably
Ben coughed
, although I found that highly unlikely. Ben’s acquaintances in general always struck me as several quarts short of an oil change, but even they weren’t crazy enough to write notes about him on the bottom of a table then throw it away. And besides, he was likely to know if they had. Of course, perhaps it was like Mr. Lincoln. I was fairly sure there were several other Bens around town. Still, what were the odds?

Squinting at the letter, I thought it might say
Rocky
. Which was plain nuts, because the table wasn’t. After the first three words, though, it was easier to read. It did not pertain to the Lincoln assassination—more was the pity, as I was sure that if it had, it would add a lot of value to the piece. Instead it seemed to be refinishing notes. Or identifying notes. As such they struck me as a little crazy. The first sentence was doubtful, the second improbable, and the third plain crazy.

It said:
Dark cherry. Hand carved. Colonial.

I looked at the little table and frowned. Could it be dark cherry? Hell, for all I knew it could be anything.
What I could see of the bottom, the only part free of paint, was a dark wood, and it had marks, like it had been sawn and someone hadn’t bothered to sand under here. Which wasn’t rare in old pieces or shoddy ones. Why waste labor on a part that would never be seen, after all?

But that rough surface had clearly collected dust and grime, and if someone could see that it was cherry through all this, they were better than I. Heck, they were better than any normal human being and should try to stay away from Kryptonite just in case.

I turned the table over again and ran my hand over the very edge, which was what had convinced me it was, if nothing else, real wood. In the Dumpster, it had seemed to me like a piecrust edging. Here, in the cold light of day spilling through the little windows, it was a little sort of irregularity on the borders. Could be carving. Or it could be . . . oh, I don’t know. A previous owner had had a dog with a habit of chewing and a methodical type of disposition?

I frowned at it. Then I pulled out the little drawer in the front. It fit funny and I immediately realized why. Whoever had painted this, at least one of the times it had been painted, had painted around the drawer and let the paint drip on the sides to form an uneven, ridgy surface. I was fairly sure the topmost white coat was not the only one. It never was. It seemed to me that all decades, but especially the sixties, had been populated with people who—faced with any piece of furniture—could think of nothing better than to paint it, inexpertly and with half-dried paint and brushes missing most of their bristles.

I pulled the drawer out carefully. The back of it was bare, and clean enough to let me see the joining, which was all wood. No nails, no rivets. No staples. The fact that the joining was done in such a way that it did not appear to be glued, either, spoke of an old piece. More to the point, there were only three tenons, irregularly sized and
clearly hand cut. I set the drawer down slowly on the table. My hands were shaking. Hand cut. The real thing, not a fake. That meant . . . seventeen hundreds. I ran my nail wonderingly around the edge of the top, feeling the indentations.

They might have been left by someone’s teething puppy, or perhaps someone’s nail file, but it didn’t feel like it. Of course, the table being in good condition underneath the thick layer of paint would make it much easier to actually get good money for it.

I grabbed my mineral spirits and wood alcohol and one of the empty cans I kept around for mixing. A small can, because unless I was seriously wrong, this thing was going to prove to have at least ten coats of paint and might end up taking lye to remove. I didn’t like to use lye for many, many reasons, one of which was that I lived in fear of falling in it—as stupid as it might be. But then, when I had a dishwasher—a luxury fortunately absent from my rented apartment—I lived in fear of somehow tripping over my own feet and spearing myself on the knives, so I always set the knives in point down. But there were other reasons. Lye is really strong medicine. Something perhaps to use on a piece of dubious provenance covered in way too much paint, but not on something like this little table, which might—just might—be a true colonial piece. Lye raises the grain and stains the wood a dark brown. You need to apply vinegar to stop it from continuing to pulp and eventually digest the wood of the piece itself, and it—on a more basic level—gave me the creeps.

Eventually I would probably end up using the heat gun and the fine point of the vicious tool on this table, taking it slowly and patiently. But right now I just wanted to know what the indentations were—which meant removing enough paint to see the shape underneath. And for that, provided I didn’t run into polyurethane, paint remover
mixed with wood alcohol and thickened with a little cornstarch so it didn’t evaporate quite so quickly would be fine.

Before I started, I opened the windows to the maximum to get cross-ventilation, and I turned on my floor fan, pointed away from the piece. Right now, the worst it would do to the piece was dry out the mixture and make it impossible for me to work with it. Most of the time, though, having the fan turned toward me would blow tiny bits of dust and fuzz onto a drying piece. So the fan was always pointed away from me.

I set some of the mixture on the very edge of the wood and waited. Waiting is always something I have a huge problem with. I like to be fiddling, playing, or pushing at things, not just waiting for chemicals to do their own thing.

Looking toward the box of lye on the shelf with some longing, I decided instead to fiddle. Fiddling consumes a lot of time I call working. I understand that other people do things like organizing the pens and pencils in their offices, polishing the phone, or whatever. In my line of business, pencils and pens and such were not really a big deal, except for my lovely little yellow flat pencil. So I did the equivalent. I rearranged my cans and flasks, set the various products on the shelf in a neat row, then came back and tested the white paint with the edge of the vicious tool. Nothing. I applied a bit more of the magic mixture and went back to—this time—rearrange the various parts of the dresser, identifying the outer shell and the drawers and looking at the points where things attached.

The dresser wasn’t half as good a piece as the table—unless I was seriously wrong, which was entirely possible. I figured it for an early nineteenth-century import from France, though where the marks would be was a question, considering the whole thing had fallen apart and also
looked—to be bluntly honest—like it had been soaked, then dried, until it seemed much like driftwood, bleached and dried out.

I started fiddling with getting a drawer together and picked with my nail at the cracked, splintered veneer in the front. It looked like some heavily figured wood, but at this point not necessarily something I could identify.

My plan for it was to do the best restoration job I could, but not break my heart over it. It was a relatively good piece, but with the resources I had it was never going to be restored to its former glory, certainly not in the way to satisfy a connoisseur. The best I could do for it was make it showy and somewhat evocative of what it had set out to be. And then it would probably fetch a good enough price.

I’d done that to the desk and small dresser sitting in the corner, ready to go up at Shabby Chic. If I could make it to Denver in my car—which, considering the state of my car, was highly unlikely.

I returned to the table and tested the edge of the paint with the pointy end of the vicious tool. It peeled back the white layer, revealing a bright green layer underneath. Right. As per script. After all, almost every piece had one green layer. Sometimes several. The only question, really, was whether the metallic layer would be over or under it, and whether it would be gold or silver. I’d stripped a little carved bookcase—of at least as early a vintage as that little table, with a carved frieze of fleur de lis—that had thirty-six coats of paint. Thirty-six. One had to wonder what was going through people’s minds. At least I did wonder. Didn’t anyone ever get curious about what was under all that paint?

What was under it, in that case, was lovely, solid golden oak and a whole lot of hand carving. That had been a good piece, bought for twenty dollars at a garage sale and sold for two thousand at Shabby Chic.

I applied another layer of the stripper and went back to fuss around with the dresser again. After a while I came back and pulled off the green layer. Revealing another green one. Right, then. That was just fine, wasn’t it?

I grabbed a notebook, went to the dresser, and made notes. Part of it was a shopping list. I was going to need a sheet or two of veneer, some of which I didn’t even think was available, or not at prices I could pay. On closer inspection, the veneer was almost certainly burled walnut, and there was no way I could match that, certainly not on my budget. Unless I found a trash piece I could cannibalize—but I was unlikely to find something large enough, as I’d need to replace entire drawer fronts.

Just in case, and because I believe that wishful thinking sometimes forces things to happen, I wrote down the wish for a trash piece with a relatively sound and large slab of burled walnut veneer. Who knew, pigs might fly and I might get my veneer. Failing that, I’d get walnut and work it with gel stain to match the pattern on the sound pieces. Then there was the hardware. The one pull left on a single drawer front was wooden and circular, of that type that you find at every hardware store. Not only had it almost certainly not come with the dresser originally, but I would bet my firstborn and all the bugs he could swallow in a year that it had been put in as a pull of last resort the last time the dresser had been whole—and judging from its appearance, doing duty as a hardware or handyman storage space in some old barn. The dead giveaway didn’t require higher intelligence than your average cat’s. There were two holes and only one pull.