Crimes by Moonlight

Small Change by Margaret Maron

I’m lying on the backward-facing seat of an SUV that is being driven much too fast, and I am rigid with apprehension. One good swerve and I could roll off the seat and bang against the rear window and then what? Would I break something crucial? Be maimed for life?

When I laid a trap to catch the thief that was ripping off my dad’s antique store, I never dreamed I’d get trapped, too.

At least we aren’t headed out of town. Not yet anyhow. I catch glimpses of passing street signs, but the names are unfamiliar. The van makes a final turn and coasts to a stop, then I hear a squeal of hinges. We pass through a set of steel gates and move slowly down what looks like an alley lined in garage doors.

Of course! A self-storage facility. Where else to stash stolen antiques?

Moments later, the SUV backs up to one of the units and comes to a full stop. I hear the doors open and shut, and a woman rolls up the door on the storage unit and starts unloading. To my intense disappointment, I don’t recognize her before she drapes a padded blanket over me.

“Careful!” a low voice warns from behind me. Man? Woman? I can’t tell.

At least I’m being handled gently. They ease me down onto the concrete floor. I can’t see through the blanket, and I’m starting to feel claustrophobic. What would they do if I suddenly screamed? I’m too scared to find out.

In no time at all, I hear the door roll down, and the van drives away.

I immediately concentrate all my will to fight my way out of that blanket. It’s pitch-black here and cold, cold. I feel along the edges of the door. If there’s a way to release the lock from inside, I can’t find it. I’m thirteen years old. Way too old to start bawling like a baby, even if I am freezing. Nothing for it but to burrow back into that padded blanket and remember how I wound up in this fix…

I probably wouldn’t be here if my mother hadn’t been struck by lightning when I was three. It was a bolt out of the blue. Literally. No chance to take cover or escape.

Dad’s mom came to live with us, but when she died five years later, Dad decided I was old enough to do without a babysitter. Every morning since then he pours us each a bowl of cereal and drops me off at school with lunch money. After school, I walk the eight blocks to his antique store where I do my homework, then read or help out.

Supper is usually a bowl of canned soup or the evening special at a nearby restaurant. Back at the house, Dad reads one of the many auction catalogs he gets in the mail, or we watch Antiques Roadshow and the History Channel. We’re both in our beds by nine o’clock. At least he is. Lately, I’ve been sneaking back downstairs and out into the backyard to test the limits of what I can do.

He’s a rather absentminded father, a kindly man more interested in the past than the present. He doesn’t care about my As in math or science as long as I make at least a C in history and know that a Chippendale is a desirable piece of furniture and not a desirable male stripper.

Friends? Hey, I’ve got friends.

Lots of friends.

Okay, okay, maybe not close friends. My classmates like me well enough though. I get asked to all the birthday parties, despite being something of a loner. I’m pretty good with a computer, but I don’t do Facebook. I don’t text or Twitter either, so no one’s ever claimed me as her best friend. I don’t mind. Honest. When I was a little kid, the shop was more fun than any playdate, and as long as I was careful and put everything back where it belonged, Dad used to let me amuse myself with the antique toys or the cases of estate jewelry.

In short, I was as normal-or what passes for normal-as any other little girl until the hormones kicked in last spring and I suddenly “became a woman,” as our gym teacher put it. It was not as huge a trauma for me as for some of my older classmates who had to endure sniggers and crude remarks from gorky boys whose voices were cracking like peanut brittle. Mrs. Kim had thoroughly explained what was going to happen to us and I had watched most of the girls in my class become women before it happened to me, so I was prepared. I had begun to wear a small bra, and I had a package of sanitary pads stashed in the back of the linen closet.

Unfortunately, my first period began during the last period of school one warm spring day. Even more unfortunately, I was wearing white clam diggers. As soon as I walked out of the classroom and headed down the sidewalk toward the store, it was as if there were a gang of feral dogs on my trail-three pimply faced boys who jeered and called, “Hey, Laurel! What’d you do? Sit down in ketchup?” and “Oooh, Laurel! Hurt yourself? Want us to call a doctor?”

One of them pulled out his cell phone to take pictures of my backside.

Embarrassed and humiliated, I began to run, which of course only encouraged them. The store seemed miles away, and as I darted around a corner, the only hiding place in sight was a thick hedge of azalea bushes in full bloom. Even as I dived into them and buried myself among the leafy branches, I knew it was a mistake. With nowhere else to look, they would surely zero in on the head-high azaleas.

“Hey! Where’d she go?” I heard one of the panting boys ask when he turned the corner and saw the empty sidewalk ahead.

“There’s her book bag,” said another. “She must be in the bushes.”

I froze as they pushed aside the flowering twigs. One acne-inflamed face was so close to mine, I could have spit on it, yet he didn’t seem to see me.

“What do you boys think you’re doing?” a woman suddenly screeched from her doorway. “Is that you, Thomas Bertram? You break any of my bushes, and I’m calling your mother.”

Tommy’s mother is built like a Humvee, and it’s rumored that she keeps a leather strap hanging in her kitchen. The speed with which Tommy took off down the sidewalk behind his friends makes me believe the rumors.

When the woman walked out into her yard, I wanted to run, too, but every instinct told me to stay still, don’t move. To my surprise, the woman didn’t seem to see me either. Muttering to herself about destructive kids today, she pushed aside the twigs and azalea flowers to look for damage. Her frown deepened. “That’s odd,” she said. “I don’t remember a white azalea here.”

I winced as she put out her hand to me and plucked a flower. It felt as if she had pulled out some of my hair, but I managed not to yelp.

When she walked away, I tried to leave, but I couldn’t move. To my horror, I was no longer flesh and blood. My fingers were leafy twigs. My curly hair, ruffled white flowers. I tried to scream, but I had no voice. No mouth. No larynx.

Eventually, panic gave way to despair. The legend of Daphne and Apollo was familiar to me because of my name: Daphne had turned into a laurel tree to escape being raped by a horny god whereas I, Laurel Hudson, had changed into an azalea to escape that bunch of adolescent jackals. But Daphne had wanted to become a tree while I-?

I suddenly realized that yeah, okay, when I dived into this clump of bushes, I did want to merge with them and disappear. There was nothing in the legend to suggest that Daphne ever regretted becoming a laurel tree and wanted to be human again, but if I wanted it as desperately as I’d wanted to hide-?

“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 stunned by what had happened to me, but I was still a kid, and over the next three days, I almost convinced myself that I had imagined it all.

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 cranny, I suddenly heard the voice of doom from the front of the store.

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.

“They took your candlesticks and left the sterling toast rack that was sitting right beside it?” said Jane. “Weird.”

“Indeed,” Ms. Loring said crisply. “Especially since the toast rack is Georgian and worth five times the candlesticks.”

Dad started listing the Chinese things on eBay in the middle of January, three new dealers joined the store in February, and the shop-lifting began soon after that.

IT has to be one of those three, I think as my eyes adjust to the darkness. Is it coincidence, or did they suddenly show up because they saw those Chinese things on eBay and thought they could come clean us out? I see a paper-thin line of light where the door doesn’t fit the sill completely. No real help. There’s nothing I can change into that would let me move through such a narrow opening. As the March chill penetrates my prison, I move farther away from the cold metal roll-up door and fumble around till I find a second padded blanket to insulate me from the concrete floor while I think about those new dealers.

Thomas Fong is from San Francisco. Late forties. Married, though we’ve never seen his wife. With that name, you’d expect someone small, dark, and inscrutable. You’d be wrong. He’s tall, blue-eyed, and four generations removed from the mainland, but his Chinese roots led him to an appreciation of classical Chinese antiques, and he specializes in decorative pieces of Asian origin. “Unfortunately, they’re mostly things that were made for export and not very old,” he told me. “Post- 1945.” Very nosy. Forever trying to get a look inside the storage room. Even though he’s not there every day, he always seems to be around when I photograph a new batch of items.

Next comes Kendall Loring from Detroit. Mid-thirties. Still single. Skinny. Brown hair that’s curlier than mine, and she’s even nosier than Mr. Fong. First day in the door, she’s asking questions about school and who my friends are and what my mom was like and if I think Dad will ever get married again. Sort of cute, but way too young for Dad. If I were on Facebook, she’d probably be banging at the electronic door begging to be my friend. Says she doesn’t like Chinese arts and deals only in estate jewelry and silver. Could she have been the second person in the van? Maybe her candlesticks weren’t really stolen. Maybe that was to keep us from suspecting her when other things disappeared.

Last is a youngish widow from New York City. Neva Earle. Forty and fighting it. Friendly enough, but more reserved than either Fong or Loring. Her space is an eclectic mix of porcelain and ceramics, everything from Staffordshire dogs to beautiful Dresden plates. Would she-Omigod, what’s that noise?

It sounds almost like someone’s touching a sheet of bubble wrap. Mice? Rats? I squint through the gloom, but it’s too dark to see anything distinctly. I flounce my blanket to flush whatever creature it is and to get a fix on its location, but all is silent again. “Nerves,” I mutter to myself. Eventually I relax and go back to analyzing the situation.

DESPITE all our care in watching our customers like a hawk, occasional small items continued to walk off. Jane started asking customers to leave their tote bags at the front counter when she was covering the store for Dad, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“It’ll look like we don’t trust them,” he said.

“We don’t,” Jane and I chorused.

Things finally came to a head last week. My fault. We keep the storeroom locked, of course, but once an item’s been listed online, I’m not as careful as I should be about putting it back under lock and key. When Dad went to crate up a lacquered chest that had sold for well over its $2000 reserve, it was gone. I had covered it with an old patchwork quilt and left it on the floor beside the table I use as a staging platform for my camera. Instead of the Chinese chest, the patchwork quilt covered a plain oak chest of our own that was worth only a fraction of the other.

The police came and poked around, but what could they do? No door had been forced, and taking fingerprints in such a public place would have been useless. “We’ll file an incident report so you can put in an insurance claim,” they told Dad, “but you might want to change your locks. Looks like an inside job by someone with a key.”

“Well, that’s stupid,” I told Dad when they were gone. “You and Jane have the only keys, and Jane hasn’t been in since I left the chest out.”

“Of course, it wasn’t Jane,” said Dad. “I hate to say it, but I’m afraid it must be one of the new people. All three of them restocked their booths this week, so they were back and forth with dollies. If you could remember when you last saw the chest-?”

But I couldn’t. This was Thursday. I knew it was there last Saturday morning because a customer had been interested in the quilt until she realized that one end of it had been damaged in a fire, but the chest could have been taken twenty minutes later, and who would notice?

Dad was due to be out of town all weekend for an antique fair. I had finally convinced him that I was old enough to stay home alone, but as soon as he left Friday morning, I ditched school and headed for the shop.

Jane was behind the counter and surprised to see me. “No school?”

“Teacher workday,” I said glibly. “I’m going to take pictures of another box of stuff in the storeroom.”

No sooner had I unlocked the door and switched on the light inside than Mr. Fong was right there at my elbow. He insisted on helping me carry things out to my tabletop photography studio. This time, I didn’t discourage him. He wasn’t particularly interested in a tall ceramic statue of a goddess-“Early twentieth century, made for export and a dime a dozen,” he said dismissively-but a Ming dynasty vase with a scaly blue dragon prancing around the flared bowl really made him salivate.

“Lovely,” said Neva Earle on her way in with a heavy box of English stoneware strapped to her dolly. She held a Blue Willow platter next to the vase and said ruefully, “You can certainly see the difference in quality, can’t you?”

“I don’t know,” said Martha Cook. “I have a weakness for Blue Willow. You ought to let me display that platter for you on one of my sideboards.”

They walked away together, and a customer called Mr. Fong back to his booth to discuss a Korean screen.

I finished photographing the Ming vase and moved on to the ceramic goddess. She might not be valuable, but her serene face, half the size of my own, appealed to me, and I took several pictures of her from all angles.

“You have a nice touch with the camera,” said Kendall Loring, who had suddenly appeared from nowhere. “I checked out your website. Good crisp pictures.”

“Thanks,” I muttered.

“I guess you got your eye for form from your dad,” she said. “What about your mom? Was she a photographer, too?”

I shrugged. “Dad never said, Ms. Loring.”

“Please. Call me Kendall. You don’t look much like him, so I guess you must take after her.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “She didn’t like to have her picture taken.”

“No pictures at all?”

“Just a snapshot he took when she wasn’t expecting it,” I said grudgingly.

“Was she as pretty as you?”

Oh please, I thought to myself.

“Does it still hurt for him to talk about her?”

God, she was nosy! But her questions made me realize how little I knew about my mother. Could she have been a shape-shifter, too? Even though he never brought her up, Dad certainly answered every question I’d ever thought to ask. They had met in college. The only child of two only children, her father died when she was in college and her mother three years later. As the only grandchild on both sides of her family, she had inherited a ton of beautiful old pieces, which is how she and Dad started the store. No other family that he’d ever heard about. But where she was born? Her maiden name? Her favorite songs and movies? I’d never thought to ask. And there was no way I could say, “Hey, Dad, Mom ever change into a rocking chair when you weren’t looking?”

Not that I was going to tell Ms. Call-Me-Kendall Loring any of this. I made a big show of being absorbed in my work, and she eventually took the hint and went on back to her booth.

Leaving the Ming vase on the table, I shoved the ceramic goddess back into the storeroom and locked the door.

Behind the counter, Jane was absorbed in pulling up type fonts on the computer. As a freelance artist, she mixed aesthetic commissions with commercial ones and was always looking for ideas. She told me she hadn’t sold a thing since Christmas except for a Valentine poster, so money was tight for her. I saw that she was totally oblivious to me, and no one else was around. Two seconds later, I was a copy of the ceramic goddess.

Talk about boring. I watched all day, but the only time it got halfway interesting was when Mr. Fong paused to admire the vase again and asked Jane if I’d meant to leave it out like that. “Isn’t Laurel afraid someone will walk off with it?”

Jane had missed our earlier comments about the worth of the vase and gave an indifferent shrug. “She’ll probably come back and put it away.”

Shortly before closing time, I shifted back into my own shape.

“Oh, there you are,” said Jane. She closed her sketchbook, logged off the computer, and began totaling up the day’s meager receipts. “I thought you were going to help me out on the counter.”

“Sorry,” I said, making a dash for the restroom. Although I could somehow see and hear in my changed state, I didn’t feel hunger, thirst, or any other bodily needs. The instant I changed back, though, my bladder felt like it was going to pop and I was ravenously hungry.

Kendall Loring was on her way out as I helped Jane lock up. I hadn’t realized she was still in the store.

As she pulled on her gloves and tightened a blue wool scarf around her neck, she gave me a hopeful smile and said, “Could I buy you supper?”

“Why thanks, I’d love that,” said Jane. She was busy setting the burglar alarm and didn’t realize the invitation was meant for me alone.

A blast of icy March wind stung my cheeks when we stepped outside and waited for Jane to turn the key in the lock. I managed a fake smile of regret. “That’s awfully nice of you, Ms. Loring, but I have to read a book for a school report. Thanks anyhow. You and Jane have fun.”

Sitting here in my dark, icy prison, the memory of her sour look gives me my first smile since I’d been locked in.

“YOU missed a good meal, Laurel,” Jane said when I got to the store this morning. “Best steak I’ve had in ages. And Kendall ’s so interesting to talk to. We must have rattled on for two hours.”

Didn’t take a genius to know who did the rattling. By the time their dinner was over, Kendall Loring had probably heard everything Jane knows about Dad and me.

Once I’d finished my usual Saturday morning chores, I put the Ming vase back on my photography table and fiddled with the camera some more. When I was sure that all the dealers in the store knew the vase was there, I draped an old tablecloth over it to look as if I was trying to disguise it. Because Saturday is our busiest day, it was almost noon before I found a safe time to shift into the shape of that ceramic goddess. At least it was more interesting than yesterday. More people in and out. Martha Cook sold a nice Sheraton-style china cabinet, and Jimmy Weston finally unloaded a large gilt-framed mirror that he’d been switching from store to store for several months.

Thomas Fong came by to lift the cloth on the vase and run his hand over it enviously.

“Careful you don’t rub the scales off that dragon,” Neva Earle teased as she passed him on her way out of the store.

At one point, I thought I had spotted a shoplifter when a woman took a needlepoint cushion from a nearby stand while Jane was away from the counter and brazenly walked out of the store with it. She brought it right back, though, and I realized that she had a swatch of upholstery in her other hand and had merely wanted to see if the two colors matched in natural light.

I was so busy watching her that I didn’t realize that someone had approached from the other side until a heavy cloth was thrown over me. A moment later I was wheeled out to the sidewalk on a dolly and shoved into the back of the van. The cloth slipped enough for me to see a pair of female hands cushion the Ming vase in a cardboard box beside me, and that was it, until those same hands unloaded me at the storage facility and locked me inside.

I must have slept because that thin line of light beneath the door is even thinner now. Sunset, and I still haven’t come up with a way out of this predicament.

“I could turn into water,” I mutter aloud to myself. “Run under the sill and onto the pavement.”

Like a whispered thought came a soft “No!”

My own subconscious telling me what I want to hear? I’ve been afraid to try liquids. Too amorphous. What if couldn’t hold it together and soaked into the ground? What if there’s a storm drain right outside this door, and I’m swept down to lose my identity in dirty water before all of me seeps past the sill?

A moment later, I hear a vehicle stop outside and voices. A key turns in the lock. Before the door rolls up, I drop my blankets, push my way deeper into the locker, and shift into the shape of a cardboard box tall enough to see over the other boxes.

As light floods in, I see for the first time, an upright, five-foot-tall wooden bear identical to one in the store. They must have stolen it when they took me. I focus my attention on the two women. They’re silhouetted against the sunset, and I can’t immediately make out their faces.

“Where’s the goddess?” one of them says, taking a step closer.

“I left it right there,” says the other one.

“You idiot! You brought that stupid bear.”

The other starts to protest when suddenly the bear gives a tremendous roar. To their horror, it lurches forward and swipes its claws at the woman in front.

Terrified, both women bolt screaming down the alleyway.

The bear drops to all fours, growls menacingly, then stops and turns toward me. I concentrate on being cardboard. I think cardboard thoughts and try to give off a cardboard smell.

The bear laughs and says. “It’s okay, Laurel. You can come out now.”

A shimmer of fur, and there’s Kendall Loring.

I stare at her, stupefied, and slowly shift into my own shape.

“I see you didn’t think to wear a coat either,” she says. “Come on. Let’s see if they left a cell phone in the car.”

I’m too stunned to argue and just follow her meekly out to the car, where we find a purse and a cell phone. When the women get up the nerve to return, we’re locked inside the SUV with the heater going, and Kendall ’s called the police. They bang on the windows and threaten us with seven kinds of hurt until a police cruiser pulls up outside the gate and an agile young patrol officer climbs over the gate and demands to know what’s going on.

Neva Earle tries to bluster her way out of it, but she and her accomplice sound crazy when they start raving about a bear, and besides, I’ve identified the lacquered chest that she stole from the store last week.

The police take us down to the station to sort it all out. Kendall tells a convincing story of how we saw them take the Ming dynasty vase from the store and followed them. They don’t think to ask where Kendall ’s car is or how we got past the locked gate. The vase and the chest are enough for them to charge Neva Earle and her partner, and the nice young patrol officer drives us both to Kendall ’s apartment.

That’s where I learn that she’s my cousin. My grandmother actually had two daughters, not one as I’ve been told.

“My mom was a shape-shifter, too,” Kendall says, “only our grandparents were horrified and so scared of her that she ran away from home when she was sixteen. Your mom was only four at the time, and maybe they never told her she had an older sister. When I finally got Mother to tell me her real name, her parents were dead, and no one knew what happened to your mom. One of the neighbors thought she’d married a man named Hudson. Do you know how many Hudsons there are?”

I shake my head.

“Thousands,” she says grimly. “From Alaska to Florida. Two years ago, though, Mother was on eBay looking at jewelry for our store in Detroit, and she spotted this.”

She hands me an oval cameo brooch, set in gold and rimmed with garnets. White on pink, it’s carved with the profiles of three women. Nothing I’d ever wear, I had assured my dad when I asked if I could put it on eBay along with some other pieces of antique jewelry. I think it fetched around $300.

“It was my grandmother’s,” I say.

“I know. My mom recognized it.”

“You came here because of a brooch?”

“Mother’s gone,” she says simply. “I suppose you could say she drowned. She was dying of cancer, and last summer she just merged into Lake Michigan. I have no other family.”

She won’t beg. I can see that.

“Okay,” I say at last. “But you have to teach me how to do animals. I can’t keep myself from wilting when I’m a plant, so I’ve been afraid to try a living form.”

She laughs and shifts into the shape of a large golden retriever and almost licks me to death before I can make her stop.

OH, and the shoplifter? The next time Jane covered for Dad, I said, “I’m sorry you’re having a rough time right now, Jane, but you can’t steal any more money, okay?”

See, the stolen items were portable, but they were also so cheap that most customers wouldn’t bother with a credit card. On Saturday morning, I watched a woman pay cash for a Blue Willow cup and saucer from Neva Earle’s booth. Jane pointed out a tiny chip on the underside of the saucer and told her it was being sold “as is,” meaning it could not be returned. Then she simply pocketed the cash.

I suppose I should have had her fired or arrested, but she’s been around since I was a baby. Besides, business is starting to pick up again, so Dad has her working more hours, and she’s gradually paying back what she stole.

Dad’s as absentminded as ever, but he’s noticed that Kendall and I are friends.

I’m still not totally convinced that Kendall ’s interested only in me and not Dad, too, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. A cousin’s one thing. A shape-shifting stepmom’s quite another.

Oh, and last week? I changed into a tiger and scared Tommy Bertram so bad he wet his pants.

Wait’ll he sees my dragon.