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Cont'd from the previous week. Sorry, no recaps.
I think you have a reasonably good idea that Daisy was not particularly respectful of the line that should not be crossed in practical jokes. When I told my friend, Guy, the trick she played on me, I admitted to being sore about it--it rankled me that she had been so cavalier about something I considered important. In retrospect, I was probably a little too sensitive about the joke, but it also rankled that Daisy did not see anything other than how funny her jokes were, whether they were on me or anyone else. Guy had recently retired after selling his ad agency and had time on his hands and was looking for fun things to do. One of them was to build a house in Bedford, NY about which he wrote the history of before he started to build. He was also writing novels and continuing to work with clients whose projects he considered interesting such as murder mystery weekends at Mohonk Mountain Resort in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. He loved plot twists and he loved good narratives and once I had told him about Daisy, he put his mind to turning the tables on her.
Daisy was a collector of dog collars, I don't know how she got into this pastime, but they are fairly decorative and, oddly enough, I purchased one in the shop of a friend of mine in the U.K. and had it laying around because it was made well, the brass was highly polished, and I figured I could sell it as a small in a fair. (The vast majority of dog collars are Victorian and yet there are some from the 18th century. When the dog collar for one of Bonnie Prince Charlie's pets came up at auction, Daisy told a silver dealer to just "buy" it. It made close to $50,000 and Daisy told me she had no idea the dealer would go so high in the bidding. Fortunately her dealer friend was the underbidder. That was pure Daisy, as well.) In any case, I never showed my collar to Daisy probably because, first and foremost, I am a furniture dealer and such items, known as "smalls" are useful for engaging conversation at fairs. Smalls are hard to find and I tend to save them for fairs so I left the dog collar at home. When I told Guy about Daisy's fetish, he looked at me and said, "I can figure out a way of getting back at Daisy." and when I showed him the collar I purchased, he looked at it and added, "this is the bait". I had no idea what he was thinking of--Guy was Guy--he loved creating realities and so he was about to create one for Daisy.
A couple of days later, Guy came to my shop and explained just what he was planning. The cast of characters, he explained, would be broad as it allowed him to puff up the narrative and make it too opaque to get a grasp on that it was all fiction. In the center of the action was an elderly couple that had worked for the Crown in the UK all their lives and who'd had access to all sorts of old collars from the royal hounds and which ultimately inspired the couple to create a unique collection of dog collars that was so comprehensive that an un-named museum in Southern California was interested in purchasing the entire collection and then sell it. Of course, the elderly couple did not want to sell. The genius was in the fact that Guy's wife, Mindy Papp, knew a dealer in Putney whose cousin was a brass dealer that Daisy knew and had dealings with so that the story of the alleged elderly couple could leak to Daisy and not involve me.. Naturally, this took a few months to set into motion, but when Daisy heard from the brass dealer that this collection existed, she was so intrigued, that she told me, independently, about this collection and how she was going to try and go see it in London some time. I was completely amazed at how Guy had worked all this out and yet, after three or four months, the hook was baited and the fish was nibbling.
To be cont'd. next week-the denouement.
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