The Big Steal

The Big Steal

Also by Emyl Jenkins
STEALING WITH STYLE

A STERLING GLASS MYSTERY

Emyl Jenkins

Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of
WORKMAN PUBLISHING
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014

© 2009 by Emyl Jenkins. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.
Design by Anne Winslow.

This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Excerpt on p. vii from “An Importer,”
The Poetry of Robert Frost
, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1947, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 1975 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Excerpt on p. 337 from “The Museum” from
Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box
by Elizabeth Bishop, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn. Copyright © 2006 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Introduction copyright © 2006 by Alice Quinn. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Furniture illustrations on pp. 345 – 49, 351 by Carol Roper, Literati Design.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jenkins, Emyl.

The big steal / by Emyl Jenkins.—1st ed.
    p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-446-2
1. Women detectives—Virginia—Fiction. 2. Appraisers—Fiction.
3. Virginia—Fiction. 4. Antiques—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3610.E544B54 2009
813′.6—dc22

2009011704

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition

In memory of three gentlemen who,
like the fine antiques they loved, were priceless
,

Sam Pennington, watchdog journalist
Robert Sack, dealer extraordinaire
Bob Volpe, art cop

And for my three priceless grandsons,
Benjamin, Matthew, and Levi

Mrs. Someone's been to Asia.
What she brought back would amaze ye,
Bamboos, ivories, jades, and lacquers …

—R
OBERT
F
ROST
, “An Importer”

The Big Steal

Dear Antiques Expert: My family has always prized a green and yellow pottery Tang horse given to our grandfather by an official of the Indonesian government in the 1950s. Could it really be valuable, or is its worth just a family myth?

 

Ever since grave robbers and archaeologists began unearthing the colorful pottery horses buried in the tombs of imperial rulers and wealthy Chinese during the Tang Dynasty (618 – 907), collectors have coveted them. But reproduction Tang horses have also been around for generations. Though an expert will have to determine your horse's age and origin, if it is authentic and in good condition, then its value could be many thousands of dollars. In 2003, a pair of extraordinarily rare Tang horses sold for $1.57 million.

T
HERE
I
WAS
, shivering from head to toe, searching for family pictures and records left behind by Mazie and Hoyt Wyndfield. They hadn't had any children of their own to sort through their things after their deaths several years ago, which partly explains why, in the dead of winter, I was up in the attic of this place called Wynderly, digging through their lives. Once
Wynderly had been a gracious home. Now it was a museum teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

Unlike the stately eighteenth-century Georgian plantations Virginia is known for, Wynderly was a sprawling place, reminiscent of a French chateau crossed with an English manor house. Rooms and wings jutted out here and there, as if some tipsy architect had thrown his plans up in the air and built rooms wherever the blueprints had landed. With its peaked turrets and slanting gables, soaring towers and stone ledges, Wynderly's message was loud and clear: Look at me. This is how rich we are; how rich are you?

Its vast attic, so large it could house three families with room to spare, mirrored the helter-skelter, multilayered house beneath. Every inch was filled with furniture, garden ornaments, boxes, books, paintings, trunks. I had begun with the boxes and trunks.

The first two I opened were filled with beautiful vintage clothing, which brought to mind the question about a 1950s Christian Dior evening dress I'd recently answered in my syndicated antiques column. But there was no time to think about that now, or to finger the lace negligees and slinky satin gowns. I was searching for papers, receipts, diaries—anything that would tell me more about the opulent objects in the house below.

It had started when Matt Yardley asked if I was available to take on an appraisal in Orange County. My brain had zipped into overdrive. Orange County, California, in the middle of February? Who wouldn't jump at the chance? With my son Ketch and daughter Lily now grown, and without a husband
to tend to, I could close the door and walk out with a clear conscience.

Anyway I liked being able to say yes to Matt. Ever since I'd met him when working for Babson and Michael, the New York insurance company, I had hoped he'd send another job my way. It was only after I said yes that I bothered to ask questions. That's when I learned he was speaking of Orange County, Virginia, a three-plus-hour drive down lonely back roads, instead of a five- or six-hour flight from my home in Leemont, Virginia. But it was too late. I had given my word.

There had been an unsolved burglary at Wynderly, and some items left behind had been broken during the theft. But because there were no signs of a break-in, and the police had no obvious suspects, a serious cloud hung over the whole situation. In addition, the most recent appraisal of the items at Wynderly was over twenty years old and totally out of date.

“The question is whether or not we should pay the full amount they're asking for the damaged and missing items,” Matt had said. He was right to be cautious. As with stocks and bonds, the value of antiques fluctuates over time. Matt wanted me to assess the current value of the broken pieces and then to see what I could find out about the stolen objects. But it wasn't until my second day at Wynderly that I was able to escape the clutches of the museum's curator, Michelle Hendrix, for time alone in the attic.

I put the boxes of clothing aside and reached for a trunk. I was lifting out a photograph album when a picture fell from between its pages. Picking it up, I noticed faint writing on the back: “Mazie and Hoyt. Wynderly. Spring 1924.”

Mazie's jet-black hair was pulled straight back at the nape of her long, pearl-white neck, which appeared even paler in the black and white picture. Hoyt Wyndfield wore a crisp linen jacket, white shoes, and fully pleated pants held up high by a shiny dark belt. Wynderly, towering behind them, had finally been completed. Hoyt and Mazie held hands, yet stood apart, as if to give the camera a wider, clearer shot of their home. Though scaffolding was still in place and muddy earth was mounded high around its foundation, I could almost feel their love for the place.

Matt Yardley had told me the Wyndfields named the house Wynderly after themselves and the windblown hills at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia where it was built. The name seemed perfect; it made me think of Biltmore, Stan Hewett, and San Simeon—other houses built by that rarified generation with the money, style, and taste to erect monuments to themselves. Their owners had traveled the world over and returned home with treasures to fill every high-ceilinged room.

Wynderly and its objects had survived the ravages of time, but Hoyt and Mazie's fortune had not. With the fate of the house and its objects in doubt, Matt Yardley knew to be suspicious of the validity of the insurance claim. I had been at Wynderly for only a day and a half, and I was beginning to have a few questions of my own.

Good appraisers are, by nature, detectives. I've always said it's because we see so
many
fakes and frauds—both the inanimate and the two-legged variety—that we never take anything, or anyone, at face value. Once upon a time I was as innocent as the next person. I loved antiques for all the right
reasons—beauty, craftsmanship, and especially the memories our treasures hold.

Then I learned how some corrupt silversmith had fused eighteenth-century English hallmarks on the bottoms of Colonial Williamsburg reproduction silver pitchers, and how Granny's beautiful eighteenth-century console table had really been made by a sly forger in the 1920s, not Mr. Chippendale himself. It had forever changed the way I looked at everything.

During my first tour of Wynderly, a couple of pieces sent up red flags, like when I saw the Tang horses. Something about them wasn't right.

Authentic seventh- or eighth-century pottery horses made in China as tomb accessories are rare indeed, as is the pocketbook that can afford one. And over the years I'd been shown two or three dozen Tang horses thought by their owners to be the real thing worth tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars. But instead of being several centuries old, their horses were no more than fifty or a hundred years old, and seldom worth more than a couple hundred dollars.

Wynderly's deep green horses, their heads bowed and their tails arched, had instantly given me pause. It didn't make sense. Wynderly had been open to the public for years. Every publication from
Art & Antiques
to
Southern Accents
was constantly looking for fresh material for their pages, so why was it that, outside of Virginia, few people had even heard of Wynderly?

I was beginning to suspect that those horses, along with other pieces, might teeter between truth and myth, honesty and deception. I could hardly wait to start my own investigations. Trouble was, Michelle Hendrix had been dogging my
every step. And like the Tang horses, she, too, was proving to be perplexing.

I had thought that since we'd be working together, we would be helpful to each other. Instead, though Michelle never left my side, she seemed to purposely avoid answering my questions about Wynderly's antiques. I had begun to think I could learn more on my own.

I shivered, partly from the biting cold, and partly from my unexplainable, but very real, queasy feelings about the whole situation. I tried telling myself that damp, creepy old houses, especially those set back in dark country woods, can give off eerie vibes. I thought of Hansel and Gretel. Remembering my childish fright I chuckled. Why, it was nothing more than Wynderly itself that was giving me the sense that something was amiss.

Feeling better, I stared hard at the photograph of Mazie and Hoyt as if hoping it would speak to me.

We can never go back again, that much is certain
, Mother had told me the day we closed up her home, some months after my father died.

Trying to make light of the heartbreaking moment, I had said, “I think Daphne du Maurier said it first, Mother. In
Rebecca
.”

I tried to imagine Hoyt and Mazie's lives during that time when ladies wore picture hats to tea parties and gentlemen dressed for dinner. What dreams they must have dreamed as they watched their house rise from its stone foundation to its magnificent completion. And all the stuff in it? Chances were the Wyndfields, like scores of my clients, had simply met up with a few fast-talking antiques wheeler-dealers and fallen for their spiels.

I kept thinking about those Tang horses. Add in Michelle Hendrix's puzzling demeanor and the eerie aura surrounding the house … In no time, uneasy feelings had crept back into my head. What I needed was a delete button in my brain like the one on my computer.

Get a grip, Sterling, I told myself. This isn't one of those novels about art theft or jewelry heists; this is life. Real life.

I'd been bent over so long, I needed to get my circulation going again—to clear my mind, if nothing else. I stood, only to stumble over a raised beam that blended into the pine floor's shadowy grain. I lurched forward and instinctively reached out to grab something before I hit the wall in front of me. A tower of boxes moved under my momentum, and together we landed in a heap on the floor.