The Big Steal (28 page)

“Oh, but Peter, you don't have to come.”

“Look, I was planning on coming to the auction on Saturday anyway. LaTisha works today. She's completely capable of running the shop. What I'll do is drop by the store, tell her I'm taking the day off, then I'll head on over your way. Anyway I'd like to see Wynderly after hearing so much about it. This might be my only chance.”

“Well, that's true,” I agreed.

“I know you're worried, Sterling, and it's admirable that you're concerned about doing the right thing. But from what you've told me, I can honestly say I don't know
what
the right thing is. If Fox really did hit a deer, let's say, or if it was a freak accident and there's no evidence of foul play, then the last thing
you'd want is to be needlessly drawn into the incident. Once you start implicating other people, no telling what might happen, especially if they're innocent. Accusations, lawsuits.”

“Oh my God, I never thought of that.”

“So. What you should do right now is continue your life as best you can for the next few hours. It's what, about nine o'clock. I should get there by, oh, two or three. Maybe later.”

“That's when I'm going to meet Miss Mary Sophie about—but that's
another
story, and now's not the time to go into all that. Thing is, I don't know how long I'll be with her.”

“Don't worry about that. I'll get away from here when I can. Can you make a reservation for me at Belle Ayre or should I call them?”

“I'll do it … No, wait, you'd better do it,” I said. “They've been pretty empty, except for me, all week. But on a weekend they may fill up. If so, Ginny, she's the owner, can tell you where else to call. But honest, Peter. Don't rush. I don't have any idea what time I'll get free this afternoon and I've papers to get ready for M—”

That's when it hit me. Peter. Matt. And me. We three. All here together.

Dear Antiques Expert: Could you tell me the name of the Russian antique I keep seeing at antiques shows? It is usually boat- or saucer-shaped and has a curved-under handle. It looks as if it might have been a sauceboat or even ladle of some kind
.

What you have seen is a kovsh. Originally, these ancient Russian vessels were made to hold a mild alcoholic drink. During the 19th century, its attractive form was much admired and many kovsh were made as purely decorative pieces intended to be admired for their beauty and crafts-manship. Even Fabergé made beautiful silver-gilt enameled and jeweled kovsh. But a word of caution: many lesser craftsmen also made souvenir-quality kovsh, and fake kovsh with bogus hallmarks have been identified.

T
HOUGH TEMPTED
, I
REFRAINED
from asking Ginny where the wreck had happened. If I came upon the site on my way to Wynderly, so be it, but at the moment I wanted to distance myself as far from what had happened as possible. Peter had said not to worry, but in truth, he had frightened, rather than
comforted, me. Telling me to do nothing, though, had made a lot of sense. My intention was to make myself invisible. There was no way I was going to chance running into Emmett and his buddy by stopping to get gas or a Diet Pepsi. And once I got to Wynderly, if anything was said about the incident, or Frank Fox for that matter, I would listen. But I was not going to volunteer anything to anyone.

It was a little before ten when I turned onto the grounds at Wynderly. As usual Michelle was running late. I needed to calm down. I decided to take a stroll around the gardens, flawed though they were. Michelle would find me soon enough.

I passed a pair of stone columns beginning to crumble beneath the English ivy and Virginia creeper coiled snake-like around them. Following an overgrown path I came upon an opening where only half an iron gate still clung to its post. Beyond that was a small flagstone patio far enough away from the house to be totally private. It must have been lovely once upon a time.

I looked across the distant fields, then turned back toward Wynderly just as a splash of reddish orange light burst along the bottom ledge of one of the towers. It was only the sunlight shining on a strip of guttering. I was thinking how the sunshine was helping to improve my mood when I realized—That's odd. Copper oxidizes to a lovely gray-green almost instantly once it is exposed to the elements, and on a house of Wynderly's age, for copper to be that bright and shiny, it would have to be brand new. Now
that
didn't make any sense.

I shaded my eyes and looked at the sun to get my bearings. I was on the northeast side. The front of the house faced
west. With Wynderly's many towers and turrets and zigzagging rooflines, I had no way of knowing where the room off the priest hole might be.

Damn. If only I had my camera. But it was in the briefcase in my car, I was pretty sure. To be positive, though, I double-checked my pocketbook, pulling out my wallet and cell phone, which hadn't done me one bit of good this entire trip. Which made me realize I could take a picture with my phone. I'd only done it once or twice before. I turned it on and snapped away.

Feeling quite proud of myself, I paused for one last look before starting back toward the house. Climbing up there to work on that roof was not a job for me. I felt dizzy just thinking about it. Yes, I sure was glad
I
didn't have to crawl along that passageway between the attic windows and the outer ledge of the roof. It was probably only a couple of feet wide. Couldn't have a fat roofer or gutter repairman working up there.

I chuckled to myself. That had been some dream I'd had last night or this morning, whenever it was. Hauling furniture across the room and tossing it out the window the way I had done in my dream? You couldn't heave anything of size through those narrow casement windows.

That's when sweat erupted on my palms and my legs went tingly. With every step my brain turned over bits of information about the objects, those stolen and those broken.

All the broken pieces had been very delicate—pieces like that Delft plate. And there had been the other porcelain pieces, an ivory figurine or two, and a beautiful engraved glass trumpetshaped vase, now nothing but splinters of glass. On the other hand, the pieces listed as stolen had been bronze and silver and
brass and a couple of small, very fine silk prayer rugs. Why hadn't I realized this before?

In my mind's eye I raced down the list of missing items. There was the fake bronze figure of Lokesvara, of course, and a circa 1850 Kyoto pierced bronze flower vase. I was naturally skittish of anything listed as Kyoto. I had figured it to be worth around three thousand if it was the real McCoy, but even if it wasn't, an attractive flower vase like that would still have a decorative value of about a thousand. I would let Matt fret over that one.

And then there was a late nineteenth-century Russian silver and enamel kovsh. It was surely worth five thousand, but maybe seven or eight or more. I'd noted it needed more research. Among the other missing silver items, two particularly valuable ones were an American coin silver teapot made in the early or mid-seventeen hundreds, and a heavily embossed English sterling silver sugar bowl dating from the 1830s.

Yes, every one of the items that had actually left the premises in the theft had been sufficiently durable to survive intact if handled reasonably well (or dropped), whereas the objects that had been broken and left in the house were all fragile—items that would have required extremely careful handling to avoid being broken or damaged.

I had followed a pebbled path back to Wynderly, straight up to a terrace with French doors that led into the house itself. I peered through the lace curtains. As best I could tell, it was Mazie's bedroom. Then going over to the edge of the door-frame, I ran my hands across the bricks.

Years back, after an out-of-town soccer game, Hank and I, our son Ketch and a couple of his friends, had stopped for
lunch at an old stone mill that had been converted into a lunch-room. After lunch, the boys had run ahead and gone outside. They were probably twelve or thirteen, so we weren't worried that they would careen down the rocky drop-off behind the restaurant. What we weren't prepared for, though, was finding those rascals on top of the roof when we came out. They had climbed up the side of the old stone building the same way climbers scale mountains and cliffs. Using the stones that jutted out from the craggy building as steps, those wiry kids had shinnied right up the wall. Of course getting down was more difficult.

Wynderly's irregularly laid clinker bricks would have been easy to scale; the very feature that made Wynderly's brickwork so handsome was its undoing. A willowy kid with a small foot could shinny up those bricks in nothing flat. But all the way to the ledge along the roofline? Now that was questionable. Also how could something be dropped from so high a distance, even when securely tied to a rope, without it swinging loose and banging against the building, or landing too hard and breaking?

But what if someone brave enough to go out on the ledge could ease a package down a story or so? Especially if, at that point, someone who had climbed midway up the wall could intercept the bundle, or even guide it safely down to the ground for a soft landing. The old cat burglar trick.

Still, there was the matter of the items that had been broken and left inside the house. Perhaps an attempt to throw everyone off, that's pretty commonplace. Or vandalism born of meanness. Red herring or pure meanness—thieves had been known to do both.

Then again, what if the burglars had
tried
to lower down a couple of plates or bowls or whatever, only to have them caught by a stiff breeze or simply break on impact. Though they would have wrapped the goods before dropping them, it would have taken much longer to carefully pack a piece of china than a piece of bronze or brass. Time might have been of the essence.

But suppose a piece of hastily wrapped china had broken when it was being lifted down, wouldn't there be some evidence left on the ground? Not if it had been put in a sack or a bag. Chances were, even if it had broken and spilled out, the ivy and periwinkle and other vines around the house were so thick the pieces would have been lost in the bramble. In fact, the growth around the foundation would have hidden any footprints.

But why, I wondered now, hadn't the alarm gone off?

Dear Antiques Expert: I recently read that an early American teapot made by Jacob Hurd sold for over $40,000 at an auction. What made it so special
?

One reason this 18th-century coin silver teapot brought such a high price is its maker, Jacob Hurd. At a time when most wealthy colonists still imported their silver from England, Hurd became one of America's first silversmiths recognized for his craftsmanship and beautiful work. The teapot you read about was rare, in excellent condition, and had a spotless provenance (or history of ownership). Since then, though, another Jacob Hurd teapot sold for $81,200.

M
ICHELLE FOUND ME
as I approached the house. I wasted no time in pointing out the patch of new guttering to her.

“Oh, that?” She made no attempt to disguise the disgust in her voice or on her face. “Talk about a row. You should have heard the goings-on at the board meeting. And all over three or four thousand dollars. You would have thought it was three hundred thousand. Why, their behavior made the U.S. Congress look like a meeting of Quaker brothers. What I don't get
is why, if they were letting the place go to wrack and ruin, they even bothered with repairing the gutter?”

“What happened? Why did it need repairing in the first place,” I said.

“That's it.” She shrugged. “Who knows? Squirrels, the ice storm earlier this winter, strong winds, nobody seemed to know
when
it happened. The gardens haven't been tended for over a year so nobody was out here to notice when it happened. Last summer some of the docent ladies cut some flowers and the Friends of Wynderly had a couple of cleanup days when volunteers came and weeded, but without the garden staff nobody was around that side of the house on a regular basis. Apparently one day somebody happened to notice a piece just hanging there, flapping away. It was right about the time the decision was made to close the house to the public.”

“No one had heard it? Seems it might have banged around.”

“Who
would
have heard it? Once the place was closed, all those faithful Wynderly supporters left this place like rats abandoning a sinking ship. I was the only person here for days at a time.”

“It is
big
,” I said smiling. But I was thinking: and in that time when you were all alone, you could have done anything.

“Aren't you cold?” Michelle asked abruptly.

“I was so glad to see the sun shining, I forgot about the temperature. But now you mention it, yes.”

While Michelle fumbled with the door and then the security system, as usual, I realized that after traipsing around on the wet grounds my feet really had become chilled.

“I hate this thing,” she declared, just as she had the other morning.

“Don't we all,” I said. “Half the time I don't even bother to turn my alarm on at home, especially during the daytime.”

“Can you imagine the thrashing I would have gotten from Alfred Houseman if the alarm hadn't been on when the burglary happened? I'd a been drawn and quartered.”

“About that day—I think you and I need to go over everything that happened before Matt Yardley gets here. I'm sure he's going to have questions for both of us. I don't want to be suddenly surprised by hearing something new.”

“He's the sexy-sounding guy who called you yesterday, right,” she asked.

I flushed. “Yes, but more importantly, he's the vice president of Babson and Michael,” I said. “Since he's in D.C. on another case anyway, it made sense for him to come look this situation over. There's a lot at stake here … for everybody.”