The Big Steal (30 page)

“Since I've been here, everyone has been lovely to me. Dr. Houseman has left me to my job, and though Michelle Hendrix and I had our rough moments at first, we've ironed those out. Thanks to Worth Merritt I've had a chance to learn more about the Wyndfields. Even Tracy DuMont has been helpful.”

Miss Mary Sophie spoke up quickly and emphatically. “Tracy didn't know them well. Her father never did like Hoyt, and I doubt if he ever knew Mazie other than to say hello.”

“And Ms. DuMont told me as much,” I replied, “which is exactly why I'm here. You're the only one who seems to have known Mazie well.”

“Ah, so it's Mazie who has your attention.” Miss Mary Sophie's eyes turned from reprimanding to interested. She settled back in her chair and knitted her hands together over her stomach. “And so you've come to see
me
. May I ask what exactly has prompted this? Have you found something?”

“Yes, I have.” I hesitated. In the silence that followed I heard what I thought sounded like a chuckle.

“No reason for us to play games, my dear,” said Miss Mary Sophie as she removed her glasses and put them with the mail. She smiled, then quietly said, “So you found the priest hole, did you? There's much I almost mentioned when you were here before, then thought better of it.”

“Yes, ma'am, I did. And the room beyond.”

“Oh?” That seemed to take her aback. A frown flashed across her brow. “So you saw the dogs?”

“Yes, ma'am. And I saw what was in them.”

She caught her breath.

“It was quite by accident, I assure you. I came upon the priest hole and the other room totally by surprise. I wasn't looking or expecting—”

“Oh, it's all right, Sterling,” she said kindly. “Sooner or later someone would have come upon them. But tell me about the dogs and what you found.”

Despite Miss Mary Sophie's reassurance, my composure was shot. “I hate to admit this, but I was so startled by the room and the books and papers I found there … Well, I'd already found some other papers in the attic—but again, totally by accident. You see, when Michelle didn't seem to have much to offer I went up into the attic on a hunch, thinking I might find receipts for some of the things lost in the burglary. It was when I knocked over some boxes …” I gave Miss Mary Sophie an imploring look.

“You came to Wynderly to do a job,” she said. “If you found what you needed, through whatever means, it sounds as if you did it well. You're to be commended.”

Her response, though well intended, did little to assuage
me. I felt no better than a grave robber digging up peoples' secrets that should have stayed buried. I took a deep breath and continued.

“I didn't come upon the priest hole that first time in the attic. It was the next day. And when I discovered the other room, I, well, in addition to taking some papers that I thought might relate to the objects, when I saw the dogs—”

“You took one of them.” She finished my sentence.

“Yes, ma'am. But only one.”

“I doubt if one will ever be missed, and you know it's inevitable that someone will find them,” she said.

“Yes, but you see, I also found some of Mazie's diaries.”

“My, you
have
been a busy girl.” Miss Mary Sophie laughed aloud.

I could feel the neon red glow of my cheeks.

Miss Mary Sophie inched forward in her chair, gathered her cane and walked to the table of photographs. “Do you know who is smiling down from heaven right now? Mazie Wyndfield.

“I'll never forget the day Mazie came to see me,” she continued. “It was a few days before Christmas. I was decorating the dining room when the door rang. Jacques Fortier always chauffeured her about, or Hoyt. This day, though, Mazie drove herself. She looked dreadful, something hardly possible for one so beautiful. She told me that, the day before, Jacques had driven her to Richmond to pick up some packages for Hoyt at a warehouse. She had planned to surprise her husband by having them at the house when he returned home from wherever he was. But, Mazie said, the packages had been
damaged in transit and before they could be released she had to inspect them. It was at that point she burst into tears.”

Speaking softly she said, “She loved that man so much. Of that I'm very sure. Mazie never stopped loving Hoyt, even …”

She raised her head and looked straight as me. “The damage was minimum, mostly to the outer wrappings. But
all
the boxes had to be opened, and when Mazie saw the four Tang horses …” Miss Mary Sophie let out a long, labored sigh. “You see, back when they had visited Kyoto in the 1920s Mazie had admired a beautiful Chinese terra cotta Tang horse statue. It was a reproduction, of course, and made in Japan, not China, but Mazie loved it.”

Miss Mary Sophie paused, then said, “Isn't it amazing how the Asian people can make anything?”

Her remark came as a relief from the building tension of the story. Though I was eager to learn anything that might provide insight into Wynderly and the Wyndfields, a strong sense of dread had begun to hang over Miss Mary Sophie's every word.

“Actually, I'm amused when I hear people talking about all the things being imported from the Orient these days as if globalization is something new,” I said. “The Japanese tea set I played with as a child had been my mother's. And all the items I've appraised that are stamped”—I held up my fingers to make quotation marks—“‘Occupied Japan' … There've been more than I can count.”

Miss Mary Sophie smiled patiently. “Anyway,” she continued, “because Mazie loved the statue, Hoyt bought it for her. Everything would have been fine, except one day some years
later, something strange happened. Upon returning from one of their extended trips Mazie noticed that the horse seemed somehow, well,
different
.”

Miss Mary Sophie frowned. “Now you know Wynderly well. Things are everywhere. And the attic is a storehouse. When you're surrounded by so many things and have so many rooms and, on top of that, you spend month after month away traveling, well, I can see how Mazie might have thought she was mistaken in thinking the horse seemed different. Remember, too, Mazie had never cared that the statue wasn't the real thing. To her it was a gift from Hoyt, bought for her as a memento of their time in Kyoto. So, she put the idea out of her mind. But
then
, shortly thereafter, the same thing happened, only this time it was an ivory crucifix that they had bought in France. Mazie was a devout Catholic, you know.”

“Yes, I do know that now,” I said, remembering how Miss Mary Sophie had skirted my question about Mazie's religion on our first visit. But she had also said something else. She had spoken of a secret place that
used
to be there. Now I understood. That had been Miss Mary Sophie's way of dropping a hint about the priest hole. Might she have been trying to encourage me to explore more, I wondered.

Yes, Miss Mary Sophie, I thought, you're a sly old bird.

“It seems that one day when Mazie went to the vitrine to get her crucifix, it wasn't there. She thought maybe she'd put it elsewhere. The help knew nothing about its disappearance, and since Hoyt was in Spain or France or some such, she couldn't ask him. Not long after he returned, though, Mazie noticed an ivory crucifix, similar, but not the same, right where she had
looked for hers. That's how, little by little, Mazie grew suspicious of her husband, but it wasn't until the damaged shipment incident that she confronted him.”

My head was spinning with thoughts and questions. I'd seen a crucifix the day Peggy Powers had made such a big deal over the reliquary. I would check it out when I got to Wynderly. Chances were it would be plastic, not ivory. I needed to bring our conversation back to the reason why I was there, to find out what had happened to the American antiques I'd seen in the old photographs, yet Miss Mary Sophie had raised questions that went far beyond the realm of things.

How, I wondered, could Mazie have continued to love her husband who was so obviously dishonest? Why hadn't she left him? He had died first … why hadn't she gotten rid of everything then? Why had she allowed Wynderly to be turned into a museum? If she knew the truth, wasn't it as if she were an accessory to a crime in perpetuating the myth? I pushed my thoughts aside for later.

“Mazie told me how Hoyt would buy something and bring it home,” Miss Mary Sophie was saying. “Then, weeks, even years later, it would have to go out for repair or Hoyt would find another one like it and replace the old one … She said things were always being shuffled about. Boxes and crates taken to the attic; things brought down from the attic.” Miss Mary Sophie looked as puzzled as Mazie must have felt when this began happening.

“Then, that day in the warehouse, and in front of those people, when she saw the horses it all came clear to her. Hoyt was counterfeiting antiques, just as people counterfeit money. It must have been terrible for her, poor dear. The warehouse
people didn't know, of course. They probably just thought Hoyt had ordered a lot of doodads to give as Christmas gifts.”

“But the dogs,” I said cautiously.

Miss Mary Sophie shook her head. “Ah, yes. The dogs. They were Hoyt's undoing. There Mazie had him, what's the saying, by the short hairs?

“As I remember her telling it, that shipment from Brazil arrived the same time as the horses. That crate wasn't badly damaged, so they only pried it open partway. But when Mazie got home and opened it further, a couple of the dogs had been broken after all. You know how it is with china. Sometimes it's an inside piece that gets broken. Well, that's exactly what happened. When she lifted the figurine out of the box, the dog fell to pieces in her hands and the stones that had been concealed inside tumbled to her feet.”

Miss Mary Sophie looked to me for my reaction.

“The rubellites,” I said.

“Oh! So they aren't real rubies?”

Miss Mary Sophie fell silent. Then, recovered, she said, “Oh dear. I don't know if Mazie knew they were fake.” She looked close to tears. “I do hope
she
didn't know. You see, Hoyt gave Mazie a beautiful ruby and diamond ring at their engagement. When I was a young girl, Daddy told me that, just as the diamond symbolizes enduring love, the ruby symbolizes mutual love. Love given and love returned. To know the rubies were fake, that would have killed her.”

“My mother used to tell me, ‘Trust not him that once hath broken faith,'” I said.

Miss Mary Sophie smiled sadly. “And how appropriate
those words are. What I
do
know is that, after that day, Mazie never trusted Hoyt.”

“Yet she never stopped loving him—”

“Don't you know about love, my dear?”

I dropped my eyes to avoid hers.

Miss Mary Sophie didn't give me a chance to respond. Staring off into the distance, an even sadder smile crossed her lips. “Thomas Moore said it best. ‘The heart that has truly loved never forgets, but as truly loves on to the close.' That is the kind of love Mazie's generation grew up with. It was a different time, my dear. Mazie might have been a woman of the 1950s, but she had been a
child
of the teens—a full century ago, now. It was a time of gallantry and undying devotion. Mazie would never have done anything to disgrace Hoyt.”

Her voice broke. “You know how we Southerners are. We are loyal to our own. Even to the death. At least that's how we used to be.”

When she turned back to face me, Miss Mary Sophie's smile had faded. She said, “But Mazie also knew right from wrong. She couldn't undo Hoyt's wrongs, but she could try to prevent more from happening. I'm sure in today's world, things between them would have ended quite differently. Your generation is a different breed.
You
wouldn't turn a blind eye. The truth is, I questioned Mazie's reaction even back then.” Miss Mary Sophie drew herself up as if reclaiming some years of her life. “I was still young. Thirty-five. Mazie was fifty-five, so there was considerable age difference between us.”

“Were you
that
close as friends?”

She began to speak, hesitated, then said, “I don't know how
to answer that. Remember this is a rural area … it's not like we had next-door neighbors. And then, the Wyndfields were gone so much. Even when Hoyt was off on his trips, I don't think she had the opportunity to make a lot of friends.”

“But all the entertaining they did—”

“Their lavish parties were more for visitors to the area than for their neighbors. Their guests were usually people they would meet on trips who would be in the vicinity visiting Washington or even Charlottesville or Richmond. Who from California or Maine or Europe, for that matter, would pass up a chance to visit a Virginia plantation house—not that Wynderly was one, but it was a fine house, there's no denying that. No, we weren't close, but we were certainly friends. I think there were two reasons why she reached out to me.

“The obvious one,” she continued, “was my father's friendship with Hoyt. Not everyone liked Hoyt Wyndfield. Many people were jealous of him, but he and Daddy had been childhood friends. Our families had been friends for generations. There was some kinship through a distant cousin's marriage, but the wife died in childbirth. The other reason …”

Miss Mary Sophie glanced wistfully at the picture of her husband across the room. “I was widowed, but my love for my husband was no secret.” She frowned thoughtfully. “I am sure that Mazie recognized the depth of my love and devotion, and that made her feel comfortable with me. I think she knew that I, better than anyone perhaps, would understand both her dilemma
and
her loyalty. I have never forgotten the exact words she said to me that day.”

Dear Antiques Expert: In a lot of historic houses I've heard the docents call a needlepoint picture atop a tall pole standing in front of the fireplace a “fire screen.” Why is it called that? It couldn't possibly keep the embers from jumping out and catching something on fire
.