We stood in the foggy night air in the alley beside the Grant house. It was bone-chillingly damp, more like November than March.
“I’ll take Josie to her car, so you can head home right away,” Alverez said.
“Are you sure?” Max asked.
“Not a problem,” Alverez answered.
“Don’t be discouraged,” Max said to me, looking at me through his rolled-down driver-side window as he got ready to leave.
“I’m okay,” I lied.
“Tomorrow’s another day, Josie.”
“I know.” I smiled to show good spirit, and oddly, doing so helped lighten my mood a bit. “I’m okay. Really.”
“Thanks for seeing to Josie, Ty,” Max called to Alverez as he drove away.
“Ty?” I questioned.
“Yeah,” Alverez answered. “That’s my name.”
I wondered if his name was Tyrone. I glanced at him. He didn’t look like a Tyrone. We stood silently until Max’s taillights disappeared around a bend. Once the car was out of sight, he turned and I felt his eyes on me, but my attention was focused on the step I’d have to climb in order to gain access to his SUV.
“This is a big step,” I remarked.
“What is?” he asked, thinking, I gathered from his tone, that I was referring to some proposed action, though he wasn’t sure which one.
“This one,” I said, nodding toward it. “To get in to the, what do I call it? A car?”
“You could call it a car. It’d be better to call it a vehicle.”
“The step to get into your vehicle,” I said, stressing the word, “is very high.”
“Nah,” he responded. “You’re just short.”
“I am not. I’m normal sized.”
“How short are you?”
“How short? What a question. I’m not short. I’m five-one.”
He opened the door and I pulled myself up.
When he was seated behind the wheel, he said, “Feel free to close your eyes if you want.”
“Do I look that beat?”
“Yes.”
“How about you?” I asked.
“How about me what?”
“Are you okay to drive?”
He looked at me sideways. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, do you need me to stay awake to keep you company?”
“No. I’m fine. What kind of friends do you have, anyway, that you have to stay awake so they’ll be okay to drive?”
“I was just being polite,” I answered.
“You don’t need to be polite. You should just rest now.”
Exhaustion, when it came, came quickly. I had no memory of drifting off to sleep, and felt groggy when Alverez awakened me by quietly calling my name.
“Wow,” I said. “I guess I fell asleep.”
“Yeah.”
“Where are we?”
“At your house.”
The rickety house I rented stood to the right. It didn’t look like home to me. It looked like the place where I’d slept since moving from New York.
Since I didn’t like to come into a dark house, I always left a small lamp lit in my bedroom. I stretched and yawned, and looked up, reassured by the soft golden gleam from my upstairs window.
“Wait…” I said, sitting up, coming fully awake. “Where’s my car?”
“Right where you left it. I’ll come get you in the morning and drive you to work.”
“Oh, no, that’s too much to ask. I’m okay. I can drive.”
He smiled a little. “Except that you were asleep before I hit the highway. I have to go to your place in the morning anyway with a technician to check for prints and see what we can see. I can pick you up en route.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. I don’t live far.”
“Really? Where do you live?”
“Over on Fox Point,” he said, naming a narrow inlet not far away.
“That’s close.”
“Yes. So I’ll pick you up. When? Seven?”
“Seven is good.”
“Okay, then.”
“Thank you,” I said, but maybe he didn’t hear me because he was out of his car, ahem, vehicle, by then, and in a few long strides reached my side.
“Can you hop down? If you want, I’ll lift you.”
“I can get down myself,” I told him, half wishing he’d scoop me up. I jumped down with more vigor than I felt, waved good-bye, and walked toward my porch door, the entry I used most frequently.
I wanted to ask him in, but didn’t. I told myself not to be stupid. He had no feelings for me, and the feelings I had for him were probably a result of feeling anxious and vulnerable in the presence of a handsome, strong man. Don’t act like a fool, I chastised myself, reiterating that neither of us had personal feelings for the other. My desire was just a spasm, a pathetic attempt to avoid entering my lonely house alone.
Screw it, I said as I approached the porch, and turned back. He hadn’t moved. He stood by the still-open passenger door, the ceiling light illuminating his craggy face and dark hair like a halo.
“Want to come in?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, and paused. “But I can’t. Not now.”
I nodded.
The next morning, riding in with Alverez, I felt a little awkward, but his conversation focused on the weather and the busy day ahead, and my anxiety dissipated in the face of this matter-offactness.
When we got there, I said lightly, “Thanks for the lift.”
“Anytime,” he answered sounding casual or indifferent, I couldn’t tell which.
Within a few minutes of arriving, there was so much going on, I was wishing I had magical powers and could be in three places at once.
It wasn’t yet eight when I spotted Wes Smith. The Seacoast Star reporter who’d cornered me at the Blue Dolphin earlier in the week was trying to interview a temporary worker at the tag-sale site.
“Wes,” I said, smiling as I approached. “How ya doing?”
“Good,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand.
“Thanks for holding off on writing that article,” I said, thankful that the expose he’d threatened to write referring to me as “maybe a suspect” hadn’t yet appeared.
He shrugged. “Still researching, still checking things out.”
“I can see you are. What are you looking into now?”
“I was just asking Yolanda here how your notoriety was affecting business.”
“Notoriety? You flatter me, Wes, you devil. But I gotta ask you to vamoose.”
“Just a couple of questions.”
“Sorry, but we’ve got to set up.” I turned on my thousand-watt smile, cursing him silently. “You, my friend, are in the way of business.”
“Are you tossing me out?” he asked, raising his eyebrows, trying to look tough.
My smile firmly in place, I shook my head, and said, “Sadly, yes. You can leave this way.” I took his elbow and guided him to the wire mesh gate, which had been latched but unlocked since seven-thirty in the morning so staff could get in. I figured that’s how he’d entered.
He took it in good spirits, play-shooting me as he left, and said, “You won this one. Next one’s mine.”
I kept smiling but didn’t respond, pleased that I had chased him away without offending him. Since I wanted good publicity for my business, I couldn’t see how pissing off a reporter would help my cause.
When I got to the auction hall, about nine, I was greeted by a flood of increasingly impatient preview attendees waiting to register and complaints from Gretchen that the laptop wasn’t working.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“It won’t let me open the spreadsheet software,” she explained.
I restarted the computer, but the problem persisted. “Is it working on your desktop?”
“Yes,” she answered. “And I have a backup on CD.”
“Okay, then. We’ll deal with it later. It’s more important to get people signed in.”
Shutting the laptop down and slipping it under the table, I grabbed a printed copy of the registration list that Gretchen, showing prescient judgment, had produced earlier that morning, and began to help with the process. The doors would open promptly at ten, and it was a courtesy Prescott’s was known for that early arrivals got processed before the doors officially opened.
Fourth in line was Martha Troudeaux, the lazy and bitchy researcher who was married to Epps’s pet appraiser, Barney. I greeted her politely, but without warmth.
“You’re to be congratulated on winning the Wilson estate,” Martha said, sounding patronizing and insincere.
“Thanks, Martha,” I said, finding her name on the list. “How are you and Barney doing?”
“Good. Barney will be here later. Have you added better lighting to your charming little room?”
Every sentence was an insult, from implying that Barney couldn’t be bothered to schedule an early viewing to making my company sound rinky-dink, and she did it with slippery precision. The auction wasn’t until tomorrow, so it didn’t matter when Barney arrived, but her tone implied that it did. My auction hall wasn’t small or poorly lit, but her words suggested otherwise.
Doing what I always did when confronted with difficult situations, I thought of what my father would have done. He once told me that the trick to outwitting sarcastic people was to ignore their tone and deal only with their content. I wondered if that strategy would work with Martha. It was a better tactic than hitting her, which was the only other approach I could think of.
“I hope you’ll find it bright enough, Martha. Will you tell me if you don’t?” I said, feigning concern. “And I’m so pleased you find the space charming.” I smiled, a hundred-watter this time, and looked toward the next person in line. “May I help you?” I asked. Out of the corner of my eye, I observed Martha’s lips thinning. I was pleased that she seemed disappointed that she hadn’t gotten a rise out of me.
At ten, when we opened the doors and the early birds had been taken care of, I left Gretchen to handle things and thought about what to do next.
I wanted to stay and observe the evil Martha at work, and I wanted to return to the tag sale and make certain that Eric had everything under control. I also wanted to see how Alverez and his team were making out. As I weighed my options, I decided that since observing Martha would only irritate me, and Eric would call for help if he needed it, I would head to the front where Alverez had set up shop.
I found him looking over his notes not far from the stack of crates. A technician wearing khakis, a sweater vest, and latex gloves was leaning over an empty crate, looking for I couldn’t imagine what. Earlier, Eric had confirmed that no crates were missing.
“Hey,” I said as I approached. “Any news?”
“Not yet,” Alverez answered, looking up from his notebook. “You said the noise came from somewhere near the crates, right?”
“I think so,” I said. “I’m not sure. Noise reverberates.”
“Yeah. Regardless, it’d be a pretty good place for someone to hide, so we figured we’d start here.”
I went into the front office and checked the voice-mail system, scanned through some mail, bills mostly, and reviewed the list of auction bidders. I hadn’t been there more than three or four minutes when the technician called in an excited tone, “Chief, look at this.”
If Alverez replied, I didn’t hear it. I swung out of the chair and was no more than a step behind him as he joined the technician, who stood partially hidden by the stacks of crates, in the far corner of the warehouse.
“There,” the technician said, gesturing toward a crate midway up in the last row. He’d removed the back panel so it stood open to our view. I was able to see a long, white cardboard tube. “All the other crates were empty,” he added.
“What is it?” Alverez asked.
The technician shrugged. Alverez looked at me. “Josie? Any ideas?”
I shook my head. “I’ve never seen it before.”
“Let’s take a look, okay?”
“Sure,” I said, and immediately wondered if I should have agreed to let him look.
Alverez slipped on latex gloves and reached into the crate to extract the tube. I watched as he used a fingertip as a lever on the top plastic cover. It came off easily. He reached inside and pulled, freeing a rolled-up canvas.
The technician moved closer, but I backed away until my shoulders pressed into the concrete wall. Holding the canvas by its edge, Alverez gave it a little shake, and it unfurled smoothly. A vivid and evocative painting of three girls sitting in the sun under a tree playing with a cat was revealed.
“Oh, my God,” I whispered. I stood frozen in disbelief.
The Renoir had been found.
That explained why someone had entered my warehouse. But it raised other questions. Why would someone searching for the multimillion-dollar painting go to the trouble of sneaking into my warehouse and then leave without it? Or, more ominously, had the person entered not to take it away but to leave it behind? Why? I shivered, as much from mounting confusion and fear as from the cold concrete wall behind me.