Hoarded to Death (A Jamie Brodie Mystery) (10 page)

“He said he was.”

“Good. That’ll be good. One of the things Matt was worried about was what he’d do all day when Elliott was at work. Now he’ll have a dissertation to write.”

“Do you want to be a kept man?”

I laughed. “No, thanks. I’ve already written a dissertation. Besides, right now I make a little more money than you. You’d have to be the kept one.”

“But I’ve already written a dissertation too.”

“Well, then. We’re both just going to have to keep working.”

Val didn't come up and Susannah couldn’t make it, but the following Saturday, Pete and I reconvened with Jennifer, Mike the organizer, Dr. Hayman the psychologist, and Stan the Junk Man and his remaining crew. All the remaining boxes and bags had to be opened and examined. We convinced Jennifer to concentrate on the boxes, since that’s where anything of value would be found.

About half of the boxes were books. Jennifer and I sorted through them. When we found something that I thought might possibly have any value, we put it aside. Everything else went in a stack for donation to the public library. There were still quite a few boxes with other items – clothes, shoes, craft supplies, school supplies, all kinds of stuff. Most of it was suitable for donation, and that's what Jennifer wanted to do with it. The local women's shelter was about to get lucky.

We were about halfway through when I opened another box and pulled out a large book. It was a book of religious-themed art from around the world. I opened the cover to see if there was a signature or any edition information, and a sheet of paper slid out onto my lap.

A sheet of very old paper.

"Holy
shit
." I stared at what was in front of me. "Pete!"

"What is that?" Jennifer reached out for the page.

I blocked her hand. "No, don't touch it."

Pete came in at that same time. "What have you got?"

"I'm not sure." I turned to Jennifer. "Do you have a pair of cotton gloves? Or if not, a bandanna or a handkerchief?"

"Yeah, I'll find something." She scrambled to her feet and out of the room.

Pete bent down over me to examine the page. "Do you think that's a complete page like the one that got torn?"

"It sure looks like it." The page was big, at least 10 by 12 inches, and divided into two sides. Both sides were covered in elaborate, chunky Latin script. There were several colorful decorations down the left side of each block of script, and several smaller decorations scattered throughout the written lines. There were a few small holes in the page here and there.

It looked very, very old. The surface was uneven. And it didn't rustle exactly like paper.

I was almost afraid to move.

Jennifer came back with a pair of scarves. "This is all I could find. They're silk so they should be okay." She stood back. "Does that look like what the dead guy had in his hand?"

"It does." I draped the scarves over my hands, slid my hands under the page, and stood up. Not an easy task without using my hands. Then the three of us stood there, just looking at the page.

I said, "We shouldn't breathe on it too closely." Pete and Jennifer backed up a little.

I looked at Pete. "I have to call Eckhoff about this, right?"

"Yeah..." Pete knew what I was thinking and smiled a little. "Eventually."

"Okay." I nudged the book that the page had slid out of with my toe. "Pick that up for me, please? This was safe in there; I'm going to put it back in there for now to transport it." I maneuvered the page back into the book it had come from without touching the page, and closed the book. I handed the scarves back to Jennifer. "We've got cloth napkins at home that I can handle it with. Thanks."

Jennifer's eyes were still wide. "What are you going to do with it? Take it to your friend that deals with the antique books?"

"Not just yet. I'm going to take it to our special collections librarian. Then we'll see who he recommends."

Pete nodded. "That's good. Anyone who could potentially make money off of that shouldn't be allowed to evaluate it. At least, like you say, not just yet."

"Wow." Jennifer blinked away her disbelief. "Maybe this was what Miss Lucille was talking about when she said there were a couple of extremely valuable things? If it is worth something, would I be able to sell it?"

"I'd think so. And if it's something truly rare and valuable, I'm not sure the police are the best ones to have control over it."

"One thing at a time." Pete frowned at me a little. "If it turns out to be nothing special, we can turn it over to Eckhoff with no worries. Let's just see what your guy at work says first."

"Right."

Jennifer said, "Sounds like a plan. In the meantime, can we finish going through these boxes? Maybe we'll find something else."

But we didn't. When we finished, I had a nice stack to take to Cloak and Dagger Books, including one signed first-edition Raymond Chandler. We boxed all of the books back up, either marking "Library" or "Sell" on the tops. We hauled the books that were destined for donation to the public library down to the Jeep. The LA public library branches nearby were all closed on Sunday, but the Santa Monica library main branch was open 1-5, and it was on our way home. Jennifer wanted to get the boxes out of the apartment, so we dropped them off for her and got back home around 4:00.

I carried the art book containing the manuscript page into the house and laid it on the ottoman that served as our coffee table. Then I just stood back and looked at it. Pete came up beside me after locking the door and wrapped his arm around my shoulders. "Do you really think that might be something?"

"Yeah. I do. And that's almost scary."

"Yeah, it is."

"We're not going to get in trouble for withholding evidence, are we?"

"I doubt it. That box hadn't been opened, so no way the killer could have touched that page. Unless he or she did it more than five years ago, right? Which I find unlikely. But I’m going to give Eckhoff a call, just to let him know we have it."

"Okay." I turned around and wrapped my arms around him. "But if we do go to jail, can we get in the same cell?"

That made him laugh.

Pete called Eckhoff and they had a long conversation. I opened the book cover and gazed at the page. Whoever had made it, and however old it was, even if it was a fake, it was beautiful. The script looked like insular majuscule; each letter was a tiny work of art. And the drawings scattered through the script were fantastic. Some of them looked as if they weren't completely finished. There were a couple where the outline had been done, but the colors weren't filled in. If it did turn out to be worthless, I was going to ask Jennifer if I could keep it to frame it.

I heard Pete sign off. He came downstairs and sat down beside me. "Eckhoff says you can take it to your guy at work. There were no prints on the page Wally was holding except for Wally's. So he wouldn't expect to find any on this one either, especially since it was sealed in a box."

"If people have been handling this who thought it was valuable, they wouldn't have been touching it with their hands, anyway."

"True." Pete cocked his head, examining the page. "Beautiful, isn't it?"

"That's just what I was thinking. If Jennifer doesn't want it, I'm going to have it framed."

Pete nodded. "It would look good in your office at school."

"Yeah, it would."

"Do you think there's any chance that this is the real thing?"

"I don't see how that's possible. I mean, think about it. A book gets stolen a thousand years ago in Ireland. Some thief removes the cover and several pages and buries the rest. How, in that thousand years, does a page like that survive at all, much less in this good a shape? And how does it get from Ireland to here?"

"Well, the last part is easy. It got stored in a chest in someone's house, and eventually that chest got brought to the New World. Stuff in the chest made it into a box, which made it into an old lady's attic. But how does a piece of paper that hasn't been protected in any way not crumble into dust over a thousand years?"

"And it's not paper, it's vellum. Calfskin. It gets eaten away by bacteria if it's not maintained in the right conditions. That's the interesting thing about this...see these tiny holes? Whoever made this copy even got that part right."

"Huh." Pete mused. "Maybe it has been protected. Maybe it got stuck in that chest and no one took it out for several hundred years."

"Yeah, but think of the journey from Ireland to here. Most of those people came on ships. The chest would have been exposed to the salt air, heat and/or cold..."

"Yeah, but if the page was wrapped in something, the air may not have penetrated into the chest. Then when it was discovered by whatever descendant, maybe even Jennifer's old lady friend, they slid it into a big book like this for safekeeping, meaning to have it appraised someday, then forgot all about it."

I narrowed my eyes at Pete. "You don't really think that this is the real deal."

He smiled. "Nah. Those stolen pages probably got used to wrap fish or something."

"Oh God. Can you imagine? Something that precious?"

"Well, it wasn't a thousand years old then, was it? Only a couple of hundred years. And the thief may not have cared about the artwork. I can see the theft taking place for the gold on the cover, and then the missing pages were torn out for convenience and used for something else."

I nodded. "That makes the most sense of anything. Which makes this a very beautiful piece of art, but not necessarily a valuable one."

"Right. So you're going to show it to Conrad tomorrow?"

"Yep." I closed the art book. "Gonna put it in my computer bag right now. What are we gonna eat this evening?"

The next morning I drove to work, uneasy about riding the bus with the potentially valuable manuscript page. When I got to my office, I emptied my computer bag of everything except the art book, then went to Conrad's office. He was refilling the jar of pumpkin seeds from a zip lock bag. "Jamie! What a pleasant surprise! Two visits in the same quarter - to what do I owe the honor?"

I laughed. "Jeez, Conrad, you'd think I was the Dalai Lama. I've got something to show you. But we need to go to the back."

We went back to the area where the most fragile manuscripts were kept; it required passing through another locked door. Temperature and humidity were more closely controlled back here. We put on face masks, and I opened the art book to the page where I had inserted the piece of vellum. Conrad sucked in a breath, and took out a pair of gloves. He put them on quickly, saying "How beautiful," almost under his breath. He leaned forward over the page. “Where did you find this?”

“We found it Saturday, at my sister-in-law’s apartment, when we went back to finish cleaning the place out. It was in a box of books that hadn’t been opened yet. When I opened this book to look at the copyright date, this page slid out onto my lap.”

Conrad took a magnifying glass out of a drawer in the table and examined the page. “Is this what the torn bit originally looked like?”

“Yep.”

“My goodness.” Conrad straightened up and looked at me. “Have you told the police about this?”

“Yes. We called them yesterday after we found it. Detective Eckhoff said that since it was in a closed box, and the page at the crime scene didn’t have any fingerprints but the dead guy’s, that we could try to find out what it was. Since the piece they have can’t be released from evidence until the killer is caught.”

Conrad barely touched the corner of the vellum and edged it out of the book, then slid his hand under it and lifted it. He picked up the magnifying glass and started poring over the script, studying the letters and drawings intently. He laid down the magnifier, turned the vellum over, and did the same to the back. It took about ten minutes.

Finally, he settled the vellum back onto the page of the book. He looked at me in wonder. "Jamie. I believe you have..." His voice trailed off.

"But it's not possible, is it, Conrad? How would a manuscript like this have survived, intact, from Ireland to here?"

Conrad spread his hands. "Other manuscripts that are close to the same age have survived. It's mostly a question of the conditions in which they have been kept. If this one has been packed away, in a dry, cool place, then it's very possible. This book - " he gestured to the art book - "is an example. The vellum has been kept dry, not exposed to the elements at all, and likely kept in cool attics or other storage areas, and pressed flat like this."

"So it is vellum."

"Oh, yes. It is most definitely vellum. And I do not believe that it has been artificially aged. I don't know that this is from the Book of Kells, but whatever it is, it is very old. And it is done in the same style as the Book of Kells, the insular majuscule, which was not in widespread use. I think there is a strong chance that this is the real thing."

Holy shit
. "Where should I keep it?"

"Why not keep it here? Our temperature and humidity are controlled here. More so than a safe deposit box in a bank, say. We have a locked area that only I and my staff can open. It will be safe in there."

My reluctance must have shown on my face. Conrad said, "I understand your desire to keep it safe yourself. Particularly after your - um - incident? But it is under heavy security here. Access is limited to this room, and to this area of the building, and the building is protected by the campus police. It's one of the safest places it could be."

I nodded. "I see your point. No one's ever broken in here, have they?"

"No. And since only you and I will know it's here, no one will even know to break in here."

"Okay." I sighed. "Is there a way to make a copy of it?"

Conrad shook his head. "Exposing it to the light of the copier could be slightly damaging. Eventually it will have to be examined by the curator of the Book of Kells itself."

"Yeah. He would be the ultimate expert, wouldn't he?"

"Yes. Others might have informed opinions, but the curator would be the...have the most informed opinion, shall we say."