The Price of Inheritance (30 page)

“Doesn't he know where you are? You're less than two hours away.”

“Sure. He tried to come and see me all summer. He called hundreds of times, but I refused. And Ford, he'll be Ford, but he won't push that limit. He could feel what I needed, and for a while, it wasn't him.”

“And you haven't seen him since then?”

“I did, just twice though.”

“Twice. Why twice? Recently?”

“Open that,” she said, pointing at the bag next to me, “and I'll tell you.”

I looked at her for a long while before reaching for the bag. I wanted to give her time to change her mind, to tell me to leave her alone, but she didn't say anything else. She just watched me watching her until the heaviness of her expression turned my confidence to awkwardness. I looked behind us to make sure there wasn't anyone around and took out the foam box. I took off the top and let her see the bowl.

“Can I take it out of this?” she said, pointing to my makeshift packaging.

Part of me was afraid she would break it. Shatter it and throw the shards in the pond so I could never do anything with it. That was the problem with art. It was so easy to ruin. I hesitantly nodded yes and she reached her hands down and took the bowl out delicately, by both sides of the rim. She turned it around and looked at the words carved in the bottom, then she ran her fingers around the circumference of the base and up along the sides. She turned it over and looked at the glaze, holding it up slightly to see it in different light. Finally, she put it back in the box, just like I had packed it.

“Is it yours?” I asked, trying to contain myself.

“It's definitely not mine.”

I looked at her, her hand still on the bowl like it was something she had owned for decades. It had to be hers.

“But you've seen it before.”

She picked it up again and transferred it from one hand to the other.

“Do you know what the words in Hebrew on the base say?” I asked her.

“Of course I do. ‘First and the last.' ”

She'd made it. I knew she had.

“How do you know that?” I asked.

A car flew past us, speeding toward Connecticut, and we both jumped at the sound of the motor tearing through the silence. It pulled over on the side of the road about a hundred yards in front of us and we both watched it, frozen. A middle-aged woman in the New England uniform of a navy and white striped sweater and khakis got out, took a picture of the swelling side of the lake with her phone, and got back in. Neither of us moved until the car was out of sight.

“I never thought I'd be in this position,” said Hannah finally. She took both her hands and ran them through her hair, her elastic stopping their movement. “That phone call from NCIS stunned me.”

“It surprises me that they didn't call you back.”

“Well, they didn't.”

“They took this bowl from me when they came to talk to me at the store. They thought it could be stolen. There is a bowl exactly like this in the National Museum of Iraq. They thought this could be it.”

I watched Hannah's pretty face turn icy. She looked down, her thick eyelashes fluttering.

“They said that? There's a bowl that looks like this in the National Museum of Iraq?”

“You didn't know that?” I asked.

“I had no idea. Is it still there?”

“No,” I replied, trying my best to gauge her reaction. “It was stolen during the Iraq War. It's been missing since 2003.”

I could tell that what I'd said had upset Hannah. She was very nervous. Her heart-shaped face was flushed and everything about her body suddenly felt restless.

“And what did NCIS tell you about this bowl?” she asked, touching it again with her fingertips.”

“They said it was a copy. Not the original. They even TL-tested it. Do you know what TL—”

“Of course I do,” she said, interrupting me. “I'm sure I know a lot more about ceramics than you do.”

I was sure she did, too. Especially how to throw and glaze pottery so well that it could be confused for an antiquity.

“They had an expert from Sotheby's, Max Sebastian, fly in from London to do the test at Brown. He's the one who alerted them that it could be the real thing. I had reached out to him and so had someone else from Newport. He did the TL testing. You know how expensive that procedure is. But they did it. Max and the NCIS guys concluded it was new. Made recently.”

“TL testing is not always accurate.”

“No, but in this case I think it was.”

Hannah looked at me, still not offering an admission.

“Did you make this bowl?” I said, taking it out of the box and holding it.

She reached for it again and I let her take it out of my lap. I looked at her, her pretty face, her faint scar, the determination in her body language. We heard thunder in the distance but the storm still felt miles away.

I asked her again if she made it.

“Yes, I did,” she finally said curtly. “I made it in the exact same studio at Hartford where you came to see me.”

She had just confirmed what I'd thought since I'd called her voicemail. It was just that I had the wrong bowl. Now I had to figure out why.

“When did you make it?” I asked, watching her turn it over in her lap.

“January. Right after the new year.”

“January. Are you sure? But I only bought it in February. And Tyler said—”

“Let's not get into ‘Tyler said' yet.”

She didn't want to talk about Tyler. I was sure this conversation was impossible to have without him in it.

“Why did you make it?” I asked, studying her.

“Why? Because Ford asked me to.”

I didn't want to know anymore. She'd said the phrase that had halted me in good decision making since I had come home. Ford. He had asked Hannah to make it. It was definitely not a gift from a translator; a girl he was once very attached to made it for him. Maybe still was.

“Why did he say he wanted it?”

Hannah looked down at the bowl again, like if she didn't keep checking on it, it would disappear.

“Around October, after trying to see me all summer, he stopped contacting me, stopped trying, and it was just silence between us. Nothing. Like we had never happened. Which is how I wanted it. Or thought I wanted it. But when he called me in December and I saw his number on my phone, I couldn't resist. He gets under your skin.” She looked at me with a flicker of animosity. “But I don't have to tell you that, do I. You know him.” Hannah brushed her thick brown hair out of her eyes and shifted her position on the towel. “I answered the phone and instead of the flood of apologies I thought I was going to hear, he said he had a big favor to ask me and could he come to Hartford to see me on a weekend.”

“A weekend in December.”

“Yes, early December. He asked, I said yes, and we ended up in the pottery studio completely alone—”

“There was no one else there?”

“Right. That's what alone means.” She glared at me for interrupting and kept talking. “We didn't talk about what happened in July. He just touched my face, the scar on my chin, my nose, sat down, put his head in my lap, and cried.”

I didn't want to feel the jealousy that flooded me as she explained. I wanted to feel sympathy, understanding, even a renewed force to keep questioning Hannah, but all I felt was envy. She had had Tyler's head in her lap; she had seen him cry. That, more than anything, was what I wanted. Tyler laughing, crying, screaming. I had seen him angry before but it was always tempered by his consummate self-control. That measure, his internal metronome, is what made him Tyler Ford. It was also what made me think, even when he was revealing his heart, that he was hiding something. I wanted the something. I wanted all of him.

“After that I felt—and you know why—an overwhelming amount of guilt,” Hannah admitted. “So when he asked me for a favor, I said yes.”

“And the favor was to copy this bowl,” I said, pointing to the one in her hands. “Or not that one, but one he had?”

“That's right.”

“What was the story behind it? Did he give you a reason that he wanted it done?”

“Not really,” she said, reaching for the hem of her boyfriend jeans again. “He said it was important and that it didn't have to be exactly the same, just as good as I could make it. I didn't ask him any questions. I thought maybe it belonged to a friend of his from the war and he wanted one, too. Ford was never very open about his time in Iraq. I didn't want to pry.”

“So how good did you make the copy?”

“Perfectly,” said Hannah, looking down at it in her hands. “I majored in ceramics at the University of Hartford a decade ago. I studied pottery in Egypt for two years after school. There's nothing I know better.”

“And Tyler knew that about you?”

“Of course. We were together for a year. What do you think, we barely introduced ourselves?”

Hannah was also proving to be an expert at slicing my confidence away.

“He asked you to just make him one.”

“Yes! That's what I told you. He asked, and I did. It took me a little while to get the glaze perfect. I had to distress it slightly. And the pattern, that was very hard to copy.”

I didn't understand why Hannah had been committed to making a perfect copy if it wasn't intended as a forgery. I felt like she was lying, but also that NCIS had made her very nervous. Maybe too nervous to lie.

“How do you distress it?” I asked, wishing I had more than a sophomoric knowledge of pottery.

“It's pretty straightforward. First you fire it twice. Once before glazing, once after. Then you use a coarse-grit sanding block, followed by a fine sandpaper. After all that you leave it in the sunlight during the day and under a heat lamp at night for a few weeks. It also helps if you dip it in urine.”

Our brown eyes locked, but she didn't confirm if she'd gone to that extreme.

“You did all that, just so Tyler Ford could have a copy of a nice bowl to place on a shelf? Forgive me, but I'm having a very difficult time believing you. Doesn't that seem like an awful lot of trouble to go through for someone to have a keepsake?”

“It doesn't matter what you think. I did it that way. He wanted that bowl, I cared about him, so I made him that bowl. I didn't ask questions. He's a marine who works at a flight school. What did I think he was going to do? Sell it at Christie's? I thought he just wanted something nice. Something he was sentimental about. Ford hasn't had that many nice things in his life. I thought he deserved it.”

“But what about the bowl he showed you? The one he wanted you to copy. Did he say that it was a gift from his translator?”

“No. Was it?”

“I don't know. That's one version of the story. Did he leave you the bowl to copy?”

“Yes. I had it for almost a month. It took me a while to make a replica. It's a very complicated pattern.”

“And what did you think of the bowl you had? You who knows so much about this stuff. Did you think it was old? An antiquity? Did you think it could be stolen?”

“Stolen, definitely not,” she said without pausing.

“But you didn't know that there was a bowl in the National Museum of Iraq that looked exactly like the one you had in your hands.”

“No, I didn't know that, but I did know Ford. I never considered that it was stolen.”

Hannah seemed far too smart to have never considered that possibility, but I dropped it. She had clearly found the answer she was sticking to.

“What about the age. Did you think it was an antique?”

“At first I didn't. It was in such perfect condition.”

“But then . . .”

“Like I said, I studied the glaze. It looked—in the right light—it looked mellow. And there was slight, very slight, crackling and crazing. But that was it on the glaze. I didn't think it could be very old until I studied the base. It showed its age.”

“I don't remember that it did.”

Hannah shrugged and stood up from the towel. She stretched her arms over her head, leaned from side to side, and sat back down. “These conversations should never be had on a beach.”

“They should never be had at all, but I don't think we have much of a choice now.”

“Since that day we met, I've been thinking about whether I would tell you all this if the chance came up,” said Hannah, leaning back on her hands again. “If you came back.”

“Why did you decide to?”

“Because you did come back, and because now I'm scared. That phone call. I'm worried that they'll call again. I don't want to talk to them. So instead, I'm talking to you. You can deal with it.” She did not sound scared, but she struck me as a girl who never went too far into the white and black of life.

“When was the bowl in the National Museum of Iraq made? I mean, the one that used to be there,” she asked.

“I'm not sure. It wasn't fully entered into their records.”

Hannah didn't reply. She crossed one leg over the other and stared out at the water, as if the solution she was hoping for was hiding somewhere in that shallow pond.

“Do you think the bowl that Tyler gave you to copy could have been several hundred years old? Museum-­worthy?”

She turned to look at me, her eyes emotionless. “I don't.”

“Is it even in the realm of possibility?”

“I'd be very surprised.”

I shifted my legs again, which were freezing now that we'd lost the sun to thick clouds.

“I just don't understand why you tried to make it so close to what he gave you. Maybe you can explain that to me again, because if anyone ever asks you, that's what they're going to wonder. The way you describe it, it sounds like you were trying to make a forgery.”

“But I wasn't!” She sat up straight and wiped her sandy hand onto her lap. “I swear to you, I never intended to make a forgery. I didn't know the thing he gave me was worth anything. I still don't. I just wanted to do a good job because it seemed to matter to Ford. I hadn't seen him since July; there was a lot of emotion tied to it. This was just a small way for me to show him that even from out here, I was still in his life. I cared. I still do.” She looked at me to see the reaction I refused to give her.