The Price of Inheritance (31 page)

“So you copied it,” I said coolly.

“Yes, I copied it. A copy. Not a forgery.” She shook her head and put her fingers on her temples. “It's going to rain, I can feel it,” she said, starting to rub her forehead. “What could happen to me if they decide I forged something?”

“I don't think they ever would. Like you said, you had no idea that one existed at the National Museum of Iraq. You never had intent to deceive. You just took a commission. That's a good point, actually. Did Tyler ever pay you?”

“Do you call him Tyler to his face?” asked Hannah.

“Yes, I've never called him anything else.”

“That's surprising. He always hated that name,” she said dismissively. “Everyone calls him Ford.” She lay down on her back and closed her eyes. “No, he never paid me.”

“Then it was just a favor for a friend. I don't think you should be worried about getting in trouble even if something did come out of all this. Something with Tyler.”

“It's very strange to hear you say that. Tyler. You're probably the first girl who ever got away with calling him that. He must like you.”

She opened her eyes, sat up, and then stood. By her body language, I could tell that our conversation was over. I stood up, too, shook as much of the sand off the towel as I could, folded it, and held it against my chest. I bent down, moved my shoes, and slipped them on my cold feet.

“I appreciate your honesty,” I said finally. “You're right. You didn't have to tell me anything.”

“You were going to find out soon enough.”

“I don't think I would have.” I started heading to the area where our cars were parked and Hannah followed. “I appreciate your time. I'll be in touch if anything happens.”

“Please don't be unless you have to be,” she replied.

“Okay. Then good luck. I hope we don't have to speak again.”

I reached into my bag, where the bowl sat safely packed in the Styrofoam box, my car keys right on top. I put everything in the backseat, making sure the bag was secure, and reached for the driver's side door. Hannah was doing the same but she looked up at me before getting into her Volkswagen.

“Do you promise you'll try to keep my name out of this if it ever becomes something?”

“I do. I promise,” I replied, surprised. She stepped slightly away from her car door, closed it, and leaned against it.

“Then I'll tell you one more thing. But if anyone ever asks me in an official capacity, I plan on denying it.”

I nodded in understanding.

“I added something to the original bowl. The one that Ford brought me to copy. The one that, you seem to think, could have been from that museum in Iraq.”

She looked at me like I should have known what she was alluding to. Me with my big education and my big career, but I had no idea.

“I added a fake base to the bowl he gave me. I created an exact likeness and then added it to the original base so that the foot rim is almost flush with the new base. That's the only obvious difference between the two bowls, though I must have done a good job because you didn't notice.”

“No, I didn't.”

“But the most important part of that base is that in between the real base and the fake base is a thick circle of marble.”

I went over Hannah's words carefully. I didn't know what to say next. My mouth felt dry, thinking about all the days I turned that first bowl, the Goodwill bowl, over and over in my hands. I finally was able to open my mouth and all I said was “the weight.”

“Yes, the marble, it made it a lot heavier. It also meant you never saw that bowl's original base. That's why you didn't think it was old. The weight was wrong and the base looked new because I covered the old one.”

“You put a fake base on the bowl?”

“Yes.”

“But you never thought it was an antiquity. Worth anything.”

“I didn't think it was worth all that much. It's pottery.”

“But just in case it was, and just in case he was asking you to copy it with fraudulent intent, you wanted to cover Tyler's ass by making both of them look new, your copy and the one he gave you.”

“I never said that. And if anyone asks me, I won't say that.”

“But that's exactly what you did.”

“I told you I knew a lot about TL testing. More than you.” She did know more than me. But both of us knew that TL testing was always done from the base unless forgery was suspected; that way the glaze stayed intact. If there were grave concerns about authenticity, a very small piece had to be cored from the side of the piece to TL-test, which would damage it. From what I had gathered from my few hours spent with Hannah, she was good enough not to have anyone suspect a fake.

“Ceramic forgers put old bottoms on new bowls to turn a big profit. You put a new bottom on an old bowl,” I said.

“A reverse forgery. That makes me sound even more innocent.”

I didn't reply. All I could think about was Max Sebastian and his TL test at Brown.

She opened her car door again and put her hand on the door to get in. “Try not to fuck him over,” she said, turning her head toward me. “He's a decent guy underneath everything.”

“What about you? Aren't you worried about you?”

“Of course I am, but like you said, I didn't even know about the National Museum in Iraq. There's no crime there. I was just copying a bowl that I thought was some cheap keepsake. It was just a favor for a friend.”

“And the new base you put on that cheap keepsake?”

“Artistic license. I thought it looked dirty. I wanted to freshen it up.”

“A convenient explanation.”

“Carolyn, for the record, I don't think Ford was doing anything wrong.”

She might have believed that, but I no longer did.

CHAPTER 16

I
t was an hour before I made it back to downtown Newport. I drove straight to Tyler's. I wanted him to be there, but as soon as I pulled up in front, I knew he wasn't. Everything around his town house had an undisturbed stillness to it, like even the mailman hadn't dared to walk up the path. I tried the front door, pounding on it, ringing the doorbell, but no one came. I walked around back and did the same thing, but still silence. I opened the screen door and rested my hand on the doorknob. As soon as I put a little weight on it, it turned. The back door was unlocked. I tried the knob again, but it moved just like before. Had Tyler been home? Was he home now?

I hit it with my fist again and called his name, but no one came. I turned the handle for a third time and pushed the door open with my hip. The hinge creaked slightly as I walked in but the house was completely quiet. Behind me, I could hear the faint shouts of children playing somewhere in the neighborhood. I stood motionless in the kitchen, looking around. There were no dishes in the sink, no mail on the counter, nothing to indicate when someone had last been home. I wanted to scream his name again, but now that I was inside I was afraid to. I took a few steps into the living and dining room. Everything was immaculate. I could see vacuum cleaner lines on the beige rug and it looked like no one had walked on it since it had been cleaned. I moved carefully into the guest bedroom downstairs. The bed was made and the desk had a few letters on it. I walked over and looked at the date they were stamped. They were from two weeks ago.

Tyler's bedroom was on the second floor and I hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, feeling like a criminal. I thought about the last few times I had been over to the house looking for him. I was sure that the back door had been locked. Positive. I closed my eyes and thought about the first day I had come searching for him, when NCIS had been to the gallery and I hadn't yet spoken to the Dalbys or to Greg. I had turned the doorknob back and forth, I was sure of it. He had to have been inside since then, but there was no noticeable sign that he had. I climbed the stairs to the bedroom and the first thing I noticed was that his window, the one closest to his bed, was fully open. I was sure I had looked up to the second floor the last time I was there, and hadn't seen it open, but now I wasn't so sure. The house wasn't that cold. If it had been open for nine days, it would be cooler inside. Our nights in May were still in the forties. I looked at his bed, his navy blue comforter pulled perfectly over it. I wanted to lie down, to remember what it felt like the first time my body had fallen horizontally on it and he had lain down on top of me.

I opened the top drawer of his dresser, but everything looked totally normal. Boxers folded, socks paired. Nothing seemed out of character except that it was a house that had, by what I could tell, been empty for nine days and was now unlocked.

I ran my hand against the edge of his bedspread and went back to smooth it out when I saw the crease I had left.

When I went back downstairs I looked around the living room again. I didn't know what I was looking for besides Tyler himself. Some sign that he was okay or that he had been home, but I didn't have either. I saw the picture of Katie, just where it had always been, and close to it was the Bible I had looked at after I had spoken to Blair Bari. I walked over to it and examined the spine. The leather-bound King James Bible. I was afraid to touch it. It was from his mother. He'd taken it to Iraq. It felt sacred—too sacred for a stranger's hands.

I ran my finger very gently down the spine and thought about how Tyler had put me in this situation. If he had come to see me in the last nine days, done something besides leave me a note via the Finlay chair at Hook's, then I wouldn't be here. Feeling a small burst of anger, I took the book down from the shelf and as soon as I opened it, a picture fell out onto the beige rug. I leaned down and picked it up, trying not to smudge it. It was a family photo taken in a field in what I imagined was Wyoming. There was Tyler in his military uniform with his mother and his older sister. His mother had blue eyes and dark hair, deep wrinkles around her eyes, and was tall like him, but his sister had brown eyes and lighter hair. She was very pretty. Not as attractive as Tyler, but beautiful in a more innocent, made-in-the-Heartland way. They stood, with Tyler in the middle, against a white fence. I put the photo back inside the cover, feeling like I was leaving dirty fingerprints and traces of guilt all over it.

I didn't know what I would do if he came in. Apologize when I should have been screaming and I didn't want to be in that position. I held the Bible in my hand, sure not to drop the picture again, and flipped back to Revelation. I moved slowly to the sections until I found 1:17: “And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.” In Tyler's Bible, in unsteady blue ink, the phrase “I am the first and the last” was underlined. I looked at it for a few moments, then quickly flipped through other sections to see if he had underlined anything else, but that was all. Just that passage in Revelation, the same one Blair Bari had spoken to me about when I showed him the bowl. With numb hands, I placed the Bible back on the shelf, made sure it was flush with the other books, rushed to the back door, and let myself out.

I put in a few hours at William's store that evening, staying late just like I promised.

“Your punishment is inventory,” he said, handing me a flashlight. He straightened his navy blue blazer, undid his bow tie, and walked out the front door, locking it behind him.

I didn't mind staying late that night. I had so much to think about after what Hannah had said and what I'd seen at his house. I needed to talk to Tyler. I could do nothing until I spoke to him and until then, all I could do was replay Hannah's words in my overloaded mind. She had made a fake base. Not only a fake base, but a weighted fake base. Few potters, I imagined, had ever been tasked with making an old bowl look new, but she had taken that upon herself. Or had he asked her to do it?

Marble and a fake ceramic bottom with the same words in Hebrew. I thought about the words and the way she had said, “Of course I do,” when I asked if she knew what they were. I had never seen the pictures of the bowl from the museum's archives, but maybe the words were different, or not there at all. But then I thought about Max. If there had been a discrepancy on that detail he would not have flown in.

I took all these parts and tried to make them a whole as I sat on the floor in the back of the store, logging in what William had bought on a trip to Boston. There was a small table that reminded me a little of the Hugh Finlay stenciled pier table from Baltimore. I thought about that day sitting on the floor of Elizabeth's sprawling Texas home with Nicole. My career was booming. I had just sold the most expensive piece of American furniture in history and I was poised to help acquire the country's best private collection of American-made furniture before flying home to a perfect New York life. I missed walking in the park and the energy pumping from the city every season. I missed all the parties and events I used to attend because of Christie's. And most of all, I missed the challenge of the job. I loved William's but the chase was different when you were doing it for an antique store. Until recently. I sat and inspected and typed things in a spreadsheet and thought about everything that made New York perfect, until I admitted to myself that it hadn't been perfect. My nerves, after a decade at Christie's, had been shattered. Alex treated me like a call girl he could always run back to, and I was so consumed by work that the New York life I dreamed about was still out of my reach. I didn't have anything there outside of Christie's.

I turned over the table that looked like the one from Elizabeth's and examined the base. I thought about Hannah's base, the false one she had created. What I couldn't figure out was why
that
bowl. Why replicate something that, at best, was worth half a million dollars when there were so many other, far more expensive works out there? The Sacred Vase of Warka, a five-thousand-year-old piece found in the thirties in southern Iraq by German Assyriologists, had been stolen from the Iraqi museum. It was dated to 3000
B.C.
and worth a fortune on the black market. Ten thousand other pieces were missing, and I was sure several thousand of those were worth more than the green and white bowl. Tyler's bowl. There were also items that were much smaller and easier to smuggle that were stolen from the basement storeroom, including glass bottles, cylinder seals, and jewelry. Things so small that you could put them in your pockets and get on an airplane. That bowl, why Hannah was copying
that
particular object, didn't make sense.

I had read a lot about the robbery at the museum in the last nine days. Mobs of thieves had looted the building between April 10 and 12, 2003. American troops had been criticized for not guarding it, and the higher-ups had been under even harsher judgment for not ordering it to be protected, but many troops who were on the ground said that their first job was protecting life, not art. I understood that. Some global press didn't, but most of us would protect a human over a vase. Even a very valuable vase. But it was devastation. One of the world's oldest civilizations was stripped of its cultural heritage. Or as I and many others saw it, our collective cultural heritage. A recent article I had read, recent but still three years old, talked about 632 pieces from the museum being returned from the United States. Six hundred and thirty-two was nowhere close to the ten thousand that were missing. I imagined a majority of the pieces were in the United States. We were the largest art market in the world with a huge collector base.

In the last thirty minutes I hadn't logged anything for William. I was still staring at the legs of the pier table like I was waiting for them to wiggle. I clicked open the Excel spreadsheet I was working on and wrote, “far left inside leg, minor scratches,” and then flipped the table back over. When I raised my head, I realized that there was someone at the door. The motion sensor light we kept over it had turned on and even from the back of the storage room I could see it. I stood up and walked to the main room and through the glass I could just make out his face, his blue eyes, his revealing expression. He lifted his hand to knock but pulled it away when he saw me emerge from the back room. By the time I got to the door, unlocked it, and opened it, I was crying. He came in the store and put his arms around me. He was wearing the same thin white shirt he wore on the boat that day with the Dalbys. It smelled clean against my face. I let him pull me closer to him, his arms firmly around me, and I cried uncontrollably, the kind of crying you're surprised your body can sustain for more than a few seconds. Everything about Tyler seemed bigger. His muscles felt thicker, his eyes wider, his presence more palpable. The part he played in my life had gone from starring role to all-encompassing.

“I said soon,” he whispered into my ear as I flooded his shirt with tears. He ran his strong hands through my hair, down my cheeks, across my lips. I didn't move my head. I said, “I hate you,” over and over again until he held me an arm's distance away and said, “You can't. I won't let you.”

That was enough to turn my elation at seeing him into anger. All the veins in his arms seemed to be jumping out of his flesh. I may have been in love with him but right now I hated every inch of that skin.

“You do not get to do this!” I screamed, pulling away. I walked past him and closed the door to the store, sensing how my voice was going to travel into the street very quickly. “You do not get to be the one who comes to me, just like that, when
you're
ready, when
you
want to. Nine days without one word from you! How dare you. You are a selfish bastard.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't want to get you involved any more than you already were.”

“You're sorry? Oh, well, thank you. Everything is fine now! One ‘I'm sorry' and the world can go on turning. You're acting like this is nothing, Tyler! Nothing! Like this is a dentist's appointment!”

“I'm not acting like anything,” he said, walking toward me. “I needed a couple of days to sort out a few things.” He pressed my arms to my sides and pulled me toward him, so close that I could feel his heart beat.

“Oh. A few things. What did you need to do? Update your Netflix queue? Maybe pick some fantasy baseball team? Or did you have to, say, cover your tracks because you're an art smuggler? Is that what you had to do? Did you have to, I don't know, destroy evidence? Or see how you could pin the entire thing on me? Maybe tell NCIS that I wanted to sell a stolen piece of chintz on the black market to my billionaire buddies? But wait! There's the kicker! Because it's not a piece of chintz, is it. Since February, I happened to have something worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars on my bookshelf in my mold-infested apartment. But why would you tell me that? Not because you're in love with me! Remember that speech, Tyler! It wasn't very long ago, was it? ‘You should always jump when someone says jump.' Well, let me tell you how much I regret jumping. I should have never, never gone looking for you!”

“You're worried,” he said, leaning down to kiss me. I pulled away before he could, so hard that his fingers left marks on my arm. He rested his hands on his slightly faded jeans, the ones he had been wearing the first night he walked into the store, when he had changed everything for me.

“Worried? Worried? Oh no. Not at all. Why should
I
be worried! It's just a day at the fair to have military police come to my door and seize my property. And then everyone I know tells me you're a worthless piece of shit. Why would that cause me any worry? And to just blow another hole in it, you disappear! I haven't seen you in nine days. Nine fucking days! I've been going crazy. I can't sleep, I'm a zombie at work. William thinks I'm about to hang myself with some antique militia rope. I've been searching the town for you, and for what?! You haven't been home, you don't answer your phone. You abandoned me!”