The Price of Inheritance (33 page)

“I did. I never told her I felt a difference, but I had that bowl for eleven years. I knew it pretty well. I figured out what she was doing, trying to save my ass if things got messy with TL testing, and it was a pretty good idea, so I kept it on.”

“Did you send it back to Max when his person asked for it back?” Tyler looked at me with a hint of mischief in his eyes, the same expression he'd had that day on the boat.

“I didn't. A different guy. Again, someone who used a fake name and who I only spoke to on the phone asked me to leave it for him in a designated place in New York. But I didn't leave him the real one, I left him Hannah's.”

“And the real one you dropped in the Goodwill box on base that Greg LaPorte set up.”

“Right.”

“Because . . .”

“Because I wanted it to get back to the museum. But I couldn't do it. I needed it to get laundered a little. Turn over, exchange hands, then eventually get back there.”

“Who was supposed to buy it?”

“Someone, anyone but you.”

“Not me? Oh, I get it, Tyler,” I said, standing up rigidly. His cool blue expression felt like knives on my skin.

“So I messed it all up for you. I bought it, me who knows a little too much about all this stuff. And even worse, I kept it.” It was right then that I realized why Tyler had asked me out that night we had first met. He didn't just fall over from love at first sight. He had to.

I said as much through fresh tears and collapsed on a chair. He stood up and tried to bend down toward me but I put my hand out to stop him. “Don't you dare. Do not touch me right now. Do not even come close to me,” I said. “You had it all figured out, you were going to make good on your youthful idiocy, but I got in the way. I brought what you were trying to get rid of right back to you. So what did you decide to do, Tyler? Fuck me? Seduce me so that I forgot all about it and you could realign things like you'd intended them to be in the first place? Is that why you kept trying to get the bowl back from me? I wouldn't give it to you, though. And why? Because I stupidly, so stupidly, fell in love with you. But it wasn't even you! It was just some character you were pretending to be. You know what, Tyler? Everything anyone has ever said about you is true. They thought you weren't going to amount to anything and look at you now. You're even worse than they thought you'd be.”

He didn't respond and I didn't feel bad for saying it. He knew, and I knew, it was true.

“You and me, it started for the wrong reasons. I admit that,” he said forcefully. “I needed to keep tabs on you. But after that day on base, after the Breakers, everything changed. I didn't care about my plan anymore, or anything. I just wanted to make things right and move the fuck on.”

“And how were you going to make things right? How!” I screamed. My throat hurt from tears and anger. My shirt was stained and my face was burning.

“I had sent Max the copy. He was going to notice it was a copy eventually because he's Max Sebastian, but it was so good that it would buy me a little time, enough for me to get the original back from you and to the museum. But then, you sent him those pictures in February so he figured it all out a little faster.”

“Bad luck, right?”

“Pretty bad.”

“Greg LaPorte also sent him pictures.”

“Yeah, I know. So he figured out who you were and where you lived and how you were connected to me through Greg and then he came to Newport to test the bowl.”

“And what do you think he did?”

“I know what he did. He brought the bowl he had, the one Hannah made, and that's the one he tested. That he could even core from the side, not the base, in front of NCIS and the results would say it was a copy. He showed those results to NCIS and then switched the bowls. They gave you back Hannah's bowl and he took the real one from you.”

“But the real one has a fake bottom.”

“Yeah, he's not a football coach, Carolyn. He's the very best. I'm sure he tested under the glaze and then he probably removed the bottom and got it to the buyer. That's why he contacted me for it in December. His sale, I don't know the details but he wanted it back fast. He must have finally gotten his money.”

“But you could have sent the real one back and gotten away with everything. Why the hell would you do what you did? The switch? Getting Hannah involved? Dropping it in that box on base, telling me everything? You yourself admitted that Max would eventually know you were trying to fuck him over. Why are you doing this?”

“I don't know. I guess I just had my come-to-Jesus moment, Carolyn. I spent a long time being Max Sebastian's yes-man, then I got to prove my salt, put a wrinkle in his plan with Hannah's bowl. Now I've had my retribution, grown the fuck up, and I need to wipe my plate clean.”

“Clean?”

“Fine. Cleanish. I wanted to control everything.”

He smoothed his thin shirt over his body, pulling it so close that I could see muscle and skin. He looked down at me, his light eyes focusing on my flushed face.

“If this was going to move, I wanted to be the one to move it because, look, it's eleven years later and I still got away with it.”

“You say that like you're proud!”

“I am a little proud. And I promised you I wouldn't lie. So yes, Carolyn, I'm proud of myself. That I, some dumb-ass kid from nowhere, could do what I did.”

“Smuggle? How hard is it to smuggle?”

“Pretty damn hard.”

“That's disgusting.”

“Disgusting or not, it is what it is. But now everything is different and I'm ready for the gig to be up.”

“So what the hell have you been doing for the last nine days? Getting ready to have Max Sebastian out you?”

“No. I've been trying to deal with this without getting you involved.”

“Well, that was an epic fail, Tyler. You've put me in a hell of a position. Why would you ever do this to me?”

“It wasn't supposed to be you. Like I said, you weren't supposed to buy that bowl. But I'm glad you did.”

Tyler sat down and moved closer to the end of the sofa, stretching his legs so they almost touched my feet. I pulled mine in and sat back on my chair.

“So now what. You admit everything and get court-martialed and dismissed? Are you ready for that?”

“I wouldn't have switched it to begin with if I wasn't ready for consequences.”

“What about losing me? Are you ready for that consequence?”

“That's the only one I couldn't face.”

“What about Hannah?”

“What about her.”

“You're still in love with her!”

I didn't know what I was more upset about: his lies, his backhanded duplicity, or how much he needed Hannah.

“I am not in love with her. I swear to you,” he countered, his voice letting through as much tenderness as Tyler knew how. “I'm not. I care about her very much. I'll always, for many reasons, be tied to her, want the best for her, but I'm not in love with her. I'm in love with you.”

“You screwed Hannah and now you're screwing me. What am I supposed to do with all this, Tyler? What!”

He stood up again and this time I let him walk closer to me. He lifted me from the chair and put his arms around me.

“I despise you,” I said, holding on to his arms.

“You love me,” he said, kissing my face. He repeated it until I kissed him back.

I wanted to tell him I didn't. I wanted to look at him straight in those blue, glassy eyes and tell him he meant nothing to me. That I could walk out of that room and never again have my heart beat with him in mind. But we both would have known I was lying.

“What's going to happen now?” I said, gripping his white shirt with my hands. I wanted to rip it to shreds, to pound on his chest with my fists, to berate him for being such an idiot, but all I did was stand there and cry. “Tell me what's going to happen now. Tell me.”

“I don't know, Carolyn. I guess that depends on what you do.”

CHAPTER 17

I
didn't leave the store until half an hour after Tyler was gone. I walked outside and the same motion light that had startled me two hours ago turned on again. I locked the store and texted Jane that I was on the way to her house. She wrote back that she wasn't home, but she would be momentarily. I told her I'd drive slow, but instead I walked fast. By the time I got to Bellevue, my tears had dried up and all I could think about was how many times I had driven up and down the street with Tyler.

Jane opened the front door before I rang the doorbell, and for the first time in my adult life, I realized just how enormous her house was. As I looked up at it, instead of marveling at it, it bothered me.

“What's wrong? A lot is wrong. I can tell. You have a face full of storm clouds,” said Jane, giving me a hug. She was wearing cashmere. Jane always wore cashmere until the end of May, and then she switched to linen.

“I can't talk about it, Jane,” I said trying not to flood her with more than she ever needed to know. “I just need you to be the friend who can distract me.”

“I can be that friend,” she said, pointing to the living room. “What do you want to do? It's a little late but do you want to eat? Do you want to walk? Or maybe drive? Swim? Drink?”

“Swim and drink.”

“Fine. Swim and drink. I'll get us bathing suits.”

She walked upstairs and I sat and stared at the Manet on the living room wall. The Dalbys had paid $32 million for it at a Christie's auction in London in 2010. It had been part of a huge sale with a Picasso blue-period painting and one of Monet's water lilies, which surprisingly went unsold. I had asked Mrs. Dalby why she went for the Manet instead of the Monet and she'd said, “If I want to look at a water lily, I'll just build a pond. No matter what I do, I can't look at the real Édouard Manet.” I found it to be as good an argument as any.

Jane handed me a plain black bikini and we walked through the living room, a study, and the sunroom before opening a door to the pool.

We changed and dove in and I lay on my back and let the water fill my ears. Jane did a few laps, but I just floated. I was so angry at Tyler that I didn't know what to do with my anger besides let it boil through me. Everything hurt. My brain felt slow, my arteries clogged, my muscles ripped. I tried to take a deep breath but the oxygen felt stuck in my neck. I had two choices. I could do nothing and see if Max did anything. Or I could tell NCIS everything I knew and put it in someone else's hands. The thought of both made me sick.

Jane lifted herself out of the pool, walked over to the antique beverage cart, and poured me a neat whiskey. She handed me a half-full glass and got back in.

“Here, don't drown,” she said, resuming her laps. We stayed like that for half an hour, Jane swimming, really swimming, even though it was almost two in the morning, and me lapping whiskey, refilling the glass, and letting my brain be washed over with Tyler.

When Jane gave up on her laps and swam toward me to see how I was doing, I was very drunk. She swam to the wall and stretched her arms out on either side of her, her three gold bracelets dinging together every time she moved her arm.

“Can you take those off? I just can't hear that right now,” I said, staring accusingly at her wrist.

“But I never take them off.”

I knew she didn't but all of a sudden I wanted her to. I needed something to hate right then, so I hated them.

“It's just the jingling. It's rattling my rattled nerves. They sound like tin cans.”

Jane raised her eyebrows at the suggestion that she was wearing tin and lowered her arm underwater.

“Thank you,” I said, knowing full well that in a few minutes I'd hear them again, a constant reminder of her charmed life. There, standing in someone else's pool, I was feeling very sorry for myself. There were moments at Christie's when I felt like I would one day get somewhere close to where I wanted to be. Nothing up to Dalby standards, but something that met mine. There wasn't huge money to be had working at Christie's, but if I got high enough, I knew I'd be able to stretch it out into something. Especially if I left and worked as a dealer.

“You're not going to tell me what's going on?” said Jane as I poured the rest of my second glass of whiskey down my throat.

“No.”

“You're going to sit in the pool and drink whiskey.”

“Absolutely.”

“Fine. I don't want to be around you, then.”

She got out of the pool and grabbed a towel, shaking it out vigorously, her three bracelets clinking together, not like tin cans, but like champagne glasses on New Year's Eve.

“Those bracelets sound like golden handcuffs right now,” I said, not turning to face her.

Jane continued to shake her towel and said, “I don't know when you became a mean drunk, but it's about as becoming on you as a woman with a mustache.”

She walked out of the room, her towel tight around her body, and I screamed out an apology just as the glass door banged shut behind her.

I fell asleep, in the bathing suit with two towels wrapped around myself, on one of the lounge chairs by the pool. I woke up the next morning feeling like my head was in a vise. The bathing suit was still somewhere between wet and dry and my entire body felt like a mix of whiskey and swamp. I passed a clock on the way to the pool bathroom. It was eleven. I was two hours late for work, horribly hung­over, and my face hurt from all the crying I did the night before. I would go to work. I would give myself the day. And that evening, I would go to Tyler's and decide what to do. William didn't say anything except “I see you've decided to work the night shift” when I walked in. I apologized, promised him I'd work until eight, and hoped that I smelled more like chlorine than alcohol.

By eight that evening, I was dragging. I was wearing a mix of what I'd worn the day before and another one of Jane's cashmere sweaters that had been in the bottom drawer of my desk. I left the store and locked the door under the motion light. Tyler's words kept sprinting through my brain. I had to be the one to decide. I'd thought about him sober, drunk, crying, stoic, naked, clothed, sweet, mean. And every time I did, I thought about my last day at Christie's, talking to Nina on the phone, getting kicked out of my office, blackballed from my career. I'd called Tyler selfish, but really, I was about to do something very selfish. I could not make the same mistake just a few months after what happened at Christie's. If I didn't say anything, and it all came out and I was part of it, I would never work in art again. Not legally. But Tyler—I needed him to come out of this, too. If I came forward, he could get dismissed; everyone had said that, even him. I knew that would kill him. He'd been in the Marine Corps for eleven years. It had taken him out of a three-thousand-person town in Wyoming and shown him the world. It had given him eyes, and without it, I didn't know what he would do.

I walked back to the glass table and laid my head on the cool top just like I'd done when I found out I had the wrong bowl. Someone had to save Tyler Ford, but it couldn't be me. I bit my top lip and called the number I had for the NCIS agent I'd spoken to twice now, Brian Van Ness. He answered after two rings and I explained why I needed to see him.

“Should I meet you at the antique store?” he asked.

“Definitely not.”

“Want to meet at the Blue Hen?”

“You're kidding.”

“Yes, I'm kidding. How about that meat restaurant on America's Cup Ave.”

“Smoke House.”

“Yeah, that one. I'll met you at the bar in, what, twenty minutes?”

“I'll be there in five.”

I was there in four. And by the time I was sitting at the bar I wanted to take back everything I had just said to Brian on the phone. What was I doing? I should have just let fate dictate.

When Brian came, I explained my regret and he nodded.

“But you can't take it back now. And you know you're doing the right thing.”

“Am I? How many tours did Tyler do? Four. And now what? He serves his country and I fuck him over?”

“You're not. He fucked himself over. And he's delivering you to give the message. It's kind of a chickenshit move, if you want my opinion.”

“He already put himself in the position to fail.”

“Yeah, I got that from what you said on the phone.” He cleared his throat and looked at me. “I stopped by Tyler's house on the way to meet you but he wasn't home.”

“That seems to be a trend lately.”

“When he wasn't home, I turned around and looked for him a little on base, but he wasn't there, either. Have you called him since you two talked last night?”

“No, I was going to tonight. I want to tell him what I'm doing, that I talked to you, but after the fact.”

“Can you try to call him now? I just want to see if he will pick up if he sees your number. He didn't answer my call. It went to voicemail.”

I took my phone out of my bag and tried his number. My call didn't go through, either. I didn't even get voicemail.

“Nothing. Not even a message.”

“No voicemail?”

I shook my head no.

“Fine.”

I waved to the bartender for another drink and Brian asked me to tell him everything I had told him on the phone again.

“Did Tyler say if he worked with anyone else from the military? It seems unlikely that Max would only recruit him to be involved in this.”

“He didn't say.”

“And what about this other bowl? The fake one, the copy. Where did he get it?”

This was when I had to lie. I put my glass down, looked at Brian, and said, “I don't know. But I know it's fake.”

“You don't know.”

“I don't know,” I said a little louder.

“You do know that all we have to pin Max Sebastian right now is your word that he's the head of a huge black-market antiquities smuggling ring.”

“What's wrong with my word?”

“It would help a lot more if we had Tyler's.”

“But when you talk to Tyler, he'll get court-martialed.”

“Definitely. That we have enough for. With everything you've said, if he admits to it, then we do.”

“You think he'll tell you something different than I'm telling you right now?”

“Possibly. But I have to find him first.”

“Well, then I don't know why I'm still here. I told you everything I know. So go to London. Deal with Max. Arrest him.” I finished the drink quickly to numb my escalating nerves.

“You don't get it, do you. Max is not my problem. Tyler is my problem. This is NCIS. Military law, military crimes conducted by members of the military. Max is, I'm guessing, not a member of the armed forces?”

“He's fifty-something and British.”

“Right. I'll talk to the Newport police. Actually, we'll talk to the Newport police. But tomorrow, when you haven't been drinking. Now that I say that, stop drinking. Here, have this.” He pushed his water glass toward me and watched me down the whole thing. “I'll meet you at the Newport police station on Broadway at ten
A.M.
tomorrow. Can you do that?”

“Of course,” I said, hiccupping.

“Fine. Switch to water.”

The next morning when I met Brian, I was there with a clear head and clean clothes. Brian waved me over to him before we walked in the door.

“You look better.”

“I feel a little better.”

“That's not going to last long. I found Tyler. Well, kind of.”

“How can you kind of find someone?”

“When did you say Tyler told you all of this?”

“Late the night before last. The night before I spoke to you.”

“Did he ask you to wait twenty-four hours before you spoke to anyone?”

“Of course not. He didn't ask me to talk to anyone. He didn't ask me to do anything. I'm sure he would be incredibly pissed off if he knew I did.”

Brian paused and looked away from me.

“He knows you pretty well?”

“I'd go with very well.”

“He knew you'd talk, then, but he also knew you'd wait to do it. You're not much of a rash decision maker, are you? Kind of a slow boil?”

“I guess so. What are you trying to say?”

“Tyler's in Turkey. Or at least he landed in Turkey last night. He took a flight from Boston to Istanbul. He knew you were going to talk to me. But I think he also knew you wouldn't do it immediately. If he thought you'd do it right after you left him, he wouldn't have gotten on that long of a plane ride.”

I stared at Brian for a long time before saying anything. Tyler knew I was going to report him. I was, despite everything I had always hoped to the contrary, predictable. And that night, I'd told him he'd turned out worse than anyone thought, worse than every cliché about him. And now he was gone. That's what he'd been doing during the nine days he'd disappeared. He'd been getting ready to run.

“What's in Turkey?” I asked in a low, tired voice.

“I have no idea,” said Brian. “But he just made things a lot worse for himself. If Max is what you say he is, Tyler could have confirmed that, gotten a deal. Now he looks really bad. And he's also a deserter.”

“A deserter? He's been gone for twenty-four hours and he's already a deserter?”

Brian pointed to the door of the police station. “Let's just assume he's on vacation, okay? We need to get through the rest of this.”

The rest of it did not go well. I told the head of the Newport police criminal investigation unit, Captain Jeff Ambrose, everything I knew and that was all I was able to do. When I asked Brian what would happen next, he shook his head and said, “I'll be in touch. Captain Ambrose might be in touch. Until then, just keep living your life.”