The Price of Inheritance

by Karin Tanabe

  “I’d like to, Carolyn. I would. But this is all part of an ongoing NCIS investigation. I can’t just take you through everything step by step, now, can I?”

  Of course he couldn’t. I was just hoping he would.

  “What if you took me through it in a complicated way?”

  “What if I promised you that you would be hearing something soon?”

  “Then I’d probably sleep on my front stoop.”

  “You’re lucky it’s spring.”

  After my nothing conversation with Blair, I decided to go to Hook’s auction that afternoon. I had tried to be helpful in the store but William likened me to a nervous zoo animal with rabies.

  “You’re going to froth on something. Please leave,” he said, trying to lace his concern with humor. I knew I looked terrible, I was acting disastrously, and all through it William did his best to carry on like everything was pleasant.

  I wanted to stop by Tyler’s again, to pound on his door and call his name like I had done every day in a row for a week, but it was getting too embarrassing. He didn’t want to see me.

  Hook’s was exactly like it had been every week that I’d attended. This time, the only difference was that the Merlot was a dark purple, almost the color of eggplant skin. When I came in, Hook brought me a glass and I tipped it back and drank it. My sophisticated Christie’s-trained eye was doing nothing for me. My instinct about Hannah was totally off the mark. I might as well just down enough to see double; then I’d feel like I was getting a good deal.

  I passed on Hook’s first five lots of the day.

  “Lot six now, ladies and gentleman, lot six, for the real lover of American furniture, is a Hugh Finlay chair. It was originally part of a set of six, but we’ve just got the one for you today. We’ll let you go find the other five, but you can have this one, right here, right now. This is a museum-worthy piece, ladies and gentleman. The best of the best. You want to impress all your friends for the Newport summer season, you better buy this chair and put it right in the middle of your living room. Now let’s start this bidding!”

  Hook had a Hugh Finlay chair. I had no idea how he had gotten it, but I knew I had to have it. I grabbed my phone and texted William. “Hook has a Hugh Finlay chair. Maple and cane, painted and gilded. Curved crest tablet. Near-perfect condition. Can I bid?”

  “Do not go over seventy-five thousand,” he wrote back. “Authentic . . . give me a percentage.”

  “One hundred,” I wrote back. I knew the chair. The set had originally been in the summer home of the founder of the Baltimore Sun. Four were at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. One was at the High Museum in Atlanta. I knew we could sell it for over a hundred thousand.

  A few of the men readied their paddles but I already knew none of them was going to win.

  “Who’s got fifty thousand for me, starting at fifty thousand . . . Carolyn Everett! Welcome back to the show, princess.”

  The bidding went up to $65,000 and I was the one bringing every bid up. I’d sell my firstborn to have that thing.

  “Seventy thousand who’s got seventy thousand against this Newport brat, come on now someone take it from her. Let’s see it in the crowd now seventy thousand.”

  A man in Nantucket red pants bit on the bid and I went straight for seventy-one thousand. The seventy-thousand bid dropped out and Hook winked at me as he lifted the tusk he used for a gavel and said, “Sold to my favorite gal . . . of the day, Carolyn Everett.”

  I stayed at Hook’s until the end of the auction, buying two Chinese ginger jars and a piano stool. Afterward, I asked him to help me put everything in William’s car. I, for a few moments, owned a Hugh Finlay.

  “Where did you get this chair?” I asked. “I could sell this to a museum, you know.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said with mischief in his voice.

  “But you know that,” I replied. “Fine, I won’t ask you how you got it. I’m just very happy you sold it.”

  “You been keeping busy?” he said as he walked backward, holding the chair with me. “You don’t look yourself. Thin and jumpy.”

  “I know. I’m not myself. I’m about three steps from disaster but I’ll keep it together. This right here is helping a lot.”

  “Let me know what I can do,” said Hook without prying. He loaded my trunk and left before I closed the door. The chair’s feet were sticking out a little too far and I pushed it in a few more inches so they wouldn’t hit the glass when I shut it. It was heavier than I thought it would be. I braced myself with my back leg and lifted it a little higher, pulling the legs up. And then I saw it. There was a note taped to the bottom of the seat of the chair. I pulled it off carefully and opened it. On a small white piece of thick paper it said, in small black slanted letters,

  Carolyn. I’m sorry. Soon . . .

  —Ford.

  CHAPTER 14

  He knew I would buy it. The Hugh Finlay. Of course he knew. Or was he there? Had Tyler’s eyes been on me this entire time? When I was with Greg, entering the Dalbys’ house or repeatedly knocking on his door, calling him from the street—could he have been watching me? I stood motionless in the parking lot. Tyler had not abandoned me. I shut the trunk, got into the car, and locked the doors. Soon. I needed soon to happen immediately.

  When I got back into town, I passed Carter walking down by the water. I slowed the car down and called his name.

  “Carolyn, look at you sane enough to drive. Park the car. I’m about to take my boat out around the harbor. Thirty minutes. Come with me. It’s right here.” He pointed behind him to the dock that was closest to town.

  I parked the car a few feet away in a wide space and walked slowly to him. I took my sweater off and tied it around my waist, letting the sun hit my shoulders. Suddenly everything felt better. Tyler was near me and soon he would be with me. I could feel his presence.

  “Did Jane tell you about this thing?” said Carter, kicking off his Sperrys when we got to the dock.

  “No,” I said, looking up at the beautiful sailboat. The Dalbys only had sailboats. They would never own yachts. They, as a family, held on to their east coast blue blood the way southerners held fast to accents.

  “I love your boat, Carter!” I yelled out as he hopped on and gave me a hand.

  “I do, too. I bought it, you know. Not Jane. Makes it even better.”

  I smiled, looking up at the white sails, jetting out so beautifully against the sky.

  “That does make it better. It’s wonderful. Even better than Jane’s.”

  It was smaller than Jane’s, but I liked the intimacy. It felt like a very polished version of normalcy instead of Newport grandeur.

  “I’m going under the bridge out for a couple miles and then back,” said Carter, jibing the boat north. “There’s something off with the mainstay, according to Jane. And you know Jane, she knows best. I wanted to check it today.”

  I kicked off my shoes and offered Carter a hand, but he told me to relax and keep him company.

  “You want to talk about it?” he asked as we coasted under the bridge.

  “Not at all!” I shouted back. This was the first time I’d felt like I wasn’t about to have a stroke since NCIS had come to my door.

  “Can I just ask about Max?”

  “I missed him. He was here and I missed him.”

  “Why was he here?”

  To ruin my life.

  “I don’t know,” I said, smiling.

  Carter let me leave it there and we moved past Gould Island, up toward Prudence Island.

  “I appreciate this, Carter,” I said when he moved away from the sails. “I really do. I wish I could stay here indefinitely.”

  “No you don’t. You have too much to do.”

  “I know. But let’s pretend I don’t.”

  When we got off the boat I thanked Carter again for stic
king out his olive branch and drove back to William’s. I polished, I rearranged, I dusted, I catalogued, I logged, I updated the site, I changed the front window display, and at ten minutes to six, right before close, I opened the front door to Brian Van Ness, the officer from NCIS who had grilled me before.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” he said as he walked in without being invited inside. He was alone.

  “You mind if I sit at that table?” He pointed to the glass table where we had sat before.

  “Do you want to let me know why you’re here first?” I asked, trying not to get upset.

  “Why don’t you invite me to sit down and then I’ll let you know.”

  I gestured rudely toward the table.

  “First of all, I know you’ve been trying to contact us. I’m sorry we couldn’t be in better touch.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Secondly, have you had any contact with Tyler since we talked to you?”

  “Not a word. Nothing. The second you spoke to me, he vanished. Was that your doing? Did you tell him he couldn’t talk to me?” I needed him to confirm. It had to be because of them.

  “He was pretty upset over everything. He’s got a reputation on base, a real stoic thing going, but he showed a lot of anger over what was happening to him the past couple of days.”

  “Anger or emotion?”

  “A little of both. It’s understandable. Accused of possession of stolen goods, breaking several military codes, laundering.”

  “Laundering? What are you talking about?”

  “Donating the bowl to Goodwill. Make it pass through a few hands, come up again after it makes its way through different channels, possibly in a different state. By the time you have it back, it has lost its stigma. It’s just another one of those instances where a five-dollar bowl sells for several million. You know, those things happen.”

  “They happen, but not because of laundering. They happen because people don’t know what they have.”

  “But all signs pointed to Tyler knowing what he had.”

  “And the museum? Was there really a record of that bowl?” My hands were sweating, sticking to each other. Why did these NCIS agents just walk into the store? Act like they had authority over me, speak to me whenever they wanted to. I thought of Tyler’s note, of him close to me, looking after me, and tried not to panic.

  “How do you know there was a record?” asked Brian.

  I hadn’t meant to blurt that out. Greg. He would know Greg had told me.

  I shrugged.

  “I’ll ignore that and tell you like you don’t know. Yes, there is a record of that piece at the National Museum of Iraq. It was brought in right before the museum was looted, and two weeks after it got there, it was stolen. But the American military was in no way involved in the theft.”

  “Until Tyler.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “What did you say?”

  “That it looked bad. Tyler ditched the bowl in the middle of the night in some Goodwill pile and you, a girl he’s sleeping with, has it in her apartment. Then the museum’s photos of the bowl. That same bowl. All of that is enough for a front-page New York Times story. It wrote itself.”

  “So did it?” I asked, my voice broken. Was this what Tyler had meant by soon?

  Brian reached down into a leather bag he had with him. He put the bowl on the table in front of me and I lowered my face onto the glass table, trying not to cry.

  “Like you said, this bowl isn’t an antiquity. It was made in the last ten years.”

  I was crying now. My tears fell on the table around me, dripping, salty, near my mouth. Brian let me stay like that until I collected myself and sat up and dried my face.

  “I didn’t mean to react like this. I’ve been thinking the worst. I thought I got it wrong.”

  “Tyler Ford is not getting court-martialed, no charges are being pressed, and I can give this”—he pushed the bowl slightly forward—“back to you.”

  I looked at it on the table, sitting there, like nothing had happened to it. It had gone from Tyler to Goodwill to Hook’s to me to NCIS and back, and it still looked beautiful, like a bowl that should be put on a shelf and left alone. I didn’t want to touch it yet. I just looked at it sitting between us, and wondered how I had become entangled in all this, just by buying something that I thought looked nice at a nothing auction.

  I wiped my face again and pushed my hair back in place.

  “The TL testing. Were you there for it?”

  “I’m not asking how you know about this. You haven’t said any of this.”

  “Fine, I haven’t said any of it. But can you tell me about the TL testing? I want to know if that happened.”

  “It did. Max Sebastian from Sotheby’s was the lead on it with an archaeologist and an Egyptologist from the Joukowsky Institute.”

  “Was Blair Bari one of them?”

  “Blair Bari, no. I don’t remember meeting him.”

  “And the results?”

  “Like I said, it’s only ten years old, they believe. Made within the decade.”

  I had been right. Greg and Max and NCIS had been wrong and all of this with Tyler, all of it had happened for some piece made ten years ago. I couldn’t believe it.

  Brian stood up, leaving the bowl behind on the table for me. My twenty-dollar bowl was no longer a stolen half-million-dollar bowl. It was back to being my twenty-dollar memory.

  “I’m sure Tyler will come find you now,” said Brian, heading for the door. “He probably just wanted to keep you out of it.”

  I told him I hoped so. As soon as Brian left, I planned to bound out the door and find Tyler myself. All the anger that I’d felt toward him was being chipped away because he had done absolutely nothing wrong.

  “There’s just one thing I haven’t been able to drop. But it’s not my job to care about it anymore, so I’m going to stop caring, but I am still going to ask you,” said Brian.

  “What’s that?”

  “That bowl.” He pointed to my bowl on the table. “It’s new, right? Fired and glazed just ten years ago. But it looks exactly like the one that the museum has on file, the Arabic phrase, the pattern, the size, it’s identical.”

  “Did the museum record say anything about the underside of the base? The Hebrew writing?”

  “It didn’t. I don’t think. I don’t remember seeing that in the pictures Max had the museum fax over. But everything else, like I said, the colors and that intricate pattern and even that line from the Quran, all the same. So how could that happen? Did someone have the real object and just throw together a copy in the last couple of years for fun?”

  “Could have been,” I said. “Did the documentation say where the bowl had come from?”

  “A dig. An archaeological dig in Jaffa.”

  “In Jaffa?” I said surprised. “But that’s in Israel.”

  “Right. I looked that up and saw that.”

  “Why would it have been donated to the National Museum of Iraq?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not our jurisdiction to look into that. We’re only concerned with military crimes. The bowl in Tyler’s possession, previously in his possession, was not stolen, so the rest doesn’t matter to us. But that just bothered me, personally. You know, the copy.”

  “There could have been a picture if it came from a dig site. Someone could have admired it and copied it, the way countless people try to repaint the Mona Lisa because it’s a challenge. They don’t necessarily try to pass it off as the real thing.”

  “I’ll take that as an explanation. Between you and me, I like Tyler Ford. I wouldn’t have liked to see him on the wrong side of all this.” Brian smiled contently. We walked through the store and I shut the door behind him.

  Tyler’s bowl. Now I could call it that. Now I wanted to call it that
. I walked back to the table and looked at it. I didn’t want to touch it yet. I knew that as soon as I picked it up I would never want to put it down. I put my hand inside and ran it over the glaze, the even greens, the vanilla cream white. I had always loved furniture because of its size. It was heavy and substantial. Sturdy. Something you could live with and didn’t have to frame and hang away from dirty hands. But I loved the lines of this bowl. Its perfect roundness, the slanted Arabic script. I finally put both my hands on the sides and picked it up. I held it in the air in front of me and as soon as it was level to my eyes, I almost dropped it. It slipped from in between my hands and I barely caught it with my left. I screamed out for no one to hear me. But I still had it. I held it up again and then transferred it from one hand to the other. I sat back down at the glass table and put my head on the surface again. It was still wet from my tears of joy. Now I could add fresh ones. This was not Tyler’s bowl.

  CHAPTER 15

  I hesitated and then dialed three out of the ten numbers I needed for the phone to ring and hung up again. I shook out my nervous hand, stretched it like a guitar player before a concert, and sat back down at the table. I was sitting on time I didn’t have. I crossed my legs, picked up the phone again, entered the number, and waited for the phone to ring. An operator answered quickly. She had a pleasant voice, a college student’s voice.

  “I’d like to be transferred to Hannah Lloyd, please,” I said, trying to make my tone sound smooth, normal.

  “She’s in the pottery studio, but I can get her if you like. Can I tell her who’s calling?”

  “Tell her it’s Katie, with a commission for the bowl we talked about. She’ll know me.”

  I was put on hold for a few minutes, and when a voice came back on the line, it was the same girl who answered.

  “She’s in the middle of firing but she said she’ll call you back in ten minutes. Can you leave a number?”

  I gave her my number and put my phone on the table next to the bowl. I picked the bowl up again and felt the weight of it.

  That had always been my concern with Tyler’s bowl, the weight. It was heavy. Substantial. Nothing like the older Middle Eastern pottery I had ever touched. I took out my photos of the bowl and compared every inch to the one in front of me, but there were no differences that I could see. It was only the weight. I knew for TL testing you had to core out a five-millimeter piece to sample, but that was not going to make a difference.