by Karin Tanabe
“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.
“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 co
nvenient 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
It 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.