by Emyl Jenkins
At the door, an officer nodded us in, admonished us not to touch anything, then gave us free run of the small apartment. This was, after all, Leemont.
Chalk marks, just like the ones you see on those crime shows, marked the spot near the bedroom where her body had been found. I shuddered and turned back into the living room.
What seemed strange, even to me, was the way a small side table and chair were toppled over. A china teapot and cup and saucer lay broken into pieces. Near the front door, pieces of a once delicate porcelain figurine, a ballerina with a lacy, flowerdecorated skirt, were scattered about.
Based on the 911 recording, plus this disarray, Roy said the police first suspected a break-in, but Mrs. Wilkins's front door had been locked when they arrived. And there were no signs that anyone else had been there in broad daylight. The back door was undisturbed. No window screens were cut. In the soggy winter ground around the building, there were no footprints or ladder marks. Inside, absolutely nothing suggested a burglary. There were no fingerprints about other than Sarah Rose's. Her body bore no bruises. There was no blood or cuts like you might expect from the jagged shards of broken porcelain.
By the time the police captain got around to acknowledging that Roy and I were there, he had pretty much concluded that Sarah Rose Wilkins was taken sick in the living room and had started back to her bedroom, knocking things over as she went. She must have been trying to make the phone call when the fatal heart attack struck, he said. It made sense. Certainly there wasn't any reason to perform an autopsy.
What it didn't explain was the part where Sarah Rose was heard telling somebody to get out-which, it would appear, is why she had called 911 in the first place.
Then one of the young cops suggested that she might have been hallucinating, maybe Sarah Rose Wilkins only thought someone was there. His grandmother had seen her dead husband as clear as day while she lay dying, he said. "My grandma even talked to my grandpa and told him she'd be there real soon."
I believed him. Some people called them ghosts; others said they are angels. Still others, trying to be correct in these PC times, called them spirits. Whatever you called them, visitors who were unseen but nonetheless vividly visible to the dying, were well documented. A nurse once told me that she believed these spirits were helpful apparitions who came to escort the dying on their journey that lay ahead. Then again, that made me wonder: if Sarah Rose had been visited by friendly angels, just why would she be telling them to get out, and so angrily?
Do not go gentle into that good night, Mother reminded me before I could pose my question out loud. Knowing Sarah Rose's uncompromising nature, Mother's explanation made some sense.
All I knew was that I wasn't used to making house calls where the body was still warm and the police were on the scene and people were talking about ghosts and apparitions. Perhaps that was why I had kept procrastinating and hadn't finished the job for Roy Madison. I didn't like the eerie feeling I'd had in Sarah Rose's apartment, and I didn't like the way it kept creeping back every time I worked on the appraisal.
Leemont Savings and Loan's trust department had been named the trustee of Mrs. Wilkins's estate when Mr. Wilkins had died some twelve years earlier. Bob Wilkins hadn't made a great deal of money as a pharmacist, but he had inherited some land that had become fairly valuable when Leemont began growing in the 1960s. He'd sold the land, and being a conservative man, he had put the money in a trust for his Sarah Rose, which explained why I was standing there with the bank officer in the middle of a crime scene.
With all that going on, no one had seemed very excited when I discovered the tea urn in a brown bag inside a motheaten blanket in the closet. But then that was the thing about antiques. Not many people had a clue what made one piece a giveaway and another a million-dollar treasure. Oh, Antiques Roadshow had tried to educate the public about quality and rarity and craftsmanship, but most people turned a deaf ear to everything until the appraiser asked, "Tell me, do you have any idea what the value of this piece is?"
That was always the tagline that sucked them in, just the way it had that afternoon when, after unwrapping the urn and recovering from the surprise myself, I turned to Roy Madison and said, "Do you have any idea what the value of this piece is?"
"No," he had said, quickly adding, "but a coffeepot can't be that valuable."
"Tea urn," I corrected him. "Some 175-plus years ago, long before Mr. Coffee and Mrs. Tea, the finest, most expensive silver coffee and tea urns came equipped with hot boxes to do the trick, like this one. See?" While I talked, I pulled out a cylindershaped metal piece that fit inside the urn. "Either a heated iron rod or red-hot coals were placed in this box to keep the brew warm. Over the years, most urns have lost this clever device, which means that the ones that have the box still intact are all the more valuable."
From the outset Roy seemed dead set on making sure that the tea urn wouldn't he anything of substance. After I'd put off giving him a concrete monetary value for the urn for the third time he became more insistent about the urn's value or, rather, its lack of value.
"Just give it your best guess, Sterling. What? Three hundred? Four? Let's be done with it," he had pleaded. "Look, nobody would have known about the coffeepot-tea urn-if you hadn't found-"
"And what are you going to do with it now that I have found it?" I said. "Sell it after the fact and then try to explain to the IRS how that old three-hundred-dollar coffeepot, as you call it, sold for twenty-five thousand or more?"
That's how I had bought a little more time.
I looked at the picture in the catalog of the tea urn estimated to sell for thirty-five thousand to fifty thousand dollars.
Mrs. Wilkins's urn was even finer. It had been made in 1810, two years later than the one in the catalog. Paul Storr, its maker, undoubtedly had refined the design in the interim. The urn in the catalog had nice, but simple, ball feet. Sarah Rose Wilkins's urn had a much more elaborate base, and the feet were exquisite classical dolphins, in addition to a fancier lid. And it bore an exquisitely etched coat of arms and two crests. Identify the duke, earl, or lord who had commissioned this piece and its value would take a giant leap. But there was no reason for me to try to hunt down the identity of some dead British royal. That was the work of a specialist. I was just a generalist appraiser, sort of the GP of the antiques world. I did know fine objects, though, and of the two urns Sarah Rose's blew the other one out of the water.
I flipped to the back cover of the auction catalog where I had stapled in the sales results for the auction.
Lot 338. $55,000.
That much simpler urn had sold for five thousand above its highest estimate some four years ago. What would Mrs. Wilkins's urn be worth? It could only be more valuable than that one, no matter whether the stock market was up or down. Sixty-five thousand dollars? More? Seventy-five thousand? Maybe on an extraordinarily good day. But probably more like sixty-eight or seventy thousand.
The bank would want a conservative estimate, I reminded myself. Either way, those mid-five-figure prices were a "fur piece," as we say down here, from three or four hundred dollars.
Personally, I'd had a love affair with silver since I was a little girl. My parents' home was filled with all sorts of useless, enchanting Victorian silver-napkin rings decorated with sparrows perched two abreast on a tree branch; a pickle jar having on its lid a boxer dog raised on his hack haunches; a butter dish with a cow, udders and all, on top of its domed cover. But most captivating were the seals and sea otters swimming around the base of our 1870s tilting water pitcher. I'd look at those totally frivolous pieces and they became a pathway to another place, another time.
Now my tastes were a tad more sophisticated. Instead of frolicsome nineteenth-century dogs, cows, and sea otters, I'd become fond of refined eighteenth-century shells and dolphins, scrolls, and acanthus leaves on my silver. Still, I used any excuse I could find to leisurely wander, page by page, through a silver auction catalog, rather than surfing the Net or logging
on to ArtFact, gazing at masterpieces that I could only see, never possess. That, to me, was as thrilling as riding in a Ferrari.
I marked the page in the catalog that told me what I had known all along but needed to have as substantial evidence. I laid the catalog on the desk just as the phone rang. Right on cue.
"About that coffeepot," Roy started in without so much as a hello.
"Well! Good afternoon, Roy. And, by the way, it's a tea urn," I corrected him for the umpteenth time.
"Have it your way. Tea urn."
"I think you're going to be, well," I paused for effect, "amazed by its value. You can close Sarah Rose Wilkins's file now. I've figured the value of the property in the estate at about"-I glanced at my notes-"twenty-three or twenty-four thousand dollars. That includes the good china and crystal, the one small nineteenth-century sampler that I put in at four hundred dollars, and the furniture. There just wasn't much of substantial value in Sarah Rose Wilkins's apartment, and the pots and pans and that nice pottery, as well as the everyday kitchen things, even including the appliances, don't amount to more than about"-I took a long pause-"another six or seven hundred."
I heard papers shuffling on the other end of the line. I could see Roy, as fresh at the end of the day as after his morning shower, impatiently shifting the days' files to their appropriate slot in his in/out shelves while I rattled on.
"Twenty-four thousand dollars total for all the property, let's say. No car. Add in the seventy thousand for the urn and that brings the total to-"
"Seventy thousand? Are you out of your mind? Sterling, there's no way. Where did you come up with that figure? Did you actually say seventy thousand dollars?"
I waited for Roy to calm down and absently shook my plastic Magic 8 Ball left over from my childhood. Its message wavered beneath the ball's cloudy liquid. "Yep. Seventy thousand. It is decidedly so.
"Look, Roy," I said. "I know it's none of my business why on earth you are so upset that this is such a valuable piece. I'd think you'd be delighted. You're going to come out of this looking like a champ. Doesn't the trust department get a percentage of the total estate? Ninety-four thousand dollars sure sounds better than twenty-four thousand. At least to my ears. Add on the money in the trust ... Am I missing something?"
Somehow, Roy's silence, followed by a throat clearing, a sigh, and finally a long "Well" on the other end of the line came as no surprise.
"This is in strictest confidence, of course," he said eventually.
"Of course. I was doing appraisals for Leemont Savings and Loan while you were still in high school," I reminded him.
"Now I'm gonna he honest with you, Sterling."
Roy's condescending tone didn't set well with me. I rolled my Magic 8 Ball, glad that video-telephone conferencing was still unheard of in Leemont. Don't count on it, the message read.
"You know the Wilkinses had no children, and their closest relatives, who weren't very close, lived far away," Roy said. "Both the Wilkins were so active in the community that it's only logical they left their money to local charities."
"So their money is going to stay in Leemont. Doesn't that make it all the better?"
"Not really. Or at least not as far as the bank goes," he replied.
I wasn't sure if I heard Roy's door close or if I imagined it.
"By the will, the library gets the cash in the trust, which is just fine. But the money from the sale of the property goes to Hope House."
"So?" I said.
"Don't you read the papers, Sterling?"
"Yes. But? So?"
"Hope House is trying to buy the old sock factory to renovate for a halfway house," he said as if that explained everything. "This is a big infusion of cash. Just what they need to make the project possible."
"What's wrong with that?"
"The bank owns that building, Sterling."
"So? I'd think the bank would be chomping at the bit to get rid of what's left of that building before it falls down. Lots of people think it's pretty irresponsible of you all to let it just sit there being an eyesore with the windows boarded up and bricks crumbling underneath the kudzu-especially since it can be seen from the highway. Not exactly the kind of first impression Leemont wants to give to visitors and passersby. There's no telling who's living in the building, Roy. I've seen fire trucks out there more than once." I didn't say anything about the Confederate flag that had hung there for several days before it disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared.
"Wasn't there an editorial or a letter in the paper saying that the bank ought to just give the property to Hope House as a goodwill gesture?" I asked. "If this urn makes it possible for Hope House to put the building to good use, it's a win-win situation."
"On the surface maybe," Roy said pompously, as if eager to show me how dense I was. "But Sparks Burns has won the state senate race. Once he's in Richmond, well, who knows what business might become interested in moving into that spot? And if the right tenant comes to Leemont, the state might even get serious about doing that roadwork the city's been trying to get the highway department to approve for the past ten years."
Sparks Burns had made millions in land deals and the con struction business during Leemont's recent growth spurt. Though a local boy, rumor had it that he had been handpicked and financially backed in his run for office by some Washington businessmen with Virginia connections. He'd easily won. Sparks Burns was also on the bank's board of directors, just like Hank's grandfather had been. I mulled the situation over.
"Oh," was the best I could muster.
In politics there is no honor, my mother often said, quoting Disraeli.
It was late in the day and the week, and Roy had taken most of the wind out of my sails, but still I wasn't about to see that magnificent urn swept under some bank's boardroom table.
"Well, Roy, I'm just the appraiser," I said. "I can't make the urn go away. What you do with it is up to you. But I will say this. That urn isn't just about money. It's about craftsmanship and connoisseurship. Did I mention culture? It may not be as valuable as an old master painting or a piece of Faberge, but that's just because silver hasn't gotten a lot of publicity, aside from the Hunt brothers' silver scam back in the seventies." I took a deep breath. "Look. It's your responsibility to do the right thing by the urn-if not by Sarah Rose Wilkins's will."
The words were out of my mouth. I couldn't take them back. So much for any future work from those guys-former in-law family connection or not.
"I'll get the report to you by Monday," I said more calmly. "I can either fax it to you or run it by on my way out of town. You still go in at eight thirty don't you?" I asked.
"Better bring it in." Roy's tone was decidedly cool. "Bring it in a sealed envelope and put your bill in as usual. I'll see that your check is cut right away. This is one estate I'll be happy to see the end of. And Sterling," Roy added a shade more cordially, "thanks for your, ah, diligence. I would have done the same thing."
I hung up, pondering his parting statement and my wisdom, or lack of it.
Chapter 4
Dear Antiques Expert: My great aunt left me a diamond ring that I believe dates from the 1870s. The cut of the diamond is different from the ones I see now-almost rounded-and it seems to sparkle less. The jeweler said it was "mine cut. Does that make the diamond any less valuable?
Before modern gem-cutting tools and techniques were developed, diamonds were cut with a high rounded top, a flat bottom, and not as many facets as today's diamonds. In contrast, today's diamonds are cut with a flat top, rounded bottom, and high number of facets. An older mine-cut diamond may not have as "brilliant" a sparkle, but many people prefer that antique look, especially when the diamond is in a lovely antique setting. Generally speaking though, minecut diamonds are less costly than comparable brilliant-cut diamonds.
So MUCH FOR THE lovely evening I'd looked forward to.
Without a husband and with the kids gone, I often found my self-worth in my work, and Roy Madison had ju
st slapped me down. I generally tried to be tough and let the little bleeps fade off the screen, but the truth was, without someone to talk things over with and reassure me, well, I could get pretty down. Which was where I was right now.
All I wanted to do was to slip into my flannel jammies, curl up in the bed with a glass of wine, and watch an old Chevy Chase movie. But I had said I'd he at the museum party. I had to put the recent conversation behind me and change my mood. I put on a Marvin Gaye CD and drew a hot bath. I resolved to put the exchange with Roy out of my head. "Guess the old adage is right," I said half-aloud. "You just can't fight City Hall."
"Or the biggest bank in town," I thought as Marvin and Tammy Terrell sang "Ain't No Mountain High Enough."
Only after I was out of the tub and half dressed did I notice the light blinking on my caller ID box. The number had a 718 area code. A message was waiting.
"This is Sol. Solomon Hobstein again. I couldn't get back with you earlier." I recognized the Brooklyn voice touched with a slight European accent. "Look, this is what it is. I have these old molds."
"Yes, Yes," I said impatiently to the absentee messenger.
"I got your name from a newspaper article. Something about appraisers. You know the one I mean? Anyway I liked your face. You look honest. See, I don't want anybody from around here knowing what I've got." He coughed. "These New Yorkers only care about the money. They don't give a damn about the things. I've checked up on you. Called around. What I need to know is when you're coming this way. I want to make an appointment. I'll pay for the trip if I have to. Give me a call."
I put the call out of my mind for the moment and returned to the business at hand. I brushed a nice "natural" blush across my cheeks and carefully applied my requisite brown eyeliner and mascara. We blondes may have more fun, but it sure takes us a long time to make our eyes come alive. I misted my short locks with a quick fog of superhold hair spray I'd bought on the promise that it would give a professional hold with added shine and still leave my hair loose and touchable. I dabbed a little Tresor behind my ears, on both wrists. Then I fastened the sapphire and diamond clasp of my predivorce pearls.