by Emyl Jenkins
I had only had a quick tour of the house. Still, a couple of pieces had sent up red flags. Something about them just wasn't right. Oftentimes a piece can look good, maybe even great. But on closer inspection ...
In a fake old-master painting, the clue might be in the paint used. Fast-drying acrylic paints didn't exist in the seventeenth, or even nineteenth, century. Still, many a greedy faker, thinking he can knock one off in a hurry, won't bother to use oil paint, which can take days to dry. But the highly trained eye will catch the difference in the texture of the brushstrokes of the faked painting.
In furniture, some detail hidden away on the inside-modern screws used in an eighteenth-century piece, or a plywood drawer bottom in a circa 1807 Duncan Phyfe table-will signal something is wrong.
That's why the savvy appraiser never passes judgment on what appears to be an exceptionally rare and valuable piece without thoroughly inspecting it to be sure it's not hiding a false history.
Then there are the times when the very existence of an object gives you pause-even from far across the room. Take Tang horses, for example. The authentic seventh- or eighth century pottery horse made in China as a funeral accessory is rare indeed, as is the pocketbook that can afford one. Yet over the years I'd been shown two or three dozen Tang horses thought by their owners to be the real thing, worth tens, even hundreds, of thousands of dollars. Trouble is, instead of being twelve- or fourteen-hundred years old, their horses were no more than fifty or a hundred years old, and seldom worth more than a hundred dollars.
It was a pair of Tang horse figures and other rare antiquities that had bleeped a warning across my radar screen on my initial spin through Wynderly.
You see, the antiques world is a small, close-knit place ruled by just a few big players. We call them the "big boys." The saying goes that they can smell the million-dollar pieces, and when they're chasing them down, you can bet they're hot on the trail of one of three Ds-debt, death, or divorce.
The thing was, if those pieces I had seen in Wynderly were right, the big boys not only would have known about them, they would have been clamoring after them the moment the Wyndfields died. And you can bet that the rest of the antiques world would have heard about those extraordinary treasures through the Maine Antiques Digest or Art & Antiques, or just trade gossip. But, outside of Virginia, few people had even heard of Wynderly.
Those pieces, I was beginning to suspect, might teeter between truth and myth, honesty and deception. That's why I could hardly wait to start my own investigations. But I'd been relegated to the attic by the curator, Karole Ferrell, a woman I had had certain reservations about from the start. Her coal black hair and inch-long fingernails were perfect; the rest of her was nondescript. Plus, she had a superior attitude-that hadn't set well with me either.
I shivered, partly from the biting cold, and partly from my uneasy feelings. I tried telling myself that damp, creepy old houses, especially those set back in dark country woods, can give off eerie vibes. Even so, with each passing moment spent beneath those half-timbered eaves, I was beginning to feel more certain something was amiss.
I looked at the photograph again as if hoping it would speak to me. That's when a memory of my own popped into my head. I smiled in spite of myself.
We can never go back again, that much is certain, Mother had told me the day we closed up her home after my father died.
"I think Daphne du Maurier said it first, Mother," I had said. "In Rebecca."
Looking back at Mazie and Hoyt in the photograph, I tried to imagine how life must have been during that once-upona-fairy-tale time. What dreams they must have dreamed as they watched their house rise from its stone foundation to its magnificent completion. Most likely the Wyndfields, like scores of my clients, had simply met some fast-talking antiques dealer and fallen for his spiel hook, line, and sinker. But what if Mazie and Hoyt had been involved in something untoward, something troublesome? I shook my head. Where did that thought come from?
After bending over for so long, I needed to stretch and get my circulation going again-to clear my mind, if nothing else. I stood up, only to stumble over a raised beam that blended into the pine floor's shadowy grain. I lurched forward. My hands instinctively reached for something stable to grab hold of before I hit the wall in front of me. A tower of boxes moved under the weight of my arms and together we landed in a heap on the floor.
The plank beneath my feet had moved, or at least that's the way it felt. Perhaps that's why, instead of falling forward, my body had twisted and I landed on my right side. First my hip, then my shoulder, took the impact of the fall instead of my hands and head.
The faint lightbulb dangling from the attic ceiling had flickered, then gone out when I fell. A small casement window was nearby, the kind typically found in Tudor homes, but afternoon clouds had settled in. I mentally kicked myself for not bringing in the flashlight I keep in my car for just such situations, but the attic was the last place I had thought I'd be spending the day-and I was not about to fetch it now. Crawling on my knees in the dark, my hands were as helpful as my eyes.
No question about it. One of the wide floorboards had sunk at least a half, maybe even three-quarters, of an inch below the boards on each side of it. Then again, maybe that plank had been lower all along. Perhaps that was why I had tripped. I patted the floor around me. My hand hit an obstruction. The raised beam I had stumbled over was definitely jutting up through the floor. It was probably part of a highvaulted ceiling, or maybe one of the innumerable staircases I'd seen on my breeze-through tour of the house.
I pushed hard on the sunken board in hopes it might spring back in place. When I did, the wall I had barely avoided hitting head-on creaked ever so slightly.
Don't be crazy, I told myself, but my hands went wet and my throat dry. I swallowed hard and pressed the board again.
There was no mistaking the connection between the movement of the displaced piece of flooring and the low creaking noise coming from what looked like just another wallexcept that the wall was paneled, not plastered the way other parts of the attic were. Maybe the plan had been to make this a closet or an enclosed space-a maid's room? But the unfinished floor didn't jibe with that idea. Then again, perhaps they just never got around to doing it.
As my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I set about restacking the fallen boxes. There was no reason to try to replace them as they had been. Who could tell in this tangled jungle of stuff? One of the boxes had broken open and its contents had fallen out. Once again I dropped to the floor, but this time carefully, to clean up the mess I'd made.
Strewn across the floor were sheets of dry onion-skin paper held together by rusty paper clips and straight pins. Officiallooking ledger pages were mixed in with handwritten receipts. Why, this must be what I'd been sent to find, I told myself.
Just enough late-afternoon light was streaming through the small cobweb-covered windows, so I could make out the printing on some of the pages. Societe Anonyme Au Capital De 250.000 Francs. Invoice. Nurnberg. Hong Kong. American Consulate. Customs Broker. Saaz. I paused. Saaz?
That one caught my attention. I moved the paper back and forth until I could make out the faded purple ink writing.
1 little sugar box, jeweled, 2200
1 silver vessel, 600
12 spoons
2 little tea spoons
I was musing over the quaint description of the "little" box and spoons when I realized no prices were cited for the last two entries. I looked back at the stationery's letterhead. On one side was the date, July 1927. On the other, above a red ink coat of arms, in raised royal blue letters, I read the name Franz Bauer. Beneath the arms was "Saaz-New York-Rio de Janeiro." Saaz? German, perhaps? Polish? The paper flopped forward when I shifted my hand to get it in a better light. A handwritten note on blue-bordered paper was attached to the back.
To whom it may concern, the spoons are genuine antiquities and over a hundred years old and the work of Saaz handicraft and passed on in possessi
on of families of this region of Bohemia and sold privately.
Well, that answered one question. Saaz, Bohemia, now Saaz, Czech Republic, I surmised. But the handwritten explanation about the privately purchased spoons struck me as peculiar. Why would a merchant have included them on his list? To get them past customs was all I could think of.
Still, that one receipt added to the questions building up in my mind. Something about these papers stored (or were they hidden?) in the attic, rather than being on file in the curator's office, deepened my suspicions. Clearly these documents related to the objects in the house, didn't they? After all, I had been sent up here to look for papers and documentation. "Just see what you can find," Karole Ferrell had said offhandedly. It didn't make sense. If she knew the papers were there, why hadn't she shown me where they were, rather than leaving me to my own devices? Was it possible I was the first person to discover them?
Every four or five months there's breaking news that a heretofore unknown composition by Beethoven or a manuscript by Goethe or some such discovery has just turned up. Why, over in the eastern part of Virginia called the Northern Neck, the original eighteenth-century plans for Francis Lightfoot Lee's Menokin plantation were found in the attic of a house some several miles away. You never know when some lost treasure will turn up, but it's always right under everyone's nose in a filing cabinet or book or box. Box. The word resonated in my head. Box-
"It's almost three-thirty."
My heart leapt.
Karole Ferrell loomed over me. She looked no different in the dark shadows of the attic than she had in the morning sunshine when I had arrived at the house. A tall woman in her midthirties, she had no sparkle.
"I had no idea," I said, trying to recover, all the while turning the papers over in my lap. "I didn't hear you."
"Dr. Houseman expects meetings to start on time," Karole said. Crossing her arms in front of herself and stepping closer, she asked, "Finding anything?"
"Dr. House ... Houseman?" I asked.
"Alfred Houseman, chairman of the foundation," she snapped.
Moving to make a little room between Karole and me, I struggled to my feet. She stood her ground. From the moment she had opened the door, she had let me know who was boss. Little matter that, like me, she was hired help.
"Finding anything?" she repeated.
"Too early to be sure," I said, again skirting her question and carefully omitting the part about my fall. She hadn't mentioned the thud, which surely was heard downstairs, or the mess. And too many questions were swimming around in my head for me to share any information with this woman who clearly resented my presence. Her failure to comment on the receipts gave me more pause. Curators should be as curious as appraisers. Then again, it was dark up there.
I gave her what I hoped was a frustrated look and a noncommittal shrug.
"What about you? Have you had a productive afternoon?"
"Not after Houseman blew in. He has a way of doing that." She rolled her eyes. "I was back in my office when he showed up. He's called a board meeting for this afternoon. Didn't bother to tell me, though."
So that was why she hadn't commented on the noise. She wouldn't have heard it if she was in her office at the far back of the house. Her showing up now was thanks to Dr. Houseman and had nothing to do with me.
"But what if you hadn't been here?" I asked.
She moaned. "He knows I'm here. It's my job." Clearly she was preoccupied. Maybe that's why she didn't mention the papers at her feet. She pointed to her watch. "You'd better hurry. Houseman doesn't allow for lateness."
"Me?"
What to do? I swooped up the papers with every intention of putting them in the open box. Karole had started toward the steps. With her back turned, did I dare slip some of them in the zip-up binder I had with me so I could take notes. Just one or two, maybe?
Opportunity makes the thief, Mother scolded. One thief in this place is enough.
"Evidence," I said.