The Glass Thief (A Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery Book 6)

by Gigi Pandian

  “You were supposed to wait for me yesterday,” Mr. Leap said.

  “You too?” I croaked. “You’re in on this?” I closed my eyes. Of course. Tina hadn’t been the curator I’d contacted. I remembered that curator Sophea Kim, who I’d contacted first, had an “emergency” the day before, so I was told Tina would be the one to meet with me. And Leap was Tina’s cousin.

  “Oh no!” Tina said. “Jaya, you have the wrong impression. Leap and I don’t have anything to do with that murderer. What we do have is the answer to the riddle you’ve been trying to solve.”

  “You sent your cousin to spy on us.” I tried to catch Leap’s eye, but he took a sudden interest in his fingernails.

  “I’ve been so careful all these years, I couldn’t let a good first impression affect my better judgment. I had to know for certain that I could trust you.” She pulled off the road and parked in front of a modest house.

  She ushered us into the house and offered tea. I was going to decline except my throat was so constricted I could barely speak. Leap and I made the most awkward small-talk imaginable while we waited for Tina to return.

  She came back ten minutes later with a gorgeous French tea set, including a tea cozy resting over the teapot.

  “I’m starving, Leap,” she said. “Could you take my car and get us some lunch?”

  Leap felt bad about what had happened the day before, so he made sure he knew exactly what I wanted before leaving.

  “You’re not hungry,” I said once he left.

  “No. But it’s not a good idea for him to see what I’m about to show you.” She removed the tea cozy, and it wasn’t a tea pot beneath. Like a naga guardian, the fabric was protecting something: a carving of prince Kaundinya with inlaid ruby eyes and a sapphire-eyed nagini princess Soma.

  The sandstone carving was more detailed than those at temples, because it wasn’t a bas-relief carved only on one side of the stone. The prince and princess stood on a small boat, bow and arrows in each of their hands, looking fondly at each other.

  My own eyes grew as wide as the gemstone eyes of the prince and princess. “Is this what I think it is?”

  She nodded. “They’ve been waiting all these years for the naga king guardian to be returned to them.”

  Chapter 47

  “You’re familiar with the world of museum curation and art antiquity authentication?” Tina asked.

  “A bit.”

  “This treasure came across my path many years ago in New York. Not through public channels, but through people who know of my interest in Cambodian treasures. It didn’t have proper provenance, since I’m pretty sure it was looted from Banteay Chhmar during the rule of the Khmer Rouge, so the owner couldn’t put it up for a legal auction. But I knew—I knew it was real and that it needed to be returned to Cambodia. I didn’t want it for myself. I wanted it for a Cambodian museum. But with the sketchy credentials of the seller, I knew it would be a bureaucratic nightmare.”

  I coughed. “I might know a thing or two about those.”

  She smiled. “I know you do. Remember, I looked you up. As soon as Sophea told me what you were interested in, I got nervous and looked into you. This was the day before you arrived, near the end of our workday. Based on who you were, I wondered…So I told Sophea about a possible acquisition for the museum. I made it sound far more enticing than it really was, so she’d feel the need to look into it right away, and I could offer to speak with you instead. I needed to find out what you knew about this treasure that had both blessed and wrecked my life.”

  “How did you get it?” I asked, my eyes drawn again to the smiling princess with sapphire eyes.

  “I didn’t leave the Met for the reason I told you. Not exactly. I really did get divorced and was sick of New York. But both came about because I spent my last dime on buying the prince and princess from the seller, privately. My husband was furious. He didn’t understand. We got divorced. I would have had to start from scratch in one of the world’s most expensive cities, plus keep the treasure safe when it had no legal provenance.”

  “Siem Reap is a lot less expensive and more beautiful,” I said.

  She smiled. “When I met with you and learned you knew about the protector naga that’s supposed to hold the prince and princess, I was going to tell you. But when Devi said there was another person looking for the royal couple, I didn’t know what to do.”

  “So you kept an eye on me, and then asked Mr. Leap to do so too.”

  “We didn’t know there was a killer.” She shook her head and closed her eyes. “I’m so sorry about what happened to Lane. We thought you were being protective of your discovery when you said dangerous people might be after it.”

  “It was never my discovery,” I said. Just as Frenchman Henri Mouhut hadn’t “discovered” Angkor, I hadn’t discovered this bejeweled Cambodian treasure.

  “But you know where the naga king statue that holds the prince and princess is,” Tina said. “Leap said you knew about the family who’d looted it. You can reunite the treasure?”

  I looked at her hopeful expression. The woman who’d sacrificed so much for this.

  “I think I know where it is,” I said, “but it’ll take me several hours to make sure I’m right.” With everything I’d heard and figured out the previous day, I thought I knew where the naga king was. But I’d been wrong about so much lately, I had to be certain.

  “A few hours is nothing,” she said. “But when you find it, I have a favor to ask. I don’t care about the money I spent buying this under the table. I have a good life here. I don’t need money. But I want to return the treasure to Cambodia and my museum.”

  “I’m already there with you.” I squeezed her hand. “We’ll reunite the naga king with the prince and princess before we present them to your museum publicly. The family who possessed the snake sculpture never reported it stolen, since they knew it was looted. So if I’m right—”

  “You’ll be right.”

  “If I’m right, we can suggest the looted items were found together. With nobody disputing it or claiming it. It’ll be Cambodia’s property.”

  The missing naga king that had vanished from the Durant mansion in Paris. I now had all the information I needed to know where it was. And I knew who could help me figure out if I was right about this as well—if I wasn’t too late this time.

  Sébastien pretended he didn’t mind being awakened in the middle of the night. But I could tell he wasn’t lying when he said he’d be more than happy to drive one of his Porsches back to Paris (the Panamera again, since we told him he’d need room in the trunk). This time he took Fitz. I wasn’t sure about that, but if the man would be sticking with Sébastien, he should know his true nature. If he didn’t know about Sébastien’s spirit of adventure yet, it was time he learned.

  That night, Tina and I paced around the hotel room that Lane and I shared, driving Lane crazy, while we awaited Sébastien’s phone call.

  “You were right,” he said when he called that night. “It was tricky to get past the security system that had been fixed, but together we were able to do it. We found the Serpent King at the bottom of the grandfather clock.”

  The clock that was one of the pieces of French furniture he’d had custom made when he was living in Cambodia. The clock had stopped working just a few minutes past the time when Lane watched Marc die the first time, while Lane went up into the attic to look for the person who’d supposedly killed his friend.

  Marc moved the statue into the clock that his own ancestor Aristide had used to get the Naga King out of Cambodia. That’s how the serpent had made its way to France after Aristide’s death from a fever in Cambodia.

  I figured it out because if there was no logical way for the statue to have left the house, then the only explanation was that it hadn’t left. The oversize clock with the pendulum was at the bottom of the stairs. Sinc
e the statue was heavy, Marc must have decided it would be easier to transfer it to the ground floor for quick transfer to the gurney. So after Lane had gone to the attic he moved the statue to the clock, as an intermediate spot before his accomplices arrived. When Marc went back upstairs to lie down and pretend to be dead, Abby snuck out of her hiding spot (which could have been any number of closets since she knew the house well) and pushed him down the stairs. She hadn’t seen him putting the statue inside the clock. But because the pendulum had been moved, the clock stopped working.

  There were no secret panels that Sébastien had missed. Bas-relief carvings have flat backs. The statue was hiding in plain sight as a simple weighted stone base of the large clock, as it had hidden in plain sight on its sea voyage to France.

  The Durant family moved out of the house in haste, so nobody cared that the clock had stopped, and the statue was never found. When we’d searched the house, we were looking for evidence of how someone could have faked a ghost and gotten away with the crime. Instead, the supposedly haunted house that pushed Lane Peters to move on from his past life of crime was again giving us an unexpected gift.

  Chapter 48

  Sébastien and Fitz decided they wanted to come to Cambodia for New Year’s. If an eccentric retired magician wanted to bring a trunk full of his old magic acts with him to Cambodia, so be it, the customs officials thought. I cringed when I learned the naga king would be dressed in a vampire cape as a disguise, but that meant he’d soon be reunited with the treasure he was meant to be guarding. The naga statue and its daughter and son-in-law with gemstone eyes would be reunited and displayed in the Angkor National Museum. With no bureaucracy to speak of.

  Lane wasn’t yet fit to travel home, or to visit his mom in Europe, so he and I celebrated Christmas in Cambodia. Beyond the Christmas decorations at hotels and the marketing aimed at persuading the younger generation to buy each other gifts, the Christmas festivities in the primarily Buddhist country were low-key. Which was perfect. All I wanted to do was sleep for days.

  For a man recovering from a heroic knife wound (Lane) and now-humbled woman who’d kinda sorta found a treasure (me), our low-key Christmas meant sitting on the hotel’s shaded patio in the moderate warmth, listening to a live band of musicians playing a combination of traditional Khmer music and Western Christmas songs, and eating sour mango salad with green bell peppers and plenty of spicy, bright red bird chilies. Back at the room, red stockings filled with mini mince pies inside were waiting on our pillows.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t know we’d be here for Christmas or I’d have bought you something,” Lane said.

  “You did. You jumped in front of a knife for me.” If that sacrifice didn’t represent the spirit of Christmas, I didn’t know what would. His heroic deed was especially meaningful across the world from home, in this land where legend had it that a magical kingdom was created when a foreigner had proved his worth to the woman he loved.

  “I was also thinking,” I added, “that I haven’t opened that envelope you gave me yet. I think I’ll do that now.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “You’re ready?”

  “Just this week, I’ve been threatened and manipulated by one of my idols, chased through the jungle and watched you nearly die, and had my ego put in check by failing to find what I was after because it had already been found. I’m ready for anything.”

  I popped the mini mince pie in my mouth and opened the envelope. Inside were three printouts, each with a hand-written note scrawled in the margin.

  The first was a copy of a living trust, specifying the huge sum of money Lancelot Caravaggio Peters could receive beginning on his twenty-first birthday. My throat went dry as I looked at the number of zeros.

  The note in the margin read, I haven’t touched this yet because it’s from my father, but it’s there if we need it or if we want to use it for the house.

  I stared at him. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He started to shrug, but the pain in his shoulder made him wince. “It feels less legitimate to me than what I made on my own. Legal, but unethical.”

  The second was two stapled sheets of paper, the top one being a bank statement with identifying information redacted. It wasn’t as big as the trust, but it was big enough that I stopped feeling guilty that Lane had gotten us first class tickets to Siem Reap. Stapled behind the statement was a news article from ten years before about a corrupt London financier who had been arrested based on information the authorities found when they were called in to investigate the theft of millions of dollars’ worth of jewels at his home. The scrawled note next to the article read, No regrets.

  The third item in the envelope was a list of charities I thought highly of. The note read, Your choice. Robin H.

  I glanced up. “Embracing your inner Robin Hood?”

  “You missed one last thing.”

  Behind the last printout was indeed a small sheet of paper I’d overlooked. It was a skillfully drawn sketch of a pack of cigarettes with an X through it. The handwritten text stated, I might fail, but I’m trying.

  “I don’t want you to change for me,” I said, and I realized I meant it completely.

  “I’m not. Smoking is a bad habit. As for everything else, I don’t regret what I’ve done. But after our fight, you got me thinking about how I’ve never touched my father’s money. It could be better used by some of those charities than sitting untouched in a bank.”

  “And you’re paying for the Berkeley house with the payments from your own exploits.”

  “That’s me, Jones.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll also be putting up the Paris apartment for sale to cover the cost.”

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “Don’t?”

  “I don’t want to change you. I also don’t want you to do this on your own. I’ve gotten enough money from finder’s fees and rewards the past couple of years that I want to be your partner with this house. When we move in together, I want it to be a place that’s truly both of ours.”

  “You said ‘when,’ not ‘if.’”

  “I suppose I did.”

  Chapter 49

  Two weeks later

  The new semester would be starting soon.

  I was finished with my grading. Becca’s research had been stellar, aside from the real letter she’d used falsely, which wasn’t included in her final paper. But I learned she would also be taking a leave of absence for the spring semester, no doubt to process what she’d learned about her mother. She’d been seeking revenge for seven years against the wrong person.

  The dean of faculty called me to a meeting in his office, so I walked the six blocks to where I’d parked my car and drove to campus.

  I didn’t think I’d gotten any bad publicity for my latest discovery, which wasn’t even my discovery. Vincent Coronado had now been identified as the body in the bay, though I could hardly be blamed for that. And if anyone took issue with my being a fan of Rick Coronado novels, that was their problem, not mine. I was no longer going to hide the spines of my favorite fiction. Rick’s books were displayed proudly next to my academic books.

  I’d forgiven Rick. Sort of. I still loved his books, though I wished I hadn’t met him under these circumstances. I’d learned I wanted to be friends with Gabriela Glass, not Rick Coronado.

  Rick had lost two of the people closest to him. He mourned the loss of his brother. Even though Rick knew Vincent was a sleazy guy in many ways, he blamed himself because of his own early success that Vincent could never attain. Personally I didn’t think sibling rivalry should justify Vincent’s actions, but Rick had accepted his brother for who he was.

  Harder to wrap his head around was Abby’s betrayal. Rick had grown up with her in the strange world of publishing for more than half his life, and he’d been in love with her for much of that time. She’d been the reason he wanted
to find the Cambodian treasure he believed existed.

  But from the news reports that showed his Ithaca neighbor who was now watching his dog Clifford, a tiny woman who masterfully managed the huge mastiff, I thought he’d be just fine in time. As for whether he’d write again, that future remained uncertain.

  As was mine.

  I knocked on the dean’s door.

  “Jaya! Good, good. Thanks for meeting with me. In person is best for some things, don’t you think?” He offered me a seat on the stiff gray couch across from his desk. It was not meant to inspire prolonged visits with the busy man.

  “Sure. Why did you want to see me?” I tried to get comfortable on the unfriendly cushions.

  “I’d like you to submit your tenure paperwork this week before the new semester begins.”

  “I don’t have all my requirements together yet. But thank you for suggesting it. I know Naveen applied. He told me himself.”

  “I appreciate your speaking up on his behalf about that false accusation. That plagiarizing student will not be returning to the program in the spring.”

  “Glad to help.”

  “Not everyone would have done that, you know. I know you and Naveen think there’s only enough funding for one of you to get tenure.”

  “Isn’t that the case?”

  The dean sat back in his leather desk chair. “Yes. Yes it was. Until last week. It appears you’ve impressed some important people.”

  I sighed. “I can’t take responsibility for finding the Kambuja statue. And the stone naga protector statue I found wasn’t a historical find, it was simply a missing object.” I didn’t add that it was only possible for me to solve the crime of the disappearing statue because of things I’d learned from Gabriela Glass novels, not from academia.

  “This has nothing to do with how you spent your winter break in France and Cambodia.”