“Yeah, well, unfortunately that grant they implemented to centralize record keeping hasn’t finished the job yet. I called every single office, but none have a record of an interaction with Ben in the last seventy-two hours. The last officer I spoke to suggested we file a missing persons report.”
“Yeah, we were about to do that.”
“Good. Now, I do have good news. I got a lead on the antiquity Jack called me about.”
My pulse quickened. “Go on.”
“The chief disclosed that a photo of an old clay vase was found in Jack’s jacket pocket.”
My fingernails dug into the palm of my hand. I forced myself to relax. I wasn’t up on the retail value of antiquities, but it was hard to fathom a single vase being worth a man’s life. Maybe the police were right and Jack’s death was an accident. Or . . . maybe the vase was the tip of the iceberg—a lead on a bigger operation.
“The chief will have a copy ready for one of us to pick up any time after 10:00 a.m. Can you handle that? I promised the wife and kids we’d go out on the boat this morning.”
“Absolutely. Thanks, Isaak.”
I quickly rang up Aunt Martha. “It’s Serena. I don’t have time to explain, but I need you and Carmen to meet us outside the funeral home after our appointment.”
“Sure, we can do that.”
I could always count on Aunt Martha to be up for an adventure. “Then I’ll need you to accompany Ashley wherever she needs to go after that so I can pay a visit to the state police office.”
“You don’t want Ashley to know where you’re going?”
“It would avoid a lot of questions I don’t know the answers to just yet.”
“Leave it to me,” she chirped. “I have the perfect cover story.”
My heart flip-flopped. What had I done?
“Serena,” Ashley called. “We need to leave now or we won’t have enough time.”
“I’ve got to go,” I said to Aunt Martha and hurried out to Ashley’s car.
“You’re wrong about Ben,” Ashley said. “And I have a bad feeling your aunt’s boyfriend is right.”
There was no good way to respond to that. Neither scenario was good for Ben.
We stopped at the Chilmark police station to file the missing persons report. The sergeant who took the information must’ve been the same officer Isaak had spoken to, because he didn’t waste our time asking all the “could he just be . . .” questions that likely accounted for a good number of the non-emergency missing persons reports they took down.
Ashley gaped at me when I filled in the approximate date and time of his arrival by ferry and the fact he’d been hitchhiking. “How do you know that?”
I shrugged as if I hadn’t canvassed every cab driver at the ferry to find out. She didn’t need to know how deep my suspicions about his nonappearance ran. “I got talking to an old friend of Ben’s when Malgucci’s ferry came in. He mentioned seeing him.”
Thankfully, she didn’t question how I’d recognized a friend of Ben’s.
By the time we reached the funeral home, Jack’s fiancée was waiting for us at the door. Her eyes were puffy, and dark circles had settled beneath them. Thankfully, her daughter Carly hadn’t joined her.
Ashley apologized for being late and launched into the reason why, right down to finding Ben’s backpack on Uncle Jack’s porch. The color drained from Marianne’s face, and I couldn’t help but question if it was for fear of what might’ve happened to Ben or for fear of something else. A side effect of spending almost two years interrogating suspects who rarely spoke the truth in the first round.
The meeting with the funeral director proved to be easier than I’d expected. As it turned out, Jack had long ago made his own funeral arrangements, and Ashley and Marianne needed only to be informed of his requests and update the information for the obituary. Jack had stipulated a closed casket and no visitation times before the service, which I’m sure was meant to spare Ashley and Ben from added emotional strain.
The director confirmed with the police that the body would be released tomorrow at the latest. Marianne and Ashley agreed on Saturday evening for the service, and I expressed confidence that Ben would turn up by then. If he wasn’t in jail.
We stepped outside at 9:53, and Aunt Martha toodle-ooed us from the far end of the parking lot.
As we meandered over to ask what brought her into town, a distinguished-looking older man jumped up from a garden bench and intercepted us. He wore a slightly outdated business suit that tugged at his midriff and scuffed leather shoes, tempering my first impression when I’d glimpsed his graying sideburns and well-trimmed salt-and-pepper hair. He grasped Ashley’s hand. “I was grieved to read in the paper this morning about your uncle’s accident.”
“Thank you.” She disentangled her hand from his grasp and kept moving toward Aunt Martha.
The man didn’t take the hint. He trailed us across the lawn, and Carmen—scratch that—Nate opened the driver’s door.
“Where’s Carmen?” I blurted.
“He went bass fishing with Preston before dawn this morning. When we left, they’d just finished cleaning their catch, and he was headed back to his B&B for a nap,” Aunt Martha said.
Which she’d probably already anticipated when I called this morning. I should’ve known she’d pull something sneaky to ensure I spent time with Nate over Tanner. Not that I was complaining. But Tanner would be.
“Jack and I are old friends,” the man behind us said a hair too desperately to the back of Ashley’s head, then rambled on about their mutual interest in art and antiquities.
That caught my attention, but before I could quiz him further, Marianne, who wasn’t even driving with us, interjected, “I’m afraid you must excuse us. There is much to do.”
“Of course, of course.” The man pressed his business card into Ashley’s hand, reminding me of a circling vulture. “The name’s Joe. I’d be interested in purchasing some of your uncle’s pieces once the estate is settled.”
Uncle Jack had an art collection? Where did this guy get that idea? Enlargements of his own photographs were the only decorations gracing his walls.
“I’d give you a good price,” the man added.
Ashley stared at him mutely, but after a moment, managed to nod.
The instant he climbed into a faded car close to the door, Marianne snatched the card from Ashley’s hand and ripped it in two. “He and Jack were old friends, my eye. He’s one of those flea market vendors that hawks whatever he can get his hands on from people’s estates.”
Aunt Martha toed the discarded pieces of business card toward her, then reached down and picked them up. Pocketing them, she tossed me a wink.
As sidekicks went, she was the best. If I ever decided to quit my day job and become a PI, I’d hire her in a flash. Well, except for the fact that Mom would kill me.
I winced at the poor taste of my own mental quip, considering we were standing outside a funeral home. I watched the man drive away and wondered if Marianne was right about him or if he knew something she didn’t want Ashley and me to find out. I texted Isaak Joe’s name and business address and suggested he run a background check.
“What are you doing here?” Ashley asked Aunt Martha.
“Oh, honey, I got to thinking you’d want to choose floral arrangements for the service, and Serena is hopeless with things like that.”
“Hmm, thanks Aunt Martha,” I said.
“Nonsense, you know you are. You can’t even keep houseplants alive.”
Nate chuckled. “Yeah, criminals fare far better with her.”
Great, now they were ganging up on me. “I’ll have you know that the dieffenbachia you left in the apartment is still alive, and I’ve been its guardian for over a year.”
Aunt Martha gave me an odd look. “That plant’s fake, dear.”
No way. It looked so real. Guess that explained why it survived months at a time without water.
“Besides,” Aunt Martha went
on, discreetly slipping the business card into my hand, “Serena loathes shopping. You should’ve seen her poor friend trying to get her into bridal shops to choose a maid-of-honor frock last year. And this way she and Nate can have a bit of time alone to sightsee.”
Ashley met my gaze and smiled, seemingly catching on to Aunt Martha’s true motive. Probably truer than the fact I’d asked her to come.
Somehow I was sure the fact I’d inadvertently caught the bouquet at the wedding last month loomed larger on Aunt Martha’s mind than my deficit in the shopping-gene department. Mom had ramped up the matchmaking hints ever since Zoe’s wedding, and from the assist Aunt Martha gave Nate to get him here, he was clearly Aunt Martha’s front-runner.
Thankfully, Ashley thought flower shopping with Aunt Martha was a wonderful idea since she hadn’t even remembered that it was something she should do. I gave Ashley a hug and mouthed “thanks” to Aunt Martha, then turned toward Nate’s sporty yellow rental car—different enough from Malgucci’s that I should’ve clued in it was his long before he’d stepped out.
But Nate didn’t follow me. “I meant to ask,” he said to the women in general, “what’s the best beach around here to hunt for sea glass?”
“Oh, Eastville is good,” Ashley said.
“What about at Menemsha Hills? The hunting any good there?”
“Not at all. I don’t know anyone who’s ever found any sea glass at that beach. Do you, Marianne?”
Marianne had one foot in the red sports car her daughter had been driving a couple of days ago, and her gaze jumped from Nate to Ashley. “No. Never.” Her attention returned to Nate. “Why do you ask?”
“Just curious.”
As he reached to open the passenger door for me, I whispered, “I’m not so sure that was smart.”
“Told us something. Don’t you think?”
“Yes, that I can’t trust you to be discreet.”
“Trust me. I can be discreet when it matters.” His light touch at the small of my back sent tingles dancing up my spine as he smiled down at me. “I hear I’m playing chauffeur.”
Okay, that wrangled a smile out of me. “Yes, I appreciate it. Thank you.”
He scooted around to the driver’s side. “Where to?”
“The state police headquarters. It’s practically across the road.”
He drove slowly down the funeral home’s long driveway. “What did you think of Marianne’s reaction?”
“Curious. The police already know she was at the crime scene, so she had no reason to be worried she might’ve dropped something incriminating there.”
“Exactly, so why did she look so unnerved?”
“Good question.”
He turned onto the road and almost immediately into the small lot behind the police station as I filled him in on the photo I needed to pick up.
A text message came in from Tanner: You almost done at the funeral home?
My thumb hovered over the screen.
“You feeling guilty?” Nate asked.
I shoved the phone back in my pocket. “What are you talking about?”
“Tanner flew all this way to help you with the case, and here I am, the ‘non-’agent, driving you around.”
“Well, you flew here too, and no, I wasn’t feeling guilty, but thanks so much for giving me something else to angst about.” I meant it to sound wise-cracky, but I don’t think I managed to pull it off.
“Hey, I’ve got to respect any guy who has your protection at heart, even if he beat me to the draw on inviting you for dinner.” Nate winked at me. “Got lunch plans?”
“Why’d you stop flying?”
His smile dropped. “Will it make a difference to your answer?”
Oops. With all the talk about flying, my brain had gotten stuck on wondering about why he’d stopped and hadn’t registered his lunch invitation. “Yes.”
“Yes, it’ll make a difference?”
“No, ‘yes, I’ll have lunch with you.’”
“Ah, good.” He opened his door. “Shall we go in?”
“Wait. First I want to know why you stopped flying.”
“Because my parents died in a car accident and my brother needed me,” he said matter-of-factly.
“What does your brother needing you have to do with giving up flying?”
“I was a courier, flying all over the place and never home.”
“So, you flew cargo planes.”
“Yeah.”
I flicked to the webpage I’d saved on my phone of a cargo plane shot down over Yugoslavia. “Was this your plane?”
Pain flickered across his face as he nodded. “For three days, my brother thought I was dead.”
“That must’ve been scary. I can understand why you never wanted to fly again.”
“I love flying. I’d forgotten how much until I came here. I could take you up if you like.”
Reflexively, I gripped the armrest and gritted my teeth, already feeling claustrophobic. “I don’t know. I have a hard enough time with the big planes.”
“It has lots of windows. It’s not much different than driving in a car, only it’s in the air.” His voice took on a hint of a pretty-please tone that made me want to acquiesce.
“We’ll see.”
A trooper swaggered out of the two-story white clapboard building and headed straight for us.
“I guess our sitting back here made him antsy,” Nate said.
“Wait here.” I climbed out of the car.
“May I help you?” the trooper asked.
“I’m Special Agent Serena Jones, here to pick up a photograph.”
“Right. I’ll get that for you.” He returned within a minute and handed me a manila envelope. “You just caught me in time or you may’ve been waiting hours. Have a good day.”
He drove out of the lot in a state trooper cruiser before I had the picture out of the envelope.
Nate took one look at the photo and said, “No way, that looks like the Fenton Vase.”
“The Fenton? Are you sure? I thought it looked Mayan, but . . . if it’d gone missing from the British Museum, we would’ve heard about it.” The Fenton Vase was discovered around the turn of the twentieth century, in Guatemala, if I remembered correctly, and purchased by C. L. Fenton, hence the name. Given Ben’s article on Mayan antiquities smuggling, I wanted to believe that he was on board with Jack to expose a smuggling ring. But he wouldn’t have been asking for a deal if his hands were totally clean. I blew out a breath. At least we weren’t looking at Middle Eastern antiquities, which might’ve tossed terrorist ties into the mix.
“It looks like the one I saw as a kid when my family visited the British Museum,” Nate said. “But there are others around, only not with as pristine provenances.”
“Because Fenton exported his before Guatemala’s post–World War II decree declaring all artifacts the property of the state.”
“Exactly. It’s one of the few Mayan pieces in foreign collections with a legal provenance.”
“I’m impressed. You know your antiquities.”
“I did a massive project on the Maya when I was in grade school. My grandfather had a piece at the time, and the iconography had always fascinated me. It’s what made the artifacts so popular on the international market in the ’60s.”
“What happened to your family’s artifact?”
Nate’s gaze drifted to the windshield, and his eyes crinkled as if inside he was smiling at some memory. “My project convinced him to return the piece to the Guatemalan government.”
I laughed. “So you were already playing art crime detective a couple of decades ago!”
He let his grin show. “Gramps was horrified to learn how destructive the looters are. We’re talking sawing the stone monuments to make it easier to get them out of the jungle and tunneling into temples and pyramids to access the pottery buried with the dead. So many sites were looted long before they were discovered by archeologists that it became an unrecoverable loss to our under
standing of the Ancient Maya.”
I studied the picture. “What do you know about the look-alike vases?”
“Can’t help you there. But check out the British Museum’s website. They may have more information that will help.”
I did a search for the website on my phone and sure enough, there was a write-up for the vase along with several photographs of the piece. “It’s remarkable how similar they look. It says four other pots by the same artist, likely looted and trafficked in the 1970s, exist in foreign collections.”
“It doesn’t say which collections?”
“No.” I input the description into the FBI art crime database to see if anything came up. Not a single record for the Maya time period.
“The vases must be in public museums if they’re known to the British Museum. But then, you’d think they’d be more delicate about declaring them essentially stolen from the state.”
I did an online search for Fenton vases. “If museums repatriated every antiquity they owned that didn’t have pristine provenance, there’d be a lot of empty spaces. And as some curators have pointed out, they are often preserving what would’ve long ago been destroyed or irretrievably lost to looters or the elements, if not for their investments.” I scanned the options and clicked on a reputable looking one. “Huh, this article says there are six known vases. Three are in American museums, the one in Britain, one in Berlin, and one in Guatemala City. But none have been reported stolen.”
“So this could be a reproduction.”
“Or one that’s recently surfaced from a private collection.” I couldn’t help the excitement that trickled into my voice. It would be an amazing recovery.
“So what do we do now? Retrace Jack’s appointments from the time he called the FBI? See if we can spot this vase?”
“Its owner isn’t likely to be foolish enough to have it in view. Not if he’s connected to Jack’s death. And especially if he’s clued in that I’m a friend of the family. We need someone who has no apparent connection to Jack’s family to check out the homes.”
“How about Martha’s friend? He said he was in real estate.”
“Winston? Yes, he’d be perfect.” I phoned Aunt Martha.
Over Maya Dead Body Page 10