The Big Steal (25 page)

Slapping the side of his thigh, laughing and coughing, he said, “Maybe it's a good thing we stopped you, otherwise you'd of ended up down in one of them hollows with the wild dogs and black bears.”

I didn't say a thing.

Dear Antiques Expert: My grandmother always raved about her John Belter slipper chair. To me it's just an uncomfortable low chair. Is it tremendously valuable?

John Henry Belter, a 19th-century New York furniture maker, is well known for his high-style laminated and carved rosewood furniture. Belter's pieces are included in many museum collections of American furniture makers, and fine examples of his craftsmanship have sold in the mid-five-figure range. But unlike a sofa or armchair, a slipper chair's low seat limits its use and desirability and thus its value. I'd estimate that a documented Belter slipper chair could be expected to sell for six to eight thousand dollars at auction.

I
HADN'T THE VAGUEST
idea how I got back to Belle Ayre. I hardly knew I was there until I cut the car's motor. That's when I realized my fingers had clutched the steering wheel, hanging on for dear life. I sat frozen, thinking, trying to forget what had happened. But my mind wouldn't let go of the fear I had felt. Not one car had passed while I'd been waylaid by
those guys, and I must have driven another two or three miles before house lights came into view.

It took raw determination to drag my body up the long flight of stairs to my room. With every step another what-if scenario popped into my head—each more troubling and disturbing than the last.

Inside my room, I reached beneath the mattress until my fingers touched the spine of the book I'd hidden there. I slid it out and began to read again the pages I had tagged with Post-its—those pages having Hoyt's notes on them. It was as I had remembered. The dates he had penciled and inked in were all in the early and mid-1950s.

I dug through the stash of papers I had taken from the attic until I found the haunting announcement Mazie had written of her own death. 1955. I took it and the appraisal book over to the slipper chair by the fireplace, but it was next to impossible to hold anything in my lap the way my legs slanted downward. I moved to the bed, and settled in between the piles I had stacked there. Despite my resolve to forge ahead, a wave of tiredness swept over me. Maybe it was too late at night for deciphering scribbled notes or trying to match the items in the appraisal book with their original receipts. But there were the photos. Now that was manageable.

Photo after photo chronicled Mazie and Hoyt's lives through the places they had visited and the things they had done in the 1920s and ‘30s—elephant rides in Nepal, skiing in Saint Moritz, wild game hunting in Africa, visiting the Amazon, on and on. It was like flipping through an old travel magazine. After that were several pictures of Wynderly. Someone had dated each picture in the sort of precise hand people used to
have and arranged them in chronological order, as if planning to put them into a scrapbook or photograph album.

I smiled to myself. I wondered if Mazie had done this as part of her vow to herself to get better organized.

The first few pictures progressed from Wynderly's ground-breaking to its completion—1922 to 1924. These were followed by photographs of the house's various gardens in their differing stages of completion. Finally, there was a group of interior shots held together by a rusty paperclip.

Looking closely, I recognized the arched doorway and steps leading into the drawing room, but other than that …

I looked again. The chandelier was the same, but there was no Venetian mirror. The furniture, rather than being in the European taste, was distinctly fine eighteenth-century American furniture. The same beautiful silver accessories that had caught my eye that first day were present, but so were Chinese Export porcelain bowls and teapots, the sort that affluent colonists bought from eighteenth-century seagoing merchants when they returned from the Orient. None of these furnishings were there now. Had I not known I was looking at Wynderly's drawing room, I might have thought the picture was of Tracy DuMont's living room. These must be the items that Tracy's father mentioned being at Wynderly some fifty years earlier. Though lovely, they definitely were not the ones I had seen in Mazie's secret room.

I turned the photograph over. There, in a hand I had come to recognize as Mazie's, was written “Wynderly, June, 1932.”

I put that picture to the side, then tugged a second photo loose from the clip. This was of one of the bedrooms, but which one? I'd not seen one with lovely American Federal
pieces—a canopy bed, cherry chest of drawers, brass inlaid work table, and convex mirror. Some architectural detail, a mantelpiece or arrangement of the windows, would identify the room. But I couldn't do it from the quick walk-through I'd had of the house.

The quality of the antiques was unquestionable. I moved the piles to make a new space for the photos when an envelope caught my eye. It was yellow, the sort that photographs and negatives used to come back from the developer in. I placed it in the picture pile, but on second thought decided to take a quick peek. Here were pictures that had been taken in the late 1940s or ‘50s. I could pick out the occasional American antique, but mostly the rooms were now furnished with much fancier, showier pieces from abroad. I felt as if I had finally found the pieces needed to finish a huge jigsaw puzzle. I was getting closer, but I still had to fit them all together to see the big picture.

“Too many secrets. Too many lies to live,” Miss Mary Sophie had said.

“Hoyt and Mazie lived for their showplace. Their obsession. Their baronial playhouse,” Worth Merritt had told me over dinner.

And Fred Graham, what had he said? “The only way I got the funds last time was because of all the trusts Hoyt Wyndfield established at the bank way back in the twenties and thirties. If the trust department wasn't still administering those accounts, Wynderly wouldn't have gotten one red cent from the bank.”

And Mazie. She had wanted “To be a lady from Virginia.” She'd also been frustrated: “Why Hoyt wants to turn his back on his Virginia ways is beyond me. I love Wynderly, but not
for its showiness and flamboyance, because
that
is what it is, a place to show off where we've been and what we've bought. I love Wynderly because it is our
home
and Hoyt loves it so.”

Hoyt's was the absent voice. Then again, the notations he had written in the appraisal book—didn't they say it all? The receipts for the fakes … The letter from Kyoto …

That was it. Pure and simple. Worth Merritt had said it, as had Tracy's father: thieving blood had run in Hoyt's veins.

Thieving? Oh my God. Matt was coming tomorrow. I still didn't have a clue how the things from Wynderly had been stolen. But that wasn't what I'd been hired to do. Still, I had hoped to have answers.

Why hadn't Matt called tonight the way he had said he would? Then again, maybe he had. If he'd called, surely a note would have been slipped under my door. Nothing was there. Surely he wouldn't call now, not at midnight.

And Peter. How had we resolved
his
trip? I couldn't remember.

I went to bed without so much as brushing my teeth. I might as well have taken the time to do it, though, for once my head hit the pillow I was fully awake. No telling how long I tossed and turned, and once I did drift off, my dreams were as unsettling as my wide-awake thoughts had been.

B
ACK IN
L
EEMONT
there's a town character known as Bagman. He's perfectly harmless, but people cross the street to avoid his bare feet and burlap bag. It's the bag that frightens them. Rumors have it that he's toting around everything from Confederate gold to homemade bombs.

Over time Peter has gotten to know Bagman, as you would
expect when a retired priest is doing good deeds. Which is how I know that Bagman carries nothing more than a couple of cans of tuna or beanie-weenies and whatever book he's reading. Sustenance for the body and the mind, he says. And invariably, when I'm in the middle of an appraisal and stumped, Bagman romps through my dreams.

When I finally drifted off, I dreamed I was a prisoner in the priest hole, rather much like the mad wife in
Jane Eyre
. But Bagman wasn't Rochester. Bagman was a thief who would bring me treasures for safekeeping. Soon the priest hole was piled to the ceiling with the pieces I had seen in the interior photographs from Wynderly's early days—the beautiful worktable, a banquet-size Federal dining table set, a bow-front cherry chest of drawers, chairs of every style and period.

In my dream, Bagman stuffed the furniture into his bag, then loaded it in the back of a pickup truck. He then drove the truck several flights up to the attic the way actors used to drive cars up and down steps in old silent movies. To make space for the new load, I dragged chairs and tables over to the wall leading to the secret room off the priest hole. Before I could push on it, though, Michelle would swing the wall open. There I'd be greeted by barking English spaniels. But when Michelle would tell them to sit, they'd hop up on the shelves and become figurines.

While Michelle stood by, I heaved furniture out the window to Frederick Graham, but instead of arms he had vulture-like wings. Once, while tossing out a huge four-poster bed, I overthrew the mark. Graham chased after it and disappeared into Mazie's maze, but Peggy Powers appeared, flapped her wings,
soared into the air, and caught it. At least I think that's who it was. I never saw her face, but she was decked out in heavy gold jewelry.

Like most dreams, mine made no sense whatsoever.

Like most dreams, it made perfect sense.

Dear Antiques Expert: I recently attended a large antiques show and was particularly attracted to one dealer's display of majolica. When I looked the term up on the Internet there were so many definitions of it I became confused. Can you give me a simple definition?

Those definitions can be confusing indeed. But generally when people speak of “majolica” they are referring to the 19th- and early 20th-century colorful tin-glazed earthenware made in Italy, Spain, England, and America. This type of majolica is highly recognizable by its raised decoration, with fruits, vegetables, flowers, and sea life being particularly popular motifs. Majolica kitchenwares included pitchers, oyster plates, sardine boxes, covered cheese dishes, and biscotti jars. No fashionable Victorian home was complete without some majolica and originally it was very affordable. Today rare majolica pieces can sell for thousands of dollars and even the more usual piece can cost hundreds.

I
T'S NO WONDER
I awakened long before I would have liked to. I sat up in bed. What now? With an hour or so to spare before having to get ready to go to Wynderly, once again I
stacked some of the purloined books on the bed. I reached for Mazie's diary from the twenties. If I could only find some documentation telling exactly when the transition of Wynderly's furnishings had begun.

Reading the entries before, I hadn't paid much attention to where Mazie had been while writing them. There was the one written at Wynderly when Hoyt was away. I thumbed through the pages. Again, luck was with me, or perhaps Mazie was willing it to be, but I quickly found it—1926. Turning several pages over I read, “Spring, 1927. Kyoto.”

That was the place where Hoyt had purchased the Lokesvara figures. I marked the page, scrambled out of bed, found Kirklander's appraisal, and the letter from Mr. P. Yas ka, the one where he had apologized for the delay in filling Hoyt's order. It was dated 1928, not too long after their visit. I turned back to Mazie's diary.

 

April 9, 1927. We took rickshaws for sightseeing. The cherry blossoms are exquisite! Imagine being in Japan when the cherry blossoms are blooming. Hoyt thinks of everything. And the temples and shrines! They are everywhere. Today we even saw a shrine to the god of the silkworms. How busy those silkworms must be, too, for the kimonos are beautiful. Hoyt tells me the finest ones are made for the geishas. Tomorrow we will go to the ancient palace of the emperors, then shopping and to Mr. Yasaka's house. I can't wait. I know his home will be very beautiful and have a garden. Everything is light and airy in Kyoto—like the cherry blossoms themselves—so very different from Wynderly with its tall towers and dark paneling
.

Hoyt has already met with Mr. Yasaka, both yesterday and today. When he comes back from these meetings he is like a kid, all excited and happy. He tells me he has found a treasure trove and we will soon be even richer. I don't dare interfere with his business dealings. He loves to tell me all about them, but then turns impatient and agitated if I ask him questions so I leave it at that
.

 

What I needed now was a volume from the 1930s or ‘40s—something with a specific mention of what happened to the furniture that had been removed. A postcard stuck out from the pages of one volume.

 

Your shipments from Japan and Brazil have arrived and been forwarded on to Richmond. Because of the holidays you may wish to have your agent collect these. Otherwise it will be after the New Year before we can forward them on to your residence at Orange via the Chesapeake & Ohio RR. Mr. Elliott is expecting to hear from you. They are stored at the Bonded Warehouse in the usual place. James B. Heyward, Customs Broker
.

 

It was stamped December 12, 1955. There was that year again.

I opened the diary to the page where the postcard had been inserted.

 

December 15, 1955. Why, why did I do it? I know why. I thought I would surprise Hoyt. Instead I have ruined my life. Not that I haven't suspected something for years and years, but suspecting and knowing are two different things. Now it has all come clear to me. What Hoyt has done is wrong. Could
I have stopped him? I don't know. It isn't as if we needed the money … at least I don't think we did. But even if we had, to have cheated other people … to have lied and deceived them. Why, why did he do it? Would he say he did it for me? I never wanted all the things … HE was the one who was obsessed with them. But he told people I had fancy tastes and I let him. I stood by and let him have his way. That's what made him happy. Oh, why did I? Why did I?