Nigel gives me an elaborate bow. “Would Master Win prefer me in tails?”
Nigel thinks he’s funny.
“Are those Chuck Taylor Cons?” I ask, pointing to his sneakers.
“They’re very chic,” he tells me.
“If you’re in eighth grade.”
“Ouch.” Then he adds, “We weren’t expecting you, Master Win.”
He is teasing with the Master stuff. I let him. “I wasn’t expecting to come.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Groovy,” I tell him.
Nigel’s sometimes-English accent is fake. He was born on this estate. His father worked for my grandfather, just as Nigel works for my father. Nigel has taken a slightly different path. My father paid for him to go to the University of Penn undergrad and law school in order to give Nigel “more” than the life of a butler and yet handcuff him via obligation to stay on at Lockwood permanently, per his family tradition.
PSA: The rich are very good at using generosity to get what they want.
“Will you be staying the night?” Nigel asks.
“No,” I say.
“Your father is sleeping.”
“Don’t wake him,” I say.
We start toward the main house. Nigel wants to know the purpose of my visit, but he would never ask.
“You know,” I say, “your outfit matches the manor’s stone.”
“It’s why I wear it. Camouflage.”
I give the horse stables no more than a quick glance. Nigel sees me do it, but he pretends otherwise.
“Patricia will be here soon,” I say.
Nigel stops and turns toward me. “Patricia, as in your cousin Patricia?”
“The very one,” I tell him.
“Oh my.”
“Will you show her into the parlor?”
I head up the stone steps and into the parlor. I still get the faint whiff of pipe tobacco. I know that’s not possible, that no one has smoked a pipe in this room in almost four decades, that the brain not only conjures up false sights and sounds but, more often, scents. Still the smell is real to me. Maybe aromas do indeed linger, especially the ones we find most comforting.
I walk over to the fireplace and stare up at the empty frame where the Vermeer once hung. The Picasso took up residence on the opposite wall. That was the sum total of the “Lockwood Collection”—three hundred million dollars of value in only two works of art. Behind me I hear the clatter of heel against marble. The sound, I know, is not being made by Chuck Taylors.
Nigel clears his throat. My back stays toward them.
“You don’t really want me to announce her, do you?”
I turn, and there she is. My cousin Patricia.
Patricia’s eyes roam the room before settling on me. “It’s weird to be back,” she says.
“It’s been too long,” I say.
“I concur,” Nigel adds.
We both look at him. He gets the message.
“I’ll be upstairs should anyone need me.”
He closes the massive doors to the parlor as he departs. They shut with an ominous thud. Patricia and I say nothing for the moment. She is, like yours truly, in her forties. We are first cousins; our fathers were brothers. Both men, Windsor the Second and Aldrich, were fair in complexion and blond, again like yours truly, but Patricia takes after her mother, Aline, a Brazilian native from the city of Fortaleza. Uncle Aldrich scandalized the family when he brought back the twenty-year-old beauty to Lockwood after his extended charity-work journey through South America. Patricia’s dark hair is short and stylishly cut. She wears a blue dress that manages to be both chic and casual. Her eyes are shiny almond. Her resting face, rather than the cliché “bitch,” is grippingly melancholy and startlingly beautiful. Cousin Patricia cuts something of a captivating and telegenic figure.
“So what’s wrong?” Patricia asks me.
“They found the Vermeer.”
She is stunned. “For real?”
I explain about the hoarder, the Beresford turret, the murder. I am not known for possessing subtlety or tact, but I’m trying my best to build up to the reveal. Cousin Patricia watches me with those inquisitive eyes, and again I fall back into a time portal. As children, we roamed this acreage for hours on end. We played hide-and-seek. We rode horses. We swam in the pool and the lake. We played chess and backgammon and worked on our golf and tennis. When the estate became too pompous or grim, as was Lockwood’s wont, Patricia would look at me and roll her eyes and make me smile.
I have only told one person in my life that I love them. Just one.
No, I did not say it to a special woman who, say, eventually broke my heart—my heart has never been broken or even tweaked, really—but to my platonic male friend Myron Bolitar. In short, there has been no great love in my life, only a great friendship. Relatives have been the same. We are bonded in blood. I have cordial, important, and even compelling relationships with my father, my siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins. I had virtually no relationship with my mother—I didn’t see or speak to her from the time I was eight years old until I watched her die when I was in my thirties.
This is a long way of telling you that Patricia has always been my favorite relative. Even after the big rift between our fathers, which is why she hasn’t been at Lockwood since her teens. Even after the devastating tragedy that made that rift both unfixable and, alas, eternal.
When I finish my explanation, Patricia says, “You could have told me all this on the phone.”
“Yes.”
“So what else is there?”
I hesitate.
“Oh shit,” she says.
“Pardon?”
“You’re stalling, Win, which really isn’t like you…oh damn, it’s bad, right?” Cousin Patricia takes a step closer to me. “What is it?”
I just say it: “The Aunt Plum suitcase.”
“What about it?”
“The hoarder didn’t just have the Vermeer. He had the suitcase.”
* * *
We stand in silence. Cousin Patricia needs a moment. I give it to her.
“What do you mean, he had the suitcase?”
“Just that,” I say. “The suitcase was there. In the hoarder’s possessions.”
“You saw it?”
“I did.”
“And they don’t know who this hoarder is?”
“Correct. They haven’t made an identification.”
“Did you see the body?”
“I saw a photograph of his face.”
“Describe him.”
I do as she asks.
“That could be anyone,” she says when I’m done.
“I know.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Patricia says. “He always wore a ski mask. Or…or he blindfolded me.”
“I know,” I say again, this time more somberly.
The grandfather clock in the corner begins to chime. We stay silent until it finishes.
“But there’s a chance, I mean, even a likelihood…” Patricia moves toward me. We had been standing on opposite ends of the parlor. Now we are only a yard or two apart. “The same man who stole the paintings also…?”
“I wouldn’t jump to conclusions,” I say.