Page 68 of Over Her Dead Body

By 8:03, Emma Calloway has a door.

Private collections are wonderfully cooperative things. They can exist for years without anyone seeing them.

Lisbon is convenient.

So is Emma’s need to make her lie survive the friend from Vienna.

At 8:17, I give the door a name.

At 8:24, I add the line that will make her reach for it.

No inventory. Requires discretion.

That will be enough.

Emma Calloway can resist a great many things.

She cannot resist a closed door pretending to be provenance.

By 9:00, Emma will receive exactly what she invented.

A private collection.

Lisbon.

Old family money.

No inventory.

Because sometimes the kindest thing you can do for a liar is give her somewhere to stand.

CHAPTER 26

EMMA

By the time the sky outside my kitchen window begins to lighten, Google has offered me two attorneys, a dentist, and a poet who died in 1987.

None of them are him.

The business registration gives me a name and a Lisbon address. No photograph. Nothing connecting it to the man Celeste thinks he is.

I open the databases I use for work.

Auction houses are discreet until a name makes an object more expensive. Then discretion becomes provenance.

Martin Hale appears in the acknowledgments of an exhibition catalogue from Brussels. One hundred and forty-three poorly scanned pages devoted to Portuguese interiors painted by men who considered furniture a sufficient substitute for women.

His name is near the back.

The museum gratefully acknowledges Martin Hale, Lisbon, for facilitating loans from private collections.

I check the publication date.

Eleven months before Reid died.

The exact wording leads me to an archived trade article about the exhibition. It names Martin Hale as the Lisbon adviser representing the lender.

It quotes him.