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Chapter Fourteen
“Hey!” Jason sprang for the door. “I’m in here. Someone’s in here!”
No one answered. He listened hard but heard no sound but his own agitated breathing.
“Hey!” He tugged fruitlessly on the grate.
Nothing. No footsteps, either retreating or approaching. No sign that anyone was out there beyond his range of sight. He scanned the copse of nearby evergreens. No movement. No color behind the blue-green branches. Not so much as a fucking squirrel.
But the door hadn’t closed on its own. There was no breeze, let alone the gale force wind it would take to move those ornate swirls of bronze. Therefore…what the hell?
He gripped the metal carving, again pushed hard against the grating. Nope. It was locked tight and built to last.
“Goddamn it.” Jason tried yelling again. “Hey! Can anybody hear me? I need some help.”
Good luck with that.
If anyone was out there, they were not coming to his rescue.
If anyone was out there, they had likely slammed the door on him.
Jason stopped yelling.
He pulled out his cell phone and checked for a signal.
Nada.
The walls of most crypts around the age of this one were ten-inch thick. The roofs were typically twelve-inch thick. That was another bit of arcane knowledge, courtesy of a degree in art history. He had once taken a course on funeral art and different death rituals. Some things just stuck in your memory. Like what coffin liquor was, for example.
Anyway, the thickness of the walls and roof were irrelevant. The door was basically a giant grate and the windows… Jason stepped near to get a closer look at the windows—and then a still closer look. He whistled, temporarily forgetting about his plight.
Unless he was very much mistaken, those stained-glass windows were original Tiffany. The workmanship was unmistakable. The stylized, exquisitely detailed flowers and swans, the rich, luminous blues and greens and golds. If these were indeed Tiffany glass, it would put the value of the windows somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range. For windows that size? A quarter of a million at least.
At the turn of the last century, wealthy families frequently commissioned valuable art and glass to furnish family mausoleums. Those items—Tiffany glass in particular—were now in high demand with overseas collectors willing to pay just about anything. But because so much of Tiffany’s work was in churches and mausoleums, it never went on sale. Over the past few decades, enterprising thieves had turned to robbing upscale cemeteries where security was guaranteed to be minimal.
In fact, in 1999, one of the world’s foremost experts on Tiffany glass had been convicted in federal court of knowingly buying and selling Tiffany windows stolen by a career grave robber.
To stumble over a find like this in the middle of nowhere? It was incredible. In fact, it was a miracle that no one had yet targeted these.
Jason studied the jewel-bright panels of white snowdrops, ivory roses, and purple and yellow pansies against crystal blue water and blazing azure sky. Tiffany had perfected a technique of layering glass that created a kind of 3-D effect. More real than real. These particular flowers reminded him a little of Monet’s paintings of his spring garden at Giverny. He felt as though he could almost step through the window onto the sunlit grass.
Monet. He shivered. Yeah. Maybe better not to think of Monet right now.
He tore his gaze from the windows. Even on this drizzly gray day, they seemed to glow warmly with the promise of life and hope and eternal sunshine.
No locked doors in that world.
Jason swore quietly.
Now what?
He walked back to the door, took his phone out, and thrust his arm through the grating to see if he could get a signal.
He didn’t have Shipka’s number, but if Shipka had sent his notes as promised, Jason could check his mail and possibly retrieve Shipka’s contact info.
But no.
The two miniscule signal bars that popped up faded out again immediately.
