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At first, I hoped she might send for me. I used that lighter on a birthday candle. I didn’t have a cake—Meemaw’s budget didn’t stretch that far and she hadn’t even remembered my birthday. But I found a broken candle from a faded box in the pantry and I lit it with my mother’s lighter, making the same wish I’d made when I’d stolen a rabbit’s foot keychain from the five-and-dime just so I could rub it.
The wish never came true. I used the lighter to burn the postcard she sent from Venice Beach telling me how wonderful it was but how she just couldn’t afford the bus ticket for me to visit. After that I stopped checking the mail and I stopped looking backwards. But I kept the lighter. I used it when I wanted to burn my bridges, torching report cards and disciplinary notes, rejection letters and pink slips. I glued back the turquoises when they fell out and refilled the fluid and kept it polished. I moved a lot during my first years with the Museum. I preferred furnished rentals and kept mypossessions light—just a single box of things I could ship easily from place to place. Over the years, the things in the box changed, but the lighter was the constant, the one item I always carried in my pocket. I used it to burn intel and light signal fires and flaming shots when the occasion called for it. It lay on the nightstand the first time I spent the night with Taverner, and I used it to light a cigarette the last time I said good-bye to him, my hand shaking so badly I could hardly get it to catch. It was a talisman of sorts, and it never failed me.
Until now. I turned it over and over in my hand, but it just felt cold and heavy. There was no inspiration for how to find Vance, only the biting cold of the shed and the weight of the lump of silver in my hand. I flicked it, kindling the little flame. I passed my hand over it, warming it a bit but mostly killing time, bringing my palm closer and closer with each pass.
I flipped open the folder from Carapaz’s house and paged through it. Whatever instinct had prompted me to snatch it on the way out had paid off. It was our dossier, the one prepared for the board, alleging we were on the take. Like all material prepped for the board, it was almost clinical in its tone, laying out the evidence like a trail of bread crumbs for the directors to follow. There was a section on each of us, complete with murders we were supposed to have committed for pay. I skimmed my pages again, going over the lurid details. They were laughable—targets I had never even heard of, methods I rarely used. The whole thing smelled sloppy to me, like it had been assembled too fast or by somebody with no time to spare.
I lit another cigarette—it might have been nasty but Ineeded the nicotine—and blew out a mouthful of smoke slowly, making rings. Smoke and mirrors, that’s all the dossier was, a prop to keep on hand in case anybody asked questions about us. The file was the old-fashioned kind, pasteboard covers with a long metal bracket down one side. The arms of the bracket were threaded through holes punched in the pages inside, keeping everything neat and tidy, with little clasps to hold the bracket arms down and form a temporary binding. It meant the pages could be flipped through like a book, complete with a snug little gutter on the inside. I flicked the clasps off and straightened the bracket arms before I slid the front cover off. I pulled each page free until I saw it, a tiny set of coded characters running vertically along one of the inside margins. Every dossier came with a code like that, a series of letters and numbers that could be interpreted if you knew what you were looking at. Every person who had a hand in compiling it added their initials and the date to the code. By the time it got to a field agent, the code could take up the entire length of the page. This one was short—one set of initials and one date. One person had compiled the dossier.
I ran my finger over the initials, remembering my conversation with Naomi Ndiaye, searching for anything I might have missed. After a while, I put the dossier back together and clipped the cover into place. I had some answers, but there was only so much I could do without more information.
I pulled out the phone Minka had set up for me and dialed in Naomi’s number. There was a long moment of silence, then an automated voice.
“This number is no longer in service. If you believe youhave reached this message in error, please hang up and dial again.”
I jabbed the “off” button and swore. The bitch had changed her number, no doubt to keep me from calling her again.
I figured it was a long shot, but I was running low of options. I punched in the number of the answering service I’d given Martin. When it picked up, I keyed in the pin, expecting to hear the usual snippy recording. “You havenonew messages.” Instead, she perkily told me that I had a new message and asked if I’d like to hear it.
“Yes, you stupid bitch,” I muttered.
The recording didn’t like that. “I did not recognize that response,” she said, sounding offended as a recording can sound.
“Yes, please and thank you, with sugar on top and cream on Sundays,” I said.
“One moment, please.”
There was a long few seconds of staticky silence before Martin’s voice came through, sounding younger than I remembered and hushed, as if he were afraid of being overheard.
“Billie, it’s Martin. I think I heard something, or maybe I didn’t. I don’t know. But I had to bring some files to Vance and I went to the bathroom and when I came back, he was on the phone. He didn’t hear me, so I... shit, I eavesdropped, okay. I don’t know what it means, but he said the same phrase twice. Toll mash. I know it sounds stupid and I’m probably going to hate myself for even thinking it might help, but I feelbad. I mean, you were always nice to me, Billie. I—I have to go. Toll mash. I hope it helps.”
I pressed “end call” and stared at the phone, rolling the phrase over in my mind. Toll mash. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it might mean. It sounded like a wrestling move or something to do with a chocolate chip cookie.
“Toll mash.” I tried saying it out loud and that didn’t help. I closed my eyes and pictured the letters, but they didn’t look right. Instead oftoll mash, I kept picturing something different.
tollemache.
The name was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t remember why. I clapped my hands together to get some warmth back into them, then plugged the word into the search bar of my phone. There were 775,000 results, but the first was what I wanted. Tollemache’s Auctions and Private Sales. Along with Christie’s and Sotheby’s, it was one of the big three auction houses in London, specializing in paintings and jewelry. I pulled up their website and the landing page featured an exquisite Boldini woman in pink satin and tulle. Tollemache’s was traditional, stuffy even. They’d sooner burn the house down than sell contemporary art. No stuffed taxidermy sharks or canvases streaked with menstrual blood for them. They were strictly old-school.
And they meant nothing to us. I’d never even set foot in the place, and to my knowledge neither had any of the others. Tollemache’s was old money, housed in a sagging Tudor building that made Liberty look postmodern. I clicked through the site for maybe a quarter of an hour before I found it.
It was on the Events page, an announcement of theirannual January sale. This year’s theme was female painters and it was titledA Celebration of Five Centuries of Women in Art, 1500–1950. I clicked through the online catalog, translating the estimates in pounds sterling to dollars as I read. There was a luscious O’Keeffe predicted to hit mid–eight figures, with works by Gentileschi, Cassatt, and Vigée Le Brun expected to fetch a little over five million dollars each. A Vallayer-Coster was projected to roll in the range of $900,000, with a Fontana bringing up the rear at a cool half a million.
At the bottom of the listing was a line in bold.Recent addition to the sale.I clicked it and stared. I took off my reading glasses, polished them carefully on my shirttail, then stared some more. And suddenly I knew exactly how we were going to find Vance Gilchrist.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The others were in the kitchen when I came in, waving my phone and doing a little victory dance.
“What the hell are you so excited about?” Mary Alice asked. Her temper was getting sourer by the day as Akiko kept her distance.
“I know how we’re going to find Vance,” I told her, turning my phone. The others gathered around and I heard three women suck in their breath at one time.
Only Akiko and Minka didn’t understand. “So?” Minka said, handing back the phone.
Akiko peered at the tiny screen. “Nice painting, but what does it have to do with Gilchrist?”
I smiled. “This is not a nice painting. This isThe Queen of Sheba Arisingby Sofonisba Anguissola.” I cleared my throat and started to read from the catalog entry. “ ‘Commissioned by Elisabeth of Valois, Queen of Spain,The Queen of ShebaArisingwas painted by Anguissola during her tenure in Madrid as court painter. Upon the death of the queen, Anguissola returned to her home in Cremona with the painting, where it remained until her death in 1625. It was inherited by her stepson, Guido Lomellino, and was passed down through the Lomellino family, remaining in private hands.’ ”
