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Evan had gone over to the oil painting on the wall and was pulling it open like a small door. Ah, so there was a compartment behind it. She started stepping over the spilled contents of the drawer when something caught her eye. She bent, picking up a piece of paper with writing on it that definitely wasn’t English.
“Evan, look,” she said, and he turned his head. He was holding what appeared to be a necklace case, and he brought it with him as he walked over to her.
“I don’t know what this is,” she said, handing him the paper, “but look.” She tapped the spot at the bottom that held an address.
He looked up, meeting her eyes. “Brussels?”
She nodded. “That story you printed. The diamond-mining company. The missing women. They were from Brussels.”
“What is this, though?”
“I don’t know. It looks like some formal document. We’d have to try to translate it. But there’s a name on it.”
“Fontane Lejeune.”
“Have you ever heard that name?”
“No. The man from that article who’d been questioned was named Dedryck Van Daele.”
Noelle frowned. Still, that was odd. She heard another small noise from outside in the office and tiptoed quietly to the door, peering out again. No one. And the doors were locked.There’s probably a full staff in this house. You’re only hearing them. Relax.
When she turned back toward Evan, he’d opened the top of the box in his hands. She approached him, looking at what he was holding. A red gem sparkled up at them, the large stone resting at the end of a delicate silver chain. It looked very old and very expensive. “A ruby?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s from a jewelry store in Belgium. What the hell is going on?”
“I have no idea,” she said. She pulled in a breath. “But we need to find out what the connection to Belgium is.”
He held up the jewelry box. “You know who we can ask about this?”
“Yes,” she said. She knew just who he was talking about—André Baudelaire, purveyor of antiques, collectibles, and fine jewelry. Evan stepped over the mess they’d left, leaving the compartment exposed. It had been empty, except for the necklace. And then they both exited the small hidden room where Leonard Sinclair stored his secrets.
A few of them at least.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Evan drove, his mind filtering through what they’d just discovered as Noelle used a search engine on her phone to look up the name Fontane Lejeune. Unfortunately, all the hits she got were in Dutch.
“He might have been the son of a judge,” she said. “There’s a photo from the early sixties of a man named Sevrin Lejeune being sworn in to office. The boy in the photo is named Fontane.”
He glanced over at her to see a troubled frown on her face. “What is it?” he asked.
“He looks like Callie.”
“Let me see,” he said, coming to a stop at a light and taking the phone. There were three children in the photo, and Noelle didn’t have to point out which one was Fontane. He did look like Callie. He looked like boyhood pictures of Evan himself.
He looked like his father.
Evan swallowed, handing the phone back to Noelle as the light turned green. The little boy was his father.
He didn’t understand that. He’d never heard the name Lejeune in his life. Why would his father move from Belgium and change his name?
He parked down the street from André Baudelaire’s antique shop, taking Noelle’s hand after they’d both exited the vehicle and hurrying toward the black awning with the gold lettering.
Evan pulled the door open, and Noelle went in first. The same scent greeted him as the first time he’d been in the shop, and there was something comforting about it, and something spooky. Again, it brought to mind some attic full of a grandmother’s treasures. Not that he’d ever known either of his own grandmothers. His mother’s mother had died when he was two, and he’d been told his father’s had died before he was born.
But he suddenly wondered about that.
Wondered if she was alive and well and living somewhere in Brussels.
