“No need to apologize.”
“Please. There is, for me. I’m sorry.”
“Accepted.”
“He said—Roarke said you wouldn’t stop. He said this was your calling, and you wouldn’t stop until you found who killed my father. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Holding on to that’s a better way not to fall to pieces.”
“Chloe, did you tell anyone about the vault?”
Her tear-filled eyes widened in something like horror.
“God no! It’s—it’s just shameful. Who wants to tell people your grandfather stole priceless art, historic jewelry, and worse, did it just to lock it away like—like some finger-tapping miser. Plus, we promised, all of us. We take promises seriously. You don’t make one unless you know absolutely you can keep it.
“Not even some casual thing,” she added with a little smile. “Like, ‘Hey, Dad, will you bring home some ice cream?’ He’d always say he’d try, or he’d make a note of that. Because what if he fell and broke his ankle, or had to help deliver a baby?”
At Eve’s expression, she laughed. “Honestly, that’s the sort of thing he’d point out. So when you promised, you had to mean it all the way. And we promised, no one said anything about it to anyone until we figured out how to make it all right again. And it hurt him, Lieutenant, because he knew we had to make it right again, and it would stain his father’s name. The father he’d just lost. It hurt, but he was going to do it.”
She took a breath. “Before you ask, Anya wouldn’t, either. We barely talked about it when we were alone because it’s painful.” She lookedback out to where security loaded packed items in the armored truck. “It’s going to hurt. I worried about that, about how I’d handle the talk around campus when it came out. Now? It’s nothing. The sooner it hits, the better.”
“Can you think of anyone who your grandfather might have told?”
“I don’t know. I know he didn’t tell my father or Aunt Joy.” She let out a sigh. “He liked women—you probably know that. Dad called it Henry Barrister’s ‘Asinine’ Heel. Kind of a joke, a play on Achilles’ heel.”
“I get it.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s impossible he might’ve said something when he was, you know, caught up. But if he did, I don’t know who, I don’t know when.”
“Did you ever meet any of his friends or his ‘Asinine’ Heels?”
That got another little smile. “Now and then. Once he decided we were old enough to behave at a dinner party, we got to come sometimes. He liked entertaining, especially if he had a new beauty to show off. Always young. I think thirty-five to forty was the cutoff. It was the money. Not that he wasn’t charming, interesting, even dynamic nearly to the end. But no thirty-year-old’s going to get naked with a man seventy years older unless he’s rich.”
She shrugged. “He knew it, Granddad wasn’t stupid. But it didn’t bother him. In fact, he got a charge out of it. He loved us, Anya and me especially. That was real. He was always so good to us. But he was a selfish, dishonest man. I know that now. We all have to live with that now.”
She looked back toward the house. “I need to get back to my mother. If you come up with more questions, or if you get any answers, we’ll be here. I’m going to have what Anya and I need sent from college.”
“You’re not going back?”
“Not now. We’ll take a pass this semester. Mom will fight that, sowe’ll compromise and take some classes remotely. But we’re moving back for now. She needs us. God, we need her. So we’ll be here.”
“All right. I’ll be in shortly.”
“Did I help at all?”
Eve met her eyes. “Yes.”
“Something else to hold on to.”
When she went back in, Eve tracked down Lowenbaum.
“It seems to be moving along faster than I figured once I saw the vault. There’s a frigging Cézanne in there.”
She’d started to speak, but now just stared at him.
“What? I know stuff. The jewelry? I can tell you it’s really shiny. The statues and that? Either hey, pretty, or wow, weird. But the paintings? I know stuff. He’s got a Cézanne in there, a Degas, a Renoir, a Corot, I think an early Picasso, and that was just at that initial scan.”
