“Dad told me he stayed in South America for three years,” she says in a wistful voice.
“That seems right,” I say. “If you page through the passport, you’ll see that he traveled to Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Venezuela.”
“It changed him,” she says.
This too is not a question, so I see no reason to comment.
“He did good work down there. He founded a school.”
“Seems he did, yes. According to the passport, he didn’t return to the United States until December 18, 1976.”
“December?”
“Yes.”
“I was told earlier.”
“Of course you were.”
“So my mother was pregnant with me,” Patricia says.
“You didn’t know?”
“I didn’t. But it doesn’t make a difference.” Patricia sighs and leans back in her chair. “Is there a point to all this, Win?”
“There is.”
“Because we are now up to 1976. The paintings were stolen from Haverford in, what, the mid-1990s? I still don’t see any connection here.”
“I do.”
“Tell me.”
“The key is your father’s departure from New York City to São Paolo.”
“What about it?”
“Your father was still a student at New York University. He hadn’t graduated. He seemed to be doing well enough. But suddenly, in April of that year, with the end of the semester less than two months away, he chose to travel on his overseas mission. I find that odd, don’t you?”
She shrugs. “Dad was rich, impulsive. Maybe he wasn’t doing great that semester. Maybe he just wanted out.”
“Perhaps,” I say.
“But?”
“But he departed April 14, 1973.”
“So?”
I have the old newspaper article on my phone. Even I feel a chill when I bring it up to show her. “So the Jane Street Six murders occurred two days earlier, on April 12, 1973.”
* * *
Patricia is up and pacing. “I don’t get what you’re saying here, Win.”
She does. I wait.
“It could be a coincidence.”
I don’t make a face. I don’t frown. I just wait.
“Say something, Win.”
“It can’t be a coincidence.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Your father runs off to Brazil almost immediately after the Jane Street Six murders go down. Twenty years later, valuable paintings of ours are stolen and end up in the hands of the leader of the Jane Street Six. Care for more? Fine. At Ry Strauss’s murder scene, we find the suitcase you were made to pack when you were kidnapped after your father’s murder. Oh, the icing: Nigel set up a shell account to purchase Ry Strauss’s apartment—the murder scene—and to take care of his maintenance payments. Enough?”
Patricia stands and crosses the room. “So what are you saying? My father was part of the Jane Street Six?”
“I don’t know. Right now, I’m still presenting the facts.”
“Like what else?”
“I met a barmaid who works in a place called Malachy’s. She had a relationship with Ry Strauss. She told me that Ry would often visit Philadelphia.”
“So if I’m reading you right, you think my father was part of the Jane Street Six. He escaped. Our family paid off Ry Strauss to keep quiet, I guess, about his role. Did we pay off the others?”
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t you tell me you talked to one? Lake something.”
“Lake Davies.”
“Wouldn’t she know?”
“She might, but I’m not sure she would tell me, especially if she’s been receiving payments. She also claims the women of Jane Street were low-level, so she may not know.”
“But my father is dead,” she says.
“Yes.”
“So why would anyone still be paying to keep his reputation intact?”
Now I do make a face. “You just entered the gates of Lockwood Manor. Do you really need to ask that?”
She considers that. “Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say my father was somehow part of the Jane Street Six.”
I hadn’t said or even concluded that yet, but I let it go for now.
“What does that have to do with stealing the Vermeer and Picasso all those years later? What does it have to do with my father’s murder or…” Patricia stops. “Or what happened to me?”
“I don’t know,” I admit.
“Win?”
“Yes?”
“Maybe we know enough now.”
“Come again?”
“I’ve built this charity on our family story. A large part of that is my father spending time helping the poor in South America and my desire to carry on his legacy. Suppose it comes out that the story is built on lies.”
I think about that. She makes an excellent point. Suppose what I find ends up being damaging to the Lockwood name and, more specifically, Patricia’s worthwhile cause.
“Win?”
“It’s better if we are the ones to unearth the truth,” I tell her.
“Why?”
“Because if it’s bad,” I say, “we can always bury it again.”
CHAPTER 23
Kabir hops off the helicopter, keeping one hand atop his turban so the slowing rotors don’t blow it off his head. He wears a black silk shirt, a green puffy down vest, worn blue jeans, and bright-white throwback Keds. I look behind me and up, and I see my father at his window, predictably frowning down at what he sees as a foreign interloper.
I wave Kabir toward me and lead him down through the wine cellar to Grandmama’s back room. When we arrive, Kabir takes it all in, nods, and says, “Bitchin’.”
“Indeed.”
When the press finally learned that Ry Strauss had been the murder victim found with the stolen Vermeer, the story, as you might imagine, generated enormous headlines. In the past, those headlines would have lasted for days, weeks, even months. Not today. Today our attention span is that of a child receiving a new toy. We play with it intensely for a day, maybe two, and then we grow bored and see another new toy and throw this one under the bed and forget all about it.
I spent most of the Ry Strauss media frenzy in the hospital. In the end, every news story, and yes, I’m moving if not mixing my metaphors, is a burning fire—if you don’t feed it a new log, it dies out. So far, there was nothing new. A stolen painting, the Jane Street Six, a murder—all delicious in their own right and together forming an intoxicating brew—but that was eleven days ago.
The media had not yet learned about the suitcase with my initials found at the scene or the case’s links to Cousin Patricia and the Hut of Horrors. That is good, in my view. That makes my investigation somewhat easier to navigate now.
Kabir carefully lays the file folders out on Grandmama’s old table. The key to hiring a top assistant and working cooperatively is having a shared vision. Kabir understands that I am visual and that I like facts and evidence displayed in organized patterns. The folders are all the same size (legal, nine inches by fourteen) and the same color (bright yellow). His neat handwriting is on the tab of each.