Tom Dolby - The Trust

“We’d better get out of here,” Phoebe said. “This is way too creepy. What if there’s no oxygen in the room or something?”

“Come on, don’t you want to find out what this is all about?”

He was right. Phoebe blinked as she looked around. The door closed again. She noticed one difference already, as the door closed. Not only were the walls of this enormous room a clean, pure white, with properly finished surfaces, but the humidity was much lower, not the dank moisture of the basement, but an even, steady level of cool air. Not too dry, not too wet. And the lights were not too bright, not too dark.

Like a museum.

Phoebe looked around and Nick followed her. There were at least a dozen enormous wooden packing crates. She was suddenly drawn back to her time at the Schrader Gallery, when she had been allowed to browse the artist collections that were stored in the back room. She now realized that this was the same thing.

Inside all of these boxes were artworks.

Three paintings were on easels at the back of the room. She didn’t recognize the first two, but when she looked at the third, she realized it was the Pollock that belonged to Nick’s parents. She pointed it out to Nick, and he shook his head in dismay.

She looked at some of the names on the crates. Each was meticulously labeled with the name of an artist: Vermeer, Rembrandt, Degas, Cezanne.

Phoebe gasped as she read the title of each piece. “Do you know what these are?” she asked Nick.

“No, I don’t.” He seemed frustrated with her.

“They are only some of the most famous stolen paintings in the world. I mean, holy crap, was your grandfather really part of this? Do you know how much jail time he could have done if he was ever caught?”

They looked around the room, walking by each boxed work, as well as the few that were on easels. There were more famous names: Brueghel, Watteau, Manet.

“Okay, this has got to be a joke.” Nick pointed to one box.

Phoebe read aloud. “The Mona Lisa.”

“You’re kidding me,” Nick said. “The Mona Lisa isn’t a stolen artwork.”

“No,” Phoebe said. “It’s not. But it was stolen from the Louvre in the early 1900s. My mom read a book about it. At that time, they actually made copies, and then thieves would return either the copy or the original back to the museum, depending on how they were playing it.”

“So you’re telling me that the Mona Lisa in the Louvre is a copy, and this is the original?”

“No,” Phoebe shook her head. “The Mona Lisa in the Louvre has been authenticated. Your grandfather had a copy there.”

“But he had to have known that. Why would he keep a copy?”

“I think he probably did. Maybe it thrilled him to have a little piece of the history of art. Or, rather, the history of art theft.”

“Okay, this is all getting too weird,” Nick said. “I say we go back up.”

Phoebe followed Nick through the door and back through the dank basement passageway.

“What do you think we should do?” Phoebe said, her voice echoing slightly in the basement. “I mean, these pieces have to be returned, don’t you think? Some of those works have been missing for decades!”

Did Nick realize the enormity of what they had uncovered? The discovery of these paintings would shake up not only the art world, but quite possibly, the global economy. It would be in the news for months. Books would be written about it, films would be made, the parties involved would be interviewed-

If the Society knew about their discovery, none of that would happen.

Nick and Phoebe reached the staircase leading up to the first floor and were grateful when they found themselves in the kitchen of the enormous house. Patch was waiting there, sitting at the antique farm table while Horatio read a copy of the Financial Times.

As Nick and Phoebe told Patch what they had seen, he shook his head in amazement.

“Give me your car service account number,” Patch said to Nick. “There’s only one person who can help us figure this out.”

It took Patch fifteen minutes on the phone before he could cajole Genie into joining them in Southampton. She had come back late that morning from her vacation in the Catskills, and it was everything he could do to convince her that traveling two hours out to the beach would be a worthwhile pursuit. He promised her that a town car would meet her outside the apartment in twenty minutes. She fussed and complained, but ultimately, Patch told her she didn’t have a choice.

With those words, she joined them.

The next few hours passed strangely, as Horatio began to prepare an elaborate lunch for the three of them. Nick insisted that he not go to any trouble, but they were hungry after their trip and the anguish of trying to figure out what was going on.

The three of them roamed around the house, but there wasn’t a single personal artifact, not even a single clue, that led them to know its story.

“I don’t think anyone actually lives here,” Phoebe said, as they poked around one of the bedrooms.

“Why do you say that?” Nick asked.

“I just looked at one of the bathrooms. There are no toiletries, no personal items. Even a guesthouse would have certain amenities.”

“Maybe the Bradford Trust keeps it as an investment, and the Society uses it for meetings,” Patch said.

Nick nodded. “I think you’re probably right.”

“What I want to know,” Phoebe said, “is where does the money come from to pay for all this?”

“Maybe we just saw it all downstairs,” Nick said. “Maybe they sell off the artwork, bit by bit.”

“It’s possible,” Patch said. “But I think it’s a bit more aboveground. If they started with a certain amount of capital and they invested it wisely, they would have hundreds of millions of dollars by now. I mean, the older members pay dues, right? Like, ten thousand a year or something?”

“I think so,” Nick said.

“Think about it-that’s more than enough to pay for it all. Let’s say they have two hundred dues-paying members-that would be two million dollars a year. Invest that, year after year, and you’ve got more than enough to finance all this.”

Horatio rang a bell downstairs in the kitchen, which meant they were being summoned for lunch. The smells of cooking had already started wafting up to the second floor. Once they had started their meal, Patch had to admit that Horatio’s cooking was even better than that of Gertie, Nick’s family’s cook in the city. Horatio had prepared them a lunch of tomato fennel soup, grilled cheese sandwiches with truffle oil, a winter salad of apples and pecans, and a steaming pot of tea to go along with fresh lemon-glazed scones for dessert.

The three of them ate cautiously in the breakfast area on the sunporch.

“Hey,” Phoebe said as she picked at her food. “How do you know he’s not going to poison us or something?”

“I don’t think we need to worry,” Nick said. “I’m pretty sure that isn’t what this is about. His allegiance was to my grandfather.”

“I wouldn’t say for sure,” Phoebe said. She made a motion to indicate that they couldn’t trust him.

“Look, you guys, I’m hungry, okay?” Patch said. “Can we just relax a little bit?”

“If he’s eating it, then it’s probably okay,” Nick said. Patch had, after all, been through more than he and Phoebe had-and had come out relatively intact on the other end.

As they were finishing lunch, they heard a car pull into the driveway. Genie arrived at the front door, bundled up as if she were headed on an arctic excursion. Patch desperately wanted to talk to her about the situation with Parker Bell and what he had learned yesterday, but he restrained himself.