Chapter 8 - The Stripping of the Spurious
By Wednesday afternoon, the humidity had broken, leaving the Richmond sky a high, pale, porcelain blue that smelled of dried oak leaves and river silt.
The armored transport truck—a matte-black Freightliner with bulletproof glass and three armed guards from Loomis—was parked across the driveway of 414 Monument Avenue.
The guards didn't use the front stairs. They carried the heavy wooden crates around the side portico, through the brick courtyard, and laid them directly onto the floor of the carriage house.
I stood by the workbench with an iron pry bar and a pair of white cotton preservation gloves.
The first crate was marked FENWICK — LOT #1.
Inside, wrapped in three layers of oiled tissue and dense wool batting, was the 1812 Federal tea service. The silver had been cleaned by the Savannah auctioneers with some abrasive paste that had left tiny, circular micro-scratches near the maker’s mark, but the heavy, unadorned lines of the pot—forged by a silversmith in Alexandria when Madison was in the White House—were intact.
I lifted the pot by its ebony handle.
The weight was sixty-four ounces of pure, unalloyed coin silver.
Beside me, Eleanor Gable was sitting on an overturned wood box, carefully peeling the brown paper wrapping from the three blue velvet boxes containing my mother’s amethysts.
"They didn't sell the stones, Audrey," she said, holding a pendant up to the afternoon sun that slanted through the hayloft door. The deep, purple crystal caught the light, throwing a rich, wine-colored diamond across the cypress wainscoting. "The jeweler in Savannah told the sheriff that the cut was too old. He said modern buyers don't want stones that were faceted by hand in the eighteen-forties. They want those machine-cut things from India that look like plastic."
"Reid didn't know what they were," I said, setting the silver pot on the bench. "He only knew the numbers on the appraisal form."
A horn sounded from the street.
Not the polite chime of an Uber, but the dry, frantic honk of a rental sedan.
I walked to the carriage house door.
Standing on the sidewalk outside the cast-iron gates was Brooke Calloway.
She was wearing an oversized gray sweatshirt, dirty white tennis shoes, and no makeup. The sleek, smooth, lacquered posture she had worn at my dining table five nights ago had vanished. Her hair was pulled back into an unwashed knot with an elastic band, and she was carrying a cardboard Bankers Box filled with clothes and beauty supplies.
The leased Audi was gone. She had arrived in a lime-green Kia Rio with an airport barcode on the rear quarter-glass.
She didn't try to open the gate. The gate was secured with a brand-new five-inch hardened steel American Lock, its shackle five-eighths of an inch thick, keyed to a registered cylinder that lived on my key ring.
"Audrey!" she screamed through the iron bars. "Audrey, you open this gate right now!"
I didn't walk down the brick path. I stood on the threshold of the carriage house, sixty feet away, my arms crossed over my canvas vest.
"The house is closed, Brooke," I called out.
"They took my car!" she wailed, her voice cracking into that shrill, piercing register that had terrorized retail clerks in three counties. "Two men with a tow truck showed up at my apartment in Short Pump at six o'clock this morning! They towed it right out of the carport! They said the lease was canceled for fraud! I had my gym bag in the trunk! I had my laptop in the back seat!"
"Your laptop," I said, "is currently at the forensic imaging unit of Vance & Fenwick. Since it was purchased with a commercial check from the Calloway Capital sweep account, it constitutes a business asset subject to the bankruptcy receivership."
"You can't do this to me!" she screamed, rattling the iron bars with both hands until the bronze gate bell rang in erratic, violent bursts. "I didn't do anything to your mother! I was just visiting! Reid said it was his house! He said he was paying for the lease!"
"You sat at my table, Brooke," I said, my voice carrying cleanly across the sunny courtyard, "and told me my mother was making a mess because she had spilled soup with a torn knee."
"It was a joke!"
"Nobody is laughing, Brooke," I said. "Now take your rental car and leave. If that vehicle is still idling in the fire lane in five minutes, the city parking enforcement unit will have it on a hook before you reach the corner."
She stared at me through the iron bars, her face mottled with red and white blotches of pure, impotent fury.
For twenty-six years, Brooke Calloway had lived in a world where men apologized when she raised her voice, where store managers issued store credit to make her stop shouting in the aisle, where her brother Reid solved her overdrafts with a signature on a corporate check.
She was looking at an engineer who had spent fifteen years working with the second law of thermodynamics: Entropy always increases. Energy cannot be created from nothing. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
She dropped the cardboard box onto the pavement, kicked the iron gate with the toe of her tennis shoe, let out a ragged, vulgar curse that made an elderly woman walking a poodle across the street stop and stare, and scrambled back into the green Kia.
The engine buzzed like an angry hornet as she reversed into the street, clipped the curb with her right front tire, and sped toward the Boulevard.
Mrs. Gable walked to the doorway, holding a glass of iced tea.
"You have your father’s eyes, Audrey," she said quietly.
May you like
"My father," I replied, "would have given them twenty-four hours to apologize."
"Your father," Mrs. Gable snorted, taking a slow sip of her tea, "was a soft-hearted man who let Douglas Calloway steal three hundred bushels of seed barley in nineteen-eighty-four because he felt sorry for his wife. You did what Thomas Fenwick should have done forty years ago."
