Page 61 of The Stolen Queen

Annie looked down at her dress, the one that she’d put on not five hours ago with such hope. The hem was dirty and her feet hurt and her mother had just chosen a man over her own daughter. Tears streamed down her face at her predicament, as well as the unexpected kindness that Mrs. H had shown her.

“Now, don’t cry. Think of it this way: You’re free.”

She wiped her eyes. “Free to do what?”

Mrs. H waved her hand in the air. “Anything. You’re healthy and young, go out there and make some noise.”

“But I don’t know what to do, or how to go about it.”

“Excuses. Tonight, you’ll take the spare room and get some rest. Tomorrow, you can make me breakfast and start fresh. Think about what you want to do next.”

“I want to fix what I screwed up. I screwed up badly. And not just my life, other people’s lives as well.”

“Now, now. Stop being dramatic. You’re just a kid. You’resupposedto screw up at your age. You still have plenty of time to make things right. When you’re my age, it’s too late. Too late to apologize because the people you screwed over are dead.”

Annie had never heard Mrs. H speak so bluntly, and she couldn’t help but laugh. “Oops. Sorry.”

Mrs. H let out a giggle. “That’s terrible of me, isn’t it? Well, it’s true. Then, and only then, is it really over. So stop grousing about how tough you have it. When you’re eighty, you can grouse.”

She rose, picked up the cookie jar filled with Annie’s money that sat on the counter, and planted it on the table. “Until then, get the hell on with it.”

Chapter Twenty

Charlotte

“Look, Charlotte, I can’t just show up at the Met and offer to pitch in to help recover the Cerulean Queen. That’s not the way it works.”

Tenny Woods placed his coffee on his desk as he removed his coat, eyeing Charlotte warily.

She’d turned up at his office at eight thirty after a sleepless night. Once she and Mark had returned from the Met, he’d gone straight to bed while she’d retreated into the dining room to try to piece together the strange series of events from the evening, eventually crashing on the living room couch, her mind whirling. She knew Mark had wanted her to join him, but his need to protect and understand her, while comforting at first, was also suffocating. She didn’t have all the answers to his questions, and before she could help it, her natural evasiveness kicked in.

At the same time, she couldn’t figure this out alone. She hoped Tenny Woods might be able to help. Right now she needed to do something material. Take action.

“I would think the Met would want as much assistance as they can get,” she said. “The Cerulean Queen is a major piece in thecollection.” Her explanation of last night’s events was disjointed and confusing, no doubt, but Tenny appeared to understand the basics: Charlotte had received a threatening note and one of her important files had gone missing, possibly taken to stop her from asking any more questions about the loan’s provenance. On top of that, a valuable statue had been stolen, possibly by using a diversionary tactic involving moths. A lot of “possiblys.” It all sounded as insane to her as it probably did to Tenny, who took multiple swigs of his coffee as she spoke.

“The Met has its own security team, they’ll reach out if they need me,” he said.

“What happens next? Do they go to the press?”

“What happens next is they’ll notify the New York Police Department and the NYPD’s Property and Recovery Squad. They may contact the FBI as well.”

“What would you do, if you were in charge?”

He considered the question. “If my priority was to recover the statue, I’d go to the press, as well as alert the National Antique and Art Dealers Association. But there’s no promise that will work. The rates of recovery for this kind of crime are less than ten percent.”

Less than ten percent. The more often the statue changed hands—as the thief pawned it off to an unscrupulous dealer, who then sold it to a discreet client, who sold it to some unsuspecting collector—the less the chance of tracking it down. The odds weren’t good.

Tenny looked through the notes he’d been taking. “This girl, Annie Jenkins, the one who set off the moths, do they suspect she’s part of the crime ring?”

“They do, but I disagree. She was terrified, and I don’t think she was pretending.”

“What makes you believe the missing file and the threat are related to the theft?”

Now that she was asked that question point-blank, Charlotte had a hard time coming up with an answer. “It’s just too strange that it all happened at the same time. I’m convinced that it has something to do with the events in Egypt in ’37. With Leon and Henry.”

He tapped a couple of fingers on the desk. “Huh.”

No doubt Tenny thought she was projecting her own tragedies onto what was happening today, and maybe he was right. But if Leon was still alive, anything was possible. Charlotte’s past was threatening to swallow her up whole and ruin everything she’d worked for and accomplished. There was one concrete clue that Charlotte had gleaned from the evening’s events, though. “Annie Jenkins said the man who attacked us wore a pendant with a cross with a small circle at the top.”

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