Chapter 3

Marisol Beaudry had called thirty-one seasons of estate property on Royal Street, and she had never read a donor line that made her stop and start again.

"Anonymous - W.T.," she said into the headset, for the fifth time that night, because house rules required the provenance line be read into the record before every lot passed. Gift date, 1974. Property of a river-parish parish. She lifted the gavel and set it down without striking.

At the phone console on the left wall, Hollis Prine held up two fingers, then four. Line four. Waiting.

Marisol looked at the floor manager.

Colby Reinhardt, thirty-eight years old and immaculate, stood at the end of the second row with his earpiece in and gave her a single nod. Small. Final. The kind of nod that closes a conversation the other person was never invited to have.

She had asked him about it at four o'clock, in the back office, with the consignment file open between them. Lot Twelve is a parish lot, she'd said. It should run on the floor. He'd said, The house owner wants it settled. He'd said it twice.

"Sold," Marisol said. "Lot Twelve, to the telephone, line four, at the reserve."

The room made a sound.

Not a big sound. Two hundred people at a black-tie auction make a very particular noise when something is wrong - a shift of cloth, a hundred small turns of the head, a dealer in the third row saying, clearly, "Before it opens?"

The gala rule was printed on the back of every catalog. Bidding opens at the podium. Nobody buys from a phone line before the gavel.

Marisol's thumb found the edge of the accession card and pressed until it bent.

Twenty minutes earlier, out on Royal Street, the rain had just stopped and the gutters were running. Wil Thibodeaux had been standing under the gallery's black awning, waiting for his shoes to dry on the mat, when the floor manager came out the side door with a phone at his ear and did not notice him.

Line four, Reinhardt had said. Lot Twelve. Keep it at the reserve and don't let it run.

Wil had stood very still until the side door closed.

Now, from the doorway, his voice came across the herringbone without any volume in it at all, and it carried anyway, the way a low note carries under a choir.

"Nineteen eleven," he said.

Marisol's head came up.