Chapter 6

Reinhardt was already moving, smile fully assembled, hand out.

"Ms. Baptiste. We were starting to think the rain kept you."

Cleo Baptiste did not take his hand. She was sixty-one, and she stood like a woman who had spent forty years in front of a microphone and had long ago stopped being impressed by rooms.

"Who is that?" she said.

"Nobody. A walk-in."

She looked past him at the old man Dupree was holding by the arm, and at the pink fan still open in his hand.

"What's his name?"

Reinhardt glanced at the lectern, at the ledger, at the young woman in black who had stopped writing.

"Thibodeaux," he said. "Wilbur."

Cleo Baptiste went still.

Not a small still. The kind that makes people nearby stop talking. Her chin came up half an inch, and her right hand closed on the small black clutch under her arm, and she stood in the middle of the aisle of Le Moyne & Sons and did not move for four full seconds.

"Say it again," she said.

"Ms. Baptiste -"

"Say the name again."

"Thibodeaux."

She turned to the podium. "Marisol. Read the card."

Marisol Beaudry's hand went to the accession card on the shelf beneath her gavel, and stopped there.

"I can read the donor line," she said. "It's already in the record. The memo field is consignor's property."

"Then read the donor line," Cleo said.

Reinhardt stepped in front of her, hands open, reasonable. "Cleo. With respect. This is a scheduling problem, not a -"

"I am the guest of honor at this gala," Cleo said, "and I have asked a licensed auctioneer to read a card out loud. If the house can't do that, the house should say so into the microphone, so the whole room hears it."

Nobody was drinking. Nobody was sitting.

Marisol Beaudry lifted the card, put on her glasses, and read.

"Lot Twelve. Cypress console. Donor of record, anonymous - W.T. Gift date, 1974. Property of a river-parish parish."

The words came out of the speakers and hung in the gilt air, and for a moment nothing happened at all.

Then, at the phone console on the left wall, Hollis Prine said, "Line four's gone."

The red light was dark.