Chapter 5

Dr. Voss's final report ran to twenty-two pages and Delia read all of it standing at her kitchen counter, because she could not sit down.

It was careful. It was honest. Voss was not the problem. Voss had done what a good appraiser does: she had looked at the frame, found the rebate built with period screws and a corner of salvaged moulding, and traced the moulding to a tin of deaccessioned hardware that had sat in the curator's office since 1974.

The report said: the curator amended the catalogue entry eight months before the discovery, without notification, without a condition report, without a note in the daybook. It said: the curator had daily, unaccompanied access to the painting for nineteen years. It said: the curator's own hardware tin contained the material used to disguise the copy.

It did not say she did it. It did not have to. Everyone else did.

The society's board voted to support the examination. A trade newsletter ran it under the headline THE CURATOR'S TIN. Two people Delia had known for thirty years crossed the street in Narberth to avoid her.

On the last Thursday in August, Bunny Ashcombe came into the library on her stick while Ward was standing at the refectory table with the auctioneer, and she stopped in front of Delia and looked up at her with those sharp dark eyes and asked, in front of both of them, in a voice that carried:

"Did you do it?"

"No," Delia said.

Bunny held her gaze a moment longer than she needed to. Then she turned and went out to the terrace, and Ward said, quietly, "That was decent of her," and Delia said nothing at all.

Renata Buhl came on the first of September with a lanyard badge and a tablet and a demand letter.

The policy's fraud clause required the insurer to establish the loss on the record. That meant the muniment room. That meant the deeds, the register, and the 1928 dies, opened in the presence of the adjuster and a witness.

Ward opened it himself at eleven in the morning with the number one key on his ring, and Delia stood in the corridor with Renata and watched the steel door swing.

The room smelled like cold stone and old paper. Shelves to the ceiling. Deed boxes in rows. A long flat table under a single bulb.

Renata went to the boxes first. She lifted the first lid and stopped.

The hasps were scratched. Not old scratches - fresh ones, bright metal showing through the tarnish, three boxes in a row, where somebody had worked a blade under the hasp because they did not want to open the lock.

"These have been opened," Renata said.

"Recently," Delia said.

She turned to the shelf behind the door. There was a wooden box there, shallow, dovetailed, with a paper label in a 1928 hand: KEY DIES - ASHWOOD, E. SATTLER, PHILA.

She lifted the lid. Two steel dies sat in their nests, dark with oil, the reverse of the bow cut into them: the lettering, the number, the little hairline crack that ran through the top loop of the 8.

She set the lid down.

"The dies are here," she said.

Renata looked at the box. "So the key came from here."

"Yes."

"And there's one way into this room."

Delia looked at the door, and the escutcheon, and the bright scratch on the bottom edge of it.

"One way," she said. "And somebody's been using it."