The Big Steal

by Emyl Jenkins

Genres: Female Sleuths; Amateur Sleuth

Synopsis

Hired to assess the value of broken and missing antiques following a suspicious burglary at a Virginia manor house, intrepid appraiser and amateur sleuth Sterling Glass finds that her job is more complicated than she’d anticipated. The antiques, she realizes, are not always what they seem: some are worth tens of thousands, others are well-done replicas.

Whether the well-traveled and well-heeled couple who once owned Wynderly could have been trafficking in fakes is what Sterling must unravel from the secret rooms, hidden treasures, uncovered diaries, and convoluted trail of paperwork and provenance. As our sharp-witted heroine sifts through details doled out by the museum's curators, board members, and the town's local residents, she discovers that objects, unlike people, do not lie.

The Big Steal is a delightful mystery that enhances readers' antiques acumen and provides an easy guide to identifying the most popular styles and periods in an illustrated appendix.

Release date: July 14, 2009

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

Dear Antiques Expert: My family has always prized a green and yellow pottery Tang horse given to our grandfather by an official of the Indonesian government in the 1950s. Could it really be valuable, or is its worth just a family myth?

 

Ever since grave robbers and archaeologists began unearthing the colorful pottery horses buried in the tombs of imperial rulers and wealthy Chinese during the Tang Dynasty (618 – 907), collectors have coveted them. But reproduction Tang horses have also been around for generations. Though an expert will have to determine your horse’s age and origin, if it is authentic and in good condition, then its value could be many thousands of dollars. In 2003, a pair of extraordinarily rare Tang horses sold for $1.57 million.

THERE I WAS, shivering from head to toe, searching for family pictures and records left behind by Mazie and Hoyt Wyndfield. They hadn’t had any children of their own to sort through their things after their deaths several years ago, which partly explains why, in the dead of winter, I was up in the attic of this place called Wynderly, digging through their lives. Once Wynderly had been a gracious home. Now it was a museum teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

Unlike the stately eighteenth-century Georgian plantations Virginia is known for, Wynderly was a sprawling place, reminiscent of a French chateau crossed with an English manor house. Rooms and wings jutted out here and there, as if some tipsy architect had thrown his plans up in the air and built rooms wherever the blueprints had landed. With its peaked turrets and slanting gables, soaring towers and stone ledges, Wynderly’s message was loud and clear: Look at me. This is how rich we are; how rich are you?

Its vast attic, so large it could house three families with room to spare, mirrored the helter-skelter, multilayered house beneath. Every inch was filled with furniture, garden ornaments, boxes, books, paintings, trunks. I had begun with the boxes and trunks.

The first two I opened were filled with beautiful vintage clothing, which brought to mind the question about a 1950s Christian Dior evening dress I’d recently answered in my syndicated antiques column. But there was no time to think about that now, or to finger the lace negligees and slinky satin gowns. I was searching for papers, receipts, diaries—anything that would tell me more about the opulent objects in the house below.

It had started when Matt Yardley asked if I was available to take on an appraisal in Orange County. My brain had zipped into overdrive. Orange County, California, in the middle of February? Who wouldn’t jump at the chance? With my son Ketch and daughter Lily now grown, and without a husband to tend to, I could close the door and walk out with a clear conscience.

Anyway I liked being able to say yes to Matt. Ever since I’d met him when working for Babson and Michael, the New York insurance company, I had hoped he’d send another job my way. It was only after I said yes that I bothered to ask questions. That’s when I learned he was speaking of Orange County, Virginia, a three-plus-hour drive down lonely back roads, instead of a five- or six-hour flight from my home in Leemont, Virginia. But it was too late. I had given my word.

There had been an unsolved burglary at Wynderly, and some items left behind had been broken during the theft. But because there were no signs of a break-in, and the police had no obvious suspects, a serious cloud hung over the whole situation. In addition, the most recent appraisal of the items at Wynderly was over twenty years old and totally out of date.

“The question is whether or not we should pay the full amount they’re asking for the damaged and missing items,” Matt had said. He was right to be cautious. As with stocks and bonds, the value of antiques fluctuates over time. Matt wanted me to assess the current value of the broken pieces and then to see what I could find out about the stolen objects. But it wasn’t until my second day at Wynderly that I was able to escape the clutches of the museum’s curator, Michelle Hendrix, for time alone in the attic.

I put the boxes of clothing aside and reached for a trunk. I was lifting out a photograph album when a picture fell from between its pages. Picking it up, I noticed faint writing on the back: “Mazie and Hoyt. Wynderly. Spring 1924.”

Mazie’s jet-black hair was pulled straight back at the nape of her long, pearl-white neck, which appeared even paler in the black and white picture. Hoyt Wyndfield wore a crisp linen jacket, white shoes, and fully pleated pants held up high by a shiny dark belt. Wynderly, towering behind them, had finally been completed. Hoyt and Mazie held hands, yet stood apart, as if to give the camera a wider, clearer shot of their home. Though scaffolding was still in place and muddy earth was mounded high around its foundation, I could almost feel their love for the place.

Matt Yardley had told me the Wyndfields named the house Wynderly after themselves and the windblown hills at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia where it was built. The name seemed perfect; it made me think of Biltmore, Stan Hewett, and San Simeon—other houses built by that rarified generation with the money, style, and taste to erect monuments to themselves. Their owners had traveled the world over and returned home with treasures to fill every high-ceilinged room.

Wynderly and its objects had survived the ravages of time, but Hoyt and Mazie’s fortune had not. With the fate of the house and its objects in doubt, Matt Yardley knew to be suspicious of the validity of the insurance claim. I had been at Wynderly for only a day and a half, and I was beginning to have a few questions of my own.

Good appraisers are, by nature, detectives. I’ve always said it’s because we see so many fakes and frauds—both the inanimate and the two-legged variety—that we never take anything, or anyone, at face value. Once upon a time I was as innocent as the next person. I loved antiques for all the right reasons—beauty, craftsmanship, and especially the memories our treasures hold.

Then I learned how some corrupt silversmith had fused eighteenth-century English hallmarks on the bottoms of Colonial Williamsburg reproduction silver pitchers, and how Granny’s beautiful eighteenth-century console table had really been made by a sly forger in the 1920s, not Mr. Chippendale himself. It had forever changed the way I looked at everything.

During my first tour of Wynderly, a couple of pieces sent up red flags, like when I saw the Tang horses. Something about them wasn’t right.

Authentic seventh- or eighth-century pottery horses made in China as tomb accessories are rare indeed, as is the pocketbook that can afford one. And over the years I’d been shown two or three dozen Tang horses thought by their owners to be the real thing worth tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars. But instead of being several centuries old, their horses were no more than fifty or a hundred years old, and seldom worth more than a couple hundred dollars.

Wynderly’s deep green horses, their heads bowed and their tails arched, had instantly given me pause. It didn’t make sense. Wynderly had been open to the public for years. Every publication from Art & Antiques to Southern Accents was constantly looking for fresh material for their pages, so why was it that, outside of Virginia, few people had even heard of Wynderly?

I was beginning to suspect that those horses, along with other pieces, might teeter between truth and myth, honesty and deception. I could hardly wait to start my own investigations. Trouble was, Michelle Hendrix had been dogging my every step. And like the Tang horses, she, too, was proving to be perplexing.

I had thought that since we’d be working together, we would be helpful to each other. Instead, though Michelle never left my side, she seemed to purposely avoid answering my questions about Wynderly’s antiques. I had begun to think I could learn more on my own.

I shivered, partly from the biting cold, and partly from my unexplainable, but very real, queasy feelings about the whole situation. I tried telling myself that damp, creepy old houses, especially those set back in dark country woods, can give off eerie vibes. I thought of Hansel and Gretel. Remembering my childish fright I chuckled. Why, it was nothing more than Wynderly itself that was giving me the sense that something was amiss.

Feeling better, I stared hard at the photograph of Mazie and Hoyt as if hoping it would speak to me.

We can never go back again, that much is certain, Mother had told me the day we closed up her home, some months after my father died.

Trying to make light of the heartbreaking moment, I had said, “I think Daphne du Maurier said it first, Mother. In Rebecca.”

I tried to imagine Hoyt and Mazie’s lives during that time when ladies wore picture hats to tea parties and gentlemen dressed for dinner. What dreams they must have dreamed as they watched their house rise from its stone foundation to its magnificent completion. And all the stuff in it? Chances were the Wyndfields, like scores of my clients, had simply met up with a few fast-talking antiques wheeler-dealers and fallen for their spiels.

I kept thinking about those Tang horses. Add in Michelle Hendrix’s puzzling demeanor and the eerie aura surrounding the house … In no time, uneasy feelings had crept back into my head. What I needed was a delete button in my brain like the one on my computer.

Get a grip, Sterling, I told myself. This isn’t one of those novels about art theft or jewelry heists; this is life. Real life.

I’d been bent over so long, I needed to get my circulation going again—to clear my mind, if nothing else. I stood, only to stumble over a raised beam that blended into the pine floor’s shadowy grain. I lurched forward and instinctively reached out to grab something before I hit the wall in front of me. A tower of boxes moved under my momentum, and together we landed in a heap on the floor.

The plank beneath my feet had moved, or at least that’s the way it felt. Instead of falling forward, my body twisted and first my hip, then my shoulder, took the impact of the fall.

The faint lightbulb dangling from the attic ceiling had flickered, then gone out when I fell. A small casement window was nearby, but afternoon clouds had settled in. Crawling forward, I mentally kicked myself for not bringing in the flashlight I kept in my car for just such situations.

No question about it. One of the wide floorboards had sunk at least half, maybe even three-quarters of an inch below the boards on each side of it. I patted the floor around me. My hand hit an obstruction. The beam I had stumbled over was definitely jutting up through the floor. It was probably part of a high-vaulted ceiling I’d seen on my tour of the house.

I pushed on the sunken board in hopes it might pop back in place. When I did, the wall I had barely avoided hitting head-on creaked ever so slightly. My hands went wet and my throat dry. I swallowed hard and pressed the board again, harder this time. There was no mistaking the connection between the movement of the displaced piece of flooring and the low creaking coming from what looked like just another wall—except it was paneled, not unfinished the way other parts of the attic were. Maybe the plan had been to build a closet or a maid’s room, but they never got around to doing it.

As my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I set about restacking the fallen boxes, one of which had broken open. Strewn across the floor were sheets of dry onionskin paper held together by rusty paper clips and straight pins. Official-looking ledger pages were mixed in with handwritten receipts, as were several small books.

Enough late afternoon light was trickling through the windows so I could make out the larger lettering on some of the receipts. I gathered a handful and began sifting through them. “Société anonyme au capital de 250.000 Francs. Invoice. Nürnberg. American Consulate. Hong Kong. Customs Broker. Saaz.”

That one caught my attention. Saaz? I moved the paper back and forth until I could make out the words written long ago in purple ink, but that now had faded to a light lavender.

1 sugar box, jeweled, 2200.
1 silver vessel, 600.
12 spoons.
2 little tea spoons.

I was musing over the quaint description “little,” when I noticed no prices were cited for the spoons. I looked back at the stationery’s letterhead. July 1927 was scribbled at the top right hand corner. Embossed on the center of the page was a red coat of arms and, beneath that, in royal blue letters, the name Franz Bauer. A third line ran across the width of the page. Saaz—New York—Rio de Janeiro. But where was Saaz? Germany, perhaps? Poland?

Again I shifted the paper to get it in a better light when a straight pin holding a handwritten note attached to the back pricked my finger. I turned the page over and read: “To whom it may concern, these spoons are genuine antiquities and over a hundred years old and the work of Saaz handicraft and passed on in possession of families of this region of Bohemia and sold privately.”

Well, that answered one question. Saaz, Bohemia, now Saaz, Czech Republic, I surmised. But the handwritten explanation struck me as peculiar. Why would a merchant have included the spoons on his list? To get them past customs was all I could think of. But no price? I came up empty.

Still, something about these papers stored—or had they been hidden?—in the attic, rather than being on file in the curator’s office, seemed strange. Then again, in a house as large as this one and with so much in it, the chances were great that things would be scattered all about. I had had a gut feeling about the attic, and Michelle had been surprisingly agreeable. “Who knows what’s up there,” she’d said offhandedly. “Just see what you can find.”

Many an attic has held great treasures. Why every four or five months there’s breaking news that a heretofore unknown composition by Beethoven, a manuscript by Goethe, a long lost old master painting, or some such discovery has turned up hidden beneath often walked-by shadows. In Virginia the original eighteenth-century plans for Francis Lightfoot Lee’s Menokin plantation were found in the attic of a house several miles away. I was wondering how much more might be up here.

“It’s almost three thirty.”

My heart leapt.

Michelle Hendrix loomed above me. She looked no different in the gloomy shadows of the attic than she had in the daylight when I had arrived at Wynderly. A tall woman probably in her mid-thirties, she had no sparkle.

“I had no idea,” I said, attempting to recover, while also trying to slip the papers onto the floor without her noticing. “I didn’t hear you.”

“Dr. Houseman expects board meetings to start on time.” Michelle crossed her arms in front of her and stepped closer. “Finding anything?” she asked.

“Board meeting?” I replied.

“Oh, did I forget to tell you yesterday? Alfred Houseman, you know, the chairman of the Wynderly Foundation board … anyway, he’s called a meeting for this afternoon.”

I struggled to my feet. Michelle Hendrix didn’t budge.

“So, finding anything?” she asked again.

“Too early to be sure,” I said offhandedly.

Too many questions were swimming around in my head for me to share my findings. I gave her a noncommittal shrug. “What about you? Have you had a productive afternoon?”

“Not after Houseman blew in earlier than I had expected. He has a way of doing that.” She rolled her eyes. “I was back in my office when he showed up, a full half an hour early.

Didn’t bother to call ahead either.” She made a low growling sound. “That man thinks he owns this place.”

Michelle pointed to her watch. “You’d better hurry. Houseman doesn’t allow for lateness.”

“Me?”

What to do? I swooped up the papers with every intention of putting them in the open box. Michelle had started toward the steps. With her back turned, did I dare slip some of them in the zip-up binder I had with me so I could take notes? Just one or two, maybe.

Opportunity makes the thief, Mother scolded. One thief in this place is enough.

I hesitated, but only momentarily. What’s an appraiser to do?

Evidence, I thought.

Dear Antiques Expert: In a recent article about a fabulous European palace museum there was mention of a pair of blackamoors, but it didn’t explain what blackamoors are. Could you help me, please?

During the late 17th century, life-size statues depicting the Muslims, who had spread from Africa into Spain and Europe during medieval times, became popular household decorations in grand European homes and palaces. These were called blackamoors. (Incidentally, servants sometimes wore Moorish costumes. Remember Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief?) If the statue or figure held a light or torch (candle, oil lamp, or later, an electrified bulb) it was called a blackamoor torchère. But be warned. Not all the “antique” statues seen in shops are old. Reproductions come in a variety of material, sizes, quality, and prices.

I WAS STILL wrestling with my conscience when I reached the last attic step. Mother was right. One thief was enough. On the other hand, I rationalized, I had been sent to Wynderly to get to the truth, and that meant digging for evidence.

By the time I reached the main floor, three flights down, I was no longer thinking about the papers I had confiscated, but the tension building between Michelle and me. Yesterday’s encounter had set the tone for all that followed.

GETTING TO WYNDERLY had been no small feat. The twisty, narrow back roads would have been nerve-racking in bright sunshine. Yesterday had been gray and threatening. Only when I had brought the car to a stop in front of the mansion and tossed the directions I had clutched between my knees onto the passenger seat did I relax a little. I should have turned around right then and headed back to Leemont.

I had been reaching for the pull of the bell mounted on the front archway when Michelle Hendrix flung open the massive front door as if this were her ancestral home. Had she really been the lady of the house, surely she would have invited me to come in out of the cold and inquired about my trip. That’s the polite Southern way. Instead, she had motioned me inside with a grand, sweeping gesture. “The drawing room,” she had said.

My eyes had followed her arm and voice. Assuming the red velvet rope marked off the drawing room, I ventured forth. I paused at the top of the four steps leading to the sunken room beneath the vaulted ceiling. Below lay a magnificent sight.

At the far end of the room hung a Venetian mirror with a rich cobalt blue glass border. The glow of the enormous silver-plated chandelier reflected in the mirror was as dazzling as a summer sun. In contrast, the furniture was dark and elaborately carved, the sort tourists go to great expense to see in the grand castles of Europe. Ornate sterling picture frames graced every tabletop. Pairs of trumpet-shaped silver vases filled with bunches of blue and green peacock feathers adorned the twin marble mantelpieces on the side walls.

“Oh dear, I forgot to turn on the sconces,” Michelle said.

It hadn’t been necessary, the room was splendid enough. But when she did, my appraiser’s mind instinctively kicked in: English, nineteenth century, originally intended for candles, now electrified.

As if reading my mind, Michelle said, “The sconces weren’t electrified until after Hoyt died and Mazie decided it was too much to have the servants lighting and snuffing out the candles every night. Candles … that’s how they lit the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles,” she said.

Thank goodness Michelle couldn’t see my frown. Despite its size and grandeur, Wynderly hardly measured up to Versailles.

“We seldom turn them on these days. Way too wasteful,” she continued. “But I wanted you to get the full effect, to see the way the Wyndfields lived in Wynderly’s glory days … when they were here, that is. They traveled all the time. And I took the sheets and coverings off the furniture especially for you.”

I glanced about. In my mind’s eye I could envision shrouds of white sheets and gray tarps mounding over the furnishings, turning the room into its own dreary mausoleum. Michelle turned and made another, even grander gesture, flipping her wrist and pointing ballerina-like. Assuming she meant for me to go down into the room for a closer look, I stepped forward. When I did so, Michelle announced, “No. No. This way. The ballroom is to the left.”

She reminded me of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, preparing for her grand entrance.

I followed her along the paneled corridor separating the two rooms, our echoing footsteps the only sign of life. Portrait after portrait of unsmiling people entombed in heavy gilt frames lined the oak walls. At the hallway’s end, two larger-than-life wooden blackamoor torchères guarded the entrance to the ballroom. The flickering bulbs in their outstretched hands cast a golden light across the parquet floor. Only the white ceiling, a flurry of plaster loops and swirls carved to imitate fully opened rose blossoms, broke the gloomy darkness.

I know, my responsibility was to identify quality and assign a value to my client’s treasures, not pass judgment on someone else’s taste. But the house wasn’t at all in keeping with the slightly frumpy style this part of Virginia was famous for. This was horse country. Fashions might come and go, but not the family’s ancestral huntboard or threadbare Oriental rugs.

Michelle stopped to remove the roping before she almost pirouetted over to the light switch. When she turned to face me, her eyes left little doubt that not only was I expected to be impressed, I should tell her so. But gushing isn’t my way.

“Hmm-humm,” I mumbled noncommittally, all the while thinking that I might be more enthusiastic if I could shed my heavy coat and break away to the lady’s room after such a long trip. But when Michelle flipped on the lights and I saw the life-size mural on the far wall of the room, I forgot my discomfort. So what if the scene of a masked ball replete with bejeweled women, their hair adorned with billowing plumes and feathers, flirting with men in satin britches and lacy shirts was a bit too tony for these parts. It was masterful.

“How wonderful,” I said. “Venetian?”

“Oh, yes, and hand-painted,” she answered.

For the first time since we’d met, Michelle Hendrix smiled a pleasant, almost warm smile. Leaning toward me as if sharing a secret, she said, “Hoyt and Mazie brought craftsmen from Italy to paint the murals. In fact, there are murals all over the house. Masons. Painters. Artists of every sort, even sculptors. The Wyndfields brought them all here. You’ll see the marble statues in some of the gardens later,” she added. “Mazie loved her gardens.” Michelle held up her fingers as she named them. “Herb, formal, cutting, rose, even a vegetable garden, Italian, Elizabethan … ah …” She faltered. “Boxwood. And of course the maze. That’s always been the public’s favorite. But Mazie got tired of people always talking about Mazie’s maze. Her real name was Mary Elise, you know, but everyone called her Mazie,” she said. “Hoyt had it designed as a gift to her. Actually, I think the water garden might have been Mazie’s favorite. It’s so remote most people don’t even know about it. Like the pagoda. Wynderly is a very large place, you know. Acres and acres.”

I was about to make some joking comment that “large” was an understatement.

“I’d advise you not to try to wander off by yourself, though,” Michelle said, her voice flat. “You’ll need to stick with me. If there’s anything you want, or need to see, you’ll have to ask me.”

With Michelle in the lead, I had dutifully followed—beneath arched doorways, in and out of wings, down long dreary passageways, around massive bookcases, through the rooms of Wynderly, each one seemingly larger and grander than the one before. Her unnecessary aggrandizing of the house and its contents was beginning to grate on my nerves. Wynderly spoke for itself. Plus, I was anxious to get down to work.

Still, I tried putting myself in her shoes. With the house closed to visitors, she had to be lonesome. What else had she to do than show me around? I’m sure she thought I needed the orientation.

On the other hand, knowing that she was a possible suspect in this unexplainable burglary was bound to have her upset. Perhaps this was her way of trying to keep control of the situation.

A few minutes later, just as Michelle was about to show me another room, I finally asked directions to the lady’s powder room. Bathroom just didn’t seem the appropriate word in these surroundings.

Michelle was waiting for me. “Isn’t it a beautiful room,” she said. “The faucets are gold-plated, and the mirror came from India—a gift from the maharaja. Those are real rubies and sapphires.”

The opulence of the powder room had taken me aback even more than had the mural and the blackamoors.

Now remember, Sterling, you have to forget that you’re in Mr. Jefferson’s country, I had told myself. Stop trying to make Wynderly something it isn’t. It’s not Monticello.

I nodded in agr. . .