The Price of Inheritance Read online

  Nina and Richard looked unconvinced.

  “Tell me about your family,” I asked. “Has your family been in Baltimore a long time?” What I was more interested in now was how a Hugh Finlay table could have ended up in a women’s clothing shop in a lower-income African-American neighborhood in Baltimore in the late sixties.

  “We’ve been here for just about ever,” said Richard. “As far as we know, and I’ve done plenty of research, our great-great-great-grandmother was born in the Cape Verde Islands and was brought in a boat, a Spanish ship we think, but one originally built in Baltimore, in 1820.”

  “A lot of the boats in the international slave trade were built right here in the early eighteen hundreds,” said Nina. “Even though it was illegal. But no one really did a thing about it.”

  “Do you have a family tree? Or some other record of your family? Who was born when, who lived where, their places of employment, that kind of thing?”

  “We don’t have a family tree. Like an actual tree on paper with names and all that,” said Nina. “But we’ve got a lot written down.”

  “Your brother,” I said, motioning to Richard. “He said that you’re interested in American furniture and that’s why you have our catalogues. Is that because of this table? The one your mother had?”

  “You mean this table?” she said, pointing to the picture in the catalogue. “My table? Absolutely. I was there when that woman said it was worth a lot of money, and frankly, there have been many times in the past couple of decades where I could have really used the money. And now I see it, estimated here between two hundred and twenty and two hundred and thirty thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money.”

  She flipped open the catalogue with her slightly chapped hands and ran her index finger over the picture.

  “I never believed it burned. I always thought it got taken. If you walked into that store it was clearly the nicest thing in there. Anyone could have seen that. And I loved it. When I would help my mom in the shop, she used to let me dust it and place the hats back on it. That was the best part of my day back then.”

  •••

  I did not have time for this, whatever this was, and no one else in the department did, either. I was in no position to pass this all along to Louise. We were in the middle of previews. We had buyers all over the world requesting condition reports. And we had a lot of interest. It was only panic time when you didn’t have interest, but that wasn’t the case with the estate of Mrs. Adam R. Tumlinson. Why should I stop what I was doing and listen to these people who may or may not have owned a companion piece forty-five years ago? What weight did they have? She worked in a library and he worked in shipping—they weren’t art experts. All they had were some old photos and memories. That wasn’t enough to do anything with and it certainly wasn’t enough to convince me to pull Elizabeth’s table from the auction. I thought it would sell for around $240,000—it wasn’t a lot, but it wasn’t nothing, either. Plus, they had already lied to me.

  I shivered as I tried to hail a cab and muttered the time of my train to the driver, asking him to hurry. The city still had Christmas decorations up, but in the wet snow, they looked sad. Why had these people bothered me with their story when they knew how close we were to the January auction? The catalogue had been out for weeks. It was ­January 11 and I had a week left before the auction. I had met them, I had listened to them and looked at their pictures, I had offered to help them when the auction was over, and I would. But right now, there was nothing else I could do.

  CHAPTER 4

  The morning of our January auction brought sheets of freezing rain, the kind of rain where you feel wet even if you’re just watching it from indoors. Five degrees colder and it would have been snow. Instead, New York was being forcefully flooded: the cars, buildings, streets, and people bathed in freezing rain. Like every evening sale since Nicole and I had worked together, she got there first and I joined her on the later side in the back of the room. Maybe I’d left my nerves in Baltimore, or maybe I had just gained a little faith between September and January, but when I moved through the already packed auction room and stood in the back with Nicole, my heart felt steady and my sweat glands were behaving.

  “Did you see Nick Marshall-Smith in the second row?” said Nicole, nodding very subtly in the direction of one of the country’s biggest collectors of mid-Atlantic eighteenth-­century furniture. “And Harriet Traymore is three down from him. Michael Floyd is sitting far left, sixth row back. Marvin Levine and his new wife, there, right side, by the phones.”

  “This crowd . . . ,” I said, scanning the room and recognizing many of the faces. For some auctions—Impressionists, contemporary art—reservations were required to attend. We had an open-door policy, as we had enough low-dollar items to appeal to a wide audience, and we had enough high-dollar items to bring energy and adrenaline to the room.

  As always, Olivier Burnell was calling the auction, and as always, he packed the front with some of the best items, brought the dollar amounts down for a few lots, and kept the very best for smack in the middle. Nicole looked at me again, pushing one of her curled strands of hair out of her eyes, and smiled. “No hives today?” she said, looking at my smooth face. I had about a pound of pancake makeup with me, but so far, I had no need for it.

  My short nails dug into my clenched fist as Olivier transitioned to Lot 29. The rotating wall to his right turned and on a small platform anchored against it was the Hugh Finlay.

  “Lot number twenty-nine is the Hugh Finlay pier table, inlaid with gold leaf and marble.” Olivier lifted his arms and started the bidding at $75,000. “Seventy-five thousand dollars on the floor, seventy-five thousand,” said Olivier, looking at the crowd.

  It was times like these when I cursed my short stature, but try as I might, I did not see Nina or her brother in the room. Thank God. Thank almighty God. I would not have to hurl myself across the podium as they reached for the table screaming their mother’s name.

  The bids moved quickly past $170,000 and Olivier said, “I can sell at one hundred ninety thousand,” revealing the reserve to the buyers. “The lady’s bid here at one hundred ninety thousand,” said Olivier, pointing to a woman seated on the left side of the room. “Two hundred thousand here in the room,” he said, switching sides. When it moved past two hundred and ten, I let myself exhale. The woman on the left finally dropped out, there were no phone bids, and it stood at $260,000. “Are you all done in the saleroom?” asked Olivier with his hands up. “I’m going to sell it.” He hit the podium and announced, “Sold at two hundred and sixty thousand dollars.” And like that, the Hugh Finlay table sold to another collector, who had nothing to do with the city of Baltimore.

  When Elizabeth’s estate had finished and we were an hour and fifty-five minutes into the auction, Nicole pressed the total key on her phone calculator and put it in my hand. The estate had gone for $40,900,000, including buyer’s premium.

  “Didn’t I tell you thirty-seven million was way too low for a guarantee,” she said with a grin.

  The auction wrapped up twenty minutes after nine o’clock and Nicole and I agreed that if there was ever a time for celebratory drinks, this was it. Elizabeth, our trip to Texas, pulling it all together for January when we should have had nine months more—it was crazy, and I hadn’t come down from all of it yet, and this time I didn’t want to.

  “Let me just see Louise before we go,” I told Nicole when the auction room was nearly empty. “I’ll meet you and Erik at the bar.”

  I found Louise in the narrow hallway leading back toward our offices on the fifth floor. She was leaning against the frame of her office door, not quite inside and not quite outside. When she saw me, she motioned for me to come closer and pointed toward the phone she had against her ear.

  I loitered a few feet away as she wrapped up. I was about to do a very restrained and respectable celebratory dance involving a backflip
, but Louise’s face stopped me. She finished the call, put her phone in the pocket of her dress, and looked at me.

  “I need to talk to you, and here you are.”

  She motioned to a chair in her office and closed the door. She put her hands in her lap and stared blankly at me across her desk. It had a little paperweight on it made from a Japanese cherry tree branch that I had bought her for her fiftieth birthday. Louise always used the things you gave her, and I always noticed.

  “I just got the strangest call from the newspaper in Baltimore, the Baltimore Sun. They asked me for a quote regarding a human interest piece they’re running tomorrow about a family whose store was looted during the Baltimore riots of 1968 and somehow their table ended up in our auction catalogue and just sold for two hundred and sixty thousand dollars.”

  Maybe it was the fact that my body had just gone rigid, but Louise asked, “Would you know anything about this? Because that reporter who just called me said you did.”

  “I should have told you, I mean, now that I have the stress of the auction off my shoulders and I’m thinking a little more clearly, I realize I should have told you.” My words poured out of me, my voice starting to crack. Louise looked at me trying, and failing, to steady myself. There was no compassion in her face. “This brother and sister, about fifty-five, sixty years old, they called me,” I explained. “They said the table was their mother’s and that it was with them in Baltimore. I went to see it—which I know I shouldn’t have—but I did. I just wanted to be sure there was nothing to their story because I cared so much about Elizabeth’s estate. And when I got there they didn’t have the table. They lied. All they had were some blurry pictures and a story that didn’t add up. I thought, if anything, it was a companion piece that was now lost. What was I supposed to do with that? Pull the piece? Pull the whole collection? Seventy percent of our January sale?”

  “What you were supposed to do is to ask me what I would do because I am your boss!” Louise screamed, pushing the desk with her hands.

  “Of course I should have. I’m sorry, Louise. I’m so embarrassed. It’s just that you were under so much pressure from Dominick. You said your hair was falling out from stress. I didn’t want to be the source of—”

  “Those people are black, Carolyn. And poor! We’re going to look like we steal from poor black people!”

  I didn’t interrupt her again.

  “That reporter said the table, that very low-, low-dollar table, was their mother’s. And that their mother got it from their grandmother and that she got it from some family that she worked as a maid for in the early nineteen hundreds. This reporter found that family, the Smarts or the Smarths or something, and they confirmed she worked for them. They even have pictures of her! So they’re now claiming that the grandmother got it as a gift from the children of this family who were very attached to her and she gave it to her daughter who owned it until it was stolen and the Tumlinsons bought it from a dealer and we sold it thirty-five minutes ago.”

  “What!” I screamed through panic. “I didn’t know any of that. Nothing! They didn’t say a thing about another family or their grandmother or anything. If they had mentioned any of those details I would have told you immediately. All I saw were some old pictures of a table they hadn’t seen since 1968.” I was paralyzed with fear. This could not happen. This absolutely would be the death of me. I wasn’t the only one involved in the estate of Mrs. Adam R. Tumlinson, but in Christie’s eyes, I was.

  “I didn’t know about any of that, Louise!” I repeated. “They didn’t tell me anything.”

  “I need to talk to our general counsel,” she said, still holding the edge of the desk. “We need to contact the buyers, the media. We need to suspend all of the sales in the Tumlinson collection until they are verified. Do you know what this will do to the department? We’re going to be shoved with the instrument sales! Numismatics and armor! I’m already selling chairs with lamps, Carolyn. I don’t know if you understand the gravity of what you’ve done. And it all could have been avoided. We would have pulled one lot.”

  “I’m so sorry, Louise. I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do.” I glanced up at her desperately.

  “Carolyn, I’m sorry, but . . .”

  There is nothing more terrifying than the silence of your own heart. I knew it was just a few seconds before I opened my mouth to respond, but in that long moment, I couldn’t hear anything but a stillness of where my heartbeat should have been and the cold shock of my promise, my potential blowing away.

  “I know,” I said weakly, trying to dry the tears from my face. “I understand. I’ll get my things.”

  I ran to my office, looked at Nicole’s empty chair with the gray cashmere cardigan on it, pulled out my phone, and called the number I had for Nina Jones Caine. She answered after one ring.

  “Who did you tell about your table? What did you do!” I screamed into the phone.

  “I didn’t do anything. I just told my story to a reporter over lunch. I’ve known his mother for years; we were just eating as family friends. It wasn’t even meant to be on the record.”

  “Really? Well, when we don’t want something to be on the record, we start with the words ‘off the record,’ which you clearly forgot! Nina, I just lost my job because of what you did.”

  “No . . . not really . . . did you?”

  “Yes I did!” I said, unable to hold back the tears. “You have ruined my life! I tried to help you. But these things don’t happen overnight. Why couldn’t you have talked to me first? I went down to Baltimore. I listened to your story. I did everything you asked. I was going to help you.”

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you, to get you fired! I just thought it was time to increase public interest in our story, with the auction about to happen. And Jeffrey, the reporter, he was able to find out so much in such a short period of time. I showed him an album of my grandmother and he recognized the house she was standing in front of. He knows the people who live there now. We were shocked. But still, maybe that wasn’t the right thing to do. Is there someone I can talk to? Can I try to fix this?” When I had met Nina, she had spoken in a firm, self-assured way. But now her voice had flown up in pitch. She sounded worried, almost repentant, but I didn’t care.

  “Your talking just caused Christie’s to potentially lose millions, for me to lose my job, for my boss to get in major trouble. All the Tumlinsons’ pieces from Baltimore will take years to recover their value. Elizabeth Tumlinson is ­seventy-six years old. She’ll probably die before that happens!”

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know that our story had so much more story to it. Jeffrey just traced it faster than we ever could. He found this family we didn’t even know about, thanks to that photo and some black-and-white picture in the Baltimore Sun archive, and the whole thing unraveled. But he couldn’t have written anything yet; I just talked to him.”

  “Well, now you know that in this world, that’s all it takes. One conversation!”

  I slammed down the phone. I wanted to stay in my office forever. Maybe no one would notice me. I could climb into the comfortable oblong metal trash can, lean back against piles of crumpled paper, and stay there until I died. How long did it take a person to starve to death? A few days? Weeks?

  At quarter to ten, Louise opened my door and watched me empty the contents of my first desk drawer into a paper bag. “I can always bring you the rest tomorrow,” she said, watching me. My purse wasn’t much bigger than an envelope.

  “No, it’s fine, I can manage tonight,” I said. “I don’t need much. I’m sorry I’m still here.”

  When I walked out the doors of the almost empty building and into the night air, crisp and cold, I knew I would never step foot inside Christie’s again.

  CHAPTER 5

  I barely remember the hours after I left Christie’s that night. I wanted to sprint, to get away from everythi
ng that had been jarringly stripped from my life, but my heels were too high and my body was too tired to do anything but move slowly and sadly. This couldn’t be happening to me. This sort of thing happened to other people. The men or women whom I read about very quickly in the Art Newspaper, I’d purse my lips at their gaffes and announce to Nicole how I was “embarrassed for them.” We’d whisper something kind, like “morons,” and continue our dominance of all things American and made of wood. When word got out about Elizabeth’s sale, some girl, just like me, would do the same thing, but it would be my name she was reading.

  Somehow my feet turned in the right direction and took me home. I found my keys under a thick stack of embossed and letter-pressed business cards that I’d shoved in my purse, let everything I was holding drop to the ground right inside my front door, threw my clothes in the direction of the bathroom, and cried. I felt pathetic, but I didn’t know what else to do but mourn the person I had been only two hours ago. Had it all been my fault? Would Nicole, Erik, or Louise really have acted differently in my situation? Was it terrible judgment or terrible luck? It didn’t matter now. I couldn’t undo it.

  My apartment was freezing so I turned the heat up to 85 and then remembered that I was no longer employed and turned it down to 50, adding another blanket to my bed instead. The blanket smelled like wet dog, and I didn’t have a dog. But who cared. So I would smell. So I would become a shut-in who resembled Jodie Foster in Nell. I’d forget the English language. I would sleep on a bed of moss. I’d be like Lord of the Flies without the other flies. “The lone fly,” I said, crying. “Piggy.”

  I heard my phone ring repeatedly that night but didn’t stir to turn off the ringer or answer it. When I woke up the next day at noon, all I did was open my metal apartment door to take out the keys I had left in the lock, close the door, put the chain on, and pretend that the world outside was something that no longer applied to me. I didn’t turn on my computer to see if the article had run in the Baltimore Sun. I didn’t check to see if it had gained traction or if someone had made a GIF of my head with the words EPIC FAIL flashing on it. I didn’t want to know. I ignored voicemails from Nicole and text messages from Alex. I just let my phone battery blink in warning and die.