Not that he’d been crass enough to threaten her. Open confrontation was not Shambley’s way. The man was oblique indirection: a lifted eyebrow, a knowing twitch of his lips, a murmured phrase of ironic Italian. His victim’s guilty conscience would do the rest.

Only… had she drastically mistaken which situation Shambley meant her to feel guilty about?

In the office across the hall, Jacob Munson unwrapped a peppermint drop from the bowl on his desk. He had not intended to eavesdrop on the conversation between Benjamin and Hester and had almost announced his presence on their line when something in Benjamin’s voice kept him silent. A lover’s quarrel, he’d thought at first.

When he’d realized last year that Hester and Benjamin were occasional lovers, he’d hoped that it might lead to marriage. Thirty-four, Hester was, and time was running out if she wanted children.

That would have made an appropriate solution to the gallery’s uncertain future-Horace’s daughter and the best friend of Jacob’s only son. To his disappointment though, their relationship had never gotten out of bed. When dressed, they didn’t even seem to like each other most of the time. So what was all this about plaster flakes?

He sighed and absently tucked the cellophane candy wrapper into his pocket. Maybe it was a sign. Maybe blood was best after all. Surely it was not too late to train young Richard to carry on the Munson heritage at Kohn and Munson?

By closing time, Rick Evans had shot the last roll of film that he’d brought with him to the Breul House. He climbed down from Pascal’s tall aluminum stepladder and unplugged the floodlights he’d used to light the plaster moldings on the ceiling of the third floor hallway.

“I guess we’ll call it a day, ” he told Pascal Grant, and began packing up his cases.

Pascal bent to help, his smooth face so near Rick could have touched it with his own. His beautiful eyes met Rick’s trustingly. “Will you need my ladder anymore, Rick?”

“Not for now.”

They collapsed the light stands and carried everything through the frosted glass doors, down to the end of the hall and the mannequin maid, where they loaded it all on the dumbwaiter-easier than carting everything up and down by hand. Together they carried the ladder down the back service steps and unloaded the dumbwaiter down in the basement next to Pascal’s room.

“Want to go get a pizza?” Pascal asked hopefully when they had stowed Rick’s equipment in an empty cabinet. “We can eat it in my room and listen to some more jazz.”

Rick hesitated; then, with a fatalistic que sera sera shrug of his shoulders, he nodded.

“Dr. Shambley?”

The patrician voice floated through the marble hall, startling him as he descended the main staircase, now dimly lit. For a moment, he almost thought he’d been addressed by the elegant female mannequin on the landing. Then he realized it was that Beardsley woman speaking to him from the doorway of the darkened gallery beyond the massive fireplace.

“Cretina!” Roger Shambley mumbled under his breath. He thought everyone had left for the day and that he was alone except for the simple-minded janitor somewhere in the bowels of the house.

Mrs. Beardsley turned off the lights in the cloakroom, leaving only the security lights in the hall, then buttoned her red wool coat and pulled on her gloves. “You won’t forget to let Pascal know when you’re leaving tonight, will you, Dr. Shambley? The burglar alarm wasn’t switched on till almost midnight last night because he thought you were still here.”

“I’ll remember,” he said brusquely. “Buona notte.”

Dismissing her, he crossed the hall and entered the library, pettishly turning on the lights she had extinguished only moments before.

A slam of the front door restored the earlier silence. Already, the automatic thermostat had begun to lower the temperature here. For a moment, he contemplated finding the master control and turning it up again, then decided it was pointless.

He’d begun to despair of finding the letters he knew Erich Jr. must have written during his brief months in France. He had already leafed through all the personal papers still stored in Erich Breul’s library. Except for that one tantalizing letter misfiled in the attic, there was nothing later than the spring of 1911 when young Breul wrote to say how pleased he was that both parents were coming to Harvard, that he’d reserved rooms for them at Cambridge’s best hotel for graduation weekend, and that “although you will find her much altered since her father’s death, Miss Norton trusts that her health will enable her to receive you at Shady-hill.”

Charles Eliot Norton! Shambley had marveled when he read that. One of the patron saints of fine arts-an intimate of Ruskin, Carlyle, Lowell and Longfellow-and the Breuls, padre e figlio, had been guests in his home!

Disconsolate, Shambley twirled Erich Breul’s large globe in its teak stand. Those letters might as well be in Timbuktu for all the chance he had of finding them at this point.

Sophie Breul had saved her son’s toys, his schoolwork, his best clothes. Surely she would have saved his letters as well. Yet he’d exhausted all the logical places and no more of Erich Jr.’s last letters were to be found.

He gave the globe a final twirl, switched off the lights, and crossed the hall to the cloakroom for his overcoat, the hollow sound of his footsteps on the marble floor echoing eerily from the walls all around him.

He started to leave, remembered Mrs. Beardsley’s injunction, and descended the stairs to the basement, muttering to himself. As if he had nothing better to do than remind another cretin of his duties!

At the bottom of the steps, Roger Shambley paused, uncertain exactly where the janitor’s room was. Lights were on along the passageway beyond the main kitchen and he followed them, noting the storerooms on either side. Late last week he had checked through the racks of pictures that Kimmelshue had consigned to the basement on the off chance that the old fart really had been as senile as Peake claimed. A waste of time. No silk purses hiding among those sows’ ears.

No pictures stacked behind that pile of cast-off furniture, trunks, and rolled carpets, or-

He stopped, thunderstruck.

Trunks?

Slowly, almost holding his breath, he found the light switch, pulled a large brown steamer trunk into an open space, and opened it.

Inside were books, men’s clothing, turn-of-the-century toilet articles, and a handful of-Dio mio, yes! Programs from Parisian theaters, a menu from a Montparnasse café, and catalogs from various art exhibits.

Excitedly, he pawed to the bottom. A few innocuous souvenirs, more clothing, nothing else. Erich Breul Jr.’s last effects didn’t even fill one trunk.

Well, what did you really expect? he jeered at himself.

Retaining the catalogs, he shoved the large trunk back in place and lifted the lid of the smaller one to see yellowed feminine apparel, an autograph album from Sophie Breul’s childhood, and what looked like an embroidered glove case. He almost pushed it aside without opening it, but scholarly habit was too strong and as soon as he looked, he knew he’d found treasure: fourteen fat envelopes, thick with European postage stamps. The top one was postmarked August 1911 and had been mailed from Southampton, England; the last from Lyons in Octobre 1912. And si! si! SI!-near the bottom was an envelope postmarked XXXI Août 1912.

His hand was shaking so that he could hardly read the faded city.

Lyons?

If he remembered rightly from his one course in Post-Impressionism, Sorgues lay south from Lyons in the Rhône River valley.