told him I’d go out with him. He’s coming up to drop his finds off this Saturday. We’re going out after that.”
Annie glanced around the cozy office. The room was really quite large, but with two desks, two computers, a fax machine, a copier and all sorts of chairs and bookshelves, there wasn’t much room even to walk. But Cara MacLeish was an essential fixture here. “Don’t you be going and getting married, MacLeish,” she said sternly. “No running off to South America with Jerry Tillit.”
Cara grinned. “I’m only going to the movies with him,” she said. “The next logical step might be a dinner date. Not marriage.”
“You don’t know Tillet as well as I do,” Annie muttered. “And that man has a definite thing for you….”
“Speaking of marriage,” Cara said, flipping through the phone message slips. “Nick York called—five different times. Something about a party down at the Museum of Modern Art sometime this month.”
Annie released her hair from its ponytail, letting it swing free in a gleaming brown sheet. She leaned back in the rocking chair, resting her feet on top of the computer desk. “Shame on you, MacLeish. You know the words marriage and York cannot be uttered in the same sentence,” she said. “York wants only two things from me. One of them is free lab work. And the other has nothing to do with marriage. Who else called?”
“The freight guy at Westchester Airport said a package from France will be in Saturday.”
“Great.” Annie sighed. “Like I’ve got any chance of getting to work on it in the next decade.” She closed her eyes. “Okay, so I pick it up on Saturday. What else?”
“A guy named Benjamin Sullivan called,” Cara said. “Ring any bells?”
Annie’s eyes popped open. “Yeah, of course. He’s the owner of the piece I just picked up. What did he want?”
“He left a message on the machine, saying that we should ignore Alistair Golden if he calls,” Cara said. She laughed. “I didn’t recognize Sullivan’s name, but it seemed kind of mystically, cosmically correct to get a message from a stranger telling us to ignore Golden. I always ignore Alistair Golden. Ignoring Golden is one of the things I do best.”
Golden was Annie’s chief competitor, and he usually handled all the U.S.-bound artworks and artifacts from the English Gallery.
“And sure enough,” Cara said, snickering, “the little weasel called. He was in a real snit, whining about something—I’m not sure exactly what, because I was working very hard to ignore him.”
Annie laughed. “I think I know what the bug up his pants was,” she said. “When I got to the gallery, Sullivan’s package was already crated and sealed. Golden had assumed he’d be doing the authentication job, so he’d already done the packing work.”
“Golden packed the crate for you?” Cara said with great pleasure. “No wondering his whine was set on stun. He wanted you to call him back, but unless you want to subject yourself to a solid forty-five minutes of complaining, I wouldn’t. I give you my permission to use the ‘scatterbrained employee didn’t give me the message’ excuse for the next time he catches up with you.”
Annie smiled. “Thanks. Did Ben Sullivan want me to call him back?”
“He said something about going out of town,” Cara said, glancing back at the phone message slip. “Who is he? How do you know him? Come on, fill me in. Height, weight, marital status?”
“As far as I know, he’s single,” Annie said, then smiled. “But he’s also seventy-five years old, so get that matchmaking gleam out of your eyes.”
Cara made a face in disappointment.
“Ben’s an old friend of my parents.” Annie leaned back in her chair, breathing deeply. “I don’t think I’ve seen him since, wow, since I was about fifteen. Apparently, he was talking to Mom and Dad recently, and they told him about me—you know, that I opened this lab a few years ago. When the offer to buy came in on this death mask, he requested that I do the necessary authentication.”
“Instead of Golden,” Cara said.
Annie grinned. “Instead of Golden.” She sat forward, stretching her arms over her head. “Anyone else call?”
Cara nodded. “Yeah. I saved the best message for last. It came in on the answering machine. Let me play it for you.”
Cara slid off the table, handing Annie the message slips, then pushed the message button on the machine. The tape rewound quickly, then a voice spoke.
It was odd, all whispery and strange, as if the caller had deliberately tried to disguise his voice. “The mask you have gained possession of does not belong to the world of the living. It is the property of Stands Against the Storm. Deliver it at once to his people, or be prepared to face his evil spirit’s rage. The doors to the twilight world are opened wide, and Stands Against the Storm will take you back with him.”
There was a click as the line was disconnected. Cara punched one of the buttons on the machine and the tape stopped running. “So, okay.” She grinned. “Which one of your weirdo friends left that message? And who the heck is Stands Against the Storm?”
But Annie wasn’t laughing. Swearing softly under her breath, she stood up, hoisted the crate containing the death mask off her desk and went down the hall toward the lab. Cara followed, her grin fading.
“What?” Cara asked, watching as Annie locked the front door. “What’s the matter?”
“We’ve got to put this in the safe,” Annie said, gesturing to the package in her arms.
“Annie, who was that on the tape?” Cara asked, eyes narrowing.
“Some crackpot,” Annie said, heading back to the sturdy vault that sat directly in the middle of the house, surrounded by the lab in the front and the office in the rear. It was secure, impenetrable. She would feel a lot better after she locked the gold death mask inside.
“If it was just some crackpot,” Cara demanded, “why did you rush across the room and lock the door?”
Annie opened the innocuous-looking closet door to reveal the combination lock of the big safe. She spun the red dial several times before entering the numbers. “Because it would be foolish not to take precautions, crackpot or not.” She looked up at her assistant. “You must not have had a chance to read the background info I left you on this project.”
Cara shrugged expansively. “I cannot tell a lie. I had about an hour of free time last night, and I spent it watching ‘Quantum Leap’ instead of reading about nineteenth-century Indian chiefs.”
Setting the package on the top shelf of the vault, Annie swung the door shut, locking it securely. “Native Americans, not Indians,” she corrected Cara. “In a nutshell, the artifact we’re testing for authenticity is supposedly a gold casting of a death mask of a Navaho named Stands Against the Storm. He was one of the greatest Native American leaders. He was a brilliant man who truly understood Western culture. He tried to help the white leaders understand his own people as thoroughly.”
Cara followed her back into the office. “How come I’ve never heard of him?” she asked. “I mean, everyone knows
