Ch 16

It was dusk. The last rays of sunlight were disappearing behind the rooftops. Jake paced back and forth across the kitchen. Where were they? He checked his cell phone for the hundredth time. No text. Amy had promised they would come by the house after the museum. He worried about this mission. He would never voice it to Amy, at least, not yet, but he had a suspicion that if these stolen works of art were happily placed in thieves' homes, they wouldn't give them up easily. Had they already run afoul of some disgruntled possessor?

Jake heard two car doors shut. He whipped his head around and spotted the Mercedes parked on the side street, Amy and Dan pulling on backpacks as they made their way to the sidewalk. They weren't smiling and Amy had a large gash on her cheek. Dan looked wet.

Jake bounded out the back door, "What happened to you two? Are you alright? I've been texting you both for an hour and a half!" He gave them each the once over. Concern spread across his features.

Amy gave him a small smile, "We're OK, we ran into some trouble at the museum. I'll tell you all about it later. We need to change."

"As Jonah would say, 'I'm mad starved, yo'" Dan said, exhaustion on his face.

"I'll reheat dinner for you. We ate when you didn't show up." Jake said heading for the fridge.

Twenty minutes later, Amy and Dan had changed into dry clothes, Amy had a bandage on her cheek. She and Dan were sitting at the island, hunched over plates of Indian food with beans, rice and a creamy masala sauce. It was amazing. Atticus had joined them.

"Ok, spill it. I want to hear everything." Jake said leaning close to Amy across the island, fixing her with one of his worried looks.

Amy sighed, she looked at Dan. She knew the minute they started talking, Jake would slip into 'worried boyfriend' mode and want them to abort the undertaking.

Thankfully, Dan spoke first, "Somebody doesn't want those works found. We got locked in the records room and that wasn't a normal records room. It had crazy security and a sealed door like a bank vault."

"Whoa, you got sealed in a vault?" Atticus' eyes lit up and a look of amazement came over his face.

"Somebody sealed us in while we were researching. There were no communications inside and our cell phones didn't work." Amy said. "Thank god Trevor came by."

Dan sniggered, "Yeah, Trevor to the rescue." His voice took on a falsetto and he clasped his hands in front of his chest, "Oh Amy, I didn't know you were in here! Are you alright? Can I get you anything? A pen, some paper, a kiss?"

Amy shot Dan a look of deep loathing. "knock it off Dan. It wasn't like that."

Atticus and Dan broke into giggles.

Jake looked confused. "What happened?" his eyes traveling from Amy's deep scowl to Dan's laughter.

"You've got some competition Jake," Dan said between fits of giggles. "Trevor looovvvveeesss Amy. He was all gaga over her today."

Amy sighed, "It wasn't like that at all, Dan. Knock it off."

Jake's eyebrows were raised and he was giving Amy an 'I need an explanation' look.

"Oh alright, he was a little enthusiastic, but that's just because he's really interested in his job."

Dan burst out in laughter again, "No he wasn't Amy, he's an intern in a boring art museum! He lit up like a fire cracker when you walked in. He followed you around like a puppy all afternoon."

"Well, I'm glad he did, because if he hadn't, we'd still be locked in the records room." Amy said with exasperation.

"I'm coming with you next time," Jake said a mixture of worry and jealousy on his face. Amy had to smile a little. He was cute when he was jealous.

"We're fine. You don't need to come with me." Amy said.

"How did you get all wet Dan? Amy where did you get that gash?"

Amy reached up and touched her face. That was a little harder to explain.

"We met some goon in the alley behind the museum where we parked the car." Dan said. "He told us to back off from our search. Amy kicked his butt, but not before being thrown against a dumpster and I took a quick nap in a puddle."

"WHAT?" Jake spit out.

"You guys got attacked in an alley?" Atticus added

Amy nodded. "Apparently more people know about our purpose at the Gardner than Anne Hawley knows about."

"You have to tell her!" Atticus said

"No, you have to walk away from this," Jake said with authority. "You both could have gotten killed today!"

"No, we're not doing either." Amy replied. "Anne Hawley would call off the search herself if she knew about this, and," Amy continued before Jake could cut her off, "that guy wasn't trying to kill us. He wanted to send a message, that's all."

"Message received," Dan said flatly, rubbing a bump on the side of his head.

Amy and Dan filled the two brothers in on the information they had gathered from the vault. "I decided to focus on Vermeer's The Concert simply as a place to start. That seemed the most likely to be the focus of the theft." It was the first major artwork that Isabella Stewart Gardner purchased back in 1892 at a Paris auction."

"I heard back from Ian," Dan said "she was a Cahill. A Janus" he added. "She was independently wealthy and married a non-Cahill who was about as interested in art as a slug."

"How did the piece end up at auction?" Jake asked.

"That's where the story gets interesting," Dan said. "Apparently, Theophile Thore-Burger was an art critic and political author who was obsessed with Vermeer. In fact, nobody even cared about Vermeer before he started writing and stirring the art world up for Johannes Vermeer. He bought up a lot of Vermeer's work in his lifetime while the art was still pretty cheap. Dude foamed at the mouth for him."

"His love of Vermeer was the main reason his art became popular. He'd never been a very successful painter and he only created 43 art works that we know about. He died young." Amy added.

"Theo, that's what I've started calling him, was a total fangirl. He and his partner bought up Vermeers whenever they could." Dan interjected.

"So how did Isabella Stewart Gardner end up buying it at an auction?" Atticus asked.

"Theo Burger died about two decades before the auction and his estate was being liquidated." Amy said. "We think she started with this work because of the interest in Vermeer, but also because it was moderately affordable. It would have been a good piece to start with."

"So, he didn't have any heirs? No family who would have wanted to keep this work?" Jake asked.

"No, he had a partner, but at the time, his partner wouldn't have had any rights. Plus, even by 1892, his partner was dead."

"What about an extended network? Anyone who would have had resentment that the works were being sold?" Jake asked.

Amy's heart warmed. Jake had a way of asking just the right questions. This used to unnerve her when they had been on opposite sides of the hunt for the Vespers, but now it was comforting. She loved how pin-point accurate he could be. She smiled at him and he caught her looking. He smiled back at her and a shiver went up her spine. He knew how to make her melt.

"We thought of that," Dan said, "but the trail went cold, like, a hundred years ago."

"She hung the work in the museum starting in 1903 when it first opened. It hung there for 87 years without incident."

"Do we know if Theo Burger was a Cahill?" Atticus asked

"Yes, a Janus, a distant relative of Isabella Gardeners. They never met however, as he died when she was a small child."

"So, we're back to square one then?" Jake asked with disappointment in his voice.

"Maybe not, Dan had an idea of trying to look back through the old video surveillance leading up to the robbery," Amy started.

Dan finished, "but it was old and grainy and it didn't really show much. It would have taken a million years to scan all the surveillance and try to look for repeaters. Plus, it was so grainy we wouldn't have been able to distinguish anything."

Jake frowned, "I thought I heard a 'but' coming,"

"but, that's when we were locked in the vault."

"Somebody didn't want us looking through that footage," Amy said. "even though that footage is probably the most watched surveillance in the world."

"We think that since somebody knew we were there to look into the robbery and that a goon tried to intimidate us in the alley, Anne Hawley's phone may have been tapped. How else could somebody know that she had hired us to find the stolen works?"

"I don't know, but I don't like this." Jake said frowning. "I thought this was going to be different. Easy almost. Nobody knew what we were there for so no fear. Now, you're assaulted on your first day to the museum and we don't have any good leads."

"It is going to tough, but we've faced harder things than this and we all know it." Amy said with an edge of steel in her voice. "We're not giving up."

Everyone looked at Amy.

"So, now what?" Atticus asked

"I think the next step is to talk with your dad, we've put an all-call out to the entire Cahill network for info on this work. If both Theo Burger and Isabella Stewart Gardner were both Cahills, there's bound to be information in a Janus stronghold somewhere."

"And for that, we need Jonah," Dan said.