Standing in the Shadows (McClouds & Friends #2)(137)
Tonia slanted her an odd glance. "Ran away? What's this?"
"It's a long story," Erin said stiffly. "It had nothing to do with Mr. Mueller, though. He needn't have worried."
"I see." Tamara's face looked pale and drawn beneath her flawless makeup. Her emerald eyes looked haunted and shadowy.
Or maybe it was just Erin's own bleak perceptions, reading ominous portents into every innocuous thing. The dread in her belly got heavier. Flutters of the panic that had mastered her the day before stirred inside her, and she clamped down on them ruthlessly. She would get through this job, close this chapter gracefully, and that was all she would ask of herself. Professional suicide or not, once she delivered that report, she would be politely unavailable to Claude Mueller forevermore. She would refer him to other experts who would all fall over their feet in their eagerness to consult for him. In the meantime, she would be taking typing tests, filling out W-4 forms for temp secretary and paralegal jobs. And she would be cheerful about it if it killed her. Yippee. What a joy. You shape your own reality, she reminded herself.
Unless you allow other people to shape it for you. The thought flitted through her mind like a bat's shadow, almost too quick to catch.
God, how she hated this house. It seemed to give her a constant, low-level electrical charge, just enough to feel nauseous and dizzy, and determination alone wasn't enough to manage it. She'd bolted out of the place in a full-blown panic attack last night, like Cinderella fleeing the ball as the clock tolled midnight. But here she was again, putting one foot in front of the other, cold sweat trickling down between her shoulder blades. Trying to act like a grown-up.
Tamara stopped in front of the door to the salon. The heavy, ornate door was like the mouth of some monstrous creature, gaping wide to swallow her whole. Erin stomped down on the childish, queasy surge of panic, and tightened her belly into tempered steel.
Mueller was staring out the window, as he'd been the day before, the deep-in-thought-aristocrat pose. He turned, and smiled as he came forward to greet her. "Ah, excellent. I wasn't sure I would see you again," he said. "I am sorry if I upset you yesterday. You look pale."
"I'm fine, thanks." See? Polite, pleasant, nothing wrong with this picture. Novak is dead, on the other side of the planet. Everything here is perfectly normal. I will not let someone else's fear control me. It raced through her mind in the blink of an eye. "I'm so sorry about that. I don't know what came over me."
His teeth looked so sharp when he smiled. "And who is your lovely companion?"
"Tonia Vasquez. Glad to meet you," Tonia said, when Erin took too long to reply. "I'm Erin's shadow today. I hope I'm not in the way."
"Not at all. Any friend of Ms. Riggs is welcome. One can never have too many beautiful women in one place."
"That depends," Tonia purred, "on the circumstances."
So Tonia was going to flirt with him. Fine. It made her flesh creep, but if it diverted his attention from her own unhappy self, she could weep for gratitude. Soon this would be over, and she could retreat to her dingy mouse hole at the Kinsdale and lick her wounds in the dark.
And maybe she was being unfair, but it was going to be a very long time before she called Tonia again. If ever.
"Can I get started?" Her voice came out so sharp that Tonia and Mueller stopped their bantering and stared at her, startled.
"Of course." Mueller indicated a table at the far end of the room.
The sooner I get this over with, the sooner I can get out of this hellish place. Her mind repeated the thought like a mantra.
Three items lay on the gleaming dark wood table. The folders of provenance papers lay beside them. She dug out her recorder, and grimly disposed her mind to concentrate. Grown-up. Professional.
The first item was a bronze dagger and sheath. The provenance papers placed it as La Tene, 200 B.C.E., dredged out of a river in Wales in the 1890s, but the blade seemed much older to her. The guard, grip, and pommel had been made of some organic material that had rotted away, but the wasp-waisted, leaf-shaped sweep of the blade was still beautiful. It had the reinforcing ridges, grooves, and finger notching that she had seen on many bronze Celtic swords from 1000 B.C.E.
The next piece was a stone statuette, eighteen inches high, of a hideous beast holding out its arms. Huge, thick claws sank into the forehead of two severed heads. An arm dangled out of its fanged, gaping jaws. La Tarasque, very like the Gallo-Roman limestone statue she had studied in Avignon on her junior year abroad in France and Scotland.
She flinched away from it. It was a rare and beautiful piece, but she felt too wretched to cope with bloodthirsty man-eating monsters, unprofessional or not. Later for that one.
The third item was a bronze flagon, decorated in the vegetal swirls and spirals of late La Tene style. It was embossed with several mythical creatures, but the ones that caught her eye first were the two dragons.
Fiery red garnet eyes glared at each other. They were symmetrical, a perfectly balanced pose of eternal mortal challenge. Like the torque. Serpentine tails coiled beneath them, blending into the intricate, flowering tendril design that decorated the whole piece.
The realization crept up on her so slowly, the way a headache gathered force until it had to be acknowledged by the conscious mind. A puzzle she hadn't known she was trying to solve slipped into place. The provenance papers cited the flagon as discovered near Salzburg in 1867 by a gentleman explorer and tomb raider from the nineteenth century, and subsequently sold in the 1950s to a rich Austrian industrialist.