He Will be My Ruin

“Celine stopped taking client calls through me after the incident, so if she was meeting with men after that, I had no involvement.”

“Incident? What incident?”

“A new client whose tastes are very particular, and not something that Celine wanted to be involved with.”

“What does that mean, exactly?” Forced sex? Bondage? How bad could it be that it would make her stop?

“Check her diary. Maybe she wrote about it.”

Maybe she did.

And maybe that’s why that diary is missing.

No, I need to focus on Jace right now. Jace holds the secret here, I’m sure of it. But I file the other possibility away in my mind. I’ll flag it to Doug, just in case.

Larissa stands and begins walking to the door, signaling the end of the conversation. I follow, admiring her firm, curvy profile. I can see why men would buy her. I just can’t understand why she—already a successful woman—would sell herself. But I guess it’s like Celine said about me: I’ll never have a good grip on reality because I’ve never wanted for anything. Not financially, anyway.

“Why are you so interested in this ‘Jay’ anyway?” she asks.

“Because I think he was very important to Celine.”

She folds her arms over her chest. There’s a hint of concern in her eyes, which makes me think she’s not just a money-hungry bitch. “How important?”

“Too important, maybe.”

Larissa opens the door. “So, are we square here?”

She means: Am I going to drag her name through the mud, forcing her to do the same to Celine?

“I have no interest in Rosa ever finding out what her daughter was involved in.”

She offers a tight, satisfied smile. “Good.”

CHAPTER 19

Maggie

December 9, 2015

The intercom begins buzzing in rapid succesion, as if someone’s pounding on the button over and over again, until I’m rushing out of the bathroom to shut it up, with Celine’s hot rollers in my hair and one eye finished with mascara. “Let me in!” Hans screams.

I have just enough time to throw on the satin robe that hangs from a hook in the bathroom before the sound of feet pounding up the stairs and down the hall has me opening the front door. “Where is it!” Hans screams, his winter clothes in disarray.

“Where is what?”

He pushes past me just as Ruby’s door creaks open and she sticks out her head. We exchange shrugs.

“The twin! My voice mail!”

I glance over at my phone, plugged in and on “Do Not Disturb” so I can get ready for lunch with my mother, in town for business and the Sparkes-sponsored charity gala this coming Sunday.

“The missing twin! Where is the twin?” Ruby now joins me in a salmon-colored terry-cloth robe that could be pushing thirty years old, to watch Hans as he crouches and frantically scans the handwritten labels on the boxes stacked against the wall.

“What are you talking about?”

“The missing twin!” I’ve never seen his eyes so wide, heard his voice so shrill. He whips out one of Celine’s journals where she catalogued everything she ever bought and shoves the opened page in my face. “The eighteenth-century Qing Dynasty porcelain vase that is worth millions!”

I study the picture—a tall, thin vase with a golden yellow base, decorated by colorful floral detail around the neck and a red dragon on the body. “I don’t remember packing this one.”

“But you did, right? You had to!” Spotting the box of vases, he lifts it as if it’s laced with C-4 explosives and places it on the ground ever so gently. “So help me God, if you didn’t wrap it properly . . .”

“Let me see that.” Ruby slides her glasses down onto the bridge of her nose and reaches for the journal. I watch her study it, her gaze darting back and forth between the picture and the top shelf where Celine’s collection of porcelain vases used to sit. “Ah, yes.” She smiles. “I thought something looked different when I was here last. It was almost too tall for the space. Oh, Celine was so excited about this vase.”

Hans prattles on as he unwraps each fragile piece, his voice shaky with nerves. “I can’t believe Celine would have had this and not phoned me right away! It’s a well-known story. The seventh emperor of the Qing Dynasty—the last Chinese dynasty before the Republic of China was formed—commissioned two such bone china vases to be added to his imperial collection, in honor of his firstborn, a set of twins who died three days after their birth. They were exact replicas of each other, made using the bone ash from the children’s bodies.”

I cringe at the thought.

“I know. Creepy. And to use red, which is considered a celebratory color in my culture, was just tacky. Anyway,” he dismisses that with a wave, “one had a red phoenix to represent the girl, and one”—he stabs the picture of the vase with his index finger—“had a red dragon, to represent the boy prince.”

“So, this is a knockoff.” I’m sure there were plenty made.

Hans isn’t listening to me. “When the palaces were pillaged by Anglo-French troops in the Second Opium Wars, both vases were taken by people who clearly didn’t understand the significance of keeping them together. The vase with the phoenix—the emperor’s twin daughter—was recovered in the early 1900s in an attic in London during an estate clean out. It went for almost a hundred thousand pounds to a private collector in France—an exorbitant amount for Chinese art at that time. That estate held on to it until 1996 and then sold it to a collector in Beijing for the equivalent of thirteen million dollars.”

“That’s some serious inflation!” Ruby exclaims.

“Yeah, well the heirs of that French collector are probably ready to hang themselves now. Had they just held on for a few more years . . .” Hans tsks. “The Chinese art market has exploded over the past decade. They could get double for it. Triple! I can’t even be sure! And that is for the daughter’s vase. I don’t have to tell you how much the Chinese value their sons, do I? Especially in the dynasty era.”

“And you think Celine had this twin?” I start to laugh.

“If I could just see the official period seal . . .”

“That I’m sure anyone could Google and copy,” I rationalize.