The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

For the next hour, he roamed, finding two other isolated gable attic rooms like this first one, and another that was empty. All were reached by closeted staircases from the front hall below.

Then he went back down to Felix,s old room that he would occupy tonight, and he felt a little panic that he,d been here so far away from the television news that had sustained him since he,d been old enough to turn it on at the age of four. But then he had his computer, of course. And maybe it was all just as well.

It was the night that the power went out in Berkeley that he,d finished Joyce,s Finnegans Wake by the light of a candle. Sometimes you need to be forced to study what,s right in front of you.

He surveyed Felix,s shelves. These items in his bedroom must have been the most important to him. Where would he begin? What would he examine first?

Something was missing.

At first he thought, No, I,ve just made a mistake. I,ve misremembered. But as he quickly scanned every shelf in the room, he realized he was right.

The tablets, the tiny Mesopotamian tablets, the priceless tablets covered in cuneiform, were gone. Every single one of them, every single fragment of them, was missing.

He went down the hall and examined two other storerooms. Same result. No tablets.

He went back up to the attics.

Same thing. Treasures galore but no tablets.

And now in the dust he could see where things had been that were no longer there.

Everywhere he searched he found evidence that small items - the tablets - had been carefully collected and removed, leaving shiny blank places in the dust.

He went back to the room he knew best and double-checked. The tablets were indeed gone, and the dustless places were clearly visible and he could see here and there fingerprints.

He panicked.

Someone had come into this house and stolen the most valuable parts of Felix,s collection. Someone had taken the most significant finds he,d brought back with him from years of traveling in the Middle East. Someone had raided the treasure that Marchent had wanted so to protect and to bequeath. Someone had ...

But that was ridiculous.

Who could have done that? Who could have done that and left so very much here utterly undisturbed - statues that were surely worth a fortune, even old scrolls that must have been priceless to scholars and curators? Who would have left the little boxes of ancient coins and, look there, a medieval codex in plain sight, and he,d seen others upstairs, books that libraries would have paid a fortune for.

He couldn,t figure this out! What sort of person would have known what the tablets were, when in fact some of them had looked like pieces of dirt, or plaster or even dried cookie or biscuit?

And imagine the care of this august thief, ferreting out these precious fragments from amid so much valuable clutter and slipping away leaving all else undisturbed.

Who would have had the knowledge, the patience, the skill, to do this?

Didn,t make sense, but the tablets were gone. There was not a fragment left in the house with the precious cuneiform writing.

And just maybe a lot of other things were gone and Reuben simply wasn,t aware of it.

He began to rummage through items on the bedroom shelves. Here were books from the seventeenth century, pages soft and disintegrating, but still turnable, readable. Yes, and this statuette was genuine, he could see and feel that as he set it back down.

Oh, there was so much here that was worth a fortune.

Why, on one shelf he found an exquisite necklace of soft, pliable gold worked into engraved leaves that was surely ancient.

He was very careful to put it back exactly as he had found it.

Reuben went down to the library and rang Simon Oliver on his home phone.

"I need some information," Reuben said. "I need to know if the police photographed every single thing in this house when they investigated, I mean did they photograph all the rooms they didn,t disturb. Can you get me those photographs?"

Simon protested that that wouldn,t be easy, but the Nideck law firm had photographed everything right after Marchent,s death.

"Marchent took photographs of all of it, she told me," said Reuben. "Can you get those photographs?"

"I honestly don,t know. I,ll see what I can do. You,ll get the law firm,s inventory, of that I,m quite sure."

"The sooner the better," said Reuben. "Tomorrow, e-mail me whatever photographs of the place you can."

He rang off and called Galton.

The man assured him: no one but him and his family had been in the house. He and his wife had been in and out for days, and yes, his cousin and his stepson, along with Nina, the little girl from the town who had often helped Felice, okay, yeah, she,d been in there too. Nina liked to hike the woods back there. Nina wouldn,t touch a thing.

"Remember the alarm," said Galton. "I set that alarm as soon as the investigators left." That alarm never failed. If Miss Nideck had had that alarm set the night she was attacked, why it would have gone off the minute those windows had been smashed.

"Nobody,s been in that house, Reuben," he insisted. Galton said he lived just off the road ten minutes below the point. He would have seen or heard any traffic headed up that way. Yes, there had been reporters and photographers, but that had only been in those first few days and, even then, he,d been up there most of the time keeping an eye on them, and they couldn,t have gotten past the alarm.

"You have to realize, Reuben," said Galton, "that place is hard to get to. Not many people want to drive up this road, you know. Except for the nature lovers, you know, the hikers, well, nobody goes around there at all."

Right. Reuben thanked him for everything.

"If you,re getting uneasy up there, son, I,ll be glad to come back up and sleep in the back."

"No, that,s fine, Galton, thanks." Reuben rang off.

He sat at the desk for a long time, looking across the room at the big photograph of Felix and Company over the fireplace.

The draperies had not been drawn, and he was surrounded with dark mirrorlike glass. The fireplace was laid with oak logs and kindling but he didn,t want to light the fire.

He was a little cold, but not too cold, and he sat there pondering.

There was a distinct possibility here. One of these men, one of Felix,s old friends, that is, had read of Marchent,s murder in this house, read it somewhere far away, maybe on the other side of the globe, where such news would never have penetrated in pre-Internet days - and that person had taken time to research the whole story. And having researched the whole story, that person had come here, entered surreptitiously, and collected those priceless tablets and tablet fragments.

The story of Marchent,s murder had gone viral all right, no question of that. He,d checked that last night.