“Yes, they look … familiar. They were probably mine.”
“Where did you find them?” I ask, knowing they didn’t wash up on any beach.
“I … they came into my possession a while back. A few years ago.”
“They’re only a few years old,” I tell him. “They’re fakes. But you must know that. Any collector worth his salt would. These have been extinct for twenty years—”
“Thirty years,” Ness says.
“So explain them to me.”
“I can’t.”
“How much of your collection is fake?” I ask. I feel bolder the more beat down Ness appears. His confidence is gone and mine surges. Like a seesaw. I forget why I was even nervous. Why I hesitated to do this. There’s a Pulitzer in this. Henry will go ballistic. Hell, I could probably get the science section rolling again, I’ll have so much leverage.
“They aren’t fake,” Ness says, but his voice is a whisper. He doesn’t even believe himself.
I laugh.
Ness looks up at me. His eyes widen at some thought. “I can prove it. Hold on.”
He goes to the kitchen and rummages through several of the cabinets, comes back with a heavy mortar and pestle, the kind used to grind up spices. Ness takes one of the lace murexes and places it in the mortar. Before I can stop him, he cracks the shell with the pestle. I feel the destruction in my chest, like those are my bones snapping.
He fishes out a piece of the broken shell. All I can think is that even a fake of such quality could pay my rent for the year. Even with the buyer knowing it was fake!
“Look,” Ness says. “Wait. I’ll get a loupe.” He turns away from the counter, and I hear myself say that I have one. I fumble in my bag. Ness is animated again, excited. “Look at the shell wall,” he says. “You’ll see a pattern where the slug’s foot scraped back and forth.”
I look through the loupe. I know exactly what he’s talking about; I feel like reminding him that I studied to be a marine biologist. Instead, I say, “This could easily be part of the mold.”
I hear another crunch. The mortar is emptied onto the granite again, forming a second pile of debris. And as I pull the loupe away, there’s a third crunch as the last shell is cracked open.
“Look at these,” he says. “They should be different.”
I’m too busy taking in the fragments and the powder everywhere. It’s as thoughtless as the driveway. Senseless waste.
“Look,” he insists.
And so I do. And sure enough, the patterns are different. The shells are distinct. So, not from a single mold.
I pull the loupe away. Despite what I’m seeing, another thought occurs to me. Ness is a collector. And no collector in his right mind, whatever their collection is like, could destroy three lace murexes without batting an eye. Without flinching. Much less seem to recover their spirits while doing so. His confession came by destroying the shells. All I can think of now is getting to the inn and calling Agent Cooper to let him know what happened here.
“You believe me, don’t you?” Ness asks. Almost with desperation.
“Sure,” I say. I check the time on my phone. “I think I should go.”
11
My car is beeping at me as I coast into the inn. I leave it with the valet, grab my overnight bag out of the trunk, and remind the young man a second time to make sure he plugs the car in. The registration desk is empty. There’s laughter from the bar, but the rest of the facility is winding down for the night. A man emerges from the back. I hand over my business card, ask for any available upgrade, and get a room key to a suite. I figure Henry owes me for yanking my story.
I find the suite and spend a few minutes unpacking. I catch a flash of myself in the mirror and decide that I look like a wreck. The first person I call is Agent Cooper. I try his cell and brace for the grumble of the half-asleep. Instead, he picks up on the first ring. Sounds chipper as he says “Hello.”
“Do you ever sleep?” I ask.
“Who is this?”
“Maya. Maya Walsh. From the Times.”
“Of course. Sorry. Been one of those days. So how did it go?”
I imagined him waiting around breathlessly for my call. Instead, it sounds like I’m just one of many things on his mind. “It went great,” I tell him. “The shells definitely link back to Ness … Mr. Wilde, I mean. And the case you had the shells in, did it belong to Mr. Arlov by any chance?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Because he recognized it. And when I asked him if he knew Mr. Arlov, he said they were very close. I think those were his exact words. And then get this—he wondered why Dimitri would have taken the shells from him. They were definitely Ness’s.”
“And you recorded all this?”
“It should all be on your device. Hold on a sec.” I unbutton my blouse, work one arm free, move the phone to my other hand, and wiggle out of my top. Unsnapping the back of my bra, I let it fall away and unclip the recorder from the underwire. “Yeah, the little light is still on. So I should’ve gotten it.”