Three days after Grace Nolan spent her afternoon in my garden, my phone rang while I was making coffee.
The man on the other end introduced himself like we had already met.
"Thomas Mercer? Adrian Vale. Vale Heritage Gallery."
"I know the name," I said. "I don't know how you got mine."
He laughed in a way that was probably meant to sound relaxed.
"Ours is a very small field, Mr. Mercer. Word travels."
"Word about what?"
"About a Holloway garden bronze that may have surfaced in a private Savannah garden. That's the sort of thing people in my line of work hear about."
I had told exactly two people outside my family anything detailed about the statue. Laura Bennett. Grace Nolan. Neither of them struck me as the gossiping kind, and both of them had professional reasons to keep quiet.
"People talk," Adrian said, before I could ask. "Estate people. Insurance people. A photograph in an old archive gets pulled, somebody asks a question at a conference. You'd be surprised."
I was surprised. Just not in the direction he wanted.
"I'd like to come and see the piece," he said. "No obligation. I evaluate American sculpture for a living. If you have something significant, I can tell you what the market would actually bear for it. Museums are wonderful, but they don't write checks."
"Experts are already looking at it."
"Of course," he said quickly. "Of course. I wouldn't want to interfere with that. I'm only suggesting a second set of eyes. Mine have been doing this a long time."
"Are you offering to buy it?"
A small pause. Polished men do not stumble. They pause on purpose.
"That would depend on what I found."
"I'm not selling it."
"Everything has a number, Mr. Mercer."
"Not everything in my yard does."
He laughed again, softer this time, like I had said something charming instead of something final.
"Fair enough. If you change your mind, or if the museum process becomes slow β and it can become very slow β my door is open."
I said goodbye and stood in the kitchen for a while with the phone in my hand.
The call bothered me in a way I could not neatly explain. He had been pleasant. He had been professional. He had not threatened anything or pushed past my refusal.
But he had known about the statue within days of Grace's visit, in a field where the two people I trusted had both told me discretion mattered. Somebody had carried the news to him. Or he had gone looking for it himself.
A week later, a letter arrived.
Not an email. A letter, on thick gallery stationery, the kind designed to feel like it weighs more than ordinary paper.
Vale Heritage Gallery was pleased to make a preliminary offer for the bronze garden figure attributed to Margaret Holloway, currently in my possession. Subject to inspection and final verification, the gallery offered thirty-eight thousand dollars.
$38,000.
For a statue my mother had hosed down with a garden sprayer.
I sat at the dining room table and read it three times. Part of me β the part that had grown up in that house, that had hidden marbles under a bronze base β was almost offended on the statue's behalf. Another part of me was simply stunned that a number existed at all.
Six months earlier she had been "the girl" beside the fountain. Now a man I had never met was offering me more than my first car, my second car, and possibly my third car combined.
I called Grace before I called anyone else.
"I got an offer," I said.
"From a dealer?"
"Adrian Vale. Thirty-eight thousand."
There was a silence on her end that I had learned to respect. Grace did not fill silences carelessly.
"Don't sign anything," she said.
"I wasn't planning to."
"Good. Don't even answer it yet."
"Is thirty-eight thousand insulting, or am I supposed to be flattered?"
Another pause.
"Thomas, if that statue is what I believe it is β and I am not finished believing it, so don't quote me β then that offer is not just low."
"How low?"
"Dramatically low. The kind of low that makes me wonder what he thinks he's buying. Or what he hopes you'll think you're selling."
I looked out the back window. The Reader sat by the fountain with her book open, exactly where she had sat through my entire childhood, through my parents' whole marriage, through weather and neglect and decades of nobody knowing her name.
"She's not for sale," I said.
"Then the number doesn't matter," Grace said. "But keep the letter. Keep everything. In my experience, paperwork that arrives too early tends to matter later."
I put the letter in the folder with my grandfather's notebook and the Whitmore receipt.
I did not know how right she was.