Jamie Brodie 02 - Hoarded to Death

Jennifer. "We've got cloth napkins at home that I can handle it with. Thanks."
    Jennifer 's eyes were still wide. "What are you going to do with it? Take it to your friend that deals with the antique books?"
    "Not just yet. I'm going to take it to our special collections librarian. Then we'll see who he recommends."
    Pete nodded. "That's good. Anyone who could potentially make money off of that shouldn't be allowed to evaluate it. At least, like you say, not just yet."
    "Wow." Jennifer blinked away her disbelief. "Maybe this was what Miss Lucille was talking about when she said there were a couple of extremely valuable things? If it is worth something, would I be able to sell it?"
    "I'd think so. And if it's something truly rare and valuable, I'm not sure the police are the best ones to have control over it."
    "One thing at a time." Pete frowned at me a little. "If it turns out to be nothing special, we can turn it over to Eckhoff with no worries. Let's just see what your guy at work says first."
    "Right."
    Jennifer said, "Sounds like a plan. In the meantime, can we finish going through these boxes? Maybe we'll find something else."
    But we didn't. When we finished, I had a nice stack to take to Cloak and Dagger Books, including one signed first-edition Raymond Chandler. We boxed all of the books back up, either marking "Library" or "Sell" on the tops. We hauled the books that were destined for donation to the public library down to the Jeep. The LA public library branches nearby were all closed on Sunday, but the Santa Monica library main branch was open 1-5, and it was on our way home. Jennifer wanted to get the boxes out of the apartment, so we dropped them off for her and got back home around 4:00.
    I carried the art book containing the manuscript page into the house and laid it on the ottoman that served as our coffee table. Then I just stood back and looked at it. Pete came up beside me after locking the door and wrapped his arm around my shoulders. "Do you really think that might be something?"
    "Yeah. I do. And that's almost scary."
    "Yeah, it is."
    "We're not going to get in trouble for withholding evidence, are we?"
    "I doubt it. That box hadn't been opened, so no way the killer could have touched that page. Unless he or she did it more than five years ago, right? Which I find unlikely. But I’m going to give Eckhoff a call, just to let him know we have it."
    "Okay." I turned around and wrapped my arms around him. "But if we do go to jail, can we get in the same cell?"
    That made him laugh.
    Pete called Eckhoff and they had a long conversation. I opened the book cover and gazed at the page. Whoever had made it, and however old it was, even if it was a fake, it was beautiful. The script looked like insular majuscule; each letter was a tiny work of art. And the drawings scattered through the script were fantastic. Some of them looked as if they weren't completely finished. There were a couple where the outline had been done, but the colors weren't filled in. If it did turn out to be worthless, I was going to ask Jennifer if I could keep it to frame it.
    I heard Pete sign off. He came downstairs and sat down beside me. " Eckhoff says you can take it to your guy at work. There were no prints on the page Wally was holding except for Wally's. So he wouldn't expect to find any on this one either, especially since it was sealed in a box."
    "If people have been handling this who thought it was valuable, they wouldn't have been touching it with their hands, anyway."
    "True." Pete cocked his head, examining the page. "Beautiful, isn't it?"
    "That's just what I was thinking. If Jennifer doesn't want it, I'm going to have it framed."
    Pete nodded. "It would look good in your office at school."
    "Yeah, it would."
    "Do you think there's any chance that this is the real thing?"
    "I don't see how that's possible. I mean, think about it. A book gets stolen a thousand years ago in Ireland. Some thief removes the cover and several pages and buries the rest. How, in that thousand years, does a page like that survive at all, much less in this good a shape? And how does it get from Ireland to here?"
    "Well, the last part is easy. It got stored in a chest in someone's house, and eventually that chest got brought to the New World. Stuff in the chest made it into a box, which made it into an old lady's attic. But how does a piece of paper that hasn't been protected in any way not crumble into dust over a thousand years?"
    "And it's