The Magyar Venus

CHAPTERTHREE

September 6

I AWOKE TO A PAINFUL THROBBING AT MY TEMPLES, AN unpleasant queasiness in my gut, and an annoying ringing sound in my ears. Apparently my reunion with my college buddies had resulted in a college kind of drinking spree. It was clear to me why I had given it up the moment I left college. I felt positively vile.

I was in my underwear in my own bed, but how I'd managed to get there, I had no idea. My clothes were scattered in a line from the doorway, and my bag was by the bed, contents spread over a wide area. The car keys were on a chair. Oh my, I thought, looking at them.

The noise stopped for a moment or two, to my great relief, but then started again. I realized it was the phone. I had recently purchased a new one with all the bells and whistles available to anyone silly enough to buy them, and it seemed to take an immense effort to make it work. "Hello," I croaked.

"Are you all right?" Clive demanded.

"Why would you think I wouldn't be?" I snapped. If he thought I'd been crabby yesterday, today was going to be quite a trial for him.

"A couple of reasons," he replied. "One is that it is 11:00 in the morning, and as you may recall, we open at 9:30. The second is that your car is here at the office and you're not."

That's good, I thought. It was a relief to know that apparently the part of my brain that knew enough not to drive had still been operating when all other higher brain functions had ceased. "I didn't feel like driving," I said.

"You got a parking ticket," he said. "A rather large one."

"I did?" I said. Our parking places off the lane behind the store were perfectly legal day and night. "How come?"

"You left your car on the street," he said.

Not good, I thought. I had no recollection whatsoever of moving it.

"I also have a rather large parking ticket," he said.

"Why?" I said.

"Because you left your car blocking the lane so I had to park on the street this morning, too."

Not good at all, I thought again. "There's a spare set of car keys in the desk in the office," I said. "You can move my car."

"Where?" he said. I could hear him rummaging around in a most annoying way. "Okay, found them. How did you manage to make that rather large dent in your bumper?"

Very bad, I thought. "I'm not sure," I said.

"I'm getting worried about you, Lara. Are you coming in today?"

"Maybe later," I said.

"Did you hear the news, by the way?"

"I hate it when you ask questions like that," I said.

"Then I won't tell you," he said.

I waited. Clive could not hold on to a good story for long.

"There was a break-in at the Cottingham," he said. "Somebody probably trying to steal the Venus. Didn't get it, but I gather the place is something of a mess. Somebody just drove a car into the glass windows at the back, if you can believe it. Of course it made a terrible racket, the alarms all went off, and whoever it was just backed the car up, according to police, and made their getaway. Unbelievable!"

Very, very bad, I thought. How much did I have to drink anyway?

"Good grief!" he exclaimed. "Now we're going to get towed. I've got to go. I'm worried about you, Lara. This is not like you."

"I'm fine," I said.

"You'd better pull yourself together," he said. "We need to talk."

"Did you not say you were about to get towed?" I said.

"I'm going to call you back to discuss this," he said.

"Please don't. I'm fine," I repeated. I wasn't though. The minute I stood up, I realized I was going to be sick, which I was. I couldn't believe it. What had I been thinking? Did I actually believe I could drown my sorrows? And more important, what had I done?"

The phone rang again. "I'm fine," I snarled into the mouthpiece.

"Well, I'm not," a man's voice said.

"Rob?" I said. "Sorry, I thought you were someone else." Was Rob calling because he'd seen on the wire that a nationwide manhunt for me was underway?

"I'm trying to understand this thing," he said.

"What thing?" I said. Yes, the police were almost certainly looking for me.

"Why you left me, of course," he said irritably. "Or have you forgotten that already?"

"I'm hanging up," I said. Praise be it was only about that.

"No, please," he said. "I'm sorry."

"Rob, we've been over this," I said.

"I know, but I still don't get it," he said. "I feel as if—I don't know—I guess I was missing all the signs or something, but it just came out of the blue. I don't understand what 'you and I just don't see the world the same way' means, in real terms."

I thought back over the last year, the things I'd done, the decisions I'd made that I had never felt I could talk to him about. "Maybe you don't really know me," I said.

"I think I know you pretty well," he said. "You are loyal to a fault, generous to your friends, you have a strong moral and ethical sense, you are a fine stepmother to Jennifer. She feels terrible about this, you know."

"Please don't play that card," I said. "That's not fair."

"Sorry," he said.

"Believe me, Rob, you don't know me. I have done things you would never approve of."

"Oh, please, Lara," he said. "Like what? Are we talking about your love for what we affectionately call French parking?"

"French parking?" I said.

"You know, that thing you do when you see a parking place on the other side of the road and zip into it, so you're parked facing the wrong way? That's a no-no here in Toronto the Good."

"It is?" I said. "They do it all the time in Europe, especially Paris."

"I believe that's why we call it French parking," he said.

"Oh," I said. "Well, we probably shouldn't. I'm sure it's politically incorrect."

He chuckled. "I do love you, Lara, for many reasons, not the least of which is that you make me laugh. What I'm trying to say here is that I can't imagine you doing anything that I wouldn't approve of. You didn't even ask me to call one of my esteemed colleagues at the Ontario Provincial Police when you got that speeding ticket. I loved you for that, too."

"I wouldn't dream of asking you to do anything like that," I said.

"My point exactly. Look, give me something I understand here. I'm a guy. 'You don't really know me' doesn't work for me. Do I bore you, in bed or otherwise?"

"No," I said.

"Do I have annoying habits you can no longer tolerate?"

"No."

"Do I watch too much baseball on TV?"

"No," I said. "Okay, maybe, but that's not the point."

He laughed again. "What if I promised never to watch another baseball game, not even the World Series?"

It was my turn to laugh. I shouldn't have. It made my head throb even worse. "You know that is a promise you would never be able to keep, and if you tried you wouldn't be fit to live with."

"Is…" he hesitated for a second or two. "Is there somebody else?"

"No," I said. "Let me ask you a question. Let's take your speeding ticket example. What would you have done if I asked you to make a call for me?"

"I wouldn't have done it," he said. "It would not have been right. You were speeding. You got caught."

"Exactly what I would expect you to say and do. Now what if our situations were reversed. I'm the cop, you're the driver. You ask me to make a call. What do you think I would do."

"I have no idea," he said.

"There you are," I said. "I'm going now."

"I can't decide whether to put my energy into getting over you or into trying to convince you to come back," he said.

"I think you should choose the former," I said.

"I know. But it's going to be the latter."

"Goodbye, Rob."

"Till next time," he said.

Two minutes later the phone rang again. "No, Rob," I said.

"Hello," a woman's voice said. "Is that Lara?"

"Sorry," I said. "I thought you were someone else." Why I was paying for call display on a fancy new phone I didn't bother looking at was a mystery to me. "Is that Diana?"

"Yes," she said. She sounded funny, as if she was talking underwater or something. "Have you heard the news?"

"I certainly have," I said.

"Isn't it dreadful?"

"It certainly is." Which one of us had been driving, I wondered, when we decided to take on the glass wall of the Cottingham.

"I just don't understand it," she said.

"What do you mean you don't understand it? It was your idea, surely."

"What did you say?" she gasped. "How could you!"

"You did suggest it, did you not?"

"I can't believe you are saying something so awful. What could I have done to make this my fault? You were always one to speak your mind, but I didn't realize you could be so cruel. You're nothing but a mean drunk," she said. "Poor Anna." The line went dead.

I stared at the phone for a minute, then started flailing around in the bedside table drawer to find the manual for the stupid thing. In a minute or two I was calling the last number that had called me. I got an answering machine.

"Diana, please pick up the phone. I think maybe we were talking about different things."

In a few seconds, she came on the line. "What were you talking about?" she said. She had obviously been crying.

"The break-in at the Cottingham," I said.

"Was there a break-in at the Cottingham?" she said. "I didn't know that."

"You did say we were going to steal the Venus right out from under Charlie's nose, did you not?"

"I didn't mean that literally," she said.

"Then what were you talking about?" I said.

She took a deep breath. "Anna's dead. She killed herself," she said.

"What!" I exclaimed. "No! What happened?"

"She threw herself off a bridge over Rosedale Valley Road," she said. "She landed on the hood of a car that was unfortunate enough to be passing under the bridge at that moment. Poor guy."

"Is the driver all right?"

"Not really," she said. "He's alive. His car was destroyed. I guess even someone as small as Anna would make quite an impact falling from that height. He's in serious condition but expected to recover. No doubt he'll be in psychotherapy for the rest of his life, but at least Anna didn't take him with her. I suppose that's something. It's on the news channel. You get to see the car every fifteen minutes or so."

"This is horrible," I said.

"It is. I thought she was getting better, you know. I really did. So did Cybil, who is, I have to say, absolutely devastated. She thought Anna was way better too. She was getting out of the house. She seemed to enjoy herself last night, at least part of it. Maybe we should have known this sort of thing could happen, but we didn't."

"Last night," I said. "What happened?"

"To you, you mean? You passed out."

"I know that. What happened then?"

"I'll pay for the damage to your car, okay? It will take me awhile but I'll do it."

"That wasn't the question," I said.

"I steered you back to your car, realized you couldn't drive, and decided I would drive you home and take a taxi from your place. I wasn't used to your car, and that lane is very narrow, and I really shouldn't have been driving anyway. I scraped the fender, I know. There was a post at the end of the lane way where you turn into the street, and I didn't notice it. I just kind of freaked, and left the car where it was because I didn't think I could get it back in its place without hitting something again. Did you get towed?"

"No," I said.

"That's good. I got us both into a taxi, dropped you off at your home, and went home myself. I was going to phone you first thing to tell you about the car, but then this business with Anna…" Her voice trailed off.

"You don't know where I live," I said. "Do you?"

"It's on your driver's license, and you did confirm it was your place when we got there. I watched you stagger in the door."

"I can't remember any of this," I said.

"Obviously, you have a problem with alcohol. But right now, I have to say it's just not that important to me," she said. "Anna's dead. The funeral's Friday. Let me know the damage on your car." She hung up abruptly.

No doubt she thought I was a selfish sod, worried about my car when an old friend had thrown herself off a bridge. How could I explain that I was filled with a sense of dread, an unshakable feeling that I had been involved in something terrible the night before?

I turned on the television. The car Anna had landed on was there, all right, flashing on the screen every few minutes as the bland commentator droned on about it, including constant mention of the fact that the jumper had suffered from mental disorders and was known to have been depressed. The car was hopelessly crushed, and it was a miracle the driver was still alive. I made myself some tea and toast and tried to pull myself together. I just didn't know what to do. I felt I should probably just turn myself into police and go to jail for whatever it was I'd done, but given I didn't know what it was, I would certainly look like an idiot at the police station. I could call Rob back, but what would I say to him?

By midafternoon I was in sufficiently decent shape to venture forth. I went to the shop first, and endured Clive telling me how nice it was of me to drop by, and went to look at my car, the lane way and the post. The car had sustained a fair amount of damage: no doubt it would be an expensive repair, which obviously I was not going to charge to Diana. As for the post, the truth was just about everybody hit that post at some point, and there were so many marks on it, I really couldn't say whether my car had hit it or not. What I did decide was that it had not sustained enough damage to have gone through the glass at the Cot-tingham, so I told myself to relax.

Then I drove to Rosedale, parked my car on a side street, and walked on to the Glen Road pedestrian bridge over the Rosedale ravine. It was a beautiful fall day and the colors were splendid, the sun warm but the air with a touch of a chill. I found it hard to believe that something so terrible had happened in such a lovely place. I went and looked over the railing. It was a very, very long way down. A few yards away a tiny piece of pale blue cloth had caught in one of the uprights. Anna had been wearing a blue dress, and that was almost certainly a piece of it. This must have been the spot where she'd gone over the side.

"You're not going to jump or anything, are you?" an anxious voice behind me said.

I turned to see an elf-like man in plaid pants, a green jacket, and a rather jaunty tan cap.

"Don't worry," I said. "I have no such plans."

"Woman jumped last night," he said.

"I know. She's an old college classmate of mine. I just came here to…" To what, really?

"Saw the whole thing," the little man said.

"What?"

"Live there," he said, pointing to a yellow brick apartment building on the edge of the ravine. "My window is the one at the end."

"You saw it?" I said.

"Don't sleep much anymore. Retired, you know. Don't have enough to do during the day. Sit at my bedroom window for hours. It's interesting at night—the trees and the city lights, the fire hall across the way. The city never sleeps, just like they say."

"So what did you see last night?"

"Young woman runs out on to the bridge."

"What do you mean by young?" I said.

"Born in 1922," he said. "Looks young to me. She keeps looking over her shoulder like she's being followed. Then there's this bang, and she's up and over the side. Took her two or three tries, and all the while she's looking over her shoulder. Figure she was running away from somebody she's pretty scared of."

"This bang?" I said.

"Sounded like a car hitting something, like maybe the barricade at the end of the bridge. Can't see that from my window. But there was something. Told the police, but they think they're dealing with a crazy old coot. What do you think, being her friend and all?"

"I don't know," I said. "Let's go look at the barricade."

The truth of the matter was that it would be difficult, but not impossible, to get a car past the flower beds and up to the barricade, but no way to get up enough speed to actually knock down it down. The barricade was metal and showed many signs of wear, but nothing that I could see that looked particularly fresh. The stone wall around the flower beds was a different matter. A large stone had been dislodged and there was dirt on the sidewalk around it. The last geranium of summer lay on its side, roots exposed.

"There," the man said. "That's where it must have been."

I kicked the stone to roll it over, and sure enough there was a streak of color on it, a scrape really, in silver, and while silver was an extremely popular color for cars, it just happened to be the color of mine. I had eliminated one possibility, I'd thought, for the dent in the bumper, and had just been presented with a truly dreadful alternative. My stomach churned.

"You know who'd have been chasing the poor thing?" he asked me.

"I have no idea," I said.

"You believe old Alfred, don't you?"

"I think it's possible," I said.

"Then, maybe you'll tell the police," he said. "Hearing it from somebody like you might make them believe it."

"I'll try," I said. But I didn't. I got the man's name— Alfred Nabb—and phone number, and after commiserating with him for a few minutes about shoddy police work, made my escape. I picked up the phone to make the call several times that afternoon, but I didn't really know what to say. They had the same information I did, and if they chose to do something with it, then surely that was up to them. For myself, I was going to have to wait until I felt better to figure out what I was going to do.

September 9

Anna's funeral was a dismal affair, but perhaps that says more about me than the event, having spent the two days in the interim expecting the police to arrive at my door at any second. I kept pulling at the threads of my memory, but still there was nothing. The service was held in one of the huge downtown churches, way too big for the dozen or so of us who turned out. Our footsteps echoed on the stone floors, and we huddled together in the first row. Cybil sobbed through the whole thing. They'd already cremated the body, and a rather plain urn sat where otherwise a coffin might be. All of those who had been at the reunion were there, including Frank, as well as Anna's mother, a sad little creature by the name of Doris, and quite remarkably, Alfred Nabb. "Thought old Alfred should pay his respects," he said, continuing what was obviously a habit of avoiding the word "I" at any cost. "Under the circumstances. You call the police yet?"

I had to confess I hadn't, but promised I would.

"Too late," he said. "The city's already been around to fix the stone wall and the garden. If you wanted them to do it, it'd take them years to get around to it."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Won't bring her back anyways, will it?" he said as he toddled off to take his seat.

Just before the service was to begin, a nice-looking man appeared with two sweet little girls in tow. They took their places in the front row across the aisle from the rest of us. The older of the two girls was about nine, I'd say, the other only four. They were in their very best dresses, pink for the elder girl, blue for the young one, with lacy collars and big skirts. They wore white tights and black patent Mary Janes, their blond hair was pulled back with matching barrettes, and they were two of the prettiest little girls I had ever seen. The younger one was the spitting image of Anna, the older looked more like her father.

We were about ten minutes into the service when the clear bell-like tones of the little girl filled a momentary pause in the proceedings. "Where's Mummy gone?" she said. The sound seemed to rise to the very top of the cathedral, echoing from every corner of the church. We all started, and some of us gasped. The man leaned down and murmured something to her. I think he said something about heaven. "When is she coming back?" the little girl demanded in a plaintive tone. The older child put her arms around the shoulders of the little one, and gave her a hug. The man, Anna's husband, looked terrible. Cybil burst into tears, and it was all I could do, not to do the same.

I sat through the rest of the service in a little puddle of misery, going back over that evening for the thousandth time, and wondering if I'd been responsible in any way for the little girl's pain. How many drinks had I consumed? I had a glass and a half at the bar before we went to the museum. The wine was lovely, but you would never call the glasses large, and I hadn't had time to finish the second one. I'd taken three glasses of champagne at the Cottingham, but I'd not got more than a sip or two out of any of them. Indeed I felt I'd spent the whole evening looking for my stray champagne glass. I'd barely sipped the first glass when we'd been asked to set them down to go upstairs. I'd been served another afterward, but only had a couple of sips before leaving it in the bathroom. I got a third, but then I'd had to set it down to go into the shop to buy Karoly's book. When I came out there were several half-drunk glasses where I'd left mine, so I'd just given up on champagne. That meant that by the time I returned to the bar, I couldn't have had much more than two drinks in me, two and a half at most. There was the B52, or course, which had been a bad idea. They didn't name those things after military aircraft for nothing. But still, I'd only had a couple of sips, certainly not enough not only to pass out, but not to remember a thing. I'd started drinking at five, and recalled seeing the clock over the bar at midnight, awhile before it all went black. That meant I'd had seven hours for the stuff to work its way out of my system. Maybe, I thought, I had a peculiar virus or a brain tumor. Or maybe, more likely, I'd just had a helluva lot more to drink than I recalled.

There was no interment ceremony, although Cybil told us that her mother had chosen a plot for Anna's ashes in the cemetery that led down into the ravine where Anna had died. After the service we all went back to Anna's mother's apartment. It was in a yellow apartment building very similar to Alfred Nabb's and only a block or two away from the bridge. Mrs. Belmont served tea and those sandwiches we used to get at children's birthday parties, pinwheels of peanut butter and banana, cucumber and cream cheese, and impossibly constructed squares of pink and brown bread that look like a chessboard. Cybil, who was quite obviously dealing with this by stuffing her face, ate most of them. There were cakes, tiny petits fours, with pink icing, and for those who needed something a little stronger, in this case Alfred Nabb, there was some truly awful sherry.

"Didn't know she was a neighbor of mine," he said, looking at the picture of Anna, taken in happier times, that rested prominently on a table beside the small urn of Anna's ashes. "Been living in that building for over twenty years, and saw everybody who'd walked across the bridge. Never remember seeing her. That lady," he added, indicating Doris. "Her mother. Seen her many times, but not that poor girl."

"I didn't know she was a neighbor, either," I said. "I live just across the bridge in Cabbagetown, and she was a classmate of mine at college, and I didn't know she lived just a few blocks away from me. She didn't get out much."

I looked at the many photos Doris had on display. The most poignant of them all was Anna with her family: her husband, smiling, a boy of about three in his lap, the older daughter about six standing beside her mother and smiling at the baby in Anna's arms. Many of the photos dated to our college days. Anna had been the clown of the group, always sneaking into our apartments to short-sheet our beds, or to dream up some prank we all had to participate in. In the photos, she was the one holding up her fingers behind someone else's head, or mugging outrageously. That she should come to such a sad end, after years of anguish, seemed impossible. I'd thought of going after her that night in the bar, to get her address from Cybil, to just sit with her to see what was bothering her, but instead, I'd just hung around the bar drinking myself into a coma.

"This is so sad," Morgan said, looking about the apartment. "I can't even imagine what it would be like being afraid to go out. Did she just sit here, day after day, staring out the window?"

"I think she had visitors. Cybil certainly came over. And Diana told me that even though she lost custody of her children, they came over to see her once a week."

"I hope she at least went out on the balcony or something," Morgan murmured. "Being stuck in this little apartment would have the opposite effect on me. I'd be clawing at the walls trying to get out."

The apartment was tidy, but, as Morgan had pointed out, rather small. There was a bedroom that obviously belonged to Doris, one bathroom, and a second, much smaller room with a single bed that doubled as a couch, a small chest of drawers, and, the dominant feature of the room, a rather large desk. "Anna's room," Cybil said, joining me. "Tiny isn't it? I guess she really did close herself in. She had virtually nothing, you know. The cupboard's small, but it was big enough for her stuff. She had lots of books, that's about all. She read everything. Frank and I cleaned out the room yesterday. I didn't think Doris could manage it, and I thought I'd need a guy to do the heavy lifting. Frank volunteered, which was nice of him. He came to visit Anna a few times while she was shut in, or whatever we want to call what she was doing. I didn't really need his help, as it turned out, but it was nice to have his company. We got everything into three small cartons. We took pretty well everything to a women's shelter. Frank said he'd take her books to a library, if Doris didn't want them, which she didn't.

"It was her shoes that really got to me," Cybil went on. "She had three pairs. When you looked at them on the floor of the closet they looked perfectly normal, but when we put them in the box, on the bottom they looked like new. The apartment has broadloom as you can see, and the soles never got worn. The tops had some spots on them, of course, what you'd expect—spaghetti sauce or something, on one of them. But the soles… It hit me then. She really never went out."

"We can't imagine that, can we?" I said. "You hear about people like that, but you can't understand it."

"No, you can't. Could I ask a favor, though, while you're here? Would you mind having a look at the desk? Doris was going to give it away, but I think it's rather nice, and I thought she should save it for one of the little girls. I had the idea it might even be worth something. What do you think? Is it an antique or anything?"

I took a closer look, opening the drawers, and pulling it out from the wall to look at the back. "It's not terribly old," I said. "Maybe fifty or sixty years. But it is a lovely desk, solid wood. They don't often make them like this any more. Notice it has a pocket shelf over the bank of drawers on either side. It's a nice feature. If you need a bigger work surface, you just pull out the shelf and work away, and then slide it back in when you're done," I said, demonstrating. A small piece of paper came out with the shelf. I glanced at it before handing it to Cybil, to see that it contained only two words: Calvaria Club.

"Find anything interesting?" Frank said, joining us in the room. In that place, three was definitely a crowd.

Cybil handed him the slip of paper. "What's Calvaria mean?"

"Beats me," Frank said.

"I'm trying to remember," I said. "It sounds familiar. Isn't Calvaria Latin for something?"

"Latin?" Cybil said. "How would I know?"

"Skull," I said. "Calvaria is Latin for skull."

"The skull club?" Cybil said. "Weird."

"She was a very strange woman, I'm afraid," Frank said, crumpling the paper and looking about for a wastebasket. "Very strange. Nice desk, though," he added, opening the drawers.

"See the little shelves," Cybil said. "Aren't they neat?"

"They are," I said, as Frank wandered off. "In any event, yes, I think it would be a very nice idea to save the desk for the girls."

"I'll talk to Brad, that's Anna's ex—did you see him in the church?—about coming to get it."

"It's nice of you to take such an interest," I said.

"Nice? Anna was a good friend, you know. She maybe didn't go out of the apartment, but she wasn't, like, bonkers, or anything. Raving, I mean, or incoherent. She just wouldn't go outside, that's all. She read, she took Internet courses, she watched TV. She didn't turn into a vegetable. She was even working on her master's thesis from home. She did the course work, but got married and had kids before she got around to doing the thesis. She was really trying to get better, maybe get her husband and kids back."

"What happened to the little boy, do you know?" I said.

"He fell off an apartment balcony. Several floors. He was visiting his other grandmother with his sisters. I guess the three of them were too much for her. The baby was crying and the grandmother went to look after her, and the little guy just went up and over. It shouldn't have happened, but it did.

"I keep thinking about her being out on that bridge. All that open space. Maybe she just couldn't stand it, or maybe because the little guy fell, she just sort of fell, too. I don't know. What I do know is that I should have gone home with her instead of letting her go off by herself like that. She said she didn't want me to come with her, but I should have insisted. She might still be alive now, wouldn't she?"

It was a good question, of course, but a futile one. "Don't think about that. She wasn't bonkers, as you say, but she wasn't well, either. It is tragic, but not your fault."

"I'm trying for my own sanity to believe that," Cybil said. "I really am." Me too, I thought. Me too.

We stood around a few minutes outside the apartment building until Grace suggested we all go for a drink. Frank declined, and after some debate it was determined we'd go back to the bar where we'd last seen Anna. Everybody ordered a Scotch except me. I was still on a mineral water regimen.

"Good idea," Grace said as I ordered.

"Look, I know I behaved badly the other night," I said to the group. "But I don't usually drink that much. In fact, I don't actually remember drinking too much."

"You always had a drink in your hand when I saw you," Grace said.

"We're not here to talk about that," Diana said. "We have to put our plan into operation. We're counting on you, Lara."

"What plan?" I said.

"This from the woman who doesn't actually remember drinking too much," Grace said, rather sarcastically.

"Our plan to bring down the high and mighty Karoly Molnar, of course," Diana said.

"By stealing the Venus. I thought someone had tried that already."

"We'll need a little more time to put the material together, now that I'm no longer employed there," she said, ignoring my comment.

"You're not?" Cybil said.

"No, I'm not. As Lara apparently knows, I got sacked at the party."

"No!" Morgan said. "Why?"

"I was fired on an entirely trumped-up charge of stealing from the till. Please be assured I did no such thing. Now to get back to the plan."

"You must have done something," Grace said.

"I believe Dr. Molnar has figured out what I was up to, which will make our plan more difficult, but not impossible, to carry out."

"You mean he knew what you were researching," Cybil said.

"That's the only explanation I can come up with," Diana said.

"The worm," Morgan said. "Is everybody thinking what I'm thinking?"

"Pretty much," Grace said. The others nodded.

"What are we thinking?" I said.

"That Anna killed herself because of something Karoly said to her at the party, of course," Cybil said.

"Isn't that a bit of a stretch?" I said, but in my mind I was back to the bridge and the overturned stone.

"You were there. You saw how she went right up to him at the bar."

"You can't actually say that," I said. "She went up to a large group of people at the bar, and I for one couldn't tell which of them she was shouting at."

"Don't tell me you're still infatuated with him," Grace said.

"Hardly," I said. "And even if I had been, that night would have cured me. He didn't even know me."

"I'm afraid you told us that already—several times in fact—in the bar afterwards," Diana said.

"I did?"

Diana made a face at the others. "The plan?" she said. She'd pulled a copy of the previous day's newspaper and was tapping the front page of the arts section, which prominently featured Karoly and his Magyar Venus. As Frank had pointed out the evening of the unveiling, Karoly could charm the birds out of the trees, and the interviewer, a woman, was obviously besotted. She made it sound as if Toronto were singularly blessed to have such a dynamic individual in our midst. There was, of course, a great deal about how he'd tracked down the Venus and how extraordinarily perceptive the Cottinghams had been in snaring both Karoly and by extension the artifact.

"Would somebody please tell me what this plan is?" I said. Were they going to make me beg?

"Okay, let's take it from the top, as they say," Diana said. "Several of us have reasons to dislike, dare I say loathe, dear old Charlie. I have already mentioned mine."

"That scum," Cybil said. "I just know he said something awful to Anna. I just know he did."

"If it makes you feel any better, Lara, he didn't seem to remember much about me when I got the assignment at the museum, either," Diana said. "I reminded him, though. I suppose that's what put him on his guard. I was responsible for his expense accounts, and I found something there that would probably get him fired. That's why I got sacked. I leave it to the others to decide whether they want to talk about their reasons for disliking the man enough to take part in this endeavor, but in a nutshell, the plan is as follows: we, with your help, Lara, are going to prove that the Magyar Venus is a fake."

"How are we going to do that?" I said.

"I don't know. That's what you're going to tell us. We'll have to check the whatever you call that thing, you know, who owned it when, who sold it to whom."

"Provenance?"

"Provenance, right. We'll need to establish that the Venus's provenance is a fabrication. Dr. Molnar's reputation will be in tatters, something I for one will enjoy."

"Hold it!" I said. "I don't much like Charlie these days either, but what makes you think it's a fake?"

"The Piper diaries, of course. Have you read them?"

"Not yet," I said.

"Read them," Diana said. "There is something patently wrong there. I can't put my finger on it, not yet anyway, but they do not ring true to me," she said. "This C. J. Piper is not what he's supposed to be, I'm sure of it."

"By 'not what he's supposed to be' do you mean he didn't have the academic qualifications?"

"Just read the diaries," she said. "You'll see what I mean. It would hardly be the first time a lot of people were fooled. There was that Piltdown business, wasn't there? That was a complete hoax and we still don't know who did it."

"We have a lot better testing methods now, and would perhaps not so easily be fooled, although I grant you there are a number of prized exhibits in museums all over the world that are being quietly put in storage because the centerpiece has been proven to be at best suspect."

"What's a Piltdown?" Cybil said.

"Piltdown man was a skull found in Sussex, England, in the 1920s that purportedly was the missing link between ape and man. People believed it for years. I think there's even a plaque where the skull was found. But it was proven to be a complete hoax, and Diana is right, while there have been several theories posited about who did it, no one is entirely sure."

"So, Diana, you are convinced the Magyar Venus is a similar hoax? Are you saying Charles manufactured it in his garage or something?" Grace asked.

"I'm not necessarily saying he manufactured it, no. I am saying that there is something the matter with the diaries, and Charles is either pulling the wool over everybody's eyes, or he is guilty of faulty scholarship. Either way, the Venus has to be a fake."

"Were people faking art a hundred years ago?" Morgan asked. "I mean, could it have been faked then, rather than now?"

"Sure," I said. "But a hundred years ago, most of the fakes of objects that were supposed to be as old as the Venus were found in North America, not Europe. They were attempts to prove—I use the term loosely—that man was on this continent tens of thousands of years ago."

"I'm telling you it's a fake," Diana repeated. "We need you, Lara. It was a godsend that I ran into you on the street the other day. Given what's happened, we need you more than ever. Now, if we want to prove the Venus is a fake, where should we start?"

"I'm really busy right now," I said.

"No, you're not," Diana said. "You told us the other night that you were thinking of taking a leave from the shop for a month or two. How long could it take to prove this thing is a fake? A month, give or take a week or two?"

"Have I mentioned that this thing, as you call it, is about twenty-four thousand years older than anything I know anything about? Give or take a millennium or two," I said.

"Where do we start?" Diana repeated.

I looked at their expectant faces, and in an instant I knew that I was going to have to follow this thread wherever it took me, because I had to know what happened the night Anna died. Somehow this group had to be part of it. One of them had to know.

"We'd start with Lillian Larrington," I sighed.