“We have ten minutes, Madame,” LaFont said.
“Thank you, Pierre.” Maggie’s gaze was steely as she stood staring at the pristine man from New York. “So tell me, Mr. Kelly, what can I do for you?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I was under the impression that it was you who had asked to see me.”
“Not me, darlin’,” Maggie said, patting his arm. Despite everything, Kat had to admire the woman before her. The accent was spot-on, the word choice simply perfect.
Kelly, on the other hand, looked significantly less impressed. “I was told to meet you here ten minutes before the start of the auction.”
“I don’t know what to say, sweetie,” Maggie told him. “You must have me mistaken for some other about-to-be-filthierrich woman.” She gave a throaty laugh, but Kelly didn’t join in.
“Very well,” he said. “I suppose I will wish you luck.”
He was turning to leave when LaFont called, “Madame, His Royal Highness has asked for a moment of your time.”
Maggie started after LaFont, but then stopped suddenly and turned back to Kelly.
“You say someone told you to meet me here?” she asked the man who was reaching for the elevator call button.
“Yes,” Kelly said.
Maggie seemed to consider this just as the doors were sliding open. “Who?” she asked.
“That insurance man. I believe Knightsbury is his name.”
It only took a second for Maggie to recognize it—for the pieces to fall into place. But Kat had been right, it seemed. The Long Con never was truly long—just a few million moments strung together, and that moment was just long enough for Kat to jump into the elevator beside Oliver Kelly.
Long enough for her to call, “I’ll meet you at the auction, Aunt Maggie!”
Long enough for Maggie to curse and watch Kat disappear behind the sliding doors.
Oliver Kelly was not in the business of antiques. He didn’t pay his bills with old family paintings and Grandmother’s pearls. True, that was how it seemed to the world, but Kelly himself knew better. He was in the business of details. A name remembered. A card sent. A forgery noticed and weeded out before it could tarnish anything else that it might touch.
Still, standing in the small elevator, floating through the walls of the Prince’s Palace, it was easy to ignore the young girl who stood beside him. She was no doubt too poor to buy and she seemed too worthless to sell, so he kept his eyes on his own reflection in the mirrored doors.
When the elevator hesitated and rattled, Kelly punched frantically at the buttons. When the elevator froze, he pushed the buttons harder. Only the soft voice saying, “It won’t do any good,” reminded him—the king of details—that he was not in that small space alone.
There was a slight rattling overhead, and Kelly’s gaze flew upward. “It sounds like someone’s up there,” he said.
The girl laughed. “Maybe a ghost.” But Oliver Kelly saw nothing at all funny about the situation.
“What’s wrong?” the girl asked. “Don’t you believe in ghosts, Mr. Kelly?”
“That’s absurd.” He banged at the doors, “Hello! Hello, out there!”
But the girl didn’t seem the least bit panicked as she inched closer in the small space. “What about curses—do you believe in them?”
He punched the buttons again—all of them. The girl must have thought that was hilarious, because she laughed and leaned against the wall. There was a slight tilt to her head when she told him, “I thought you’d be more like your grandfather. He didn’t scare easily, did he?”
Only then did Kelly whirl on the girl beside him. “My grandfather was a brave man—a visionary.”
“A thief ?”
She said it so easily, with such little shame or disdain that he could have sworn he’d misheard her. She looked innocent enough, after all, leaning there with her hands resting against the rail at the small of her back.
“Pardon me?” Kelly asked.
“I don’t think I could do it—rob a tomb in the middle of the desert.…I mean, I know he didn’t go alone, but he would have kept the crew small. And it would have been hard…for an amateur…cleaning out the entire chamber in just a couple of days.”
“Young lady, you have no idea of what you speak.”
But the girl just laughed. She looked and sounded far older than she should have when she smiled and said, “Actually, I do.” The man turned back to the controls. “There should be a…” He let his voice trail off, still searching among the buttons and lights.
“They didn’t start putting telephones in elevators until 1972,” she told him flatly. “This is an Otis 420.” He stared at her. “Manufactured primarily in Europe in the forties.” She shook her head. “No phones.”
It was then that Oliver Kelly felt himself begin to panic. “Breathe, Mr. Kelly. It’s okay. I’m sure we’re fine. After all, it’s not like one of us is cursed.”
“The Cleopatra Emerald is not cursed !”
But the girl just smiled, as if she knew better. The look in her blue eyes said that she knew everything.
“He took it, didn’t he?” the girl asked while Kelly pulled at his tie. “What I can’t decide is if he joined the Millers’ expedition for the purpose of double-crossing them or if it was just dumb luck.”
“My grandfather was not dumb,” Kelly snarled.