When in Rome Read online

  Prologue

  Trying to get a boisterous family of five out the door had never been easy. Still, the kids all liked ancient mythology these days, and I knew they would like the new exhibit at the Met… if we ever got there, at any rate.

  “Come on, Rocky!” I called to my youngest, who was sitting at the kitchen table drawing pictures in traces of his maple syrup. “Get that plate in the dishwasher and let’s go!”

  His curly hair bobbed as he jumped up with the dish. I grinned at my husband, Hawthorne, and he smiled back. Somehow, even though neither of us was involved in deadly gunfights or deep dives for treasure anymore, there was never a dull moment in our lives.

  Of course, with three kids to contend with, maybe that made sense. After all, they were just as unpredictable as, if less deadly than, any field operation.

  After a little more herding, we got Rocky, Ash, and Lizzie into shoes and socks and out the door. From there, it was just a matter of getting everyone into the subway to the museum which wasn’t so bad these days. As the kids had gotten older, trips like this had gotten easier, and now that Rocky was in middle school and the other two were in their teens, the only real issue was Lizzie’s newfound distaste for family outings. She was only on this one because she’d just finished an elective on ancient Greece in school and decided that seeing some of their art in person was cool enough to make up for being out with us.

  The subway station was close to our apartment. We only had to walk a block before herding ourselves down the escalators and into the station. The kids each had their own Metrocards, and one by one, we scanned our cards and went through the turnstiles with no complications. By now, all of us were pros at reading the transit map and navigating the crowded station, and everyone knew in no uncertain terms that they were not to go closer to the track than the bright yellow line. When the kids were younger, Hawthorne and I had been terrified that one of them would run over the line and fall onto the electrified third rail. We’d stayed in the city because it was full of culture and had lots of space for adventures, both for the kids and for Hawthorne and me, but with adventures came danger. I knew that better than anyone.

  But now that the kids were older, we could relax a little bit. We knew the station well, with its white tiled walls and concrete floors. It always smelled a little gross in a way I could never put my finger on. I assumed it was just the result of so many people and so many trains all running through the same space. We even knew the busker who stood against the wall and played saxophone. Hawthorne and I dropped a few dollars in his open case whenever we got the chance. Lizzie and Ash both went to sit on a nearby bench, squeezing to fit on one end, away from the stranger sitting at the other. Another downside of New York City was there was no such thing as personal space.

  We heard the thunder-like roar of our train and felt the platform rumble before we saw the headlights from one end of the dark tunnel. As the train rolled into the station, I saw brightly colored graffiti on a few of the cars.

  “Ash, Lizzie!” I called to the bench where they were still sitting. “Come on!”

  “We know,” Ash called back. She and Lizzie joined us as a dinging noise came from the train, joined by a pleasant voice announcing that the doors were opening. When Ash had been younger, she had annoyed us all by trying to imitate that voice. By now, it was something she had grown out of, and she kept quiet as the doors slid open. All five of us stepped back, waiting for travelers to leave the train so we could get on.

  The train was crowded. Everyone wanted to get out and about on a Saturday morning in summer. There were plenty of other families, some of whom were clearly tourists, squinting at maps on their phones and trying to match what they saw to the subway maps posted on the walls of the train. Hawthorne and I had been a little like that when we first moved to the city, but by now, we knew the area well enough that we didn’t need a map for a trip like this, and the kids practically had the subway map memorized.

  We had all been to the Met many times before. We didn’t go very often as a family, but I went on my own or with one of the kids fairly often, and I knew Lizzie liked to spend a lot of time there. The detailed stone arches on the huge white building were familiar to all of us. Crowds of tourists swarmed the steps, and there was a line of taxis in front, waiting to drop off or pick up passengers. We made our way past all of these people and entered the museum.

  We emerged into a huge hall whose ceiling was multiple stories high. The rounded ticket desk was in front of us, and we waited impatiently in line to buy our tickets.

  “You’re not free anymore, Rocky,” I noted, pointing out the sign that said kids twelve and under didn’t have to pay admission. Rocky had just turned thirteen, meaning we now had three teenagers in the house.

  “Hey, I’m not the one paying,” Rocky said with a grin. I rolled my eyes. The kids got student tickets, anyway, and technically the Met had a policy where New York residents could pay whatever they wanted to get in… if the money had really been a problem, we would have taken that option.

  Once we had our tickets, we had to leave the backpack that Hawthorne was carrying in the coat check. This was important because the museum didn’t allow outside food, and we had brought a picnic lunch. It didn’t take long, though, and then we were ready to explore the museum.

  The mythology exhibit was on the third floor. It was easy to get lost in a museum like this. Ash demanded we look in at the medieval armor, and Rocky got distracted by the ancient Egypt halls. It took us half an hour to get from the ticket desk up to the third floor.

  Once we got to the exhibit we had come to see, the kids ran free, leaving Hawthorne and me to go through at our own pace. We didn’t do this sort of thing often, but when we did, Hawthorne and I always spent a lot more time looking at each individual piece of art than the kids did. I had a theory that the human attention span didn’t develop until the age of eighteen, or maybe even twenty. At any rate, the kids zipped through, barely glancing at each piece, and then Rocky came back to find us as we were halfway through.

  “Mom, Dad, can we go to the ancient China exhibit?”

  “If Lizzie will take you,” Hawthorne said.

  “I want all of us to go!” Rocky exclaimed.

  “Just so you can run through twice as fast as us again?” I asked.

  Rocky faltered. There was a shine in his eyes that told me he was trying to think of a comeback, and that made me laugh.

  “We’ll be out soon,” I said. “You know, you saw the entire exhibit, and your dad and I haven’t yet. Is there anything you thought was really cool that you can show me?”

  Rocky’s brown eyes lit up. “Over here!” He dragged me to the other side of the room, and Hawthorne followed close behind.

  The wall was dominated by marble depictions of figures engaging in water-related activities: steering a ship, fighting a sea monster, washing up on an island.

  “They’re from a boat,” Rocky explained. “See?” He pointed to the placard on the wall. Sure enough, it described a boat belonging to a Roman emperor and dredged from the bottom of a lake in Italy. Something about it looked familiar. I turned to Hawthorne, but he was way ahead of me.

  “Hey, Angie, isn’t this that the boat from that one case we did?”

  “Yeah,” I said as the realization hit me fully. “I’m pretty sure that lake took years off my life.”

  “What do you mean?” Rocky asked.

  Hawthorne and I exchanged a glance.

  “It’s a really long story,” I began to explain before Rocky cut me off.

  “I want to hear it!”

  “Maybe after the museum?” Hawthorne suggested. “We can all go for ice cream. I’m sure Ash and Lizzie will want to hear about it too.”

  “Okay,” Rocky agr
eed. “I’m going to go tell Ash and Lizzie!”

  He rushed away, moving fast, but not so fast that anyone stopped him. I turned back to Hawthorne with a knowing look.

  “I guess the cat’s out of the bag,” he said.

  I shrugged. “We have to start somewhere.”

  Although the kids knew we’d been in the military and worked as federal agents, we hadn’t told them a lot of details about what that had entailed. Most of our cases got pretty violent, and we were careful to sanitize what we did tell. But even Rocky was in middle school now. Maybe they were getting old enough to hear the full story.

  Well, most of the full story. Some parts of it still weren’t exactly anything I wanted the kids to hear.

  We made our way through the exhibit, and then we checked out a couple of other collections before heading out. We’d brought lunches to eat in the park, but the kids made sure we remembered our promise of ice cream, so we took a walk to an ice cream shop that happened to be across the park. I always liked walking across Central Park. It was a short walk, but a pleasant one, surrounded by some of the only greenery that New York had to offer.

  The ice cream shop was a little crowded since it was a hot day. We had to wait in line before we could even enter the shop. But there were no limits to what the kids would tolerate if ice cream was in their future, so we waited. Once we got inside, a blast of cool conditioned air hit us. It was more of a relief than I had expected it to be. I wiped the sweat off my face.

  “What are you all getting?” I asked. “Anyone know?”

  “I have to see the flavors,” Ash said.

  “Can I get one of those dipped cones?” Rocky asked.

  “Sure,” I decided. This day was meant to be a treat, after all. We were too far away from the front counter to see each flavor through the glass display case, but they were all listed on a chalkboard next to the menu. I scanned both the list and the menu. Not wanting to order anything that would melt while I was telling the story I had promised, I decided on the tried-and-true option of a chocolate milkshake.

  Slowly, the line moved up, and we were at the front. Each kid ordered in turn. Rocky got strawberry in a cone dripping with chocolate, Ash got a green tea flavor in a normal cone, and Lizzie got a chocolate malt. I ordered my milkshake, and Hawthorne got a scoop of butter pecan in a cup. We left the crowded and brightly lit shop and walked back to the park. Just like the museum and the ice cream shop, the park was somewhat crowded, but people were spaced out enough that we didn’t have trouble finding an empty patch of grass.

  “You have to tell us your story now!” Rocky exclaimed once we were all settled.

  “Okay, then,” I said. “Does everyone want to hear it?”

  “Of course we do,” Ash said, tossing her long hair back. “You never tell us any of your good stories.”

  Hawthorne laughed. “Well, they’re not always kid-friendly,” he explained. “You guys aren’t so much kids anymore, though, are you?”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying,” Lizzie griped, but even she looked interested.

  “All right, then,” I said. “Let’s see.” I took a sip of my milkshake and tried to think about where to begin. This was a big story, after all, and one that needed to be treated with care.

  “It was our first case in New York and our first in our new job…”

  Chapter 1

  Dr. Greg Howard was looking forward to the day. The sun was shining, the birds were chirping, and he had a chance to verify a true one-of-a-kind ancient artifact. This was the sort of thing that he lived for, as a dedicated archaeologist and New York University professor.

  He got up and put on his favorite tweed suit, the light brown one he wore when he had a lecture or an event. Of course, there was no dress code for this specific occasion, but he was a strong believer in dressing to impress.

  Dressed, he looked in his bathroom mirror. He was getting older, and his hair was going gray. He didn’t mind. Aging was inevitable, and he had noticed that as he got older, others had begun to take him more seriously. He wore glasses with a square plastic frame in a tortoiseshell pattern. His eyesight was one thing that wasn’t getting worse as he aged. His eyes hadn’t been any good to begin with.

  After a quick bowl of cereal, he poured a cup of coffee into a reusable to-go cup, picked up his briefcase, and left his apartment. He was earlier than he needed to be, which would give him time to savor the morning air. He walked to the nearest subway station and sipped his coffee on the train as he looked around at the other morning commuters. At this time of day, there were a lot of office workers in business casual clothes, on their phones or even laptops as the train went from station to station. He finished his coffee on the train and, making sure he’d drained his cup dry enough that nothing would spill on his papers, he stowed it inside his briefcase.

  He finished his journey with a walk through the park. He was heading toward the home of a wealthy art collector, and as he walked, he thought about the situation at hand. He had been corresponding with her over email for quite some time, and although this was the first time he’d interacted with this specific woman, it wasn’t the first time someone had called him in to authenticate a piece of art before a sale. A lot of collectors in New York didn’t know marble from concrete, so they needed a pair of more experienced eyes to make sure the art was worth the money they were about to spend before they committed to an expensive mistake.

  Dr. Howard had been on many trips of this sort recently, and a few of them had been suspicious enough that he had begun doing his own research into private art collections and the pieces found within. After going to a few elegant homes to evaluate ancient pieces of priceless art, he was convinced that some of the artifacts he’d evaluated belonged back in their home countries or, at the very least, in a museum. There was at least one case that he knew of in which a piece had been found in a private collection and repatriated, and Dr. Howard was sure more pieces existed that rightly belonged elsewhere. It would have been easy enough for a private collector with little knowledge of art history to acquire something of immense historical value without even knowing it, and Dr. Howard had spent much of his career bemoaning the amount of art and literature that had been lost since ancient times. Any new discovery, whether it was dug from a mound of dirt in Turkey or recovered from a New York penthouse, could lead to great strides in the fields of archaeology and ancient studies.

  The collector he was going to see today was Cecelia Hobbes, and he didn’t know much about her. She hadn’t called him in before, nor had he ever heard of her before, but that wasn’t a surprise, really. An archaeology professor living in a cheap one-bedroom so he could afford to travel wasn’t likely to be rubbing elbows with an Upper East Side socialite, or whatever it was that Miss Hobbes did in her spare time.

  Dr. Howard turned onto Miss Hobbes’s street and checked the address he had recorded on his phone. He scanned the buildings to either side, looking for the right number. It was a little further down, he determined, so he kept walking, taking in the well-kept buildings around him. They weren’t as old as some of the items he dealt with in his profession, but their upkeep was still impressive. It probably took a lot of money to keep these historic buildings as nice as they still were.

  When Dr. Howard found the right building, he stepped right in. There was a receptionist in the lobby who asked him who he was there to see.

  “Miss Cecelia Hobbes,” he replied, adding, “She should be expecting me, I think.”

  The receptionist buzzed Miss Hobbes’ apartment, and a staticky voice answered on the other end.

  “Send him up,” it said.

  “Top floor,” the receptionist told Dr. Howard. “She knows you’re coming.”

  “Thank you very much,” he said. He made his way to the elevator.

  Once he was in the elevator, he had to take a moment to admire its decor. Elevators, generally speaking, did not tend to have gold trim around the edges of the ceiling, nor did they often have plush
carpet on the floor. Even the mirrors lining the small space had no chips, cracks, or smudges. Dr. Howard could see every hair on his mustache in the shining glass surface.

  Finally, the elevator stopped on the top floor. Dr. Howard got out and found himself on a landing at the top of a staircase. There was only one door, a piece of dark wood labeled “P” for penthouse.

  Dr. Howard knocked.

  A dark-haired woman answered the door. She wore a white pencil skirt and blazer, a pearl necklace lining her throat.

  “Hello,” she said. “Dr. Howard?”

  “That would be me,” he confirmed.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” the woman said. “I’m Cecelia Hobbes. We’re still waiting for Regis to come with the artifact in question. Won’t you come in and have a drink?”

  “It would be my pleasure,” Dr. Howard assured her.

  He stepped inside and found himself in a lavishly decorated living room, the walls lined with old-looking paintings. Nothing quite as old as what Miss Hobbes had called him in to see, or indeed nothing quite so old that it fell within his area of expertise, but old nonetheless.

  “These are lovely,” he added, gesturing at the walls.

  “Thank you,” Miss Hobbes said. “I’ve been building my collection for quite a while, and I like to think it rivals some of my peers’. Of course, I lend them out to museums sometimes. I have a lovely Renaissance sculpture that’s on loan to the Met right now. It would go over there.” She pointed into an empty corner.

  “How nice,” Dr. Howard said. “It’s good that others are able to enjoy your collection from time to time.”

  “I think so. After all, everyone enjoys art.” Miss Hobbes gestured to an armchair. “Have a seat.”

  Dr. Howard did, easing into the overstuffed chair. It was much more comfortable than the recliner in his apartment, which he’d picked up secondhand when it had become clear he needed a spot in his room for relaxation.

  Miss Hobbes moved to the bar cart at the back of the room.

  “What’s your drink?” she asked.