WIN, Coben, Harlan [ebook and pdf reader .txt] 📗

to tell me on the phone, you’d do so.”

“See you in an hour,” I say, and disconnect the call.

We fly over the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, which traverses the Delaware River separating New Jersey from Pennsylvania. Three minutes later, Lockwood Manor rises into view, as though it deserves a soundtrack. The copter, an AgustaWestland AW169, passes over the old stone walls, hovers in the clearing, and lands in the lawns by what we still call the “new stables.” It is coming on a quarter century since I razed the original stable, a building dating back to the nineteenth century. The symbolic move was uncharacteristically mawkish on my part. I had convinced myself that a tear-down-and-rebuild might hurl the memory in the mind’s debris.

It did not.

When I first brought my friend Myron to Lockwood—we were college freshmen on a midterm break—he shook his head and said, “It looks like Wayne Manor.” He was referencing Batman, of course—the original television show starring Adam West and Burt Ward, the only Batman that counted to us. I understood his point. The manor has an aura, a magnificence, a boldness, but “stately Wayne Manor” is reddish brick while Lockwood is made of gray stone. There have been additions over the years, two tasteful albeit huge renovations on either side. These new wings are comfortable and air-conditioned, brighter and airier, yet they try too hard. They are facsimiles. I need to be in the original stone of Lockwood. I need to experience the damp, the must, the drafts.

But then again, I only visit nowadays.

Nigel Duncan, the longtime family butler/attorney—yes, it’s a bizarre mix—is there to greet me. Nigel is bald with a three-wisps comb-over and double chin. He sports gray-on-gray sweats—gray sweatpants with a Villanova logo and a tie-string waist around the protruding gut, and an equally gray hoodie with the word “Penn” across the front.

I frown at him. “Nice groufit.”

Nigel gives me an elaborate bow. “Would Master Win prefer me in tails?”

Nigel thinks he’s funny.

“Are those Chuck Taylor Cons?” I ask, pointing to his sneakers.

“They’re very chic,” he tells me.

“If you’re in eighth grade.”

“Ouch.” Then he adds, “We weren’t expecting you, Master Win.”

He is teasing with the Master stuff. I let him. “I wasn’t expecting to come.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Groovy,” I tell him.

Nigel’s sometimes-English accent is fake. He was born on this estate. His father worked for my grandfather, just as Nigel works for my father. Nigel has taken a slightly different path. My father paid for him to go to the University of Penn undergrad and law school in order to give Nigel “more” than the life of a butler and yet handcuff him via obligation to stay on at Lockwood permanently, per his family tradition.

PSA: The rich are very good at using generosity to get what they want.

“Will you be staying the night?” Nigel asks.

“No,” I say.

“Your father is sleeping.”

“Don’t wake him,” I say.

We start toward the main house. Nigel wants to know the purpose of my visit, but he would never ask.

“You know,” I say, “your outfit matches the manor’s stone.”

“It’s why I wear it. Camouflage.”

I give the horse stables no more than a quick glance. Nigel sees me do it, but he pretends otherwise.

“Patricia will be here soon,” I say.

Nigel stops and turns toward me. “Patricia, as in your cousin Patricia?”

“The very one,” I tell him.

“Oh my.”

“Will you show her into the parlor?”

I head up the stone steps and into the parlor. I still get the faint whiff of pipe tobacco. I know that’s not possible, that no one has smoked a pipe in this room in almost four decades, that the brain not only conjures up false sights and sounds but, more often, scents. Still the smell is real to me. Maybe aromas do indeed linger, especially the ones we find most comforting.

I walk over to the fireplace and stare up at the empty frame where the Vermeer once hung. The Picasso took up residence on the opposite wall. That was the sum total of the “Lockwood Collection”—three hundred million dollars of value in only two works of art. Behind me I hear the clatter of heel against marble. The sound, I know, is not being made by Chuck Taylors.

Nigel clears his throat. My back stays toward them.

“You don’t really want me to announce her, do you?”

I turn, and there she is. My cousin Patricia.

Patricia’s eyes roam the room before settling on me. “It’s weird to be back,” she says.

“It’s been too long,” I say.

“I concur,” Nigel adds.

We both look at him. He gets the message.

“I’ll be upstairs should anyone need me.”

He closes the massive doors to the parlor as he departs. They shut with an ominous thud. Patricia and I say nothing for the moment. She is, like yours truly, in her forties. We are first cousins; our fathers were brothers. Both men, Windsor the Second and Aldrich, were fair in complexion and blond, again like yours truly, but Patricia takes after her mother, Aline, a Brazilian native from the city of Fortaleza. Uncle Aldrich scandalized the family when he brought back the twenty-year-old beauty to Lockwood after his extended charity-work journey through South America. Patricia’s dark hair is short and stylishly cut. She wears a blue dress that manages to be both chic and casual. Her eyes are shiny almond. Her resting face, rather than the cliché “bitch,” is grippingly melancholy and startlingly beautiful. Cousin Patricia cuts something of a captivating and telegenic figure.

“So what’s wrong?” Patricia asks me.

“They found the Vermeer.”

She is stunned. “For real?”

I explain about the hoarder, the Beresford turret, the murder. I am not known for possessing subtlety or tact, but I’m trying my best to build up to the reveal. Cousin Patricia watches me with those inquisitive eyes, and again I fall back into a time portal. As children, we roamed this acreage for hours on end. We played hide-and-seek. We rode horses. We swam in the pool and the lake. We played chess and backgammon and worked on our golf and tennis. When the