The Time Collector Read online

  Melicent swallowed, becoming emotional again, and brought the bottle to the kitchen. She wasn’t a champagne drinker, but today was monumental. She popped the cork and poured a glass.

  Holding her mother’s favorite champagne glass brought on a cascade of memories from birthdays to baby showers to friends’ milestones and Sadie’s one big break as an actress. Those moments coursed over her like a bubbly river of happy thoughts. Her mother might be gone, but Melicent could embed one more memory into her mother’s champagne glass. She would add another celebration to the stem and commemorate the day Abraham-Louis Breguet changed their lives forever.

  After today nothing would ever be the same.

  She raised her glass in the air and said softly to the empty kitchen, “Thank you, Louis.”

  9. THE GIFT

  ROAN ARRIVED TO NEW YORK IN THE MORNING, to overcast gray skies and a nipping wind. At Teterboro Airport he reserved a car and driver for the day to take him into Manhattan.

  From the imprint in Hanus’s key, he was able to identify where Sun lived. He’d seen clearly in his mind’s eye her building right across the street from the Met. The fifteen-story co-op looked like it had been built in the 1920s.

  Stuart must have been desperate to have gone to New York to enlist Sun’s help. Miguel was missing and François was dead, and Sun thought both were connected to their research with the ooparts—now Stuart couldn’t be reached. Things were much worse than Roan had imagined. He needed to see Sun and find out what she knew.

  He didn’t have her phone number to schedule an appointment. But given the circumstances, maybe it was better if he arrived unannounced. She could be a factor behind Stuart’s disappearance. He didn’t know anything about the woman.

  After Roan tried to meet with Sun, he would fly on to London and see what he could find at Stuart’s apartment. Stuart had always extended Roan an open invitation to stay at his place whenever he was in town and had shown him where he kept a spare key hidden in his garden. Roan had never taken Stuart up on the offer. He hoped the key was still there.

  When he got out of the town car the doorman in front of Sun’s building greeted Roan with a tip of the hat. Roan went inside and approached the concierge behind the desk. “Could you please call up to Sun Kim and tell her Roan West is here?”

  The man behind the desk said, “Certainly, sir,” and dialed. He spoke quietly into the phone. “There’s a gentleman here, Roan West, to see you. Shall I send him up?” His eyes flickered over to Roan. “Very good, ma’am.” The man hung up and looked at Roan and the small box he was holding in his gloved hands. “She’ll be down in a moment.”

  Not two minutes had passed when Sun stepped from the elevator. She looked just as she had five years ago, and her eyes landed on Roan with the force of an arrow. Her gaze fell to the box he was holding.

  “Shall we walk?” Sun inclined her head, clearly not wanting to discuss their business in front of anyone, least of all the concierge, who was eyeing them. She did a pivot and went outside without waiting to see if he would follow. She was no more than five foot three, a foot shorter than him, and still Roan had to hurry to keep up. “What’s in the box?” she asked.

  So much for cordial hellos. Roan’s curiosity about the prickly woman was increasing. “Stuart’s oopart. I assume you know why I’m here?”

  “No. Did he ask you to come?” Sun had no idea Roan knew the entire conversation she’d had with Stuart in Central Park.

  “I’m here on my own accord. Stuart’s in trouble. Or maybe you already knew that?”

  Sun stopped walking. For a minute she didn’t say anything. “How did you find me?”

  “With this.” He held up the box holding Hanus’s key.

  Sun raised an eyebrow. “From an imprint?”

  “Like I said, I’m here to help Stuart. He’s been unreachable.”

  “For how long?”

  “Three days.”

  Sun said something under her breath in Korean that sounded like a swear word. Then she turned around and marched back toward her building. “Come inside then. We have much to discuss.”

  * * *

  They rode the elevator in silence to the fifteenth floor, where Sun had a corner unit. Roan walked inside to find a gorgeous view of the Met from the living room. The rooms had gleaming mahogany floors, and a dining table that sat close to the floor was the only furniture in sight. A ring of flaming-red embroidered silk floor cushions circled the table instead of chairs.

  “You sit,” Sun ordered. “I’ll bring tea,” she said, and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Roan assumed she wanted him to sit on one of the cushions. He took off his coat and folded it into his lap. He looked around the spartan space, wondering what Sun did for a living. She was still a total enigma.

  An enormous antique Korean screen hung on the main wall like a fresco. The six painted panels portrayed a magical scene of wildlife being chased through a forest and over the ocean by hunters wielding bows and arrows. As Roan studied the masterful brushstrokes and vivid hues, the urge gripped him to touch the panels, but he knew Sun wouldn’t appreciate the gesture.

  “Third century,” Sun said from the doorway. “From a burial chamber in Silla.” She came toward him holding a tray. She placed a porcelain cup in front of him that looked more like a bowl and sat down across from him at the table.

  The fragrant smell of barley in the tea rose with the steam, making him want to drink it. Yet he hesitated, unable to discern if Sun was friend or foe.

  They studied each other for a long moment. Roan refused to look away from her commanding stare. Was she trying to intimidate him?

  She finally asked, “Why did you not join us after you came to France?”

  “Because I like to work alone.”

  Sun’s hooded eyes glinted with intensity as she considered him. “I understand. You’re a busy man. Pine Ridge, St. Joe’s, Manzanar, Minidoka.”

  Roan crossed his arms, the tea forgotten as she began listing the sites he’d been working on with the Heirloom Foundation.

  “So many dark spots in this country’s history to shed light on … the Japanese internment camps of World War II, the Native American massacres, the government boarding schools. The United States has a complicated history. I believe your work started with the sugar plantations in Louisiana?”

  Roan pursed his lips, not saying a word. Sun had done her homework on him.

  She measured his reaction as she continued, “West, Inc. sold over fifteen million dollars in antiquities last year, and yet you spend most of your time giving away heirlooms for free. Anonymously. How noble.”

  Roan couldn’t tell if she was mocking him or not. Tracking down lost heirlooms and giving them back to those families who were the victims of the darkest times in history had become his passion and made him feel like he was doing something purposeful with his life. He didn’t need to explain himself to her.

  He tried to steer the conversation back to the matter at hand. “I came here for Stuart, to find out if you have any idea what he’s involved in. I’m trying to help him.” Roan still didn’t understand what it was Stuart had discovered about the ooparts. Stuart had mentioned to Sun something about “the circles” and finding a connection. But Roan wasn’t about to reveal that he knew that much from an imprint.

  Sun gazed at him hard. This was some kind of bizarre test. She was sizing him up.

  “How old do you think I am?” she asked. The question caught him off guard and she answered before he could. “Seventy-eight. Maybe in thirty years you’ll learn how not to need gloves. And maybe in twenty you’ll learn how to be polite to your elders.”

  Roan let out a short laugh. Sun was beginning to remind him of his mother. He never would have pegged her as being in her late seventies. She looked closer to sixty.

  “My years have taught me many things, and my instinct is telling me you can be trusted. Whatever has happened to Stuart is connected to the research the group was doing. Migue
l is also missing, and poor François is dead from an apparent suicide, which I think was staged.”

  Roan could see the emotion in her eyes, hear the strain in her voice. These men were her friends.

  “Two psychometrists halfway around the globe from each other, and something happened to them weeks apart,” she said. “Now Stuart is gone too. I’m afraid we’ll be next.” She reached over and opened the box Roan had brought.

  Roan tried to warn her. “I wouldn’t touch that—”

  Sun picked up Hanus’s clock tower key and closed her eyes, sitting immobile like a statue for a long moment. Then she set it back down and let out a tsk. “I really don’t like handling things from the fourteen hundreds … too much brutality,” she said with distaste, and sipped her tea.

  Roan could only stare at her in amazement, wondering how she had read the imprint without being affected.

  She went on. “This key may be an oopart, but I don’t think the answers lie in its imprints. Miguel believed the ooparts were not random anomalies. He recently discovered a connection between ooparts and crop circles.”

  “Crop circles?” Roan’s eyebrows shot up.

  The circles Stuart had been talking about with Sun were crop circles?

  What Sun was saying was so unexpected, it threw him for a moment. Roan didn’t know much about crop circles, except that there had been wide public interest in them in the nineties, followed by a Hollywood blockbuster film that ended with an alien in theatrical makeup. Their mystique diminished when two men, a pair of “crop circle artists,” came forward and confessed that they had been traveling to different countries for years and creating them overnight. The media officially declared the phenomenon a hoax and over time crop circles faded from the public eye.

  After his mother moved to Oxford, Roan had been surprised to learn that Great Britain, particularly the area around Wiltshire, continued to be the crop circle mecca of the world, well after the two artists had officially retired. Crop circles still occurred every year around the globe, with dozens of circles appearing in Britain alone. Only a handful were ever acknowledged as being made by an actual person or a group while the rest remained shrouded in mystery. But the phenomenon had been going on for so long, not many people paid attention to them.

  He asked Sun, “How are crop circles connected to ooparts?”

  “I haven’t seen their research. I don’t have the answers.” Sun nodded to Hanus’s key on the table. “But someone doesn’t want these ooparts identified. And who better to do so than us?”

  Roan shook his head, unable to make sense of it all. He needed to go to London and see if Stuart had left any clues at his house that could give them some insight. “What about Gyan?” Gyan had Stuart’s other oopart, René Descartes’s ring. Roan might need to pay the man a visit.

  “He’s in India with his family. Stuart warned him to be on guard.” Sun gave him a contemplative look. “You must be careful too. You’re a target as well.”

  A feeling of anger prickled inside him. “Because I came here?”

  “Because we must assume someone is going after all psychometrists,” Sun said, her face unreadable. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a long thin box that looked like it might hold a necklace. She slid it across the table to him as an offering. “We need to trust each other, Roan West.”

  Roan stared at the box, not quite willing to take it. It was true he didn’t trust Sun. He couldn’t imagine what she was giving him.

  Sun handed him her card with her phone number. “There is a psychometrist in Korea I must warn,” Sun told him. “She was planning to join the group this year. She is young and inexperienced, which makes her even more vulnerable.”

  Roan immediately thought of Melicent Tilpin back in Los Angeles. She was all those things too. Then there was the YouTube video, announcing that she was a psychometrist for all the world to see.

  Would the people who were after Stuart’s group find her in the minefield of the internet? Holly had and sent him the YouTube link, which meant others could find it.

  Roan took Hanus’s key with him and Sun’s mystery box. They agreed they would be in touch if either of them received news from Stuart.

  * * *

  As Roan headed to the airport in the back seat of the town car, he pulled out his lucky coin and ran it back and forth across his hand as he contemplated his next move.

  He couldn’t stop his train of thought from landing right where he didn’t want it to—before he flew to London he needed to return to Los Angeles and actually talk to the woman he was trying so hard to forget. He needed to warn Melicent Tilpin she was in danger.

  10. THE DOORKNOB

  MELICENT WAS ON THE LAST CHAPTER of Mastering Psychometry and had gotten caught up by Woods’s account of all the archaeological mysteries in the world that were waiting to be solved: the giant stone spheres of Costa Rica, the Nazca lines, the megalithic jars in Laos, the Sajama Lines of Bolivia, Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid. The list was long and Woods believed many of the answers could be found through psychometry. He pointed out how the technology archaeologists were using was getting better with time and that as a result everything their machines dated kept getting older. The accepted timelines of history didn’t match up anymore. It was like getting a new coloring book of the history of the world and being told it had to be colored all over again. Woods believed psychometrists could help fill in the lines. The knowledge was there, buried and waiting.

  The front door jingled.

  “When were you going to tell me?” Tish, the owner of The Trove and Melicent’s boss, rushed in with excitement.

  Melicent blinked and looked up. She’d lost all track of time. “Hey, I didn’t hear you come in.” She slipped the psychometry book under the register.

  Tish came toward her with an astounded look, waving a newspaper in her hand. “Is this you?” She slapped the paper down on the counter.

  Melicent read the headline of an article in the Arts & Culture section of the L.A. Times in disbelief. “Woman Sells Priceless Pocket Watch Back to Breguet.” Next to the article was a picture of the Rodeo Drive storefront and the French representative she’d met, smiling for the camera and holding up the watch.

  “Is this you?” Tish asked again. “You sold a pocket watch for almost two million dollars?”

  “Oh my God” was all Melicent could say, feeling out-of-body when she found her name.

  Melicent Tilpin, a Los Angeles native, found the Breguet pocket watch at a swap meet in Anaheim. The timepiece was a noted favorite of Abraham-Louis Breguet and became lost sometime during the French Revolution.

  “I know! Answer me! Did you sell a watch for two million dollars?” Tish was beside herself.

  Melicent quickly skimmed the rest.

  Ms. Tilpin sold the watch back to Breguet, which has estimated its value to be close to two million dollars. The company is very pleased to have an original Breguet, made by the man himself, returned, which makes the pocket watch priceless in their eyes.

  This was a nightmare.

  “Yes,” Melicent whispered. She hadn’t been ready to share the news with anyone, least of all her boss.

  “When?” Tish demanded.

  “Yesterday.” Melicent shook her head in disbelief that she’d made the paper. She read the article again.

  “And you haven’t told me yet?” Tish put her hands on her hips.

  “I haven’t told anyone. I’m still processing it.” Melicent was beginning to feel annoyed. Tish had a way of thinking Melicent’s life was her personal business. They had been roommates and good friends in college. But the dynamics of their friendship had changed when Tish began to officially pay Melicent for her time.

  “Tell me everything! Start at the beginning.” Tish sat down next to her. “What are you going to do with the money?” she asked, catapulting over the part about wanting to hear the story. “I mean, you could start your own gallery. You could go into business for yourself. You could even partner
with me.”

  Melicent’s eyebrows rose at that. She had no urge to partner with Tish. “I don’t know my plans yet,” she hedged. “It’s still kind of all sinking in.”

  It’d been only a few days since the Antiques Roadshow appraisal, and Melicent had already decided that she wouldn’t use her budding ability to sense anything else. Now that she and Parker had more than enough money, she didn’t want to go antique hunting for a while. Part of her didn’t even want to dwell on what she’d done. In the aftermath, it still felt like a dream.

  “Well, think about it. Seriously. I could use a partner. I’m practically getting an ulcer running this place.”

  Melicent frowned at that. She was running this place. Melicent had been store manager for almost four years, since opening day. Melicent and Tish had both been art majors at UCLA. Tish’s parents gave their daughter The Trove store as a college graduation present. Melicent got flowers from her mom on graduation day—and yet Tish always complained she wished her mother were more like Sadie, quick to hug, laugh, and invite the world over for dinner. The irony was that Melicent’s mom was the struggling actress, the cliché L.A. waitress juggling auditions and night shifts while living paycheck to paycheck. Tish’s parents were Hollywood producers, the kind who had the best parking spaces on the studio lot. Tish pitched the idea of managing the store to Melicent while Tish traveled to find the art to fill it with. At the time the proposal sounded like a fabulous idea. But the reality was Melicent was a workhorse. She was in charge of running the store and handled the payroll, advertising, and accounting. She usually put in six days a week and had only one part-time assistant to cover for her, while Tish breezed in and out whenever she wanted.

  Tish turned to the sales receipt book and began flipping the pages. Melicent knew her friend didn’t mean to be dismissive, but still it stung. It also astounded her that Tish wasn’t asking the real question—would Melicent quit her job?