Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
H emingway agreed with Jenny’s decision to start the ninety-day clock for declaring ownership of the egg. No more playing nice with the state. They had found a treasure and were ready to claim it.
A high-end auction house like Christie’s or Sotheby’s would know the law and might even help them manage the flood of people likely to assert ownership. Jenny quickly decided to approach Christie’s simply because the auction house had an office only four hours away in Miami.
By eight o’clock the morning after her grove was destroyed, she and Hemingway were on the road to Miami with their video evidence of the egg. Sprawling farmland in the middle of the state was mostly home to orange, grapefruit, and lemon trees, with occasional pastures for cattle. It was hard not to be jealous as they drove past miles of healthy orange groves.
Strawberry, avocado, and cabbage fields started showing up as they drove farther south, but it wasn’t long until the urban sprawl of Miami encroached on the farmland. Jenny had allotted two hours of extra time for traffic, but even so they arrived ten minutes late for their appointment with an auction consultant.
Hemingway’s eyes nearly popped out of his head when he saw her. Kristen Vargas looked like a cross between a Barbie doll and Betty Boop. She wore three-inch spike heels that clicked on the marble floor of the foyer and a flaring skirt that could have come straight out of a fifties Mouseketeer movie. She wore her black hair coiled up in twin rolls, ruby red lips, and cat-eye glasses.
“Hi, I’m Kristen,” she said, reaching out to shake Hemingway’s hand.
“And I’m dazzled,” Hemingway responded, to which Kristen from Christie’s blushed gorgeously. She ushered them into a private office, although could an office with see-through glass walls be considered private? The interior had little besides a flat glass table, a sleek laptop, and a few black leather club chairs.
“You have something interesting to show me?” Kristen asked.
“You might say that,” Hemingway replied and set his laptop on the glass table. Kristen leaned in, and her jaw dropped open as she watched the three-minute video of Jenny holding a Fabergé egg.
“Oh yes,” Kristen agreed in a breathless tone. “Yes, this is very interesting.”
Excitement thrummed on the drive home because Kristen from Christie’s agreed to guide them through the legal process for claiming lost property in the state of Florida, and would happily help them sell the egg should their claim prove successful.
“We need to celebrate,” Hemingway said as they arrived back in Amity. It was almost seven o’clock in the evening and they’d missed dinner.
“The Brickhouse?” she asked, which was their standard place to go for a celebration. The restaurant was pricey, but they’d had a good day and such blessings weren’t to be taken for granted. A platter of slow-roasted ribs with baked beans and cornbread was calling their name.
Jenny was practically faint with hunger when she eased the truck into a parking spot on the town square and started making her way to the Brickhouse. Hemingway got distracted by a couple of girls who’d snagged him outside the coffee shop, but Jenny hurried ahead to secure a table because the Brickhouse was the most popular gathering spot in town. The exposed brick walls and wide plank flooring created a wonderfully homey atmosphere despite the staggering prices. There was space for hundreds of people and the stage near the front often featured local bands and political speeches. Tonight, a local author was holding a book talk. The podium was already in place, with books mounded on a front table ready for purchase.
Jenny’s eyes widened when she recognized the name of the author, and she hastily exited the restaurant. Hemingway was only a few yards away.
“I changed my mind,” she said. “Let’s stop for a hamburger on the way home.”
Hemingway slanted a frown at her. “Jenny, one does not stop for a hamburger when smoked ribs from the Brickhouse are available. Must I explain everything to you?”
“It’s crowded inside. Let’s go.”
She tried to sound casual, but Hemingway peered over her shoulder into the restaurant. “No more crowded than usual,” he said, then glanced at the sign in the window advertising the book talk scheduled to begin in ten minutes.
Hemingway’s face transformed, a feral light coming into his face like a leopard stalking its prey.
“I’m going in,” he said.
She tugged his arm. “Don’t go. It’s not worth it.”
Hemingway shook her off and headed inside. She followed, hoping she wasn’t going to be forced to act as a referee, but it might be necessary.
Tonight’s speaker was Raymond Wakefield, Senator Wakefield’s son whose career serving on corporate boards happened by riding on his father’s coattails. Sitting on the Board of Trustees for the college where Hemingway once taught had been one of those cushy appointments.
When Hemingway was denied tenure, he had appealed to Raymond Wakefield, pointing out their long and productive association. Raymond declined to intervene, and Hemingway lost his job. He was still bitter about it, and nothing could irk Hemingway faster than seeing another of Raymond Wakefield’s books crawling up the bestseller lists.
Because Hemingway was his ghostwriter.
That came to an abrupt end after Hemingway got fired from the college, and Raymond obviously found a new ghostwriter because tonight he was promoting yet another biography of his grandfather. This one focused on the late Karl Wakefield’s career as a philanthropist.
Jenny hurried inside and slid into a booth beside Hemingway.
“Don’t cause him any trouble,” she warned. “There’s no point in stirring up bad blood.”
“I think there is,” Hemingway said. “He signed off on my termination letter when he’s never held a real job in his life, only cushy appointments earned by being his father’s son. He pays ghostwriters to write his books. I’ve spent six years burning the midnight oil to write my novel. I open a vein that leads straight from my heart to capture the soul of Florida, and yet Raymond Wakefield thinks I deserved to be fired.”
She peered through the crowded interior of the pub and spotted Raymond with his wife, the Baroness Claudia von Buhler, standing near the stage and speaking with the restaurant manager. They’d been married for fifteen years but the baroness still held on to her Austrian title, which seemed to please them both given how liberally they flaunted it.
As usual, Raymond and the baroness wore coordinating outfits. Was that some sort of European custom for married people? Or maybe it was a sign of Raymond’s slavish loyalty to his wife, because Jenny couldn’t imagine any red-blooded man choosing to wear a yellow polka-dot sweater. It contrasted with his full head of dark chestnut hair, surprisingly thick for a man in his mid-forties.
The waitress took their order, then Hemingway started grumbling about his nemesis. “Raymond is desperate to have another bestseller to worm his way back into the senator’s good graces.”
“I didn’t realize there had been a falling out.” She rarely emerged from the grove to hear local gossip, but Hemingway was close to the staff at Wakefield Manor.
“The senator caught Raymond skimming from the household accounts,” Hemingway said with a smirk, and Jenny listened with drop-jawed amazement as Hemingway recounted the story. The senator spent most of his time in Washington, leaving Raymond at home to manage the estate. Every year at Christmas the senator gave the household staff, stable hands, and groundskeepers a $5,000 bonus. Raymond had been trimming the amount to $100 and pocketing the rest.
“They’ve got twenty full-time employees, so Raymond has been skimming almost a hundred thousand a year,” Hemingway pointed out. “It’s been going on for years, and the senator threatened to cut Raymond off if he didn’t repay each staff member for the entire amount he stole. Raymond is probably hoping the senator will be mollified by another bestseller celebrating the family heritage.”
Jenny stared at Raymond through the dim light of the restaurant. Raymond and the baroness seemed so worldly and sophisticated, jetting all over the world to ski in Switzerland and bask on islands in the Caribbean. How could a person enjoy those luxuries knowing it was stolen from hardworking household staff?
A few minutes later Raymond came up to the podium and began speaking, outlining the main points of the biography of his grandfather, the internationally renowned Karl Wakefield, whose contributions to finance, industry, and humanity deserved to be lauded through the ages. After making a fortune from the phosphate mine, he became ambassador to the United Nations and founded a charitable relief foundation that was still operating decades after the old man’s death.
Karl Wakefield and his son Senator Max Wakefield were so well known in Pierce County that Raymond skipped the introductions and went straight to the heart of his latest biography of his grandfather.
“In America we consider the decade of the 1920s to be ‘the roaring twenties’ because of a healthy economy and feeling of optimism,” Raymond said with a smoothly polished voice. “It was quite the opposite in Europe, which was pock-marked with war, hobbled with grief, and plagued by savage hunger.”
Hemingway leaned close to Jenny. “That came straight out of his ghostwriter’s mouth,” he whispered, but Raymond was just getting warmed up.
“My grandfather founded the World Famine Commission in 1924. It sent fertilizer and farming equipment to war-torn areas of the world,” Raymond said. “Although he shipped emergency rations of grain, his motto was always that if you give a man a fish, he eats today. Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.”
Hemingway snorted. “Karl Wakefield’s motto was to get rich as fast as possible,” he said loud enough for others at nearby tables to hear.
“Shh,” she urged. “Don’t embarrass him. His wife is here.”
The baroness sat at a table near the stage, her sleek chignon and Hermes scarf looking incongruent with Florida’s best barbecue joint.
Hemingway grumbled, but their food had arrived, and he was too busy slathering spicy barbecue sauce over the ribs to care anymore. They stopped listening to Raymond’s speech and toasted their triumph in Miami with a locally brewed ale, then toasted it again with an imported lager.
All the while, Raymond lauded his grandfather’s glorious history. This was the third book Raymond had “written” about Karl Wakefield. Hemingway wrote the first two books. One covered Karl Wakefield’s impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Florida, then their change of fortune when the family discovered phosphate on their land. Hemingway’s second ghostwritten book covered Karl’s years as ambassador to the United Nations.
Today’s book was about Karl’s commitment to easing world hunger through his creation of the nonprofit World Famine Commission. Raymond outlined his grandfather’s three-pronged approach to alleviate world hunger: the donation of farming tractors to developing nations, free access to fertilizer, and a network of agricultural consultants who travelled the world to help struggling nations embrace modern farming techniques. If the Nobel Peace Prize could be posthumously awarded, Jenny suspected Raymond would be gunning for his grandfather to win it.
When the time for questions arrived, Hemingway immediately called one out without waiting to be recognized. “Did you instruct your ghostwriter to omit your grandfather’s communist sympathies?”
A few people turned to glare at them, but there was a lot of chuckling, too. Raymond cleared his throat and stood a little straighter. “I wrote every word of this biography,” he insisted. “My grandfather’s work with Russia?—”
“With the Soviet Union,” Hemingway corrected.
“My grandfather’s work with Russia was entirely humanitarian,” Raymond insisted. “Are you familiar with the Holodomor of 1932? We’ll never know how many Russians starved to death because of?—”
“How many Ukrainians starved,” Hemingway corrected. “The Holodomor was a man-made famine that happened when Stalin took control of Ukrainian farms and seized their grain. The term ‘Holodomor’ comes from the Ukrainian words for hunger and extermination, and that’s what Stalin did. Four million people died in that famine.”
Raymond handled the tirade with admirable calm. He nodded his head sagely. “You are correct. The Holodomor inspired my grandfather’s humanitarian efforts throughout the 1930s. It was Karl Wakefield’s commitment to Ukraine that stopped a horrible situation from becoming even worse. My grandfather knew of the Holodomor. He wept at the photographs.”
“That was big of him,” Hemingway muttered under his breath as he raised his hand to order another beer. Jenny suggested it was time to stop, but Hemingway correctly pointed out that they had yet to properly toast Kristen from Christie’s. Jenny switched to ice water while Hemingway got another mug of beer.
“With luck, we shall soon be toasting a fortune from a long-lost Romanov treasure,” he said, and Jenny raised her glass in agreement.
The Fabergé egg might be the only way she could keep her head above water now that she’d lost her orange trees, and they were about to launch their quest to win it.