She just looked down at the hardwood floor and said, “I know.”
“It’s his family, and he has the right to know.”
“I know,” Kat said again.
“So why haven’t you told him?”
“I don’t know, okay? The reading of the will was so crazy, and then I was going to… I was,” she said again, stronger, when Gabrielle gave her a skeptical look. “But what if Marcus is wrong?”
“He’s not,” Gabrielle said, certain.
“What if he is, Gabrielle? You didn’t see Hale. You didn’t hear him. His grandmother is the only person in his family he has ever cared about, and now she’s gone, but he’s got her company. So it’s like he’s got a piece of her. If we’re right about this… If we’re right, it’s going to be like losing her all over again.”
“So it’s better to let him go into this—whatever it is—blind? It’s better to let him be somebody’s mark?”
Kat knew it was her turn to speak—to say something to prove her cousin wrong. But the words didn’t come, and Kat just sat there.
“He deserves to know,” Gabrielle said again.
“You’re right. He does. But something about this…scares me.”
Gabrielle stepped back and crossed her arms, surveyed her cousin carefully. “Are you scared, or are you angry?”
“Why would I be angry?”
“Come on, Kitty Kat…” Gabrielle cocked her head. “You’re Hale’s secret girlfriend.”
“His what?”
“You know, the girl he likes just as long as no one knows it.”
“Everyone knows it.”
“No.” Gabrielle spun on her. “Everyone you know knows it. But I’m willing to bet he conveniently forgot to mention the G-word when you met his mother. What about his dad?” Gabrielle added. “And Little Miss Redhead? What’s her name?”
“Natalie,” Kat said.
“Yeah.” Gabrielle huffed. “I’m sure he was all lovey-dovey in front of her?”
Kat said nothing, and her cousin talked on.
“I’m just saying, if you’re sneaking around behind his back because you think something’s wrong, fine.”
“Of course I think something’s wrong.”
Gabrielle sidled closer. “But if you’re doing it because you want something to be wrong…”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the owner of Hale Industries might not be able to go to Rome to steal a Rembrandt on a whim. I mean, maybe a guy who is concerned with stock prices might forget to care about long cons.” Gabrielle sidled even closer, hand on hip. “What I mean, dear cousin, is that maybe you want Hale to get out of his family’s business because that is the only way to keep him in yours.”
It was more than a little embarrassing how much time Kat spent wishing her cousin were wrong but knowing in her heart she wasn’t. It wasn’t fair that Gabrielle could be both so beautiful and so wise.
“Get some sleep, Kitty Kat.” Gabrielle started up the stairs. “You’re spending tomorrow night at the museum.”
The good news, Kat couldn’t help but think, was that the Petrovich exhibit was far from the most impressive thing among the Henley’s always impressive collection. Sitting as it was, in the center of the grand promenade, it was easy for the guards and the docents and even the visitors themselves to overlook it, to treat the dozen prominent pieces less like valuable works of art and more like…well…furniture.
Desks and bookcases and even chests of drawers filled the center of the corridor with only red velvet ropes standing between the precious works and the sticky hands of sweaty tourists.
The crowds were heavy and the winds outside were brisk, so even Kat had to concede that the conditions were as perfect as they could be, given the circumstances. But the circumstances, any decent thief would know, were far from good.
It was still the Henley, and Kat and her crew were still the kids who’d robbed it, and so it was with more than a little trepidation that she followed Gabrielle (who had been forced to abandon her short skirts and tall heels for the occasion, lest any of the guards recollected seeing her legs on that fateful day last December).
The past was the past, and the people at the Henley seemed to go about their business as if nothing at all had changed.
Kat, on the other hand, knew better.
The guards were on a different rotation. The cameras had been upgraded no more than a month before. The security system was running on an entirely different feed, and this time Kat could see Simon out of the corner of her eye, lingering by the doors to the North Garden. His hands were shaking as he paced back and forth, looking like he was going to burst through the doors and run screaming from the Henley at any moment. But he didn’t.
“I don’t like this. I feel naked. I feel…blind,” Simon said through the comms unit.
“Then push your wig back,” Gabrielle told him from her place by the windows.
But that wasn’t the problem, and Kat knew it.
“It’s no fair,” Simon said. “They get to have computers. And cameras. With facial-recognition software. Have I mentioned I am not a fan of facial-recognition software?”
“Yeah,” Gabrielle told him. “You might have mentioned it when you were shopping for fake noses.”
Simon defended his honor. Gabrielle insulted his nose. But the words were just a distant humming in Kat’s ears as she walked down the long main corridor filled with desks and cabinets, a bookcase from the library of a very famous university that had been transplanted there piece by piece, including the very secret compartment behind it.
Kat moved slowly, taking it all in.
And then she saw it—the desk in the middle of the exhibit—twenty yards from the entrance to the Imperial China room, directly opposite the portrait of Veronica Henley herself. Kat thought of another fine old lady as she inched closer to the velvet ropes.
It wasn’t the most ornate of the pieces, but it was Kat’s favorite—the very one she would have chosen if she could have picked any Petrovich for herself. The drawers were intricately carved. The pass-through underneath had a swinging door. The top was soft leather with small brass studs. It was masculine, Kat thought; not the place for an old woman’s thank-you notes and diaries. No. It was a desk made for business, and Kat imagined Hazel there, filling her husband’s seat quite literally as she carried both the family and the company into a new era.
“I still wish I had a computer,” Simon said from his place by the doors.
Kat pulled her thoughts and her gaze away from Hazel’s desk and studied the long corridor.
“We don’t need a computer, Simon,” Kat said. “We just need them.”
To any casual observer, she was probably pointing at the herd of schoolchildren that was walking down the promenade and toward the main doors. It was easy to miss Nick, who lingered at the far end of the hall, and the Bagshaws, who were walking in her direction, a tall, steaming cup of coffee in Angus’s hands.
“Attention Henley guests,” a woman’s voice announced over the loudspeakers, “we have reached our close of business. Please make your way to the doors, and remember, the museum will open again at nine a.m. tomorrow morning. Thank you for visiting the Henley, and have a lovely evening.”
The schoolchildren walked a little faster. The docents gestured the crowd toward the doors. And, quietly, Kat said, “Now.”
Though the management of the Henley would never say so aloud, no one was really certain what had happened that afternoon. Of the two dozen school groups that had been scheduled to visit, not a single teacher seemed to know where the children got the items they eventually carried through the Henley’s halls. A staffer had handed them out, somebody said. It was some kind of free promotion gone wrong, others assumed.