to peer sightlessly at the living room wall, thinking about the van. What the fuck was it? Where was the van coming from?

The checks were in no particular order—it seemed that she’d simply tossed the latest one in a drawer, and then, when the drawer got full, dumped the old ones in a plastic tub and started a new pile in the drawer.

He finally found one that entered a check for $155,000. The numbers were heavily inked, as though they’d been written in with some emotion. He went through check registers for six months on either side of the big one, and found only two exceptionally large numbers: a check for $167,500 to Central States Title Company. She’d bought the house.

A few months later, she registered a check for $27,500; and then, a week later, a check payable to U.S. Bank for $17,320. The $27,500 was the sale of her old house, Lucas thought. She’d taken out a swing loan to cover the cost of her new house, and the check to U.S. Bank was repayment.

HE’D BEEN SITTING on a rug as he sorted through the checks, and now he rocked back on his heels. Not enough coming in. There’d been $470,000 up for grabs, and she only showed $155,000 coming in as a lump sum. He closed one eye and divided $470,000 by $155,000…and figured the answer was very close to three.

He got a scrap of paper and did the actual arithmetic: $470,000 divided by three was $156,666. If Marilyn Coombs had gotten a check for that amount, and to use the $1,666 as a little happy-time mad money…then she might have deposited $155,000.

Where was the rest? And what the fuck was that van all about?

HE CALLED Archie Carton at Sotheby’s, and was told that Carton had left for the day, that the administrative offices were closed, and no, they didn’t give out Carton’s cell-phone number. Lucas pressed, and was told that they didn’t know Carton’s cell-phone number, which sounded like an untruth, but Lucas was out in flyover country, on the end of a long phone line, and the woman he was talking to was paid to frustrate callers.

“Thanks for your help,” he snarled, and rang off. Carton would have to wait overnight: he was obviously the guy to go to. In the meantime…

ALICE SCHIRMER WAS the folk art curator at the Walker. She was tall and too thin with close-cropped dark hair and fashionable black-rimmed executive glasses. She wore a dark brown summer suit with a gold silk scarf as a kind of necktie. She said, “I had two of our workpersons bring it out; we’ve had it in storage.”

“Thank you.”

“You said there was a woman missing…?” Schirmer asked. She did a finger twiddle at a guy with a two-day stubble and a $400 haircut.

“Yeah. One of the heirs to the Armstrong fortune, in a way,” Lucas said. “Granddaughter of the woman who found them. That woman may also have been murdered.”

“Mrs. Coombs?”

“Yup.”

“Good God,” Schirmer said, touching her lips with three bony fingers. “They really do hold a curse. Like the tomb of Tutankhamen.”

“Maybe you could palm it off on another museum,” Lucas suggested. “Get a picture or a statue back.”

“I don’t think…we’d get enough,” Schirmer said, reluctantly. She pointed: “Through here.”

They walked past a painting that looked like a summer salad. “Why wouldn’t you get enough?”

“I’m afraid the value of the Armstrongs peaked a while ago. Like, the year we got it.”

“Really.”

“First the stock market had problems, and art in general cooled off, and then, you know, we began to get further and further from the idealism of the early feminists,” she said. “The cycle turns, women’s folk art begins to slip in value. Here we go.”

THEY STEPPED PAST a sign that said GALLERY CLOSED, INSTALLATION IN PROGRESS, into an empty, white-walled room. The quilt was stretched between naturally finished timber supports; it was a marvel of color: black, brown, red, blue, and yellow rectangles that seemed to shape and reshape themselves into three-dimensional triangles that swept diagonally across the fabric field.

“Canada Geese,” Schirmer said. “You can almost see them flapping, can’t you?”

“You can,” Lucas agreed. He looked at it for a moment. He didn’t know anything about art, but he knew what he liked, and he liked the quilt.

“This was donated by Ms. Bucher?” Lucas asked.

“Yes.”

“Where are the curses?” he asked.

“Here.” Schirmer’s suit had an inside pocket, just like a man’s, and she slipped out a mechanical pencil and a penlight. They stood close to