The nineteenth was the clincher: I told Honeycutt I might try going for it after the war and said I'd split it with him. He got really angry and said it was none of my business. During the mission, a bomb got stuck in the bomb bay. Honeycutt went to look at it and I went to give him a hand. He tripped and fell through. We'll all miss him. Guess I know where I'm going after the war.

"Wow," exclaimed Sabrina.

"The story I always heard was that the navigator turned his head and my grandfather was gone. Here he said he tripped."

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" she asked.

"Yeah, that your grandfather killed my grandfather."

She thought for a moment, then said, "Oops. Sorry about that."

I looked at her and started to laugh. She joined right in, and we laughed so hard that tears came to our eyes. It wasn't funny, and yet, it was.

We finally calmed down.

"Well," I said. "We know now how our families got involved with each other. The question is: Did your grandfather ever pursue it?"

Chapter 11

The rest of the log book went back to being all about the missions. They became shorter and eventually petered out. My grandfather wasn't mentioned again. We had lost interest anyway. Finding out that Ray was a murderer had taken away all of our historical fascination for the log. So we pulled out the briefcase and emptied it on the table. There wasn't as much in there as we had hoped, but enough to know that Izzy was on the right track.

She had done quite a bit of research on the three crooks, which is where she had come up with my name. In fact, the thieves took up the bulk of her notes. Since her grandfather didn't mention Fairfield in his log, and probably never knew the name of the gallery, she was missing a big chunk of information, so she had concentrated on the perpetrators of the heist. It was also why she was so frustrated by our meeting at Au Bon Pain. She was disappointed that I was such a loser and didn't even know my family history.

But her loss was our gain, as we were able to put some pieces to the puzzle together. Although there was no explanation of how, it seems that Tony Guidry, Mikey Flynn, and my great-grandfather, Bruce Honeycutt, were friends—probably all from the same neighborhood. Izzy hadn't been able to determine how they knew about the eleventh painting, although Sabrina and I were able to put together a theory.

After the heist, Bruce took the eleventh painting—as we knew from his letter—and it seemed that Mikey took the other ten for safe-keeping. It was Mikey who tried to ransom some of the paintings, and it got him killed.

Izzy had talked to Mikey's grandson, and although he was reluctant to talk about it, she eventually got his take on it all. It was all family legend, but supposedly Mikey was told to lay low. When he tried to ransom the paintings, Tony killed him. At least it was assumed that Tony was responsible. No one ever found Mikey's body. Although they had no proof of Mikey's death, they didn't seem interested in pursuing it, or even talking to Izzy about it. "Scared of something?" wrote Izzy in her notes. Mikey's grandson was convinced that Tony was the ringleader, and that he was a member of the mob.