"You'd be helping a family answer some questions about its past," said Sabrina truthfully.

"Couldn't care less." He started to close the door.

"Legally it's mine," I said quickly. "I can get a lawyer and force you to give it up."

"You could," he said, momentarily stopping the door from closing. "But you won't. First, you don't even know if I have it. Hell, I don't even know. Second, it would take months—maybe years—for this thing to work its way through the courts, and I don't think you want to wait that long. You need this painting now, I can tell."

He was good. I had to give him that. I guess when you're a life-long asshole, you assume everyone else is too. He knew we had an agenda.

He closed the door, leaving us standing there.

"Wow," said Sabrina.

"He can afford to close the door," I said. "He knows he's got us. Now he'll expect us to knock on his door and bargain with him."

"Then let's not," Sabrina replied, turning back toward the car. I followed along.

"And your thinking?" I asked.

"He'll pull out the painting and do some research on it. He'll discover that it's not valuable, and then he'll be as stuck as we are."

"Of course, we don't know that it doesn't tell exactly where the treasure is."

"It doesn't. I can't believe they'd go to the trouble of painting a picture as the clue and then put explicit instructions on it."

"But it has to have enough of a clue to set us in the right direction, I would think."

"But we might already have enough to set us in that direction," she answered. "We have notes and family history to go on. Russ has nothing. No, I say we go to a hotel and wait for him to find us. We have each other over a barrel. We need him for the painting and he needs us because he has no idea what this is all about. We should talk about what we can offer him when he shows up."

We found a better than average steak house and took some time to decompress. Sabrina had me describe my now former job. She seemed genuinely interested in my story. She must have liked me. No one else would have willingly suffered through that.

After dinner we found a decent hotel. After our experience in Fairfield, things were definitely looking up. When we arrived in our room and had closed and double-locked the door, Sabrina grabbed me and kissed me. It wasn't just any kiss. It lasted almost five minutes. She was probing and exploring, and I was willing to let her explore. And of course, it didn't end there.

An hour later, with the bed covers in a heap in the floor, we lay in each other's arms, completely naked, just savoring the moment.

"It was different," I said finally.

"Different?"

"You were different. Less tentative. More forceful. You seemed more at ease."