“Not a whole lot,” he said. “Asian art sometimes has the same problem as art from third-world countries: provenance. Because some of it is stolen or smuggled, provenance can’t be given—you know what provenance is?”

She nodded. “The paper trail of owners tracing a piece of art back to the artist.”

“Or the place where it was dug up,” he agreed. “So what we get sometimes is an authentic piece of ancient art with a fake provenance. It’s my job to authenticate pieces that we acquire, and I’ve learned to look beyond the paper to the piece itself.”

“Hud, where’s the T‘ang horse?”

If she hoped to startle him with that question, she didn’t succeed. “In storage. Most of our collection is in storage, because we’re renovating the Asian art exhibits, giving separate galleries to India, Korea, Islamic countries, Himalayan kingdoms”—he was counting on his fingers—“Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. Plus new lighting and better alarms. It’s going to be spectacular. I take it you went looking for the horse?”

“Yes. Margot was going to redo her needlepoint picture for a customer, who offered a thousand dollars for it—a sum the shop can use, badly. I’ve got an employee who thinks he can do the needlepoint, so maybe we can still get the money. I was curious to see what it looks like—I don’t remember more than glancing at Margot’s original.”

“You want me to show it to you?”

“Can you?”

Hud glanced toward his desk, where papers waited. Then he smiled at her like a schoolboy plotting to play hooky. “This will have to be quick, okay?”

“Thanks.”

But as they turned toward the door, Betsy saw the one non-Asian note in the room, an umbrella stand made from an elephant’s lower leg, standing by the door.

“Let me explain,” Hud said with upraised hands, when her questioning gaze came back to him. “I needed something to hold my walking sticks, and they were going to de-accession that. Somehow, it ending up in a Minnesota landfill seemed worse than keeping it, though of course we can’t display it. So don’t look at me like I killed the elephant myself; that happened a hundred and thirty-odd years ago.”

Betsy approached the object gingerly. She had heard about such things, but to actually see one was horrible—it even had the toenails—so she changed focus to the seven or eight walking sticks and the one umbrella it held. Most had brass heads, including the umbrella, which was tightly furled. “Is this your collection?” she asked.

“Part of it. I’m always taking one or another home and then coming in with a different one. I don’t even know what’s in there right now.”

The flat-faced owl was, and another shaped like a snail. “Which one’s the sword cane?”