“Was she mad at him?” asked Dwight.

“Well, she certainly wasn’t happy having to buy back the things she particularly wanted. He sold her a table, some chairs, and a framed mirror and he told me he got enough from those four pieces to put him in the black for that particular locker. Braz liked to drive hard bargains.”

She threw open the double doors, and Dwight saw a massive oak bedroom suite proportioned for a room with ten-foot ceilings.

“That came out of the same auction,” said Tally Ames, “but nobody’s called him about it. Over here’s the rest of that woman’s mother’s things.”

It looked like ordinary furniture to Dwight.

“Cheap veneers and beat-up postwar era,” Mrs. Ames agreed, “but migrant workers will snap it up down in Florida. Fish, you can slide that rack in behind the dresser here, okay?”

“Okay,” he said cheerfully. He was early thirties, about five-nine, and well muscled with a heavy lower jaw and a bullet-shaped head made even more noticeable for being shaved smooth. Around his neck was a gold chain with a cross on it, and the cross banged his chin whenever he stooped to pick up something he’d dropped. Some of the filmy robes kept slipping off their hangers and he bent to retrieve them with a surprising delicacy of touch.

“They’re real pretty, Tally. You ought to keep these for yourself.”

“I don’t think so,” she told him with a smile. “Too fancy for me.”

They left him to finish unloading the truck, and Mrs. Ames showed Dwight some of the things her husband had bought, including the tools that incited the Lincoln brothers to slash the Pot O‘Gold slide.

They were headed for the far side of the compound toward a small shed that stood up on low rock pilings. “Braz’s office,” Mrs. Ames was saying when she broke off and quickened her step.

“Well, damn!” she exclaimed. “Somebody’s pulled the lock off.”

She was right. The lock was still closed tightly on the hasp, but the whole thing had been prized right off the door and now lay on the grass near an abandoned hammer. Inside was a shambles. A box of used books had been overturned and more loose papers fluttered off the old battered teacher’s desk as a breeze from the open doorway blew in.

“What on earth were they looking for?” Tally Ames wondered aloud.

“Try not to touch anything,” Dwight said, “but can you tell me if anything’s missing?”

“God, how would I know?” she said tartly. “Braz called this his office, but mostly it was where he kept the books and papers and pictures he and Arnie unload from the lockers. Arnie used to toss them in the nearest Dumpster, okay? But Braz once found a fifty-dollar bill in one of the books. And he was watching a rerun of Antiques Roadshow the night they showed how sometimes old tintypes and letters could be worth a few hundred. After that, he got Arnie to give him any papers he was going to toss and he’d go through them. We used to tease him about him and his slow dollar. We thought the only thing he’d found was baby pictures and old income tax returns. Nothing worth even putting in a flea market, much less on eBay.”