Free The Graveyard Game by Kage Baker Page B

uncomfortable. It was a very well known antiquarian bookshop, the kind that did almost no business out of the shopfront but relied principally on private clientele and Web orders. Nevertheless there was not a speck of dust anywhere, and the furniture in the parlor was expensive.
    Trevor and Anita were not well off. They were hoping to be; artistic, creative, and talented, they were busily working at several concurrent schemes to make a bundle. One of these schemes was buying and restoring old houses, doing the work themselves to cut overhead, and reselling at handsome profits. Although to date there had been no profits, due to the union fines they had to pay. Then they found the old box.
    It was so old, its leather panels were peeling away, and now it was wrapped in a green polyethylene garbage sack. Trevor held it on his lap. A white cardboard carton would have been more elegant, or brown paper. Looking uneasily around at the fifteenth-century Italian manuscripts under glass, Trevor and Anita regretted that they had found nothing better to put the old box in.
    After a half hour of raised eyebrows from immaculately groomed persons who came and went through the office, Trevor and Anita were ready to sink through the floor. They had just decided to sneakout with their nasty little bag when a young man descended the stairs from the private offices on the first floor. He looked inquiringly at them.
    He too was immaculately groomed, and wore a very expensive suit, though it seemed a little too big for him. He was handsome in a well-bred sort of way, with chiseled features and a resolute chin, rather like a romantic lead from the cinema of a century before. His eyes were the color of twilight.
    “Excuse me,” he said. “You wouldn’t happen to be my three o’clock provenance case, would you?”
    They stared at him, nonplussed.
    “Um—you described it on the phone? Old wood-and-leather box found in an attic?” He gestured helpfully. “About this big? Full of possibly Victorian papers?”
    “Yes!” The couple rose as one.
    “So sorry I kept you waiting,” he said, advancing on them and shaking hands. “Owen Lewis. You must be Trevor and Anita? Is this the box?”
    “It is—”
    “There was an iron bed frame in the attic room, and I don’t think anybody had moved it in just, well, ages—”
    “And this was wedged in underneath, we would never have known it was there if we hadn’t moved the bed, and it took both of us—”
    “The lid just fell apart when we prized it off—”
    “Gosh, how exciting,” Lewis exclaimed, rubbing his hands together. “Let’s take it up to my office and have a look, shall we?”
    He led them up the stairs, and they followed happily, completely set at ease. This was a nice, unintimidating man.
    “My, this really has come to pieces, hasn’t it?” said Lewis, when they were all gathered around his desk and he’d gingerly cut away the green bag. “Good idea to have brought it in in plastic. This is what we in the trade call a basket case.”
    Trevor and Anita smiled at each other, validated.
    “A pity the box fell apart,” Trevor said.
    “Don’t feel too badly,” Lewis told him, taking a pair of latex gloves from a drawer and pulling them on with fastidious care. “From the pieces I’d say it’s early Victorian, but rather cheap for its time. Mass-produced. You say it was in the attic? Where’s the house?”
    “Number 10, Albany Crescent,” Trevor and Anita chorused.
    “Ah.” Lewis lifted away the ruin of the lid, piece by piece. “I know the neighborhood. Upstairs-downstairs, once, with a full staff of servants. Parlormaids and footmen and undergardeners and, here we are! A packet of letters. Let’s just set these aside for the moment, shall we? This looks like a certificate of discharge from the army; this is a clipping from the London
Times
for—” Lewis tilted his head to look at it. “13 April 1840. And here’s an old-fashioned pen.”
    “I thought people