Free Circles of Confusion by April Henry

get this?"
    "I found it in my great-aunt's mobile home underneath the bed. I think she'd been there a long time. My aunt was stationed in Germany after the war ended."
    The shop owner looked upward, speculating. "It could be that this little jewel went missing during the war. A lot of things lost their way during that time." He handed the painting back to her reverently, reluctantly. "I can't really tell you anything. She's Flemish, perhaps, or Dutch. And I would guess several hundred years old— painted somewhere maybe in the 1600s. I know enough to know when I'm out of my depth. And if you want my opinion, anyone in this town would be out of their depth with that. She needs to be appraised by a professional, someone who knows the period intimately. Someone who can be shown something and immediately tell you who this lady was, as well as everything from the name of the artist to what he had for breakfast the day he finished the painting—and then trace the provenance forward three hundred years."
    "The provenance?"
    "The history of who owned the painting, how it came to change hands." He smiled apologetically. "Nothing against people who live in trailer parks, but I would expect past owners to have been duchesses or earls. The type of people who live in castles." He paused, then chose his words carefully. "There's a time-honored tradition of spoils of war. And sometimes there's a fine line between that and looting."
    Claire's head was spinning. Could this painting rightfully belong to someone else? She remembered her great-aunt's diary, with its mention of an inlaid bracelet—probably the same bracelet she had found in the suitcase. "What would you do if you were me?"
    Without hesitation, he said, "Go to New York. Don't go to a dealer or an art gallery. Take her to Sotheby's or Christie's or Avery's. Have someone tell you who she is, where she comes from, and what she's worth."
    "Don't they charge money for that?"
    "The big houses don't. Of course, they take a percentage if they sell it. In this case, my hunch is that would amount to a tidy little sum."
    MYTB$$
     

Chapter 11
    Claire arrived back at the office just in time for her monthly "Hold the Gains" meeting with Roland. She knocked on his office door and then pushed it open. Hundreds of staring eyes greeted her.. Like Aunt Cady, Roland also had a collection of animals, although in his case it was elephants. The collection dated back to his childhood and had followed him from his parents' home to college to this job, his first. Each Christmas or birthday, someone in the department drew the short straw and was forced to take on the task of finding the group gift—a new elephant unlike the others he already owned. Now they peered at her from bookshelves and the tops of filing cabinets, dozens of elephants in all shapes, sizes and materials. Although Roland boasted that the elephant thing had begun because of his excellent memory, Claire sometimes thought that given his big ears and lumpy body, he felt more at ease surrounded by animal versions of himself.
    The elephants weren't the only ones appraising her. Claire repressed a shudder as Roland's eyes slowly traveled from her head to her feet. "Is that a new outfit?" he asked.
    She tried to keep things from veering off course by not answering his question. "How did my charts for last month look?"
    "That's what I like about you, Claire. Always so business-minded." He pulled a sheaf of paper from a file. "And last month you did your usual excellent job." Roland handed her the charts, created in Excel on his IBM but hand-colored by him with rainbow pens.
    Although there were more than a dozen charts, each one actually showed the same piece of information—the number of applications the department had processed, broken down by employee. Roland was enamored of the fact that with just a few clicks of the mouse, the computer could present the same data in many different ways. Each month he printed out pie charts, bar