Free Pacific (9780802194800) by Tom Drury

their daughter’s eyes. He still wondered what Jack and Wendy were doing in the warehouse.
    He staked it out, watching with binoculars from the trainyard. They worked bankers’ hours, arriving in the red Mustang. Parcel trucks came and went. There was one visitor, a lady who went inside and left half an hour later.
    Dan ran her license plates and found that she was a professor named Mildred at the community college in Stone City. He found her one day in her office, a small room musty with books at the end of a hallway in the Culture, Media and Sport Annex.
    She was a tall woman, in her sixties, Dan guessed, with long brown hair and a gray felt hat with a black ribbon on the side.
    â€œMr. Snow put up a notice on a bulletin board looking for someone to appraise Celtic relics,” she said. “I was curious. And the truth is, I could use the money. Part-time college professors are not highly paid in this area.”
    â€œYou went, you talked to him,” said Dan.
    â€œThey’re not real,” she said. “He’s tried to make them look old, but I don’t know who they would fool. They’re not, they don’t, no.”
    â€œWhat does he do to them?”
    â€œTarnishing solutions, crude abrasives. I believe he wraps some of the larger items in blankets and hits them with a two-by-four.”
    â€œSo you say, Whoa, this stuff is no good.”
    â€œSomething like that. And he suggested that I could estimate what they’d be worth if they were real, and I said I didn’t think that would be a very wise use of my time.”
    â€œGood call,” said Dan.
    â€œI was disappointed.”
    â€œWhere are these things from, Ireland?”
    â€œBeing copies, I suppose they could be from anywhere. The designs are most likely based on excavations in Europe, Britain, and Ireland. The Celts, you know, were not a single culture, and would not have referred to themselves as ‘Celts.’ They were a lot of different people who spoke a similar language and lived all across central Europe at one time, from Ireland to the Balkans and as far east as Asia Minor.”
    Mildred beamed, giving knowledge.
    â€œI had no idea,” said Dan.
    â€œSay, 200 B.C.E.,” she said. “The Greeks called them Keltoi . But then came the Romans and the Germans, and the Celtic speakers of Europe were mostly defeated. I mean, it didn’t happen all at once. Over several centuries. The reason we think of Ireland is that Ireland evaded Romanization. So it was there that many of the stories were written.”
    Dan drove out to the warehouse that night, pried open a window in back, and climbed in. He did not mind breaking laws now that he was not in charge of keeping them. The transgression amounted to nothing against making out with Donna behind Louise’s back.
    He shined a flashlight down the long and narrow space. Metal shapes glinted on tables. The air smelled of sulfur.
    One table held steel swords and scabbards, some new, some in degrees of decomposition. They were simple—broad tapered blades, with crossguards and without. Dan picked one up, tossed it hand to hand. The grip had spiral ridges, making it easy to hold. Dan ran a finger down the blade, drawing a bead of blood that he wiped on his sleeve.
    And so he went through the warehouse, examining helmets, tiaras, crowns, stone and bronze figurines of people and animals with shapes softened as if by fire, a horse with a human face, countless pins and rings and C-shaped neck pieces, oval shields with carvings and eroded edges.
    Snooping in the dark, he felt the magic going on here. It was a common magic, as in a gun shop or camera store where people gather around things that have been made and become excited. And why? he wondered. What would account for that. Maybe an ingrained love of tools, from caveman days. Things are not what they seem.
    The workbenches were laid out with rasps and saws and ball-peen hammers and sealed