Free The Price of Inheritance by Karin Tanabe

who had been in South Carolina since the early eighteenth century. It had never been owned by anyone else besides them and the Tumlinsons and was estimated between $190,000 and $200,000. The other was a round tea table built around 1790, which had been in the Tumlinson family since it was bought by Adam’s great-grandfather, James Tumlinson, in 1817. Adam’s family came to Baltimore aboard the Dove in 1634 and just shy of 30 percent of Adam and Elizabeth’s collection had been passed down exclusively from family. They’d even had pieces sell, through Christie’s, that had the exact same provenance as the pier table. Three of those Hugh Finlay pieces all sold in the early nineties. Hugh Finlay kept meticulous records. And James Tumlinson appeared in his records. That was as good as it got.
    I shouldn’t have been anxious. I knew the Impressionist and Modern Art department received calls like this frequently. The only thing that was worrying me was that we didn’t. I had never gotten a call about a fake and it was something I thought I was immune to in my department. When I got into bed that Thursday night, I knew sleep was not in my immediate future. My nerves were shaky and I couldn’t stop thinking about Baltimore. After two hours of restlessness, I got out of bed and sat on the small Queen Anne walnut side chair that I had spent three months’ salary on during my first year at Christie’s. It was the only thing I had ever bought at auction and it only made me love the world of buying and selling and bidding and winning and losing even more.
    I pulled open the metal window next to the chair and let the freezing night air in. I didn’t have a very good view, but I liked my bad view best at night, when everything, including the insides of the buildings, was still. It was in that chair that I eventually fell asleep with my feet propped up on my bed, and when I woke up that morning at six, I was clinging to my quilt, which I had managed to rip off the bed, and my nose felt like a Popsicle screwed onto my face. I’d probably contracted seven different strands of the cold virus and even an hour-long shower couldn’t warm me up.
    It was while sitting on a bar stool, eating a green pepper and cheese omelet as the sun rose, that I first felt real anxiety about the phone call from Baltimore. The thing about the Hugh Finlay table was it had such a unique look. It was marbleized, grained, and stenciled. It had gold leaf inlay and stood out because of the level of detail. I pulled a Christie’s folder toward me and opened it, taking out a color print of the picture the woman in Baltimore had sent me. It looked a lot like Elizabeth’s. I stared at it with a brass magnifying glass. It looked exactly like Elizabeth’s.
    I turned the piece of paper upside down and looked at the legs. The photo looked old, but the table appeared to be in great condition, just like Elizabeth’s was. I pushed it across the counter and swirled my eggs around the plate. Why was I so worked up? There were dozens of ways to doctor an image. It had to be inauthentic. This was just another crazy person trying to make a buck. I tried to convince myself of that as I finished my cold, runny eggs and all I could come up with was, why this piece of furniture? It was not where the money was. Why wasn’t this woman trying to scam the Impressionist department? Or if she was furniture obsessed, why not pick something that was worth a lot more? Something with less detail yet more value? If someone were skilled enough to fake early nineteenth-century furniture, why would they waste their efforts on a small pier table? This was ridiculous. I threw my plate in the sink, not caring if the egg remained solidified there for a year. I hated myself for picking up that call.
    On Saturday, more than a week after I had drunk in my office with Nicole on New Year’s Eve while we worked, and only eight days away from