“This may be the only real exercise I get this week,” George replied, coming upright by doing a perfect walkover.
“Where’s Bess?” Nancy asked.
“Upstairs. Amy’s at school, and Terry’s in his studio.” George stretched to the side and gave Nancy a quizzical look. “Have you given any thought to what we’re about to do?”
Nancy chuckled. “You mean baking a cake for three hundred people?”
Bess opened the screen door to the deck and walked outside. She was wearing a short aqua skirt and a white blouse. “We’d better get going,” Bess said. “I wonder if Joanne will let us sample some of the cake after we bake it,” she added as she and her friends headed for the car.
“You mean, just to make sure it tastes okay for the guests?” George said with a laugh.
“Yeah,” Bess replied. “Just to make sure.”
The girls drove to Joanne’s discussing what kind of cake they would each have if they were getting married.
When they arrived in Joanne’s kitchen, she handed Nancy a five-pound bag of shelled walnuts. “You can start by chopping these. I’d let you use the food processor, but I need to stir the batter.”
“That’s all right,” Nancy said. She looked at the chopping board and knife and felt a bit dazed. She couldn’t quite believe that the four of them were actually going to bake a chocolate-carrot cake that would look like a castle and feed three hundred people. But Joanne and Bess both seemed sure it would work, and neither Nancy nor George was about to argue.
Nancy began to chop walnuts, enjoying the coziness of Joanne’s cheerful kitchen. To her surprise, it felt good to be away from the case for a while. The four friends talked about growing up together in River Heights, and how the small midwestern city was still very much the same as it had been when Joanne left.
At last the talk turned back to the present. Nancy and Joanne told George and Bess what had gone on that morning at the gallery.
“So when do we get to see those photographs?” George asked.
“Soon,” Joanne promised. “I took them to the print shop this morning. Keith is going to pick them up on his way here from his last class.”
“Did you tell Terry about the brass latches?” Bess asked Nancy.
Nancy finished chopping the last of the walnuts. “Not yet. I wanted to have the photographs first.”
A short time later, the doorbell rang, and Keith came in, carrying a tan envelope. He bowed to Joanne with a flourish. “As you requested, my lady. What are these, anyway, that you needed them so quickly?”
“I’ll show you,” Joanne replied. “Photo break, everyone,” she announced to her friends. “Let’s go into the living room and see what we’ve got.”
Joanne handed Nancy the envelope. Trying to control her eagerness, Nancy looked through the prints one by one. Joanne had followed her directions exactly. At first there were pictures of everyday objects that might have fit inside the trunk: a clock, a book, a pad, a stapler, and other assorted items.
“Great ash tray,” Keith teased. “And a very exciting photograph.”
“Patience,” Joanne said. “The best is yet to come.”
Next came the gallery’s exhibit. Nancy was amazed at how many of the carvings Joanne had been able to photograph and how clearly they came out in spite of reflections from the display cases.
“That’s an eighteenth-century Japanese piece,” Keith said, identifying a dark green jade pendant. “And this amulet is probably from China at the turn of the century.”
“There!” Nancy exclaimed as she found the photograph of the brass dragon latches. “I think we’ve got our proof that Mr. Mai had Terry’s trunk.”
“I’m still confused,” Bess said. “Does that mean someone stole the trunk and sold it to Mr. Mai? Or did Mr. Mai have someone steal it for him?”
“And we’re still not sure if there was anything in the hidden compartment,” George pointed out. “What if Mai opened it and there was nothing inside?”
“I don’t have the answers to any of those questions yet,” Nancy admitted, “but I will.”
“Wow!” The soft exclamation came from Keith. “I’ve never seen anything this fine before—except in museums.”
Nancy glanced over to see what he was looking at. It was a photograph of the jade tiger. “That’s the one I loved, too,” she told Keith. “Mr. Mai didn’t even have it on display out front—it was in the back room. He said it just came in, and it’s already been bid on by a private collector.” She looked at Keith curiously. “How old do you think it is?”
Keith studied the photograph for a moment before answering. “It’s hard to tell without seeing the thing up close, but I’d guess it’s not that old, as jade goes. I’d say it was carved sometime during the eighteen hundreds. It’s the type of statue you’d find in Buddhist temples built during that period.” He held the photo up to the window and examined it again. “I could be wrong, but this looks like Burmese jade, which, as everyone in Asia will tell you, is the finest jade in the world. And whoever did the carving was incredibly talented. This piece may be worth as much as everything else in the gallery combined.”
“I knew you had good taste,” Bess said to Nancy.
“Speaking of taste,” Joanne broke in, “we’ve got a lot of cake to bake. The wedding is only three days away, which means the photo break is officially over.”
Keith joined the kitchen crew, and they began pouring batter into sheet-cake pans. The delicious smell of chocolate-carrot cake filled the kitchen as the five friends cleaned up. It was just after sunset when the last dish was washed and the last cake came out of the oven and was set on a rack to cool.
“Today, cake. Tomorrow, icing and assembly,” said Joanne with a sigh of satisfaction. At the look of alarm on her friends’ faces, she quickly added, “Don’t worry, I can handle that on my own.”
• • •
“What’s this?” Terry asked later that night when Nancy handed him the packet of photographs.
“Joanne and I went back to the Fe T’sui Gallery,” she explained. “And Joanne took some pictures.”
Terry and Amy had been watching TV. He turned down the sound, balancing the envelope in his hand as if trying to sense what was inside. “Did Mr. Mai know you were photographing his gallery?”
“I don’t think so. Joanne’s camera is only a couple of inches big, and she was careful.”
“I hope so,” Terry said.
