Crimes by Moonlight

“They took your candlesticks and left the sterling toast rack that was sitting right beside it?” said Jane. “Weird.”

“Indeed,” Ms. Loring said crisply. “Especially since the toast rack is Georgian and worth five times the candlesticks.”

Dad started listing the Chinese things on eBay in the middle of January, three new dealers joined the store in February, and the shop-lifting began soon after that.

IT has to be one of those three, I think as my eyes adjust to the darkness. Is it coincidence, or did they suddenly show up because they saw those Chinese things on eBay and thought they could come clean us out? I see a paper-thin line of light where the door doesn’t fit the sill completely. No real help. There’s nothing I can change into that would let me move through such a narrow opening. As the March chill penetrates my prison, I move farther away from the cold metal roll-up door and fumble around till I find a second padded blanket to insulate me from the concrete floor while I think about those new dealers.

Thomas Fong is from San Francisco. Late forties. Married, though we’ve never seen his wife. With that name, you’d expect someone small, dark, and inscrutable. You’d be wrong. He’s tall, blue-eyed, and four generations removed from the mainland, but his Chinese roots led him to an appreciation of classical Chinese antiques, and he specializes in decorative pieces of Asian origin. “Unfortunately, they’re mostly things that were made for export and not very old,” he told me. “Post- 1945.” Very nosy. Forever trying to get a look inside the storage room. Even though he’s not there every day, he always seems to be around when I photograph a new batch of items.

Next comes Kendall Loring from Detroit. Mid-thirties. Still single. Ski

Last is a youngish widow from New York City. Neva Earle. Forty and fighting it. Friendly enough, but more reserved than either Fong or Loring. Her space is an eclectic mix of porcelain and ceramics, everything from Staffordshire dogs to beautiful Dresden plates. Would she-Omigod, what’s that noise?

It sounds almost like someone’s touching a sheet of bubble wrap. Mice? Rats? I squint through the gloom, but it’s too dark to see anything distinctly. I flounce my blanket to flush whatever creature it is and to get a fix on its location, but all is silent again. “Nerves,” I mutter to myself. Eventually I relax and go back to analyzing the situation.

DESPITE all our care in watching our customers like a hawk, occasional small items continued to walk off. Jane started asking customers to leave their tote bags at the front counter when she was covering the store for Dad, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“It’ll look like we don’t trust them,” he said.

“We don’t,” Jane and I chorused.

Things finally came to a head last week. My fault. We keep the storeroom locked, of course, but once an item’s been listed online, I’m not as careful as I should be about putting it back under lock and key. When Dad went to crate up a lacquered chest that had sold for well over its $2000 reserve, it was gone. I had covered it with an old patchwork quilt and left it on the floor beside the table I use as a staging platform for my camera. Instead of the Chinese chest, the patchwork quilt covered a plain oak chest of our own that was worth only a fraction of the other.

The police came and poked around, but what could they do? No door had been forced, and taking fingerprints in such a public place would have been useless. “We’ll file an incident report so you can put in an insurance claim,” they told Dad, “but you might want to change your locks. Looks like an inside job by someone with a key.”

“Well, that’s stupid,” I told Dad when they were gone. “You and Jane have the only keys, and Jane hasn’t been in since I left the chest out.”

“Of course, it wasn’t Jane,” said Dad. “I hate to say it, but I’m afraid it must be one of the new people. All three of them restocked their booths this week, so they were back and forth with dollies. If you could remember when you last saw the chest-?”

But I couldn’t. This was Thursday. I knew it was there last Saturday morning because a customer had been interested in the quilt until she realized that one end of it had been damaged in a fire, but the chest could have been taken twenty minutes later, and who would notice?

Dad was due to be out of town all weekend for an antique fair. I had finally convinced him that I was old enough to stay home alone, but as soon as he left Friday morning, I ditched school and headed for the shop.

Jane was behind the counter and surprised to see me. “No school?”

“Teacher workday,” I said glibly. “I’m going to take pictures of another box of stuff in the storeroom.”

No sooner had I unlocked the door and switched on the light inside than Mr. Fong was right there at my elbow. He insisted on helping me carry things out to my tabletop photography studio. This time, I didn’t discourage him. He wasn’t particularly interested in a tall ceramic statue of a goddess-“Early twentieth century, made for export and a dime a dozen,” he said dismissively-but a Ming dynasty vase with a scaly blue dragon prancing around the flared bowl really made him salivate.

“Lovely,” said Neva Earle on her way in with a heavy box of English stoneware strapped to her dolly. She held a Blue Willow platter next to the vase and said ruefully, “You can certainly see the difference in quality, can’t you?”

“I don’t know,” said Martha Cook. “I have a weakness for Blue Willow. You ought to let me display that platter for you on one of my sideboards.”

They walked away together, and a customer called Mr. Fong back to his booth to discuss a Korean screen.

I finished photographing the Ming vase and moved on to the ceramic goddess. She might not be valuable, but her serene face, half the size of my own, appealed to me, and I took several pictures of her from all angles.

“You have a nice touch with the camera,” said Kendall Loring, who had suddenly appeared from nowhere. “I checked out your website. Good crisp pictures.”

“Thanks,” I muttered.

“I guess you got your eye for form from your dad,” she said. “What about your mom? Was she a photographer, too?”

I shrugged. “Dad never said, Ms. Loring.”

“Please. Call me Kendall. You don’t look much like him, so I guess you must take after her.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “She didn’t like to have her picture taken.”

“No pictures at all?”

“Just a snapshot he took when she wasn’t expecting it,” I said grudgingly.

“Was she as pretty as you?”

Oh please, I thought to myself.

“Does it still hurt for him to talk about her?”

God, she was nosy! But her questions made me realize how little I knew about my mother. Could she have been a shape-shifter, too? Even though he never brought her up, Dad certainly answered every question I’d ever thought to ask. They had met in college. The only child of two only children, her father died when she was in college and her mother three years later. As the only grandchild on both sides of her family, she had inherited a ton of beautiful old pieces, which is how she and Dad started the store. No other family that he’d ever heard about. But where she was born? Her maiden name? Her favorite songs and movies? I’d never thought to ask. And there was no way I could say, “Hey, Dad, Mom ever change into a rocking chair when you weren’t looking?”