Read Online The Price of Inheritance by Karin Tanabe - Free Book Online Page B

interested in American furniture. Has been since the sixties. She pays attention to all the buying and selling and stuff like that and she came around last night and showed me the magazine for your upcoming sale—”
    â€œIs that one of our January catalogues, you mean? Your sister has a catalogue?”
    I knew everyone our catalogues went out to and I was not familiar with the name Nina Caine, but they were for sale online and found in university libraries.
    â€œRight, your catalogue. I don’t know all the lingo, but what I do know is that Nina showed me the catalogue, the Property from the Collection of Mrs. Adam R. Tumlinson catalogue, and she was very upset because right there on page seventy-three was a picture of a table she owns. Well, we own it because it was our mother’s, but it’s on page ­seventy-three of your catalogue and it’s also in Nina’s living room.”
    It wasn’t rare for Christie’s to receive phone calls when catalogues came out about something being inauthentic, but the calls were usually nothing to be alarmed by, just people wanting to make a quick buck off the Picasso they had just “found” in their grandmother’s attic. But it didn’t happen in the furniture department.
    â€œCould you send me a picture of your table?” I asked. “It’s hard to take anything to the next step if we don’t have a photo,” I explained.
    â€œTrust me. You should take this seriously because Nina has that table.”
    â€œCan you please just start by sending me a photo?” I asked, giving him my email address.
    â€œYes, I can send you a photo but don’t you want to come down here to Baltimore and see it? You’re about to sell a fake.”
    I was less than two weeks away from our sale. I was working fourteen hours a day and I still felt like I was three months from being ready. The last thing I was going to do was take a train down to Baltimore to see some flea market table someone was trying to pass off as a Hugh Finlay, a furniture maker that rarely fetched prices higher than the low six figures.
    â€œIf you could just send me a photo . . . that’s how we start everything in the auction world,” I repeated. “If we can’t see it, we can’t do much with it.”
    I let Richard go and spent the rest of the day and evening refreshing my email, but nothing from Baltimore came through. I happily let the call go as some petty, highly original criminal trying to make a buck and I set my mind back on Elizabeth’s sale. When I helped consign the Nicholas Brown I had a little bit of luck thanks to the tip. Jack had changed his mind a few times as the American economy continued to rapidly tank, but I’d paced him through that. He was a seller who was ready to sell. Elizabeth was different. Elizabeth’s estate was a very tough get but presented one hundred twenty-seven chances for historic sales.
    It wasn’t until three days later that I got the picture that Richard from Baltimore had promised me. It came to my Christie’s email address from his sister Nina along with a message saying she was absolutely positive that the one in the collection of Mrs. Adam R. Tumlinson must be a replica or a fake. But she was wrong. It wasn’t a piece that we’d known Elizabeth had for years, but we had inspected it in Texas and it was no mistake.
    We were now ten days from the sale, and it had taken them seventy-two hours to send me a photo. I refused to pay attention to these people. It was without question a Hugh Finlay stenciled pier table made in Baltimore in the early nineteenth century. There was no hole in the provenance on that piece. It had been in the Tumlinson family for generations and they had two other Finlay pieces, which could be traced to the same decade. One was a Federal mahogany sofa, which had been reupholstered. It was bought at auction in 2006 from a prominent family