“All of that, yes. Fortunately, I have very competent staffs in the galleries, and the exhibits that are currently running were set up before I got distracted by your great-great-grandmother and her glorious hidden stash of art. So I’m really concentrating on the book mostly. I’m almost finished, but I don’t want to rush it. I want it to be good and I want it to be accurate. I want Carolina’s spirit to show through.”

“Sounds like you’re getting to know the old girl quite well.”

“I really feel as if I am. The more I read, the more I think she was a very modern woman trapped in an archaic world.”

“Nice subtitle.”

“Hmm.” Carly wrote down her words in the margin of her notebook before she forgot them. “Maybe. Thanks for the idea.”

“Don’t mention it. Gotta run. Got an early date with the alarm clock. Send me your list whenever, and I’ll see what I can dig up for you.”

The ink on Carolina’s list was faded and hard to read, so Carly photocopied it then scanned it into her computer. She enlarged and darkened the text before sending it to Ellie, who probably hadn’t expected to receive it that quickly. But Carly was compelled to get that phase of the project moving, lest it weigh on her mind until it was in Ellie’s hands. The job done, she sat back at her desk and picked up the journal.

“So, let’s see what other surprises you have in store for me, Carolina.” Carly rested her feet on the desk and crossed her ankles. “What other secrets have you been hiding for the past hundred or so years …”

Working on the effects of caffeine, Carly read for several more hours before falling asleep at the desk. When she finally awoke, every part of her body was cramped. Upon standing, she found her left leg numb from having sat with it under her for all that time. She stretched and flexed until she could walk without stumbling.

Through the French doors of the study, she could see the first pale colors of dawn. She unlocked the doors and stepped out onto the patio. The air was still, heavy with humidity, and saturated with the heady fragrance of honeysuckle mingled with rose. She inhaled deeply, then walked on bare feet to the edge of the stone wall that surrounded the patio. The only sound was the waterfall that overlooked the pool. She lowered herself onto one of the lounge chairs and leaned back to watch the stars as their last light flickered before disappearing with the dawn. Tired but still buzzed, in her mind she arranged, then rearranged Carolina’s paintings on the walls of her Manhattan gallery for what was probably the fiftieth time.

While she’d earlier professed to her mother that she no longer felt a need to prove herself, in her heart, Carly knew that wasn’t quite true. She was well aware that many in the art world considered her a lightweight, a wannabe player with deep pockets behind her. Armed with her degrees and her parents’ money, she’d boldly opened the gallery in Tribeca when she was twenty-five years old, but she’d heard the talk then, and sometimes she still heard a whisper here and there. Her petite size and long blond hair had given rise to a host of snarky comments about “Alice in Wonderland using her daddy’s money to take on the big boys.”

It had taken several years before she’d been taken seriously, but these days, there didn’t seem to be as much comment on her appearance as there once had been. She’d worked hard to establish relationships with artists whom she considered up-and-comers, treating them as important long before they became relevant, and, in doing so, had a long list of now-prominent artists who would deal only with her. She had not been unaware of the presence of other gallery owners at the last of her several openings. The word on the street was that Carly Summit had a knack for finding and cultivating the artists who would become the next big thing. Her reputation was flawless, yet she knew that more than one rival turned green with envy every time she announced a new showing for an artist they’d hoped to exhibit.

“Well, tough,” she muttered. She’d earned her good name the hard way. Yes, her parents had fronted the money for her galleries—she’d never tried to deny that—but she’d paid them back in full. She was pretty sure that there were some who still believed that Patrick and Roberta still wrote the checks, but there was nothing Carly could do about that. Still, her success and her reputation aside, she sometimes felt that she had to work her butt off to prove that she was the real deal.

Which was why, she acknowledged, Carolina Ellis now dominated her days and nights. Once Carly announced her find and her plans to introduce the long-hidden paintings to the public, no one would ever again be able to question her legitimacy.

It had taken her a long time to admit that bankrolling the European galleries had been part of her efforts to be taken seriously—a longer time still to recognize that many in the international art world viewed her actions as those of an amateur, someone with more money than good sense, a desperate attempt to make a big splash in that very big pool. While she’d done well with those investments, it was time to focus on her real passion—American women artists of the past century. Carolina Ellis would be the first of what Carly hoped would be a long line of fine women painters whose works would be displayed and brought to prominence by Summit Galleries.

She yawned, closed her eyes, and with visions of long walls filled with glorious art dancing in her head, slept until midmorning.

Chapter 2

FORD Sinclair eased his rental car onto the approach to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel in Virginia Beach and reduced his speed. It had been several years since he’d made this crossing, and he wanted to savor it. The bridge—named one of the Seven Engineering Marvels of the Modern World—had been a favorite destination when he was a young boy and his father was still alive. Some days, they would sneak away from the family’s inn, just the two of them, and head south in the old Bay Rider down through Virginia’s Pocomoke Sound. His father would drop anchor off Raccoon Island, where they’d sit for a while and watch the cars passing over the northbound span of the bridge-tunnel—which was still new back then, and attracted attention like a shiny new toy—then they’d head back into Maryland waters, where they’d spend the rest of the day fishing. They’d go home, more often than not sporting a farmer’s tan along with a cooler of whatever had been running that day, rockfish or sea bass or croakers. Once his dad had helped him bring in a tuna that had given him—at ten—the fight of his life. The memory was so vivid that whenever Ford dreamed of that day, he still felt the rod biting into his hands as he struggled to hold it.

The bridge-tunnel itself was, in fact, a marvel. A little over seventeen miles long from shore to shore, it was exactly what the name implied: a series of bridges and tunnels that crossed the Chesapeake Bay where it joined the Atlantic Ocean, connecting Virginia Beach to Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

Ford stopped at the first of the four bridges and pulled into the parking area. He walked to the rail that overlooked the water, and from there he could see for miles. Below, where the Chesapeake and the Atlantic met, the water was still dark and disturbed from last night’s storm. In the distance, a large navy vessel headed into port at Virginia Beach, and far out in the ocean, another made its way toward the bridge. Noisy gulls circled overhead, hoping for a handout from the sightseers on the pier, while others swooped and soared over both sides of the bridge. Ford closed his eyes and inhaled the scent of salt water, and held it in his lungs for a few seconds before letting it out in a whoosh. Chesapeake born and bred, he hadn’t realized how much he had missed the Bay’s scent. In that moment, he couldn’t wait to be home. He climbed back into the car and continued his trek north.

The radio reception was spotty along the back roads—some things, he thought, never changed—so he could only pick up a country station. He’d been away too long to know who was singing; he only caught enough to know it was a girl with a pretty voice singing about vandalizing the SUV that belonged to her cheating boyfriend. He turned it off when the static drowned her out, and drove in silence, the windows up and the air conditioner blasting against the heat and humidity of the late-summer afternoon.

Before he knew it, Ford was crossing the bridge over the Choptank River and was halfway to Trappe, where he and his high school buddies had proven their manhood by spending the night in the haunted White Marsh Cemetery and living to tell about it. Even now, memories of that night made him grin. They’d been so cocky, all five of them, until they heard the faint tinkling of a tiny bell borne on a breeze around three in the morning. They spent the rest of the night wide-awake, huddled in the car, windows closed and the doors locked, but still bragged that they’d lasted the night because they didn’t drive back out through the cemetery gates until dawn.