Excerpt
"The collection is this way."
His tone was dry and not particularly welcoming.
Standing before her in the parlor, he gave her the chills. His gray reptilian eyes showed no emotion, and his long face seemed cut from ivory. His right hand was sunk deep in the pocket of his night-blue blazer and refused to budge--not even to greet her.
George Gaudin had been Edmond Magni's personal assistant until a week ago, when, somewhere in Peru, Magni had mysteriously dropped dead--for the second time in Marion's life.
The first time, her mother was the one to announce the news. "He died in a plane crash," she had told Marion. It was a lie. In truth, her husband had abandoned his family and his given name, Jean Spicer, and had assumed a new identity.
From the age of three, Marion had gotten by with- out him, believing all those years that her father was dead, without so much as a photo to cling to. Not a single picture of him could be found in their home. And every time she asked her mother to share a story, an anecdote, a memory, the woman would retreat into a silence or fly into a fit that could only be remedied if she isolated herself in her bedroom and slept.
Marion stopped asking questions.
Now, thirty-three years later, out of the blue, an executor had informed her that her father hadn't beendead all those years. He had just made a new life for himself, and she would be inheriting--among other things--one of the greatest collections of pre-Columbian art in the world, valued at over forty million euros. Of course, the inheritance had certain stipulations. Nothing came that easy for Marion.