“What? Is that our backup?” Sadie turned to Nick. “You had the same idea?”
“Sure. Jones-Ebbing was a dead giveaway back there, sweating and jittery. All the signs of deception. In fact, he had recently become a focus of our inquiry.”
“That’s what you were doing when you made those phone calls?” Sadie didn’t wait for him to answer. “Then why did you play dumb behind the lion?”
“For the look on your face now.” Nick smirked. “Besides, you wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise.”
They met the cops at the foot of the stoop and let them lead the way. Jones-Ebbing opened the door, sputtering with confusion, and tried to protest as they pushed their way in. Down the hallway, Sadie spotted a figure running to the back of the town house. “It’s Robin!”
One of the policemen took off after her, while the other remained nearby.
Jones-Ebbing sat down hard on the couch, staring at the Tamerlane on the coffee table in front of him. Nick picked it up and handed it to Sadie. “Let’s not lose it this time, please.”
She was about to answer as Robin was led out—kicking, screaming, and wigless—to a police car.
This crook, this thief, couldn’t possibly be the same woman who’d sat in Lonnie’s apartment and comforted Sadie after the loss of her mother. Who’d taken such care with Valentina. It seemed impossible.
“Thank God you got her, she’s an absolute criminal for what she’s done.” Jones-Ebbing rose to his feet. “Can I get you a cup of coffee, or anything stronger? I could sure use a drink.”
The gall of this man. “No thanks, I think we have bigger things to discuss,” said Sadie.
“I assure you, I had no idea who she was,” Jones-Ebbing said. “This woman turned up at my door, showed me the book, and asked if I’d like to purchase it from her. I pretended to be interested so I could secure it for the library. Then you turned up. Well done. Great teamwork.”
“Is that how it went down?” asked Nick.
“Of course. I was waiting for her to leave, and my next call was to Dr. Hooper, to give him the good news.”
“You’re on the board of the library. Why would she approach you?” Sadie wanted to keep him talking, see if he could be forced into a corner.
“I’m quite well-known in the rare book world, of course.”
“And what if we go through your own collection?” Nick pointed to the endless bookshelves. “I wonder what else we might find.”
“You’re welcome to examine my shelves.”
“We might also want to show Mr. Jones-Ebbing’s photo to the owner of J&M Books,” suggested Sadie. “I’m sure he’s eager to throw someone else under the bus.”
At that, it was as if the man deflated. He sank back on the couch, head in his hands. “She approached me, I swear.”
Nick motioned for Sadie and the policeman to hang back, let him handle the questioning. “Robin came to you with the idea to steal the books? It makes a difference, you know, if you weren’t the one who initiated the idea.”
He gave a tentative nod.
“Did she tell you what books she was going to take?”
Jones-Ebbing looked at the policeman, then back at Nick. When he finally spoke, the words poured out of him in a childish whine. “I never had any idea what she was going to turn up with. Until last night, when she said she was going to try for the Tamerlane, but I didn’t believe her. I knew it had been missing for decades.”
Something about his confession didn’t ring true to Sadie. He was underplaying his part in the whole scheme, she was certain.
“What about the folio?” asked Nick. “The torn page?”
Jones-Ebbing went pale. “I would never have condoned ripping a page out. Macabre, to have done that.”
“And the others you brought downtown to J&M Books to be sold.” It was a statement, not a question.
“I had to.”
“Had to?”
“Money trouble. Keeping up appearances was becoming difficult.”
The damage he’d done, the stupidity, riled Sadie. All for appearances’ sake.
At the police station, Robin sat on a bench, handcuffed, looking as small and waifish as possible, her eyes huge, but all that changed when she spotted Sadie. She practically spit on the floor as they neared, morphing from Little Orphan Annie to Bonnie Parker in one fell swoop. Remarkable, really.
“Who are you?” asked Sadie.
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
Nick intervened. “Enough. You can’t talk to her right now.”
Sadie reluctantly turned away.
A week later, Nick got word that the district attorney had decided against going after Robin for kidnapping. Robin had insisted that Valentina had followed her into the library without her knowledge, that she hadn’t held her against her will, which was corroborated by Valentina’s story. However, Robin was charged with endangerment of a minor, and accepted that charge as well as those of the book thefts. Part of her agreement was that she explain how she pulled the thefts off.
Sadie met Nick at his company’s space in the Grace Building overlooking Bryant Park along Forty-Second Street. A receptionist directed her to his private office, which offered a stunning view of the library. “How convenient,” she said, taking the seat he offered. “I’m surprised you didn’t have a telescope set up to watch the goings-on through the windows.”
“Don’t think it didn’t occur to me.”
“Tell me everything she said.”
“Robin’s family history is pretty awful,” he said. “She was abandoned by both parents and put into the foster care system in northwestern Massachusetts. Then she and her sister were separated from each other. As a teenager, she got involved in a program that placed at-risk youths in local businesses, in part-time jobs, and worked in a bookstore for a few years before heading to a community college.”
“And that’s where she got to know about rare books?”
“Looks like it. At some point, though, she was caught razoring maps out of rare atlases at Amherst’s library. She’d said she needed the money to pay for her tuition and, since it was her first offense, was given probation.”
If only Robin had been handed a harsher punishment back then, she might have been thwarted early on.
“How did she meet Jones-Ebbing?”
“Turns out he has a summer home up in western Massachusetts, and it was there that they first connected. Eventually, they began working together, stealing from estate sales and bookstores. It was a low-key racket until Jones-Ebbing was asked to join the board of the library and they hit the mother lode.”
Nick had also learned that Robin had specifically targeted Sadie and Lonnie when they first met, the day that Valentina had fallen in the playground. The young twins she said she was with, it turned out, weren’t even her charges. She’d been following Lonnie and Sadie for some time, hoping to ingratiate herself into their lives.
“I don’t understand the connection, though. Why us?”
“She knew that the Tamerlane had been stolen by your family at some point, but she wouldn’t say how she got that information. She’s protecting someone, I’m sure. In any event, she figured you were the missing link. Once she landed the job as babysitter, she’d listen in on the extension whenever you and Lonnie spoke. That was how she figured what books to take, and what sent her into the old apartment looking for the Tamerlane, hoping to find it before you did.”
“How exactly did she get around the library, not to mention in and out?” asked Sadie.
“She’d hide out in one of the spiral staircase anterooms in the Reading Room until the library closed, then take the dumbwaiter from there to the stacks in the basement level. She’d exit via the fire escape hatch under Bryant Park, which opens out beneath some shrubs. Apparently, even once, a cop walked by, and she just pretended like she was homeless, sleeping under a bush. He didn’t blink an eye.”