The next morning Gina, or rather Lee, showed up at the Langham Museum as usual. In chatting with her fellow volunteers, she let it be known that she was nervous about spending further time at the museum.
“Actually,” she said, spouting words that just came to her from nowhere, “it’s my father. He heard about the theft yesterday and he absolutely freaked. Says he doesn’t want me here early in the morning or when it’s close to closing time.”
“Oh, no,” said one of her peers, “what are you going to do?”
Gina shrugged. “I’ll just change my hours. It won’t interfere with my classes at the community college. Anyway, today’s my last day working mornings.”
She hung around until about eleven-thirty, when the museum was busy with a number of school tours. Strolling casually through the rooms, Gina saw that, as she had hoped, all the employees and all the volunteers were busy. The security guards, too, were accounted for, occupied with a check of all the cameras in the building.
Gina made her way back to the break-room and picked up the backpack she’d carried every day of her ‘volunteer’ work.
With her back to the open door, she put the backpack on the table and unzipped it, taking out a couple of college-looking text books she’d picked up at the thrift store. With those on the table, Gina reached for the large bowl of candies. Plunging her hand into the mass of individually-wrapped goodies, she moved it toward the side of the bowl until she felt something solid—something that was not the interior of the plastic mixing bowl.
Feeling for the rim of the non-plastic-yet-solid thing, Gina’s fingers grasped the edge and, pausing only to listen and glance quickly over her shoulder, she pulled out the item.
There it was—the Woodland Bowl.
She brought it out at an angle, so the candies that were inside spilled into the larger plastic bowl. With a single swift move, Gina tucked the bowl into her bag, and quickly folded a sweatshirt around it. She then replaced the books in the backpack as well, carefully sandwiching the bowl between them, and let out a relieved sigh as she zipped the bag.
Gina glanced at the full bowl of candy and smiled. She turned and, leaving the break-room, made her way out of the museum for the last time.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Nick was finishing a meeting with a client when he saw Gina enter the outer office of Aston Security Consulting. He watched as she made her way to the small kitchenette to wait until he was free.
After walking his client to the door and having a quick word with Roy, Nick joined Gina and poured himself a cup of coffee from the small pot of simmering brew.
“You got it?” he asked, glancing at her backpack.
She nodded, then pointed to the coffee mug. “Is that lunch?”
Nick smiled ruefully. “Busy day, so... yes, it is. Come on.”
He led the way back to his office and gestured for her to sit before taking his own seat behind the desk. Reaching into a drawer, he pulled out a nutrition bar.
“That’s a little better,” Gina acknowledged.
“Okay, enough chit-chat,” Nick said with mock seriousness. “Let’s see the bowl.”
Gina opened her pack and removed the sweatshirt from between the books. Carefully she unfolded the soft fleece and brought out the bowl.
“Very nice,” Nick said approvingly as he eyed the two-thousand-year-old bowl. “So you didn’t have any trouble getting it out of the museum?”
“No, none at all. The place had been very thoroughly searched yesterday”—she couldn’t resist the minor sarcastic tone—“so nobody said a word as we all went about our business today. And retrieving this was my business.”
Nick shook his head when she told him where the bowl had been. “You’re apparently a believer in the old ‘hiding in plain sight’ thing,” he observed.
Gina shrugged. “It’s usually the best way, if it’s possible. And in this case, it was possible. I was originally thinking of putting it in one of the break-room cabinets, with some of the other bowls that have been left there over the years, but that might’ve been too obvious.”
“Probably,” he agreed with a smile, “not to mention somebody might have actually used it for something. As it was, lucky for you there was a big bowl of candy in the break-room.”
“Yeah, lucky,” she repeated. “Also lucky I had an extra mixing bowl and a five-pound bag of hard candies.”
He blinked at her. “You mean.... you’re the one who brought in the bowl and candy?”
She nodded. “My first day there. I wanted to be sure everyone liked me.”
“But—but you didn’t even work there! You weren’t a real volunteer!”
“True,” she agreed, “but nobody else knew that. As I told you, I simply avoided seeing the volunteer coordinator; she’s the only one who’d know I wasn’t official.”
“So did you know that first day that you were going to, uh, hide the bowl—this bowl—inside that other bowl?”
“No, not really. Like I said, I just wanted to act like I fit in. And be known. Usually in this type of situation I try to blend in and not be noticed, but this time it didn’t really matter. And after I’d been there a couple days and was coming up with my plan, and it occurred to me that I might have to stash the bowl for a while… I realized the bowl-within-a-bowl thing was the perfect way to go. Who knows, maybe on some unconscious level I did know all along that’s what I was going to do.”
“Pretty smart,” Nick acknowledged. Then he shook his head as if to clear it. “Okay, then. Anyway, getting back on point... I’ve laid some of the groundwork for the next phase of the plan. As you can see, the theft made the news.” He held up that morning’s Citizen-Observer; the front page below-the-fold featured a headline proclaiming ‘Baffling Theft at Langham Museum.’ The sub-headline read ‘Police: No Sign of Break-In.’
Tossing the paper back on the desk, Nick continued. “I reached out to some of the other small museum owners around the state, the ones who’ve been swindled by Heath, and told them about the theft. I hinted that it might have been an inside job at worst, or at the very least, a case of negligence on the part of the Langham Museum. And I asked if they’d come forward again with their grievances if Heath was implicated in some way—especially since they weren’t the only institution that had been conned by her.”
Gina showed her surprise. “You told them all that? And asked that? I’m surprised they talked to you.”
“Well,” Nick said with a mischievous grin, “they might have thought I was a news reporter.”
“Uh-huh. And why might they think that, I wonder?”
“Heaven only knows,” was his angelic reply. “But obviously I didn’t press them for answers or promises. I mainly wanted to plant the idea in their heads, let them know that they weren’t the only ones who got a raw deal from Ann Heath.”
“Sort of hint at the old safety in numbers thing, huh?”
He shrugged. “Something like that. One small-town museum or historical society might not be able to do much on its own, but three or five or seven of them together... those complaints will carry a lot more weight.”
“So now what? You’re fanning the flames of publicity and notoriety, but that’s just rumor. That can’t hurt Heath very much.”
Nick smiled. “No, you’re probably right. Which is why she’s going to get caught red-handed.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
