“The interesting thing is, why did Greeley show up here, just now?”

Wilma nodded. Their order arrived, and they were silent for a while. Charlie said, when her first pangs of hunger were appeased, “When Mavity called this morning to ask what time they should be at your place, she sounded really distressed. She said she’d kicked Greeley out, called the station and gotten a restraining order. She said he’d been so drunk, so loud that she didn’t have a choice. I let her talk it out, or try to.

“She really rambled,” Charlie said, “not at all like Mavity, said she was so embarrassed, the way he behaved in front of her friends. She confessed she’d gone through Greeley’s suitcase, she was embarrassed about that. She said he had some kind of little gold idol, an ugly little man. She called it a devil, said it gave her the shivers. Sounded like those museum copies that Greeley’s ex-wife brings back from her trips. But Mavity said this was far heavier. She said she’s looked at those, and they don’t weigh half what this did…”

Wilma had stopped eating. “Those little pendants that Sue brings back for the South American shop.” She was silent for a long time, looking at Charlie, and thinking. “Charlie, on the way home, let’s swing by the library. It won’t take a minute, I’ll just run in.”

Charlie nodded. Wrapping half her sandwich in her paper napkin, and asking for the bill, she quickly paid it, gulped her tea, and rose, picking up the cardboard box filled with the Bakery’s famous desserts.

They were back home at Wilma’s twenty minutes later, Wilma loaded down with half a dozen heavy coffee-table books on pre-Columbian art, Charlie carrying the bakery box. Pushing in through the front door, they smelled fresh coffee. It was not until the five of them had finished coffee and the desserts that Wilma sat down with Mavity in the living room surrounded by library books. Getting Mavity settled with the heavy books, Wilma thought, amused, that she’d set aside the next few days to be alone and quiet, to enjoy a little recuperative R and R, and instead, here she was, digging into clues, unable to leave the puzzle alone-every bit as curious as the three cats.

In the library, as she’d hurried toward the stacks, one of her coworkers had stopped her and started laying on the sympathy about her “ordeal,” asking nosy questions about the kidnapping. You could keep nothing secret in a small town. Little dumpy Nora Wahl had told her with great authority that what she needed to do “right now,” was to “get right out with your friends again, Wilma. Do things, go places, don’t stay shut up in the house brooding. Go out among people right away, get your mind off all that trouble, keep busy and you’ll soon forget it.”

Wilma had told Nora curtly that that wasn’t the way to heal anything, to try to forget it and hide from it. That that wasn’t the way her mind worked, thank you. That what she needed was a little privacy. And she had headed into the stacks, leaving the library assistant startled into unaccustomed silence.

Now, sitting on the couch next to Mavity, with Charlie on the other side, she watched the little grizzle-haired woman leaf through color photographs of gold pendants and gold ceremonial artifacts that had been dug from ancient graves.

“Ugly,” Mavity said. “But…I don’t know…” She looked up at Wilma. “They hold you, don’t they? Do you think they’re ugly?”

Charlie said, “I think they’re fascinating, strong. But maybe that’s an acquired taste. The faces are ugly, but the work itself…”

“Yes,” Mavity said. “I think I see.” She studied Charlie. “You’re the artist, you know about these things. These were made by ancient Indians?”

“Yes, with really simple tools. The whole of that continent was so rich with gold, great veins of gold that they could just dig out. When the Spanish conquered those people and killed them, they took their beautiful gold sculptures and melted them down, destroyed thousands upon thousands of these pieces, casting them into Spanish coins.”

“But how did Greeley…?”

“His is most likely a copy,” Wilma said. “The museums make copies, to sell.”

“It was so heavy,” Mavity repeated. “So very heavy, for such a little thing.”

“If it is gold,” Wilma said, “it was illegal to bring it out of the country. In Panama, it’s illegal even to own real gold huacas, unless you register them. You can’t sell them. Only the Panamanian government, and the museum of Panama, can legally own them.”

“Then if it is gold, where could he…? Oh, he didn’t steal it, from a museum! Greeley isn’t that clever.”

Charlie said, “Would there be more? Would he have more of them?”

Mavity’s eyes widened. “Greeley…Greeley isn’t some international thief like you read about, able to get into a museum.” She looked hard at Charlie, and at Wilma. “That’s just not possible.”

“We’re guessing a lot here,” Wilma said. “But…maybe not a museum. ‘The most recent grave discovered,’” she read, ‘was found less than a hundred years ago.’” She looked up at Mavity. “People stole gold artifacts from it, before the Panamanian government found out and stopped the thefts.” She scanned the columns again, then, “No one knows where those pieces ended up. Possibly, it says, in private collections.”

“But,” Mavity said, “if Greeley stole something so valuable, even from a private collection…” She shook her head. “My brother’s just a petty thief. I don’t think he’d know how to go about that kind of sophisticated theft.”

“Maybe Greeley and Cage together?” Wilma said. “Cage might be capable of that, if he planned carefully.”

Mavity sat back, marking her place in the book that lay open on her lap. But then, leaning forward again, caught almost beyond her will by those riches, she read aloud the description of a golden garden in ancient Peru, a garden paved in gold, with life-size gold corn growing on gold stalks, life-size gold sheep and their lambs, huge gold jars filled with emeralds, full-size gold women; she read of gold fountains with running water where gold birds bathed, and there were even gold spiders, other gold insects, and gold lizards.

“Like a fairy tale,” she said. “Such wealth seems impossible. To even imagine…Oh my, how valuable even that little devil must be, if it’s real. And how many centuries old?”

“Maybe five centuries,” Wilma said, “or less. Some were made later.”

“I don’t think,” Charlie said, “the Indian cultures had devils. They had underworld men, but I think the idea of the devil came with the Spaniards, with the Christian religion.”

Wilma nodded. “And the native religions incorporated the Christian devil into their own beliefs-but those underworld figures looked like devils. Dulcie said Cage has masks with devil faces hanging on the living room wall. I think those are more common. After Christianity was introduced, the Mexicans and many other cultures made devil masks of…Oh, painted papier-mâché or wood. Masks for festivals and holidays.”

Charlie said, “Would that be why Cage kidnapped you, because he did have such a treasure, and someone stole it while he was in prison?”

Mavity said, “And Greeley has at least one.”

Wilma put her arm around Mavity. “If Greeley stole from Cage, why would he search the Jones house? We don’t know that Greeley stole even that one little figure.”

“So heavy,” Mavity repeated, her little wrinkled face pulled into lines of concern. “So very heavy when I picked it up. And the way the metal felt…Warm and heavy, not like some bit of cheap jewelry…”

It was not until Mavity had left, she and the two younger women driving off in the blue van with Charlie’s logo on the side, that Charlie said, “How much of this do Dulcie and Joe know? And where is Dulcie? I haven’t seen her all morning. Clyde said that when you didn’t come home last night, Dulcie was a basket case. So where is she now? I’d think she’d be staying close.”