Liam looked up at Jack. “I’ll hold it steady,” he said. “Three full turns, counterclockwise. Want to do the honors?”

Jack seized the smooth knob, felt the texture of the morning glory vines beneath his hand, and applied pressure. It did not budge.

He tried again. Still nothing. “I’m afraid of damaging it,” he said.

“It’s been sixty-five years,” Vivi said. “It’s bound to be stiff.”

He applied pressure, and felt a crack, a squeak. The leg began to turn. One time, two, three. Fragments scattered, but it came free.

The bottom part in his hand was hollow. Threads had been carved into it, caked with ancient, blackened wax. He tilted it, and a cylinder of parchment dropped out of the hollow. Ancient paper, yellow and brown at the corners. He held it gingerly in his hand, and passed it to Vivi.

“Here,” he muttered. “I’m afraid to hold the thing.”

“All this time,” Nancy whispered. “Right here. In Lucia’s table.”

Vivi accepted it and laid it on the table, gently loosening the roll. The pieces of paper were not large, but very brittle, threatening to crack. Vivi widened the flat space, pressing them against the table as she unrolled them. She stared for a long moment. When she lifted her face, her eyes were huge. “Oh, you guys,” she said. “This is…I think that this might actually be…oh, God, this is scary. I’m getting dizzy.”

“What?” Jack snapped. “Out with it, goddammit!”

“The big L,” Vivi said, staring first at Nell and then at Nancy. “Just look. At this sketch, of the angel. Look at that face. And look at this, the writing below it. That script. Backward.”

Nell and Nancy gasped. “No way,” Nancy whispered.

“I can’t believe it.” Nell’s voice choked off into a squeak.

“Who the fuck is the big L?” Jack roared, maddened.

Nell turned to him. “L as in Leonardo. As in, da Vinci.”

“Oh.” Jack closed his mouth abruptly.

There was a moment of dead silence. “I need a drink,” Liam said, turning toward the door.

“Bring the bottle back with you,” Duncan called after him.

A few restorative swallows of fine single-malt Scotch took the edge off their collective freak-out, and a half hour later they were all sprawled on the couches grouped around the coffee table in Liam’s living room, still stunned. Staring at the roll of parchment that sat in the middle of the table, as if it were an unexploded bomb.

Which, in a sense, it was. After all. It had almost gotten all six of them killed, at one time or another.

“We have to tell the press,” Nancy said. “Get it on AP. All over the Internet. If the sketches are no longer secret, and that bastard knows that it’s in the hands of experts getting authenticated, there’ll be no more reason for him to attack us. No profit to it.”

“Wrong,” Vivi said, regretfully. “That would be true if you were dealing with normal, reasonable criminal buttheads, but John is special. He’s totally over-the-edge insane. I don’t think John even cares about the money anymore. He’s just pissed. He wants payback. He wants blood.”

“So we’ll be looking over our shoulders for the rest of our lives?” Nancy flared. “I am so sick of it!”

“One thing’s for sure,” Liam said. “I will not have that thing in my house overnight. I’ve lost enough sleep lately.”

“It’s been in your house for weeks of nights,” Nell reminded him.

Liam gave her an eloquent look and tossed off another swallow.

“I’ll take it,” Vivi offered. “My friend Jill has a big rare-book and antiquarian gallery in the city. She’ll be able to tell us how to take care of it and get it authenticated. And how to find a safe place to store it. Somebody lend me a phone. I’ll call her.”

Vivi wandered into the kitchen to make her call, and Jack listened to the animated rise and fall of her voice as she told her librarian friend the crazy tale. He felt beaten down, exhausted. Scared. Impressed about the famous art and the big L, for sure. Very cool, zowie and all that, but only a tiny part of him really gave a shit. It was only paper, after all.

He was far more focused on the danger that bastard John posed to the living, breathing, beloved Vivi. And her sisters, of course.

Vivi came bouncing out, and tossed Nell’s phone back to her. “It’s all set up. Jill about had a stroke. She’ll make arrangements for us for authentication, and she can store the sketches in her rare-book vault.”

“The sooner you get rid of them, the happier I’ll be,” Liam said.

Nancy gave him a soothing kiss. The guy looked unsoothed.

Vivi was holding up the necklace to her sisters. “Should we detach these again? Do you want your necklaces back now?”

Nell and Nancy looked at each other. Nell took it from Vivi’s hand, flipping the lever to retract the three planes with the miniscule writing. “Not yet,” she said. “Let’s stay united. When this is sorted out, we’ll get the chains fixed and wear them again. For now, you keep it, okay? Like a talisman.”

There were tears, at that point, and group hugs. Jack averted his eyes, until Vivi’s voice caught his attention. “Nancy, can I borrow your Jetta to drive into the city?” she asked.

Jack’s muscles seized up. “What? You’re going to just stick the sketches in your purse? Carry them right out on the street?”

“I’ll put them carefully into the table leg where they’ve resided for sixty-five years, put the leg into a big shopping bag. No one will know they’re there,” she soothed. “We’ll all breathe easier when those sketches are safe in a vault.”

“I’ll breathe easier when that son of a bitch is dead,” Jack said.

Vivi kissed the top of Jack’s head. “Afterward, we’ll drive out of the city. Find ourselves a hotel, okay? If Nancy can spare the car.”

“Sure, but it’s kind of unpredictable,” Nancy warned. “The window in the back’s come loose, so don’t even try to roll it all the way up. It got smashed in by crazed crackheads one too many times.”

“Can’t be more rickety than my van was,” Vivi said, wistfully. “My poor drowned van. I owe that van. It gave its life for me.”

Jack’s urge to fight drained away. Look at him. Pussywhipped as they came. Following that chick around like a panting hound, doing exactly as he was told. Jesus. Still, the thought of a night in absolute privacy with her alone in a hotel room was too inviting to resist.

He wanted to have that talk that she had promised him. To thrash things out between them, so he could relax, and buy her a goddamn engagement ring already.

He wanted to close the deal. Now.

But his pussywhipped patience reached its end when he realized that she intended to stop at Lucia’s house in Hempton on the way. “There’s something I need to pick up there,” she insisted.

“At a time like this? What in holy hell could be so important?”

“It’s a secret!” She frowned at him. “You’ll understand later! Now just take this exit, turn to the right at the bridge, and stop arguing!”

He snarled obscenities as he flicked on the turn signal, and guided Nancy’s battered, coughing little car off the highway, following Vivi’s directions to the quiet street where Lucia’s house was located.

He jerked to an angry stop in front of it. “So?”

“So what? So thank you,” she said primly. “You’re very obliging. So polite, too. Do you want to wait here while I run up and get it?”

“Fuck no. You think I’ll let you go into a dark, abandoned house all alone?” He pulled out his gun. “Bring those goddamn sketches.”

“As if I’d leave them in a car,” she scoffed. “Let alone one with the back window held together with duct tape.”

Jack kept hold of her arm. The street was quiet at this hour, just a few of the houses lit, the bluish flicker of televisions here and there. But his senses were buzzing, his hairs rising. No way could anyone know they were here—unless Lucia’s house itself was watched. But who would watch an empty house? For weeks?