angels in the snow.
Read on for a special preview of
Paul Christopher’s next thriller,
Coming from Signet in January 2013.
If you were looking for a word to describe Peggy Blackstock’s mood as she walked down the strand in the seaside English town of Torquay, “bored” would have sprung to your lips, immediately followed by “If I see one more ye olde English pub advertising the best fish and chips in Torquay, I’m going to hurl.”
She’d been in town for two days, and there were still three more to go until Rafi’s World Archaeology Congress convention was over. She was already at her wit’s end. Being in Torquay was like being in Coney Island without Nathan’s, the Cyclone or the bumper cars. There were just as many people, but the sand on the few beaches was muddy and dirty, the English Channel water was freezing cold and most of the food tasted like library paste.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t interested in her husband’s work. In fact she was more than interested—she was fascinated. Rafi specialized in the archaeology of the Crusades in Israel and it took them both to dozens of sites from Jerusalem and Jaffa to Turkey and Turin, from Bosnia to Berlin and just about everywhere else in Europe. The Crusades had covered a lot of ground from the tenth century to the fourteenth century, and they had reached as far as Sweden in their scope.
On her far-flung trips with Rafi, Peggy had become an accomplished archaeological photographer, and she had landed more than enough freelance assignments, contributing pictures to the
But something was missing, and Peggy knew exactly what it was: she craved the adrenaline rush of the truly unknown. Since coming back from Africa and losing track of her cousin Doc, she’d missed the…excitement and adventure that seemed to follow the ex–U.S. Army Ranger. It had been like that even when she was a girl.
It was Doc who’d taught her not to be afraid of heights and had calmly and efficiently taught her the skills of rock climbing in the Adirondacks. It was Doc who’d also taught her to hunt and fish and use a gun.
It was their uncle Henry the professor who’d given Peggy her first camera and taught her how to use it, but it was Doc who’d given her the courage to reach the places where’d she’d taken the first photographs that really mattered to her: the summit of Mount Skylight, the fourth-highest mountain in the Adirondacks; at sunset, a lone gray wolf in the winter at Yellowstone; and a hibernating twelve-hundred-pound Kodiak bear in Alaska. It was Doc who’d started her on a lifelong quest for adventure, and somehow she knew the quest wasn’t over yet.
One thing was sure: no one was going to find the adventure of a lifetime on the main street of Torquay. So, at the next corner, she turned left, away from the sea, and began climbing a narrow residential street of low attached bungalow-style dwellings that climbed up a seriously steep hill. It was not the most likely path to any kind of adventure at all, but the kids in the Narnia books had found it through a cupboard door, and Harry Potter had found it on platform 9? in King’s Cross Station, so you never really knew, then, did you? Anyway, the exercise would do her good; she’d had one too many orders of ye olde fish and chips in the past few days.
There were a few shops on her way up the street; the English version of a 7-Eleven, with ads for fruity- flavored vodka coolers in the window. There was a hairstylist called British Hairways, where the customers under their dryers looked as though they were all in their eighties. And a prosthetic store called Lend You a Hand had a single bright pink artificial leg in an otherwise empty window. Peggy would probably find the Bates Motel around the next bend.
What she did find was Weatherby and Sons Auction House, a ragtag assembly of a plastered bungalow attached to something at the rear that might have been a two-story carriage house turned into a commercial garage and a third stumpy-looking building with a pair of firmly closed barn-sized doors.
Between the stumpy building and the garage lay a paved driveway that seemed to be doubling as a parking lot. At the end of the drive there was an overhead aluminum door, slid three-quarters open. The roll-up door had a sign over it that read AUCTION TODAY. The car in the parking lot was a Jaguar XKR convertible, this year’s model. The auction business was doing well by somebody. Peggy turned down the drive and ducked under the aluminum door.
The interior of the auction house was like the biggest, most chaotic yard sale in the world: rowboats sat in the rafters; chandeliers and harpoons were hanging from the beams; a stack of twisted narwhal tusks lay in one corner along with an equal number of ancient-looking bamboo fly rods and an enormous stuffed Scottish stag with a rack of eighteen-point antlers. The stag looked dusty, the glass eyes cloudy. Probably not a lot of buyers for stuffed giant Scottish stags in these days of fiscal responsibility. There was a stage at the front of the hall, with perhaps a hundred or so folding chairs in front of it, most of them filled with people waving numbered paddles around as they bid on one item after another. Easels were set up on the stage to display works of art. There were a movable display wall full of hanging musical instruments and several tables with smaller and medium-sized objects to be sold. The auctioneer stood at a podium in the center of the stage, and a crew of workers, male and female, carted things on and off the raised platform. An old man with grizzled stubble and thin hair slicked back with something that looked like Vaseline handed her a paddle and said, “There you go, dearie. Have fun.” Then he pointed her to an empty seat at the end of an aisle halfway to the auction stage. She took her seat and noticed that the number on her paddle was 666—not a particularly auspicious number for someone who’d shivered her way through all five of the
The items went by quickly: six Regency chairs for twenty-two hundred pounds, the lot; a Georgian silver porringer for a thousand; a Royal Winton circus jug for three hundred sixty pounds…. The list went on and on. Throughout every lot that went up, Peggy noticed that the paddle in the lap of the man beside her never twitched. He was in his fifties, with the high cheekbones and dark deep-set eyes of a Russian or a Slav. His hair was too long—well over his nape. But his salt-and-pepper beard was perfectly groomed, and his suit looked very expensive. The man’s hands were strong, well-manicured, but with the raw knuckles and the calluses of someone who had spent a lot of time outdoors. He certainly didn’t give the impression of someone who’d be interested in silver porridge pots. After fifteen minutes, he made a frustrated grunting sound, stood up and left.
The next lot was a hodgepodge of household effects from a man named Raleigh Miller, who, according to the auctioneer, had lived to the ripe old age of one hundred ten in a room at the back of the Hole in the Wall Pub on Park Lane for as long as anyone could remember. He would come down to the pub each evening for a bottle of Samuel Smith’s Imperial Stout and an order of fish and chips, both of which he took back to his room.
The room must have been sparsely furnished because there weren’t too many household goods being offered and even fewer being auctioned. The final lot was a small steel footlocker, padlocked and rusted shut with a faded first-class travel sticker that said RMSP
“You know anything about this old guy Miller?” Peggy asked as they went up the main aisle.
“He was a bit of a loon, I know. Least, that’s what my uncle told me.”
“Your uncle?”
“Bert. He’s one of the barmen at the Hole in the Wall.”
“Why did your uncle Bert think he was crazy?”
“He was forever getting newspapers, not proper English ones but foreign—the
