Chapter 4: Everything Must Go

"Did you buy them?" I asked.

"No, ma'am. A man selling paintings out of a storage unit at night with no paperwork isn't selling his own paintings."

"They're his. He just swore to a judge he sold them last year."

Jubal took the pencil from behind his ear and tapped it against his palm.

"Then I'd say they're in that building," he said. "And he's in trouble."

I told my lawyer that night.

"Keep him talking," she said. "And sell your furniture."

Jubal set the sale for the next Saturday.

He spent four days on my warehouse floor with a pencil and a laptop, and his daughter after school with a box of price stickers.

"That's a nine-hundred-dollar sideboard," I told him on Wednesday.

"It's an eight-thousand-dollar sideboard. You bought it from somebody who didn't know what they had."

"I'm somebody who didn't know what I had."

He looked up from the drawer he was checking.

"I don't think that's true anymore," he said.

Then he went back to the drawer.

Saturday morning there were cars parked up the river road for half a mile.

Belle Meade had come to see what the mover's daughter had stripped out of the Talmadge house.

A dentist's wife bought my linen sofa and asked me, very quietly, if it was true about the assistant.

"It's true about the robe," I said.

She bought the matching chairs too.

Jubal worked the floor with a clipboard and a smile that made women pay full price and thank him for it.

His daughter followed him with the sticker box, announcing prices in a very serious voice.

At eleven, Opaline arrived.

She wore pale pink tweed and her pearls, and she brought two friends from the hospital foundation board.

She walked straight to the Steinway.

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