The Freight Crew Found A Court Order On The Studio Door

Mara called at five that afternoon.

The judge had signed a temporary order after reviewing our sworn statements. Ansel had to stop selling or moving the disputed archive. He also had to keep his records and allow a supervised count the next morning.

The court had set a hearing. I had posted a $1,000 bond, money Mara said could cover harm if the temporary order proved wrongful.

My van repair fund was getting thin.

At five forty the next morning, I parked outside the studio with Fenella. A sheriff's deputy arrived carrying the order. Mara followed with a woman named June Voss, who did estate inventories.

Ansel came out of the house in slippers.

"This is private property."

The deputy handed him the papers.

"You've been served, Mr. Bracken."

Ansel read the first page, then looked at me.

"You pledged a thousand dollars over some pots?"

"Over the right to count them."

A freight truck turned into the drive at six. Ansel walked toward it, but the deputy called him back.

The driver read the order and called his dispatcher. Then he waited by his truck, drinking coffee from a steel cup.

June put a numbered seal on the studio's side door. She photographed the lock before Ansel opened it.

"Nobody handles an item until I record it," she said.

"I've been doing auctions since before you had a driver's license," he told her.

"Then this should feel familiar."

Inside, the empty rack was full again.

Fenella stopped so sharply I almost stepped on her heel.

"They came back?" I asked.

Ansel folded his arms.

"You people made quite a story out of photography."

June began at 001. She read each number, checked the tied tile, and photographed the foot. I stood across the table with the August twelfth inventory.

For the first forty jars, the count matched.

Jar 041's tile lay in a carton under the bench. We found it by the stamped number and tied it back on after June recorded both pieces.

Then we reached 063.

Its color looked close to Grandma's dark ash green. Its shape did not.

"Stop there," I said.

Ansel let out a breath through his nose.

"Another crisis?"

I asked June to hold the jar toward the window.

"See those three rough points on the bottom?"

"Stilt marks," Fenella said.

"Grandma fired her archive jars on clean feet. She left that clay bare so it could sit on the shelf. This one had glaze all the way under it. It needed a three-point stilt."

"She changed her methods," Ansel said.

"She did. That's why she wrote them down."

The original inventory described 063 as straight-sided, with an unglazed foot and a small firing crack below the rim. This jar had a round belly and no crack.

It had a blue comma, though.

I bent close without touching it.

"That blue is on top of the clear glaze," I said. "The real marks were fired underneath."

June used a light and a magnifier. She wrote that it needed further examination. She didn't let me rub it or scrape it.

I liked her better for that.

We worked until nearly noon.

There were two hundred sixteen jars in the room. Eighteen failed the original descriptions. Their replacement numbers were paper labels pasted over older marks.

The remaining hundred ninety-eight matched.

"A complete count," Ansel said. "Exactly what I promised."

June slid the eighteen doubtful jars onto a separate tray.

"A count and an identification are different jobs."

Fenella picked up her notebook.

"I recognize those pots. Iona used them in her evening class. They sat in the sale cupboard."

"Can you prove that?" Ansel asked.

"You priced the whole box at ninety dollars. I remember thinking you'd finally been fair."

Mara asked him where the class cupboard stock sheet was.

He said his bookkeeper handled old stock.

She wrote down the bookkeeper's name and told him the order covered those records, too.

The freight driver left without loading anything. June sealed the archive room after we finished, and the deputy watched Ansel surrender his key for safekeeping under the order.

Outside, I sat on my van's step.

For years, a kiln that would not reach heat had been a problem I could solve with a meter, patience, and enough wire.

This problem had two hundred sixteen spaces, and eighteen of them were lies.

My phone buzzed.

Mara had forwarded a listing saved from Cedar Trace's website before it disappeared.

In the photograph, a straight-sided green jar stood beside a ruler. A tiny crack ran below its rim.

The caption said Private Collection, Sold.

I enlarged the picture. Beneath the foot, I could just read 063.