The crash from my backyard was loud enough to make the kitchen windows shake.
I dropped my coffee and ran toward the patio.
When I stepped outside, I saw a woman standing beside the fountain.
And at her feet was the most valuable thing my family had ever owned.
Broken.
Shattered into pieces.
For more than fifty years, the bronze statue had stood beneath the old maple tree.
My mother called her “the girl.”
She had always treated the statue as if it were another member of our family.
My father had bought it before I was born.
My grandparents had cared for it before him.
And after my parents died, I became the one responsible for keeping it safe.
I had never thought of it as valuable.
To me, it was simply part of home.
Until a museum curator called me six months earlier.
She had found an old photograph showing my grandfather standing beside the statue.
The photograph had been taken in 1952.
The curator asked me a strange question.
“Do you still have it?”
“Yes.”
“Are you certain?”
“I see it every day.”
She became very quiet.
Then she told me the truth.
The statue was believed to be an original work by Amelia Voss, a respected American sculptor from the early twentieth century.
Only a handful of authentic versions were known to exist.
One was in a museum.
Another belonged to a university.
Another had disappeared decades ago.
One had supposedly been destroyed in a warehouse fire.
And the fifth might have been mine.
If the museum's suspicions were correct, my family's old garden decoration could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Possibly more.
That was when strangers started appearing.
First came a dealer named Julian Cross.
He offered me $52,000.
I refused.
Then he offered more.
I refused again.
He became increasingly interested in the statue.
Too interested.
Then, one afternoon, I caught a woman photographing my garden through the fence.
She claimed she was working for an insurance company.
I asked which one.
She gave me a vague answer and left.
Later, the museum identified her.
Lydia Crane.
A freelance art inventory specialist.
And she had previously worked for Julian Cross.
That should have been enough to make me suspicious.
But I never imagined she would destroy the statue.
Until that morning.
I stared at the woman standing beside the wreckage.
“What did you do?”
She didn't answer.
Instead, she looked at the broken bronze and smiled.
Then she said something that made my blood run cold.
“You're going to have a lot of explaining to do.”
I looked down.
An orange-handled masonry hammer was lying beside the statue.
My hammer.
The one I kept in my garage.