“There are stress marks beneath the surface.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means the statue was weakened before it was struck.”
My stomach tightened.
“Someone prepared it for destruction.”
Elaine nodded.
“Exactly.”
The police reopened the scene.
This time they looked for evidence instead of a convenient story.
They found a small fragment of industrial adhesive beneath the fountain.
Then another.
And then something even more important.
A tiny fiber caught on the statue's broken base.
It wasn't from my clothes.
It wasn't from my gloves.
It matched the lining of Lydia Crane's jacket.
Suddenly, the woman who claimed she had been an innocent witness became the center of the investigation.
But she had anticipated that possibility.
She had another story.
She claimed she had entered my garden because she believed I was about to destroy the statue myself.
She said I had become angry after learning its value.
She told police I had been trying to create an insurance claim.
The accusation was absurd.
But it was carefully designed.
The fake evidence was supposed to make me look greedy.
The hammer made me look violent.
The glove made me look careless.
The insurance theory made me look dishonest.
And Lydia was positioning herself as the innocent person who had “discovered” the crime.
Then investigators found my old family notebook.
It contained the original purchase record for the statue.
My grandfather had purchased it from the Channing estate in 1951.
The notebook described it as an Amelia Voss garden figure.
That proved our family had owned the sculpture long before Lydia or Julian Cross knew about it.
But there was another entry.
One I had never noticed.
My grandfather had written:
Do not sell until the museum confirms the provenance.
That sentence changed everything.
My grandfather had apparently known the statue could be important.
The family had simply forgotten.
And someone else had discovered the secret.
That someone was Julian Cross.
Investigators examined his business records.
They found payments to Lydia.
Large payments.
They were disguised as consulting fees.
But the dates told the real story.
The first payment came shortly after the museum contacted me.
The second came after I rejected Cross's offer.
The third arrived two days before Lydia was caught photographing my garden.
Then came the payment made the morning before the statue was destroyed.
The police obtained a warrant.
They searched Cross's office.
Inside a locked cabinet, they found photographs of my statue.
Dozens of them.
Close-ups.
Measurements.
The base.
The casting marks.
Even photographs of the inside of my garage.