The Trust by Tom Dolby Page A

All the lights on the property were off and the ground was frozen. After parking on the gravel driveway, Nick opened the front door with his key.
    “Home again,” Nick said as they stepped inside. The house was kept at a chilly fifty-five degrees in winter, and Phoebe shivered.
    “Ugh, I wish I could just flop into bed,” Phoebe said. “Do you want to start our search tomorrow? For whatever we’re looking for. I guess we really should start now.”
    “Oh my God,” Nick said. He stood in the central foyer facing the living room.
    “What?” Phoebe asked.
    Nick pointed to the space above the fireplace, and Phoebe looked up.
    The Jackson Pollock painting, the one Nick had mentioned his mother had purchased at Sotheby’s for ten million dollars, was gone.

Chapter Twenty-Two
    N ick sat with Phoebe in the living room, and they both looked up at the blank space above the fireplace where the Pollock had hung. There was nothing on the mantel, just a few family photos.
    “Is this what he wanted us to find?” Nick asked. “This isn’t what I would call finding something.”
    “More like the absence of something,” Phoebe said. “Maybe that’s part of the clue. Maybe we’re supposed to look for what isn’t there.”
    “So we’re looking for something that used to be there in the first place? That doesn’t make any sense.” He rubbed his temples. A headache was starting to come on.
    “Hey—more importantly: Should we tell your parents about the painting being gone?”
    “We don’t have to. The caretaker will see it on Monday morning. Remember, we aren’t even supposed to be here.”
    “Nick, they’re going to have police here eventually. They’ll see our fingerprints.”
    Nick felt nervous for a moment before he relaxed. “We’ll just say we thought it had been sent out for restoration. My mom is always saying that the frame needs to be cleaned.”
    “So what do we do now?”
    “Search the place?”
    They went through each room of the house, which was no easy feat, considering that it was a six-thousand-square-foot house with eight bedrooms and multiple public rooms. Luckily, because the house was built in the 1920s, it was not enormous in the way of newer houses in the area. Nick had always appreciated that; its size was manageable, and you didn’t need to run through every wing to find someone.
    The house was immaculately clean but had that musty smell from windows not having been opened in more than a week. New Year’s Eve would have been the last time his parents were here.
    After several hours of searching, however, they hadn’t turned up anything. It didn’t help that they had no idea what they were looking for.
    It didn’t help, either, that it was four o’clock in the morning.
    They went back to the living room and flopped down on the couches across from each other. “Your grandfather told you, ‘You’ll find everything you need at the beach,’” Phoebe said.
    “We have no idea, though, if he was in his right mind.”
    “Let’s think about this,” Phoebe said. “The one thing we’ve noticed is that the Pollock is missing. We don’t know if your grandfather moved it, but it’s all we’ve got to go on. So can we assume that this search has something to do with art?”
    Nick furrowed his brow. “Maybe.” He stood up and looked at the space above the fireplace where the Pollock had been. He examined the panel, slightly darker, where the painting had been hung. Nothing appeared unusual or out of place. He pushed the panel, to see if anything would happen. Nothing.
    Then Nick noticed something strange as his eyes ran over the photographs sitting on the mantel: while there had always been family photographs below the painting, they had now been switched out for specific ones. Every single picture of the Bell family was taken down in Palm Beach, where his grandfather lived during most of the year.
    “I feel so stupid,” Nick said, looking at the