Then I started digging.
Public filings showed a company called North Road Holdings, registered under Colleen’s name four months before our wedding. It bought estate items at low prices and resold them. She had never mentioned it once.
Sandra called the gallery in Dallas that was advertising a Spanish silver monstrance for $38,000. The manager sent over its invoice. The seller was Whitmore Estate Services.
The original owner was a seventy-nine-year-old widow named Agnes Pomeroy in Georgetown. When I called her, she told me a polite young man named Curtis had come to her house twice.
“He said Mr. Hale had reviewed everything personally,” she said. “He said you were very well respected.”
“My husband, Walt, bought it in Seville in 1961,” she said. “On our honeymoon. I thought twelve hundred dollars sounded low. But who was I to argue with an expert?”
I told her the truth: that I’d never been to her house, never seen her monstrance, and never signed anything with her name on it.
