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her.
    Joss stuck her head into the room. “The front is all locked up, nice and tight.”
    Gwen swung back the white board that concealed the wall safe. She inserted her key and spun the dial of the combination lock. “First thing tomorrow I’m firing Jerry,” she told Joss. “Then I’m going to put an ad in the help-wanted section.” The dial moved smoothly under her fingers.
    â€œYou can’t just fire someone out of the blue, can you?” Joss asked. As the day had gone on, her defense of Jerry had ebbed. “Can’t he take it to the employment board? What if something came up?”
    â€œAnd what, he couldn’t even call? Joss, he’s been late to one degree or another for seventeen of the twenty days he’s worked for us.”
    Joss raised her eyebrows. “You kept track?”
    â€œOf course I kept track. I’m an employer, that’s what you have to do. If he wants to protest, I can show cause.” Gwen spun the dial to its final position and opened the door.
    And stared in alarm.

2
    â€œD ID YOU OPEN THE SAFE WHILE I was gone?” Gwen’s voice sounded unnaturally loud in her ears.
    â€œNo.” Joss crowded up behind her to look at the stack of stamp albums in the safe. “What are you talking about?”
    â€œThe books have been moved. I always put them in the same way every time. Joss, you swear you haven’t touched anything?”
    â€œCross my heart.”
    Stay calm, Gwen ordered herself. Maybe she’d been careless the last time she’d unlocked the safe door. Maybe she hadn’t put things back the usual way. In her gut, though, she knew.
    Someone had been in the safe.
    She spilled the albums onto the desk, opened them with shaking fingers. There was no point in bothering with the blue books that held the store inventory or the green book that held some of her own acquisitions. They didn’t matter. Not now. She focused solely on the burgundy albums that held her grandfather’s collection—the books that held his treasures, his pride and joy, bits of his childhood.
    The books that held his retirement.
    Holding her breath, she opened one and flipped through to the back, made herself look.
    And her mouth went dry as dust. “They’re gone.”
    â€œWhat’s gone?”
    Gwen battled the wave of nausea that threatened to swamp her. “Grampa’s best stamps. The Blue Mauritius. The one-penny Mauritius. The British Guiana one-cent. And maybe more.” Definitely more, the voice of certainty whispered to her. She’d seen at least two other blank spots as she’d flipped through.
    Gwen squeezed her eyes tight shut and then opened them to stare at the empty squares. Why had her grandfather insisted on keeping his collection close at hand instead of safely in a bank vault? She knew his reasons, knew the joy he got from regularly looking at his holdings, but they didn’t outweigh the risk.
    And now her worst fears had come to pass.
    Joss stared at her. “Those were his big stamps, right? My god, what are we talking about—forty, fifty thousand?”
    â€œNot even close.” Gwen’s lips felt stiff and cold. “The last Blue Mauritius auctioned went for nearly a million dollars.”
    Â 
    H ALF AN HOUR LATER , G WEN stretched to ease the iron pincers of tension. She’d gone through every one of the books meticulously, recording what was missing.
    It was worse than she’d imagined.
    The four most important issues of her grandfather’s collection were gone: four nearly unique single stamps and one block of twenty, in aggregate worth some four and a half million dollars. The inventory books were missing another thirty to forty thousand dollars in more common, lower-value issues.
    â€œGrampa has other investments, right? This is just a part of what he’s got.” Joss didn’t ask but stated it a little desperately, as though saying it