“Just keep talking to me, ma’am,” the operator urged.

“What should I talk about?” Olivia asked, her voice edgy. The only subject that came to mind was how quickly her life had changed in such a short time. Two months ago, she’d been on top of the game, Boston’s most successful antiques dealer. She travelled all over the country, searching out the finest American antiques for her shop. Her client list read like a Who’s Who of East Coast society. And she’d recently been named to the board of one of Boston’s most prestigious historical societies. There was even talk that she might be asked to appear on the public television show Antiques Caravan.

All this for a girl who’d grown up not on Beacon Hill, but in a working-class neighborhood of Boston. But she’d risen above her rather common beginnings, leaving her past far behind and creating a whole new identity for herself-a wonderful, exciting identity, filled with travel and parties and influential friends. And financial security. She had saved only one thing from her childhood-an interest in anything one hundred years old or older.

“My parents were antique fanatics,” she murmured to the operator, surrendering to the memory. “They used to haul me from auction to auction as a child, eeking out a living with a tiny little secondhand shop on the North End. We never knew where the next meal was coming from, never knew if we’d scrape together enough to pay the rent. It was frightening for a child, that uncertainty.”

“Don’t be frightened,” the operator said. “The police are on their way.”

“When I got older,” Olivia continued, “they turned to me for authentication and I became an expert in 18th- and 19th-century New England furniture makers. My parents never had a very good eye for fine antiques and when I was just out of high school, they decided to try the restaurant business, managing a truck stop off the interstate in Jacksonville, Florida.”