It didn't take much digging to find out how her husband died. A year after Patrick, he was found in bed, dead without a mark, without a suicide note, without a cause.

And Helen Boyle says, "How was your editor found?"

Out of her yellow and white purse, she takes a gleaming silver little pair of pliers and a screwdriver, so clean and exact they could be used in surgery. She opens the door on a vast carved and polished armoire and says, "Hold this steady for me, please."

I hold the door and she's busy on the inside for a moment until the door's latch and handle fall free and hit the floor at my feet.

A minute later, and she has the door handles, and the gilded bronze ormolu, she's taken everything metal except the hinges and put them in her purse. Stripped, the armoire looks crippled, blind, castrated, mutilated.

And I ask, why is she doing this?

"Because I love this piece," she says. "But I'm not going to be another one of its victims."

She closes the doors and puts her tools away in her purse.

"I'll come back for it after they cut the price down to what it cost when it was new," she says. "I love it, but I'll only have it on my own terms."

We walk a few steps more, and the corridor breaks into a forest of hall trees and hat racks, umbrella stands and coat racks. In the distance beyond that is another wall of breakfronts and armoires.

"Elizabethan," she says, touching each piece. "Tudor .. . East-lake .. . Stickley ..."

When someone takes two old pieces, say a mirror and a dresser, and fastens them together, she explains that experts call the product a "married" piece. As an antique, it's considered worthless.

When someone takes two pieces apart, say a buffet and a hutch, and sells them separately, experts call the pieces "divorced."

"And again," she says, "they're worthless."