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“Send her in.”

Charlotte Falkenrath Whitcombe enters my office less than a minute later.

She is somewhere in her sixties, perhaps older, with silver-blond hair cut neatly above her shoulders and the kind of understated clothes that usually cost considerably more than anything designed to announce their price. Her navy trousers, cream silk blouse and small diamond earrings are immaculate without being showy, and she carries a slim leather portfolio instead of a handbag.

I step around my desk and offer my hand.

“Mrs. Whitcombe, I’m Blaire Wilson,” I say.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Charlotte, please,” she replies as she shakes my hand. “Thank you for seeing me on relatively short notice.”

“Of course. Please, have a seat.”

She settles into one of the chairs across from my desk while I return to mine. There is nothing nervous about her, but she takes a moment before opening the portfolio she has brought with her.

“I suspect this is going to sound more complicated at first than it actually is,” Charlotte says.

“That’s usually how these things begin,” I reply.

A slight smile touches her mouth. “Good. Then perhaps I came to the right person.”

She removes several documents and places a photograph on top of them before sliding the small stack across my desk.

The painting in the photograph is immediately recognizable as German Expressionist, although not one I have seen in person. A woman stands beside a tall window with one hand resting against the frame, her body rendered in sharp planes of blue, ochre and muted red. There is something almost severe about the composition until I look at the woman’s face.

“Elsa Reinhardt,” I say.

Charlotte nods. “Woman at the Window. Nineteen twenty-eight.”

I pick up the photograph for a closer look.

“I know the work.”

“I thought you might.”

“It hasn’t been publicly sold in a long time.”

“No,” Charlotte says. “It hasn’t.”

I set the photograph down and look at her.

“What would you like me to do?”

Charlotte folds her hands in her lap.

“The painting belonged to my great-grandparents in Berlin. My family left Germany in 1938. Before they were able to leave, a number of assets were sold under circumstances that would be described much differently today than they were at the time.”

“Including this painting?”

“Yes.”

I glance toward the documents beneath the photograph.

“Do you have records from the original sale?”

“Some. Correspondence, an inventory, several family letters and documentation gathered much later by my grandfather. There has also been outside provenance research.”