Fresh, local ingredients are always good. All of the neighborhoods, buildings, institutions, and pieces of art in this mystery are real. Most can be found in Chicago. The Farmer Museum, however, wears a disguise. When writing about it, I imagined The Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, in Boston, Massachusetts. The structure and art collection are just about identical; the thirteen stolen pieces are, sadly, the same. They can be seen on the FBI site, www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/vc_majorthefts/arttheft/isabella or on the Gardner Museum site, at www.gardnermuseum.org/resources/theft.

The real crime occurred in the early hours of March 18, 1990; the art has now been missing for an astounding and tragic twenty-five years. My hope is that someone will read this book and lose their heart — perhaps all over again! — to the missing art. Who’s to say what magic or which dreams might help in recovering it?

Sarah Chase Farmer and Isabella Stuart Gardner have much in common, but Mrs. Farmer’s book, The Truth About My Art, is her own. I have hijacked the marvelous 1894 Anders Zorn portrait, Isabella Stuart Gardner in Venice — it appears in Pieces and Players as a portrait of Sarah Chase Farmer in Chicago.

Ulrich Boser’s excellent book, The Gardner Heist, provides a wealth of information about the unsolved Gardner Museum theft and the long, frustrating search for these missing treasures.

There are elements of this story that might remind readers of the 1990s struggle surrounding the Barnes Foundation, in Philadelphia. The art world is never at a loss for drama and disagreement, which is part of its power and charm.

The two volumes of Mother Goose rhymes that are referenced in this story are The Real Mother Goose (Scholastic, 1994) and The Annotated Mother Goose, William S. and Ceil Baring-Gould (Bramhall House, 1962).

All characters in this story are fictitious; they do what they do, and I do my best to keep up.