Part 2:
At 6:15, he ate a plate of salmon and roasted vegetables at the staff table alongside a bartender named Dex and two servers who talked exclusively to each other about a reality show Ethan had never heard of. He ate quickly, thanked the kitchen staff, and went back outside. That was when he saw the car. It was in a storage area adjacent to the main garage, a large out building set back from the main house, its doors partially open.
Someone had left a work light on inside, the kind that throws a pale yellow glow and makes everything look both more and less real. Ethan wasn’t looking for it. He was walking back to his truck from the kitchen entrance, taking a shortcut between buildings, and the light caught the edge of something, and his feet simply stopped.
Later, he wouldn’t be able to explain why exactly. There was nothing obviously compelling about what he saw. It was to any reasonable observer a ruined car, a hulk of corroded metal sitting on four flat tires, its body buckled in places, its surface consumed by decades of rust. It looked like something that should have been scrapped 30 years ago and somehow never was.
But the shape, the shape of it stopped him. He stood in the gap between the buildings for a moment, then walked toward the storage area like he’d been asked to, like it made obvious sense, like there was any logic to what he was doing at all. Up close, it was worse and better than he’d thought. The rust was severe, the kind that came from long-term improper storage, probably moisture exposure over decades.
Whoever had kept this hadn’t kept it well. The wheels were gone under flat, cracked tires. A section of the front bodywork was caved in from what looked like an old impact. The interior was barely visible through the dirt caked windows, but he could see that it had been stripped at some point, seats gone, most of the dashboard missing.
None of that was what he was looking at. He was looking at the bodywork itself, the panels. He crouched near the front wheel arch and brought out his phone’s flashlight, handformed aluminum. He could see it under the rust, the slight irregularity of hand hammered metal versus stamped production panels. The radius of the wheel arch, the way it transitioned into the front fender.
It wasn’t the work of a factory line. This was coachu built. Someone had shaped this body by hand, panel by panel over a frame. In 2025, that was unusual. In whatever decade this car was built, it suggested a very specific kind of manufacturer. He stood up and walked around to the rear. The tail treatment, the proportions of the greenhouse, the angle of the rear glass where it met the trunk lid.
His mind was pulling at something, a specific memory, a photograph in a book, an auction catalog from years ago, a conversation with an old colleague in Geneva about a particular coach builder in northern Italy whose work in the 1960s was so distinctive that you only needed to see a section of a panel to know. He made himself slow down.
He was jumping. He was getting ahead of the evidence. He’d been standing here for 4 minutes and he was already constructing a narrative that would be embarrassing if he was wrong. He took three photographs with his phone. He measured the wheelbase by pacing it approximately 9 ft.
He photographed the cowl, the door seam, the rear hunches. Then he stood back and let himself feel the thing he’d been holding back. The silhouette. It was that more than anything, the shape the car made against the work light. The long hood, the short tail, the low roof line, the almost aggressive lean of the rear pillar.
He had seen this shape before, not on the street, not in any showroom, not in any museum. in a photograph, a black and white photograph printed in a 1974 issue of a European automotive journal that his mentor, a retired coach builder named Carl Bower, had kept in a cardboard box in his workshop in Stoutgart. The photograph showed a car that had disappeared from the automotive world in 1971.
“Hey,” he turned. A man in event staff clothing was standing at the edge of the storage building, frowning. “You’re not supposed to be in here.” Sorry, Ethan said completely calm. I was checking the perimeter. I’m with the vehicle support team. Saw the lights were on and wanted to make sure everything was secure. It wasn’t a great lie, but the man looked tired and had 17 other things to worry about.
And after a moment, he just said, “Leave it.” and walked away. Ethan took one last look at the car. “Okay,” he said quietly to no one. Then he went back to work. He didn’t sleep much that night. He got home at 11:40, paid Mrs. Delgato’s teenage granddaughter, who’d been sitting with Sophie, looked in on his daughter sleeping in her bed with one arm around a stuffed elephant named Gerald, and then sat down at the kitchen table with his laptop.
He told himself he was going to spend 20 minutes checking his theory and then go to bed. It was 3:40 in the morning when he finally closed the screen. The images he’d taken at the estate weren’t great. low light, taken fast, not exactly the documentation a professional appraiser would use, but they were enough to work with.
And the more he studied them against the reference material he was pulling from his files, old photographs, archived auction cataloges, a digitized copy of Carl Bower’s private notes that Carl had sent him years ago as a goodbye gift when his eyesight got bad, the more certain he became. the specific proportions of that rear 3/arter view, the seam treatment on the doors, the particular way the coach builder had handled the transition from the roof to the SE-pillar, a technique that was almost a fingerprint. He made a list.
Then he made another list of all the reasons he could be wrong. The second list was shorter. He opened a browser and typed a name into the search bar. Stellarini Caroteria. The results were sparse because this was a name that existed mostly in specialist literature, not in the pages of mainstream automotive journalism.
