Chapter 4 #2
The door swung open with a soft creak.
My heart started pounding so hard I felt sick. The jewelry wasn’t there, but a folded piece of paper from a legal pad, like the one my mom used in her office, was leaning against the back wall of the safe.
With trembling fingers I picked it up and carefully unfolded it, smoothing out the edges.
It’s not here, but I don’t blame you for checking. Follow the clues. Stick to the plan.
I love you.
Mom
I slumped back and pressed my fingertips to my eyes as my breathing grew ragged. It had been a little while since I last cried, but now I couldn’t hold back the tears. All my emotions crashed together messily: grief and loss and pain, confusion and fear, frustration and aching tiredness.
Tears didn’t solve anything, though, and I quickly forced myself to pull it together. The jewelry wasn’t here. My mom knew I’d check, that I’d try to cheat and skip ahead to the finish line. I had to move on and, like she said, stick to the plan.
Before I locked the safe again, I ran my fingertips around the walls and shone my phone flashlight over everything, just in case there was another secret message, like in the Biltmore vault safe.
Nope.
With the safe checked, there was nothing left for me to do.
It was too early to go to bed, unfortunately, and now I was home I really didn’t want to go back out again.
For tonight, I’d make do with Netflix and pizza delivery, wrapped up in a soft wool blanket from the back of the couch that had been there for so long I couldn’t remember when it was bought.
Hours later, when it was dark outside and all that was left of the pizza were a handful of crusts, I curled up on my side and fell asleep on the sofa, too tired and emotionally exhausted to even drag myself to bed.
The next morning I felt better – not by a lot, but I’d take the wins whenever I could. Sleeping on the sofa had left me with a sore shoulder, though, so I took an extra long, extra hot shower to try to ease the ache.
I had another hour before I needed to open the shop.
I had already made up my mind that I would meet Alice again this evening, instead of trying to work out the next clue on my own.
I could tell myself that it was because of the reward money, which I definitely needed, but a secret, tiny part of me knew it was also because it felt nice to be around someone else, especially when that someone else wasn’t a crook.
Alice’s bright optimism was almost refreshing.
I threw on a clean pair of jeans and another black T-shirt, then headed downstairs to actually open up the shop for the first time in months.
With the front door ajar, letting in some fresh air and the familiar sounds of New York passing by outside, I allowed myself a tiny but significant moment of satisfaction. This was a big step.
Not expecting anyone to immediately walk through the door, I sat down at the desk with a granola bar for my breakfast to review the list of books.
They spanned a whole range of topics – not just art and antiques.
My mom used to research certain historical periods to understand the context of items that came through the shop, as well as geography to understand architecture and interior design, and a whole bunch of fiction.
She’d never really cared much for TV, preferring to get lost in a book.
I tried to clear my mind and look past the obvious as I scanned the titles.
Then one name jumped out at me.
Mila Yegorova.
The connection hovered just out of my grasp, and I screwed my eyes closed to try to work it out.
It took me a second to connect the dots, then my brain flashed the title 101 Things To Do in Lima at me and I realized that the book was another clue, confirming my suspicions that my mom hadn’t been planning to go to Peru.
Lima.
Mila.
‘Sneaky,’ I muttered, feeling ridiculously pleased with myself. That particular clue had required me to get so many things right in order to figure it out – it was so complex and layered. It made me wonder whether this scavenger hunt was going to be one of the hardest my mom had ever set for me.
When I took a break for lunch I went and pulled the Lima book off the shelf and flicked through it a few times, wanting to be sure I hadn’t missed anything and there wasn’t another element to the clue hidden inside.
I couldn’t find anything obvious, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t something there. For now I set it to one side.
For the rest of the afternoon I felt itchy, desperate to get back to the scavenger hunt instead of running an antiques shop. So, when late afternoon rolled around, I was excited to close up and head back to the library to meet Alice.
Before leaving the apartment I got changed again for reasons I would never admit, even under torture – Alice was pretty, and I wanted to look nice.
I spent a moment messing about with mascara and eyeliner and pulled my hair up into a giant clip.
By the time I was done, the clock on the wall told me I was running late, so I grabbed the list and my keys and ran out of the apartment.
I found Alice on the steps outside the library, between the two stone lions that were named Patience and Fortitude.
‘Hey,’ Alice said brightly.
‘Hi. Sorry I’m late. But I figured it out,’ I said in a rush.
Alice gaped at me. ‘Really? I spent hours today working on that list. Hours! What did you find?’
‘Let’s go inside first?’ I suggested, not wanting anyone to overhear our conversation, and Alice nodded.
We headed up the grand staircase to the study rooms and I presented the list.
‘That one,’ I said, pointing at the title.
‘You sure?’ Alice asked. ‘The Great Lost Treasures of the House of Fabergé by Mila Yegorova.’
‘Definitely.’
‘How do you know that’s the book?’ Alice asked. ‘What’s special about it?’
‘My mom left a book on the kitchen counter before she died,’ I said. ‘It was 101 Things To Do in Lima.’
‘Peru?’
‘Yeah. Except Lima is an anagram of Mila. And Mila Yegorova wrote the Fabergé book.’
She looked unimpressed. ‘Kendra, that is extremely tenuous.’
‘If it was obvious then anyone could figure it out. Come on, we should go find it.’
This part of the library, in particular, I knew well from the hours of research I’d done on various items over the years.
It took me a few minutes of walking through the shelves, trying to find the right section, before I stopped in front of the section for Russian art.
Mila Yegorova’s book was located on a lower shelf.
‘Do you know anything about Fabergé?’ I asked, taking the book back to an empty table. Alice followed me dutifully.
‘A little,’ Alice said. ‘Eggs.’
‘More than eggs,’ I said. ‘Fabergé was one of the most, if not the most respected jeweler to the Russian nobility.’
Alice sat down in the chair next to me and scooted in close so we could both read the text at the same time.
The first section of the book covered the rise of Gustav Fabergé and his sons, and I flicked through it to the main section I was interested in – the lost treasures the title promised.
We were, after all, looking for a lost treasure.
The main section started with a focus on the famous Fabergé eggs that had been made for the Russian Imperial Family but, since there definitely wasn’t one of those in the missing jewelry case, I continued on.
‘The eggs are kind of the holy grail for antique dealers,’ I said. ‘But there’s plenty of other stuff that was made by Fabergé that’s still insanely valuable. Especially the items he made for the Imperial Family.’
Alice nodded. I turned more pages.
‘Wait,’ she said, though I’d already stopped turning. ‘That was in the jewelry case.’
‘The Insect Brooch,’ I read, recognizing it too. I shivered with excitement. My mom’s clues had brought me here, to some very real answers.
The chapter title was surrounded by the faintest pencil marks, making a box. It would take only the most gentle eraser to delete the lines entirely, and I knew this was my mom’s work.
‘Made for Alexandra Feodorovna, the wife of Tsar Nicholas II and granddaughter of Queen Victoria,’ I read.
‘Later owned by American socialite Abigail De Lacy,’ Alice murmured, her finger pressing down on the name while she scanned the chapter.
‘An ancestor of yours?’ I asked, remembering how she’d introduced herself to me yesterday.
‘Yeah, my great-grandmother. I was given her last name as my middle name.’ She read more from the chapter.
‘The brooch was made of eighteen-carat gold and embellished with pearl, opal and natural black diamonds, and had rose-cut black-diamond eyes. The Insect Brooch was worn by De Lacy in the first-class lounge of the Titanic and is presumed to have been lost when the ship sank.’
‘Holy shit,’ I murmured.
The insect looked like a bee, or maybe a fly, with oversized eyes and three distinct parts to its body. Even in the photographs, the jewels glittered.
‘Did you know?’ I asked Alice.
‘That my great-grandmother traveled on the Titanic? Yeah, it’s, like, family legend. I didn’t know the brooch was with her at the time, though.’
‘You didn’t know? No one ever thought to mention that she’d lost a Fabergé brooch aboard the ship? Or not lost it, as it turns out.’
‘No.’ Alice shook her head. ‘She lost her husband that night – he died when the ship sank. I suppose in the grand scheme of things a Fabergé brooch wasn’t all that important.’
I nodded, not sure I had the right words. I could empathize with Abigail’s grief, and it had hit me harder than I expected.
‘My great-grandmother became reclusive after her second husband died,’ Alice continued.
‘And she hardly ever spoke about what happened to her on the Titanic. I guess making it widely known that she’d escaped with the brooch wasn’t one of her priorities.
She definitely never gave interviews to the press or anything like that. ’
‘I guess 1920s therapy wasn’t what it is today.’