Chapter 4 #3
Alice gave me a small smile. ‘I’m not sure she would have gone to therapy even if it was a thing back then. She was a “repress my feelings until they go away” kind of person.’
Well, that was a great description of me, too.
‘Right,’ I said, my throat dry.
Alice kept going. ‘When she passed away, her daughter, so my grandmother, moved into her house. And it was only when my grandmother died last year that we started going through everything, trying to understand what two generations of women had hoarded during their lifetimes.’
‘That was when you took the items to be appraised,’ I said, filling in the gaps.
‘Yeah. My mom started selling things last fall – pieces that no one in the family wanted. It’s a big house. There’s a lot to go through.’
‘I can imagine.’
I hummed as I absorbed that information.
‘This changes everything, right?’ Alice said.
‘In terms of how valuable the brooch is?’ I replied. ‘Yeah, for sure.’
‘How valuable do you reckon?’
‘I have no idea what could happen at auction,’ I said, stretching my neck from side to side to ease the ache from my night on the sofa. ‘And I’m not fobbing you off – it really depends on who does the marketing for it and who turns up.’
‘I get that,’ Alice said.
‘But a couple of years ago, a pocket watch that belonged to John Jacob Astor, who was the richest man on the ship, was sold at auction in England for over a million pounds. The Insect Brooch is Fabergé, it was made for the Russian Imperial Family, and it survived the sinking of the Titanic. Your great-grandmother might have even been wearing it when she was rescued.’ I shook my head.
‘It wouldn’t surprise me if it sold for a million dollars. ’
‘Holy shit,’ Alice breathed. ‘Your mom must have found this out during her research,’ she said, looking up at me.
I nodded. ‘She would have researched everything in the jewelry case to determine how valuable each individual item was.’
‘But it had all been valued already,’ Alice protested. ‘By Van der Hausen’s.’
‘She wouldn’t have known that when she bought it,’ I said, not wanting her to know about the valuation paperwork. ‘We always do our own research anyway. Especially when –’
I was about to say, ‘Especially when we buy from criminals,’ but that was absolutely not something I was going to tell Alice. I’d lowered my guard too much and I cursed myself for getting comfortable.
‘Especially when?’ Alice prompted.
‘When we’re dealing with mixed lots, like the jewelry case,’ I said, lying smoothly, like I was used to doing in sticky situations. ‘Sometimes appraisers can get lazy and will just slap a price on a case of jewelry instead of examining each piece.’
‘Oh,’ Alice said, seemingly accepting my explanation. ‘I’m surprised your mom didn’t realize it was stolen. It would have been in the police database.’
‘The cops don’t always log stolen items straight away,’ I said, and I wasn’t lying now.
‘Sometimes that admin can take days, or even weeks, if there’s a backlog.
I’ll double-check our records, but it’s possible someone came into the shop to sell the case the day after the break-in.
Maybe before you even realized it had been stolen. ’
If I knew Wilson, he would have called my mom the minute the jewelry was in his hands. He was a criminal, sure, but he was also a coward. He wanted to move stock on as quickly as possible to make sure he wasn’t implicated in the theft.
‘Don’t you double-check?’ she pressed.
I forced a laugh. ‘That time of year, leading up to Christmas? It would have been on our to-do list, but we’re always really busy then, with people selling as well as buying. It’s usually my job to do admin tasks like that, so if you want to blame anyone, blame me and not my mom.’
‘It’s not a problem,’ Alice said, placating me as I got heated. ‘I was only asking.’
She picked up the book again and flipped through the chapter.
‘What’s this?’ she asked, pointing to more marks in the text.
I had to lean in close to her to see what she was pointing at. Just like the soft pencil marks that surrounded the chapter heading, someone had left tiny dashes under certain uppercase letters.
‘Could be another clue,’ I said. ‘Let me see.’
Alice passed me the book and I held it up, angling it to let the natural light fall on the paper.
‘You think this is another message from your mom?’ Alice asked.
‘It could be. Can you write this down?’
‘Sure,’ she said quickly, pulling out her phone. ‘Go ahead.’
‘C, Q, T, E, P, W,’ I said, reading out the six letters in the order I found them in the text, all within the chapter on the Insect Brooch. The book was old, and the paper had lots of natural variations in tone and texture, which made for pretty good camouflage.
‘I think I got them all,’ I said.
‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ Alice replied, scanning the letters she’d written down.
‘We can work it out later.’
I flicked through the rest of the pages, then went back to the beginning and checked the whole book to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. Alice dug around in her backpack, retrieving a small case, then riffled through that until she pulled out an eraser with a satisfied noise.
‘Are you done?’ she asked.
I nodded and handed the book over to her, then watched, amused, as she photographed the three pages that made up the chapter on the Insect Brooch before carefully erasing all the pencil marks my mom had left. Just like I had done with the message in the Biltmore vault safe.
‘Just in case,’ Alice murmured.
I got up and went over to the shelf where we’d pulled the book from to check if there was anything else left behind – a note stuck to the back of the shelf, or underneath it, or another mark that would lead me to wherever we needed to go next.
Except leaving two clues in one location felt lazy and not something that my mom would do.
But not checking would be lazy too, and I wanted to make sure I’d covered all bases.
Sadly, I was right. There was nothing else here.
I sat back on my heels, frustrated.
‘Did you find anything?’ Alice asked from behind me.
‘No,’ I said, standing up again before my thighs started to ache.
She ran her thumb over the row of gold earrings looped through her ear. ‘We’ll figure it out,’ she murmured.
‘I hope so.’ I rolled my shoulders. ‘We should keep moving.’
‘Good idea.’
I turned back to the table, and in that exact second my stomach dropped and my heart started to thunder.
The two chairs we’d been sitting at were still at the odd angles we’d left them when we’d got up to head to the shelves.
But the book was gone.