Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Darlene was behind the register at the wine and cheese store, penciling something into an invoice. She set the pencil down slowly when Nans, Ruth, Ida and Helen entered.
The shop was dim and cool, the bottles lined up in their rows, the handwritten cards fluttering slightly in the air from the open door.
Ida drifted toward the gourmet shelf with the instinct of a homing pigeon.
Ruth set her iPad on the corner of the counter.
Helen clasped her hands and looked pleasant and patient.
Darlene folded her arms. “What do you want?”
“We know you took something from the yard sale,” Nans said. “Not bought. Took.”
The shop was very quiet. One of the handwritten cards trembled on its bottle.
“I don’t know what you think you saw,” Darlene started.
“It’s on video.” Nans said it gently, the way you’d tell someone their coat was inside out. Just a fact. No theater.
Darlene’s jaw shifted. She looked at the invoice. She looked at the window. She looked at five women who were clearly not leaving.
“It’s mine,” she said finally. “It was always mine.”
“Tell us,” Nans said.
Another long pause. Then Darlene reached down and pushed back her sleeve to reveal a sparkly gold bracelet with garnets set in a row, deep red catching even the dim shop light.
“My great-grandmother’s.” Her voice came out matter-of-fact, but careful. “She died when I was seven. I barely remember her.” She touched one of the stones with her thumbnail. “But I remember this. She let me wear it once. Red like Christmas, she said.” A pause. “She died that winter.”
Nobody said anything. Darlene seemed to prefer it that way.
“When I got older I started wondering where it had gone. Figured it would have ended up in the house eventually. Grandma kept everything, but she didn’t know where this was.
I’d been looking for years.” She pulled her sleeve back down over the bracelet.
“And then there it was. On a card table between a broken clock radio and a set of fondue forks.”
“So you put it in your pocket,” Nans said. Not an accusation. Just the shape of what had happened.
“Yes.”
“Darlene.” Nans tilted her head. “It was a yard sale. You could have just bought it for a couple of bucks or told your cousins you wanted it.”
Darlene let out a short, sharp sound — almost a laugh. “Ha. And start the whole family brewing over it? No.” She straightened. “People would have wanted to have it appraised, make a big deal out of, maybe even fight me for it. And Kyle —” She stopped.
“What about Kyle?” Ruth asked.
“Kyle needs money.” Darlene said it the way you’d say the sky is blue, a fact so established it barely needed stating.
“He always needs money for something he’s gotten himself into.
If he’d seen me negotiating over that bracelet he’d have been at my elbow in thirty seconds pointing out what it might fetch somewhere.
” She shook her head. “It was easier to not call attention to it.”
“What has Kyle gotten himself into?” Ruth asked.
Darlene lifted a shoulder. “He’s always getting into something. I don’t ask.”
Ruth wrote something on her iPad. Darlene watched her do it with the expression of someone watching a small problem get recorded into permanent evidence.
“Now.” Nans kept her voice easy. “We’re not here about the bracelet. That’s a family matter and none of our business.” She paused. “We want to talk about the cat.”
“I already told you I don’t know anything about a cat.”
“I believe you. But you were in that attic when you were young. You, June, and Margo.”
Something moved across Darlene’s face. Quick, almost nothing.
“We were all up there at one time or another,” she said.
“Do you remember the porcelain cat specifically?” Helen asked. Her voice was gentle, curious — the voice she used when she wanted someone to feel they were helping rather than confessing.
Darlene looked at her like she’d asked whether she remembered a particular dust mote.
“Why would I? We weren’t up there cataloguing things.
We were listening to records.” She paused.
“And consoling June, mostly. She was absolutely convinced that boy was going to give her his high school ring.” A short snort.
“Daniel Shaw. Little weasel strung her along for the better part of two years.”
“June was upset?” Helen asked.
“June was seventeen and dramatic.” Darlene’s expression softened slightly at the edges — not warm, exactly, but the look of someone visiting an old memory that had stopped hurting.
“Margo and I spent half those afternoons in that attic talking her down off whatever ledge she’d worked herself onto that week.
” She shook her head. “Oh, to be young again and have your only worry be whether some boy is going to hand over a cheap ring.”
“And Margo,” Nans said, keeping her voice easy. “Was she focused on June too? Or did she have her own interests up there?”
“We were all focused on June.” Darlene said it with the mild exasperation of someone who had been focused on June for sixty years and had more or less made peace with it. “That was generally how it went.”
Nans nodded slowly. “Is there anything else from those afternoons you remember? Anything out of the ordinary?”
“We were teenagers listening to records and worrying about boys.” Darlene picked up her pencil. “No.”
Flat. Final. The kind of answer that was technically complete and gave away absolutely nothing.
Ida appeared at Nans’s shoulder holding a small wedge of aged cheddar. “Is this one good?” she asked Darlene.
“Yes,” Darlene said, with the exhausted resignation of a woman who had accepted that some parts of this conversation were simply outside her control.
“Wonderful.” Ida placed it carefully beside the fig jam already in her basket.
Nans rose. The others followed.
At the door Nans paused, not quite turning around. “We won’t tell any one about the bracelet.”
“Thanks,” Darlene said.
The bell chimed once behind them. Ruth’s blue Oldsmobile sat at the curb in the pale afternoon light.
“It’s rather ironic, isn’t it. Darlene had the genuinely valuable piece in her pocket the whole time. Old gold, real garnets. And someone killed a man over a porcelain cat worth twenty-five dollars,” Helen said.
“Maybe value isn’t really the point,” Nans said. “Look at Darlene. That bracelet is worth something on paper, but that’s not why she took it. She’s been looking for it for years. The value was never about money. It was sentimental.”
“I doubt anyone is sentimental about a ugly cat,” Ida said.
“No,” Nans agreed. “Which means maybe it wasn’t the cat itself at all.” She paused. “Maybe it was what was inside it.”
“Which brings us to the question,” Lexy said.
“Yes,” Nans said. “Was there something in there and, if there was, who knew about it.”