The Jewelry Case Read online

  "Let's see. Chopin, of course. And Pope John Paul II," Paisley said, opening the pages and rifling through them randomly. "And wasn't Madame Curie originally from Poland as well?"

  "So was the astronomer Copernicus."

  "Really?" Paisley thought the words appeared to be written in code. Sprinkled through the text were black-and white photographs of men with handlebar mustaches and high collars, and engravings of sturdy women in peasant costumes. She stopped turning pages, however, when she recognized two words in bold type. A woman's name.

  She looked up and met Shirley's eyes. Shirley nodded. Carefully, Paisley lifted the fragile piece of tissue covering the black-and-white photograph, almost not daring to look. They both stared at the picture for a while.

  "That's her," Paisley said quietly. "That's Ruth Wegiel."

  "And those," said Shirley, "are the jewels."

  Chapter Eleven

  Paisley refused Shirley's offer of a drink, and, clutching the book with one hand, drove home. Shirley had insisted on giving the volume to her. "It's priced a lousy two bucks, for goodness sake. It's the least I can do, after all the time you've spent helping me with rehearsals. You can buy me lunch if the book leads to anything."

  Paisley had intended to savor the discovery alone, but once she got home she found her hand straying toward her cell phone.

  He arrived in less than five minutes. Paisley stood on the porch watching as the familiar green pickup truck turned up the driveway. Once, Esther used to invite him in for blueberry muffins when he was walking home from school, a tall, gangly teenager. Had the old woman stood on the porch like this, joyfully anticipating the approach of sandy hair, smiling eyes, and long limbs? But surely the older woman's emotions would have been maternal. Her own were more ... complicated.

  As Ian strode toward up the walkway, his smile broadened as he saw her as it always did. She wondered what her late husband would have thought of her visitor. Most likely Jonathan would have looked down his long, patrician nose at the younger man, figuratively speaking, of course, since Ian stood at least four inches taller. And yet, she thought with an odd lurch in her stomach, Ian matched or exceeded her late husband in every way that mattered: intelligence, kindness, and strength of character.

  The realization took her aback, and she took a step back, a hand going to her throat.

  The object of her cogitation stopped in front of her. The smile faded, and his light-gray eyes grew puzzled. "Are you all right? The call sounded urgent."

  "What? Oh. No burglars tonight. I just wanted to see you. Are you hungry? I just made an omelet."

  "Do you need to ask?" Sniffing the air appreciatively, he followed her to the kitchen, where she had set the table with Esther's stoneware dishes and cut some yellow roses she had found blooming in the back yard, putting them in a mason jar. She'd tell him of her discovery after dinner, she decided. It would increase the suspense.

  After his first query, Ian didn't seem to question her invitation, seeming to take it for granted the call had been social. "There's a question I've been meaning to ask you," he said, scraping his plate clean after his second helping and pushing it away. He leaned his chin on his knuckles, and regarded her closely. "Why opera?"

  Caught off guard, she stared at him blankly. He went on. "I looked you up online. You were definitely on your way up before the crash. First local productions, then winning some prestigious competitions, then the Met. Music is a fiendishly competitive business, so I wondered: if you have such a great voice…." She blessed him for not saying "had." “…why pick opera for a career?"

  "I don't understand your question."

  He shrugged. "There's a lot of other things a singer can do. Rock, folk, pop. Opera's pretty much a dead art form, isn't it?"

  She dabbed her mouth with a paper napkin. This was an argument she had faced many times with relatives and friends, and this was the perfect opportunity to set him straight. "That's a misconception. There are hundreds of thousands of opera fans all over the world, as many as there have ever been. The style may not be as popular as rap or pop music, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant. After all, Romance novels are the best-selling literary genre, but people still read serious books, don't they? Opera will last forever, like Shakespeare, or Charles Dickens."

  From the expression on his face, she realized how pedantic she sounded, and she felt her face relax into a smile. "I'm aware opera can seem over the top at times, with people hurling themselves off cliffs for love, or dying of consumption while singing at the top of their lungs. But what I love about it is that it admits the power of passion. Our times bend to the other extreme, don't they? We're embarrassed to admit the power of human emotions. It's almost as if our generation is afraid of feeling. Or at least of admitting what we feel."

  He considered this. "Hmmm. I've seen rock concerts where the emotions seem pretty intense."

  "Screaming and waving cell phones around isn't the same thing. I'm not saying I don't like popular music. My play list is probably at least as diverse as yours. But yeah, I love opera. When you get home, download Carmen and see if you don't agree with me."

  "I know the story. A sexy cigarette factory worker leads a young man astray, right?

  She chuckled. "Pretty much. If you don't like it, you'd have to have a cold heart. No sense of romance, of passion, of...."

  "No sense of passion?" At his expression, her heart skipped a beat. He started to push himself out of his seat, and she realized he had misinterpreted her invitation to come over. Quickly, she said, "I saw them today, Ian. They existed. They're real."

  He froze in an awkward half-standing position, then plopped back in his seat his face a comical mix of disappointment and anticipation. "What do you mean? How do you know?"

  "I was right." Her words tumbled over each other. "Ruth did pose for a photograph wearing the jewels. The picture must have been taken just before she quit her career. I've got the proof." From the side table, she fetched the book from Shirley's store and flipped open to the page.

  Ian studied the black-and-white picture and whistled softly. His eyes lingered on the wide, multi-stranded pearl choker that lay across the singer's creamy throat; several large pendants suspended from it as if flaunting the size of the gems in their centers. Matching earbobs dangled against the swanlike neck; a sparkling tiara crowned the thick, wavy hair. A matching bracelet encircled one slender wrist, and a large stone adorned her ring finger.

  "So it's true." His voice was hushed.

  "It's her. Even if the book hadn't given her name, I'd have recognized her from the portrait. Those are Jonathan's eyebrows, dark and peaked in the middle. I'll bet the book doesn't say anything about where she got the parure. Certainly nothing about a spurned Russian count. But the photograph proves that at least the jewels weren't imaginary."

  He couldn't take his eyes off the page. The gems looked nearly black against the porcelain skin of the beautiful singer's arms and shoulders. "Are those rubies, sapphires, or emeralds? Or something else?"

  "The family legend says rubies. I don't know how many carats they add up to, but they're enormous, aren't they? They look like the crown jewels of England."

  "Or Russia. All right," he said, handing her back the book. "You win. They existed. Unfortunately, that doesn't change anything. We're no closer to answering the question of where they are now. Are you still convinced they ended up in California?"

  "We can't know for sure, but at least we can narrow down the possibilities." She began to tick them off on her fingers. She'd had all afternoon to think about it, and the old excitement was back. "Ruth might have returned them to the count when he wouldn't marry her. I bet when he gave them to her, she interpreted it as a proposal of marriage. That’s the kind of naïve girl she was, and how she would react when she found she was wrong. Don’t ask me how I know that Ruth was emotional and naïve. I just do.” She didn’t tell Ian about her dreams, where somehow she had melded into the other woman, feeling her emotions and thinki
ng her thoughts. Someday she might, but she was afraid he would mock her belief that somehow those experiences had been real. He was too logical to fully understand.

  Something in the way Ian looked at her, waiting patiently without immediately jumping in to contradict her, as she’d expected, made her think that somehow, perhaps, he did understand the psychic connection she had with that long-dead woman. She remembered that he was the one who had pointed out the resemblance between her and the photograph of Ruth hanging in the hallway by the kitchen.

  She cleared her throat and continued. “In those days, returning the jewels to a man with dishonorable intentions might have seemed the honorable thing to do. I hope she kept them, though. He was a swine, he didn't deserve them."

  "How do you know he was a swine?"

  "Really, Ian! I just told you! The man refused to marry her although he purported to love her. Why? Not just because she was an opera singer and of lower caste, but because she was a Jewess, which was the term they used in those days. She was good enough to be his mistress, but not good enough to be his wife. Of course he was a swine!"

  He thought about it and nodded. "All right. I'll concede the point. It does make sense."

  "Options two, three, four, and five for what happened to the jewels," she went on, holding up her other fingers in turn: "Ruth kept them, but they were lost somehow. Or they were stolen. Or sold. Or hidden. One thing is certain: she never wore them again. Her husband wouldn't have approved of her flaunting a gift from a former lover, and besides, she wouldn't have had anywhere to wear them. She was the wife of a conservative, bourgeois factory owner. Raising seven children would have kept her too busy for fancy parties."

  Ian tapped his fingers on the table thoughtfully. She pictured him leaning over a light-table designing a skyscraper surrounded by rolls of trace paper and razor-point pens, considering some difficult problem. He would have the same expression on his intense, narrow face. "All right, since we're conjecturing anyway,” he said at last, “I'll place my bet that the legend was correct, and the jewels did make their way to California. Why not? Oral traditions are often based on a germ of truth. Look at Herman Schliemann: he’s that German guy who believed that the Odyssey and the Illiad had their roots in fact and ended up discovering Troy."

  "Aha!" Her eyes glowed with triumph. "Then you believed the jewelry existed all along!"

  "I always accepted the possibility," he reminded her dryly. "I just didn't think it was likely."

  "Well, thanks to Shirley, now we know. How lucky that she saved this book! It used to belong to the Perlemans." She looked at the old black-and-white photograph again, noting again Ruth's thick dark hair and large, expressive eyes. The singer must have been at least a decade younger in this image than in the family portrait that hung in Esther’s hallway. Ruth really had been a beauty, Paisley thought with a pang. Perhaps it was disappointment had drained some of that eager, hopeful loveliness out of the singer’s face.

  Then Paisley's eyes dropped to the three-stranded pearl-and-ruby necklace around the Polish singer's throat. Up until now, the existence of the gems had seemed mostly an intriguing riddle. Now, the knowledge that they were real lit a fire inside her. For the first time, she could understand why men had sacrificed their families, their sanity, and even their lives to track down gold in the Sierra Mountains in the mid-1800s. She imagined the feel of those bracelets around her wrist, the pressure of the necklace against her throat.

  "Now that I'm convinced the story wasn't made up of whole cloth," Ian’s voice penetrated her awareness, "it seems reasonable to assume that the jewels did make it to California. Why not?"

  "You've skipped a step. Just because the rubies existed doesn't prove that Esther had them." She was playing devil's advocate, though. Paisley was sure Esther had brought them with her. It was as if some unseen force was guiding them, step by step.

  Ian shook his head. "And yet this photo strengthens two pieces of circumstantial evidence indicating that she did. One is the letter from Auntie Adelajda referring to Esther's homemade coat, which, as you pointed out, may well have had the jewels sewn in the lining. That was a common way to smuggle valuables back then. The other evidence is Esther's childhood diary, which as you pointed out yourself, cites Aunt Henka's endless badgering about mysterious missing objects." He paused, as if for dramatic effect. "And there's one more thing."

  "What?"

  "The crowning evidence, which we haven't even talked about yet: Aunt Henka’s firm belief that the jewels were on the premises. She wouldn't have spent the rest of her life looking for them if she hadn't been convinced her young niece had brought them."

  "That sounds reasonable," Paisley admitted. "But if so, that means Esther must have hidden them soon after she arrived here, or Henka would have found them."

  Ian seemed to be enjoying the game as much as she was. "Hid them or lost them. And kept it a secret her whole life." He stood up and started pacing, as he always did when he was deep in thought. "But if the jewelry was in the house, surely it would have turned up. Aunt Henka would have found it eventually, with her endless searching."

  "She never found the box hidden in the wall in Esther's room," Paisley pointed out.

  He awarded her the point with a nod. "Its a shame Esther's diary didn't tell us why she didn't hand over the jewels to her American relatives right away, like a good little girl."

  "Or why she spent her life denying their existence."

  "I'm sure she wouldn't have denied it so heartily without good reason," Ian said reminiscently. "I remember a sparkle of enjoyment in her eyes when the subject came up, as if she knew something no one else knew. At the time, I thought it was that the jewels didn't exist. Now, I suspect it's because they did."

  "All right." Paisley was ready to move on to the next point. "Let's say that Esther had them. Where are they? We've been through every inch of this house. And I'm sure Auntie Henka searched it more thoroughly than we have. She had fifty years to look."

  Ian poked his fists deep into his pockets. "If those jewels haven't turned up, it must be because Esther didn't want them to."

  "Maybe she sold them," Paisley said doubtfully. She'd never seriously considered this possibility, perhaps because she didn't want to. That would mean they had been wasting their time all along.

  "She didn't sell them," he said with certitude. "If there's one thing Esther never cared about, it was money. I can't see her selling Great-aunt Ruth's heirloom jewels for extra cash."

  Paisley thought he was probably right. Esther seemed like one of the least materialistic women she had known. She stretched her arms high above her head, kicked off her shoes, and wriggled into a more comfortable position on the couch. "I'm sick of going around in circles," she complained. "Let's accept for the sake of argument that Esther did hide them after arriving in River Bend. That brings us back to the old question: where? I want to grab a shovel and start digging."

  Ian stopped pacing and slumped into the recliner nearby. "Wherever she put them, she hid them well," he agreed. "Think of the box inside the bedroom wall: if we hadn't torn down the plaster while remodeling, we'd never have found it."

  "Are you saying we should tear down the entire house looking for another hiding place?"

  He smiled at her wanly. "We could. But I don't think it would help."

  "Why not?"

  "Think about it," Ian said. "She already had a perfectly good hiding spot in her room. Why would she go to the trouble of creating another one?"

  Paisley thought about this while surveying her glossy pink toenails. "So you really think she kept the jewelry in that dusty old box?"

  "The box was half empty; there would have been plenty of room. Maybe she took out the pieces to show her best friend some 'pretty things,' like she wrote in the diary."

  Pretty things. Georgiana had used the same term.

  Still, Paisley felt obligated to play devil's advocate. It was a role that came naturally to her. "If the jewels were what Esther was
referring to. She could have been describing anything. Flowers, or pictures, or…."

  "True, but we have to conjecture, since we have no hard evidence," Ian reminded her. "And if she did take the jewelry out of her box of treasures, why would she have gone to the trouble to hide the pieces somewhere else? The hiding place in her room was perfectly adequate."

  "Why would she do anything?" Paisley was growing more and more frustrated.

  Ian nodded. "I'm just saying the jewels are unlikely to be hidden behind a wall or under the floors of the house. I doubt we need to get out a crowbar or hammer and destroy all the work my crew and I just put in."

  Paisley shook her head. "So you're suggesting she took the jewels from her hiding place, but something happened before she could put them away again? That maybe they were stolen?" If so, the search was over before it had begun.

  "That's one possibility." Ian left the easy chair and plopped beside her, dropping his long arm across the top of the couch. She smelled Irish Spring soap and damp hair. He must have showered immediately before coming over. He was frowning intently, as he always did when he was thinking. "The robbery could have happened without her knowledge. Someone could have found the hiding place, removed the valuable contents, and replaced the container where we found it."

  Paisley enjoyed his closeness with one part of her brain--the part that wasn't busy trying to figure out where the jewels might be. "Why would burglars bother to put the box back?"

  "One reason is so Esther wouldn't know the jewels were gone immediately. If that scenario is correct, the thief was someone who lived in this house."