by Barbara Ross
“I don’t know.” Since I’d returned to Busman’s Harbor the previous March, for reasons far beyond my control, I’d helped a team of state police detectives with more than one murder investigation. “Usually you contact the police when something is taken, not when something unexpectedly shows up. Let me work on it.”
* * *
I climbed the main stairway to the second floor and entered the room at the front of Mom’s house. Though I’d moved to the apartment over Gus’s restaurant in the fall, this was the place where I ran the clambake business. The office had been my father’s before it was mine and it still held his old metal filing cabinets and enormous mahogany desk. I went to the big front window and looked through the falling snow down the hill to the town pier and the Snowden Family Clambake ticket kiosk, standing at the ready, waiting for spring.
I fired up the desktop computer. It was old—I had a newer, sleeker laptop back at my apartment—but more than sufficient for my purposes. When the monitor sprang to life, I typed “Black Widow necklace” into a search engine.
There were no results, or at least nothing the least bit useful, just a lot of Halloween costume jewelry, as well as discussions about a necklace Scarlett Johansson’s character had worn in the Marvel Avengers movies.
So I typed “black diamond” to see what I could learn. Black diamonds did occur in nature and were exceedingly rare and beautiful. There were some famous ones, though I didn’t spot the central stone of the Black Widow among the images. There were also man-made black diamonds, still expensive, but a fraction of the value. And there were fakes, big black stones in costume jewelry, apparently favored by witches and Goths.
The Internet had gotten me nowhere. I went downstairs and put the box with the necklace in it, along with the wrapping paper, in my tote bag. Mom was in the kitchen when I brought my boots from the back hall to put them on. She said, “Are you going out? I’d hoped you’d stay for the afternoon.”
“You want to know where the necklace came from,” I reminded her. “I’ll be back.”
“It’s getting worse.” Mom inclined her head toward the kitchen window. The sky was a dark gray and the wind had come up, pushing the icy snow sideways against the glass.
“I won’t be long.”
Chapter 3
I walked carefully down the hill that led from my mother’s house to the commercial part of Main Street. On the corner of Main and Main, where the street snaked around, following the contour of the harbor hill and crossed itself at the only traffic light in town, was Gordon’s Jewelry, my destination. I only had my mother’s speculation that the Black Widow was genuine and had been in her family. She’d never seen the real thing, for one, and even she had said the necklace might be a copy.
I half expected the shop to be closed, given the awful weather. It was the off-season, and both Christmas and Valentine’s Day had gone by. It was hard to think of a reason why Mr. Gordon would stay open, but when I pushed through the front door, there he was at his desk, jeweler’s loupe to his eye, studying some items on a felt cloth in front of him.
He looked up, startled to see me there, despite the opening and shutting of the shop door. “Julia Snowden. What brings you out on such a terrible afternoon?”
“I’m surprised to find you at work.”
“Better than staring at the four walls at home.” He expressed the Mainers’ disdain for wintry weather. “What can I do for you?”
“I’d like you to look at something, if you have time.”
“Nothing but time.” He gestured around the empty store. He was a small, round man with twinkly blue eyes that were usually hidden by the thick glasses he put on when he removed the loupe. His white hair was longish, hanging over his ears. When he got up, he took the pieces he’d been studying, which turned out to be a pair of emerald earrings set in gold, and returned them to one of the shop’s glass cases, locking it as he did. The tidy habits of a man who’d handled valuable things all his life.
He looked at me with interest across the counter. “What have you got for me?”
I slid the box out of my tote bag and onto the glass counter. I opened it, removing the top layer of cotton.
“Jeezum crow, Julia. What have ya there?”
“That’s what I hoped you could tell me. Is it real?”
“May I?” He gestured toward the box. I nodded and he picked up the Black Widow with both hands, carefully balancing the big center gem as it dangled from the diamond-encrusted strands. He took the necklace to his worktable, put the jeweler’s loupe back on, and examined it with a couple of instruments I didn’t recognize. “It’s real, all right. Where did you get this?”
“It came to my mother.” I told the truth, but what I said was deliberately misleading. I hoped he’d think that it came to my mother through inheritance.
He didn’t ask me more, but returned to studying the necklace intently. “Beautiful setting. Antique, as are the stones. You can tell by the way they’re cut. Not this century or the last one. Late eighteen hundreds, I would say.”
“What’s it worth?”
“I couldn’t begin to tell you. Pieces like this are hard to value. That center stone is rare, for a certainty. A true black diamond. Enormous. Seventy carats. And it’s surrounded by”—he counted—“two dozen genuine white diamonds. I’ve been in the trade all my life, and I’ve not seen the like of it.”
“Is it worth ten thousand dollars?” I put a stake in the ground.
Mr. Gordon gestured with his thumb, upward.
“One hundred thousand?”
Upward.
“Five hundred thousand?” I could barely get the words out.
More.
A swishing sound pounded in my ears. “A million?”
He nodded. “Closer. I would guess around two million.”
I could barely catch my breath. “You’re kidding.” Someone had sent it through the mail, uninsured, with no return address.
He put his glasses back on. “You say this is your mother’s? It must be listed in some estate inventories. And if it ever went to auction, it would appear in the catalog, depending on when it was bought.”
“My mother said the necklace was called the Black Widow. Have you heard of it?”
Mr. Gordon shook his head. “Never. And that’s odd, because I’ve appraised, or at least seen, most of what’s valuable in these parts. How did you say you got it?” He peered at me, gray eyebrows drawn together over his glasses’ frames. He was a nice man, a man whose discretion could be trusted with all sorts of information—from who in town owned something of real value, to who was about to pop the question. But it was widely known my mother’s family hadn’t had any real money since the 1920s. And since we’d almost lost my mother’s house, Morrow Island, and our business to a loan default the previous spring, if we’d had a resource like this at the time, why wouldn’t we have used it?
“It was in my mother’s family,” I answered, blushing deeply. I was lying, or at least not telling the whole truth, and I could tell he knew it.
He put the necklace back in the box, covered it, and slid the box back into my tote bag.
I couldn’t look him in the eye. “Thank you.”
“That necklace needs to be formally appraised, Julia. It should be insured and put in a safe deposit box. Don’t you go walking around with that thing.”
“I’ll take care of it right away.” I made for the door.
“Careful as you go, Julia,” he called after me. “Careful as you go.”
* * *
I walked into the street. The town plow churned by, heading up the hill toward Mom’s. It felt weird, to put it mildly, to stand at an intersection in my little town with two million dollars’ worth of diamonds in my Snowden Family Clambake tote bag. I felt nervously for the box to make sure it was still there, that I hadn’t lost it in the four-foot journey from the jewelry store. I had one more errand to run before I took it home.
I headed back to the post office,
walking in the newly plowed street. It was almost five o’clock and nearly dark. We’d gained daylight rapidly since December, but as far north as we were, as far east in our time zone, the days were still brutally short. I jogged along as best I could on the crunchy ice in the street, fingering the necklace box every few feet as I ran, reassuring myself it was still there.
It was hard—no, impossible—to wrap my head around the life-changing possibilities of two million dollars. When we’d rescued Morrow Island, the clambake, and Mom’s house from the bank in the spring, we’d done so with a loan from my friend Quentin Tupper. Quentin had lent the money unselfishly, because he was a friend, and because he had more money than he knew what to do with. And he knew, over the long term, we were good for it. But he had also done it selfishly, because his land looked right across at Morrow Island and he feared a high-end resort, complete with helicopter pad, would be developed there. I’d envisioned paying Quentin off slowly and painfully, over many years, with the profits from the clambake company.
At the end of last season, Mom, Livvie, Sonny, and I had taken the bare minimum of money we could and sent the rest to Quentin. That meant I was running a winter restaurant, Sonny was back doing dangerous work on his father’s lobster boat, and Mom was toiling at Linens and Pantries. When I heard the magic words, “two million dollars,” I imagined Quentin paid off and my family living comfortably off the clambake’s profits, with plenty of money left over for Page’s education, and the new baby’s.
“Hullo?” I called when I entered the post office. The sounds of packages being moved came from the back. “Hullo?”
Barbara Jean emerged, curly hair wild, looking harried. “Julia, you’re back. I didn’t expect to see you again quite so soon.” She glanced at the time. “I’ve already clocked out. I’m not allowed to stay late. The USPS insists I leave at five.” She rolled her shoulders. “They’re afraid I’ll try to make them pay overtime.”
“I hope this won’t take more than a minute.” I pulled the brown paper wrapping out of my tote. “I’d like to know where this package came from.”
She squinted at me. “Sure, but why?”
“There was a gift in it for my mother, but the sender didn’t include a card and there’s no return address. She wants to send a thank-you note.” A big one.
“Of course.” Barbara Jean pulled the glasses from the top of her head. “Let me take a look.” She stared intently at the wrapping paper. “For one thing”—she pointed to the corner of the front—“this is a precanceled stamp. That’s why you don’t have a postmark.” When I looked puzzled, she said, “Precanceled stamps are the kind you buy in the automated machines.” She nodded toward a kiosk standing by the PO boxes, then returned her attention to the wrapping paper. “Hmm. The originating zip code has been blacked out.” She pointed to a thick black line on the stamp. It looked like someone had run a Sharpie over it. “And we’re not supposed to accept packages with precanceled stamps unless they have a return address.”
“So this shouldn’t have been shipped this way?”
“No. But there aren’t enough inspectors to catch everything.” She ran her finger over the rough patch on the wrapping paper. “It looks like it did have a return address sticker, but it fell off. See the adhesive and the bit of paper backing here.”
“Does all this mean you can’t tell where it was sent from?”
“Not right this minute, but the sending post office would be encoded in these numbers on the precanceled stamp. I can find out.” She looked up at the big clock on the wall. “But not today. I’ve already shut down my system. Bring it back on Monday. I’ll dig into it then.”
“Can you at least tell me when it was sent?”
“Come back Monday morning, first thing,” she promised, gently pushing me out the door.
Chapter 4
I ran back to my apartment to make sure Le Roi had plenty of food and water, and then continued on to Mom’s. It was fully dark by the time I reached her house. Normally, I would have gone in the back door, but the long walk down the unplowed driveway didn’t appeal. Whatever I did, I’d have to climb over the huge mound of wet snow the town plow had pushed up against the curb, while clutching my tote bag and its precious contents in my gloved hands.
I took a deep breath, climbed the snow mound, sunk in snow up to my thigh, and then trudged up the steps, onto the front porch, and pushed open the always-unlocked front door.
“It’s me!” I stomped my boots on the mat before entering.
“Upstairs,” Mom answered.
I found her in the sitting room off her bedroom, a book in her lap and the Weather Channel playing silently on the TV. “The storm will go all night,” she said in hushed tones. “You’ll stay?”
“Sure. Let me find something dry to put on and do a little more work. Then I’ll come back and tell you what I’ve discovered.”
Her eyes widened, and I wondered if she’d demand to know what I’d found right that second, but I was obviously wet and cold, so she let me go. I hurried into my old room, which was still covered with rose print wallpaper and furnished with a single twin bed. I pulled an old pair of pajama bottoms out of a bureau drawer. I’d stayed in this room from March until October and hadn’t taken everything when I moved out. I paired the pajama bottoms with a long-sleeved Snowden Family Clambake T-shirt and a ratty sweater that should have been heaved years before. I longed for a hot shower, but I had one more thing to do before I talked to Mom, and the later it got, the lesser the odds I could accomplish it.
I crossed the hallway to the clambake office, tote bag in hand. My parents had started the business in the 1980s, just before the explosion in credit card use. In those years, during the summer season, the clambake generated a lot of cash. Also back then, banks were closed on Saturday afternoon and all day on Sunday, the two busiest days at the clambake. So my father had a safe in his office, a sturdy model that sat on the floor beneath the desk. We didn’t keep much cash in the house anymore. There was much less of it used at the clambake, for one thing, and a deposit went to the bank every night. But the safe had stayed, probably because it was too heavy for anyone to move.
I turned on the desk lamp, then twirled the combination on the safe’s lock—a string of family birthdays—and pulled open the door. There wasn’t much inside. My mother’s passport, and my dad’s, which gave me a pang of sadness to see, their wills, the deed to the house, and some other old papers. I opened the white jewelry box, made sure once again the Black Widow was inside, replaced the lid, and put it in the safe. I twirled the dial around to obscure the last number of the combination, sat back in the desk chair, and pulled out my cell phone.
While the phone at the other end rang, I listened to the old wooden storm windows rattle in the wind. I could feel the gusts sneaking through the crevices.
“Cuthbertson here.”
“It’s Julia Snowden. What are you doing? Is this an okay time to talk?”
“Julia, I am doing what any sensible person would be doing at this very moment. My feet are up, the fire is lit, I am drinking coffee brandy and watching a basketball game I care nothing about whatsoever. It may even be a rerun.”
“So it is okay to talk?”
“Fire away, my dear, though I hope you’re not calling me from some county jail, because I’m too comfortable to come and get you. And I may have had a little too much of the aforementioned coffee brandy to drive in this weather.” Cuthie was a short, round man, with a head full of thick, mahogany brown hair that was always coated in a “product” that smelled like Vaseline. His clothes were miles too big and hung on him like pajamas. But appearances to the contrary, Cuthie was a brilliant criminal lawyer. He had helped me, my family, and my employees out of several jams.
“It’s not actually a criminal matter,” I said, “but you’re the best person I can think of to call.”
“I’m intrigued. Proceed.” He had a deep, resonant voice he used like a weapon in the courtroom.
“Say someone sent you something valuable in the mail, anonymously. Is it yours to keep?”
“The US Mail or a private delivery service?” he clarified.
“US Mail.”
He was silent for a moment. “How valuable?”
“Seven figures.”
He whistled. “Is it cash? Because the federal government takes a dim view of that amount of cash going through the US Mail.”
“No. Not cash.”
“Stock certificates? Bearer bonds? Money orders? Because that stuff has particular rules.”
“Nothing like that.”
“Whew. This is fun. Is it a deed to a piece of property?”
“No.”
“Okay, we’re making progress. Is it a physical item, like a coffee can full of gold doubloons or a ruby-encrusted tiara?”
“Yes, more in that neighborhood.”
“Interesting. And was this package addressed to you? Because if it was addressed to someone else and delivered to you by mistake, that’s a different kettle of fish.”
“It was addressed to my mom. I’m asking for her.”
“And she has this ruby tiara in her possession right now?”
“Yes.”
“Possession does make a difference in these cases. Certainly, you have a claim. The legal question is, do you have the best claim? How many people have as good or a better claim? With that kind of value, as soon as anyone knows you have the tiara, claimants will crawl out of the woodwork. These cases are almost always huge messes, and as a result, almost always get settled, with the item being sold and the money divided up.” He paused. “Of course, if it was stolen by the person who mailed it to your mom, and there’s one person who can prove he’s the rightful owner, all bets are off. It’s not yours at all.”
It was my turn to be silent.
“Did I answer your question?” Cuthie asked.
“Yes.”
“In that case, it was lovely talking to you. When you’re finished wearing the tiara around the house, be sure to put it in a safe place.”
“Already done,” I answered.
