Artifact (A Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery)

by Pandian, Gigi

  “One last thing,” Nadia said as I headed toward the door. “He was here again.”

  I stopped walking. The only he I could conjure up in my mind at the moment was Rupert.

  “The lurking fellow,” Nadia continued, taking the opportunity to press one of her homemade Russian pastries into my hand. “I should have called the police.”

  “You mean Miles?” I asked. The last person I needed to see that night was the neighborhood poet who had developed a crush on me. “He’s harmless,” I added, then stepped through the front door into the night.

  I polished off the pastry as I reached the top of the stairs at the side of the house that led to my attic apartment. I have a good appetite to start with, and it grows even larger when I need to keep a clear head, such as when I happen to have a ruby in the bag bouncing against my hip.

  I kicked off my shoes and set down the tabla case, then closed the door behind me with the ball of my bare foot. Before sitting down to examine the package, I turned around and locked the door. I didn’t believe Miles was anything to worry about, but it couldn’t hurt.

  I removed the anklet from its package and set it down on top of a relatively stable stack of journals on my coffee table. My hands were still shaking as I found a flashlight to inspect the piece more carefully. It looked every bit as real under the brighter light. The dirt was also more prevalent than I had previously noticed. The style was more obvious, too. As the exquisite gold design and the jagged ruby shone in the light, I thought of India. I was relatively certain my impression wasn’t merely because it was the country of my birth. I left India when I was a child, so my gut reactions are more American and Western than anything else.

  The anklet hadn’t been sent from India, though. I looked more closely at the packaging itself. I ran my index finger across my name and down to my address. My body froze. I knew why the package had triggered a feeling of familiarity. I recognized the handwriting. My address had been written by Rupert himself.

  The writing had been scrawled sloppily with a thick pen, as if it had been addressed in a hurry. The funny swirl of the “S” in San Francisco stirred a memory. Rupert could never resist adding small flourishes to the various aspects of his life.

  My head spun, and it wasn’t from the gin. Rupert would never simply hand over something so valuable. I knew him well enough to know that with certainty.

  Rupert had a classy enough upbringing that he had monogrammed handkerchiefs in the twenty-first century. Along with his breeding went a sense of entitlement. He wouldn’t give something like this anklet to someone else. Not under any circumstances. Not even to me.

  I scrambled to my desk and grabbed a pair of scissors. I cut along the edges of the padded envelope, snipping away at the package until it lay flat. With the excessive taping of the package, a small sheet of lined notebook paper had stuck to an inside corner. The edge tore in my haste to remove it. There it was. My explanation lay on the coffee table in front of me.

  I smoothed out the wrinkled paper and read the handwritten note.

  Jaya, love. I’m sending this artifact to you for safekeeping. And for your help. I’m onto something. But somebody knows it. It’s not safe for me to hang onto this at the moment. You’ll know what to do. Ring me on my mobile and I’ll explain everything. You’re the only one I can trust. xox Rupert

  I turned over the mangled package. The postmark confirmed my creeping suspicion. The day Rupert had mailed me the package that wasn’t safe for him to keep was the same day as his accident.

  It no longer seemed believable that Rupert had accidentally lost control of his car as the press reported. And I was the only one who knew it.

  Me, and whoever killed him.

  Chapter 2

  “Our paths will cross again someday.”

  I woke up in semi-darkness with those words in my mind. They were the last words Rupert had said to me. I was leaving London, having finished the research for my doctorate. At the time, I thought it was a romantic way to end an affair. Quite unlike me to think such a thing, really. I don’t need anyone, romantically or otherwise. That’s something I learned a long time ago, when I saw what my mother’s death did to my father. Life with Rupert was an exciting rush, nothing more. Yet it pained me more than I thought it would to realize our paths would not cross again.

  I wiped away the single tear that rolled down my cheek. Sitting up in my bed, I grew nervous as I looked around the shadows of the studio apartment. Nothing was different, yet I was uneasy. It wasn’t the memory. I had the strongest impression that something had woken me up.

  A hint of light seeped through a window, suggesting either sunlight filtered through morning fog, or the beam of a streetlight in an otherwise dark sky. The clock informed me it wasn’t quite six o’clock. It was August, so it would be the day’s first rays of sunlight trying to fight their way through the summertime fog.

  I’m not the type to stay in bed and drive myself crazy. I threw back the covers and looked through the peephole in the door. Then out both windows. Nothing. I rubbed my temples and looked absently out my front window.

  Why had Rupert thought I could help him? I study trade routes and military skirmishes of the British East India Company. Not ancient Indian jewels. I gripped the window sill until my knuckles turned white. It wasn’t as if the note mattered now anyway.

  I pulled on an oversized sweater—oversized for me at least—and made my way to the kitchen in search of coffee. All my dishes were in the sink. I selected the least filthy mug I could find, which turned out to be one bearing the logo of the British Library in London. Great.

  After washing the mug, I filled it with several spoonfuls of instant coffee and sugar while waiting for water to boil. I like the real thing better, but there was plenty more time in the day.

  I stepped onto the small landing outside my door, eager to feel cool air on my face. Summer in San Francisco is unlike the season in the rest of California. Fog enveloped me as I sat down on the top step, and I watched the wisps of steam from my coffee blend into the fog gently blowing around me.

  In the light of day, I couldn’t deny the truth. Rupert was of the treasure-hunter school of archaeologists. Not the scholarly branch. That mentality was what made him so exciting. And also so infuriating. He had a tendency to jump to tenuous conclusions based on local rumors or vague references in forgotten academic texts. During the time I had known him, the ideas he pursued had always resulted in wild-goose chases. Except this time. This ruby anklet was real. Could it really have gotten him killed? Or was I going crazy?

  Murders from the annals of history are one thing. India under British rule was full of unnatural deaths. A present-day suspicious death is quite another beast. If Rupert had truly been murdered on the other side of the world, what could I possibly do about it?

  I was distracted from the problem by a movement I caught out of the corner of my eye. I turned my head, but it was gone.

  It was probably only a cat, I told myself. But when I sensed it again, it was accompanied by the sound of creaking from below. That would have to be one fat cat climbing up the twisty wooden stairway.

  I poked my head over the ledge and caught a glimpse of unkempt auburn hair and delicate wire-rimmed glasses. As if I needed more help to get my day off to a bad start, it was my poet stalker.

  “I thought I saw you,” Miles said as he reached the stairway landing below me.

  The stairs are barely visible from the sidewalk and accessed through a narrow gate along the side of the house. I could have pointed out that he would have had to come through the gate with the sole purpose of finding me. I decided against it. As I’d said to Nadia, I didn’t think Miles was anything to worry about. I wasn’t convinced enough to smile at him, but I did nod an acknowledgment.

  “I thought you might be up already,” he continued, proceeding up a few more stairs until he was eye level with me. “We poetic souls rarely sleep well. Coffee?” He thrust out a hand-painted thermos in front of my fa
ce.

  I declined the offer, indicating my own mug and its remains. Miles pulled back his outstretched arm. For a moment he stood there, awkward and quiet. He took a deep breath, his eyes fixed on the empty space next to me on the top step. “May I?”

  “Sure,” I said, after only a moment’s hesitation.

  If a stalker is someone who stakes out your house to determine when you’re home, then yeah, Miles is technically a stalker. A better assessment is that he’s a harmless poet who lives down the street and has nothing better to do than walk around the neighborhood to find inspiration for his poetry.

  Miles was in his usual army camouflage gear, which always seemed to me a strange thing for a pacifist to wear. Sticking out of one of his oversized pockets was his beaten-up poetry notebook. He set down the thermos and rubbed his ink-stained hands together in the crisp morning air.

  “You were out playing a tabla gig last night, huh?” he asked.

  “You do realize it’s not cool for you to follow my every move.”

  “But you’re a fellow artist in the neighborhood.”

  “Did you come around here earlier?”

  “What, today?” A blush spread across his face. “Did you have a dream about me?”

  I rolled my eyes. “What brings you around this morning?”

  “We poets need to stick together.”

  “I’m not a poet,” I said. “As I’ve told you. Several times.”

  “But you are,” he said. “Don’t you see? You played your tabla at the cafe that one time, while that guy read his poems. That makes you a poet.”

  The rhythmic drumming sounds of the tabla do make for a nice accompaniment to various types of performances and can create a poetic melody on their own, but I didn’t think “that one time” with “that one guy” made me much of anything Miles wanted me to be. Playing the tabla for people is my release. My escape. Not my real life.

  “I was thinking,” he continued slowly, “I have something I wrote. I read it at open mic last week already, but if you would accompany me next time, it would be so much better. Here, I can show you.” He pulled out the mangled notebook sticking out of his pocket.

  “Maybe later.”

  “Oh, okay. But I wish you’d at least come see me read sometime, even if you don’t want to play. Nobody else gets me except for you.”

  “I don’t think I get much of anything these days.” I leaned back onto my elbows. Why on earth had Rupert thought I would know what to do with the anklet?

  “That’s okay. What fun would it be if life was easy?” He looked over my face for a few moments. “It’s in your soul, you know. You get things. You know how to piece together all that history stuff. I know it’s not easy. It’s the same with poetry. It’s all a puzzle until it’s pieced together. You see through what’s on the surface.”

  I nearly knocked over the mug I’d set down next to my elbow. Was I really receiving sage advice from my stalker? Miles is a few years younger than me, in his mid-twenties. I realized I didn’t know if he even had a job, since I’d only ever seen him at neighborhood coffee houses or in front of my own house. But the man had a point. I did see something that nobody else did. Nobody else would believe Rupert’s car accident might not have been an accident.

  “Earth to Jaya.” Miles scratched his scruffy head. “You okay?”

  “You were right,” I said, standing up. “I do see something that nobody else does.”

  “You mean you’ll do open mic with me?”

  “No,” I said. “Something even better.”

  I slipped inside my apartment, leaving a stunned Miles on the landing. I grabbed my phone and dialed Rupert’s number from memory. He had to have realized I’d have a different cell phone back in the U.S. without his number saved. The arrogant bastard had known I’d remember it.

  As soon as I finished punching in the number, I wondered what I would say to whoever answered the phone. Presumably it would be his best friend Knox or his father. Do you happen to know why Rupert sent me a precious Indian artifact? Oh, and by the way, there’s a possibility his death wasn’t an accident. Not the smoothest way to start a conversation.

  I never had the opportunity to figure it out. My call was met with an automated message. “The subscriber you are trying to reach is currently unavailable,” the recording of a woman with a refined English accent told me. Of course. A cell phone wouldn’t necessarily survive a fatal car accident any better than a person.

  There had to be someone else I could call. Even though it was early here, six o’clock in the morning in San Francisco meant it was two in the afternoon in England.

  If anyone knew what Rupert had been up to with the anklet, it would be Knox Bailey. Where Rupert went with a pseudo-scholarly scheme, Knox would follow. Knox had once been an archaeology graduate student along with Rupert, but had dropped out. Knox claimed it was because he didn’t want to settle on a single project for a dissertation, but I knew from Rupert that Knox had been caught plagiarizing and was discreetly asked to leave.

  I didn’t have Knox’s phone number, so I was considering what to say in an email when the last line of Rupert’s note flashed into my mind.

  You’re the only one I can trust.

  My stomach clenched and my head throbbed. Rupert had no longer trusted his best friend. Who could I trust?

  Chapter 3

  “What’s the matter with you?” Sanjay’s groggy voice asked through the receiver.

  “You sleep with your phone under your pillow?” I asked, surprised he picked up the phone after one ring.

  “Pocket. Must’ve fallen asleep practicing my new act.”

  “You’re asleep in a trunk?”

  “Escape shaft.” Sanjay yawned. “There’s a set of pillows here to cushion my landing.”

  Sanjay is a magician. He’s also my music partner. We play sets at the Tandoori Palace two nights a week, entertaining diners with his sitar and my tabla. It’s not a real job for either of us, but it’s fun. The rest of the week I’m buried in history books or with my students at the university, and Sanjay is a successful stage magician who goes by the moniker “The Hindi Houdini” and sells out entire seasons at a winery theater just north of San Francisco. In spite of his accomplishments in the magical field, Sanjay is one of the worst sitar players in this hemisphere. He’s like a brother to me, so I pretend I don’t notice when his fingers hit the wrong strings and we fill the restaurant with sounds reminiscent of a screaming monkey. He makes up for it in other ways, such as the fact that he’s the only person I knew I could call upon with no hesitation at this early hour.

  “Are you at the theater or in your studio at home?” I asked.

  “Studio. Why?”

  “Can you meet me at my place in twenty minutes?”

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Sort of. Are you coming?”

  After hanging up with Sanjay, I looked out the peephole of my door. Miles was gone. Good. I needed some sustenance to think while I waited for Sanjay. I didn’t have to look in my fridge to know there was nothing in it.

  The Coffee to the People cafe was full of people who were surprisingly cheery for the early hour. I had no idea there was a secret population in my laid-back neighborhood who woke up by six in the morning. I ordered a muffin for Sanjay and got myself a scrambled-egg bagel sandwich with crunchy peanut butter instead of cheese. The morning staff don’t know me as well as the afternoon staff, so the woman behind the counter raised a pierced eyebrow before ringing up my order.

  I walked the few blocks back to my apartment while I ate. I barely tasted the food, I was so distracted thinking about Rupert and the ruby anklet. When I reached my front door, I forgot about both. My door was ajar.

  I didn’t think I’d been absentminded enough to forget to lock up. It’s not the sort of thing you do when living in San Francisco. Had I been so distraught about Rupert’s death that I’d acted so stupidly? Only one way to find out.

  Without thinking, I gave
the door a hard shove. It didn’t swing open in the lightning-fast motion I had anticipated. Unfortunately, I was still holding the paper bag containing Sanjay’s now-squished muffin. As the door swung slowly open, I stayed on the landing, ready to toss a banana nut muffin at the burglar before running down the stairs.

  Since the apartment is a studio, I could see ninety percent of it from where I stood. Dressed in an impeccably tailored suit and a custom-made bowler hat, Sanjay sat on the couch with his elbows resting on his knees while he looked at the screen of his phone. He looked up at me as I stepped into the apartment.

  “I hate it when you do that,” I said, closing the door.

  “Let myself into your apartment? Since when have you hated that?”

  “I know it goes with the territory, that being friends with a magician means one must accept his ability to let himself into or out of any building he’d like. But today was a bad day for you to do it. How did you get here so quickly, anyway?”

  “I supposed you’d slap me if I said magic.”

  “Definitely.”

  “In that case,” Sanjay said, “I was already dressed, and it’s too early for there to be much rush hour traffic. What’s in your hand?”

  I tossed Sanjay the paper bag containing his smashed muffin.

  “What would you do,” I said, “if I told you someone had just been killed, that I was the only one who knew it might be murder, and that I now have the ruby he was killed over?”

  “You brought me here after I slept less than four hours to tell me a new plot idea for my stage show? Couldn’t it wait? A ruby is good, though. Those always look great under the stage lights.”

  I pulled the ruby anklet out of my bag and held it in my hand in front of Sanjay’s face. He swore. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what he did. He spoke the words under his breath in Punjabi. I’m half Tamil, so I don’t speak any Punjabi. But I know Sanjay.