Blood Rubies

by Jane K. Cleland

  I picked up the phone and dialed Nate Blackmore, our first call for jewelry appraisals. He was in and could see me right away.

  * * *

  Blackmore’s Jewelers, the finest jewelry store on the seacoast, bar none, had been in its current location, across from the village green, for ninety-four years. It was still owned and operated by the Blackmore family. Although they’d brought it up to date with recessed lighting and new, thick carpet, not much else had changed, not the cherrywood paneling, the comfortable plush seating, or the Bach sonatas playing softly in the background. Nate, the current owner’s grandson, was about thirty. He looked older because of his professional grace and polished manners.

  “Can we go in the back?” I asked, after exchanging greetings.

  He pretended my request was routine. “Sure.”

  The back office at Blackmore’s was a large room designed for work, not show. Tall file cabinets lined one wall; two computer stations ranged along another. Four blue upholstered chairs and a small round table were positioned off to the side, and an oversized cherry desk was littered with papers, folders, and sample books.

  Once we were settled on guest chairs, I extracted the plastic bag labeled GEMS and placed it on the table between us. Shards of bloodred, iridescent pink, creamy white, and pale green stones jostled one another in the bag.

  “Are any of these real?” I asked.

  He lifted the bag and stared at the colorful, broken pieces, twirling the bag this way, then that way. The stones glimmered as they caught the light.

  “I’ll need some time. Not too long. I’ll call you this afternoon.”

  I thanked him, accepted his receipt, and returned to work, eager to continue my examination, to see if I could figure out what I had. I was pretty sure I knew what I didn’t have—a genuine Fabergé egg.

  * * *

  By the time Nate called around four to report that all of the gemstones were, in fact, colored glass, cheap crystals, and painted rocks, I’d found additional anomalies. Comparing the materials in my possession with those listed on the previous appraisal, I was able to confirm that the object I was assessing was different in every way, from the MDF and veneer used on the base to the glycerin inside the dome to the Harber clasp attached to the egg. I called Ellis and told him what I’d discovered.

  “The oily substance found at the crime scene was glycerin, so now we know where it came from,” he said. “Is there any way you can date the replica in your possession, assuming that’s what you have?”

  “Not any closer than post-2005, which was when the Harber Fastener Company opened its doors. The screws are modern, but impossible to date exactly. They adhere to the Unified Thread Standard, which came into play in the late 1940s, but obviously, that doesn’t help us. The other materials are also modern, but even using the most scientifically advanced chemical dating technology, it’s unlikely we can narrow it down further than 2005.”

  “So all we know is that we’ve dealing with a phony.”

  “Right, or rather, all we know is that I’m not looking at a Fabergé egg or a snow dome fabricated by Fabergé. It might be a replica of the Spring Egg snow globe—as you say, a phony—or it might be some other object. There’s no way to know. I tried piecing together the dome and the egg, but I can’t. Too many of the pieces are too small.”

  “How is this related to Jason’s murder?”

  “I don’t know … but…” I paused, thinking how to express my hesitation. “Coincidences are funny things. I mean, I know they happen, but…”

  “Yeah … ‘but’ is the right word. Obviously, I need to tell Ana about this, to get her take on it, to see if she has an explanation. I’m certain she’ll have questions I can’t answer. Stefan, too. Technical questions about how you verified the egg and snow globe weren’t real, what the materials actually are, and so on. I’d prefer to interview them in a neutral environment, not the police station. I’m thinking the hotel might be a good choice. They’ve checked into the same hotel where the bridal party and most of the wedding guests are staying, the Pelican. If I set something up, will you join me there?”

  “Of course.”

  He paused. “What do you think is going on?”

  “I think someone created a replica of the Fabergé Spring Egg snow globe during the last nine years so they could sell the real egg or the jewels without anyone catching on. We should publicize the theft. This is major.”

  “How much are we talking?”

  “A known Fabergé egg, and by known, I mean authenticated and with clear title, would sell for around twenty million dollars, maybe more.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  “Twenty million?”

  “Or more.”

  “I’ll call the FBI giving you as a contact for further information about the object. Will you notify the appropriate antiques sites?”

  “Yes. Listing you as the contact for details about the theft. I’ll ask Nate Blackmore to post a listing of the jewels, too, on sites he knows about. They’re unique.”

  “In case someone destroyed the egg to get to the jewels.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Twenty million?” he asked.

  “Hard to imagine, isn’t it?”

  “Impossible, actually. You used the word ‘known’ before. Is Ana’s egg known?”

  “No. It comes with a great narrative, but there’s no evidence it’s true.”

  “What would someone be able to sell it for?”

  “A few hundred thousand, maybe as much as a million.”

  “Who’d buy it?”

  “Megarich people without ethics. Drug lords. Gangsters. Modern-era robber barons.” I shrugged. “There are a lot of Russian megamillionaires who might be interested in repatriating it on the QT.”

  Ellis didn’t speak for several seconds. “This is a mess.” I could hear him breathing. “Shouldn’t Stefan have noticed that it’s a fake when he packed it up?”

  “Only if he actually looked at it. You know what I mean, right? You see something every day for enough years, you simply don’t notice it anymore. In a rush of packing, I can see how he might have placed a sheet of bubble wrap on top of it, taping it as he rolled it up, which means he might well have never actually looked at it.”

  “What a situation.” Another pause. “It was on display in the family home … is that right?”

  “So Ana told me. Heather described the house as a fortress.”

  “The family home … that sure points to Ana, Stefan, or Peter.”

  “Or any visitor who might have an opportunity to snatch it. Just ’cause you build a fortress doesn’t mean it can’t be breached. Maybe Stefan is as loosey-goosey in allowing access to his house as Ana is to her cottage. Whoever took it wouldn’t need it for long. A day maybe, just enough time to allow a craftsman to take measurements and photographs. I’m guessing here, but I bet that when Heather was dating Peter, she visited his dad’s home.”

  “Do you think Heather killed Jason?”

  I’m sorry, she kept saying. Sorry for what? “No. Do you?”

  “We’re looking into all possibilities.”

  Another evasion, no surprise. “You’re so forthcoming.”

  “It occurs to me that since we’re going public about the snow globe, we should go all the way,” he said, ignoring my comment. “Tips from the community can be very helpful.”

  “Are you going to release it to the media?”

  “Not me. Too official. Some people get spooked when it’s a police matter.”

  “Especially people who might have contacts in the black market.”

  “Especially those people.”

  “Those people won’t talk to me either.”

  “They might. They might want to get their side of the story out there. Maybe whoever took it doesn’t think they did anything wrong. It’s possible they think it’s unfair that the egg has been passed down from mother to daughter.”

  I understood his point.
Sibling rivalry was part and parcel of my business. “Peter.”

  “Will you tell Wes?”

  This wasn’t the first time Ellis had drafted me as his amanuensis, and I was glad to do it. Telling Wes what was going on would go a long way toward satisfying his quid pro quo demands. “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thanks, Josie. I’ll call you when I know about meeting at the Pelican.”

  I placed the receiver in the cradle and turned to Hank. He was purring in his sleep, his front paws twitching. He was dreaming, perhaps, of chasing a mouse.

  “You’re so beautiful, Hank,” I whispered, not wanting to disturb him.

  I posted notices of the missing egg on all three of the proprietary industry Web sites we subscribed to, one of which fed directly into a lost-art database maintained by Interpol, then called Nate.

  “Tell me it ain’t so,” he said after I explained why I was calling.

  “Isn’t it awful to think about?” I sighed.

  “Give me the list.”

  I rattled off jewel type, cut, karat, and all the other details the appraisal specified and gave him Ellis’s number for the law enforcement contact. He agreed to send me the links once he’d uploaded the reports, and we promised to stay in touch.

  I squared up the Polaroids. The images were so faded, they weren’t useful for identifying anything, but I wondered if an artisan could bring the colors back. Anyone can learn to use Photoshop and insert colors where none existed or change colors or textures at will, but it took a master craftsman to understand how colors changed over time and re-create a true rendition of the original. I called down to Gretchen.

  “Who are we using for photo retouching these days?”

  “Matthew Hughes.”

  “I’m going to scan in some old shots. He needs to repair the coloration. It’s crucial he gets as close to the original as possible. Ask him to rush it, all right?”

  Ten minutes later, she IM’d me that Matthew would have them back to me by ten Monday morning, the fastest he could manage. I okayed it, then called Wes and got him.

  “You’re a hot potato, Josie!” he said after I filled him in. “Fantastic.”

  “You said you wanted some quid for your pro quo. I’d say that after this exclusive, I’ve got a nice little credit balance going.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  Give a reporter a few bars and he wants a symphony.

  * * *

  I stood up and stretched, then went and sat cross-legged on the floor near Hank’s basket watching him sleep. I stroked his tummy, down, then up. Down, then up. Down, then up. Still asleep, he rolled over, ready for me to rub his side.

  I couldn’t see how the counterfeit Fabergé Spring Egg snow globe could have led to Jason’s murder, which meant either it hadn’t or I lacked information.

  I gave Hank a little kiss, pausing midsmooch, as a research idea came to me.

  “Let’s do it.”

  I told Hank he was a very good boy, then hurried upstairs to my private office. If my idea worked, I was about to learn more about the shattered snow globe.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I typed “snow globe” into our database and learned that we had twelve in stock. I wasn’t surprised we had that many since they were steady sellers at our weekly tag sale.

  Ellis called at five to ask me to meet him in the Pelican coffee shop at six. I agreed and called Ty to tell him I’d be home late. I got his voice mail and left a message. I glanced at the clock on my monitor. I had forty-five minutes before I’d need to leave.

  Unless there’s a good business reason to do otherwise, like covering the phones, or meeting with a client, or making a scheduled delivery, I let my staff set their own hours. Fred was a night owl, often coming into work around noon and staying late into the evening. Since he’d begun dating Suzanne, he joined her for an early dinner at the Blue Dolphin two or three times a week, arriving around four, before the after-work crowd flooded the lounge for drinks and the early-bird diners descended on the dining room for dinner. If today was one of those days, he wouldn’t be in. I picked up the phone and dialed his extension.

  He was in. I asked him to meet me at the worktable.

  * * *

  I held up the plastic bag of glass shards so Fred could see it. “I have a crazy idea, and I need your input. I want to figure out how large a snow dome this glass would make. If I take an existing dome and weigh it and then weigh this Baggie, am I comparing apples to apples?”

  He stared at the bag. I could almost see the wheels in his brain turning. He raised his eyes to mine. “It depends on the thickness of the glass.”

  “Which we can measure. I’ve already measured several pieces in the bag and tagged them. They’re uniform in thickness.”

  “Really?” Fred pushed up his glasses. “That’s not good.”

  Given that antique glass was handblown, it was subject to vagaries of breath and heat and humidity and craftsmanship. It was never uniform.

  “I know. I have so much evidence that both the egg and the snow globe—if that’s what these are—are modern reproductions, I can’t even tell you. And not very good repros, either.”

  He shook his head, commiserating at the loss.

  “These have glycerin on them,” I added. “We need to compensate for that, too.”

  “If you can live with a ballpark estimate, your idea should work. Shall I check if we have any cheap, modern snow globes in stock?”

  “I already have.” I explained what I’d found in the database, and he set off to gather a few samples, starting with the least expensive.

  Removing a snow globe dome was a risk; we might be able to put it back into salable condition, but we might not. I got a plastic tub and canvas aprons from the supply cabinet. I was tying the apron when Fred came back with a souvenir snow globe from Tampa dated 1953. We’d priced it at twelve dollars. He put his apron on.

  “All right, then,” I said. “Here goes nothing.”

  I placed the snow globe in a tub, slid my fingers into plastic gloves, and eased a hard plastic chisel under the glass lip. I tapped it with a rubber mallet, one gentle tap. Nothing. I tapped a few more times, without loosening it at all.

  “I think you’ll need to use a metal one,” Fred said.

  “I agree.” Wedging the metal tip under the glass overhang, I tapped the handle with the mallet, then switched to the flat end of a claw hammer, and the seal broke. Fred lifted the dome. Mineral oil poured into the tub. The innards—miniature palm trees, carefully arranged and glued-down sand, and stacked crates of oranges—were undamaged. All the plastic snowy bits were intact, floating in the oil. Fred laid the dome on a piece of wax paper and measured the thickness of the glass. It was about a sixty-fourth of an inch thicker than my shards.

  “We can use it for reference, at least,” I said.

  “True.” Fred placed it on the digital scale. “Just over six ounces.”

  I placed the plastic bag on the scale. “This is so inexact. Between the thickness of the glass, the glycerin coating some pieces, and the weight of the plastic bag, to say nothing of my certainty that there are plenty of pieces missing—” I broke off, my eyes on the scale’s display. “Am I reading this right? Fourteen and a half ounces?”

  “Yes … so the snow dome was, theoretically at least, more than twice as big as this little guy from Tampa.”

  “Which is consistent with the size required to cover an Imperial egg. Those were the big ones. Go get the largest snow globe we have.”

  While Fred went to the shelves, I retrieved a second plastic tub and put on a fresh pair of gloves.

  “This one has some heft to it,” he said, cupping the snow globe, a 1970s Christmas scene showing Santa Claus in his sleigh flying high above a nameless city’s rooftops.

  It was huge, about the size of a honeydew melon, but inexpertly made and painted. Santa’s features were crudely rendered, and the paint was sloppily applied. We’d priced it at fifteen dol
lars, less than a third of what it would have fetched had it been more expertly crafted. I used the same tools and had the same happy result. Nothing broke. All the mineral oil and white flecks were salvaged.

  Fred slid the dome onto the scale. “Twelve and a quarter ounces.”

  “So the broken one is even bigger than this.”

  “Right.”

  “Good. This is helpful. Let’s weigh the oil, then I’ve got to scoot. Sorry to leave you to put the two Humpty Dumptys back together again.”

  “No problem.”

  We weighed an empty tub, then the two that contained varying amounts of oil and “snow,” and deducted the tub’s weight to learn the difference. The smaller one, from Tampa, weighed just over two ounces; Santa Claus came in at a full eight ounces.

  “That’s a lot of goo,” Fred remarked.

  I stared at the viscous liquid, implications sparking through my brain like live wires.

  Fred said something else, but I didn’t hear him.

  “Josie?”

  I peeled off the gloves, untied my apron, and dropped everything on the floor. “Sorry … I need to go.”

  I grabbed my tote bag and ran for the door.

  * * *

  I peeked through a plastic palm tree in the entryway to see into the Pelican’s coffee shop. Ana, Stefan, and Peter sat next to one another along one side of a round table set for six, each in his or her own world. Ana, frowning, slid her knife closer to her teaspoon, lining them up, then moved them apart, aligning the tops, then the bottoms, as if she were working a geometry challenge. Stefan stared into the middle distance, a million miles away. His lips were puckered, the corners of his mouth pointed to the floor. Peter looked at nothing, then scanned the room. He crossed his arms over his chest and screwed his lips into a cynical smirk. He kept scanning the room, left to right, looking for I didn’t know what.

  Ellis wasn’t at the table, a good thing. I needed to talk to him privately, urgently, before he confronted the Yartsins.

  I backed out of the palm tree and returned to the lobby, texting Ellis as I walked. “In lobby by front door. I have news.”

  His reply came within seconds: “2 min.”