The Glass Thief (A Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery Book 6)

by Gigi Pandian

“But not this.”

  The flicker of a strong emotion crossed Lane’s face. He was good enough at hiding his emotions that I couldn’t be sure what it was.

  “Where are the rest of the Rajasthan Rubies now?” he asked. His voice was outwardly calm, but now I’d identified the emotion. Not anger. Not indignation. Disappointment.

  I stared at Lane, uncomprehending. “What?”

  “Where are they?”

  “You already know where they are. The British and Indian governments are in negotiations.”

  “Exactly. Are the Rajasthan Rubies in a museum?”

  “No. But that doesn’t mean you get to decide what you take for yourself.”

  “Why not? It would have been lost forever if not for you. You deserve it. So much more than the people who generally end up with riches. I’ve seen it happen too often. Precious art disappearing because powerful people who want to save face won’t bend. They’d rather the art be lost to everyone than for their own ego to be bruised.”

  “It’ll get resolved.”

  “One day. Maybe. Until then, won’t you get joy from this? Seeing your face—”

  “That’s not the point. I’d like the Mona Lisa on my wall too.”

  Lane’s lips ticked up into what I’m sure was an involuntary smile. “Would you? God, I always hated that painting. It’s like she’s mocking us.”

  “I was making a point with a hypothetical example. But maybe an Ogata Korin painted screen. I’d love that.”

  “And if you had one you’d loan it to a museum or at the very least have it photographed so people can experience it. I might actually have a contact—”

  I choked.

  “Legally!” Lane hurriedly continued. “I think I saw that there’s one up for auction soon. See—that look. That’s all I ever wanted. That makes everything worth it. You’d be inspired to rescue more treasures.”

  “According to you, so they’ll end up in a government’s labyrinthine secret basement—”

  “You can cross that bridge when you come to it.”

  “Wonderful. My very own Devil’s Bridge.” I put the bracelet and ruby back in the box, left it on the mantle, and headed for the door.

  “Jones, wait.”

  I didn’t.

  Lane had tried to end our relationship several times, because he was gallantly trying to protect me, acting like the knight his mother had named him after. He’d been afraid his past would catch up with him. And it had. That past year we’d been blackmailed into working for one of his former associates. We’d come out the other side, and Lane was ready to stay put near me and be together. It all happened so fast that I hadn’t been ready to commit. It was my turn to be conflicted. After believing I wanted a more stable life than the one I’d grown up with, I’d found myself unexpectedly drawn to the adventures that had taken me all over the world to save lost pieces of history. I’d always loved the Gabriela Glass novels, but never thought I wanted to be her in real life. Until it turned out I did.

  I was so angry I knew I wouldn’t sleep that night. I was right, but not for the reason I imagined.

  When I reached home, I stormed up the stairs loudly enough that I must have disturbed Nadia. Almost as soon as I slipped out of my shoes and locked the door, she knocked.

  “Sorry for the stomping,” I said.

  Nadia shrugged. “We all have bad nights sometimes. This arrived for you.” She handed me a slim package. It was the next chapter from Rick Coronado.

  Chapter 11

  The Glass Thief

  Chapter Three

  Tristan Ruben’s Pigalle apartment, Paris, France

  Gabriela was immediately drawn to the handsome, mysterious Tristan, Luc’s old university friend who had been present for Luc’s strange two deaths.

  Of course, nearly everything could be explained and wrapped up quickly if, like Laura, she accepted that Tristan was lying. Nearly everything.

  Gabriela wished to hear Tristan’s story from his own mouth. And what a mouth it was…

  Tristan had agreed to meet her at his apartment, with a view of the Moulin Rouge, on the condition the police weren’t involved. Why was that, she wondered? What did he have to hide? If he was guilty, surely he would have disappeared that night, as he easily could have.

  Gabriela Glass could sweet-talk men from secret societies across the world into showing her documents in long-forgotten archives; she could learn a local language fluently to pay her respects to tribal elders who would then trust her enough to show her maps no American had ever seen before; and she had braved many a mosquito and snake-filled jungle.

  But solve two crimes that had baffled a wealthy family for more than half a century, along with a new murder committed that week? She wished to right a wrong for Laura Delacroix, and she wasn’t above admitting that the Serpent King reward intrigued her. This was a challenge like no other.

  Tristan Rubens clutched a cigarette as if for dear life, while offering her a glass of port, which he deftly opened and poured with his free hand. She followed his fingertips with her gaze, wondering what those fingers might do to her. Were they the hands of a lover or those of a killer? Perhaps both. Like Gabriela herself.

  “I gave my statement to the authorities,” Tristan said. They spoke French, Tristan’s mother tongue.

  “You spoke with them about the death of your friend.” Gabriela paused and took a sip as she watched his face for his reaction. Grief. Subtle, yet unmistakable. “I’m sorry for your loss. The authorities don’t have much to go on to locate the missing family heirloom. The Serpent King. I was called for that.” She didn’t mention that she thought he would lead her directly to it.

  Tristan laughed without humor. “Keeping up appearances. Any hint of a scandal is worse than the alternative. They cannot say the sculpture was itself stolen, so they cannot give a good description.”

  Gabriela found her gaze dipping to Tristan’s lush lips and sculpted arms, then back to his forlorn gaze. Falling into his arms could be a welcome distraction. And perhaps he would talk in his sleep.

  Gabriela had dressed today in knee-high brown hiking boots which she hadn’t buffed, well-worn khakis, and a green cloak over a simple white cotton blouse from Nepal. Sweepingly stunning on the outside, and elegantly casual as soon as she stepped inside and removed the cloak. Tristan was a traveler, so she had dressed to put him at ease. Her skills were best used to blend in—well, not exactly blend. She stood out wherever she went. But she stood out as a different person in each location.

  “Tell me about that night,” she said.

  “You know about the family ghost. I expect you also know that Laura Delacroix believes I’m using the legend to cover my own crime. But I swear to you, I’m telling the truth.”

  “So you believe in the ghost?”

  “I didn’t used to. But after what I saw—”

  “What exactly did you see?”

  Tristan told her the same story Laura had.

  “Stop,” she commanded. “Why are you creating an impossible situation for yourself? Surely you see that if nobody else was found in the house, and the snow was untouched outside when the police and paramedics arrived, that you are the only suspect. Why make up a ridiculous story of a man being murdered two times? Why not simply say it was an accident?”

  “Because I’m speaking the truth.”

  Gabriela pressed her index finger to his chest in frustration. “You’re telling me Luc Delacroix was first strangled by invisible hands. Invisible? Surely you mean the man or woman was dressed in black, so you couldn’t identify them. And the person must have failed at killing him, which is why he was attacked again.”

  “No, Mademoiselle Glass. I saw him through the glass doors of the second-floor library. We were only a few feet away from each other. He was alone in that room, and yet he was strangled by an invisible man be
hind him. I saw the imprint of the fingers gripping his neck. As he struggled, his face became red, then purple.”

  “Perhaps he was choking. He could have had something stuck in his throat.”

  “Something that would cause the glass door to slam between us and lock? And for him to fight with his attacker?”

  Gabriela thought about the animals of the jungle. Its fiercest predators could be silent until they wanted you to see them. In some ways the predatory animals were smarter than man. But she knew there were ways a man could hide himself. Tristan had surely been too shaken to see the hidden murderer.

  “And Luc’s second death?”

  “I called for an ambulance. There was a slight chance he might have still been alive. I went downstairs to let them in. As they came inside, we all saw Luc being thrown down the stairs by an invisible force. He landed at our feet, his neck broken. For a second time that night.”

  Gabriela’s heart pounded. Surely the words he spoke could not be true. The events he described were impossible.

  Tristan continued. “The two men from the service d’aide medical urgante were more frightened than I was, seeing Luc killed by the ghost. Did they think it a joke, or a nightmare from which they could not wake up? One of the men was especially superstitious. He looked around nervously, shouting, ‘Where is the ghost!? Where is it!?’ When the police arrived, we learned about another strange aspect of the mystery.”

  “The Serpent King statue was gone,” Gabriela said.

  “Yes. At first, the police were convinced I had taken it earlier in the day and covered up my crime by murdering my friend. But there were two problems they couldn’t ignore, which is why they let me go. First, several people witnessed Luc die as he was flung down the stairs by the ghost.”

  Tristan paused and looked at Gabriela with naked fear in his eyes. “Second, there was no opportunity for me to remove the statue. Snow had been falling all day, but it stopped shortly after the Delacroix family left the home for the anniversary night. The snow surrounding the house was pristine. No footsteps approached the house except for mine and Luc’s when we entered the house, and those prints were nearly covered by the snow. We never left.”

  “Laura Delacroix is positive the Serpent King statue was in the house when they departed,” Gabriela murmured. She had searched the house herself, thinking that Tristan must have been lying and hidden it. But if there was a secret passageway she’d missed, she didn’t live up to her name.

  “There’s no way for the statue to have left the house,” Tristan said, “unless carried out by an entity that can float above the snow.”

  “A ghost.”

  Only Gabriela Glass didn’t believe in ghosts. She believed in many things in this strange world, but had never encountered a ghost. The secret rested with the Serpent King. The family was hiding its history, as a valuable treasure stolen from India.

  To solve the puzzle, Gabriela Glass needed a historian. Not just any historian.

  She knew exactly who she would call.

  Chapter 12

  I rubbed my eyes and read the last paragraph again. Like that would make it change. But I’d half expected I’d imagined it. Gabriela Glass was asking for my help.

  I read the last lines of the chapter again:

  Gabriela Glass needed a historian. Not just any historian.

  She knew exactly who she would call.

  I have a healthy ego. An overly developed one, if you were to ask my brother Mahilan. But I didn’t think I was imagining that Gabriela and Rick meant me.

  Rick Coronado had spared no expense getting this new chapter to me quickly, with a same day cross-country delivery leaving New York at seven o’clock in the morning reaching me at five o’clock. What was the urgency? The answer screamed at me from the page. This wasn’t fiction. It was real life.

  Rick Coronado wasn’t asking for my help to write a book—he was asking for my help to solve a murder and find a lost treasure.

  I reread the pages. He was telling me that Tristan Rubens was guilty of both crimes, but the mystery was solving how the murderous thief had accomplished it. The secret lay in the Serpent King statue from Munnar—how had it been removed from the house?

  The problem was, I couldn’t find any records of a looted Serpent King statue from Munnar, or anywhere else in India. Not everything could be found on the internet, but surely it was a big deal if Rick was in search of it.

  Let’s be honest. He was writing the book for me, and quite possibly manipulating me to help him. Damn right I could start thinking of him simply as Rick.

  I could also call the man. That didn’t mean he had to answer my call, which he didn’t. I followed up with a text. I know you’re asking for my help with a real-life puzzle. I need more details if you truly want my help.

  I remembered it was the middle of the night in New York. But if he wanted my help so urgently, wouldn’t he have left his phone on? I stared angrily at the unresponsive phone for another minute before turning to more productive tasks.

  My immediate impulse was to call Lane. He was the person I could turn to talk through things like this. I was capable of solving problems on my own, but I thought more clearly with him at my side. But if he could keep something so big from me, did I know him as well as I thought I did? I still needed to wrap my head around everything that had happened earlier that night. I couldn’t call Lane.

  There was no way I was getting to sleep any time soon, so I got down to work.

  I knew a lot about Rick already, but it wasn’t like I was a superfan. I enjoyed his escapist books. I didn’t know much about him personally, but no one living in the United States with a television or internet connection could have missed the coverage of his disappearance seven years ago. Missing for six weeks. Long enough for all sorts of theories to abound, but not too long for the public to forget him.

  No passport activity was found (at least none recorded at the time, though the police later found a visa stamp from China in his passport). No credit cards used. No turning up on surveillance cameras. His brother Vincent, who was also his business manager, had been frantic, but commentators had been skeptical that his motives were purely from brotherly love. Vincent lived a lavish lifestyle courtesy of his brother’s success.

  Born Ricardo Coronado in the Bronx, New York, forty-nine years ago, Rick was a hopeless student as a child. His teachers’ notes to his parents indicated he was smart but far too easily distracted. That changed when he was accepted into a high school for the arts. He wrote his first novel at seventeen. This was before the internet. That, he said in many interviews, is what saved him from himself, because he wasn’t able to publish it himself. To this day, he hadn’t resurrected the self-declared dreck. That “dreck” was rejected by publishers, but was good enough to land him an agent. His first Gabriela Glass novel, Heart of Glass, set in New York and Mexico, was published when he was twenty years old.

  I looked up from my laptop to the world map that covered the wall above my mini living room. I hadn’t realized he was so young when the book had been published. That explained some of Gabriela’s more difficult-to-believe backstory, such as infiltrating a drug cartel when she was thirteen to rescue her mother. (Said drug cartel had accidentally discovered Mayan ruins with a hoard of gold, which Gabriela proceeded to rescue for the descendants of the Mayans, after she rescued her mother.)

  Over the course of nineteen novels over the next twenty-two years leading up to Rick’s disappearance, Gabriela had remained eternally twenty-six years old. Whatever he was working on at the time would have been his twentieth novel.

  I’d already looked up the Delacroix family mentioned in the manuscript but found nothing. Rick would have changed the name. I tried searching for a French tea empire. Interesting history abounded, but none of it appeared to be related to a murderous family ghost and a stolen statue. Several prominent families and homes we
re supposedly haunted, but that didn’t get me anywhere. Unless I decided to give up being an academic and move to Paris to become a tour guide. Which I admitted didn’t sound completely unappealing.

  I was also at a disadvantage because I didn’t speak French. I was the antithesis of Gabriela. The only language I spoke fluently was English. Though I’d been born in Goa, India, my parents spoke mostly English with each other and with me and Mahilan, since my dad is American and English gets you far in India. When I was little I used to speak a smattering of local languages well enough to communicate with people (in a country with over seventy formal languages and hundreds more dialects, it wasn’t uncommon to have conversations that lapsed into three or more languages), but since we left India when I was eight, I’d forgotten most of them. I spoke enough Hindi to help with my dissertation research, but studying the British East India Company, most of my research was accessible in English.

  Research in French wouldn’t work—not unless I called my one French friend. But I wasn’t going to bother Sébastien Renaud. He was the liveliest ninety-one-year-old I knew, but I still felt guilty that he’d caught pneumonia after we were trapped in frigid waters inside a dungeon of Mont Saint-Michel together, when he was trying to save my life. I had other avenues of research I could pursue. Like Rick’s own statements. Rick was handsome and charismatic, and loved to talk about himself. That made him a natural for interviews—at least until he holed up as a recluse nearly seven years ago. I’d seen a few before, and I easily found hundreds more of them online.

  My stomach rumbled. I hadn’t eaten dinner with Lane as planned. I opened my fridge. I don’t know what I was expecting to have magically appeared since I’d last looked. Staring back at me were bottles of mango pickle, ginger chutney, Dijon mustard, harissa sauce, and a package of coffee beans. A takeout container was behind the coffee beans, but the remains of the super-size burrito hadn’t survived. Hidden behind it was a foil-wrapped piece of naan from the Tandoori Palace. I tossed it into the toaster oven and hit play on a video that had a lot of viewers. An entertainment television show interview. I didn’t care if he liked to eat the same things for breakfast as Gabriela. The toaster oven dinged. The scent of the garlicky bread filled my drafty studio apartment. I slathered chutney over the toasty bread and clicked on another video.