The Jewelry Case (27 page)

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."

Paisley felt the conversation was getting farther and farther from reality. She was growing increasingly aware of Ian's warmth, centimeters away, his breath on the top of her head. As she leaned her head back against the cushions, her long hair brushed his shoulder. It seemed a long time since she had thought of him as nothing more than an occasionally annoying handyman.

Dragging her mind back to the point, she said, "We know it wasn't Aunt Henka. She would have worn those jewels triumphantly and openly, and we wouldn't be sitting here wondering what happened to them."

Ian scratched his chin. "It could have been one of Aunt Henka's children, but neither of them ever spoke of it or showed unusual wealth in later years. So we're back to Esther taking the jewels out of her treasure box herself."

"It probably wouldn't have been the first time," Paisley said, picturing a childish Esther decked in her Great-aunt Ruth's glittering finery, playing dress-up. Withdrawing her bare feet from the coffee table, Paisley tucked them under her, and turned to Ian. Their faces were only inches apart. "Of course she wanted to play with the shiny trinkets
. W
hat little girl wouldn't?"

"But that day, she was interrupted before she could put them away," he said slowly. He seemed to be unaware of her nonverbal hint that she was tired of the endless conversation about something that could never be proved, that she was ready to move on to ... something else. "Esther had to find a place to hid them in a hurry. Buried them in leaves, or shoved them under a bush, or dumped them somewhere. It makes sense."

Paisley buried her head in her hands, her hair spilling over her fingers. "Does it? We're building so much on speculation. We have no way of knowing if any of this is true."

Remembering her presence, he patted her on the shoulder. "Remember, the scientific method begins with a hypothesis." His tone sounded very much like that of a Berkeley student debating a professor, or
,
she thought fleetingly, like the TV character Sherman, on
Big Bang Theory
. "Then you test it to see if the hypothesis pans out. If not, you start over. That's what Sherlock Holmes did. And yes, I know he was a detective, not a scientist, but the point is the same."

She didn't say what she thought: that Ian was neither a scientist nor Sherlock Holmes. He was a fledgling architect. Architects created things, incredibly elaborate things, out of their imagination. They dreamed things into existence. Which was the opposite of what she was trying to do, which was to pin down what really happened. An impossible task.

Then she felt ashamed of her mental criticism of the person who had been her greatest ally in the hunt for the jewels. Laying a hand on his forearm, she said, "I don't mean to sound ungrateful, Ian. I know how much time you've taken out to help me, and I don't even know why." It was true. She realized that he did not stand to profit from any of this, whether Ruth Wiegel's rubies were found or not. So why was he spending so much time helping her try to find them?

"You don't know?" He looked at her and raised one sandy eyebrow. She caught her breath at the expression on his face, then laughed, a little hysterically. She remembered their earlier discussion of opera and passion. If there was one thing long, gangly, intellectual Ian didn't look capable of, it was passion. He certainly hadn't seemed like it a moment ago, when she had snuggled next to him, hoping almost unconsciously that he would pick up on the hint.

Apparently he was not entirely clueless after all. The next thing she knew, he caught his breath sharply. Then he reached out, pulling her close with unexpectedly strong arms. Working with a hammer these past few weeks had made him buff. Or maybe his body had always been this way, and she just hadn't known it.

Under his rumpled plaid shirt, she felt a hard chest and his heart, beating rapidly. Her laughter died away as she looked up at him. The expression on his face was perfectly serious, endowing its earnest features with a sort of dignity. She felt a stronger flutter of something she had not felt in a long time, something that Steve with all his good looks and charm had failed to arouse.