The Jewelry Case (26 page)

His eyes lit up, but he hesitated. "I don't know. Finances are kind of tight right now, with Steve expanding the winery, and all. He might not want to pay for lessons."

Paisley thought of Steve's gleaming new Audi and the custom oak barrels recently ordered from France. Her mouth tightened. "Don't worry, I won't charge you for the lessons. Just study the score tonight and come to my house tomorrow after rehearsal, okay?"

"Why?" His eyes met hers with unaccustomed frankness, and again she was struck by a nagging sense of something familiar about him. "Why are you willing to do all that for me, Mrs. Perleman? Free lessons, giving up your time...."

"Because we need you. And I like you."

He regarded her with an odd look on his face. "Um ... Mrs. Perleman, maybe I ought to tell you...."

"Call me Paisley."

"Um
….
"

She interrupted before he could back out. "Tomorrow, seven o'clock sharp. Bring the sheet music with you."

#

Shirley met Paisley at the door of the book shop and led her to an apartment upstairs. The living room was overcrowded and homey, stuffed with furniture not quite old enough to qualify as antique. After installing Paisley in a 1950s wingback armchair reupholstered in a loud floral fabric that didn't match the rest of the decor, she settled herself on the facing sofa. "A little bird told me your boyfriend went to the Berkeley historical library last weekend," she said, with a shrewd look.

Paisley felt disappointed. Was that was what Shirley was excited about? A new tidbit of gossip? "First of all, Ian's not my boyfriend. Second of all, who told you that he drove to Berkeley?"

"I told you, I know everything that goes on in this town." Shirley kicked off her shoes and curled up her legs like a preteen at a pajama party. "That's why I wanted to ask you if that old rumor is still going around."
"What old rumor?" Paisley said cautiously.

"
You
know. We talked about it before, a long time ago. I think I know what you're up to. You're looking for the jewels that Esther Perleman supposedly brought over from Warsaw before the second World War."

When her mouth stopped hanging open, Paisley struggled to sit up straighter in her seat. "How did you know?"

Shirley looked smug. "Come on, I told you that there isn't anyone in this town over a certain age that hasn't heard that old story. Jonathan and his younger cousin, Sarah, used to brag about it at school. I used to spend Saturday mornings with them digging in the back yard for Great-Aunt Ruth's jewels with our shovels and plastic buckets. That is, until we got bored and went home. So when you started asking questions about the family's past and enlisted Ian to help you do research, I knew there was only one thing you could be looking for."

Paisley kicked herself. "Was it really that obvious?" Ian had guessed what she was after too, she remembered ruefully. . .almost before she was aware of it herself. So much for secrets.

"What else would have brought you here? You could have recuperated from your injuries anywhere. It would have saved a lot of time if you'd come to me for information, Paisley. Why bother sending Ian all the way to Berkeley?"

"But I didn't
!
"

"I told you, I have a whole collection of that stuff in my back room, gathering dust. Better than the Berkeley library, I'll bet. Come downstairs, and I'll show you."

Still barefoot, Shirley led her back down to the dimly lit bookshop and flicked on a light switch, illuminating the rows of shelves. "There," she said, waving her hand toward a rack of dusty books in the back. "It's in there somewhere. I'd have looked it up for you, but I haven't had time. To be frank, if I wasn't so grateful with you for helping with the play, I'd be insulted you didn't ask me for help sooner."

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she pulled out a stack of books. Paisley joined her. For an hour they went through the titles until finally Paisley held up a large leather-bound book with lettering in a strange alphabet she had seen before. She felt a stab of excitement.

"Hey, look at this one. It's written in Polish." Paisley remembered the aerogramme Ian had found. The words in the book were also heavily sprinkled with Ws, Ys, and Zs.Shirley plucked the volume from her hand and nodded with satisfaction, handing it back. "This is the one I thought you might be interested in. Jonathan's father sold the family's old books just before he passed on, but no one wanted this collection of biographies because it wasn't in English. There might be some pictures in here you'd be interested in. There are more famous Poles than you might think."

"Let's see. Chopin, of course. And Pope John Paul II," Paisley said, opening the pages and rifling through them randomly. "And wasn't Madame Curie originally from Poland as well?"

"So was the astronomer Copernicus."

"Really?" Paisley thought the words appeared to be written in code. Sprinkled through the text were black-and white photographs of men with handlebar mustaches and high collars, and engravings of sturdy women in peasant costumes. She stopped turning pages, however, when she recognized two words in bold type. A woman's name.

She looked up and met Shirley's eyes. Shirley nodded. Carefully, Paisley lifted the fragile piece of tissue covering the black-and-white photograph, almost not daring to look. They both stared at the picture for a while.

"That's her," Paisley said quietly. "That's Ruth Wegiel."

"And those," said Shirley, "are the jewels."

Chapter Eleven

Paisley refused Shirley's offer of a drink, and, clutching the book with one hand, drove home. Shirley had insisted on giving the volume to her. "It's priced a lousy two bucks, for goodness sake. It's the least I can do, after all the time you've spent helping me with rehearsals. You can buy me lunch if the book leads to anything."

Paisley had intended to savor the discovery alone, but once she got home she found her hand straying toward her cell phone.

He arrived in less than five minutes. Paisley stood on the porch watching as the familiar green pickup truck turned up the driveway. Once, Esther used to invite him in for blueberry muffins when he was walking home from school, a tall, gangly teenager. Had the old woman stood on the porch like this, joyfully anticipating the approach of sandy hair, smiling eyes, and long limbs? But surely the older woman's emotions would have been maternal. Her own were more ... complicated.

As Ian strode toward up the walkway, his smile broadened as he saw her as it always did. She wondered what her late husband would have thought of her visitor. Most likely Jonathan would have looked down his long, patrician nose at the younger man
,
figuratively speaking, of course, since Ian stood at least four inches taller. And yet, she thought with an odd lurch in her stomach, Ian matched or exceeded her late husband in every way that mattered: intelligence, kindness, and strength of character.

The realization took her aback, and she took a step back, a hand going to her throat.

The object of her cogitation stopped in front of her. The smile faded, and his light-gray eyes grew puzzled. "Are you all right? The call sounded urgent."

"What? Oh. No burglars tonight. I just wanted to see you. Are you hungry? I just made an omelet."

"Do you need to ask?" Sniffing the air appreciatively, he followed her to the kitchen, where she had set the table with Esther's stoneware dishes and cut some yellow roses she had found blooming in the back yard, putting them in a mason jar. She'd tell him of her discovery after dinner, she decided. It would increase the suspense.

After his first query, Ian didn't seem to question her invitation, seeming to take it for granted the call had been social. "There's a question I've been meaning to ask you," he said, scraping his plate clean after his second helping and pushing it away. He leaned his chin on his knuckles, and regarded her closely. "Why opera?"
Caught off guard, she stared at him blankly. He went on. "I looked you up online. You were definitely on your way up before the crash. First local productions, then winning some prestigious competitions, then the Met. Music is a fiendishly competitive business, so I wondered: if you have such a great voice
….
" She blessed him for not saying "had." “…why pick opera for a career?"

"I don't understand your question."

He shrugged. "There's a lot of other things a singer can do. Rock, folk, pop. Opera's pretty much a dead art form, isn't it?"

She dabbed her mouth with a paper napkin. This was an argument she had faced many times with relatives and friends, and this was the perfect opportunity to set him straight. "That's a misconception. There are hundreds of thousands of opera fans all over the world, as many as there have ever been. The style may not be as popular as rap or pop music, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant. After all, Romance novels are the best-selling literary genre, but people still read serious books, don't they? Opera will last forever, like Shakespeare, or Charles Dickens."

From the expression on his face, she realized how pedantic she sounded, and she felt her face relax into a smile. "I'm aware opera can seem over the top at times
, with
people hurling themselves off cliffs for love, or dying of consumption while singing at the top of their lungs. But what I love about it is that it admits the power of passion. Our times bend to the other extreme, don't they? We're embarrassed to admit the power of human emotions. It's almost as if our generation is afraid of feeling. Or at least of admitting what we feel."

He considered this. "Hmmm. I've seen rock concerts where the emotions seem pretty intense."

"Screaming and waving cell phones around isn't the same thing. I'm not saying I don't like popular music. My play list is probably at least as diverse as yours. But yeah, I love opera. When you get home, download
Carmen
and see if you don't agree with me."

"I know the story. A sexy cigarette factory worker leads a young man astray, right?

She chuckled. "Pretty much. If you don't like it, you'd have to have a cold heart. No sense of romance, of passion, of...."

"No sense of passion?" At his expression, her heart skipped a beat. He started to push himself out of his seat, and she realized he had misinterpreted her invitation to come over. Quickly, she said, "I saw them today, Ian. They existed. They're real."

He froze in an awkward half-standing position, then plopped back in his seat his face a comical mix of disappointment and anticipation. "What do you mean? How do you know?"

"I was right." Her words tumbled over each other. "Ruth did pose for a photograph wearing the jewels. The picture must have been taken just before she quit her career. I've got the proof." From the side table, she fetched the book from Shirley's store and flipped open to the page.

Ian studied the black-and-white picture and whistled softly. His eyes lingered on the wide, multi-stranded pearl choker that lay across the singer's creamy throat; several large pendants suspended from it as if flaunting the size of the gems in their centers. Matching earbobs dangled against the swanlike neck; a sparkling tiara crowned the thick, wavy hair. A matching bracelet encircled one slender wrist, and a large stone adorned her ring finger.

"So it's true." His voice was hushed.

"It's her. Even if the book hadn't given her name, I'd have recognized her from the portrait. Those are Jonathan's eyebrows, dark and peaked in the middle. I'll bet the book doesn't say anything about where she got the parure
. C
ertainly nothing about a spurned Russian count. But the photograph proves that at least the jewels weren't imaginary."

He couldn't take his eyes off the page. The gems looked nearly black against the porcelain skin of the beautiful singer's arms and shoulders. "Are those rubies, sapphires, or emeralds? Or something else?"

"The family legend says rubies. I don't know how many carats they add up to, but they're enormous, aren't they? They look like the crown jewels of England."

"Or Russia. All right," he said, handing her back the book. "You win. They existed. Unfortunately, that doesn't change anything. We're no closer to answering the question of where they are now. Are you still convinced they ended up in California?"

"We can't know for sure, but at least we can narrow down the possibilities." She began to tick them off on her fingers. She'd had all afternoon to think about it, and the old excitement was back. "Ruth might have returned them to the count when he wouldn't marry her. I bet when he gave them to her, she interpreted it as a proposal of marriage. That’s the kind of naïve girl she was, and how she would react when she found she was wrong. Don’t ask me how I know that Ruth was emotional and naïve. I just
do
.” She didn’t tell Ian about her dreams, where somehow she had melded into the other woman, feeling her emotions and thinking her thoughts. Someday she might, but she was afraid he would mock her belief that somehow those experiences had been
real
. He was too logical to fully understand.

Something in the way Ian looked at her, waiting patiently without immediately jumping in to contradict her, as she’d expected, made her think that somehow, perhaps, he
did
understand the psychic connection she had with that long-dead woman. She remembered that he was the one who had pointed out the resemblance between her and the photograph of Ruth hanging in the hallway by the kitchen.