by Meg Cabot
But I couldn’t do it. Not to him. I wasn’t sure why, exactly. He hadn’t been very nice, not to me or to my mom.
Denial. That was the way to go.
“No,” I said, tearing my gaze from the necklace and looking him in the eyes. It wasn’t the lighting. The stone did look white in the middle. Something weird was going on. “I’ve never seen that before in my life.”
“I thought you’d say that,” Richard Smith said, smiling. “What’s interesting is that I, on the other hand, have seen it before.”
My heart sank. Oh, great. Not another one. This was exactly what the jeweler had said. How did I get myself into these situations? And with my own two feet? I just seemed to walk — or pedal — into them constantly.
“Never in real life, of course,” he went on. “Only in artist renderings. You see, in my spare time, when I’m not in here processing grave site reservation applications or out there trying to keep idiotic teenagers like you from desecrating hundred-year-old tombs, I read. Mostly about death deities…those who escort the newly deceased to the afterlife,” he added, I suppose because he thought, as one of those “idiotic teenagers,” I wouldn’t understand the term.
He didn’t know, of course, I was an NDE and, as such, highly familiar with all things relating to the dead.
“My partner thinks I’m crazy, too,” he said with a shrug. “And I guess I do take my work home with me a bit. But I find our culture’s fear of death a bit ridiculous, when death is really only a natural part of the life cycle. I’m not saying life shouldn’t be enjoyed to its fullest, because I certainly enjoy mine. But you should see people’s reactions at parties when they ask, ‘What do you do?’ and I tell them. They can’t get away from me fast enough.”
“Oh?” I said, just to be polite. I knew how the people at the parties must have felt. Also, not to be mean, but I thought his partner might be onto something with the crazy thing. Although I was hardly one to be casting stones.
“So you see,” Richard Smith said, “that’s why, when I stumbled across this” — he patted the necklace — “in my cemetery this morning, I not only knew exactly what it was, but I also knew it hadn’t been dropped by some tourist who just happened to be passing through our little graveyard to take a few pictures on her way back to one of the cruise ships. And when I found these attached to it” — he smoothed across the desk pad some strands of my long, dark hair, which had clearly been gently extracted from the knotted tangle that had been caught in the chain — “I thought, who have I seen in the cemetery lately with hair like this, who might possibly have gotten her hands on such a singular item? It certainly couldn’t be that young lady I see in here almost daily, who not only refuses to abide by my simple request not to use the paths as a public thoroughfare but who also habitually wears a long gold chain around her neck. Could it?”
I realized I had underestimated him back in the New Pathways office. The bow tie and tassels were just window dressing.
This guy was good. Really good.
“I’ve never seen that necklace before in my life,” I said. That was my story — for now — and I was sticking to it.
He smiled some more and went on as if I hadn’t spoken.
“I thought a young lady who whips through this place with no regard for pedestrians, almost as if she were in training for the Tour de France, might say that the night after a terrible act of vandalism was committed here. So, naturally, I went to the area where the vandalism occurred. And look what I happened to find lying by the gate.”
He held up another long, dark hair. First he laid it down alongside the ones he’d extracted from the necklace. “Same color. Same length.” Then he held it up in the air and closed one eye, as if measuring it against the hair tumbling from the top of my head down past my shoulders. “A good match, I would say.”
There was no way to know, of course, if he’d really found it by the gate. There was no way to tell if any of it was true or if he was just putting all of this on for show, to get me to crack and trick me into admitting I’d been in the cemetery last night.
But suddenly, I felt weak. Like I was going to faint or something.
Please, don’t mess this up for us, Mom had asked me. Not in words but with her eyes. I was messing this up. I was messing this up big-time.
Why? I asked myself. Why wasn’t I seeing red, when I most needed to? What was wrong with me? This guy wasn’t that good. He was just what Dad would have called a kook.
Maybe that was why. He was just a kook. I didn’t get the sense that he wanted to hurt me.
So what did he want?
“That…doesn’t prove anything,” I managed to murmur.
“No,” he agreed, sweeping all the hair back into his desk drawer and locking it away. Evidence for later, I thought bleakly. “It doesn’t. I only mention it because I was so surprised to see you, of all people — Carlos Cabrero’s granddaughter — involved with something so…messy. I would think you’d want to stay out of trouble, at least for your uncle’s sake.”
Oh, God. Not Uncle Chris. He really was good.
“I do,” I said, my eyes filling with tears. “I do want to stay out of trouble.” That’s what John had given me the necklace for.
And now look at what had happened. Why had he thrown it away?
It’s not safe for you here.
“Well,” Richard Smith said, looking a little taken aback, perhaps because of my tears. “You’ve certainly got an interesting way of showing it. Now, tell me. Who gave you this necklace?”
I looked down at the stone. It wasn’t the lighting. It wasn’t my imagination. The diamond wasn’t gray anymore. It was white. White.
The opposite of what it had become outside his office windows, where it was now almost as dark as night. Thunder rumbled. It was distant, but it was there. Maybe it was the feeder bands Uncle Chris had mentioned we were supposed to get. They seemed to have come on awfully quickly, though, considering we were supposed to have been only under a watch.
I shook my head.
“I can’t tell you,” I said. It was hard to talk with the tears prickling my nose. “I’m sorry. I’d like to. But you seem like a nice man. And…” I couldn’t help thinking about what had happened to the jeweler. I didn’t think John would be coming back — ever. But I didn’t know for sure. “I just can’t.”
Mr. Smith frowned, obviously frustrated with me.
“Miss Oliviera,” he said. “Are you aware that this diamond is stolen? Not just stolen but cursed?”
I sucked in my breath, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was so like John to have given me a cursed, stolen diamond.
“It’s quite famous, actually, in certain circles,” he went on. “Well, mine, anyway. Allegedly, it was mined by Hades, the Greek death deity, to give to Persephone, his consort, in order to protect her from the Furies.…”
I felt goose bumps break out all over my entire body. Cemetery Sexton Smith, of course, was seated too far away to notice.
The Furies. John had mentioned them.
“As a death deity, Hades was, of course, disliked by the spirits of a good many souls who weren’t satisfied with where they ended up after they passed through the Underworld,” Mr. Smith went on, oblivious to my discomfort. “The Furies — this is what the spirits who disliked him so much were called. There’s some scholarly dispute over it, of course, but I believe this version. The Furies could be quite tricky in their efforts at retaliation. So Hades needed to make sure his consort had a way to protect herself, or supposedly — Are you all right, Miss Oliviera?”
I thought I was going to throw up my Coke float. I couldn’t stop thinking about all those people I’d seen in line for the other boat…the one John had told me I didn’t want to be on. Had they all turned into Furies?
Something told me they had.
“No,” I said. Outside, lightning flashed so abruptly, it made me jump. “I need to go. I’m on my bike, actually. I need to go before it starts raining. So �
�”
“Don’t worry. I’ll give you a lift.” Mr. Smith reached for a large book that was sitting on a shelf behind him. “Personally, I’ve never been a fan of the Hades/Persephone myth. So much drama, with him kidnapping the poor girl in that distasteful manner and forcing her to live with him down in the Underworld against her will, and then Persephone’s mother having to intervene.…I never enjoy stories where the mother gets too involved. Let the kids work it out for themselves, I always say. But I digress. That’s what they call this diamond, you know. The Persephone Diamond. Ah, here it is.”
He held up the illustration to show me. “Marie Antoinette, in all her glory, wearing your diamond. Her husband, King Louis the Sixteenth, gave it to her. I have no idea how he got his hands on it. Furies allegedly have the power to possess any human they wish to — that is, any human who has a weak enough character for the Furies to bend to their will — so perhaps a Fury possessed the king, or the queen, or whomever gave the necklace to them, hoping to cause mischief. Bad luck for them both, however it happened. This portrait was the only time Marie Antoinette had a chance to wear the stone before the peasants rose up against both her and her husband and had them executed for treason and crimes against the state. They have mentioned the French Revolution to you in school, haven’t they, Miss Oliviera?”
I stared at the picture, a reproduction of a portrait of Marie Antoinette, the doomed queen of France. Amazingly, she was wearing a gown that resembled the sort of toga in which Persephone, the reluctant bride of Hades, was always depicted on the sides of ancient vases. There were even grape leaves woven through the queen’s enormous powdered wig. Well, grape leaves made of gold, but whatever.
And at her neck — that slender neck that would soon be sliced in two by Madame Guillotine — hung my diamond, but on a dark green velvet choker instead of a gold chain.
John had told me men had died for the diamond he’d given me. Not just men, it turned out.
Had he known? Had he known its bloody “provenance,” as the jeweler had called it?
Of course he had. He had to have known.
And he’d given it to me anyway. He’d said it was supposed to protect me.…
A lot of good it had done Marie Antoinette.
I was shivering uncontrollably by now. I’d left my cardigan back at the house. I wished I’d thrown it in my bike basket.
But how was I to know? How was I to know I’d be hearing about…well, this?
The cemetery sexton still didn’t appear to notice my discomfort, though. He was quite cheerfully telling his morbid story.
“The diamond disappeared,” he said, closing the book, “along with most of the rest of the queen’s jewelry, after her arrest. Until, quite randomly, it showed up again, a little more than fifty years later, on the cargo list of a merchant ship that was docked here in Isla Huesos, of all places, on October eleventh of 1846. And that’s the last time it — or anyone on that ship — was seen again. It, like every ship that was in port that day, was sunk by what was likely a Category Five hurricane that appeared from nowhere, drowning over a thousand people, destroying every boat and building on the island — including the hospital, so there was nowhere to treat the wounded, and the lighthouse, so there was no way to signal for help. It also,” he added, “washed every coffin that was buried here in this cemetery out to sea. So there was nowhere to bury the newly dead, either.” He shook his head. “Must have been quite a mess, what with the mosquitoes and the cholera.”
I think I made some kind of choking noise that Richard Smith mistook for disbelief, since he hastened to assure me, “Oh, yes. That’s why we keep the coffins in crypts now, you know. Of course, they ought to have known better, even then, considering what the Spaniards found three hundred years earlier when they got here, but…” He gave an elaborate shrug. “Some people choose to turn a blind eye to history.”
I didn’t feel like fainting anymore. Or cold. Now I just felt…nothing.
“Interesting fact about that hurricane,” the cemetery sexton went on. “It was the deadliest in recorded Isla Huesos history. A more superstitious man than I might say it was almost as if someone didn’t want this diamond — with its bad juju, as my partner would call it — making it off that ship. Because it never did, you know. It sank down to the bottom with the rest of the ship’s cargo, never to be seen again…though the company that owned the ship hired wreckers to salvage for it, and they looked for months, even years, in water that was only ten feet deep. Never found a trace of it. Is that where you got it?” His gaze, over the rims of his glasses, sharpened. “From a wrecker? Because it’s not called wrecking today, Miss Oliviera, or treasure hunting, or whatever the person who gave this to you might have told you. It’s called violation of submerged archaeological sites and destruction of underwater cultural heritage, and it, like desecrating someone’s tomb, is illegal.”
I shook my head, shocked. What was he even talking about?
“No,” I said, my heart beginning to thump more loudly than the thunder outside. “No, of course not. It was nothing like that —”
I thought of it the minute I saw you, John had said when he’d given the necklace to me. Only I never thought…well, I never thought you’d turn out to be you, or want to come here with me.
Is that how he’d gotten it? By causing that horrible hurricane that had killed so many people and sunk so many ships, then collecting their bounty from the bottom of the sea?
But that was impossible.
Then again…none of what I’d seen him do was possible.
“Whoever gave it to you,” Mr. Smith grumbled, picking up the necklace and examining it more closely in the light, “had it reset since Marie Antoinette’s time. And in a fashion I can only call — and that’s if I wanted to be charitable — whimsical.”
“I told you,” I said. “I don’t —”
“Oh, right,” he said, looking towards the ceiling. “You don’t know anything about it. Well, this setting is highly unique. Do you see how each prong forms a little curlicue design across the top of the diamond? Quite beautiful. And unusual. Do you know what these five prongs represent?” He didn’t even wait for my reply. “Rivers,” he said. “Five in all. Now, can you think of a place that has five rivers? Go on. Guess.”
“I don’t know. I’m terrible at geography.” And every subject, really, that didn’t have to do with avenging the death of Hannah Chang. “Look, I really have to —”
“It’s quite simple.” He picked up a pencil and pointed with it to the first prong. “Sorrow.” He pointed to the second. “Lamentation.” He pointed to the third. “Fire.” The fourth. “Oblivion.” The fifth. “And hate.”
Thunder cracked. Now the storm was so close, it seemed to be right above our heads.
“The five rivers of the Underworld,” Richard Smith said, sounding thrilled with himself. He ticked them off on his fingers. “Acheron, Cocytus, Phlegethon, Lethe, the river Styx. Good Lord, girl.” He leaned back in his chair and stared at me. “Do they teach children nothing useful in school these days? The Underworld. ”
I felt as if someone had run over me.
I shouldn’t have, of course. I should have known. It had been right there in front of me all along. Literally. It had been around my neck.
I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it. The psychiatrists had tried to tell me. My alleged dream had been full of things I’d seen on TV. Hadn’t I studied the Greek myths in school?
Of course I had.
But I had never paid attention to things that didn’t interest me, even before the accident. I had inherited that, too, from both my parents, though if I ever mentioned this, they would blame each other for it. Spoonbills, your fault. No, throwing stars, yours.
But who did pay attention to the myths, really? All those strange names and people being hit with arrows in the Achilles heel and girls being swept down into the Underworld. It was complicated and weird and had nothing to do with reality.
And yet at t
he same time…something didn’t make sense.
“But.” I blinked at him. “There weren’t any rivers when I was there. Just a lake.”
Now he was the one staring at me.
And no wonder, really. “When you were there?” Mr. Smith took his glasses off. “What do you mean, when you were there?”
Sometimes I just got so tired of all the pretending. It was exhausting, really, trying to fit in, trying to be “normal.” Even if that word wasn’t therapeutically beneficial.
“This necklace,” I said, putting my hand over it. The stone felt warm and comforting under my palm, the way it always had.
But now that I knew a thousand people had been killed because of it — that a queen had, indirectly, lost her head because of it — I didn’t feel quite as friendly towards it as I once had.
“It’s supposed to protect its wearer from evil,” I said.
“Well,” Richard Smith said, blinking rapidly. For the first time, he didn’t appear to be quite so sure of himself. “Yes. That’s how the legend goes. That’s supposedly why Hades had it made. And if anyone not a chosen consort of the death deity attempts to possess it —” He shrugged, then rubbed his eyes, then put his glasses back on. “Well, nothing good will happen to her, obviously. But all of that is just a story. What did you mean when you said —”
“He didn’t tell me that part,” I murmured, looking over my shoulder, back at the window. “He didn’t tell me there would be evil spirits coming after me. He didn’t tell me that’s who he was. Or maybe he did. I was crying so much.…”
I got up out of my chair, feeling dazed, and moved towards the window. The view from the cemetery sexton’s office was of the street but also of the corner of the cemetery where the poinciana tree stood, its dark and twisted branches spreading out across the Hayden crypt.
I don’t know what I was hoping to see out there. Him? As if there was a chance he might be there, by the crypt where he’d thrown away the necklace he’d given me (because I’d given it back to him)? Or by the gate he’d kicked apart after telling me to go (because I’d called him a jerk)?