The Jewelry Case

by Catherine McGreevy

  The Jewelry Case

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Jewelry Case

  By Catherine McGreevy

  Copyright © 2013 by Catherine McGreevy.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review without written permission.

  Web site address: catherinemcgreevy.blogspot.com

  The Jewelry Case: An injured opera singer retreats to a small Northern California town and gets caught up in a search for missing jewels / Catherine McGreevy

  ISBN

  Cover Design by Daniel McGreevy

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you to my incredibly helpful writers’ group partners, Donna Benedict, Suzanne Shephard, Danna Wilberg, Dorothy Rice, and Melinda Terry, Deb Julienne, and to my sister, Karen Brown, for their important suggestions and comments, all of which improved this novel.

  C.M.

  November, 2013

  The Jewelry Case

  by Catherine McGreevy

  Prologue

  Vienna, 1895

  The gaslights blinded her. In the darkness she could hear the audience roaring, stomping and whistling with deafening enthusiasm more suited for the gold camps of California than this elegant marble-clad hall in the heart of Vienna. She was almost used to the acclaim by now, to men fighting for the right to pull her carriage through the street, showering her with long-stemmed roses and expensive gifts. But tonight was different.

  Heart beating faster, she sensed him standing and applauding like the rest, set apart by his height and broad shoulders and the crimson sash across his chest. The necklace he had given her earlier that night lay against her throat. The matching pearl-and-ruby earbobs swung gently against her neck, while the glittering tiara pressed down on her black curls, like a kiss. Although the parure must have cost a fortune, she cared nothing about that. The only thing that mattered was what that he loved her… and finally, he was willing that the world knew.

  She rose from her deep curtsey and blew a kiss toward his box. Tonight. Her heart quickened even faster. Tonight she would agree to marry him.

  Chapter One

  "What do you mean, I'm broke?" Paisley's mind, already woozy on Vicodin, had been drifting as her lawyer droned on. Now she sat bolt upright, as if someone had suddenly kicked her in her bad leg, the one held together by the brand-new titanium rod.

  Heavy-set and middle-aged, the kindly gray-haired attorney had bushy eyebrows over thick glasses and wore a creased three-piece suit. He sighed and pushed a spreadsheet toward Paisley. "’Broke' is perhaps too strong a word, Mrs. Perleman, but I’ve been speaking with your financial advisor, and we felt it was imperative that we call attention to your situation immediately. I'd rather have waited until you finished recuperating from the accident, but….” He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  Reluctantly, Paisley took the spreadsheet. The columns of numbers might as well have been gibberish, for all she could make of it, but Barry Klein's words could not have made the end result clearer. The money, virtually all of it, was gone.

  Barry gestured at the page. "Fortunately, insurance covered Jonathan’s funeral expenses and your medical bills, and if you sell off the remaining stocks, as I’ve advised, you can pay down the other debts. That should leave enough to live on while you finish recovering, that is, if you are frugal." He took on a tone like that of a teacher reprimanding a slightly dull student: "May I remind you, Mrs. Perleman, that you can't blame me for the fact that over the past few years you failed to read my letters or respond to my phone calls."

  "You" singular. Not "you" plural.

  Paisley kept her mouth firm under its splash of scarlet lipstick and raised her chin higher. This meeting was more important than any performance onstage, which was why this morning she had applied heavy makeup over her pallor and tried to dress like a woman who knew something about financial affairs. The red silk blouse and black knee-length pencil skirt belonged to the friend whose guest room she was sleeping in, and before coming she had carefully brushed her dark hair over the raw scar that ran from jaw to clavicle. Safety glass wasn't supposed to cut, but it had only taken one sharp-edged piece to carve her throat like a stiletto. That and her mangled leg had kept her in the hospital for the past month.

  If only her husband had been as lucky.

  A mixture of powerful emotions washed over her: regret, sorrow … and guilt. Jonathan, gone, with all his good looks, talent and shortcomings! She could hardly believe it. He had been such an overpowering figure in her life these past three years. Before the car crash, she'd been glad to let him handle all their monetary affairs, reasoning that he was older and wiser, or at least, so she had thought. Besides, back then practical things had seemed unimportant. All that mattered was opera and their mutual rising careers.

  A fresh wave of mixed panic and despair rose through her gut. To hide her fear, she straightened, and with a flourish worthy of Tosca, she brushed aside the spreadsheet. "This is the first I've heard of any financial problems! Didn’t we pay you to manage our affairs while we were away?"

  Barry's lips compressed. She knew what he was thinking: he had done his best. In spite of his advice, however, she and Jonathan had continued spending money as if it would flow forever: designer clothes from Saks, first-class travel, the best hotel rooms in Paris and Milan. Except opera wasn't pop music; except for a handful of the biggest stars, salaries were more modest than the public realized. But who had time to worry about finances with their careers on the rise—Jonathan's as an increasingly internationally renowned orchestra conductor and hers as an up-and-coming coloratura soprano poised for bigger roles? "The Golden Couple of Opera," People Magazine had called them, with a flattering full-page photograph across from the gushing article.

  The lawyer plucked back the spreadsheet from her fingers, his voice brisk. "As I said, stocks will pay most of the debts, and then there's the house, of course."

  Paisley's forehead creased. "House?" Her voice cracked on the single syllable, like a moll in a gangster flick from the 30s who smoked too much. Gone, perhaps forever, was the voice of the young woman whose creamy coloratura had surprised everyone and won the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions three years ago. "What house are you talking about?"

  "Don't you remember?" Barry peered at her over the heavy rims of his glasses. "The one left to you by Esther Perleman."

  "Esther Perleman? Oh, yes, Jonathan's great aunt. The one I met at my wedding."

  "I sent you a letter when she died, nearly a year ago," Barry reminded her. One of the many you never read, he seemed to say, but of course he had too much self-control to say it out loud.

  She looked at him blankly while searching her memory without success, like a computer with a failing hard-drive. Another legacy of the accident, perhaps. A temporary one, she hoped.

  He sighed. "Let me remind you that upon her demise, I notified you that she had left you her house and all its effects. In our brief telephone conversation, you told me that you were busy, and that you'd decide what to do with it later."

  Under his prompting, the memory finally began to resurface
. Jonathan had been peevish that his never-married aunt had passed him over, settling the inheritance, modest as it was, on his wife, despite the fact that Paisley wasn't even a blood relative.

  "You must have made quite an impression on the old bat," he'd said, scowling. "What did you say to butter her up?"

  She had thrown up her hands, equally mystified. She'd hardly spoken with his elderly great aunt at their wedding two years earlier. Jonathan’s parents died relatively young, in their early sixties, and there was no one else left, except for a cousin back east. Maybe that was why Paisley was able to remember so well the tiny woman with determinedly jet-black hair, and intense dark eyes. Aunt Esther must have been pushing ninety, but she looked decades younger.

  At the wedding, looking at Jonathan’s great-aunt, Paisley had a strange feeling she was looking in a mirror seventy years into the future. She and Aunt Esther were virtually the same height, allowing for shrinkage on the part of the older woman, and they both had black hair, although Aunt Esther's was assisted by a bottle and fluffed out with curlers, while Paisley's thick, glossy ringlets were naturally abundant.

  Aunt Esther peered closely at Paisley from under eyebrows as thick and downward-slanting as Jonathan's. It took effort for Paisley not to shuffle her feet under that steady stare like a disgraced schoolgirl.

  "At the beauty parlor, I read an article about you in a magazine." Esther Perleman wasn’t the kind of woman to waste time on preliminary chit-chat, such as "Nice to meet you," or, "It's a pleasure to have you in the family."

  Paisley tried hard to think which magazine article Aunt Esther was referring to. There had been a surprising amount of media coverage since she’d won the competition, and especially after her engagement to Jonathan Perleman was announced. Once, she'd thought television and magazine reporters were only interested in pop stars, but opera had become sexy the past few years with the emergence of attractive young singers like Josh Groban, Charlotte Church and Jackie Evancho.

  "You know," Esther said, a tad impatiently. "The article where you said you planned to organize an opera company for disadvantaged children."

  Paisley remembered an article in which she'd mentioned a youthful ambition to create an inner-city singing group patterned after the children's choir of Harlem. That goal had been dropped when she had met Jonathan, however. He advised her to focus on her own rising career, which left her little time for anything else. Now she felt a pang of guilt at how quickly she had abandoned her idealism.

  "Maybe I will work with children someday," she told the old woman. "I've always believed good music can cure social ills." She didn’t often say that around Jonathan, fearing he would mock the sentiment as he mocked so many things, but somehow she felt Aunt Esther would understand.

  Esther pursed her lips. "Hmf. Funny, I never expected my nephew would end up marrying a girl like you." She assessed Paisley through narrowed eyes. "You don't seem at all his type."

  Privately, Paisley agreed. Jonathan was twelve years older than her and far more sophisticated, having dated some of the world's most beautiful models and actresses. The old woman's words could easily have meant, If my nephew could have had any one he wanted, why would he want to marry someone like you? Yet somehow Paisley was sure Esther meant the words as a compliment.

  Impulsively, she reached out and squeezed the woman’s withered hand. "Thank you."

  At the gesture, Esther said abruptly, "I wasn't sure before ... but now I want you to have this." She pressed something in Paisley's hand.

  She opened her fingers and looked down at a square of fine yellowed linen that had once been white, edged with intricate lace and smelling faintly of roses.

  "A handkerchief! How lovely." Paisley was touched at the personal gift.

  "Jonathan told me you didn't wear anything old today," the old woman said, running her eyes over Paisley's couture wedding gown. "The Perlemans aren't a particularly close family, nor are we believers in tradition, but at least this will remind you that you're not alone."

  "Thank you," Paisley began again, but Auntie Esther pushed her toward the reception line with unexpected strength.

  "You've wasted enough time on an old lady like me," she said firmly. "Now go on, they’re waiting for you. Finish your performance."

  Performance? When Paisley turned around to ask about the word, Aunt Esther was gone.

  And now the old lady had left her a house. Ensconced in Barry Klein’s glass-and-teak-appointed office, abstractedly rubbing the scar on her throat, Paisley looked at the financial spreadsheet lying on the desk and wondered again, Why me? It would have been logical to have left the house to Jonathan. After all, he was Esther Perleman's blood kin. Perhaps it had something to do with the spiritual connection she had felt with the other woman, although they had never met again after the wedding. That year, Paisley had impulsively sent Esther a set of opera CDs as a birthday gift, and added her to her Christmas card list.

  Jonathan had glanced over her shoulder as she addressed the envelope. "You're not sending Aunt Esther a Christmas card, are you? She's Jewish, remember? Why don't you send her a holiday ham while you're at it?"

  "It's generic," she retorted, sealing the envelope. "I doubt she would be offended by 'Season's Greetings' and a picture of penguins wearing ice skates. Besides, I liked her."

  "Well, don't hold your breath waiting for an answer. She never cared much for me or the rest of my family." He sank into a deep leather armchair and opened the score for the opera he would be conducting in Milan, his first at La Scala. The appearance would be a personal triumph for him, one he had worked his whole life to attain. At age thirty-six, he was finally about to achieve that goal, and was as nervous about it as a cat sitting atop a Seguaro cactus.

  A week later, Paisley received a greeting card from Auntie Esther and waved it triumphantly in Jonathan's face. The card featured three tabby kittens wearing Santa hats. The old woman had a sense of humor.

  After that, Paisley continued to send cards, without telling Jonathan. Why should she? He didn't care for his aunt, even appeared to feel for her an antipathy Paisley was at a loss to understand. She hated to think of the old woman all alone, cut off from her relatives, however, and she treasured their secret correspondence, infrequent as it was.

  A few years later, one of her cards was returned unopened, and their attorney had notified them that Auntie Esther had passed away, leaving Paisley the house.

  "Just the house?" Jonathan had demanded from one of the clients' chairs in an office that could have been a clone of Barry Klein's. "You're sure? That's all?"

  "Oh, yes, there was this." The lawyer clucked his tongue, as if chiding himself for his forgetfulness, and pulled a small package from his desk drawer, handing it to Paisley. "Like the house, however, Mrs. Perleman left it to your wife."

  With an exclamation, Jonathan snatched it from her hand and tore it open. A small cameo pin fell out and landed on the desk with a musical tinkle.

  "How lovely!" Paisley exclaimed, picking up the blue-and-white cameo, and held it close to examine it better. Jonathan's angular face turned beet red. Then he hunched his shoulders and muttered, as if to himself, "So those are the family jewels? I might have known she'd have the last laugh."

  "What do you mean, darling?" Paisley looked up from pinning the cameo on her lapel. Sometimes she didn't understand her husband's mercurial moods.

  "Nothing." He gave an unconvincing chuckle, a little shakily, and scraped his chair back. "Well, my dear, it seems as if you're in possession of a worthless piece of costume jewelry and a run-down house in the sticks." To the lawyer, he said, "I don't know why you wasted our time by having us come in. Couldn't you have sent the trinket by mail?" He abruptly uncrossed his legs and got to his feet.

  "My apologies," the lawyer said stiffly, standing with him. "But since you were in New York, I thought.... "

  "Never mind." Jonathan brushed the explanation away, and taking Paisley by the elbow, escorted her out of the room so fast that
she had to jog to keep up.

  #

  Paisley had been sorry to learn that Auntie Esther had passed away. But life had been too busy to grieve for an old woman she had barely known and who had, by all accounts, lived a long and happy life. Caught up in an ever-increasing whirl of travel and performances, she had even forgotten the house until now.

  She came to herself in the lawyer’s office, realizing Barry was waiting with barely concealed impatience for her answer. "What do I intend to do with Esther's place?" she repeated. It felt as if Barry had asked the question a long time ago. "I guess the logical thing is to sell it." Absent-mindedly, she massaged the rough line down the side of her neck. The doctor had told her doing so would reduce scarring, and by now the gesture had become a habit. "It sounds as if I need the money."

  Barry nodded as if she'd given the right answer. "A real-estate agent from River Bend already contacted me. He wants to put it on the market." He flicked a business card across the desk, and she picked it up. "Name of Ray Henderson."

  "Fine. Go ahead and tell him.... " Her voice faded as her eye caught something. A snapshot had spilled out of the manila file folder: a photograph of a house that had clearly seen better times. The steeply pitched slate roof was barely visible behind the shelter of an enormous oak tree, a perfect tree for climbing. If she were a little girl, she wouldn't have been able to resist scampering up its strong, spreading limbs. Once, the small white house in its shadow must have been charming. Now, it was surrounded by weeds and overgrown flowerbeds.

  Seeing her interest, Barry handed her the photo. "Take a closer look if you like."

  "Thank you," she said automatically. A strange emotion flashed through her, so powerful that for a moment she forgot where she was. The sensation was like hearing a piece of music for the first time, yet which had a ring of familiarity to it. This, she thought, must be the old Perelman family home, the house her husband had grown up in. The one Esther had bequeathed her more than a year ago.