“I don’t care,” Jazzi said with a shrug.
“I can’t stop thinking about Harvey,” Iris said as she opened a top cupboard door.
Daisy had been in charge of the kitchen, and she’d replaced the tea tins and coffee mugs back in the cupboard. Now her aunt took out the tea tin that Harvey had given her with its painted sunflower lid and its perky yellow bow.
“Instead of trying to forget, maybe I should remember,” she decided. “How about if we all have cups of white tea in tribute to Harvey.”
“I think that’s a great idea, Aunt Iris,” Jazzi encouraged her. “After Dad died, I used to go into his and Mom’s room and just pick up the things he’d left on the dresser. Somehow, I felt closer to him. Maybe you’ll feel that way when you drink the tea.”
Daisy was so proud of her daughter. She herself didn’t realize Jazzi’s depths. She’d never known about her daughter’s excursions into her bedroom. And if she had—maybe they would have talked and hugged more. Maybe she wouldn’t have felt Jazzi begin to pull away. But she couldn’t redo the past. All she could do was stay connected to Jazzi now and in the future.
Since Aunt Iris was a tea aficionado, she’d had a filtering system put on the municipal water faucets in her house. So Daisy was able to fill the teakettle with that water and put it on the stove to heat. In the meantime, Aunt Iris pulled down one of her teapots that hadn’t been broken in the ransacking. It was red with a white polka dot design.
“Harvey liked this one,” she said. “It feels right to use it.”
Setting the teapot in the center of the table, she found the metal infuser and set it inside the rim. Then she brought over the tin of tea and a measuring spoon and sat at the table.
Daisy could see how sad her aunt felt . . . how much she wished everything was different, how she wished she could rewind time. But no one could. Daisy could remember the day exactly when Harvey had given her aunt the tea tin. Her aunt had been so happy.
Now she watched Iris pull on the bow and open it. It had kept the lid secure, so even in the ransacking, no tea had spilled out.
The lid fit tightly on the tea tin and Iris spent a minute or two working it free. After she did, she took her teaspoon and dug it into the loose tea. She needed six full teaspoons to make the white, mild tea full-bodied. This was White Symphony, the lightest of the white teas. It had a wonderful taste without honey, sugar, or milk. Even Aunt Iris didn’t add lemon to this one.
Her aunt scooped out three spoonfuls and let the tea sift into the infuser. Then she went back for another spoonful. But when she did, her spoon clanked against something.
Daisy heard it too. “Was that the side of the tin?”
“No, it wasn’t. I scooped from the middle.” She stirred the tea around and clanked against something again. Dipping her fingers into the tin, she pulled out what looked like a gold coin. “What’s this doing in here? Do you think Harvey knew it was there?” Iris asked.
“He gave you this tin. He must have known.” Daisy took the coin in her hand and turned it over, studying it. “It looks like gold, Aunt Iris. I’m not sure what happens next, but I think maybe we should call Marshall and ask him what to do,” Daisy advised her as she carefully set the coin on a dish on the table.
None of them wanted to make a misstep with the murder investigation going on and Detective Rappaport suspecting her and her aunt. So Daisy dialed Marshall’s number. Unfortunately, she reached his voice mail.
She shook her head at Iris and Jazzi. “We’re going to have to wait until he calls back to know what to do.”
“We might have to wait,” Jazzi said, “but we can google the coin and maybe find out exactly what it is.”
Leave it to Jazzi to find a solution using the tech age. Of course, they should google it.
“Search woman’s profile on gold coin?” Daisy asked.
Jazzi grinned at her. “You’re learning, Mom.”
All three women sat at the table in the dining room. Iris just stared at the gold coin while Jazzi and Daisy hunched over their smartphones.
“I found it, Mom,” Jazzi suddenly said. “At least I think I did. Look.”
The women crowded around Jazzi’s phone. The photo she found indeed did look like the coin lying on the table. The headline read—Rare four-dollar gold coin worth over a million dollars.
“A million dollars,” Iris exclaimed. “They can’t be serious. That can’t be what we found.”
“It looks like it, Aunt Iris.” Jazzi pointed to every detail of the coin; they were all the same on the photo and on the round dish on the table. “This says it’s a four dollar, Coiled Hair Stella gold coin from eighteen eighty. It’s six grams of gold and was never released to the public.”
Daisy took Jazzi’s phone to study the article. She summed it up for Iris. “Apparently the coin had been designed to match money from countries like France and Switzerland, but it never received official support. It became a political issue, and extremely rare. Only ten or twelve were known to be in public institutions or private collections.”
“Wow,” Aunt Iris said, disbelievingly.
Daisy’s phone sounded, and she quickly picked it up. “Marshall, you won’t believe what we found.” She went on to tell him.
“A million dollars, you say?” Marshall’s tone was thoughtful. “Whether the coin is worth that or not, it could be evidence. Call Detective Rappaport at once. Leave a message if you can’t reach him. I don’t want the detective to think we’re hiding anything from him. Don’t handle the coin again.”
Rappaport wasn’t at the police station, though Daisy did leave a message on his voice mail telling him exactly what she wanted. She gave him details of how they’d found the coin and described it.
After she ended the call, pizza arrived. Without disturbing the coin sitting on the table, they ate their pizza in the living room, not talking much, just thinking about that million-dollar piece of gold not so far away.
Iris didn’t know whether to brew the white tea or not, so she let the tin sit too. They made do with soda with their pizza and wings. All three were about halfway through when the doorbell rang.
Iris went to open it and found Detective Rappaport standing there.
“Mrs. Swanson left a message for me,” he said.
“I didn’t think you’d be over tonight.” Iris stepped back so he could enter.
“This is a murder investigation, Miss Albright. I don’t waste time. I hope you’re not wasting my time right now. Let me see what you found.”
“Good evening to you too,” Daisy said sweetly as she joined her aunt, and they all went to the table.
Rappaport scowled at her, maybe not liking the idea she’d called his manners into question. He took a plastic evidence bag from his pocket and a set of tweezers. Using the tweezers, he pushed the coin around on the dish, then flipped it, studying it hard.
“Iris took it out of the tea tin Harvey gave her. I can show you what I found on the Internet about it.”
“I already looked it up. I’ll have to verify if it’s authentic. You’re not to tell anyone about this, not anyone. Do you understand?”
“Marshall knows,” Daisy quickly told him. “I called him first to see what we should do.”
“Marshall Thompson knows how to keep his mouth shut.”
“Can I tell Jonas?” Daisy asked.
Rappaport gave her a hard look. He thought about it and then he sighed. “Jonas Groft knows not to let information out too. All right, but no one else.” He studied Iris. “How long have you had this?”
“Harvey gave it to me the day of his twenty-fifth anniversary celebration. He said we’d brew the white tea together on the day his divorce was final.”
It passed through Daisy’s mind that Marshall was going to think Iris was giving the detective too much information, but it was too late now.
“And you hadn’t opened the tin since then?”
“No, sir,” Iris said with certainty. “After Harvey died,
I didn’t know if I was ever going to open it.”
“So what made you open it tonight?”
“My place was a mess, and we cleaned up. We were just going to drink the tea in tribute to Harvey.”
The detective studied the three women, the teapot sitting on the counter, the teakettle on the stove burner. He must have remembered what the place had looked like the day before.
He’d been taking notes in his notebook. Now he snapped it shut. “I’ll have to take the tin of tea along too.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Aunt Iris murmured. “Take whatever you have to, Detective, but I would like you to return it to me if at all possible.”
“If it’s true Harvey gave you the coin before he died, then it’s yours. I have to wonder why he did that. Or maybe he was going to retrieve it after the two of you opened the tin of tea. Then he wouldn’t have to make it a matter in his divorce settlement. It would be a great way to hide an asset and cash in on it later. Did you say the two of you were planning a trip?”
“I did not, Detective. Harvey and I hadn’t planned anything.”
“Except hiding a million-dollar gold coin,” Rappaport mumbled.
Daisy knew this turn of events had just dipped her aunt into deeper water. What had Harvey Fitz been thinking?
Chapter Fifteen
The next morning, Daisy set off for the tea garden early because she wanted to stop in at Jonas’s shop and tell him what she and Iris had found. His establishment wasn’t open yet, but she saw him moving around inside, placing a new chair at one of the tables. She rapped on the front door.
When Jonas came to the door, he peered out, saw her, and smiled. Then he unlocked the door and let her in. “You’re early this morning.”
“I wanted to talk to you. Is anyone else here?”
“Dave doesn’t come in until a minute before the dot of nine. What did you want to see me about?”
When she gazed into his green eyes, she almost forgot. But then she found her composure again. “I was helping Aunt Iris put her place back in order last night. We decided to have a cup of tea.”
“Needed a boost to finish?” he asked.
“Something like that. But we decided to use the White Symphony tea in the can of tea that Harvey had given Aunt Iris. We were going to have a tribute to him.”
Jonas nodded. “Understandable. Your aunt has been so caught up in the investigation. She hasn’t had time to grieve.”
Daisy nodded. “Exactly. So we were going to drink tea and talk about Harvey. But as Aunt Iris scooped out the tea, we found a gold coin, and we looked it up on the Internet. We discovered it’s supposed to be worth over a million dollars!”
Jonas gave a low whistle. “I hope you called Marshall and Rappaport.”
“We did. Rappaport suggested Aunt Iris may have hidden it there herself. Honestly, I just want to sock him sometimes.”
“Not a great idea,” Jonas advised her. “Do you think Harvey was hiding his asset from his wife? Is that why he wanted to share the tea with Iris when his divorce was final, so he could get it back? With or without your aunt knowing?”
“Any of those scenarios are possible,” she agreed. “Was Harvey that conniving?”
“Anyone as successful as he was had to be a bit conniving, maybe a little ruthless too. When it comes to divorce, the parties involved can be bitter, revengeful, and greedy.”
“How do you know this?” Maybe Jonas had been divorced.
“Not from personal experience, if that’s what you’re thinking. But in police work we see it all—murder, theft, assault, and all the reasons that go with them. When you think about how much planning goes into a divorce, how much analyzing, how much the lawyers cost, it’s only natural each party wants to keep as much as they possibly can. Sometimes they find unlawful ways to do that.”
Daisy shook her head, imagining the bitterness and regrets between two people who no longer wanted to be married.
“Let’s go over the suspects for Harvey’s murder,” Jonas suggested. “If Harvey’s son knew about that coin, and he might have seen it as a kid going through the coins, maybe he found out it wasn’t appraised with the rest of the collection. Maybe he somehow knew his dad had hidden that asset. Maybe he was drunk and so angry about his father’s new life that he killed him in a rage.”
“Daniel is one suspect. Then there’s Harvey’s wife,” Daisy offered. “If she knew Harvey was trying to cheat her, maybe she was determined she wouldn’t let him. If she knew about the coin, and that it was hidden somewhere, she might have badgered him about it. If he wouldn’t tell her what she wanted to know, she could have murdered him in a rage.”
“She could have,” Jonas added, “and then ransacked your aunt’s bungalow. It doesn’t take a man to do that.”
“What about Guy Tremont?” Daisy asked. “The coin dealer. Could he have had a stake in that coin somehow? Maybe the coin had nothing to do with the murder. What if Guy found out that Harvey gave Iris the coin to hold for him. But he hadn’t known how Harvey packaged it. It was only luck that the tin had fallen sideways on the back of the shelf and the intruder missed it. Or else he saw the pretty bow and just didn’t imagine the coin would be inside.”
“Or he was interrupted. Was any of the tea spilled?”
“Yes, two of the other tins were emptied out.”
“There you go. Maybe he just didn’t get to those last tins. Maybe a car drove up, or someone walked by, or he or she feared they’d be seen. The possibilities are endless.”
“We’re not any closer to knowing who did this than when it happened.”
Jonas nodded to his office in the back. “Would you like a cup of coffee? I know it could be treason if you drink coffee instead of tea, but it gets me started in the morning.”
“No crime there,” she said with a laugh. “But . . .” She checked her watch. “I’d better get over to the tea garden.”
When she looked into Jonas’s eyes, she felt a little quiver in her stomach. The idea of having coffee with him in his office increased the velocity of that quiver. She didn’t think she was ready for that. She didn’t know if he was ready for anything more than being a friend in an investigation. Were they even friends?
“At lunchtime today I want to duck out to a dress shop,” she explained.
“Important event?” He seemed mildly curious. Did he think she was going out on a date?
“Tessa’s gallery showing is on Wednesday evening. I haven’t bought anything new for a while, and I’d like to pretty up.”
He hesitated a moment, but then he said, “You don’t need to buy something new to be pretty.”
She didn’t know what to say to that as her mouth suddenly went dry.
He cleared his throat and then said, “I’m still going through records looking for Jazzi’s mom—or rather birth mother, since you’re her mom.”
“If she finds her birth mother, she might have two moms.”
“I hope you both have faced the reality of a reunion. In general, people don’t like to have their lives disrupted. A child they gave up for adoption suddenly coming around is a huge disruption.”
“I know, and I’ll try to prepare Jazzi better if we find out anything. I think she’s excited about it now, and nothing I say is going to sink in.”
“You’re probably right. Thanks for keeping me informed about the coin.”
“I asked Detective Rappaport if I could tell you, and he said I could. But please keep it confidential.”
“Of course.”
They were back on that “friends together in an investigation” footing, and Daisy was more comfortable with that. She expected that he was too.
She made a move toward the door. “Whenever you want another cup of tea and a scone, just stop in.”
“I’ll take you up on that offer soon.”
As she left Jonas’s store, she could feel his gaze on her back. It was a nice feeling. An exciting feeling. Did she need a little excitement in her l
ife?
* * *
At one-thirty, Daisy took her break, deciding to skip lunch in favor of dress shopping. At least she thought she wanted a dress. For some reason, she considered what Jonas’s reaction might be if he saw her in a new dress. That was just crazy. He didn’t seem the type to go to an art gallery showing. Besides, she’d never dressed for men before. She dressed in what she liked, clothes she felt good and comfortable in. Advice to do just that had come from her Aunt Iris.
She headed north toward her favorite dress shop. At least the Rainbow Flamingo was her favorite window-shopping dress shop. They carried everything from an L.L.Bean type of look to a Serengeti style, and she could usually find something reasonable. When she walked in, she waved to the clerk, Heidi Korn, who often patronized the tea garden.
Heidi asked, “Are you looking for anything special?”
“I am. Something versatile that I could multipurpose with. I want to wear it to the art gallery showing this week.”
“Tessa’s showing. I bet she’s excited.”
“Oh, she is.”
Heidi motioned to the rack to the left. “I just got in new coordinates that might suit you—skirts and slacks and jackets and blouses. You can mix and match. Or . . .” She pointed to a rack on the other side. “New arrivals and dresses for the holidays.”
“I’ll take a look at all of it. I have about an hour.”
“If you need any help, just give a yell.”
Heidi apparently suspected that Daisy liked to do her own mixing and matching, and her own choosing.
She pulled out two skirts, one in plum and one in raspberry, and was choosing blouses that went with each when the door to the shop opened and the entrance bell rang. It was habit for Daisy to look up and see who the new customer was.
She was surprised to recognize Caroline, the employee from Men’s Trends. As soon as Caroline stepped into the shop, she recognized Daisy too and gave a wave.
Daisy hung the clothes she’d selected on a nearby rack and approached Caroline. “How are you?”
Murder with Lemon Tea Cakes Page 17