by Dave Lowry
“Come on,” she said. She took my hand.
We walked through the central part of the village and then over into the yard behind the Shakers’ meetinghouse. It is a little removed from the rest of the village. It was quieter there. To the side of the house, a dirt trail cut into a thicket of maples. We followed the path, Corinne leading me, until she stopped, under the green canopy of the maples, at three granite boulders. They’d probably been sitting in that spot since a team of horses had dragged them there to clear the nearby field, when the Shakers were still working the land here. There were some smaller stones scattered around too. Corinne stepped over to one, about the size of a football. She squatted down. With her top pulled up above her waist, I could see the smooth brown of her lower back, and the top of her panties. Black.
She pulled at the stone and flipped it over, and then she had something in her hand. A clear bag, like what you’d put sandwiches in for a picnic. She straightened and handed it to me. Inside, I could see a piece of folded paper, light blue.
“Be careful when you open it,” she said. “Real careful.”
I was. I took the folded paper from inside and started to pull it open. Corinne interrupted me. She put one hand under mine, holding it, then brushed aside my other, the one that was unfolding the paper, and finished the job herself.
I was suddenly aware that my heart was beating. Fast.
“I’m guessing there’s about a quarter-zillion dollars’ worth of diamonds in here,” I said. “But then again, you’re the expert.”
“Good eye,” Corinne said. “Although your estimate is off by a little. It’s more like about sixty-five thousand dollars. Give or take.”
“Give or take,” I said. “Which for some reason Sung didn’t take when he cleaned out the rest of his own supply?”
“I think he may have forgotten about these,” Corinne said. “They were a private stash he had. He must have been fairly distracted at the time.”
“How did you know about them?”
“He showed them to me one day, not too long after I started working there,” she said. “I think he had some vague designs about getting into my pants, and he thought it would impress me.”
“Did it?”
“He kept it taped under the desk in his office,” she said, ignoring my question. “He said it was a ‘rainy-day fund’ he could liquidate in case he needed money unexpectedly. He’d been putting aside diamonds, one from this consignment, another from that, for a long time. He did enough volume that it wouldn’t have shown up in the accounts.”
“How do things like diamonds not show up in accounts? It’s not like filching some staples or rubber bands.”
“Wholesalers in the diamond business deal in hundreds of thousands of stones,” she said. “They’ll send an extra one or two along to a distributor like the Wing Sung company. And distributors’ inventories are constantly fluid, anyway. It isn’t that hard, unless you’re greedy about it, to slowly take one here and there and keep it off the books.”
“So the day you showed up and he was gone,” I said, “you figured out what had happened?”
“I guessed; that was all.”
“And you remembered the stash here . . .” I lifted the packet. The diamonds caught the afternoon light and twinkled like the sky’s brightest stars. “And checked to see if it was still there.”
“I did,” she said. “It was.”
“And you hid it here the day we visited?”
“Oh, no, Nancy Drew,” she said. She held my hand again and used her other to fold the packet closed again. “I came down here and hid them, then went to New Hampshire and waited for you to come along.”
“Complicated plan.”
“Qi wo!” she hissed. “Of course I put it here the day you took me. What do you think?”
It was quiet. A little breeze riffled the maple leaves over our head. A catbird made a raw, mewling call.
“Technically speaking,” I said, “these belong to the Flying Ghosts.”
“Technically speaking,” Corinne said. “Although since they weren’t in the regular inventory, Ping and the Ghosts wouldn’t have known about them in the first place. They couldn’t have known these diamonds were missing since they didn’t know Sung had them.”
“Had them.”
“True,” she said. “However, since they are—what’s the expression the prosecuting attorney used back in St. Louis? IGG?”
“Ill-gotten gains.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Since they are ill-gotten gains, and since Ping and several others of the Flying Ghosts are right now distracted by arrests and upcoming prosecutions, they are probably not in a position to accept receipt of them. So my conclusion is . . .”
“Finders, keepers?” I said.
“Unless there is a Tucker’s Rule that covers this sort of situation.”
“This one’s in kind of a gray area, I have to admit.”
She took the blue envelope from my hand and slid it back into the plastic pouch, then tucked it into the front pocket of my pants.
“You trust me with these?” I asked.
“I’m thinking we might want to use them to make an investment,” she said. We started walking back to the main part of the village. Out of the shade of the maples, the sun was bright.
“Investment in what?” I asked.
She looped her arm through mine. “Well,” Corinne said, “I’ve been to this part of Massachusetts twice now and it’s lovely and all, but have you noticed one thing that’s missing?”
“What?”
“There doesn’t seem to be a good Chinese restaurant anywhere around here.”
About the Author
DAVE LOWRY is the restaurant critic for St. Louis Magazine and writes regularly for a number of magazines on a wide variety of subjects, many of them related to Japan and the Japanese martial arts. He is the author of numerous nonfiction books.