Jewels in the Juniper (Lovely Lethal Gardens Book 10)

by Dale Mayer

  “I’m kind of surprised you had time to pick up Chinese food, since you’ve been so busy getting into my family’s affairs,” he said.

  She stared at him in surprise, and then she knew. “Ah,” she said. “I guess you talked to your mother, didn’t you?”

  He put down his fork very precisely, then glared at her. “What on earth did you say to her?”

  “Nothing, why?”

  “Well, she has suddenly decided you’re the answer to everything, and you’ll find out exactly who those jewels belong to.” And then he stopped, leaning forward. “But what the hell are the jewels? Where did they come from, and what’s this got to do with my mother?”

  “Didn’t she tell you?” Doreen couldn’t imagine her only telling Mack a little of the story.

  Mack shook his head. “Only that she had put you on to your next mystery and that you would solve something that had worried her for a long time.”

  “Wow,” Doreen said, sitting back in surprise. “I think she just threw me to the wolves.”

  At that, Mack sat back and laughed. “You know what? She just may have done exactly that.”

  Chapter 4

  Friday Dinnertime …

  Doreen chuckled. “So, let me explain.” Then she told him about his mother telling her about the jewels she had found years ago.

  Mack stared at her. “How come I’ve never heard a word of this?”

  “I was a little confused if you’d heard or not. One time she told me that you didn’t know, but she also said something about having mentioned it to you, but you were always off doing sports. So, I don’t know exactly what the deal was.”

  “I’ve been a cop for fifteen years,” Mack said. “She had fifteen years to tell me.”

  “She did,” Doreen said, as she picked up a bite of broccoli, then crunched her way through it and moaned. “Gosh, this is so good.”

  “You’re not getting off that easily,” he said.

  “Me?” she said. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Where are the jewels now?”

  “On my kitchen table,” she said, “but you also must know that she did hand them over to the cops. They held them for thirty-plus days, so now they are technically hers.”

  “So nobody picked them up?”

  “Nobody picked them up, and, not only that, the cops back then couldn’t trace them.”

  “Right,” he said. He shook his head and ate another large bite of noodles. “This is really good,” he said. “Normally when I come here to eat, I have to cook first.”

  “And like I said”—she gave him a stern look—“if I’d known you were coming and were expecting to eat, I could have ordered twice as much.”

  “Good point,” he said. “We’ll want something for dessert to help fill in some holes.”

  “Maybe.” She pushed back her empty plate. “I wonder if he gave me more than normal.”

  He looked at the container. “What did it cost you?”

  “Nine dollars and forty-five cents—or something like that,” she said, reaching into her pocket to pull out the change.

  He looked at it and said, “That’s a lot of food.”

  “I know,” she said. “Maybe it was an overlarge helping. I don’t know. He did say that, even if I didn’t have money, he’d feed me.”

  At that, Mack chuckled. “That could be a really good deal for you,” he said, shaking his head.

  “And, of course, I could never take advantage of it, except maybe if I was super hungry and truly needed the food,” she said quietly. “I’m grateful I’m not in that situation at the moment.”

  “Hey, speaking of jewelry,” he said, letting her comment slide.

  She appreciated the change of subject. The last thing she wanted was to have more discussions about her dire circumstances.

  “The jewelry that your husband still has. Is it really yours?”

  “I’m not sure how that works under the law,” Doreen said, “but he gave them to me. Like the emerald was a wedding gift. The pearls were my birthday gift, and there were matching earrings. There was a beautiful sapphire pendant he gave me for an anniversary.”

  He just stared at her. “When did you wear them?”

  She really hated to tell him this part. “When he told me to. Sometimes we argued about it because I’d want to wear a piece, and he wouldn’t get them from the safe. Other times he wouldn’t like my choice, and he’d want me to put on something else.”

  “Controlling, wasn’t he?”

  She nodded. “Very. I never had access to the safe, so I could never get the jewels out on my own.”

  Mack continued to eat.

  Doreen, on the other hand, had finished all her food. But watching him eat made her hungry for a little more. “We shouldn’t have eaten all the zucchini bread,” she thought out loud. “Another piece of that would be perfect with a cup of coffee right now.”

  “Good,” he said. “Take a look at what I brought, when you go in to put on the coffee. It’s on the counter.”

  She looked at him in surprise, then jumped up and raced inside to see something wrapped up in tinfoil. She put on the coffee and brought out the tinfoil package, placing it on the outside table. “What’s this?”

  “Did you take any when you left?”

  He was back to discussing her jewelry. She shook her head. “No. He refused to give me anything.”

  “So they were hardly gifts in his mind?”

  “I’m certain they were always assets in his mind,” she said. “He gave them to me, but, as long as he kept control of them, they were still his.”

  “Right,” he said. “I sent an email to my brother about that. He was wondering if you had any proof of the individual pieces.”

  “How could I have proof of gifts?” she asked in a wry tone.

  “Photos of the jewelry you wore?”

  She looked at him in surprise. “You know what? I do have photos. I was thinking I should try to find some of those anyway.”

  “Because?”

  “Because of exactly what you said. I don’t know how to tell people those pieces are mine. Even if I tried to get some of them back, I don’t have a way to identify them.”

  “Pictures would be a good start.” He was still working away at the food on his plate.

  “So, what’s in the tinfoil?” she asked, nudging it.

  He grinned at her. “Open it and see.”

  She unwrapped the foil to see cinnamon buns inside. Four big ones, each coated in icing.

  “Oh my,” she said. “Wherever did you get those?”

  “Somebody bought a big pan in to work,” he said. “That was left at the end of our shift, so I grabbed them. They won’t be any good tomorrow anyway.”

  “But they’ll be perfect with coffee tonight,” she said in anticipation. “Good thing I shared my dinner with you.”

  “Good thing,” he said. “Otherwise I might not have shared my dessert with you.”

  She chuckled. “Are they dried out from sitting on the counter all day?” She reached for one, but she didn’t have a clean plate. She put it back down, hopped up, and went into the kitchen to return with two small plates. She cleared off the dirty dishes, taking them to the sink, while Mack cleaned up the take-out garbage. And when she got back out with two cups of coffee, she found two cinnamon buns on each plate.

  “Two should really be too much,” she confessed, “but I want them both anyway.”

  “And so you should,” he said. “I keep saying you could use a little more weight on you.”

  “That’s such a bizarre thing to hear after all these years. My husband would have been horrified to even see one of these on my plate. I’d have been lucky if I’d gotten one-quarter of one roll.”

  “Seriously?”

  She smiled. “He controlled everything, including my dress size.”

  “Good Lord,” he muttered.

  “I know, and you’re wondering why I stayed.”

  “No, I’m not,�
�� he said, “because I’ve seen it before. Once you’re molded into who this person he wants you to be, it’s hard for you to see that you were ever anything different.”

  “Well, I keep asking myself why I stayed,” she said, “because that all seems so very different from who I am now.”

  “Don’t worry about it too much,” he said. “You are a very different person now.”

  “Thankfully,” she said on a sigh. But, with a bright smile on her face, she looked at the cinnamon buns. “Do we need to do anything with them?”

  He looked at her in surprise. “What would you like to do?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I feel like a kid in a candy store because I’ve never had a whole cinnamon bun to myself before, and now there’s two.”

  He laughed. “I’ll put mine in the microwave for all of ten or so seconds,” he said, “then I may cut them in half and butter them.”

  Doreen stared at him in wonder. “Now that sounds decadent.”

  “When you work hard,” he said, “you get to eat well.”

  Mack picked up his plate and took it to the microwave. Doreen followed with hers. He put it on for about fifteen seconds. When it came out, he cut them in half and buttered the inside. The top half had icing, but the bottom half didn’t. She did the same; then they took their plates back outside again. As they went out, she snagged the bowl with the jewels and the jewelry bag and her notepad and sat out in the fresh air with him.

  “These are the jewels,” she said, placing the bowl on the table.

  He looked at them. “Are they real?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I did figure out the bag came from a business called Johnson and Abelman.” She showed him the emblem on the bottom of the bag. “That was their old logo.”

  He stared at it, then looked at her.

  She shrugged. “They went out of business forty years ago,” she told him.

  At that, his eyebrows shot up.

  “Somewhere around the same time these were found in the juniper.” She looked down on her notes and tapped the pad. “This is what I got from your mom. She made notations of it in her gardening journals.”

  “And yet she never said anything,” he murmured.

  “I think she put them away in her mind, not just in her physical hiding place. She doesn’t believe they are hers, so never sold them.”

  “They would have fetched a decent price,” he admitted. “And they sure could have used the money.”

  “Maybe,” she said, “but your mom never felt entitled to them.”

  “Of course not,” he said. “So she gave them to you.”

  “With the request that I try to find the owner.”

  “Which won’t be that easy, depending on the circumstances. It was a long time ago.”

  Doreen nodded. “The thing is, if they’re hers to keep, they should be yours. And you aren’t so wealthy that you should be turning away that kind of money.”

  He stared at the jewels, as if mesmerized. “Wow.” He reached over and picked up the big ruby. “These are ready to be set, aren’t they?”

  “They are. But what I don’t know is if they are real. I could take them down to the jewelry store and get them appraised.”

  “Good idea,” he said. “So what else have you found out about them?”

  She told him about the young wife turned widow who remarried somebody in the insurance business. Then she said, “Oddly enough, Nan doesn’t like her one bit.”

  At that, Mack chuckled. “That could be for any number of reasons.”

  She explained what Nan had said.

  At that, his laughter fell away. “People who have a lot of money and look down on others don’t tend to have many friends.”

  “My grandmother is definitely not somebody who would tolerate that,” she said.

  “Nan had quite a lot of money stashed around this house,” he said, looking at the kitchen and the rest of the house behind him.

  “She did, but she wasn’t interested in cash—or any of it, for that matter,” Doreen said.

  “Is she okay financially?”

  “I keep asking her.” Doreen shrugged. “She keeps laughing at me, tells me that she’s fine.”

  “Well then, you don’t have much choice but to believe her for now,” he suggested. “Just keep an eye on her and make sure she is.”

  Doreen nodded. “That’s what I thought.” She stared at the jewels. “There was a burglary,” she said suddenly.

  At that, Mack put down his fork.

  “But that was before the jewelry store went bankrupt. Apparently a new shipment of jewels had come in just before the theft, but there was a discrepancy on the jewels that arrived versus what was ordered. So they only got the value of the other jewels they had at the time.”

  “And you’re thinking that’s why they went bankrupt?”

  “Well, if they got the insurance money to pay for what was there before, but they’d had a large shipment of raw jewels brought in,” she spoke the words as she thought them, “it’s quite possible the insurance money had to go toward paying off the creditors.”

  “That is possible,” he admitted. “I don’t remember hearing anything about that jewelry store.”

  “It was started by the husband and wife Johnson,” she said, “until their one child, a daughter, married Abelman. He was eventually brought in as a partner only they were struck by a series of unfortunate events and within a few years everything went south in a big way.”

  “And that was forty years ago?”

  She nodded. “The bankruptcy was not quite forty years ago.”

  “Do you suspect either were involved in the theft and insurance payout?”

  “It is something to be looked into.” Doreen frowned at him. “Any way to check back forty years to see if there is a police record of your mom turning in the jewels?”

  “What would that do?” He eyed her carefully.

  “I hate to say it, but your mom’s memory isn’t what it used to be,” she said quietly. “It’s possible she told the cops something more at the time. Something that’s written into the case she opened up when she brought in the hidden gems.”

  “It’s possible,” he said, “but I don’t know if the record is still around. But she’s right though because, after thirty days, we do have to return found property.”

  “Unless it was involved in a theft maybe,” she said.

  “And you’re right there too,” he said. “So I wonder if it’s simply a case of the cops couldn’t prove it was part of a robbery because they couldn’t trace them.”

  “Or …” She stopped and stared at him. “What are the chances that …” She paused again, knowing that, if she said anything more, it would piss him off.

  “Chance of what?” He spoke in a hard voice. “That the cops were involved or something stupid like that?”

  “Well, I guess the next question is,” she said, “when Millicent got them back, were there ever any break-ins at her house?”

  “Why would there be?”

  “Because somebody found out she had the jewels back again.”

  “I have no idea,” he said. “It’s all just been dumped in my lap. I still can’t believe you were the first to hear about it.”

  “Your mother brought it up out of the blue when we were talking about gardening,” she said. “She just suddenly brought it up.”

  “There’s something about you that has that effect on everybody.” Leaning back, he stretched. “I can take a look and see. Forty years back. That would be in the files we have stored downtown. They’re supposed to scan them all in, so they are digital, but haven’t yet. There was an attempt to get started on that, but we just don’t have the man-hours.”

  She nodded. “And something like this, with loose stones, if there’s nothing to identify them?”

  “Exactly. I’m not sure how something like these would be identified.”

  “I think,” she said, “each jewel has its own identificatio
n, and maybe even a certificate, but, if there isn’t anything that we can go on, I don’t know what to say.”

  “I heard something about certificates, but I don’t know if they had that back then.” He used his finger to stir the dozen little jewels in the bowl. “It does look like it could be a lot of money,” he admitted.

  “I think it is,” she said. “I understand jewels, even if I’ve never had the opportunity to buy or to sell them. And these look seriously expensive. I can’t imagine they are fakes with that clarity.”

  “So, I’ll look for the old records, and you look for any photos you have that show you wearing your jewelry. I know my brother is interested in seeing those.”

  “Sounds good,” she said. “Have you seen all the materials we’ve collected for the deck?” When he shook his head, she wanted to hop up immediately, but she still had one-half of a cinnamon bun. “These are really filling,” she said.

  “If you don’t eat both of yours,” he said, “you can save one for breakfast.”

  She beamed and said, “That’s perfect. I still have half of one, and that was the half with the butter on it.” She sat here and drank her coffee. As soon as she was done, she hopped up and said, “Come see,” and dashed around the side of the house, with Mack slowly trailing behind her.

  He stood there and studied the collection and nodded. “We’re getting there,” he said. He leaned over and grabbed one of the green boards Arnold had brought and smiled. “These are perfect for stringers.”

  She stared at it doubtfully.

  He looked at her and frowned. “Don’t you think so?”

  “I’m still trying to figure out what that board of wood has to do with string, why we’re stringing it in the first place, or what a stringer even is.”

  He chuckled and made indents with his fingers, holding it upright at an angle. “Then we put the boards right here on each of those.”

  And then it clicked, and she could see the steps take shape in front of her. “That’s what you’re talking about. That makes so much sense now.”

  “It does, and it doesn’t,” he said. “We have to cut them all exactly the same, which is a little bit dicey because it’s easy to screw that up. And it’s not like I’m a pro at this or anything.”