by Dale Mayer
She printed this one off and, at the same time, forwarded the email to Mack. Her phone rang right away.
“This is interesting,” Mack said.
“Why would the police have returned the jewels to your mother if they matched those in the theft? And, no, I don’t know that they did, but the image I forwarded to you got me thinking.”
“The most important reason would be they couldn’t prove the jewels came from that theft,” he said. “I’m still looking for the case file on that.”
“Yeah,” Doreen said, a note of suspicion in her voice. “This is getting a little hinky.”
“Don’t start making assumptions,” Mack warned. “Remember. We do better than that.”
“You do,” she said, “but I’m still stuck wondering about the hows and the whys.”
“Interesting that he contacted you.”
“The appraiser, Jeremy, called Zachary,” she said. “Jeremy’s the one who picked up the big emerald and checked it over.” As she was talking to Mack, more emails came in from Zachary. “Hang on,” she said. “He’s sending me more stuff. And, indeed, one is a scanned copy of a handwritten order for the emeralds. Then a follow-up note from the jewelry store, showing the delivery of the first one and the second one on order. I’m forwarding these to you,” she said in excitement. “It backs up Zachary’s story.”
“And yet,” Mack said, “why and how did they end up at my parents’ place?”
“I’m pretty sure, based on what Mangus assumes,” and she put careful emphasis on that word, “that Aretha’s first husband was responsible.”
“You think he arranged the theft himself?”
“For the insurance most likely,” she said. “And then, with the fire, I don’t know how much was reclaimed. I am getting some boxes from the insurance company though, from Mangus.”
Mack sucked in his breath. “Unbelievable,” he said.
“Maybe.” Just then her doorbell rang, and Mugs took off barking. Doreen groaned. “Now I’ve got somebody at the door.” She kept talking to Mack, as she opened the door to see a pickup out front. She looked at the young man while Mugs danced at her feet.
“Hi, I’m Mangus’s grandson, Grantham,” he said, “and apparently these boxes are for you.” With that, he propped open the screen door and unloaded all the boxes into her living room.
“Thank God, there are only twelve boxes,” Doreen announced to Mack, as the kid gave her a wave and took off.
Mack started to laugh. “Remember,” he said. “If you find anything—”
She promptly hung up on him, glaring at the phone. “Not cool, Mack,” she muttered.
Mugs was busy sniffing around the boxes, and even Goliath had hopped on top of one. Thaddeus, never to be outdone, hopped onto one of the boxes and pecked around, his head twisted, as if reading the lettering on the box.
Doreen pocketed her phone and looked at the boxes stacked up in no particular order, noting each one was dated. Dates going back forty years. She whistled. “Maybe it’ll be easier than I thought,” she said, and she pulled out the oldest of the boxes and noted it was taped.
Stepping into the kitchen, she grabbed a sharp knife, then went back and sliced open the top. Inside were not files, as she’d expected, but loose papers stacked on top of each other, including note cards and smaller cards that looked like they came from a little Rolodex. The boxes were big, much bigger than she was used to.
She emptied one box, keeping the papers in sequence and hoping some order was within the chaos. She was delighted when she saw most of the paperwork was in chronological order. The dates on the box covered a five-year period.
She was pretty sure such a company generated a lot more paperwork than this, so maybe these were just problem cases or cases that didn’t get resolved. Not new clients or accounts with no claims or anything like that. As she worked through them, she realized that was exactly what this was. A collection of the troublesome cases. And the stack she had was mostly from Johnson and Abelman.
She sat down, leaning up against the box, and slowly went through the documents. The initial coverage, then the theft, for which there was a police report. She crowed with laughter at that. She pulled it out and got up, keeping the paperwork carefully in the same position and scanned it, sending it to Mack.
Then she replaced it, but this time with a sticky note sticking off the top. Then she went through the rest.
What followed was basically the logistics behind what she’d already heard. The break-in at the business, and a theft that hadn’t been fully insured. A handwritten note contained comments, suggesting some dissension and in-fighting between the owners and more stock had been ordered than was necessary. One comment even indicated suspicions that the burglary was part of the problem and potentially was a setup.
Doreen found some missives back and forth, letters from the Johnson family, trying to get coverage for all the stock that had been purchased and had gone missing, but, because they didn’t have proof for a lot of it, even though they’d done their best to get copies of receipts, the insurance company wasn’t prepared to cover the exorbitant amount. They had covered what had been in stock and, per their normal rider, a percentage of the business itself. But there was still contention, and they would have to go through dispute resolution over it. In fact, the Johnsons had even filed a lawsuit against the insurance company.
She found notes on the insurance company copy that indicated their lawyers had been contacted. As she continued through the documents, not more than two months later the fire occurred, ripping through the business. On that claim, the insurance company had balked about paying out any more because of the problems with the previous claim.
Doreen picked up that note, then scanned it and sent it to Mack. Then she added a sticky note to flag this page as important, put it back in order, and carried on. It was fascinating reading. In the end, the insurance company didn’t have to pay out for the fire, and they hadn’t paid out the full amount for all the jewelry either.
She wasn’t sure that they had any kind of notation as to what went on in terms of the jewelry business itself going under, but it went bankrupt about the same time, and not all the creditors could be paid. Some of the jewels were recovered, and most of those were sold, including all the inventory that was salvageable, in order to help cover the debts, but the final result was, they were broke. As she got to the end of the box, she found it went on to other cases.
A single note said the lawsuit was dropped. The Johnsons, majority owners of the company, had died, leaving just Reginald and Aretha holding the bag. Neither had the funds to carry on with a lawsuit, and another note said the case was closed. Doreen put an elastic band around all the paperwork that pertained to the Johnson and Abelman case, thankful she didn’t have to go through the rest of the boxes. She did go through the rest of this box, just in case, but nothing else was connected to the Johnson and Abelman Jewelers company.
Picking up what she had found on the jewelry company, she took out each of the pages with the sticky notes attached, making duplicate copies of these sheets, reinserting them into the chronological stack, then double-checked for staples or paper clips in the rest of the paperwork, and ran the entire file through her scanner. When she was done, she reclipped it all together and put it back in the box. Then she closed it up.
With that safely in digital form and her notes in hand, she thought it all over, deciding she needed to talk to Aretha. And that wouldn’t be fun. She groaned, knowing she might as well get it over with. “Okay, Mugs. How about a walk?”
Mugs barked and raced over to the kitchen, where Doreen apparently had left his leash. He dragged it back excitedly, flicking it around, until the end of the leash smacked Goliath, who then chased after Mugs, trying to attack him. Mugs yelped and dashed behind Doreen, trying to keep her between him and Goliath, who was still rightfully pissed.
Joining the crowd, Thaddeus landed in the center and cried out, “Thaddeus is gorgeous.”
She gathered them around her, and, after securing the front and back doors, walked to Heidi’s. Doreen saw no sign of Heidi in the gardens, and the gates were locked. Doreen found a button to push though, and, shortly after she did, Aretha’s voice answered from inside.
“Aretha, it’s Doreen.”
“What do you want?” the woman asked, sounding exasperated.
“I’d like to talk to you about the jewelry business and the insurance problems at Johnson and Abelman.”
There was shocked silence on the other end. “Why would you want to do that?” she asked.
“Because I think it’s important,” Doreen said, speaking gently. “I think I know a lot about what happened, but I’d like to hear the truth from you.”
“Does anybody even know what the truth is?” Aretha asked, her voice sounding tired and old. But she hit the buzzer and released the lock on the gate, so Doreen could come in. As Doreen headed up to the house, she studied the gardens and smiled because they did look so much better. At the front door Aretha stood waiting.
“Why are you putting your nose into my business?” Aretha snapped. For all her regal stance, her clothes were from a decade ago, and her features showed strain and stress.
“Are you feeling okay?” Doreen asked gently.
Aretha gave an irritated shrug. “Of course I am. What do you care anyway?”
“You might be surprised,” Doreen said. She smiled at the older woman. “What can you tell me about what happened with the burglary?”
“Nothing to say,” she said, her tone clipped. “We came in one day to find the windows were smashed and a lot of the jewelry was gone.”
“Did you recover any of it?”
“Some of it was recovered, yes. Dropped and scattered all over. And that was all sold to pay the bills.”
“But not all of it was recovered?”
“No. Not all of it.” She hesitated but then firmed her lips, pressed them tightly together, and wouldn’t say any more.
“Did you ever figure out who did it?”
Again came a haughty stare, and her nose cranked up another inch higher.
Doreen recognized the signs. She’d seen them in many of her associates in her previous life.
“No,” Aretha said. “There were a lot of theories, and my parents certainly had a lot of their own at the time, but they were just trying to cause trouble.”
“Did they blame your husband?”
Stunned, a surprised expression covered Aretha’s face. Like a deer frozen in the headlights, she whispered, “How did you know?”
“Because he is the logical choice,” Doreen said.
Aretha shook her head. “How is that logical?” she asked. “My parents helped him into the business. They showed him everything. It was just me in the family, so my husband knew we would inherit everything.”
“But maybe he didn’t want to wait until you inherited?” Doreen said. “Did you want more than he could afford? Was he feeling pressure to give you more?”
Aretha shook her head, bewilderment in her gaze. “No,” she said. “We were fine.”
“Did he want things? Did he want a fancy sports car or a bigger house? Could he have felt like the standard of living wasn’t meeting his expectations?”
“He was a bit of a gambler,” Aretha said, “and he always thought big. He wanted to have a cabin on the lake and a bigger house in town.” She shrugged. “I just ignored him, figuring he was a bit of a dreamer.”
“And what would it take for a dreamer to cross the line to theft,” Doreen wondered.
“We were having some marital problems. But divorce was still a stigma I didn’t want back then.”
“Your parents would have been okay with it though, right?”
This time Aretha’s gaze was haunted, but she nodded. “It’s only as you look back over the years that you realize the mistakes you made,” she whispered. “My parents, they didn’t like him. They opened their arms to embrace him because they figured, if they didn’t, they would lose me. And, after everything they did for my husband, it still seemed like it wasn’t enough.”
“And then you mentioned divorce, correct?”
“We had a big fight. I wanted to move out, to go back home to my parents. I told him I wanted a divorce.”
“And the break-in? Was it that night or another night?”
“That night,” she said. “I did go back to my parents’ house. I left at ten o’clock, although I told the police I was home. I provided an alibi for my husband, but I really don’t know if he was home or not.”
Bingo.
“It’s too bad you did that,” Doreen said, “because some of this could have been resolved so much earlier.”
“I don’t know about that,” she said, “but I felt I owed my husband that much.”
“And yet didn’t you wonder if he may have had something to do with it?”
The older woman hesitated.
Doreen nodded, encouraging her. “Of course you wondered. But, once the insurance didn’t pay out, you guys were in financial trouble, weren’t you?”
Aretha nodded. “My parents were devastated. Everything they’d worked so hard for, and now they wouldn’t even have enough money for their own retirement.”
“And then the fire?”
“Why are you dredging up all this?” Aretha said, visibly shaken. “Don’t you see it’s painful?”
“I’m trying to get it all straightened out,” Doreen said. “It is important. Please trust me that far.”
Aretha shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “The fire was the end of it. The insurance company wouldn’t pay and were already calling us insurance frauds. It was a mess. They’d canceled the insurance on the business, but my parents didn’t tell me.”
Aretha sagged against the waist-high railing on the front porch. “That was too much for my parents.”
“And they died soon after?”
“Yes, I believe so.” The older woman reached up and pressed her fingers to her temples, as if the memories were painful.
“I’m so sorry for having to do this,” Doreen said, “but did you ever wonder who set the business on fire?”
Aretha slowly raised her gaze and nodded. “I didn’t have to wonder. I’ve always been sure it was my husband. He said something at the time I didn’t understand. About not knowing it wasn’t insured. But he never would tell me what he’d done. So I had no proof. Just that uneasiness …”
“Did you tell the police?”
She shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”
“Maybe you should have,” Doreen said.
“We’re going back to that decision I made such a long time ago,” Aretha said, as she sagged even lower on the railing and stared out at the gardens. “Back then, I thought I was everything,” she whispered. “I was raised in the highest of society, and, even though we worked in a trade, it was a wealthy trade. I knew everybody who was anyone and was privy to their secrets. I was privy to their world. My husband and I were both welcomed in society, but, after the fraud accusations, the fire, and then the death of my parents, it was all just too much.”
“And, in all this, what happened to your husband?”
“I had to go back to our home after the break-in, or the police would have never believed the alibi. We stayed together for a time, but our marriage was going downhill. I did think afterward that he only hung around long enough to see if I would inherit anything.”
“And?”
“My parents didn’t have anything left to speak of,” she whispered. “They’d already used up all their savings, their own money, and had even sold the house, though I didn’t know it.” Tears were in her eyes. “They did everything they could to pay back the people who had trusted them.”
Doreen’s heart ached for the older couple who would have realized how much they
had lost. “I’m glad for them that they at least went to the grave thinking they had done the best they could,” Doreen murmured. “But how terrible to know that their own losses and tragedies would continue to impact other people.”
“Exactly,” Aretha said, “it was a tough time, and Reginald was there for me.”
“Good,” Doreen said. But she wondered at the relationship. Had Reginald really been there for her or more for himself?
“But it also left me with nothing,” Aretha said with a small smile.
“And your husband?”
“And then he died,” she said with a bitter laugh. “At the time I couldn’t decide if I was delighted or horrified, but I knew I wasn’t grief-stricken. Not about Reginald. I was still dealing with the grief over my parents.”
“But some time passed between his death and theirs, didn’t it?”
She nodded. “Yes. A couple years between them. But I was very close to my parents. That loss remained with me a long, long time. At the time, I was trying to find a way to get away from my husband. He’d taken everything I had and had crushed it all to powder.”
“Did you ever suspect maybe he had stolen some of the gems for later?”
“I asked him if he had because I couldn’t let the idea go,” she said. “He just looked so hurt that I ended up feeling guilty.” She shook her head. “I found out later he had stolen quite a few of the gems and had hidden many of them in places I would never find.” She shrugged. “He left me a strange letter before he died, saying gems were still hidden in the city, but he couldn’t find them anymore. The landmarks he’d written down to remind himself were no longer there, so he didn’t even have a way to get them himself.”
“Why would he have left you that letter?”
“Because he’d kept some of the jewels and slowly sold them over time, after we were separated,” she said bitterly. “He had essentially lived off my family for all those years, and, when he finally ran out and knew he would be done for, all he wanted was that last bag of jewels, but he couldn’t find it.”