Her broom caught on an uneven point in the floor. Meghan stepped forward to see if a nail had worked upwards or if it was a loose board. The board moved on her.
She leaned down and found a board was more than loose; it sat slightly below the floor level. She tried to remove it only to find it was actually pivoting. She felt under the board, expecting cobwebs, sawdust, and concrete but touched a hard-sided book.
She lifted it out, realizing as she rubbed off the dust that the dimensions and the heavy weight of the paper were similar to a book she’d been handling every day for the last few weeks. She laughed. Neil had kept a second registry. He has kept meticulous records for the store; it made sense that he’d do the same for the pieces he was forging.
She carried it over to the table with the computer and scanner she had used as she went through his first registry. She turned on the equipment. As she waited impatiently for it to warm up, she found her phone and dialed.
“Stephen! You have to come back to the store. I found it. Neil’s registry of stolen goods, at least that’s what I think it is. It was under a floorboard where the workbench used to be and it feels like a similar ledger. I haven’t scanned it yet, but I can tell it’s been well-used over the years.”
“I’ll be there just as soon as Jack and I get this workbench off the back of the truck.”
“Thanks.”
She opened the registry, laid it on the glass, and scanned the first page.
Neil must have printed in a tight hand because the software had a hard time deciphering every letter, but it could read enough of each line to let her fill in the blanks. She listened as the software read dates, descriptions of pieces, and dollar amounts. Occasionally there was a second line with an annotated reference about the piece.
Neil had been stealing and forging pieces for years. She started jumping forward to pages at random, looking for the year Neil would have bought the brooch from JoAnne. Had it been a stolen piece that her friend had found in that music box years ago?
Stephen parked the truck in front of the jewelry store and grabbed his keys. The front door was locked. “Meghan?” He knocked, surprised the security guard was no longer on duty.
Blackie began to bark inside.
“I’m coming!”
He opened the door and his greeting died. Tears traced down Meghan’s cheeks. “What’s wrong?”
She shook her head and trailed a hand along the display cases that headed to the back room. “Come back and see the registry.”
Stephen locked the front door behind him and followed her. “Where’s the security guard?”
“There’s nothing else here of value now that the vault is empty. Today was his last day.”
Those didn’t look like her happy tears. “Meghan, why are you crying?”
“Tell me about the ledger first.” The floorboard piece she’d found was propped open. She was right. The bench would have concealed it, and it was heavy enough that no one would have looked underneath it. Meghan lifted the lid on the scanner and picked up the registry and offered it to him.
He tugged a Kleenex from his pocket and pressed it into her hand, then looked at what she’d found. “The ledger is black leather binding, legal-size pages with the light green guide lines. There are about sixty pages, the first ten pages or so with entries.” She wiped at her eyes. “What’s wrong, Meghan? Is it this book?”
“Read the line for Friday, August 16, 1996.”
He ran his hand down the page to find the entry.
August 16, Wilshire Hotel, Chicago, midnight. Three pieces switched: emerald earrings, a square-cut diamond ring, a bracelet and necklace with diamonds and emeralds in twenty-four carat gold. Fakes. 18 hours labor.
Two columns labeled simply E and T respectively showed the words advance 10,000. The next line in the ledger was a note.
Advance Craig additional 2,000—clipped bridge railing, bumper damage on father’s car.
Neil had known a great deal about the robbery—he listed when and where the stones were taken, the specifics of the pieces taken, the time it took him to create the replicas. Did T stand for transport? Maybe E for who had made the exchange? “The ledger proves Craig had been the courier Neil used for the robberies.” He looked over lines in the registry. No other names were mentioned on the page. He didn’t understand.
Stephen rubbed Meghan’s back, for she was still wiping away tears. “You’re breaking my heart, honey. What is it?”
“Friday, August 16, 1996, is the night I went blind.”
Twenty-six
Stephen felt as though he’d taken another punch as her words registered.
“Craig had to be at the Wilshire Hotel in Chicago at midnight,” Meghan said. “He would have been coming from Silverton. Sometime during that trip he damaged his dad’s car on a bridge railing. You want to figure the odds of two people traveling to and from Silverton on a Friday night six years ago, who both have accidents on a bridge, and have it be two different bridges?”
She wrapped her arms tight across her waist. “The other car accelerated at me. Craig was probably high; even back then he was a heavy user. He ran me off the bridge and left me blind.”
Stephen set down the ledger, his gaze never leaving her. “What do you want to do? Throw something? I’ll get out of the way. Scream? I’ll hold my ears. Just please do something with that anger but stand there rocking on your feet. You’re going to have a coronary on me here.” Stephen reached out to grip her arm. She’d begun to tremble.
Her hand clung to his and cut into the circulation. And rather than speak she just moved into his arms. Stephen winced at the sobs that shook her. “It’s okay. Shh.” There was nothing that made this better. She’d gone blind because of a robbery. “Don’t, Meg.”
He closed his eyes against his own tears and rocked with her where they stood. Jesus, how do You heal this pain she’s in? Couldn’t You have sent Craig into that ditch instead of Meghan? There were some events that simply didn’t square up and make sense. You could have but You didn’t. And Meg lives blind. That’s hard to accept. “You’re worrying Blackie, honey, crying this hard. Let’s go sit down.” He led her toward a chair and wished he knew what to do that would help.
A storm wasn’t much of a distraction, but it was all Stephen could come up with to get Meghan away from Silverton and the topic of the stolen jewelry. He was relieved Ken was going storm chasing today. Kate could sort out the ledger for them. He had a more pressing problem helping Meghan shake the depression.
He tended to run when life overwhelmed him; she just got quiet, and it wasn’t easy to shift her out of that sad place. He couldn’t remember the last time he ate lunch literally at the side of the road, sitting on lawn chairs and eating sandwiches. The wind blowing toward them was brisk. He watched her and was glad they came.
“The sound in the trees is changing,” Meghan commented.
Ken lowered his camera. “The front is coming against blue sky and it’s vast, with thunderheads blowing upward for tens of thousands of feet.”
“Are we going to get hail?”
Ken studied the laptop screen beside him. “Probably. There’s a big humidity and temperature change as the front crosses the Mississippi River. It looks as if the front is already beginning to generate its own wind. By the time it reaches Silverton we’re going to have a serious storm on our hands.”
Stephen tossed a tennis ball into the field for Blackie to chase. “I can see why you like to spend Saturdays out doing this, Ken. What got you started?”
“Where else can you watch something this magnificent, enjoy it for several hours, and it’s free? It was great in college when I wanted JoAnne’s time for several hours but didn’t have more than a couple bucks in my pocket.”
The wind began to pick up pieces of roadside gravel. Stephen shielded his eyes.
“Are the clouds beginning to roll at the leading edge of the storm?” Meghan asked, holding down the papers on the makeshift table.
&n
bsp; Ken snapped more pictures. “Oh yeah. The front edge is beginning to lead the main storm like a pressure wave.”
“Let’s head for the Lookout,” JoAnne suggested.
“Good idea. Pile back in the van; let’s move before we get wet.”
Ken and Stephen quickly collapsed lawn chairs. JoAnne laughed and chased the cooler as the wind blew it toward the field.
Meghan slid into the backseat and Blackie scrambled in with her. “Don’t you love this?”
Stephen slid in beside her. “It’s memorable, I’ll give you.”
Ken turned the van around and they drove away from the storm front. He pulled into the Lookout Restaurant west of Davenport. Stephen understood the name when he saw the layout of the restaurant. Windows stretched along the west wall and gave a panoramic view of the incoming storm. Their presence doubled the number of patrons in the restaurant.
“Is our table free?” Meghan asked.
“Yes,” JoAnne confirmed.
Meghan and Blackie set off across the restaurant for the center booth by the windows.
“I gather you come here often?” Stephen asked Ken.
“It’s the halfway point for most storm chasing trips,” Ken explained. “That’s one of my photographs, taken from this parking lot in ’98.”
Stephen walked over to see. The sky was a roiling gray and green with a clear funnel cloud beginning to drop at the south end of the photo.
“It came in fast and furious and about took the roof of the restaurant off when it dropped to the ground. You can still see some of its path where it decimated trees across the interstate. It ripped up and tossed eighty-year-old oaks around like they were twigs.”
Stephen glanced back outside. “Any chance this storm front will be that violent?”
“It’s generating its own wind; the cumulus clouds are rising into the low edges of the jet stream. All it needs now is energy to feed on, and the humid air held in place by the high pressure over Ohio fits the bill. They might get some twister action a state or two over tonight.”
“You sound regretful.”
“It’s hard to chase storms after sunset and get decent photos; otherwise I’d be planning to go after it. Once you’ve been close to a twister, you’ll understand the pull.” He and Ken ordered for the group then carried trays over to the booth.
Stephen slid in beside Meghan and shared a milkshake with her as they watched the storm come in. In half an hour, rain began to thump against the roof. “I vote we get back to Silverton so you can babysit your windmill, Ken.”
“Agreed. This is going to be a good test.”
Jonathan drove toward Silverton, rain and wind buffeting his van. He’d gambled and lost. They had found a ring. Mrs. Teal had only known the most cursory of details and about the inscription on the ring, but it was enough to know he was in serious trouble.
That ring was his death warrant.
He wiped sweaty hands and turned the windshield wipers up on high to push away the rain faster.
The mob boss would murder him for having an affair with Marie and would make it painfully slow for also having robbed from him. Somehow Jonathan had to get the ring back and locate the other items from that robbery—earrings, a bracelet, and a necklace.
Why did it have to be Meghan who found it, someone he knew and liked? The idea of hurting her… He had to get that ring back, and somehow he doubted she would give it to him and not tell anyone he had it. She was blind; there had to be a way to use that to his advantage. She probably had it stored in the bank vault. If he could get Meghan to open the vault for some reason, maybe he could slide the ring into his pocket and she’d never be the wiser.
And if the ring had already been turned over to the cops? He’d have to somehow force them to return it without revealing his identity. He couldn’t send someone else to get the ring, and there was no one else alive who knew the truth. The cops would have to bring the ring to him…and he had no idea how to make that happen.
It would be better all around if Meghan still had the ring.
If it had been in the metronome, there was a good chance the other pieces would be nearby. Maybe somewhere in Neil’s piano. He’d start there. He didn’t have much time to get this done.
Kate shifted in the front car seat, trying to find a comfortable position.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to stop and let you have a chance to walk around for a few minutes?” Dave asked.
Her back ached, her feet were swollen, she was eight months and four days pregnant, and she was ready to have this over. She hadn’t been comfortable in weeks. “I’m okay. I’d rather get to Silverton before this storm does.” She made a notation on the enlarged copies of the registry pages she had been working on since Meg found the book.
“What are you planning to tell Meghan?”
“Something other than the fact the ring was stolen from a mob boss. But we have to find the other stones, even if we have to break up every piece of furniture Neil ever owned.”
“Agreed.”
Stephen turned up the radio to try to drown out the noise outside as the rain reached the barn. Meghan, smoothing the edges of the baby cradle he had made for Kate, set aside the sandpaper and looked up at the roof. “It sounds nasty out there.”
“We can go up to the house if you like. If we go now we can probably make it before the heaviest rain arrives.”
“I’m okay out here. As long as the barn roof stays on.”
“It will. Your dog is not very happy right now though; he just disappeared underneath the table.”
“Blackie hates thunder, and I can’t blame him.”
Stephen rubbed a soft cloth over the piece of furniture on the workbench, checking that the glue had dried, then set it on the ground. “Come over here a minute. I’d like you to try something.”
Meghan got up, her hand trailing along the worktable. “What do you have?”
Stephen took her hand and set it on the back of the chair. She rubbed her hand along the edges trying to figure out what it was. She smiled. “You made Kate a rocking chair.”
He guided her into the chair. “Actually…I made you a rocking chair.”
She stopped rocking. “Me?”
“Your mom gave me a photo of the rocking chair you used when you were a teen and babysat in the house you now own.”
Meghan ran her hands along the armrests and the spokes, then she laughed. “It’s an incredible rocking chair.”
“The wood is unpainted right now, a light oak. I can either varnish it or paint it for you.”
“Maybe a light varnish. Why did you decide to make this?”
He rested his hands on the arms of the rocking chair. “Your smile.” Stephen leaned down and kissed her, enjoying the blush. “There are times I like the fact you’re blind,” he whispered.
Her hand curled in his shirt as her smile grew. “There are times I like being surprised.”
He eased back. “You’re dangerous.”
“Hmm.” She released his shirt and smoothed the wrinkles out. “What else do we have to work on tonight? I’m about done with the cradle.”
His thoughts were too muddled with ideas of kissing her again to think about work, and at his long pause she laughed. “Focus, Stephen.”
“I’m trying, but you’re intoxicating.” He took a deep breath and took a full step back. “I need the slats sanded for the display case, and I’ve got a couple repair projects to work on.”
“Let me work on the slats.”
“Sure.” He looked away to get his thoughts back to the work at hand. “Sanding. You’ll need more sandpaper.”
“I love it when you’re flustered.”
He glanced over at her. “It’s nice to have your smile back.”
“It’s hard to stay sad around you. Thanks, Stephen. Today meant a lot.”
“You’re very welcome.”
He set her up at the workbench and then moved to pick up the first repair project. He’d brought her dam
aged piano bench back with him to the workshop to tighten the legs and remove the wobble. He turned it upside down on the worktable and got out the wood glue, working with small shims to tighten the joints. The fabric was worn through around the staples and had begun to tear. He studied the fabric and realized the original staples had been inserted over a double fold of material. He could move the staples and give the bench another few years of life.
He found a pair of needle-nose pliers and tugged up the staples.
The wood underneath the staples shifted. He stopped. If he removed these staples the bench was so old it might come apart. Better to fix it than have it give way on Meghan someday. He pulled up the staples and rather than a solid piece of wood supporting the seat cushion found a flat piece of wood covering a hollow space.
Intrigued, he pulled the wood back. “Meghan, set down what you’re doing and come over here. I just found something.”
He tugged out a backgammon-sized case secured inside the bench.
Meghan joined him.
“Inside the piano bench there was a slim compartment and a case.” He used a knife to force the clasp open. “Oh, my.”
“What is it?”
He reached inside the box. “It’s not everything we’ve been searching for, but it’s quite a sight. Three pieces—emerald earrings and a diamond-and-emerald bracelet and necklace. Assuming these are real, compared to the pieces you had appraised, these would be in the exceptional category.”
“I doubt Neil would hide fakes.” Meghan reached out and Stephen took her hand, showed her the pieces. “Is it too late to call Kate?”
“For this she’ll appreciate a call. I’ll get my phone.”
The pager he wore went off.
“There’s been an accident caused by the storm,” Meghan predicted. He squeezed her hand as he dialed the dispatch center instead of his sister. It was a car wreck on the highway, police were responding, but he was the only one available for EMS. He confirmed he was on his way and closed the phone. “The jewels have been here for a long time; they can wait a little longer. Come with me. I can drop you at the clinic.” He didn’t want to leave her here alone.