I whirled around to see who was coming. Clearly I was still a little more easily startled than usual—probably an aftereffect of the shooting. But it was only Ragnar lumbering toward the gazebo.
“You are psychic!” he said, beaming. “Just the other day, I said to myself that I must tell Meg that the gazebo needs repair. And here you are!”
He was pointing toward one of the metal railings. Yes, it needed repair. It looked as if something heavy had landed on the railing and even done a little damage to the stone floor.
“I don’t have my tools with me at the moment,” I said. “But I’ll put it on my list. By the way, someone’s been keeping the gazebo in very good condition.”
“Buddy.” He nodded and peered around. “He puts a great deal of work into it. He hangs out here a lot—I’m surprised he’s not here.”
“I suspect I scared him away.”
“Yes—he’s very shy. Almost antisocial—he never joins in any of the group activities.” Ragnar, who hated to do anything alone, shook his head in bewilderment. “I suppose he still has much healing to do. He is one of the walking wounded, I think.”
I found myself wondering if Buddy was another former bandmate, one of the many who hadn’t kept his feet on the ground as well as Ragnar during the heady and probably drug-and-alcohol-filled days of their success. I knew better than to ask, though. Ragnar respected his guest’s privacy. And from what I’d seen of Buddy’s face, he looked a little too old to be Ragnar’s contemporary. Perhaps a mentor? Some ancient drumming guru? He looked vaguely familiar, so maybe I’d seen him in some of the many onstage and backstage pictures Ragnar had used to decorate the music room.
Not that it mattered. He was one of Ragnar’s flock now. So I changed the subject.
“Look,” I said. “I have an idea. What if I added some fretwork to the top of the railing to make it less appealing for the swans to sit there? A miniature version of the Mordor–style wall topping.”
“Awesome!” Ragnar said.
Then he narrowed his eyes and stared at the railings.
“Yes, I can almost see it,” he announced. “This visualization thing goes much better with wrought iron.”
For Ragnar, almost anything went better with wrought iron.
Just then my phone buzzed. I pulled it out and looked at the screen.
“Mother just texted me,” I said. “I’m pretty sure she needs me to do something—look, can you hold down the fort here? Help Dad figure out what he needs to do for his reenactment? And if I don’t get back by the time he’s ready to go home, just call me.”
“I can definitely hold down the fort! Give my greetings to your mother.”
Ragnar strode back to the house as if he expected to repel boarders from the ramparts. I pulled out my phone and called Mother.
“Please tell me that you have an urgent errand for me to do, so I didn’t just tell a whopper of a lie,” I said.
“Well, it’s not that urgent,” she said. “And I’d do it myself, but Viola and I are helping Robyn with more organizing, and I hate to interrupt the momentum. So if you have the time today—Lettice Forsythe found a ginger jar that would be perfect for Mrs. Van der Lynden. Could you drop by her shop? And then take the jar to Maudie?”
“Can do.” I started walking toward my car.
“And if you happen to be anywhere near Trinity…”
“Which you know to be highly likely, since Morton’s is only three blocks away.”
“… I left my umbrella and rain hat there.”
“Not that you’ll need them before tomorrow’s service.”
“It’s a very nice hat and the umbrella your brother brought me from Paris,” she said. “I’d hate to see them go missing overnight.”
“One umbrella and rain hat rescue coming up.”
As I passed by the front of the house, I heard cheering coming from inside. I was almost tempted to trot up the marble steps to find out what was going on.
Almost.
On my way back to the front gate, I noticed that the various guests and employees were no longer at work on the grounds—though I did see Hosmer, sitting under a cherry tree, reading a book. Clearly, with the exception of a few shy souls like Hosmer and Buddy, the entire population of Ragnarsheim was getting sucked into the reenactment.
But not me! Not for the moment, anyway. And then I contemplated, briefly, the curious experience of being delighted to have Mother delegate her errands to me. Over the years, I’d gotten much better at weaseling out of doing chores for Mother when I wanted to. But right now, I was perfectly content to fetch and carry umbrellas and ginger jars.
I might even find a chance to drop by the police station or Randall Shiffley’s office to find out how the chief’s investigation was going.
Lettice Forsythe’s shop was in a well-preserved white gingerbread Victorian on a side street, about a block and a half from the town square. A sign hanging from a white wooden post by the sidewalk spelled out the name of the shop, which I think was Forsythe’s—but the letters were so small and flowery that I’d never been able to confirm this theory. Locals called it “Lettice’s shop” and tourists tended to enthuse about “that wonderful little shop with the sheep on the porch.” Not a real sheep, of course, but a life-sized wooden sheep covered with woolen curls, sporting a wry ceramic face. One of these days I’d ask Lettice if there was a story behind the sheep.
But not today, unfortunately. The shop was closed.
Odd. Most of the shops in town had already gone on their summer schedules, staying open seven days a week from ten A.M. until ten P.M. It was only two in the afternoon.
I went up to the door and peered inside, in case Lettice had accidentally forgotten to flip her sign from closed to open this morning. No. No one inside, and the lights were off. Although the posted hours on the door did, indeed, promise that they’d be open today.
Well, I could pick up the ginger jar tomorrow. Maybe Lettice would bring it to Trinity for tomorrow’s service and save me the trip. Then—
“Meg?”
Lettice’s voice. I looked around but saw no one.
“You can’t see me,” she said. “I spotted you on my security system. Just a minute; I’ll come down and let you in.”
So I waited on the porch until Lettice appeared behind the door, unlocked it, and let me in, to the tinkling accompaniment of the door chime. Clearly she’d already retired to the second floor apartment where she lived, as her diminutive frame was clad in jeans and a Caerphilly Days t-shirt. Since I thought of her as one of Mother’s cronies—they shared a passion for Wedgwood and Chinese porcelain—I was surprised to realize that she was probably only forty-five or fifty. The sedate and conservative clothes she wore in the shop made her seem much older. Probably deliberate.
“Your mother mentioned you’d be dropping by for the jar,” she said. “After what happened to you last night, I decided to close down early. What if the shooter is still lurking in town?”
I considered suggesting that she stop worrying, since I seemed to have been his target, but I decided it would only make her more nervous, now that she’d brought the target into her shop.
“There it is!” She pointed to a blue-and-white porcelain jar standing on the counter at the back of the room, next to her antique brass cash register.
“Very nice,” I said. “Almost a pity to see such a beautiful antique disappear forever into the crypt.”
“I’d agree with you if it was an antique, but this one’s only a reproduction,” she said. “Let me find a box for it.” She darted through a door behind the sales desk, into the back of the shop.
“Was the broken one—?”
“A very valuable antique.” Lettice emerged with a box and a handful of old newspapers in which she began wrapping the jar. “If Mrs. Van der Lynden had donated it to a museum, that lovely thing would still be intact. We don’t want any more nonsense like that in town. So your mother and I decided we’d rebury her in a reproduction. Perfectly nice, but of no interest whatsoever to any sinister grave robbers.”
“Sensible,” I said.
“By the way,” she asked. “Do you know if the ring they found in the crypt was Mrs. Van der Lynden’s?”
“I haven’t heard.”
She finished wrapping the jar. But instead of starting to wrap the top, she set it down and went into the back of the shop again. She returned and handed me a file folder.
I opened the folder and found myself staring at a larger-than-life photo of the ruby ring.
“Either that’s the ring I saw in the crypt or an exact duplicate,” I said. “Not that I could tell one ruby from another—assuming it’s a ruby—but the setting’s pretty unusual.”
“Precisely.” She nodded and began wrapping the ginger jar’s top in more newspaper. “Art deco style. Made by Van Cleef and Arpels in the 1920s. Evidently the Van der Lyndens had some real money in the family back then.”
“The necklace isn’t too shabby, either.” I was leafing through the rest of the photos in the folder. Right behind the photo of the ring was one of a necklace with dozens of glittering diamonds. “How do you happen to have these photos?”
“Right after the robbery, the police sent around photos to all the jewelry stores, antique stores, and pawn shops within miles. My dad owned the shop back then, and when I took over and cleaned out the files, I found this. Maybe I should have thrown it out with the rest of the paper clutter, but I thought it was interesting.”
“And besides, the case is still unsolved,” I pointed out. “So it’s turned out to be useful.”
“Very true.” She smiled as she tucked the newspaper-wrapped lid in with the jar and stood up. “The idea was to make sure we’d recognize the jewelry so we could notify the police if anyone tried to sell us any of it. Of course they’d have had to be pretty stupid to try to sell any of it here in town.”
“But criminals aren’t rocket scientists.”
“Quite right.” She nodded, and reached out to take the photo of the ring. “I think it’s interesting that you found the ring. That and the necklace were probably the most valuable of the collection. But the necklace would be relatively easy to dispose of—a lot of carats there, but none of the individual stones are that recognizable in and of themselves. A savvy thief could easily break it up to sell the stones, individually or in matched pairs, without sacrificing much if any of the value. The ring, though—only so many rubies that size and quality around, and the setting’s not only distinctive but quite valuable in its own right.”
Curious how much Lettice knew about how criminals fence stolen jewels. Was this something antique dealers picked up if they dealt in estate jewelry? Or was she, like Dad, a mystery buff?
“So the ring would be hard to sell discreetly?” I asked aloud.
“Impossible, unless you had the kind of contacts that would let you offer it privately to the sort of customer who wouldn’t care about its provenance. In fact, except for the necklace, that would be the same for most of the more valuable pieces. Too distinctive to sell that easily.”
“So you’re suggesting if someone did get their hands on Mrs. Van der Lynden’s jewelry, they wouldn’t suddenly find themselves rolling in dough.”
“Yes.” She nodded absently, still looking at the photo. “Unless they were experienced jewel thieves with the right kind of contacts. The criminals Archie tried to hire were not professional jewel thieves. They wouldn’t have had the slightest idea how to liquidate a haul like this. Neither would Archie van der Lynden and his frat house gang.”
“So what do you think happened to them?” I wasn’t sure why I was asking. I had yet to talk to anyone who wasn’t positive that either Archie or Mrs. Van der Lynden had had the jewels. Still, it would be interesting to see if Lettice was on Team Archie or Team Mommie Dearest.
“Well, I don’t think Mrs. Van der Lynden buried them in her backyard.” She smiled. “No matter what Lacey Shiffley thought, rest her soul. I’d bet they were never stolen to begin with. Mrs. Van der Lynden hid them. Of course, she wouldn’t have ever been able to wear them in public again, but for some people, just owning them would be enough. She always struck me that way.”
“You knew her?”
“I saw her in the shop plenty of times. I used to help out Dad here after school and over the summer. She was one of the ones he warned me to keep an eye on. A time or two she’d been about to leave still wearing rings or earrings she’d been trying on. And claimed it was just absentmindedness, of course. Getting back to the robbery—I can well imagine her sitting in her pink satin bedroom, wearing all the jewels that were supposed to have been stolen, and gloating about the big check the insurance company was going to send her.”
“Like Gollum brooding over his precious,” I suggested. “You don’t think having her only child go to prison dampened her enthusiasm a little?”
“From what I hear, she expected him to get off with a slap on the wrist. In fact, considering that two people died as a result of his silly plan, I think his getting out after five years or so pretty much was a slap on the wrist. And yeah, his going to prison upset her, but if you ask me she minded the insurance company’s balking more.”
“You’re not the only one who thinks Mrs. Van der Lynden was behind it all,” I said. “But what if her plan backfired on her?”
“Backfired how?”
“What if she hid the jewelry only to have someone come along and steal it from her hiding place,” I said. “Which wouldn’t have mattered so much if she’d at least got the insurance money.”
“Oh, God, she’d go ballistic.” Lettice clapped her hand over her mouth as if to smother a surprisingly girlish giggle.
“And she’d be stuck with her original story,” I went on. “No way she could say, ‘excuse me, I was lying before, but now someone’s stolen my jewelry for real.’ Can you imagine?”
Lettice’s face sudden grew serious.
“You know,” she said. “I can. Before the robbery she’d come in occasionally—to our shop and any others in town that sold jewelry or antiques. Mostly window-shopping from what I remember—which made sense when I heard later on that she’d lost all her money. But after the robbery she was in here all the time. Never asked about her jewelry, but she’d study everything in the case. Since Dad and I both thought she was behind the robbery, we used to laugh about it—here she was again, pretending to be looking for her jewels. But what if she really was looking?”
“Maybe she ended up losing her money, her jewelry, and her son,” I said. “She died while he was in prison.”
Lettice nodded.
“I went to her estate sale,” she said. “Didn’t find a thing worth putting in the shop—anything of value she’d already sold off. So yes, she did come to a sad end.”
We stood for a few moments, gazing at the box containing the reproduction ginger jar that would soon become Mrs. Van der Lynden’s last resting place.
“Well, you’d better take that over to Maudie,” Lettice said. “Be careful out there.”
“I will.”
I hauled the box out and stowed it carefully in the back of the Twinmobile. Lettice peered out as if keeping watch until I was safely on my way. I wasn’t sure why she was so nervous—it was broad daylight, for heavens’ sake—but I hoped her jumpy mood wouldn’t rub off on me. Not the right mood for visiting a funeral home.