It was the early hours when Connor left. Too late to call my parents. I went to sleep with a warm, happy glow, and I awoke before the sun, still warm, still happy.
My mom was an early riser, and I knew she had a regular doubles tennis game every Thursday in the summer at seven. I made the call without even getting out of bed. Charles clearly didn’t approve: my first task of the day was always to check his water and food bowls. “Just this once,” I said to him as the phone rang at the other end, “you can wait.”
He pouted.
“Lucy!” my mother said. “Is everything all right? It’s early for you to be calling.”
“Couldn’t be better, Mom.”
“This is rather sudden,” she said when I’d given her my news. “You’ve only known him for a year.”
“A year’s a long time, Mom. Didn’t you and Dad know each other for all of six weeks before you decided to get married?”
“That was different.”
“It sure was. I’m thirty-three. You were seventeen.”
A long silence came down the phone line. I waited. I often wondered if Mom regretted her sudden, impulsive, too-young marriage. I’m the youngest of their four children, and for all the years I’d been growing up, my parents’ marriage had not been a good one. They didn’t fight—at least not in front of the children. Neither of them ever stormed out or threatened a divorce, but they barely spoke to each other and rarely went anywhere together unless it was to an event for Dad’s law firm or a party at the country club where they were members. Things had come to a head last summer, and they’d been on the verge of separating, but they’d worked things out and agreed to give it another try. When I’d last seen my parents in February at Josie’s wedding, they’d seemed genuinely happy in each other’s company.
“You’re right, dear, as you usually are,” Mom said at last. “If this is what you want, and if this is the man for you, I wish you both all the happiness in the world. Now, when are you coming to Boston? You’ll be married at the club, of course. I’ll call today and have them pencil in a suitable date, and then you and I can meet with the wedding planner.”
Josie’s wedding had been in danger of being taken over by strong-willed relatives. I was determined that was not going to happen to me. Which meant, I knew, I had to nip Mom’s plans for a big Boston country club wedding with all her friends (and some of her enemies) as guests in the bud.
“Connor’s family’s in Nags Head,” I said. “My friends are here, and my coworkers, plus Aunt Ellen, Uncle Amos, and Josie. This is where I live now, Mom. We’re having the wedding in Nags Head.”
She hesitated and then she said, “An excellent idea, dear. A beach wedding would be nice, but you know what’s best for you. Your father and I will want to come down as soon as possible to give you and Connor our congratulations in person. Will you let me know what a good time would be?”
“Thanks, Mom,” I said.
Sam Watson came into the library shortly before closing. I guessed he was here to let us know what he’d learned from Lucinda, and I could barely contain my impatience as I finished showing an elderly man how he could take out books on the e-reader that had been a birthday present from his grandchildren. I helped the last of the day’s patrons check out their books, listened to Mrs. Peterson’s complaints about the summer science camp she’d sent Dallas to (“Not up to our standards, Lucy”), and tried not to tap my foot while Mr. Snyder untangled Charles from his lap. At last they were gone. I slammed the door and firmly locked it.
Charlene, Ronald, Charles, and I followed Watson into Bertie’s office. First thing this morning, Ronald had told Charlene, in great dramatic detail, about the events of last night, and she’d proclaimed herself highly disappointed to have missed it. Bertie leaned back in her chair, Charlene took the visitor’s seat, and Ronald and I stood against the walls. Charles assumed his favorite position on top of the filing cabinet. His intelligent amber eyes narrowed, his ears stood at attention, his tail flicked slowly back and forth.
“First things first,” the detective said when he had our attention. Which hadn’t been hard to get. “My congratulations, Lucy.”
I blushed, twisted the ring on my finger, and said, “Thank you.”
“Lucinda Lorca,” he went on, “has been assigned a lawyer. The lawyer advised her not to say anything to us, but she has chosen to disregard that advice. Perhaps she needs some soul cleansing, but that’s not up to me to say. In April 1995, she had a boyfriend by the name of Jeff Applewhite.”
“So I was right,” I said.
He smiled at me. “As you so often are, Lucy. Applewhite was a drifter, younger than her by a couple of years. He did odd, unskilled jobs on small construction sites or at home renovations, stayed in one place for a while, and then moved on. She was a librarian. Her first marriage had recently ended, and she was bored and restless. She was afraid, she says now, of getting old without having had any adventure in her life.”
“Tell us about the necklace,” I blurted out, “What happened to the necklace?”
“All in due time, Lucy. All in due time. Now remember, what I have to tell you is what she told me. We have a heck of a lot of digging to do to get to the truth of what happened.”
“Understood,” Bertie said.
Ronald, Charlene, and I murmured our agreement. Charles flicked his tail.
“Applewhite got the idea in his head to steal the Blackstone necklace. Where that idea might have come from, I can only speculate. Lucinda had gone with him to at least one of the parties at Rachel’s house. She’d heard about the necklace. She would have had some idea of its value. She told me that night at Rachel’s was one of the best nights of her life. All those people simply having fun without worrying about tomorrow. No serious jobs, no families, no responsibilities. Rachel herself with all that money and nothing to spend it on other than having a good time.”
“That’s sad,” Bertie said. “Rachel was lucky: she found out in time that, despite appearances, that’s no life.”
“Whether taking the necklace was Lucinda’s idea or Jeff’s doesn’t matter. They planned to steal it at the first opportunity and run off … somewhere. Which is what happened. The first part anyway. Jeff stole the necklace. Lucinda didn’t go with him to the Blackstone home that night; she wanted a plausible alibi, I believe, in case the police came calling before the two of them could get out of town.”
“What does any of this have to do with Helena?” Ronald asked.
“Jeff planned to make off with the necklace,” I said. “Not accompanied by Lucinda, but Helena.”
“Yes,” Watson said. “Jeff figured it would be a couple of days, probably more, before Rachel realized the necklace was missing. He told Lucinda it would look suspicious if he suddenly left town, as he was in the middle of a job. Lucinda came to realize that in reality he was waiting for Helena. He finally told her, Lucinda, quite bluntly—and very foolishly in my opinion—he was in love with another woman, and they were leaving town together. With the Blackstone necklace. As Lucinda remembers it, he laughed at her, threw the other woman in her face. She followed him here, to the Lighthouse Library, when he came to fetch Helena on the night of May 2. Somehow Lucinda persuaded him to go for a walk with her before he talked to Helena. He might have been young and charming, but I suspect Jeff Applewhite wasn’t all that bright. Lucinda killed him.”
“Oh my gosh,” Charlene said.
That was what I’d suspected, but even so I was still shocked. Lucinda had initially told me she left North Carolina in 1993. Margaret Hurley had checked her records of their class and discovered that Lucinda had actually left in May of 1995. That might have been a simple mistake of the sort anyone would make, but Lucinda’s lie started me down the path of wondering what else she might be lying about.
“She killed him and dumped his body in the marsh. Probably not all that far from here,” Watson said.
“All the more reason,” I said, “for Lucinda to be susceptible to the idea that last night Helena rose from her own watery grave.”
“All these years, Helena thought Jeff had left without her,” Bertie said.
“Believing that turned her bitter,” I said. “Bitter, angry, betrayed, untrusting. Feelings that only grew and festered when she never heard from him again. I heard different accounts of Helena’s personality from different people, and when I realized it was around a particular time that she changed, I started wondering what might have happened. She’d never gotten on with her parents or her sister, so it couldn’t have been that. She told Tina she’d met a man and she was quitting her job and going with him to Hawaii. She never went to Hawaii, and a couple of weeks after the theft of the necklace and the disappearance of Jeff Applewhite, she turned on Mary-Sue and fired her. Mary-Sue, I suspect, was nothing but an outlet for Helena’s rage when she finally accepted the fact that, as she thought, Jeff had run out on her, taking the Rajipani Diamond and the other jewels with him.”
“Was Helena aware he had the necklace?” Charlene asked. “Did she know he planned to steal it and had done so?”
“I don’t know,” Watson said. “We probably never will. It’s likely he told her he was coming into some money, so she could afford to quit her job.”
“She knew,” I said. “Helena was a romantic, but not a total fool. She told Tina she and her Prince Charming were going to live on a private island in the South Pacific. She would have had some basis for believing they’d have the means to do that. Tina laughed at her. All the more reason Helena never confided to Tina or anyone else that she believed Jeff had run out on her. If she’d gone to the police when he and the necklace disappeared, Tina would have mocked her relentlessly.”
“That all makes a twisted sort of sense,” Charlene said, “but what does any of it have to do with The Celestine Prophecy and the withdrawal slip?”
Watson grinned. “Oh yes. That. Two days after Lucinda murdered Jeff, she came back to the Lighthouse Library. To gloat over what she’d done perhaps, or maybe out of regret. Maybe to see Helena, her rival. Probably a combination of all three. She took out a book and signed it “Jeff Applewhite.” If the police began searching for the necklace, she wanted to leave some evidence that Jeff had been alive and in Nags Head on May the fourth.”
“Star Wars Day,” Ronald said.
“What?” we chorused.
He pointed to today’s tie featuring colorful drawings of the robots R2D2 and C3PO. “May fourth is Star Wars Day. May the fourth be with you.” His voice trailed off. “Sorry. Please continue, Detective.”
“What was the significance of The Celestine Prophecy itself?” Charlene asked.
“I don’t know,” Watson said. “Never thought to ask.”
“That book was hugely popular in its day, particularly among those who liked the idea of abandoning their mundane lives and rushing off to seek enlightenment,” Bertie said. “I’d hazard a guess that Jeff Applewhite strung Lucinda along, probably telling her how meaningful the message of that book had been to him. Perhaps taking it out, in his name, was her final message to him.”
“Easy to seek enlightenment when you’re in possession of a twenty-five-million-dollar necklace,” I said.
“I’ve sometimes wondered why we’re so impressed by lumps of carbonated crystals,” Charlene said.
“In The Moonstone, the jewel everyone’s after is a holy relic,” Bertie said. “Oh, sorry, Sam. All that’s somewhat off topic. Please continue. What happened then?”
“At some point, Lucinda drove Jeff’s truck to the bus station in Elizabeth City and left it there. The police found the truck when they started searching for Jeff. It was in pretty bad shape, and they speculated he’d dumped it and caught a bus out of North Carolina, escaping with his ill-gotten gains. As for the copy of The Celestine Prophecy she’d taken out under Jeff’s name, Lucinda dropped it in the returns box at another library and it was sent back here. Ironically, no one noticed Jeff’s name or gave it a single thought.”
“Until last Friday.” I said.
“Until last Friday. Helena must have recognized Jeff’s name right away. We’ll never know exactly what she thought, but she would have realized he wouldn’t have come into her library two days after they’d been supposed to leave together, just to take out a book. Maybe she knew the handwriting wasn’t his.” Watson shook his head. “We’ll never know for sure, but we do know Lucinda saw the moment Helena realized what she was looking at. Lucinda’s saying Helena gave her what she calls an ‘evil eye.’ Which might be nothing but her guilt talking.”
“Helena knew, at that moment, Jeff hadn’t willingly left without her,” I said. “I’m sure of it. And I’m glad. I don’t think she suspected Lucinda of having something to do with his death. She didn’t react more negatively toward Lucinda than to anyone else that night. But as we’ve seen before, ‘The guilty run when no one pursues.’”
“So true,” Ronald said.
“And so sad,” Bertie said.
Charles and Charlene said nothing.
“Helena might have paid no attention to Lucinda,” I said, “but Lucinda was horrified when she first saw Helena at the party. I’d forgotten that until I started putting things together and then I realized how over-the-top her reaction had been.”
“Lucinda believed she had to kill Helena before Helena could do anything about what she suspected happened all those years ago,” Watson said. “If, when the police first started looking for Jeff, Helena had told them he was supposed to meet her the night in question at the library, Lucinda might have been caught. Instead, Helena believed she’d been betrayed and was too humiliated to say anything, even when word got out that the police were looking for Jeff Applewhite.”
“I suspect,” I said, “she feared the mocking of her twin sister above all.”
“So sad,” Bertie repeated.
“The police assumed Jeff had left with the necklace. A natural enough assumption to make. Lucinda quit her job and moved to California not long after, wisely not wanting to be around if they did come to wonder if Jeff had left Nags Head. As for the necklace, Lucinda went to California, but she never showed signs of having anything in the way of money, so she didn’t have it. Jeff never showed it to her, she says, so it’s even possible he wasn’t the one who stole it. If he was, perhaps he had it on him when she pushed his body into the waters of the marsh. And there it lies.”
We were all silent for a few moments.
“In several hundred years,” Charlene said, “the sands will shift as the sea level rises and the tides move, and the necklace might be exposed once again. And everyone will wonder how such a precious thing came to be at the bottom of the ocean. Books will be written about it.”
“What happens now, Sam?” Bertie asked.
“Lucinda Lorca has been charged with the murder of Helena Sanchez. I’ve started gathering evidence for that, which means I need to talk to you at length, Lucy.”
“Happy to help,” I said.
“I’m also reopening the investigation into the disappearance of Jeff Applewhite. Lucinda confessed that she killed him, but a confession means little in court without evidence, particularly in the absence of a body. We’ve got divers back in the marsh. The tides are strong around here, and it’s been a long time, but his body might have snagged on a root or something and still be here.”
“Please, please, do not tell Louise Jane that,” Bertie begged. “I do not want her trying to make contact.”
Watson laughed. “Believe me, I don’t want her help either.”
I said nothing. Louise Jane had said the marsh spirits told her, “Appearances can be deceiving.” That phrase put the idea in my head of using Tina pretending to be Helena to frighten the killer into confessing. Had the spirits truly been trying to send us a message?
Of course not. I’d simply taken my inspiration from Louise Jane’s attempt to make herself sound important.
“About that, Sam,” Ronald said, “you might be too late. Before I came down, I spotted Louise Jane and her binoculars heading for the boardwalk at a rapid pace.”