“Harold!” Roux’s voice came beaming down the intercom system. “Harold, you shining sun of a man!”
I gripped the granite top of the front desk in Roux’s building, my impatience already mounting. Roux’s doorman, the long-suffering Harold, barely blinked at me in response.
“Harold, you know it just makes my day when you buzz me. Did you know that? Because you should. Know that, I mean.”
“A girl by the name of Maggie is here to see you, Miss Green.” Harold’s voice stayed calm and monotone.
“Really?” I asked him. “A girl by the name of Maggie? You’ve known me for a year. Why can’t you just let me go up?”
“Maggie!” Roux’s voice sounded positively gleeful. “Magga Ragga!”
“I hate that nickname,” I told her. “Will you please just let me in?”
“Harold, it’s Maggie! Did you know that things got super weird between us but we’re friends again? Gotta keep up with current events, Harold. Things change every minute around here.”
“Roux—” I tried to interrupt.
“Except you, Harold.” Roux was on a roll now. “You should never change, Harold. Never, okay? Unless you want to change for the better, I mean. Then you can change. But I would still mourn the man you were and—”
Oh my God.
“Roux!” I shouted into the intercom. “Will you just let this poor man drink his coffee and send me up already? Good Lord!”
There was a brief pause.
“Maggie sounds stressed, Harold. Does she look stressed?”
Harold eyed me. I eyed him right back.
“Oh, never mind. Let her come up, Harold. We’ll do some deep breathing exercises together. It’s good for the mind and the soul.”
“Go on up,” Harold said to me, gesturing toward the ornate elevator.
“Thank you.” I could still hear Roux rattling on about the positive effects of yoga even as the doors shut.
The doors opened again at the fourteenth floor, and I hurried out and stalked to Roux’s front door, banging on it until she opened it.
“Where’s your egg?” I demanded, storming in past her.
“My what?” She grinned. “I was right, you do look stressed. Are you upset about Jesse?”
Wait. What?
“How did you know about that?” I asked her. “Did he call you? What did he say?”
She shook her head. “No, he didn’t call. It’s online. This girl Sara saw the two of you fighting last night, and she put it on her Facebook page. Did you really flip him off?”
I winced and ran my hand over my face. “No, of course not. It’s a long story,” I told her.
“I’ve got nothing but time and a sympathetic ear,” she said. “And a drawerful of delivery menus. I mean, obviously.”
“Roux.” I took a huge, deep breath. “Just stop for a minute, okay?”
“Stop what? Oooh, that was a good cleansing breath. You look relaxed already.”
“Where’s your Fabergé egg?”
Roux froze, her smile slowly slipping off her face.
“Remember?” I said. “When we were breaking into Colton’s apartment last year, you said that you got a Fabergé egg for your sixteenth birthday. Were you kidding about that? Because if you were, you need to tell me right now.”
I had seen Roux elated, furious, drunk, crying from heartbreak, and determined, but I had never seen that look on her face before. She suddenly looked like an adult, someone who could weigh her options rather than act impulsively, and I wondered if that’s how I looked when I was working, too.
“I wasn’t kidding,” she said. “I was serious.”
I took another deep breath. At this rate, I was going to either be completely relaxed or hyperventilating on the floor. “Can I see it? Please? It’s important.”
Roux went and flipped the deadbolt lock on her front door, then beckoned me upstairs. “C’mon, follow me.”
I don’t think I had ever seen her be that quiet before, that composed, and the penthouse only seemed to echo her silence. The rooms felt cold as we headed to the stairs, all marble floors and crystal chandeliers, and I wondered if that’s why Roux was so loud all the time. Living in relative silence by yourself would be eerie after a while. You would need to stab at it every now and then.
We went into her bedroom, and I followed Roux into her huge walk-in closet. My parents and I once lived in an apartment in Stockholm that was roughly the same size as this closet, and that wasn’t even accounting for Roux’s massive shoe wall.
“It’s over here,” Roux said, and she knelt down and shoved a few pairs of jeans out of the way and pulled back the thick carpet, revealing a strong floor safe. “I know you could probably break into it,” she said with a little bit of apology in her voice. “I made my dad have it installed after I met you.”
“Is that why you kept asking me about the best floor safe models? You thought that I was going to steal from you?”
“No, no, not you. I just learned a lot about protecting things. I figured I probably shouldn’t keep the egg in my sock drawer anymore.” Roux spun the lock, looking a little embarrassed. “I feel like I’m fingerpainting in front of Picasso,” she muttered. “Just don’t watch, okay?”
“You flatter me,” I said.
“Yeah, well.” Roux gave the lock a final twist, then undid the latch and pulled it open. The safe was deep and vast, and she reached in and pulled out a small object wrapped in red fabric, the only object in there. She unwound it, revealing a tiny clear glass box and a gorgeous green egg inside.
“It’s the Imperial Pansy Egg,” Roux said, her voice almost reverent.
“Wow,” I whispered. It was stunningly beautiful, a marbled jade green color with golden vines twisting around the bottom and winding up its sides. The vines eventually thinned out into individual stems with a delicate pink pansy at the top, all of them connected by a thin gold strand.
“Roux, this is amazing,” I told her. “Your parents gave you this?”
“Nope, not my parents. My grandmother. She died a long time ago, but it was in her will that I should get this when I turned sixteen. I liked her. She was really nice. My parents used to send me to her house for the summer, back before they could get rid of me in summer school, and I always used to look at this egg.” Roux shrugged as if shaking away old memories. “So she gave it to me. My mom was so pissed that she didn’t get it instead. I thought her head was going to explode! It was amazing.”
I smiled along with her. “That’s the spirit. Can I see it?”
“Yeah, sure.” Roux handed me the box and I turned it over and over, looking at it from every angle. There was a tiny set of initials stamped into the gold on the bottom. “What are these? Who’s that?”
Roux leaned over to peer at it. “Oh, that’s the designer’s initials. They would stamp them in before firing it in the oven. Like a business card or the Nike swoosh or something like that.”
I just stared at her, my mouth quirking up a little. “Did you read up on these eggs?” I teased. “Did you actually do research on a computer?”
“Shut up,” she said, but she was smiling, too. “I figured that I should know what I had. Nothing in this closet is a knockoff—I got rid of that fake Balenciaga bag as soon as Bergdorf’s got the real thing back in stock, don’t even go there—and I wanted to make sure that this egg was the real deal.”
“And is it?”
A vaguely frightening smile crept across Roux’s face, just like it had after she punched Colton Hooper right in the nose, satisfied and strong. “Oh, yes,” she murmured. “It’s the real deal.”
I sat on my heels, giving the egg back to her. “Okay,” I said. “Where’s your computer?”
An hour later, Roux and I were sitting on her bed in front of her laptop, containers of half-eaten Thai food next to us as we combed through article after article about Fabergé eggs. “Does your brain ever do that thing where you see the same word over and over?” she asked, sitting away from the screen to rub at her eyes. “And then it starts to make, like, absolutely no sense whatsoever, like it’s written in hieroglyphics?”
I looked at her.
“Yeah, me neither,” she said quickly.
“So there are eight missing Imperial eggs,” I said. “And one of those missing eggs might be in the United States. And it might look exactly like the one I saw.”
Roux pulled the laptop closer to her so she could read the description. “‘A sapphire cherub pulling a two-wheeled chariot containing a golden egg set with diamonds.’ Cherubs are so creepy, don’t you think? Like, why are naked babies shooting poisonous arrows at innocent people a symbol of love? Why aren’t they a symbol of toddler anarchy instead?”
“Roux,” I started to say, but then I paused, thinking about her comment. “That is an excellent point,” I admitted.
“I blame Hallmark,” she said. “Damn them and their anarchist baby uprising. So you think this is your egg?”
“It could be. Or it could be a fake.”
Roux sat cross-legged on her bed, picking at the bedspread with her purple fingernails. “I know we sort of had a fight about this,” she said, sounding very small, “and I swear I’m not trying to start anything, but it’s sort of nice looking up information together. It was fun when you and Jesse and I did that last year. It’s like being on a team together.”
“It is,” I said, clicking through to another link.
“So could you maybe tell me why you need to find this egg? Only because I know people,” she added before I could say anything. “Honestly. Swear to God. I’m not trolling for information.”
We had been doing research together for almost two hours. She was right, I did owe her an explanation. “I need to find some things that are very important—”
“Well, duh. Isn’t that your life motto? Sorry, sorry, go on.”
“Anyway,” I said. “I need to find something very important and I think this egg has something to do with it.”
“Is it hidden in the egg?”
“Maybe? I’m not sure.”
I could almost see the wheels turning in Roux’s head. “So if the thing you need is in this egg …”
“Then it’s a knockoff.”
“But if it’s not?”
“Then I’ll end up destroying one of the world’s greatest missing treasures for no reason and I still won’t have the thing I need to find.”
“Oh.” Roux frowned a little, then looked up at me. “Wow, Maggie. Sucks to be you.”
I stared at her, then very calmly grabbed a pillow off her bed and smacked her right in the head with it. “Kidding!” she screeched, right before I whomped her again. “I was kidding, I swear! Have mercy on the civilian!” But she was laughing too hard to talk and I was giggling, too. In fact, I was giggling so much that I missed her grabbing another pillow and slamming me in the face.
“Ow!” I cried. “When did you become so violent?”
“I’m a quick learner,” she replied with a laugh. “Just ask Colton Hooper.”