thousand for an initial guess.”
“Say what?”
“The tanzanite beaded necklace, now, isn’t quite as good as you’d think—”
“Trust me, Ruby, I’m not thinking.”
“I’m just saying. People know of tanzanite being rare, so they generally assume it’s more valuable than it is, when tanzanite is too soft a stone for a lot of applications. This one’s in a protected setting, though. It’s all right. Good stones. An interesting piece, but I still have to say I don’t think it’ll be worth more than ten K.”
“Say what?”
“Look, ladies. I need time with pieces like this to give you a true appraisal. And I’m not too proud to admit, I may have to consult with some other jewelers, check the market. Not like I’m regularly exposed to pieces like this. But offhand I’m guessing you each have jewelry valued somewhere in the two-hundred-thousand-dollar price range.”
CHAPTER 3
Two hundred thousand dollars. Bren stood at the gas pump, filling the church van before she headed home. Typically almost everyone stopping for gas was a face she knew, so she waved and smiled and did some chitchat. But her mind was still roller coastering up and down the mental hills of two hundred thousand dollars. Two hundred thousand dollars. Two hundred thou. Two hundred K. Two hundred grand.
Anyway you said it, it was beyond anything she’d imagined.
As a child, she’d grown up safe financially. But that was the last time she remembered not worrying about every dime and every bill.
“Hey, Mrs. Price, how you doing?” Joey greeted her when she plucked a few bills from her cracked wallet. He’d galloped out of the station to clean her windows the instant he’d seen the church van. She had to give him something.
“Doing just fine, Joey. How’s your mom? Her foot any better?”
There was no way to escape the conversation. She knew Joey and his sister, knew their mom, knew what a rough road the family had had ever since the mom had been laid up with foot surgery. She’d carted over dinners herself the first week. Charles had added prayers for them in his church sermon. People mattered more than money, so darn it, caring just couldn’t be rushed. But when Bren finally climbed back into the church van, she hoped God would forgive her—and the Virginia cops, too—because she sped out of town as fast as the old engine would let her.
Giddy euphoria danced in her pulse. She couldn’t wait to tell Charles about their good fortune. She could picture the relief on his face. Picture them sharing a moment of joy together. Picture that harsh look of stress ease on his face for the first time in months.
She wheeled through yellow lights at Willow, then Main, then wheeled left on Baker Road. She supposed it didn’t make too much sense to speed past the courthouse, then past the police and fire stations, as well. But there wasn’t a policeman in town who didn’t know her, so if one was going to do something wrong, Bren figured she might as well do it in plain sight. Past all that busy part of town, of course, was their Church of Peace.
A little neighborhood of houses clustered around their church. Maybe someone thought the area would become a bedroom community of D.C. back in the fifties, but that kind of prosperity never discovered the area. People were hanging on, raising their kids, but this side of Righteous was visibly struggling.
Their church looked as wilted as the rest of the structures. She was just a white frame building, long and narrow, with their house—the parsonage—just beyond the parking lot. Charles often used their home for different gatherings; so did she. The church basement was also huge, ample for events like bible readings and meals and craft sales and all that kind of thing. Even had an old, spotless kitchen down there. Bren had planted bushes and flowers when they could afford them, taken care that the church was always polished and spotlessly clean. So maybe it didn’t look like much on the outside, but inside it was safe and peaceful and had that warm-glow welcoming feeling.
Or it used to. Before things got so tight.
She parked at the house but hightailed it immediately toward the office at the back of the church, assuming she’d find Charles there. But no. She found nothing but dust motes dancing silently in the sunlight. The message light blinked on the answering machine. Charles’s jacket still hung on the old pine tree. A sermon in progress sat half-finished on the desk.
He must have taken off for some reason, and she wanted to head straight for the house, to check there. But first she grabbed a pen and paper and took the messages. Whenever Charles came back, he’d want to know who had called and why, and often enough, she could field questions on her own, without bothering him.
That done, she hustled toward the house, realizing with a half laugh that she was out of breath, had been probably since she’d left the jeweler’s. “Charles!” she called as she pushed open the screen door to the kitchen and then stopped abruptly.
Charles had his white shirt rolled up, hands on his hips. He swiveled around abruptly when he heard the door open. She had the impression he’d been pacing. Her heart sank fifty-seven feet—and fast—when she saw the straight-lipped, tight-jawed expression on his face.
“Where were you?” He asked it in that certain tone. The tone that claimed he had tons and tons and tons of patience and now was completely out.
She tried to calm her panicky pulse, but that particular tone always rub-burned her nerves. She couldn’t think when he was irritated with her. And though she’d always valued honesty, she heard a half-truth babble from her mouth. “I was just talking to a woman in town—”
“What woman?” he demanded, again his tone sharper than ice.
She couldn’t explain why she hedged telling him the whole truth. It’s not that she wanted to lie to him—ever, ever—but when she felt that anger coming at her, some instinct took over. She wasn’t thinking about lies or truth. She was just thinking about doing whatever she could to mollify him. “No one from the church, Charles. No one you would have felt you needed to talk to yourself. Just a woman who stopped to chat with me. I didn’t think there was a problem. I had no idea you were waiting for me—”
He yanked out a chair from the kitchen table, making a scraping noise that made her jump. She understood he wanted her to sit down, which seemed a fair idea, for them to try sitting and talking together—only Charles didn’t sit.
Once she was parked, he loomed over her and started talking in that tone again. The acid tone. The acid-angry scary-quiet tone. “I took you in when you were an orphan. You had nothing and no one, remember that? Just your dad in a hospital bed and no way to take care of him or yourself. You didn’t have a roof over your head. I still remember how beautiful you were. How lost. Seventeen, and so crippled on the inside to lose your mother and sister in the same accident. But I came through for you, didn’t I, Bren? Didn’t I?”
“Yes. I know you did. And I’ve always been grateful—”
“This is how you show me how grateful you are?” He yanked out another chair, just to make the squeaky noise again, just to vent more of that rage. Maybe just to make her jump again. “By disappearing for hours at a time?”
“But, Charles, I had no idea you needed me for anything this afternoon—”
“Right. How could
