she drove back into town, taking Willow Street, past all the blue-and-silver banners at the high school, past Pete’s Pharmacy and Clunkers Shoe Store and Baby Buttercup Clothes for Tots. Link’s was next, one of her favorite takeouts because it had great fresh deli.
She was still munching on a pastrami-on-rye when she pulled into the parking lot next door, behind Ruby’s Rubies. The name was hokey, but the owner’s last name was actually Ruby, so it wasn’t his fault. And of the three jewelry stores in town, everyone seemed to inherently know that Ruby’s was the best.
That wasn’t why she’d chosen the place, though. Anonymity was. One of her younger brothers was a sheriff deputy and the other volunteered with the fire department—which meant they heard all the Righteous gossip almost before a juicy story could even happen. When Poppy wanted to do something on the Q.T., she had to be sneaky enough to slip under their radar.
She was already known here, although heaven knew, not because she’d ever purchased any jewelry.
She popped in the front door, the box under her arm. The bells jangled over the door, but initially she saw no one and called out, “Hey, Ruby!”
Ruby was a one of a kind. Agewise, he had to be somewhere between forty and a hundred. He had a nose so hooked it could have caught fish, hair that streamed down his back in wiry strings and quiet gray eyes. He’d never cracked a smile that Poppy had ever seen, but he had a framed photograph over his door. It said Nature’s Most Savage Predator and showed a five-week-old orange-striped kitten peeking fearlessly over the side of a wicker basket.
Poppy had met Ruby when he’d brought the kitten in to the vet for the first time. She’d seen how he acted with the baby. Didn’t have to know him better than that to know he was a trustworthy kind of guy.
His store, though, was an alien planet. Two rows of counters gleamed with baubles and glitter. Lots of watches. Lots of wedding rings. Lots of rainbow-colored junk to dazzle the eye. Poppy heard a woman’s voice in the back room and realized Ruby must have a customer back there—but before she could duck out the door, he suddenly showed up in the workroom doorway.
She opened her mouth to say what she needed, when he simply said, “Come on back,” as if he already knew.
He couldn’t, but she really didn’t want to display the contents in the public front of the store anyway, so she trailed him into the back room. And then lifted her eyebrows in surprise.
Bren Price was already there. Her jewelry goodies were spilled out on a velvet scarf, where Ruby had obviously been studying her pieces.
“I had to know, too,” Bren said as if they’d been carrying on a conversation.
“I can do this via separate appointments if you want,” Ruby said in his deep, quiet baritone. “But I’m guessing you both have similar kinds of questions. I can do a short, cursory appraisal for you both right now—at least, if we’re not interrupted by customers.”
“I don’t know what questions either of us have. But I’m okay with your handling us together, if that’s all right with Bren,” Poppy said frankly.
“It’s all right with me,” Bren affirmed.
After that, neither woman spoke for quite a while. Poppy figured she wasn’t that surprised to find Bren there. They were both women, after all.
No female alive could survive a major dose of curiosity indefinitely. Although Poppy couldn’t believe this could possibly be a serious financial legacy—and probably neither did Bren—she just plain had to know what all that gaudy jewelry was worth so she could put her curiosity at ease.
Clearly Ruby had been working for some time on Bren’s cache of sparklers, because there was stuff all around him—paper, pencil, a monocle, some kind of fancy microscope. Once he went back to concentrating, Poppy could see a pattern emerge. He kept looking at the jewelry, then his instruments, then Bren. “Jesus,” he said.
And then, “Jesus,” he repeated.
By the time he spun his stool to Poppy’s stash and dived into her mother lode, he seemed to have that mantra down pat. The only variance in his vocabulary seemed to be an occasional, “Jesus, Mother and Mary.”
Poppy asked once, “How’s the Lion, Ruby?” referring to Ruby’s kitten, but he completely ignored her. Truth to tell, he didn’t seem to give a particular hoot if either woman was in the room.
That didn’t bother Poppy, but even for an irreverent antichurch person like herself, his choice of words started to get to her. Eventually she had to interrupt. “Look, I couldn’t care less if you use four-letter words until the cows come home, but you know Bren’s a minister’s wife, right? I mean, I realize she isn’t objecting, but I’d think…”
He just whispered, “Jesus,” again in an awe-filled tone, as if the two women weren’t even there.
A customer came in—all of them heard the bell—but Ruby jogged out to the storefront, said something, ushered the customer out and hung up his Closed sign.
In Righteous, no one turned down customers. Business was never that good.
“All right,” Poppy said finally, “you’re scaring me, assuming you aren’t scaring Bren. I sure as hell don’t want to interrupt your concentration. The sooner this gets done the better. But if you could just give us some idea what’s going on here…?”
He couldn’t be rushed. Poppy kept looking at her watch. Bren kept looking at hers.
Finally Ruby lurched off his stool and stood up, knuckling the ache at the small of his back as he gave them the bad news. He started with Bren, going through the handfuls of jewelry piece by piece. “Now all these beads here, they likely came from a five-and-dime at best. But then you see the yellow one? This one? That’s a blond diamond.”
“I never heard of a blond diamond.”
“That’s because most folks in these parts don’t tend to shop on Fifth Avenue. And you see this brooch?”
“The one with all those rhinestones and the strange peach stone shaped like a tongue?”
The brooch in question was Bren’s, but Poppy leaned closer to get a look, too. It was almost as ugly as the stuff in her hoard. The weird pink stone really did look like an animal’s tongue hanging out.
“That ain’t a tongue,” Ruby said. “It’s a conch pearl. And those rhinestones are diamonds. I need some time, but at first guess I believe that brooch is worth somewhere near a hundred grand.”
“Excuse me?” Bren’s voice was as faint as a mile-away whisper.
“A hundred thousand dollars.”
“Excuse me?”
“Then there are these long earrings here. The ones with the pink tourmaline and black gold and peridots and diamonds and all…” He held up the trashy, flashy things. “I can’t give you an exact price until I’ve studied ’em more, but off the cuff I’d say they’re worth in the ballpark of fifty grand.”
“Excuse me?”
Ruby said to Poppy, “You best get her a chair before
