Rummaging in one of the many pockets covering her pants, Allie withdrew a long piece of silver leather studded with dark red gems. “Edgar slipped out of this, and I couldn’t get it back on him to save my life.” She held it out. “Maybe you’ll have better luck.”
“Sure,” Iris lied. The poor animal was already living part of his life out of a cardboard box. She wasn’t going to force a collar on him, too. With a quick goodbye, she locked the doors after Allie left.
In the back room, she tossed the collar onto her worktable. Edgar explored beneath it, his ears swiveling this way and that. In case he made a sudden break for it, she closed the door to the sales floor before returning to the worktable, where she unzipped the backpack and found a small cat litter pan and a bag of some sort of new-age looking litter.
“You so owe me, Cosmo.” She placed the filled pan in the corner. “Bathroom’s over here, Eddy.”
The rabbit blinked its red eyes before resuming an exploratory hop around the workroom.
“Are you looking for something to eat? You should have told Allie if you were hungry-she would’ve fed you. Now you’ll have to wait until we go home.” She straightened and pushed a stray curl behind her ear. “Look at yourself, Iris Fortune. You’re talking to a rabbit.”
Determined to prove she could overcome all the chaos tossed her way in the past thirty-six hours, Iris straightened her cropped periwinkle jacket and smoothed her palms down the matching skirt. With the flick of a switch, she illuminated her worktable with bright lights then dug in her purse for a small set of keys. They jingled as she crossed the room to a set of fireproof filing cabinets. A total of fifty drawers lined the wall, all unlabeled, but Iris knew the contents of each and every one. This was where she kept the raw stones and metals for her jewelry pieces. Even though she didn’t deal in real diamonds, sapphires, pearls or emeralds, the value of these costume gems caused her insurance agent palpitations.
Unerringly, she inserted the key into drawer number thirty-three. She rarely opened this drawer as it only contained her limited copies of alexandrite and a stockpile of aurora borealis rhinestones. Inside, everything lay in place, just as it had the day before when she’d looked for signs of Cosmo tampering with her things. Gingerly, she withdrew the tray of alexandrite and carried it to the worktable.
On the tray rested a dozen or so loose stones, smaller gems she could incorporate into jewelry pieces-not that she’d ever needed them. There was also a square box Iris hadn’t opened for years, but now she lifted the lid to consider the high-quality copies within. Each close to ten carats, they were a family heirloom dating back to the 1920s when, according to her mother, her great-grandfather had cut them to resemble the Romanov gems.
Don’t ever sell these, Iris. So her mother had said time and again. But Iris knew her mother would have handed them over willingly to help Cosmo if he were in trouble.
Unshed tears blurred her eyes for a few moments. These ten stones had been her mom’s treasure. Iris had always believed the Romanov necklace, like the crown, was merely a myth, but if it did exist? Authentic stones like these would be priceless.
And Mom would have loved seeing them.
She tried to push the box away, but felt an extra drag to it. How odd. Exploring the white foam on which the stones lay, she discovered an uneven surface beneath them. Confused, she lifted a corner of the foam to find more gems beneath it. Adrenaline shot through her system as she removed the foam to reveal its hidden layer. Yesterday she’d examined the store to see if Cosmo had taken anything. It hadn’t occurred to her he might leave something here.
She set the white foam with the ten vanadium-treated stones aside. In the box lay a playing card.
The queen of diamonds.
“Dammit, Cosmo, where are you?” she whispered.
With the playing card rested ten more matching gems. Beneath the bright light of her worktable, they glowed a dark blood red, a little lighter than garnets. Four were ovals, another four were rectangles, and two were squares. But geometry didn’t begin to express the faceted edges that cast brilliant rainbows onto her wall, or the clarity of the stones.
A sudden thought made her scoop up the gems and carry them to the bathroom, so quickly, she nearly tripped over Edgar. Here, she flicked on the overhead light, its fluorescent tubes blinking to a bluish light. With a deep breath, she willed herself to look once more at the stones.
They’d turned an olive green. The color change added a dose of reality-in the myth, these alexandrite were supposed to change from vivid red to vivid green. Maybe daylight would make the green more pure. Still, there was no denying what she held. Her heart swelled with emotion. How her mother would have longed to see this day.
Edgar hobbled over to sniff her ankles while Iris stared at the gems, almost afraid to breathe. It was as if someone had made a fairy-tale come true and given her these magical, mystical, historical, terrible, cursed…stolen gems.
“He loves me so much, he left me a death wish,” she muttered when reality hit her.
Soberly, she carried the gems back to the table, pulled up her stool and sat, engrossed in them. Without taking time and setting up the refractometer, she couldn’t authenticate them as true alexandrite, but her brain screamed this was no scam. Focusing her light, she fitted a small magnifier to her eye to examine one of the gems. The blood-red stone offered incomparable clarity-even more amazing was the cut. Alexandrite was notoriously hard to cut into gems, tending to fracture on unexpected lines. One by one she examined the ten stones, only to admit these were the work of a superior craftsman. A shiver raced up her spine. If all her mother’s tales were true, her ancestor had cut these for royalty.
Were they truly from Czar Alexander’s crown? Had they then moved to the Empress Alexandra’s necklace? And how had Cosmo gotten hold of them?
With a start, she realized she needed to make a swift decision. She scanned the various gems before her again, then her gaze slid sideways to where Edgar’s silver collar with its fake red rubies lay. Biting her lip, she held one of the alexandrites up with the collar. Yes. She didn’t hesitate, afraid she’d talk herself out of the idea. With a pair of needle-nose pliers, she attacked the gem settings on the collar, deftly removing the lightweight fake rubies from their settings. These she tossed into a plastic cup on her table. A glance at the clock reminded her she had less than an hour before Mickey arrived.
While she’d like to trust him with her discovery, she didn’t dare. She’d give him her mother’s copies, just as he’d asked. This real alexandrite she’d hide on Edgar’s collar and hope an opportunity to help Cosmo presented itself.
With careful precision, she fitted the alexandrite gems one by one to the settings on the silver leather collar and soldered them in place. She worked quickly, sacrificing artistry to make sure none of the gems could accidentally fall out. When she finished, she hid all the clues to what she’d just done. She pocketed the playing card and started to throw away the plastic cup with its vivid red gems before she thought better of it. Someone might ask where they’d come from, so she stashed them into drawer forty-eight, which held a quantity of gaudy cheap stones. Last step of her plan, she hunted down Edgar and fitted the silver collar back onto his furry neck.
The rabbit shook his head at the unwelcome weight of the stones, but his beady red eyes watched her. For a moment, she swore he understood-and approved-her motives.
She was definitely losing it.
Scanning the workroom, she verified that she’d put everything back to order. She’d returned her own smaller imitation alexandrite back to drawer thirty-three. Edgar wore his same bejeweled collar. Or at least, that’s what anyone would think, so long as the rabbit didn’t go out into bright sunlight and make the stones turn green. All that remained on her worktable were her neatly organized tools and the ten vanadium-treated corundum she’d promised Mickey.