“I’m a big ABBA fan,” she explained when she followed Odelia’s look. “I think they’re just great. I keep hoping they’ll get back together and play a concert.” She gestured to the white leather couch. “Take a seat. Can I offer you anything? I have ABBA tea, ABBA coffee, ABBA lemonade, ABBA cookies…”
“ABBA coffee will be fine,” said Odelia, who’s a big coffee drinker. “And maybe water for my cats. It doesn’t have to be ABBA water,” she quipped.
“Oh, but I have ABBA water,” said Mrs. Fossard. “It’s more bubbly than regular water and tastes sweeter.”
“Thanks,” I said gratefully when moments later a dish of water was placed on the floor for my and Dooley’s enjoyment. She was right, by the way. It was sweeter.
“So what’s this all about?” she asked as she sank into an armchair with visible relish. The music blasting from the speakers was of course ABBA, and she now turned down the volume.
“So you know all about the Pink Lady turning up on the beach the day before yesterday, right?” asked Odelia, scooting forward on the couch and causing it to make squeaky noises.
“Absolutely. Imagine looking for seashells and finding a precious diamond instead. Oh, the joy that little girl must have felt!”
“So I take it you don’t know about the safe?”
“Safe?” asked the woman. She took a nibble from one of her ABBA cookies, then seemed to think better of it and ate it whole. In other words a lady after my own heart.
“I like a woman with an appetite, Max,” said Dooley, who’d noticed the same thing.
“Me, too,” I said. I’d taken a great liking to Caroline Fossard, though the fact that she’d placed a small dish with liver p?t? next to the water might have had something to do with that.
“Well, the Pink Lady was stolen from the Capital First Bank last year, and according to the information from the bank manager it was actually stolen from your safe.”
The woman gawked at Odelia.“My safe? What do you mean?”
“I mean the safe the Pink Lady was stolen from is registered in your name, Mrs. Fossard.”
“Oh, dear. You mean there was something of actual value in that safe? I thought it was just a pile of old junk!”
“I’m sorry—I don’t understand.”
“I’ll tell you what happened. My dad took that safe, but he put it in my name for some reason. But so eighteen years ago he died, and as far as he’d told Mom the only thing he kept in that safe were some old work documents and unimportant stuff. She still wanted to take a look, of course, after he died, but discovered that Dad hadn’t left her the key to the safe—he’d died unexpectedly, you see—or the combination. So she went to the bank to ask them to open it and they said that since it was in my name she had to have the key. Otherwise they’d have to drill out the lock and replace it, and that would set her back three hundred bucks. So she never bothered, and then more or less forgot all about it.”
“But you kept on paying for that safe. That must have cost you a lot of money over the years.”
“Oh, no. You see, it was all paid in advance. Dad had arranged all that, and so Mom figured that when the money ran out, the bank would open the safe and that would be that.”
“So the years passed and…”
“And some idiots burgled the bank, and stole everything they could lay their grubby little hands on. So I thought, tough luck, but I wasn’t going to weep over a bunch of old documents.”
“Only it wasn’t some old documents. It was a precious diamond that’s been missing for years,” said Odelia.
“But… how in the world did my dad get a hold of a diamond?”
“What line of work was he in?”
“He was an engineer. He worked for Spark, a company that designs and builds hydroelectric power plants.”
“Hydroelectric power plants,” said Odelia, musing on this for a moment.
“Yeah, he traveled all over the world to build those plants. He built them on every continent, and was very proud of what he did. When I was little me and my mom would travel with him to the most exotic places. But then when I got older they decided it was best for me to stay put and go to school. So Dad just came and went, sometimes staying away for weeks at a time. Though he tried to make sure to be home for all the important stuff.”
“How did he die?”
“Trouble with his ticker. He’d had a cardiac arrest on one of his trips, and hadn’t been the same since. Doctors told us that if it happened again, it might be fatal, and so he decided to take early retirement, and spend whatever time he had left with his family. And he did. He lived another ten years. But then he had another episode. It all went really quickly so he didn’t suffer.”
“Did he ever spend time in Khemed?” I asked.
Caroline Fossard smiled down at me.“Oh, how cute is that? It’s almost as if he’s trying to tell us something.”
“Yeah, cats are amazing creatures,” Odelia agreed. “So what I wanted to ask you: did your father ever spend time in Khemed?”
Caroline drew her brows up into a frown, and thought for a moment.“I’m not sure…” She swiftly got up and disappeared into the next room. We heard a drawer open and close, and moments later she returned with what looked like a large ledger and sat down next to Odelia, placing the book on the coffee table, which also held an ABBA coffee-table book. “Mom kept this,” she explained. “She wrote down the dates and destinations of every place Dad ever visited, and when he came home, he pasted pictures in here for me. It was like our family album, so we always knew where dad was when he wasn’t here.” She popped a pair of reading glasses on her noseand opened the book in the middle. “When did you say the Pink Lady disappeared?”
“Well, nobody seems to know for sure, but Laura Burns, the woman whom it was given to died in 1986, and as far as I can tell the diamond hasn’t surfaced since.”
“1986…” said Caroline, leafing through thick pages, festooned with pictures and airplane tickets and other memories of her dad’s travels. “Here we are,” she said. “In 1986 my dad was in Sweden to oversee work on a new power plant, and then later in the year he was sent to…” Her jaw dropped as she turned the page and stared at the inscription. “Khemed,” she said. “September to October 1986. He even took pictures.” Odelia scooted over to take a look. “See? He kept his hotel bill. The International Royal in Wadesdah, which is the capital of Khemed.”
Odelia held up her phone.“Can I…”
“Sure, go ahead,” said Caroline, who’d put a hand to her face and was shaking her head.
Odelia took a couple of pictures of the pages where Caroline’s father had documented his stay.
“I don’t get this. So my dad took a diamond that didn’t belong to him, and then kept it in a safe at the bank all these years and never told us? But why? Why would he do a thing like that?”
“Maybe he needed money?”
“So why didn’t he sell it? Why steal it and then keep it?”
“Maybe because he discovered he couldn’t sell it? It is a pretty famous diamond. Stones like that are very hard to sell. Nobody wants to touch them.”
But Caroline shook her head decidedly.“My dad wasn’t a thief. He just wasn’t. If he took that stone, there must have been a good reason, cause he sure as heck wouldn’t have stolen it.”
“Who’s that?” asked Odelia, as she pointed to a particular picture in the album.
“Oh, that’s Ken. Kenneth Cesseki. He was my dad’s go-to guy—an assistant of sorts. Real jack-of-all-trades. Ken always traveled with my dad. He was a company man. Not an engineer like my dad, but more like a fixer. He arranged the visas, and made sure the paperwork was in order and liaised with local authorities, that kind of thing.”
“Is he still…”