Darlene lifted a shoulder. “He’s always getting into something. I don’t ask.”
Ruth wrote something on her iPad. Darlene watched her do it with the expression of someone watching a small problem get recorded into permanent evidence.
“Now.” Nans kept her voice easy. “We’re not here about the bracelet. That’s a family matter and none of our business.” She paused. “We want to talk about the cat.”
“I already told you I don’t know anything about a cat.”
“I believe you. But you were in that attic when you were young. You, June, and Margo.”
Something moved across Darlene’s face. Quick, almost nothing.
“We were all up there at one time or another,” she said.
“Do you remember the porcelain cat specifically?” Helen asked. Her voice was gentle, curious — the voice she used when she wanted someone to feel they were helping rather than confessing.
Darlene looked at her like she’d asked whether she remembered a particular dust mote. “Why would I? We weren’t up there cataloguing things. We were listening to records.” She paused. “And consoling June, mostly. She was absolutely convinced that boy was going to give her his high school ring.” A short snort. “Daniel Shaw. Little weasel strung her along for the better part of two years.”
“June was upset?” Helen asked.
“June was seventeen and dramatic.” Darlene’s expression softened slightly at the edges — not warm, exactly, but the look of someone visiting an old memory that had stopped hurting. “Margo and I spent half those afternoons in that attic talking her down off whatever ledge she’d worked herself onto that week.” She shook her head. “Oh, to be young again and have your only worry be whether some boy is going to hand over a cheap ring.”
“And Margo,” Nans said, keeping her voice easy. “Was she focused on June too? Or did she have her own interests up there?”
“We were all focused on June.” Darlene said it with the mild exasperation of someone who had been focused on June for sixty years and had more or less made peace with it. “That was generally how it went.”
Nans nodded slowly. “Is there anything else from those afternoons you remember? Anything out of the ordinary?”
“We were teenagers listening to records and worrying about boys.” Darlene picked up her pencil. “No.”
Flat. Final. The kind of answer that was technically complete and gave away absolutely nothing.
Ida appeared at Nans’s shoulder holding a small wedge of aged cheddar. “Is this one good?” she asked Darlene.
“Yes,” Darlene said, with the exhausted resignation of a woman who had accepted that some parts of this conversation were simply outside her control.
“Wonderful.” Ida placed it carefully beside the fig jam already in her basket.
Nans rose. The others followed.
At the door Nans paused, not quite turning around. “We won’t tell any one about the bracelet.”
“Thanks,” Darlene said.
The bell chimed once behind them. Ruth’s blue Oldsmobile sat at the curb in the pale afternoon light.
“It’s rather ironic, isn’t it. Darlene had the genuinely valuable piece in her pocket the whole time. Old gold, real garnets. And someone killed a man over a porcelain cat worth twenty-five dollars,” Helen said.
“Maybe value isn’t really the point,” Nans said. “Look at Darlene. That bracelet is worth something on paper, but that’s not why she took it. She’s been looking for it for years. The value was never about money. It was sentimental.”
“I doubt anyone is sentimental about a ugly cat,” Ida said.
“No,” Nans agreed. “Which means maybe it wasn’t the cat itself at all.” She paused. “Maybe it was what was inside it.”
“Which brings us to the question,” Lexy said.
“Yes,” Nans said. “Was there something in there and, if there was, who knew about it.”
CHAPTER TWELVE