I kept them in the wall-safe hidden behind a row of sweaters in the closet. Of course, all my sweaters were black; I never was one for change. I hadn’t checked recently but I hoped the pearls were still there.
I opened the safe and breathed a sigh of relief. There they were, wrapped in the same piece of crumpled tissue, exactly the way she’d handed them to me. I held them up to show Verity.
She actually jumped up and down and clapped her hands together. “OMG! Perfect!”
She let them slide through her fingers as she put them over my head. “Like silk,” she said reverently.
I rearranged them so they sat nicely on the base of my neck and fell more prettily across my chest, ending exactly between the curve of my breasts, which themselves looked much improved with the added gleam of a pearl or two. “They can’t be real, of course,” I said. “Cultured, I believe the word is; probably grown in Japanese oysters or mussels or something seaweedy like that.”
Verity lifted the pearls, inspecting them intently. Had she had a jeweler’s loupe I might have thought she was a professional.
“Wrong,” she said. “My mom had pearls like this. She sold them when we were broke. They brought in enough to pay off the mortgage for a few years ’til my dad went broke again and they lost the house anyway. I always wished she’d kept them. They would have been my only inheritance. My parents went and got themselves killed—a holiday helicopter jaunt in Majorca, and there was nothing left. And then my husband who’d mistakenly thought he’d married big, not only cheated on me but then he stole the rest of my money. And that’s when I met you.”
Suddenly tearful, she put her arms around me and I gave her a hug.
“Don’t worry, sweetie,” I whispered in the ear closest to me. “You know I’ll always look after you, real pearls or not.”
She wiped a tear with a finger, leaving a streak of purplish mascara. “I’m alright,” she said. “And your Aunt Jolly not only left you her villa and whatever money she had, she also left you a fortune, right here, around your neck.”
Of course I did not believe it. How could I? To me they were simply a string of creamy, evenly matched pearls that surely would never come up to the standard of the late Queen Mary who’d draped herself with multiple strands of the best until she looked like a decorated doll. Plus she’d added a few diamonds of extra-large size. The story also went that she had had a shifty hand in removing anything she fancied from the homes of friends or her hosts, to the point where things were hidden before her arrival. A kleptomaniac queen was a nice touch, I had always thought.
But what if Verity were correct and these pearls were the real thing? I hefted them in my hand: weighty, smooth, properly strung with tiny knots in the silk between each bead.
I said, “Well, anyway, I’m wearing them tonight. Aunt Jolly would have liked to see me in them. I expect that’s why she gave them to me.”
I had a sudden thought. “I wonder if these were what the thief was after when he came into my room. Maybe he didn’t want to get rid of me. He simply wanted the pearls. He was a cat burglar after all.”
I saw Verity’s skeptical expression, but right then the doorbell played “La Marseillaise.” Chad Prescott awaited us.
Cinderella would go to the ball.
23
Chad Prescott
At the Boss’s villa, the first team of red-jacketed valet parkers was already racing back from the long-distance lot, while the second team picked up guests in golf carts so they did not have to wait in the long line of traffic.
“This must be some party,” Chad said to Mirabella, in the convertible’s passenger seat, her long dress hitched up over her knees, a swathe of chiffon keeping her hair intact in the breeze, old-movie-star style. Still, Chad thought, what hair was visible looked as though it had been tamed with a proper brush and comb instead of the usual flaring red mass spiraling from her head as though she’d been electric-shocked. Well, maybe not quite that bad, but definitely out of control.
“What did you expect from the local billionaire?” Mirabella said. “A dinner for twenty? Port and cheese afterward for the gents? Ladies retire to the withdrawing room to powder their noses?”
Sort of like that.” He threw her a grin, which he knew she knew meant he didn’t mean it.