“Did your mother ever work here?”
Daniel looked puzzled. “She cleaned theaters.”
“Anybody else in your family?”
“My grandfather had the stand on the corner. Umbrellas, gloves, cigarettes in the days when somebody would buy a cigarette off you. He watched me after school. Sometimes my mom left stuff in his booth if she was going downtown.”
“Was his name Mateo?”
Daniel turned both hands palm up. “You knew my grandfather?”
“He gave me a pair of red mittens once. He said I could pay him when it snowed. That was in March. I thought I’d beaten him out of four dollars until the next December.”
“The man kept accounts,” he said, and this time she saw the beginning of a real smile.
Her phone rang. Peter. She excused herself and closed the door on the two of them. Outside, Claire was kneeling beside the young man, her cheek practically on the carpet.
“Kill your light,” she told him.
“But I can’t see.”
“Put it sideways. You’re looking for the shadow, not the diamond.”
He did as she said, and there it was, a needle of shadow cast by a piece of gold hardly larger than a grain of sugar. Claire picked it up with a piece of blue wax and set it on his fingertip. It was a graceful little piece of teaching, too practiced to be for Miriam’s benefit.
Peter’s voice came through the phone. “The trustees will hold the offer open until five. That’s everything I can do.”
“Are they charging for the privilege?”
“They want the accounts as signed off on Tuesday. If we change the disclosures they reserve the right to reopen the price.”
“Where did the old repair books go?”
A pause. “If they exist, ask Vernon. I thought the city finally made him retire.”
“Why would the city make one of our employees retire?”
“Because he’s nearly ninety and has the only key to a basement that floods.”
“Which basement?”
“Ask Vernon.”
The call ended. Miriam’s screen showed another message from her son. A photograph of his arm sticking out of an enormous green sleeve. Under it: I have been promoted to apple tree number two. Please inform the press.
She wrote: Hold page one. I’m trying to make the train.
Then, because he was fourteen and liked an honest answer when he could get one, she added: Might miss it. I’ll tell you by three.
Claire had returned to the counter. Miriam went to her and asked for Vernon’s number. Claire wrote it on the back of one of the store’s stiff white business cards. Her hand was steady now.
“What did you think Alma and I were doing?” Miriam asked.
“Together?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you were going to start in about the tickets. Two people came on Monday. Three the week before. Usually they come with somebody. They come when we’re busiest.”
“And you thought they waited for a crowd on purpose?”
“Yes.”
“How about the white hat and the earrings? Did those go into your calculation?”
Claire took her time answering. “I thought you’d dressed up so we’d take you seriously.”
“Interesting. A woman walks into a jewelry store wearing jewelry and you think she’s in costume.”
“You asked what I thought.”
“I did.”
“You going to fire me?”
“I’m thinking about the people I’d be leaving here to explain why you did this if I sent you out of the building right now.”
“I can explain why I did it. I wanted you to leave.”
“Why?”
Claire looked at the counter. In the glass lay a row of gold necklaces like calm water laid down in loops. “Because I’d seen the little girl get out of the car, and I knew I was going to have to go home tonight and tell my father another one had come in.”
A woman with a cardboard cup and a paper sack was standing just outside the front door. She was Black, several years older than Claire, small and fine-boned, with silver twists pulled into a knot. She wore a denim workshop apron finished with little orange stitches. At the sight of her Claire’s shoulders dropped.
The woman came straight up to Miriam. “Well, look at that,” she said. “Josephine Bell’s daughter, with that very same expression like somebody owes her train fare.”
She handed her the paper sack. It was warm. It contained a cinnamon bun with exactly one mouthful missing.
“Sorry,” the woman said. “I had to make sure I still liked them. I’m Ada Price. I believe your lady here has been sending me some business.”
She had crossed the street on purpose. More curiously, somebody inside the store had thought to send for her.
When Miriam asked who, the young man with the earring lifted a hand. “I did. I texted my mom.”
“You work here?” Miriam said to Ada’s son.
“Until she gets me fired,” he said cheerfully. “I’m Miles.”
“Good. Could you do me a favor, Miles? Take down the portraits in the little room before anybody else thinks those men are my relatives.”
From inside the room came Alma’s voice, quite clear even through the door. “They do look like they got arrested for something.”
For one brief moment, standing in the middle of a business in which someone had apparently mislaid her future and a great many people’s pasts, Miriam laughed until she could breathe again.
Chapter 3 — Across Dean Street
Ada insisted on taking them across the street to eat. She said she could talk about twenty years of rotten business or she could talk about it while her soup was hot, and at her age there was only one sensible choice. Daniel wanted to take Alma back to school. Alma reminded him that it was a teacher workday and there would be nobody there to let her in. He looked at her as though she had personally arranged this inconvenience, then surrendered the keys so she could put another dollar in the meter.
Across Dean Street, the pavement dipped over the roots of a plane tree. Somebody had painted the hump yellow and written MIND YOUR TEETH in small letters along the curb. The window at Price & Daughter held a single clock in a chipped porcelain case. Its face was blank except for the hands. Prices are inside, said a card propped against the clock. The door is free.
“You really put that in the window?” Miriam asked.
“A man told me I’d get more walk-in trade if I removed barriers to entry. I removed the door and half my heat went out. That card was my second idea.”
The shop was twelve feet wide and nearly sixty feet deep. Four repair benches ran the length of one wall. At the first, an elderly man with a magnifier clipped to his glasses was turning a little brass wheel with the side of his thumbnail. At the second, a woman in a bicycle jersey was practicing a solder join on what looked like the skeleton of a leaf. The third bench had an assortment of clock weights and a child’s picture of a dinosaur above it. The last one was empty, clean as a plate, with the name PRICE burned into the edge.
Ada led them past the benches to a table covered in oilcloth. She took bowls out of a cabinet, ladled lentils and carrots into them, and showed Alma where to find spoons. The door opened and closed in the front of the shop while they ate. It seemed to Miriam that she heard the same customer come in three times. First he wanted the time, then the number for the taxi office, finally a straight answer about whether he should marry a woman who kept two lizards in the bedroom.
“Marry the one that makes you happy,” the old man at the bench advised him.
“I know which woman.”
“I was talking about the lizards.”
Ada unrolled a small square of cloth beside her bowl. A ring lay inside. Daniel started to rise. She covered it with her hand.
“Sit down, sweetheart. This is my wedding ring. Yours isn’t here. I just want you to look at something.”
She took it up between two fingers. On the inside of the band was a little half moon of darker gold. “My dad made that. He could close a ring so you couldn’t find the join from the outside if I gave you all afternoon and the use of a loupe. Inside he left a little crescent. He said someday folks might want to know whose hands did the work.”
“Is that what the mark on the ticket is?” asked Miriam.
“No. The mark says the ring went out the back door.”
She brought over a wooden cash drawer. Inside were twelve envelopes with names penciled across the fronts. “These are the people who came here asking for their things back. Five were sent by Claire. Two were sent by the gray-haired fellow who wears the ties with the little horses. One saw my name on a website and found me herself. I’ve been collecting their stories, with permission.”
“Why didn’t you call my office?”
“I did. Someone named Beverly asked me what model of watch I was having trouble with. Somebody else gave me a reference number. A third person told me to write the number on the outside of an envelope and send in the watch.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know what happens when a woman calls up to complain and comes away with a number. It feels very like a result, until she wants to use it.”
“Have you got the number?”
“Wouldn’t that be a lovely joke if I threw it away?”
Ada got up, rummaged in the cabinet, and dropped a blue envelope on the table. It held five reference numbers and a train ticket. She extracted the ticket and put it in her wallet. “That’s for my sister’s. Almost gave you a very nice weekend in Providence.”
Miriam took out her phone and sent the numbers to her assistant, Caroline, with a request to trace them without closing or amending anything. Behind the screen a second notification had been waiting. The bank wanted confirmation that the transfer was still happening. Miriam turned the phone over.
“The four million in my accounts,” she said. “Does that have something to do with these rings?”
Ada stopped chewing. “How much?”
“Four million. Or more accurately, an account with a little over four million in current assets has no independent statement to support it. I’ve been trying to get the statement since Tuesday. Our auditors thought it was a timing issue due to the change of ownership.”
Daniel set down his spoon. “I want to be clear about a thing. We’re talking about one gold ring, not a movie where the thing is worth more than my house. My father bought that ring for sixty-eight dollars. I know because for thirty years he told everybody he got a better price for it than my uncle got for his.”
“I know,” Miriam said. “I’m trying to understand how things travel through a business. An amount that large has to come from somewhere.”
“Sure,” he said. “But it doesn’t have to come from us.”
There was something so clean about that correction that she wrote it down on the back of one of the white business cards. Daniel, looking over as she wrote, was embarrassed.
“You don’t need to quote me in your report.”
“It’s for me.”
At the first bench the old man took off his glasses. “You want Vernon, Miriam? Turn your soup around first.”
She looked at him properly. In her childhood he had been an enormous man with a black beard and two missing knuckles. The beard was gone, and she had somehow assumed that any man who had ever been enormous would stay that way until the end. He held out his left hand. The middle two fingers were short. She had loved his stories of fighting pirates for them, believed every word until she was at least eleven, and cried when she learned how little romance was involved in a band saw accident.
“Vernon. Why have you got my mother’s clock in the window?”
“It’s broken.”
“I could have figured that out.”
“I’ve taught you something, then.”
She put her arms around him. He smelled of mild soap and something sharp. He flinched a little when she touched his shoulder, so she drew back, but he caught her hand in both of his and held on.
“Most folks just call,” he said.
“Most folks get a name and an address. All I got was a threat involving you and a basement.”