The Jewelry Case

• Title Page
  
• Prologue
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  

The Jewelry Case

By Catherine McGreevy

Copyright © 2013 by Catherine McGreevy.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review without written permission.

Web site address: catherinemcgreevy.blogspot.com

The Jewelry Case: An injured opera singer retreats to a small Northern California town and gets caught up in a search for missing jewels / Catherine McGreevy

ISBN

Cover Design by Daniel McGreevy

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to my incredibly helpful writers’ group partners, Donna Benedict, Suzanne Shephard, Danna Wilberg, Dorothy Rice, and Melinda Terry, Deb Julienne, and to my sister, Karen Brown, for their important suggestions and comments, all of which improved this novel.

C.M.

November, 2013

by Catherine McGreevy

Prologue

Vienna, 1895

The gaslights blinded her. In the darkness she could hear the audience roaring, stomping and whistling with deafening enthusiasm more suited for the gold camps of California than this elegant marble-clad hall in the heart of Vienna. She was almost used to the acclaim by now, to men fighting for the right to pull her carriage through the street, showering her with long-stemmed roses and expensive gifts. But tonight was different.

Heart beating faster, she sensed him standing and applauding like the rest, set apart by his height and broad shoulders and the crimson sash across his chest. The necklace he had given her earlier that night lay against her throat. The matching pearl-and-ruby earbobs swung gently against her neck, while the glittering tiara pressed down on her black curls, like a kiss. Although the parure must have cost a fortune, she cared nothing about that. The only thing that mattered was what that he loved her… and finally, he was willing that the world knew.

She rose from her deep curtsey and blew a kiss toward his box. Tonight. Her heart quickened even faster. Tonight she would agree to marry him.

Chapter One

"What do you mean, I'm broke?" Paisley's mind, already woozy on Vicodin, had been drifting as her lawyer droned on. Now she sat bolt upright, as if someone had suddenly kicked her in her bad leg, the one held together by the brand-new titanium rod.

Heavy-set and middle-aged, the kindly gray-haired attorney had bushy eyebrows over thick glasses and wore a creased three-piece suit. He sighed and pushed a spreadsheet toward Paisley. "’Broke' is perhaps too strong a word, Mrs. Perleman, but I’ve been speaking with your financial advisor, and we felt it was imperative that we call attention to your situation immediately. I'd rather have waited until you finished recuperating from the accident, but….” He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

Reluctantly, Paisley took the spreadsheet. The columns of numbers might as well have been gibberish, for all she could make of it, but Barry Klein's words could not have made the end result clearer. The money, virtually all of it, was gone.

Barry gestured at the page. "Fortunately, insurance covered Jonathan’s funeral expenses and your medical bills, and if you sell off the remaining stocks, as I’ve advised, you can pay down the other debts. That should leave enough to live on while you finish recovering
, that is,
if you are frugal." He took on a tone like that of a teacher reprimanding a slightly dull student: "May I remind you, Mrs. Perleman, that you can't blame me for the fact that over the past few years you failed to read my letters or respond to my phone calls."

"You" singular. Not "you" plural.

Paisley kept her mouth firm under its splash of scarlet lipstick and raised her chin higher. This meeting was more important than any performance onstage, which was why this morning she had applied heavy makeup over her pallor and tried to dress like a woman who knew something about financial affairs. The red silk blouse and black knee-length pencil skirt belonged to the friend whose guest room she was sleeping in, and before coming she had carefully brushed her dark hair over the raw scar that ran from jaw to clavicle. Safety glass wasn't supposed to cut, but it had only taken one sharp-edged piece to carve her throat like a stiletto. That and her mangled leg had kept her in the hospital for the past month.

If only her husband had been as lucky.

A mixture of powerful emotions washed over her: regret, sorrow … and guilt. Jonathan, gone, with all his good looks, talent and shortcomings! She could hardly believe it. He had been such an overpowering figure in her life these past three years. Before the car crash, she'd been glad to let him handle all their monetary affairs, reasoning that he was older and wiser, or at least, so she had thought. Besides, back then practical things had seemed unimportant. All that mattered was opera and their mutual rising careers.

A fresh wave of mixed panic and despair rose through her gut. To hide her fear, she straightened, and with a flourish worthy of Tosca, she brushed aside the spreadsheet. "This is the first I've heard of any financial problems! Didn’t we pay you to manage our affairs while we were away?"

Barry's lips compressed. She knew what he was thinking: he had done his best. In spite of his advice, however, she and Jonathan had continued spending money as if it would flow forever: designer clothes from Saks, first-class travel, the best hotel rooms in Paris and Milan. Except opera wasn't pop music; except for a handful of the biggest stars, salaries were more modest than the public realized. But who had time to worry about finances with their careers on the rise—Jonathan's as an increasingly internationally renowned orchestra conductor and hers as an up-and-coming coloratura soprano poised for bigger roles? "The Golden Couple of Opera," People Magazine had called them, with a flattering full-page photograph across from the gushing article.

The lawyer plucked back the spreadsheet from her fingers, his voice brisk. "As I said, stocks will pay most of the debts, and then there's the house, of course."

Paisley's forehead creased. "House?" Her voice cracked on the single syllable, like a moll in a gangster flick from the 30s who smoked too much. Gone, perhaps forever, was the voice of the young woman whose creamy coloratura had surprised everyone and won the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions three years ago. "What house are you talking about?"

"Don't you remember?" Barry peered at her over the heavy rims of his glasses. "The one left to you by Esther Perleman."

"Esther Perleman? Oh, yes, Jonathan's great aunt. The one I met at my wedding."

"I sent you a letter when she died, nearly a year ago," Barry reminded her.
One of the many you never read
, he seemed to say, but of course he had too much self-control to say it out loud.

She looked at him blankly while searching her memory without success, like a computer with a failing hard-drive. Another legacy of the accident, perhaps. A temporary one, she hoped.

He sighed. "Let me remind you that upon her demise, I notified you that she had left you her house and all its effects. In our brief telephone conversation, you told me that you were busy, and that you'd decide what to do with it later."

Under his prompting, the memory finally began to resurface. Jonathan had been peevish that his never-married aunt had passed him over, settling the inheritance
,
modest as it was
,
on his wife, despite the fact that Paisley wasn't even a blood relative.

"You must have made quite an impression on the old bat," he'd said, scowling. "What did you say to butter her up?"

She had thrown up her hands, equally mystified. She'd hardly spoken with his elderly great aunt at their wedding two years earlier. Jonathan’s parents died relatively young, in their early sixties, and there was no one else left, except for a cousin back east. Maybe that was why Paisley was able to remember so well the tiny woman with determinedly jet-black hair, and intense dark eyes. Aunt Esther must have been pushing ninety, but she looked decades younger.

At the wedding, looking at Jonathan’s great-aunt, Paisley had a strange feeling she was looking in a mirror seventy years into the future. She and Aunt Esther were virtually the same height, allowing for shrinkage on the part of the older woman, and they both had black hair, although Aunt Esther's was assisted by a bottle and fluffed out with curlers, while Paisley's thick, glossy ringlets were naturally abundant.

Aunt Esther peered closely at Paisley from under eyebrows as thick and downward-slanting as Jonathan's. It took effort for Paisley not to shuffle her feet under that steady stare like a disgraced schoolgirl.

"At the beauty parlor, I read an article about you in a magazine." Esther Perleman wasn’t the kind of woman to waste time on preliminary chit-chat, such as "Nice to meet you," or, "It's a pleasure to have you in the family."

Paisley tried hard to think which magazine article Aunt Esther was referring to. There had been a surprising amount of media coverage since she’d won the competition, and especially after her engagement to Jonathan Perleman was announced. Once, she'd thought television and magazine reporters were only interested in pop stars, but opera had become sexy the past few years with the emergence of attractive young singers like Josh Groban, Charlotte Church and Jackie Evancho.

"
You
know," Esther said, a tad impatiently. "The article where you said you planned to organize an opera company for disadvantaged children."

Paisley remembered an
article in which she'd mentioned a youthful ambition to create an inner-city singing group patterned after the children's choir of Harlem. That goal had been dropped when she had met Jonathan, however. He advised her to focus on her own rising career, which left her little time for anything else. Now she felt a pang of guilt at how quickly she had abandoned her idealism.

"Maybe I will work with children someday," she told the old woman. "I've always believed good music can cure social ills." She didn’t often say that around Jonathan, fearing he would mock the sentiment as he mocked so many things, but somehow she felt Aunt Esther would understand.

Esther pursed her lips. "Hmf. Funny, I never expected my nephew would end up marrying a girl like you." She assessed Paisley through narrowed eyes. "You don't seem at all his type."

Privately, Paisley agreed. Jonathan was twelve years older than her and far more sophisticated, having dated some of the world's most beautiful models and actresses. The old woman's words could easily have meant,
If my nephew could have had any one he wanted, why would he want to marry someone like you?
Yet somehow Paisley was sure Esther meant the words as a compliment.