String of Tears, page 9
“So you didn’t remember us until we came over?” Charles asked in horror.
She shook her head. “No, but, once I saw you, and we started talking, it jogged my memory, and you fell into place.”
“Thank heavens for that,” Lucas claimed, almost affronted. “How could she possibly forget us?” he asked Charles, a pained look on his face.
Charles shrugged. “I don’t think anything was on purpose. Keep that in mind,” he told Lucas.
“I know but …” he muttered, “it’s not as if we’re very forgettable.”
Hurricane had to agree with that. They were both one of a kind, yet an obvious pair, and appeared to be extremely happy together. And he was happy for them, but what he really needed was answers as to what had happened to her. “So, as far as you know, she wasn’t dating anybody. She wasn’t seeing anybody casually, had no sweetheart on the internet, nothing like that at all? Do you know if she had signed up for online dating or something along that line?”
“Why don’t you check her computer?”
“Because there isn’t one here.”
At that, she bolted to her feet and asked him, “There isn’t, is there?”
He shook his head. “No, there isn’t. I checked.” He looked at the men. “She was also found without a stitch on and with no phone.”
“Oh no,” Charles gasped, staring at her in shock, “not your phone.”
As far as Hurricane could tell, it appeared that, for Charles, losing your phone was the absolute worst thing that could happen to anybody. And Hurricane understood the frustration of losing a phone, but certainly a whole lot worse could happen to people. “Exactly. She’s using a spare phone of mine right now.” He looked over at her and suggested, “You may want to exchange numbers, so you can stay in contact.”
“Right,” she replied, pulling out her phone. “Give me your numbers, and I’ll send you both a text.” And, with that done, she nodded. “Now you have it. I don’t know for how long I’ll have this number because I don’t know what happened to my other phone, nor do I have a clue what’s happened with any other calls that may have come in.”
At that, Charles gasped again. “Oh no. You were waiting for phone calls on a jewelry show.”
She stared at him. “I don’t remember that.”
He looked at her in shock. “You don’t? It was huge for you. Every morning you would get up and say that maybe today was the day.”
She slowly shook her head. “I don’t remember anything about that,” she cried out, frowning at him. “If so important, how could I possibly have forgotten?”
At that, he winced. “I don’t know, but the real question is, if they were trying to get ahold of you, what are the chances that they’ve now given up trying?”
Hurricane interrupted. “That brings up a good point. We can track your phone number, Jewel, if somebody gives it to me.” He pulled out his phone. “I’ll see who all the calls came from.”
At that, Charles looked at him. “How can you do that?”
“I have connections,” he replied bluntly.
She looked over at Charles. “If you could, that would be very appreciated.”
Hurricane nodded. “Your phone number?” he asked Jewel.
She stared at him blankly, turned to the men, and said, “I have no idea.”
Immediately Charles recited the number. Hurricane put it into his phone and sent the number to Stefan, asking him to talk to the detective. “Stefan will talk to the detective,” he stated, by way of explanation to her.
She nodded. “I just … wow,” she murmured. She sagged onto the only couch. And then she looked around. “Did I always stay here?”
“Almost always. We heard that you had another place, but we’ve never been there,” Charles stated candidly. “This is the place we know you from. This is your heart. Your soul is here,” he said, with a wave of his hand. “So any other place really won’t matter to us because this is so you.”
She smiled at him. “I forgot how melodramatic you were.”
He looked at her in horror. “I’m not,” he cried out in protest.
“Sure you’re not,” she said, with a teasing smile.
At that, Charles grinned. “I’m glad to see you are in there.”
“I’m in here,” she confirmed, “just a little bit beaten up.”
“And did they?” he asked in a shocked tone. “Did they beat you up?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, with another wave of her hand. “That was just a phrase. I’m feeling bruised, let’s put it that way, as if everything’s gone chaotically wrong in my world.”
“It has,” Charles agreed. “Absolutely it has, and, if we can do anything to help, you just need to tell us. You know that, right?”
She smiled at him. “I do know that, thank you.” She looked over at Hurricane. “We have been friends for a very long time.”
He nodded. “And that’s good to hear.” He turned, looked at Charles, and asked, “So she’s never mentioned anybody as a stalker? She’s never had problems, not with any ex-boyfriend who was ugly?”
Charles pondered that. “She wouldn’t ever tell us if it was ugly,” he began, “but she certainly was not interested in going back into the dating scene.”
“I could have had a lot of reasons for that,” she protested. “Not necessarily because whoever my last boyfriend was could have been abusive.”
“Exactly,” Charles agreed.
But, as Hurricane considered her, he shared, “Somebody is involved in this. … Now, if your ex-boyfriend wanted to see you again, would you have gone back to him or at least had coffee with him?”
She frowned and shook her head. “I don’t think so, but I don’t know.”
He looked at the two men. They both shrugged. “We don’t know whether she would have or not. I would like to say emphatically no, but I can’t.”
And that honesty was something Hurricane really appreciated because so much more was going on here that it’s obvious things wouldn’t get cleared up anytime soon.
Charles added, “But I can tell you that she was always very cautious and that she wouldn’t have gone unless it was somebody who she knew very well.”
“That’s not quite true,” Lucas disagreed. “If anybody had wanted to meet her over this show, she would have definitely gone for that.”
At that, Charles turned, looked at him, and nodded. “Yes, you’re right. She really, really, really wanted that show to happen.”
“What are the chances that whoever was working on this show used that as a means to get ahold of her?” Hurricane asked. “Do we even know if there was a show?”
“No, I don’t know.” The two men turned to look at her.
“Do you have any documentation?” Hurricane faced her.
She gave him a flat stare. “How would I know? Do you remember what this place looked like when we got here?” Turning to her friends, she explained, “It had been completely upended.”
At that, their faces blanched. “Oh my,” Charles exclaimed, “definitely somebody is after you then. You would not have done this to yourself, but why would anybody else do it?”
“Unless they were looking for something,” Hurricane suggested. “The question is, did they find what they were looking for?”
Chapter 9
The next morning when Jewel woke up, the conversation with Charles and Lucas still rolled through her head. They’d talked for an hour, until Hurricane had finally ushered them out. She’d protested that they didn’t need to leave, but everybody had apparently seen the fatigue in her face and had ignored her. Even as she lay here in her bed, she wondered at the odd feeling coursing through her right now.
The fact that she’d woken up was great, but still something was off. Waking up to an odd feeling was an even odder feeling. Waking up was now something Jewel had to be curious about, apparently after being dead for a while. And being dead-dead to the point that she had been in a body bag was enough to make her worried in that way. Thank God those memories weren’t in her brain. She couldn’t imagine waking up in a body bag, all zipped up, wondering what had happened to her. That would have been horrific.
Almost immediately after she thought about it, she determined that she needed to talk to someone in the morgue. She didn’t know why. She didn’t know what he could possibly tell her, but it just seemed to be one more piece of the puzzle that either she needed to know, or she was torturing herself about that could put her mind to rest. She slowly got up, realized that her body was more or less pain-free, and headed for a shower.
She steadied herself, as the water and soap bubbles ran over her body, and noted that some of the bruising was easing back. Seemed her body was on some delayed response, after whatever had happened, with the bruises showing up many hours later, and now were slowly going away again.
She didn’t even know whether she was healing faster than normal or this was really just what normal looked like. She snorted at the word being applied to her. Dressed and somewhat ready to face the day, she headed downstairs, moving quietly, in case Hurricane was still sleeping, but instead she found him sitting at the kitchen island, sipping coffee.
Without looking up from his phone, he asked, “How are you feeling?”
“Better,” she murmured. “At least I think so.”
He turned and looked at her, then smiled and nodded. “I’d say you’re looking better.”
“Which just means that I was looking pretty horrific to begin with.”
He chuckled. “The fact that you’re even worried about your looks from back then says you’re feeling better.”
“I’m not a vain person,” she stated, with a shrug. “So I can’t say that I was particularly bothered about it at any point in time.”
“Good, because, for a while there, you looked like death warmed over.”
“That’s not funny,” she scolded him.
He again smiled at her. “There’s coffee, if you want.”
“Now that would be good.” She walked around, snagged a cup, and asked, “I suppose you heard no new developments, huh?”
“What developments? If you mean on your case, no, absolutely nothing. And I’m not sure that the detective has gotten anywhere with your phone records.”
“I suppose, if he’s not allowed to, is that part of the problem?”
“I think there are some laws about checking someone’s phone records. It’s possible that it requires approval from a judge or something. I can’t imagine the detective would be in a big hurry to stand in front of a judge, while trying to explain this mess.”
“Right. What if I signed a form or paid something for it?”
“Maybe.” He quickly sent off a message. “I just asked him about that.”
As it turned out, there was a way to get it done, but she would have to send in a request. With that done and the paperwork digitally signed, she sat down with her coffee and noted, “It would be nice to know that I haven’t missed a big chunk of my world because of this.”
He nodded. “Do you remember anything about the art show?”
“I remember feeling like it was very important, and I would be devastated if I didn’t get to participate in it. But now I don’t even know what it was about and couldn’t care less,” she murmured.
“Until the memories come back, and then the art show will come back with all that emotion.”
“Maybe I’d be better off if knowledge of the show doesn’t come back,” she said.
“You can’t assume that you didn’t get it, since you really haven’t been available or able to get a phone call or even an email,” he reminded her.
“No, but it does feel to me that maybe it’s something that isn’t or shouldn’t be as important as it apparently was to me.”
“Life is like that. Sometimes things are important, and then you get a paradigm shift, and you realize it really wasn’t that important at all. And, right now, something else has happened to you that’s put it into perspective.”
“I guess. It’s that necklace.”
“I noticed that you didn’t mention it to anybody.”
“No, and I waited to see if they brought it up, but nobody did.”
“Is there a chance that you didn’t tell anybody you were working on it? Were you in the habit of telling people about jobs you were working on?”
“I don’t think so,” she replied. “It doesn’t seem like something I would do. Especially repair jobs, you know? It’s not like a new piece I’d created and wanted to share with my friends.”
“So, we have to consider the possibility that nobody knew about the necklace.”
“I don’t know. Not for sure.” She turned and looked at the wall safe. “From here it does look like it’s closed off.”
“It does,” he agreed. “Of course the pearls are back in there again.”
She looked at him, startled. He shrugged. “I removed them, and you put them back in. I don’t know when you put them back in, but you did.”
She let her breath out slowly. “I don’t remember putting them back in,” she cried out.
“I know, and I was afraid you would say that,” he stated, his gaze ever watchful.
“Then you get that look in your eye, and it feels like you think everything I say is a lie.”
He shook his head. “I’m not calling you a liar at all, but something is obviously going on, and those pearls are at the heart of it. Do you have any history on them, any emails or anything?”
“If I had a computer, then I could let you know. Why would they take my laptop?” she asked.
“You tell me. What was on it?”
“My whole world.” She stared blankly at him. “Everything. I mean, isn’t everybody’s life on their computers these days?”
“Their computers and phones, and, yes, they did take both of those. I, however, do have a laptop. I got it out of my vehicle last night.” He pointed beside her. “Maybe that’s when you put the necklace back in the safe.”
She immediately snatched up Hurricane’s laptop and then stopped, looked at him, and asked, “May I?”
“Absolutely. Do you know all your logins?”
“I think so,” she murmured. “As long as I can remember my email.” And, with that, it took her just a few clicks, and she had her email up. “Oh, thank heavens for that,” she whispered.
She sat down on the bench beside him, with her hot coffee, and started going through everything. “Here it is! The communication with my client about the pearls,” she said and pushed it over, so he could see it.
He leaned forward to read the email and then asked, “If you have a printer, can you print that off?”
“Sure.” She quickly sent it to her printer, and, off to the side, he heard a printer whirring away, behind a bunch of canvases. “There’s just a couple of them.”
“How did you receive the pearls?” he asked.
“They came by courier, and that’s how they were supposed to be sent back.”
“Have you ever had any communications with this guy before?”
“No, not at all, but then I haven’t really been doing very much online recently.”
“Any idea why?”
“No reason, it’s just that I’ve been busy with my own designs,” she explained. “That whole art show thing again.”
“Like pieces of jewelry? And yet, you didn’t look for any of those here.”
Startled, she looked at him. “No, I didn’t.”
“Why is that?”
She got up and raced up to the safe, had it open as he came behind her. “They’re not here.” She looked around the safe again. “I didn’t even remember about the show.”
“Wait. When is the show? Could it already be in progress?”
She stopped, then slowly nodded. “Yeah, setting up at least,” she replied. “My God, could I have sent them out for the show?” Then she turned and looked back at her front door. “But, if the show was on, I would have told Charles and Lucas, wouldn’t I?”
“Would you? Or are you the type to make it a surprise and take them there?”
She and Hurricane returned to their seats near his laptop. She slowly nodded in response to his question. “That is something I would do.”
He smiled. “So let’s not think everything is negative here,” he stated. “Maybe this is all good news.”
“Maybe,” she murmured. She returned her attention to her emails, then let out a sigh. “The contract’s right here. The show is happening, but it doesn’t start for another three days. I had to send in all the pieces, so they could set it up.”
“There you go. So that’s some good news. Having access to your emails is important, and you can recapture some of what has been lost. That’s pretty important, and congratulations on the show.”
“In a way it’s groundbreaking for me—for my work, I mean. It’s the first show I’ve ever had.”
“Why is that? You’re obviously very talented.”
“I’ve deliberately avoided everything to do with shows,” she said, with half a smile. “I’m not a very public-oriented person.”
“And yet you seem to be quite excited about the show.”
“It’s because of who and what it is,” she murmured. “It’s huge for my name as an artist, so, of course, I’m excited. And I was invited to attend, to participate. I wasn’t just submitting material, hoping they would think it was good enough. I was invited to show some of my work. The process was fairly complicated to get it to them.”
“But you did it, right?”
“Yes, everything’s ready to go. I remember now. I can’t believe I didn’t tell Charles and Lucas about it.”
“It’s interesting that you didn’t,” he agreed cautiously. “Does it say something about your relationship?”
“I don’t know.” She pondered that. “It seemed totally normal last night, like no reason to be at all upset or worried. I think you were right. I think I might have just planned on surprising them.”
“They didn’t mention anything about that last night though.”
