If Walls Could Talk (31 page)

Cursed. It sure seemed that way. A body—two if you counted a possible skeleton in the basement. But it called to me, this house. The elegance of its arches, the melancholy chambers leading one to another. If my mother’s gift was finding enchanted homes, maybe mine was redeeming the ones that seemed condemned to misery. Or maybe I was just more at home when surrounded by melancholy and despair. They had been my loyal companions these past few years, anyway.

Time to change the subject. Sort of. I brought the copy of the gem field map out of my satchel and handed it to Graham. He spread it out on the table, studied it.

“I keep thinking Kenneth’s death has to do with this map. I know it sounds crazy, and I’m sure the police would agree. It’s probably just as simple as Kenneth’s getting mixed up with the wrong people, trying to sell the house and dupe everybody.”

“Probably,” Graham said with a nod. “Of course, that wouldn’t explain why they went after the crate, and then the piano.”

“I thought you thought this was a wild-goose chase.”

“I don’t know what to think. I feel like someone was looking for something in that house, and the box and journal were the only apparent ‘treasure’ to be found. But now . . . ?” He trailed off with a shrug.

“My dad’s going to look up the gem field, if he can find it, while they’re in the area.”

“Even if they can locate it, they won’t find anything more than dirt and rocks.”

“I’m sure you’re right, but you never know.”

“You know what raw diamonds look like?”

“Lumpy diamonds?”

“Rocks. Plain old rocks. Rubies are even worse.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“So you’re saying I should have them sifting through all the gravel in the field?”

“I imagine others have done so, through the years. If they find the right place, and it used to be a gem field claim, it would have been scoured clean by hundreds, maybe thousands, of tourists and rock hounds through the years.”

“But if gems look like regular rocks, how do they know none of the rocks are diamonds?”

“Seriously? Besides the fact that others would have looked already?”

I nodded.

“Because diamonds don’t just occur randomly in fields, Mel. They’re associated with volcanic pipes in very particular locales. And they sure as hell don’t turn up next to rubies.”

“They don’t?”

He looked at me a beat too long before talking. “Didn’t you ever take basic geology? Weren’t you studying anthropology?”

“Once again, cultural anthropologists study
live
people. It’s not archaeology.”

“Still, a course or two might have been relevant.”

“Thanks for the impromptu college counseling. You’re just a few years too late.”

He smiled. “Whatever happened with your degree? Did you finish up the PhD?”

I shook my head. “I’m an A.B.D.”

“What’s that?”

“All But Dissertation. Also known as an L-O-S-E-R.”

Graham smiled and took a long pull on his beer. “I wouldn’t say that.”

“Mmm. I say it plenty all by myself.”

“So why didn’t you finish?”

“I don’t know, exactly. It seemed like one thing after another at first. I went with Daniel to South Africa, where he was teaching for a semester, and then we wound up in Venezuela for nearly a year. All of which would have been fine if it had had anything to do with my dissertation topic, but it really didn’t.”

“Which was?”

“Mexican and Central American immigrants in the United States. Their strategies for economic success, cultural adaptation, attitudes toward education, that sort of thing. With an emphasis on women’s roles within the family, what I called maternal authority.”

“Sounds like worthwhile research.”

“Sure. But hard to do from South Africa and Venezuela. I tried to keep writing, but I kept getting caught up in other things. Local stuff. I worked on a maternal and infant health project in rural South Africa, and then with a micro-lending group in Venezuela. Fascinating but not exactly on track, if you know what I mean. And then things changed between Daniel and me—”

I cut myself off as I realized who I was talking to. I had never shared this with anyone. . . . Why was I spilling my guts to Graham Donovan, of all people?

“Sounds like you did some valuable work, even if it wasn’t pertinent to your research question.”

I shrugged. “I found it hard to write when everything was falling apart. And then when Mom . . .” I trailed off, and took another drink. “Some people find their refuge in their work. Apparently I’m not one of those people.”

“I don’t know about that. Seems to me you’ve allowed the construction business to take over your life pretty thoroughly. Some might even say you were avoiding certain other aspects of life.”

“Other aspects of life? I have no other aspects of life.”

“That was my point.”

“How about you, Graham? You’ve remained remarkably mute about the rest of
your
life, outside of your work as an inspector for a government bureaucracy.”

“You say ‘bureaucracy’ like it’s a bad thing. You know better than most where we’d all be without OSHA to enforce workplace safety laws.”

“That’s true. But I always thought . . . I thought you wanted to start your own business. Weren’t you going to be part of the green revolution?”

He shrugged and looked around the restaurant.

“Things don’t always work out the way we’d hope.”

Ain’t that the truth.

“I needed to find a job with benefits,” Graham said after a long silence. “Several years ago I married a woman who was . . . more like a friend than a lover. We still are friends. She had a pretty serious bout with cancer; afterward she decided friendship wasn’t enough from a relationship, and she moved on.”

“You’re saying you got a job at OSHA to provide for her, and then when she got healthy she dumped you? That seems . . . rotten.”

“It wasn’t quite that cut-and-dried. Jessica had a new lease on life when the cancer went into remission, and she made a number of changes. One of those included me. She decided she was only going around once, and she wanted different things from life. We didn’t have any children, so there was no real family to keep together. Frankly, I would much rather she be honest with me, as she was, than to stay with me, miserable and unfulfilled, out of some misplaced sense of obligation.”

“You sound very evolved,” I said. “I’m still in the ‘I hope my ex-husband dies in some violent and bloody way’ stage.”

Graham chuckled. “Well, there’s always a bit of that in any divorce, I suppose. You’ll probably feel different about him over time. On the other hand, though I cared for her, I was never in love with Jessica the way you were with Daniel.”

“I don’t know whether it was ever real love,” I said, looking into my iced tea.

“Don’t put it down. It was something strong, and it made sense to you at the time.”

“Have you been in therapy or something?”

He smiled. “I’ve just had a lot of time to think. Anyway, my marriage was the last time I pull the knight-in-shining-armor act. I’m hanging up my lance.”

“And yet you came looking for me in the basement.”

“Yeah, well . . . I was doing it for an old friend.”

“You and I are old friends now?”

“I meant your father. He asked me to look after you while he was away.”

“Oh, great. That’s not patronizing at all.”

Graham grinned. “He’s old school. And you attract trouble.”

“Lest you forget, Graham Donovan, I’ve got a Glock in my purse.”

After lunch I remembered Brittany Humm had mentioned that her soon-to-be father-in-law had a jewelry store on Union Street. I called and asked her whether she thought he would be willing to talk to me about gemstones. She told me that while her father-in-law would not be in the shop today, I was in luck: Ralph would be there, and he knew everything there was to know about diamonds. She gave me the address.

“I need to make a quick stop at a jewelry store,” I said to Graham as we walked down the busy street full of shops and restaurants. “I want to talk to a man about a diamond. Now that we’re spending so much time together, my father will be expecting some sort of public declaration.”

Graham looked over at me, startled.

“I’m joking,” I said, laughing. “Good Lord, man, you look pale.”

The man behind the jewelry counter was in his sixties, slight, bent at the shoulders as though he spent a lot of time hunched over his jeweler’s glass.

Brittany was right: It didn’t take much prompting to get Ralph wound up talking about diamonds.

“Ya gotta know your four C’s: cut, color, clarity, and carat weight. Of all of these, the only one influenced by man is the cut. The others are pure chance, determined by fate or God or whatever you believe in.”

“But not all diamonds would be cut, would they?” Graham asked. “Not if they were considered of lesser quality?”

“No, they wouldn’t. Since the wrong cut can take away tens of thousands of dollars of worth, expert cutters are in high demand. They use the flawed ones for practice, or sell them for industrial use. Only about twenty percent of mined diamonds are considered jewelry quality.”

He brought out a black-velvet-covered tray filled with glittery gems and looked up at me with sly eagle eyes.

“Real pretty, aren’t they?” he asked, shoving the tray toward me.

“Lovely. Do you have any rough, uncut diamonds I could look at?”

He frowned slightly, whether at the loss of a potential sale or the unnaturalness of a single woman standing beside a handsome man and not lusting after a diamond ring I couldn’t be sure.

“Just a minute,” he said, as he disappeared into the back of the shop, past the EMPLOYEES ONLY Sign.

“You’re ruining all the man’s romantic illusions,” Graham murmured, leaning back with his elbow on the counter and looking down at me with a half smile.

“We’re here for business, not romance. Unless you really did want to ask me to marry you?”

“Seems to me I tried that once.”

“Really. Was that a proposal? I don’t remember the ‘marry me’ part, just the ‘don’t get married’ part.”

“As you know, I’m a man of few words.”

“Uh-huh,” I answered.

Luckily our new best friend, Ralph-the-jeweler, returned before we went too far down that perilous conversational path.

He brought out another swath of black velvet and then emptied a little bag of its contents. Several small stones, about the size of a pencil eraser, tumbled out. They looked like lumpy, murky brownish gray rocks.

“Watch this,” Ralph said as he brought a small work lamp over and held one of the stones in front of it. When backlit, the stone was translucent, making it look like a dirty glass pebble.

“I guess you really would have to know what you were looking for,” I commented.

“That’s for sure. The brilliance that we associate with diamonds comes from the faceted cut, as I was saying before. But even before you cut these open, you would be able to tell they aren’t high quality because of the crystalline inclusions, clouds, feathers, internal graining—it all affects the clarity. Diamonds below the grade of I-3 aren’t considered gems at all.”

“But they’re still useful for industry, right? I’m in construction, and we have diamond tips on some of our drill bits and saws.”

The man looked me up and down. Then he met Graham’s eyes.

“You let a pretty little thing like her work in
construction
?” He shook his head in a what’s-this-world-coming-to gesture. First we disillusioned him with our lack of engagement, and now with a woman not only working but working in the trades, no less.

Graham just smiled. “I’m trying to keep her too busy to get into trouble.”

Ralph chuckled.

“Back to the diamonds . . .” I urged. “Industrial uses?”

“Right. They’re coming up with new uses all the time. Since they’re the hardest mineral, they’re used to polish or degrade other material. Grinding and cutting purposes. Boring machines. They used a diamond window on a probe they sent to Venus. As technologies develop, so do the uses. And they only need a tiny part of a diamond. So sometimes they sell for much more than a gem would per carat. The ‘bort,’ as they’re called, will only be about one-sixtieth of a carat.”

“Oh, I see,” I said. “Can’t they manufacture diamonds now?”

“You better believe it. But to do it right takes a lot of time and expense—those of really high quality can cost more than natural diamonds, at least industrial-grade ones. Hey, you wanna hear something weird?”

“You bet I do,” I said.

“There’s a group out of Illinois that makes diamonds out of the ashes of loved ones. They made one out of Beethoven’s hair, and I heard they got Michael Jack-son’s hair from that Pepsi commercial where it caught on fire? So they’re gonna make diamonds out of that, too. I imagine they’ll be more expensive than real diamonds, for instance.”