Jewels in the Juniper Read online

  Mack snorted at that and hung up.

  Doreen grinned and looked down at her phone, realizing just how much she liked talking to him. She placed the phone on the counter, then put on a pot of coffee, and said to her critters, “You know what? It’s lunchtime.” She was kind of bored and restless, but, at the same time, she was happy. She’d done her day’s work at Millicent’s, and Mack would owe her money again for the gardening she’d done. Millicent had tantalized Doreen with the thought of another case, but she was happy to put it all off to one side and just rest for a bit.

  Maybe a secondhand bookstore would be a good idea. She’d love to grab an armload of books, then come back and chill on her deck. Speaking of her deck, … maybe she should mark off the accumulated materials from her supply list, so she knew what she would still have to buy. Or maybe it was really just a time to do nothing and to relax. She could visit Nan.

  She leaned against the counter as she contemplated her afternoon. It was hard to imagine it could be a bad afternoon when it was a beautiful sunny Friday.

  As soon as the coffee was done, she grabbed a cup and walked to her kitchen table, putting down the cup for now because it was too hot to drink. She stared at the papers and files all over the small room and snatched up the basket of newspaper clippings.

  Bob Small. She went through the clippings. She hadn’t done anything about that serial killer yet. She didn’t want to think of it as something that could wait, but it was a big project, and she needed to be at her best to find the clues. And apparently he was suspected of killing over a dozen people, so she didn’t want to get into something so horrific without having a fresh notepad and her brain at least turned on. Right now, it felt like her brain sat on the back burner on simmer, humming away, not doing anything useful.

  With her cup of coffee in hand, she grabbed her deck supply list, stepped outside, and marked off what she now had for materials versus what she would need. As she studied her list, they didn’t have even half the materials yet, but they were a good one-third in. Which meant the cost, as far as she could recalculate, would probably be somewhere around $1,700 now. That was getting a little bit closer to doable.

  The decking boards would be pricey; plus she still needed a few more of the big crossbeams. And, of course, the railing was a horrific cost. The steps did alleviate the need for a railing. She would still put a railing down one side of the house for Nan, in case she needed it to get up and down in later years. With that, Doreen walked back inside, tossing the pad of paper on the kitchen table. Then she went back outside, sat down on the edge of the deck, and just stared out at the backyard.

  Now that she’d told Mack it was okay to contact his brother for a meeting, she was already wishing she hadn’t. It would bring up something she just didn’t want to deal with. But she still held so much anger and outrage that her husband, soon to be ex-husband, had treated her as he had. And even more so her own divorce lawyer. Even if Doreen didn’t get anything from her husband, which was less important now that she was possibly getting a lot of money from the auction of Nan’s antiques, Doreen didn’t think her divorce lawyer should get away with doing what she’d done. That wasn’t fair. But then, not everybody looked at life the way Doreen did. And it was a little difficult to get people to understand her perspective too.

  Still, enough time had gone by that she could look at her marriage, and divorce, a little more objectively and see just what a fool she’d been. She’d been so caught up in her cloistered world that, when it had come time for her husband and her divorce attorney to pull their little shenanigans, Doreen hadn’t seen it coming.

  Just then Thaddeus walked beside her, hopped onto her knee, and stared up at her, his head tilted.

  “What’s the matter, buddy?”

  He tilted his head to the other side, looked at her again, and then cocked his head the other way.

  “Don’t you worry about me, sweetie.” She smiled, reached out, and gently brushed the feathers on his neck and along his back. “We’re doing just fine.”

  “Thaddeus is here,” he said gently. “Thaddeus is here.”

  Her phone rang, but she didn’t recognize the number. “Hello?”

  “Doreen, it’s Millicent,” Mack’s mother said. “I found the jewels.”

  Doreen straightened. “Seriously?”

  “Yes,” she said, her tone wild with excitement. “Do you want to come and have a look?”

  “Do I ever! We’re on our way.” Doreen reached down and picked up Thaddeus, tucking him up onto her shoulder, and said, “Come on, big guy. Let’s go for another walk.”

  When he heard her say walk, Mugs jumped up and down. She put him on the leash just because, and the four of them walked over to Millicent’s place. It wasn’t that far away, and now she had a reason to be returning, and it wasn’t for gardening.

  As she walked up to the front door, Millicent opened it and said, “Come in. Come in.”

  “You said you never told Mack about this, right?”

  “I don’t think so, but honestly I don’t remember. It’s also why I had so much trouble finding where I’d been keeping them all these years.”

  “Exactly where did you find them?”

  “We used to have a big juniper out front.” Millicent walked over to the living room window and pointed at the corner of the property between her place and the next property along the road. “A really big one was there. We had this storm one day, and it snapped the top right off and split the trunk. So we cut it off, but then there was this big nasty stump. We left it for a long time. Of course, every once in a while, we dug into the trunk and tried to rot it out, and it finally worked.

  “But we still had to work at it to get the rest of it out. It was really bothering my husband, and, one day, when the city guys were around here doing some work with equipment, we asked one of them to just hit the stump a few times with the bucket on his machine, so we could rip it up from the roots. He did as we asked, and, after they were gone, we spent the weekend tearing it apart. And that’s when I found this little tiny bag.” As she spoke, she held out a very old and faded velvet bag. It was a dark green color.

  Doreen reached out a hand for it. “Wow,” she said. “This is a jewel bag too, isn’t it?”

  “That’s exactly what I thought,” Millicent said, as she led the way into the kitchen. “I did write down a few notes in my journal about it.”

  She flicked through one of the journals Doreen had seen before.

  “Here. I just put JJ because I didn’t want anybody to think we had jewels here on the property.”

  “Of course,” Doreen said. “Mack wasn’t very old back then, was he?”

  “He was just an infant. My husband and I discussed what to do about them, but we just tucked the little bag of jewels away, thinking the right answer would come to us. We had no way to identify whose they were, but we tried, and the police tried. When the jewels weren’t claimed in the allotted time frame, the police returned them to us. Yet, at the same time, we didn’t really feel we had any right to them, so they ended up just sitting here.”

  Doreen carefully poured the jewels into her hand. “These are amazing,” she marveled. “The gems have been cut beautifully.” She picked up one green stone and held it up in the light. It twinkled and flashed with an absolutely glorious color. “Did you ever get them appraised?”

  Millicent sat down beside her. “No, we didn’t. We felt like something was important about them, but we didn’t know how to handle them, so we didn’t.”

  “How do you think Mack will feel after hearing about this now?” Doreen asked.

  Millicent wrinkled up her face. “I can handle my boy. He’ll be upset. He’ll be even more upset that I didn’t tell him a long time ago, and I’ll just say it never occurred to me. Honestly, I had forgotten all about it until you were talking about your ‘ice pick and ivy’ thing.”

  “And then, of course, you thought, ‘jewels in the juniper,’ and you remembered these.” />
  “Exactly. And, like I said, I now want you to track down who they belong to. They aren’t mine. That’s for sure.”

  “And so you just kept them?”

  “We figured we’d hold on to them, waiting to find the true owner. Because we didn’t know what else to do.”

  “You could have sold them,” Doreen said gently. She didn’t know anything about their financial affairs, but they obviously weren’t wealthy, unlike Doreen’s soon to be ex-husband. He would have had these appraised and sold in a heartbeat.

  “No, it wasn’t really our thing,” she said. “We knew they weren’t ours.”

  “Never a thought to give them to Mack?”

  “Honestly, we put them away and forgot about them,” she admitted.

  “Good,” Doreen said. “I’ll get started. Although I’m not sure just where or how.”

  “I’m giving them to you,” Millicent said. “And you can figure out who owned them.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  Millicent looked up at her, and Doreen could see the tremble of her lower lip. “It always bothered me, not knowing,” she said, “so I hope you can.”

  “If I can’t, I’ll give them back to you. How’s that?” Doreen said.

  Millicent shook her head. She closed the jewels inside Doreen’s fingers. “No, you need them. Nobody is giving you anything for all the help you’ve shown this town. I don’t need the jewels. Mack doesn’t need the jewels.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Doreen said. “They could be worth tens of thousands of dollars.”

  Millicent’s eyebrows raised, and her eyes widened at that. She shook her head. “They’re not ours, and that’s the bottom line. They’re not mine, and I don’t feel like I can keep them.”

  “Let me see what I can do,” Doreen repeated, “but you haven’t given me a lot to go on.”

  “No, I haven’t.” Millicent stared the jewels, as if mesmerized. “I honestly don’t know what to say.”

  “Do you have a copy of the report that says you handed them over to the police, by any chance?” she asked hopefully.

  Millicent looked at her with surprise and then shook her head. “No, I don’t. I don’t know if Mack might be able to access something like that.”

  “It was probably too long ago,” Doreen said, “unfortunately.”

  Chapter 2

  Friday Afternoon …

  Back home with the valuable little bag sitting on her kitchen table, Doreen had good reason to set her security system again. Not that she ever stopped using it because there’d been enough trouble here at home that she hadn’t found any sense of peace without it. But it was a makeshift system, a hand-me-down of sorts. Mack would leave it in place until she had enough money to put in a proper one—something she needed to put on her to-do list to handle down the road.

  Within minutes of getting home, she had felt her energy draining. She kept staring at the jewels, wondering how she would even begin to find out who owned them. She should have asked Millicent for information on the property, such as how long she’d lived there but, from what Doreen already knew about Millicent and her husband, they had been there for decades. And the juniper tree was clearly already large at the time of its fall, so somebody had either lost the jewels much earlier or had deliberately planted the bag somewhere at the base of the tree. And then, as the tree grew, so did the roots around it, getting bigger and bigger.

  On a whim she sat down at her laptop and uploaded an image of the jewelry bag, and then she looked for a match. It was just a green velvet bag. She quickly got a hit on many different jewelry bags. And most had some emblem from the jewelry store. Curious, she picked up hers and carefully put the jewels into a little clear glass bowl, then carried the bag outside into the sun, where she could study the bag better. It was dirty, but maybe, if she cleaned it up, she might find something.

  Oh, but there might be DNA on it. At that thought, she couldn’t just wash it. She went back inside, grabbed a small tea towel, and gently wiped at the area over her kitchen sink, trying to brush off the dirt that had soaked in. Indeed, something was there, and, with a little brush she used for cleaning the spouts of teapots, she gave the bag a careful bit of a scrub, then added warm water to the brush and lightly brushed the bag again, trying not to remove anything but the dirt. She then took it outside into the sun to dry.

  Once that dried a bit, she took a picture of what she could faintly see, then enlarged it. Sure enough, she found the emblem of a jewelry store. Surprised, she sat back. She didn’t know why she should be surprised, because, of course, these were jewels and perhaps expensive jewels at that.

  So what would make more sense than these gems coming from a jewelry store? She downloaded the image and then tried a reverse lookup, seeking something that would match the emblem. There it was: Johnson and Abelman Jewelers. A quick search revealed it was an old company in Kelowna that had gone bankrupt about forty years ago.

  She picked up her phone and placed a call. As soon as Millicent answered, Doreen said, “Millicent, I forgot to ask you for a copy of your journal entries on the jewels while I was there. If there is no police report, your records might help pinpoint the dates regarding finding the jewels and when the police returned them to you.” Doreen held on until Millicent returned to the phone with the information asked for.

  “We found them April 12, 1982.” She sounded winded. “Oh, and I received them back thirty-three days later, on May 15.”

  “Good enough,” Doreen said, writing down the dates. “Have you ever heard of Johnson and Abelman Jewelers?”

  “Oh my,” she said. “I haven’t heard that name in forever.”

  “It just happens to be their emblem on the jewelry bag,” Doreen said. “So I wondered if you maybe knew that store. They went bankrupt about forty years ago.”

  “And that would be around the time we found the jewels. Although it was probably not quite that long ago. Mack is thirty-eight already, so he was just tiny at the time of this discovery in the juniper. We told him when he was a teenager. Though I can’t remember why.”

  “Okay,” Doreen said. As it was now, Mack probably didn’t even remember a word about it. Millicent had said something about him being busy at sports, but that didn’t make any sense either. But then, Millicent’s memory was not exactly something Doreen could count on.

  However, the store going bankrupt about forty years ago potentially matched with the time frame Millicent had found the jewels. So that was all good. Figuring out who had owned the store and finding someone alive who still remembered and could provide a clue regarding who worked there would be difficult.

  Doreen went through all the data she could find on the store with various internet searches. The owners, the Johnsons, had been an old family name in Kelowna, and, when the daughter had married, the son-in-law had become part of the business. By all appearances they had been one big happy family. And yet Doreen knew things weren’t always the way they appeared.

  As she researched the second name, Abelman, she realized that was the son-in-law. They had been twenty-eight and twenty-seven at the time they got married, and only a few years later the son-in-law was brought into the family business on an equal partnership basis. But, as their only daughter, she would inherit everything anyway when her parents passed. That information Doreen had gleaned from the historical society.

  Apparently Johnson and Abelman Jewelers was a highly regarded business, and the family had been extremely wealthy. The business had been failing and finally went under after the parents died unexpectedly, leaving the younger generation in charge. Apparently the son-in-law didn’t have the same head for business that his wife’s parents had. At least that was what Doreen surmised at the moment. Back then in the early eighties, diamonds were still a girl’s best friend, but Kelowna wouldn’t have been that large, so how much business would there have been for a prestigious diamond store?

  However, the jewelry bag Millicent found contained more than just
diamonds. Doreen studied the rest of the jewels, wondering what had happened back then. She did a search on the Abelman family and found Aretha and Reginald Abelman. Further research revealed that Reginald Abelman hadn’t lived that much longer than Aretha’s parents. He’d overdosed on drugs a few years later. Doreen frowned at that.

  “That seems a little too convenient,” she muttered. She headed back into Aretha’s family history. She was twenty-eight at the time of her marriage and only thirty-eight when her husband died, so she would have been in her mid-thirties when the family business went under. So currently she would be seventy-five. Doreen sat back and smiled, reaching for her phone. “Good afternoon, Nan,” she said cheerfully.

  “Well, it’s almost evening,” Nan said, with a happy lilt in her voice. “I just came in from lawn bowling. A lovely game.”

  “Were you actually playing with the balls,” Doreen asked, “or were you just betting on who would win?”

  “Both,” Nan said sternly. “It’s good exercise.”

  “Good,” Doreen said. “I was really hoping you weren’t just betting against the winners.”

  “No,” she said. “You’ve got to bet against the losers too.”

  “If you say so,” Doreen said, rolling her eyes, because she knew Nan had never made a stupid bet in her life.

  “I’m just about to head down for dinner,” she said, “unless you’ve got a better idea.”

  “Oh, no,” Doreen said. “I’ll just sit here and have a sandwich at home.”

  “Did you finish all that zucchini bread?”

  Since the zucchini bread had been given to Doreen days before, and Mack had been to visit several times, it was long gone. “I did,” Doreen said, laughing, “but that’s okay. I’m happy to have a sandwich tonight.”

  “You eat too many sandwiches,” Nan fretted.

  “No, I don’t think so. Besides, I’m still not much of a cook yet.”