Something hissed in a skillet on the stove. Eleanor didn’t sit down. She stayed by the doorway and spoke quietly, without wasting words. She explained about the jewelry.
Not as a ghost story, not as a threat. Just that some gold pieces carry the weight of whatever was put into them. The people holding them now weren’t to blame for not knowing. She had come to take them and deal with them safely.
The woman stood listening, then slowly sat down on a chair. “He had two pendants and a chain with a cross,” she said quietly. “I found them in his jacket after…”
She didn’t finish. “After the funeral. I didn’t know where they came from. I thought about throwing them out, but I couldn’t quite do it.”
She stood, went into the other room, and came back a minute later holding the pendants and chain out in front of her, the way people hold something that doesn’t feel like theirs. “Take them,” she said.
“They never sat right with me anyway.” Eleanor took them, wrapped them in the cloth she had brought. Then she said something brief and quiet to the woman that Daniel didn’t catch.
The woman nodded, and something in her face changed just slightly, as if a pressure had eased. The second address was in another neighborhood, farther out. They took a city bus. A young woman around thirty opened the door with a baby on her hip.
The baby was maybe eight months old and immediately fixed Eleanor with the serious interest only babies and very wise people seem to have. This conversation went differently. “What jewelry?” the woman said when Eleanor explained why they were there.
Her voice was sharp, wary. “My husband died. The police inventoried everything. I didn’t hide anything, and I don’t have anything that isn’t mine.” “I’m not saying you hid anything,” Eleanor said evenly.
“I’m saying there may have been a ring or bracelet among his things that wasn’t his. He may not have known where it came from. I’m asking.”
The woman stared at her hard, with the kind of tension people wear when they expect a trick. The baby reached for a button on her robe and began turning it with deep concentration. Eleanor didn’t push.
She simply stood there and waited with the same patience she seemed to bring to everything. Daniel stood a little behind her and studied the painted hallway wall. Three minutes passed, maybe.
Then the woman said, “Wait here,” and went back into the apartment without closing the door. She returned a few minutes later. In her hand was a gold bracelet with a red stone.
She set it on the little table by the door without looking at them. “It always felt like somebody else’s,” she said, no longer sharp. “Not his taste. I never wore it once…”
