food, since you’ve been so busy getting into my family’s affairs,” he said.
She stared at him in surprise, and then she knew. “Ah,” she said. “I guess you talked to your mother, didn’t you?”
He put down his fork very precisely, then glared at her. “What on earth did you say to her?”
“Nothing, why?”
“Well, she has suddenly decided you’re the answer to everything, and you’ll find out exactly who those jewels belong to.” And then he stopped, leaning forward. “But what the hell are the jewels? Where did they come from, and what’s this got to do with my mother?”
“Didn’t she tell you?” Doreen couldn’t imagine her only telling Mack a little of the story.
Mack shook his head. “Only that she had put you on to your next mystery and that you would solve something that had worried her for a long time.”
“Wow,” Doreen said, sitting back in surprise. “I think she just threw me to the wolves.”
At that, Mack sat back and laughed. “You know what? She just may have done exactly that.”
Chapter 4
Friday Dinnertime …
Doreen chuckled. “So, let me explain.” Then she told him about his mother telling her about the jewels she had found years ago.
Mack stared at her. “How come I’ve never heard a word of this?”
“I was a little confused if you’d heard or not. One time she told me that you didn’t know, but she also said something about having mentioned it to you, but you were always off doing sports. So, I don’t know exactly what the deal was.”
“I’ve been a cop for fifteen years,” Mack said. “She had fifteen years to tell me.”
“She did,” Doreen said, as she picked up a bite of broccoli, then crunched her way through it and moaned. “Gosh, this is so good.”
“You’re not getting off that easily,” he said.
“Me?” she said. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Where are the jewels now?”
“On my kitchen table,” she said, “but you also must know that she did hand them over to the cops. They held them for thirty-plus days, so now they are technically hers.”
“So nobody picked them up?”
“Nobody picked them up, and, not only that, the cops back then couldn’t trace them.”
“Right,” he said. He shook his head and ate another large bite of noodles. “This is really good,” he said. “Normally when I come here to eat, I have to cook first.”
“And like I said”—she gave him a stern look—“if I’d known you were coming and were expecting to eat, I could have ordered twice as much.”
“Good point,” he said. “We’ll want something for dessert to help fill in some holes.”
“Maybe.” She pushed back her empty plate. “I wonder if he gave me more than normal.”
He looked at the container. “What did it cost you?”
“Nine dollars and forty-five cents—or something like that,” she said, reaching into her pocket to pull out the change.
He looked at it and said, “That’s a lot of food.”
“I know,” she said. “Maybe it was an overlarge helping. I don’t know. He did say that, even if I didn’t have money, he’d feed me.”
At that, Mack chuckled. “That could be a really good deal for you,” he said, shaking his head.
“And, of course, I could never take advantage of it, except maybe if I was super hungry and truly needed the food,” she said quietly. “I’m grateful I’m not in that situation at the moment.”
“Hey, speaking of jewelry,” he said, letting her comment slide.
She appreciated the change of subject. The last thing she wanted was to have more discussions about her dire circumstances.
“The jewelry that your husband still has. Is it really yours?”
“I’m not sure how that works under the law,” Doreen said, “but he gave them to me. Like the emerald was a wedding gift. The pearls were my birthday gift, and there were matching earrings. There was a beautiful sapphire pendant he gave me for an anniversary.”
He just stared at her. “When did you wear them?”
She really hated to tell him this part. “When he told me to. Sometimes we argued about it because I’d want to wear a piece, and he wouldn’t get them from the safe. Other times he wouldn’t like my choice, and he’d want me to put on something else.”
“Controlling, wasn’t he?”
She nodded. “Very. I never had access to the safe, so I could never get the jewels out on my own.”
Mack continued to eat.
Doreen, on the other hand, had finished all her food. But watching him eat made her hungry for a little more. “We shouldn’t have eaten all the