Jewels in the Juniper - Dale Mayer Page 0,43
at her seriously. “I’m doing my part. How about you? Is the salad done?”
“Oops.” Doreen’s cheeks turned a bit pink, and she ran to get out the salad fixings. As she washed the lettuce, she said, “Oh, by the way, I got a really weird phone call while you were gone.” She proceeded to tell him about it.
“Zachary Winters,” he said, frowning.
“Yeah, I don’t know him, but he was trying to buy those jewels from me.”
“How do you think he found out about them?”
“My first thought is the jewelry store,” she said, “but I don’t have any basis for that.”
“Makes sense to me. I guess there’s no such thing as expectation of privacy on a deal like that.”
“Well, there should have been,” she said, frowning. “Jewelry stores need to be attentive to such matters because most of their clients have money. Obviously you don’t want to set up your clients for robberies.”
“I don’t know the name,” Mack said frowning. “Then it’s not an industry where I know any of the players.”
“I’ve got his number,” Doreen said. “He told me to make sure I had his number, in case I wanted to sell the jewelry. I was also thinking,” she continued, “that maybe he had something to do with the jewel theft, or at least knew about them, because, outside of the people at the jewelry store, who else would have known?”
“I don’t know,” Mack said. “When you think about it, the jewels were turned in to the police. So there could be all kinds of people from there who knew. And they could have mentioned them to others.”
“That’s true. Maybe your mom was asked to sell them when she turned them in.”
“No clue. Maybe we should find out.” While the pasta boiled, and Mack kept an eye on the sauce, he called his mother.
Doreen listened to his conversation with Millicent but only heard half of it.
When he hung up, he turned to Doreen and said, “She doesn’t remember much. At the time she thought several people had offered to buy them. But she wasn’t interested in selling because she didn’t consider them as belonging to her and my dad.”
“So how long do you think she had the house before she found the jewels?”
He shook his head. “Not too long. Not long at all.”
Chapter 14
Sunday Dinnertime …
“But,” Mack said. “There are pictures of the old house, way back before they bought it, and that juniper was encroaching the driveway badly. It was pretty big already.”
“Interesting,” Doreen said. “I wonder how long the jewels were there? Maybe they were buried in a rush with the intention of moving them later?”
“I don’t know. The velvet bag wasn’t superdeep into the tree, according to Mom. They found it when they were trying to get the roots out.”
“But why, if somebody hid it there, wouldn’t they have come back?”
“The most likely reason is they couldn’t.”
As soon as the salad was done, Doreen watched Mack drain the pasta, coat it with butter, and then served some on their plates. All the while her stomach grumbled. He gently scooped the salmon and dill sauce over the top. She stared at it in amazement. “You did that so easily,” she breathed.
“It is easy,” he said, as he put the pan back on the stove.
She was delighted to see there would be leftovers. He’d served himself a larger portion than hers, but she was okay with that because hers was still huge. And he’d done a lot of physical work today too. He carried both plates as she led the way, racing in front to let him out the kitchen door to the deck table. She quickly came back with the salad and cutlery. As they sat down, she marveled. “Whoever would have thought you could make something like this?”
He chuckled and said, “There are lots of leftovers.”
“Which is a good thing,” she said. “Now I can eat for the week.”
Mack just shook his head at that.
When Doreen bit in and tasted it, she moaned in joy. “Did you add lemon juice when I wasn’t looking?” she asked suspiciously.
“You videoed when I made the sauce.”
“But you sent me off to make salad,” she said. “So I don’t know what I might have missed out on.”
“It’s not hard,” he said. “You saw me make it.”
“I still haven’t cooked pasta on my own yet,” she admitted.
“You were supposed to do that from start to finish tonight,” he said with a crestfallen look.
“You’ll just have to come back and cook more,” she