“Sorry, Major. You know how it is. A flurry of false alarms that turn out to be nothing, but we’ll still check out every one of them. What about you?”
Dwight handed Lewes the inventory and pointed to an item down near the bottom of the page. “According to this, a box containing five thirty-six-caliber cartridges is stored in the safe in Judge Morrow’s office.”
“Bullets?” Mayhew looked shocked.
“Show us the safe,” said Lewes.
The director obediently opened a door in the far wall.
There were very few books in the library, but Peter Morrow’s office was a grander version of my own and the shelves here were packed with law books of every description.
While we watched, he moved aside a set of Black-stone’s
“Now let me think.” Mayhew went over to the huge mahogany desk that dominated the room. He hesitated and looked at each of us with a nervous laugh. “I suppose all of you can be trusted not to speak of this?” It was less a question for us than a reassurance to himself. He pulled out a side drawer, turned it over, gave an annoyed click of his tongue, and tried the adjacent drawer. There on the bottom was the combination. “In Judge Morrow’s own writing,” he told us.
Agent Clark took a penlight from his jacket pocket and carefully examined the exterior of the safe before touching it. I heard him mutter, “Hell. Knob and handle both too grooved to hold prints.”
His partner held the drawer up so that he could read off the numbers while he twirled the dial. Clark tugged on the handle and the door of the safe opened smoothly.
The diameter was only about eight inches yet surprisingly deep. He aimed his penlight inside. “Empty.”
“Empty? That’s impossible!” Mayhew exclaimed, almost elbowing the two bigger men aside so that he could look in.
“Don’t touch,” Clark said sharply as Mayhew put out his hand to the safe.
“Peter Morrow’s signet ring,” Mayhew moaned. “Elizabeth’s gold locket. Catherine’s mourning parure.”
“What’s a parure?” asked Clark.
“A matched set of jewelry. In this case, a necklace, bracelet, and earrings of onyx and braided hair.”
Clark frowned. “Hair?”
“It was her daughter Elizabeth’s hair. I know it sounds morbid, but people used to take comfort from wearing the hair of a loved one.”
“Is the set valuable?”
“To the Morrow House, it’s priceless. On the open market? It’s a matched set of known provenance and the glass cases of the bracelet and necklace are set in twenty-four-carat gold with intact hinges, so perhaps two thousand dollars. The hairwork is incredibly fine.”
“And those other pieces? The signet ring? And gold locket?”
“No more than five or six hundred. We kept them in the safe simply because we have no secure way to exhibit jewelry yet.”
“Is this the ring?” asked Clark. He held out a small domed box that had once been red velvet but was rubbed down almost to the cardboard backing. Inside was a heavy gold ring inset with an onyx signet.
“Yes! Where on earth did you find it?”
“In Jonna Bryant’s pocketbook,” said Lewes.
“In her purse? I don’t understand. And what about the locket? The mourning jewelry?”
“Sorry. This was it.”
C H A P T E R
22
It was only 9:45 when we left the Morrow House that morning, pointedly invited by Lewes and Clark to take ourselves elsewhere while they gave Jonna’s desk and computer a thorough examination. They had also called for their evidence truck to process the wall safe on the off chance that Jonna or someone else had left prints.
Mr. Mayhew had feebly denied that Jonna would have stolen from the safe, yet insisted that only the two of them knew that the combination was written on the underside of that drawer.
“He said the same thing about the keys to the locked key cabinet, too,” Dwight told me, turning his own key in the truck’s ignition, “and he’s only been there eight or ten years, so somebody had to show him. One of the board members or someone in that Historical Society, maybe.”
“Did she take them to sell?” I wondered aloud. “Raise the five thousand that way?”
“Never happened.” He sounded angry at me for even suggesting such a thing. “I don’t care how desperate Jonna was for money. It would never cross her mind to steal. Period.”
I knew better than to argue, but that didn’t stop my re-bellious thoughts. Only last week, he had arrested one of his mother’s most trusted employees. Miss Emily was the principal at Zachary Taylor High School and it turned out that the manager of the school’s cafeteria had embezzled almost thirty thousand over the last two years.
