Our gazes meet. We both reach out, but then he draws back. “Go ahead,” he says. “You’ve earned it.”
With shaking fingers, I ease a corner of sticky silver adhesive from the white plastic and tamp down my excitement when I feel the lumps below the tape.
Millimeter by millimeter, I work the glue away, and then . . .
“Wow . . .” Admiration fills Max’s voice.
The beauty of the stones steals mine.
We’ve found the rubies.
And the gems are as stunning as anything God has placed on the face of his earth.
We stare, silent. Then, I don’t know how much later, Max reaches out and laces his fingers through mine. I curl mine around his.
Our gazes meet again.
And hold.
After the police, FBI, Interpol, Myanma dignitaries, and Mrs. Pak have again left the house, Max and I collapse on the couch.
“Bird poop, huh?” my most eloquent cohost asks.
“You gotta admit, not many are going to go looking there for a fabulous fortune.”
“Aunt Weeby thought of it. She had Rio X-rayed.”
“You’re right. She did.” I wink. “See? Brainy women run in my family.”
He laughs.
So do I. Then I sigh. “Still can’t figure out why, of all the people Mr. Pak knew in the U.S.—the whole world, actually—he chose me.”
Max’s admiring gaze makes me warm all over.
“I started to tell you earlier,” he says. “You didn’t want those stones for yourself. You never really went looking for them. You cared more about Mr. Pak and who’d killed him than anything else.”
I shrug. “Mrs. Pak said he believed I’d return the stones once I figured out where he’d hid them. What else was I going to do? You know? I couldn’t keep them. I sure couldn’t sell them. They’re not mine.”
He smiles.
I’m so glad I’m sitting. This guy’s more lethal than Tiffany’s gun.
“That’s it, Andie. That’s what I mean. Tiffany saw the stones for what they could do for her. Roger saw the stones as another trophy. You see the stones as someone else’s property.”
I give his answer some thought. “Actually, Max, the stones, and everything else, are God’s. He only puts things here on Earth for us to use and give him the glory. We all come to an accounting before him sooner or later. When that day comes, I want to be on his good side, since he’s done so much for me.”
My cohost again says nothing, studies me some more. Then, in a quiet, serious voice, he says, “I think there’s more I’m going to learn from you than just about gems. You up for it, Teach?”
I came home for a more peaceful life. Who’d a thunk I’d find so much excitement doing TV in plain old Louisville? Who’d a thunk I’d be forced to share the screen with a California gem-dunce surfer boy?
And live to . . . what? Tell about it? Do another show? Get along with him?
I look at Max, take a deep breath, and say, “Let me get my gem-jar trays.”
Ginny Aiken, a former newspaper reporter, lives in Pennsylvania with her engineer husband and their three younger sons—the oldest is married and has flown the coop. Born in Havana, Cuba, and raised in Valencia and Caracas, Venezuela, Ginny discovered books at an early age. She wrote her first novel at age fifteen while she trained with the Ballets de Caracas, later to be known as the Venezuelan National Ballet. She burned that tome when she turned a “mature” sixteen. An eclectic list of jobs— including stints as reporter, paralegal, choreographer, language teacher, retail salesperson, wife, mother of four boys, and herder of their numerous and assorted friends, including the 135 members of first the Crossmen and then the Bluecoats Drum and Bugle Corps— brought her back to books in search of her sanity. She is now the author of twenty-six published works, but she hasn’t caught up with that elusive sanity yet.
