“My father fought the insurance company for a long time,” Rachel said. “The company refused to pay on the grounds that I’d been negligent in handling the necklace. Which I had. My parents found themselves out of a heck of a lot of money. They’ve never forgiven me for that. A few years later, I hired a private investigator to search for Jeff Applewhite. He had no more luck than the police. He located Jeff’s family back in Iowa, but they said he didn’t keep in touch much once he moved to North Carolina, and they never heard from him again after April 1995. Remember, this was before the days of texts, cheap phone calls, and everyone having e-mail. People had to make an effort to keep in touch.”
Josie laughed as she put a giant wooden bowl of salad on the table. “Sounds like the Dark Ages.”
“Also known as our youth, right, Ellen?” Rachel smiled at my aunt, and I thought how very lucky Rachel had been. She could so easily have continued down that dark path.
“Jeff’s family and friends in Iowa said they had no idea what could have happened to him. My investigator believed them. His mother in particular was upset just talking about her missing son. She insisted Jeff would not have cut off contact completely, but my investigator said that didn’t mean much. If he was on the run he’d have known not to call his family. Nags Head people told him they thought Jeff had a girlfriend, but no one knew her name or anything about her. His friendships, it seemed, were as nebulous as mine.”
“Could it have been Helena Sanchez? Or her sister, Tina?” I asked.
“It could have been anyone,” Rachel said. “No woman reported him as missing to the police or came looking for him. Not officially anyway. The police believed she left town with him. No one reported a woman missing around the time, so she was probably just a drifter too. It’s likely the necklace was broken up, the smaller jewels pried out of it and sold separately, the big diamond cut up into smaller ones. It really was an ugly thing. The story got a lot of press, nationally as well as locally. If a woman had suddenly started sporting rare and precious jewels, people would have talked.”
Josie came back, carrying a tray loaded with plates and cutlery, a bowl of potato salad, and a pineapple and mango salsa to accompany the fish. Uncle Amos carefully lifted the fish off the grill and laid it on a platter. It smelled marvelous.
“Thank you for telling me your story,” I said as I held out my plate to be filled.
“Not a problem, Lucy,” Rachel said. “I’m ashamed and embarrassed at losing my grandmother’s necklace, but I’ve come to believe my grandfather might have considered it a price worth paying to get me off that track of self-destruction.”
“One more quick question,” I said, “What would you estimate is the value of the necklace today?”
“Twenty-five million dollars,” Rachel said. “This fish smells and looks delicious, Amos. Thank you. Now, Ellen, I want to hear this idea of yours for a fundraiser for the museum.”
Chapter Thirteen
I climbed into bed with my iPad and Charles, full of fish and salads and some of Josie’s marvelous pastries that she’d brought for our dessert. I searched for more information about the Rajipani Diamond and the Blackstone family treasure. I found a picture of the necklace and studied it. I agreed with Rachel: it was incredibly ugly, designed to show off excessive wealth rather than good taste. I chastised myself for the unkind thought. Rachel said her grandfather had loved her grandmother very much. Perhaps, he gave her this necklace, thinking it matched the strength of the feelings he had for her.
The main feature was a ginormous white diamond, about the size of a golf ball, which the article confirmed was a hefty one hundred and one carats, set in gold and surrounded by sapphires. The pendant hung from a chain covered with smaller diamonds, more sapphires, and rubies. A smaller circle of equally precious gems lay inside the first.
Not something that’d drop between the floorboards and be forgotten, or would easily slip into the Nags Head criminal underworld. If Nags Head had a criminal underworld. That was something I didn’t know and didn’t want to know.
Articles on the necklace told me the main feature, the big diamond, was named the Rajipani Diamond after the Indian prince who’d had it cut into its current form. It had been found in South Africa in 1903 and had passed through several hands, eventually ending up with Prince Rajipani, who had it cut and inset into the necklace. Around the time India got its independence, the newest Rajipani prince had fallen onto hard times and was forced to sell almost all his family’s assets at fire-sale prices. Apparently his son had later gone into the movie business and made a new fortune as the producer of Bollywood flicks. The articles I read said nothing about him trying to get back the diamond, and there was no indication he’d ever come under suspicion for the theft.
From what I read, if he wanted it, he had the funds to simply offer to buy it. No need to pretend to be an American drifter working construction and hanging around beach house parties waiting for a chance to grab it.
I couldn’t help but think about our book club’s current selection, The Moonstone, which concerns the search for an Indian jewel known as the Moonstone. In the book, members of a religious cult come to England in pursuit of their sacred jewel, stolen by one Colonel Herncastle, who gave it to his niece for her eighteenth birthday. And there the story begins.
As far as I could tell from my search of the internet, the Rajipani Diamond had no supernatural or religious significance. It was simply worth a heck of
