“What does any of this have to do with Helena?” Ronald asked.
“Jeff planned to make off with the necklace,” I said. “Not accompanied by Lucinda, but Helena.”
“Yes,” Watson said. “Jeff figured it would be a couple of days, probably more, before Rachel realized the necklace was missing. He told Lucinda it would look suspicious if he suddenly left town, as he was in the middle of a job. Lucinda came to realize that in reality he was waiting for Helena. He finally told her, Lucinda, quite bluntly—and very foolishly in my opinion—he was in love with another woman, and they were leaving town together. With the Blackstone necklace. As Lucinda remembers it, he laughed at her, threw the other woman in her face. She followed him here, to the Lighthouse Library, when he came to fetch Helena on the night of May 2. Somehow Lucinda persuaded him to go for a walk with her before he talked to Helena. He might have been young and charming, but I suspect Jeff Applewhite wasn’t all that bright. Lucinda killed him.”
“Oh my gosh,” Charlene said.
That was what I’d suspected, but even so I was still shocked. Lucinda had initially told me she left North Carolina in 1993. Margaret Hurley had checked her records of their class and discovered that Lucinda had actually left in May of 1995. That might have been a simple mistake of the sort anyone would make, but Lucinda’s lie started me down the path of wondering what else she might be lying about.
“She killed him and dumped his body in the marsh. Probably not all that far from here,” Watson said.
“All the more reason,” I said, “for Lucinda to be susceptible to the idea that last night Helena rose from her own watery grave.”
“All these years, Helena thought Jeff had left without her,” Bertie said.
“Believing that turned her bitter,” I said. “Bitter, angry, betrayed, untrusting. Feelings that only grew and festered when she never heard from him again. I heard different accounts of Helena’s personality from different people, and when I realized it was around a particular time that she changed, I started wondering what might have happened. She’d never gotten on with her parents or her sister, so it couldn’t have been that. She told Tina she’d met a man and she was quitting her job and going with him to Hawaii. She never went to Hawaii, and a couple of weeks after the theft of the necklace and the disappearance of Jeff Applewhite, she turned on Mary-Sue and fired her. Mary-Sue, I suspect, was nothing but an outlet for Helena’s rage when she finally accepted the fact that, as she thought, Jeff had run out on her, taking the Rajipani Diamond and the other jewels with him.”
“Was Helena aware he had the necklace?” Charlene asked. “Did she know he planned to steal it and had done so?”
“I don’t know,” Watson said. “We probably never will. It’s likely he told her he was coming into some money, so she could afford to quit her job.”
“She knew,” I said. “Helena was a romantic, but not a total fool. She told Tina she and her Prince Charming were going to live on a private island in the South Pacific. She would have had some basis for believing they’d have the means to do that. Tina laughed at her. All the more reason Helena never confided to Tina or anyone else that she believed Jeff had run out on her. If she’d gone to the police when he and the necklace disappeared, Tina would have mocked her relentlessly.”
“That all makes a twisted sort of sense,” Charlene said, “but what does any of it have to do with The Celestine Prophecy and the withdrawal slip?”
Watson grinned. “Oh yes. That. Two days after Lucinda murdered Jeff, she came back to the Lighthouse Library. To gloat over what she’d done perhaps, or maybe out of regret. Maybe to see Helena, her rival. Probably a combination of all three. She took out a book and signed it “Jeff Applewhite.” If the police began searching for the necklace, she wanted to leave some evidence that Jeff had been alive and in Nags Head on May the fourth.”
“Star Wars Day,” Ronald said.
“What?” we chorused.
He pointed to today’s tie featuring colorful drawings of the robots R2D2 and C3PO. “May fourth is Star Wars Day. May the fourth be with you.” His voice trailed off. “Sorry. Please continue, Detective.”
“What was the significance of The Celestine Prophecy itself?” Charlene asked.
“I don’t know,” Watson said. “Never thought to ask.”
“That book was hugely popular in its day, particularly among those who liked the idea of abandoning their mundane lives and rushing off to seek enlightenment,” Bertie said. “I’d hazard a guess that Jeff Applewhite strung Lucinda along, probably telling her how meaningful the message of that book had been to him. Perhaps taking it out, in his name, was her final message to him.”
“Easy to seek enlightenment when you’re in possession of a twenty-five-million-dollar necklace,” I said.
“I’ve sometimes wondered why we’re so impressed by lumps of carbonated crystals,” Charlene said.
“In The Moonstone, the jewel everyone’s after is a holy relic,” Bertie said. “Oh, sorry, Sam. All that’s somewhat off topic. Please continue. What happened then?”
“At some point, Lucinda drove Jeff’s truck to the bus station in Elizabeth City and left it there. The police found the truck when they started searching for Jeff. It was in pretty bad shape, and they speculated he’d dumped it and caught a bus out of North Carolina, escaping with his ill-gotten gains. As for the copy of The Celestine Prophecy she’d taken out under Jeff’s name,
