Chương 2
“I’m all right,” she said.
“You’re not.”
“I have been less all right.”
It was such a dry, stubborn answer that Amelia almost smiled. Her cheek hurt when she tried.
A man near the entrance announced that the police were on their way. Vanessa spun toward him.
“Who called them?”
“I did,” Amelia said.
She had pressed the emergency button on her phone while Vanessa was shouting at the guards. The call remained connected in the pocket of her dress. She could hear the dispatcher faintly asking whether anyone needed medical assistance.
Vanessa stared at her as if the slap had been a private disagreement Amelia had rudely made public.
Adrian looked at Amelia for the first time with something other than assessment.
“You called before you knew who I was,” he said.
“I still don’t know who you are.”
Several people exchanged glances.
One of the black-suited men looked down, hiding what might have been amusement.
Adrian did not smile. “That may be useful.”
The first police officer entered four minutes later, though the boutique clock claimed it had been eleven. Two more followed, then paramedics. The crowd was separated. Phones were lowered but not turned off. Names were taken. Nobody was allowed to leave until officers recorded contact information, which caused immediate irritation among customers who had seemed delighted to film but less interested in becoming witnesses.
Vanessa asked to speak to the officers privately. Adrian asked for his mother to be examined. Amelia asked whether someone could bring her ice.
The requests overlapped.
An officer with tired eyes held up both hands.
“One at a time.”
The phrase had no effect.
Amelia found herself seated on a velvet bench beside Isabella while a paramedic examined them. The boutique’s warm lighting, designed to flatter skin and make silk glow, now made every bruise look theatrical. Amelia hated that. She hated how easily pain could become part of a display.
The paramedic asked if she had lost consciousness.
“No.”
“Nausea?”
“No.”
“Blurred vision?”
“Only when I look at her.”
The paramedic followed Amelia’s gaze toward Vanessa and gave a brief, unwilling snort.
Isabella looked at Amelia with interest. “You are funny.”
“I’m concussed.”
“You just said you weren’t.”
“I’m reconsidering.”
The humor disappeared when the paramedic touched Isabella’s wrists. The older woman inhaled sharply and tried to disguise it as a cough.
Adrian stood several feet away, still enough to look carved from the same dark stone as the doorway. Yet Amelia saw his right hand opening and closing at his side. Each time one of the officers spoke to Vanessa, his fingers tightened again.
A detective arrived after the patrol officers found conflicting statements and a crowd of recordings. She was a compact woman named Lena Ortiz who wore a navy blazer over a wrinkled shirt and listened without appearing impressed by anyone’s wealth.
She asked Vanessa where the bracelet was.
Vanessa pointed to the glass counter.
It lay under a clear evidence cover improvised from an empty display dome. Heavy gold links, an oval clasp, and a small blue stone set near the hinge. Amelia had noticed it before the slap only because Isabella had been clutching it while Vanessa gripped her wrists.
“It belongs to the boutique,” Vanessa said. “That woman removed it from the case.”
“My mother has a name,” Adrian said.
Detective Ortiz glanced at him. “And I’ll get it from her directly.”
A slight shift passed through the room. Adrian was accustomed to people moving for him. Ortiz did not.
Isabella gave her name, address, and date of birth. Her voice became more formal with every answer.
“Did you remove the bracelet from the display?”
“I asked to see it.”
“And then?”
“I held it.”
“Did you attempt to leave?”
“No.”
Vanessa interrupted. “She put it in her pocket.”
Isabella looked down at her cardigan. It had no pockets.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
Vanessa’s jaw tightened. “Her bag, then.”
The bag sat on the floor beside the chair, a soft brown leather purse with a broken zipper pull. An officer had already checked it. There was no bracelet inside.
“I recovered the item,” Vanessa said. “That is why it’s on the counter.”
“From where?” Ortiz asked.
Vanessa looked toward the guards.
The younger guard stared at the marble floor.
“The suspect’s hand,” Vanessa said at last.
Isabella’s dignity thinned. “I am not a suspect because you dislike the way I entered your store.”
“This has nothing to do with appearance.”
“Of course not,” Isabella said. “It never does.”
Amelia glanced at her. There was weariness in the old woman’s voice that did not belong only to the past fifteen minutes.
Detective Ortiz asked why Isabella wanted to see the bracelet.
Isabella’s fingers moved toward her throat, then stopped.
“Because it was mine.”
Adrian’s head turned.
Vanessa laughed once. The sound was too loud and too brittle.
“That bracelet came from an authenticated private consignment.”
Isabella kept her eyes on the gold beneath the display dome.
“It belonged to my daughter.”
The room seemed to move farther away from Amelia. She heard a customer’s phone tap, the radio crackle, the paramedic tearing open a packet. Small sounds, each one suddenly precise.
Adrian’s face remained composed, but his hand stopped opening and closing.
“Lucia’s?” he asked.
Isabella nodded.
He looked at the bracelet as if it had become dangerous.
Detective Ortiz asked who Lucia was.
“My sister,” Adrian said.
Isabella corrected him softly. “His younger sister.”
“Where is she now?”
Neither answered.
Amelia watched Adrian’s eyes and understood before anyone said it.
“She died,” Isabella said.
Vanessa folded her arms. “A resemblance does not establish ownership.”
May you like
“No,” Isabella replied. “But the repair on the clasp might.”
She described a narrow crescent of solder beneath the hinge, added after Lucia had broken the bracelet against a railing when she was sixteen. The repair, she said, had been done by a jeweler in Little Italy who had since retired. Lucia had complained for years that the clasp pinched her skin.
