The Girl at the End of the Line Read online

  “Listen, Molly, honey,” said the little woman, lowering her voice and leading Molly away from the gravesite to the back of the tent. “Maggie gave me somethin’ for you, somethin’ she wanted you to have when she was gone.”

  Tess dug deep into her enormous handbag.

  “She gave it to me that day she got sick, before the ambulance came. Maggie had it on a chain around her neck. She just pulled it right off. Broke the chain. Her head was hurtin’ her something awful, but she knew what was happenin’. Kept talkin’ ’bout how people was always gettin’ robbed in hospitals and such places.”

  Tessie pulled her pudgy hand out of the handbag. She opened her fingers triumphantly beneath the shelter of her ample bosom to reveal a ring that took Molly’s breath away: a large, deep green stone entwined in a thick golden band.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Molly, stunned.

  “I didn’t want to take it, but Maggie made me,” said Tessie, pressing the ring into Molly’s hand. “You know how stubborn she could be. Said I could give it back if she got better, but if not, she wanted you to have it. Then the ambulance came and took her away.”

  Nell came over for a closer look, her curiosity apparently overcoming her reluctance to be in clutching range of Tessie.

  Molly studied the ring. The thick band was crafted to look like the stem of a flower. It was deep yellow in color and surprisingly heavy for its size. The clear green stone was square-cut and perfectly faceted.

  Molly’s field was antiques, not jewelry. The ring looked expensive, but she was well aware that jewelry was a trap for the unwary. Things often were not what they appeared at first glance to be. Still, a bold, well-crafted piece like this had to be worth a few hundred dollars to somebody, Molly knew, even if it was just costume jewelry. If it was real … well, she couldn’t even guess at a price. Her appraisal expertise was strictly limited to antiques.

  Who could have given Margaret Jellinek such a thing? wondered Molly—she surely wouldn’t have bought a ring like this for herself. Grandma just wasn’t the sort of woman who was interested in flashy jewelry, even if she could have afforded it, which she couldn’t. She had barely been able to buy herself a new toaster oven when the old one broke and had even shared a telephone with Tessie to save money. Other than a small savings account and the drab furniture from her apartment, there had been no assets for the nursing home to take before admitting her.

  Molly turned the ring over and looked on the inside for lettering that said 14K or GOLD-FILLED or some other clue that could tell her something about it. What she found was a faint mark that seemed to read SC & P.

  “I guess it’s pretty valuable, huh?” said Tessie’s faraway voice.

  Molly snapped back to the present. She had forgotten for a moment where she was. Nell was staring at her with a quizzical look. Two cemetery workmen were standing by the open grave, waiting to get on with their business. The sky was gray. The rain had finally stopped.

  “Did Grandma say where she got this ring?” asked Molly.

  “No,” said Tessie. “Just that she’d had it since before she got to Pelletreau. I figured maybe it was from a beau, but then of course, I’m just a hopeless romantic. Y’all don’t have any idea?”

  Molly shook her head.

  “Maybe it was an heirloom. Something from her family. Did she ever talk about them?”

  “Not really,” said Molly, flustered. “Grandma didn’t like to talk about the past. She said all her family were dead.”

  “Well, I’m just glad you have it now, honey,” said Tessie, reaching over and patting Molly’s hand. “That’s the important thing, that’s what Maggie wanted. I’m surely gonna miss her. Look, I better scat before I get all weepy again. You girls take care of yourselves, you hear?”

  Tessie wrapped her arms around Molly and kissed her fervently on the cheek, as if she were kissing a precious child farewell. Nell endured a hand squeeze. Then they watched their grandmother’s best friend scurry back to her big old Pontiac and drive slowly off.

  “What do you think?” Molly said to Nell, holding up the ring, when Tessie was out of sight. “I know I shouldn’t be thinking about money at a time like this, but I can’t help myself. I’ve been a dealer too long, and this looks real to me. Then again, what do I know about jewelry?”

  Nell didn’t answer. She looked at the ring, then stared at the grave, her eyebrows scrunched together in thought.

  “It’s turning out that there was a lot about Grandma we didn’t know,” said Molly in a sober voice. “First she’s this big Broadway actress. Now she has a ring on a chain around her neck that nobody’s ever seen, but that she leaves to us as some kind of legacy. Do you leave your grandchildren a fancy-cut piece of glass?”

  Nell didn’t look up.

  “I don’t much feel like going home right away. Maybe we should show it to Oscar, what do you think?”

  Nell didn’t say what she thought. But she started walking toward their van.

  When Oscar Winnick moved down from Detroit in 1961, he had been the only black jeweler in Pelletreau.

  Molly knew that he had had some trouble at first. Older dealers had told her that Oscar’s first store downtown was firebombed and that he had marched to Selma with Martin Luther King. Oscar himself would never talk about those days, however, and things had changed a lot since then, even in North Carolina.

  Oscar now lived in a cheerful Victorian house in what used to be an all-white suburb and helped out three mornings a week at the jewelry store in Pelletreau’s most fashionable mall that his son had taken over from him. As far as Oscar was concerned, he was just another senior citizen, though there weren’t many eightyyear-olds who taught themselves Greek all winter then spent the summer working eight hours a day in their vegetable gardens. Since his wife’s death a few years ago, Oscar’s garden had grown to the size of a small farm.

  Molly had known Oscar since she was sixteen years old. She had bought a box lot of odds and ends at a country auction and had found a strand of pearls hidden inside a leather change purse. Molly couldn’t wait to cash in on her good fortune, and Oscar had been the only jeweler open on a Sunday.

  Her pearls had turned out to be plastic. Oscar had been nice about it, however, and had shown her how she could tell phonies herself by running them across her teeth. They had been friends ever since. Oscar still kept his hand in the jewelry game even in semiretirement. He still gave Molly a fair price for what she brought him and good advice whether she wanted it or not.

  Molly found him digging up radishes in his backyard half an hour after she had laid Margaret Jellinek to rest. He knelt on a tarp against the still-wet ground; a little dampness never stopped Oscar.

  “My condolences about your grandmother,” he said in his precise baritone as she and Nell approached.

  “How did you hear about that?” asked Molly, surprised.

  “The obituaries. These days, they’re about the only part of the paper where I can read about people I know.”

  “Thanks, Oscar. She was a nice lady. You would have liked her. I’m sorry you two never met.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” said Oscar, brushing black soil from a clump of radishes and tossing them into a waiting bushel basket. “You and your sister look real pretty. Don’t think I’ve ever seen you in dresses before.”

  Molly winced. She had always hated grown-up clothes.

  “And you’re not going to again anytime soon,” she declared. “We just came from the cemetery. I have something I want you to look at.”

  “Wash your hands first. Nell, too. Come on. I’ll take you inside.”

  Oscar took off his gloves and threw them in the basket with the radishes, then stood and headed for the back door.

  “This is important, Oscar,” protested Molly, following.

  “So’s washing your hands after you get back from the cemetery,” said Oscar, holding the door for her and Nell. “Old Jewish custom.”

  “Funny, you don’t look Jewish.”
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br />   “In the jewelry business you meet a lot of Jewish people, and you come to respect what they have to say. At my age I’m practically a professional funeral-goer, and I can tell you for a fact that it’s a good thing, psychologically speaking, to wash your hands of death. Sanitary, too. Bathroom’s by the front stairs.”

  “I know where it is,” said Molly, reaching into her pocket. “But you look at this in the meanwhile.”

  Molly placed the ring on the kitchen counter and followed Nell through the door to the hall.

  When they returned, Oscar was squinting at the green stone through a loupe and shaking his head.

  “Where did you get this, Molly?” he said, strangely sober and very businesslike.

  “It was my grandmother’s.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s glass, right?” sighed Molly.

  “Hardly. It’s the best emerald I’ve ever seen.”

  “An emerald!”

  “You’ll have to give me a little time to raise the money if you want to sell it.”

  “What’s it worth?”

  “To me, about forty thousand dollars.”

  Molly opened her mouth, then closed it. Nell held a hand to her forehead and collapsed theatrically into a chair at the kitchen table. Oscar’s mutt, a playful little hairball named Pythagoras, attempted to revive her by licking her hand.

  “You’re kidding, aren’t you?” Molly finally managed.

  “All right,” smiled Oscar. “You drive a hard bargain. Forty-five. And that’s my best offer. Interested?”

  “I don’t know,” stammered Molly, glancing at Nell. “We have to think about it.”

  “Up to you,” said Oscar, handing her back the ring. “You might be able to get more from a dealer in a bigger city.”

  “You know we wouldn’t give it to anyone but you.”

  “Well, I appreciate that, because you know I intend to make a profit on you. A small one, of course. You did okay this time, kid.”

  Molly tried to smile. None of this made any sense.

  When she had first come to Pelletreau, Margaret Jellinek had barely been able to feed herself and her daughter. Molly clearly remembered the horror stories of hunger and privation that her mother had told about her own childhood in order to get them to eat their vegetables. There must have been truth to some of those tales. Now it appeared that Margaret Jellinek had had a forty-five-thousand-dollar emerald ring on a chain around her neck all that time.

  “Do you have any idea where this ring might have come from originally, Oscar?” Molly asked.

  “There was an SC & P mark on the inside, pretty worn, but I could still make it out.”

  “Yes, I saw that. What does it mean?”

  “It was the retailer’s mark. Scanlon, Carrier and Polk, the Boston equivalent of Tiffany. They went out of business about thirty years ago.”

  “Boston, Massachusetts?”

  “Of course, Boston, Massachusetts. You don’t get stones like this and high-quality custom settings in Boston, Arkansas. That any help?”

  “Not much,” said Molly. “But thanks anyway, Oscar.”

  Molly didn’t know anything about Margaret Jellinek’s childhood except that she had grown up in New England. The fact that the ring had come from Boston seemed to connect it to her youth. Was it an heirloom? Had it been a present from a suitor? Unfortunately if the store had been out of business for three decades there would be no way to trace the original purchaser.

  “Well, just give me some time if you decide you want to sell,” said Oscar. “Like I say, I’ll have to make some calls to raise that kind of money. You might put it somewhere safe in the meantime. It really is a beautiful stone.”

  Forty minutes later the beautiful green stone that hung like a fruit from a golden stem was in the safe-deposit box at Pelletreau Trust and Savings, alongside various family papers, the deed for their house, and the passports Molly kept ready for the Mexican vacation that she planned to take with Nell some day.

  Molly hadn’t said a word during the whole drive from Oscar’s house—perhaps some kind of a record for her—though Nell didn’t appear to have noticed.

  Since their mother’s death Molly’s life had been an endless scramble for money. Yet even with twelve-hour days and seven-day weeks she was barely able to keep their heads above water. Plunging property values in Pelletreau had decimated Molly’s equity in the house. Any cash she had left over after paying the bills went back into inventory, which seemed to move more and more slowly these days. Margaret Jellinek’s funeral had all but wiped out their cash reserve.

  Suddenly, however, Molly had a ring that she could sell for enough to turn everything around. A ring that was the only thing left of her grandmother. A ring Maggie Jellinek had apparently refused to part with, no matter what.

  “You don’t think she stole it, do you?” Molly asked in a quiet voice, finally putting into words what had been bothering her since Tessie had pressed the ring into her hand at the cemetery.

  Nell raised an eyebrow and scrunched her lips into one of her famous don’t-be-an-idiot looks.

  “But it just doesn’t make any sense!” Molly exclaimed, as she turned the van into the driveway of Enchanted Cottage Antiques. “Grandma was about as sentimental as an Otis elevator. I don’t care whether that ring was a family heirloom or party favor from the Shah of Iran, you know she would have sold it in a minute to feed herself and Mom unless there was one hell of a good reason why she shouldn’t. And if it was so important that she shouldn’t sell it, how can we?”

  Nell wasn’t paying attention, however. She was staring out the window at a white Mercury Sable that had turned down Porcupine Road behind them and now continued on, down the road in front of the store.

  Molly caught only a glimpse of the man behind the wheel as the car sped away. He was wearing sunglasses. A red-haired man with a bushy mustache.

  Three

  “There it is again!” exclaimed Molly, glancing out the front window. “A white Mercury Sable.”

  Nell was sitting by the cash register, brushing epoxy onto the two halves of the broken foot of a nineteenth-century ironstone creamer. She didn’t look up from her delicate work.

  “Either they’ve got a white Mercury Sable convention around here somewhere,” said Molly, “or I’ve been seeing the same car all week. I just wish the road weren’t so far away so I could see who’s doing the driving. Do you think it’s that same man with the red hair and the mustache?”

  Molly instantly regretted her words. She hadn’t meant to say so much. There was no point in troubling Nell with her irrational worries. Not Nell, of all people.

  “Of course, it is a pretty common car. It’s probably not him at all. I’ll bet you think I’m nuts, don’t you?”

  This time Nell did look up—and nodded enthusiastically.

  Molly and her sister hadn’t been out of the shop for several days now, trying to adjust to a world without their grandmother in it, living on the peach cobblers, country hams, and tuna-noodle casseroles that Margaret Jellinek’s friends had thoughtfully dropped off.

  Summertime was tourist time, and there was enough traffic heading toward Charlottesville on U.S. 29 to assure a small but steady stream of customers into Enchanted Cottage Antiques. A few people had actually bought things, mostly ten-dollar odds and ends, but Molly had also sold an American Empire mahogany chest of drawers with a heart inlay on the black splash. It had been in the shop for years and Molly had despaired that anyone would ever take it off her hands. Miraculously a Yuppie couple had left a four-hundred-dollar cash deposit on it yesterday and promised to return with the four-hundred-dollar balance when they picked it up tomorrow or the next day on their way back to Atlanta.

  Despite the prospect of being a little ahead for a change, Molly had been having a hard time keeping her mind on business. Margaret Jellinek’s emerald ring kept burning a hole in her pocket. What they could do with forty-five thousand dollars! But how could they sell something like
that without knowing why Grandma had held on to it all these years?

  The ring wasn’t the only thing that was troubling Molly. She was also worried about the way they had found their grandmother at the nursing home. The picture of Margaret Jellinek in her bed, her pillow on her chest, kept flashing in Molly’s brain like a neon question mark.

  Why, Molly wondered, if Grandma were having another stroke, would she have taken her pillow out from beneath her head and placed it on her chest? It made no sense. Throw it on the floor, yes, but would she have had the strength to do even that if she were dying? Certainly no nurse would have put a pillow on a patient’s chest. If anything, a nurse would have plumped the pillow up and put it where it belonged.

  So, why had Grandma’s pillow been on her chest?

  Of course, dying people did inexplicable things, Molly knew. Maybe Grandma had just wanted to lie flat. Maybe she had gotten the pillow out from under her head and rested it on her chest until she could decide what to do with it. That made sense.

  But the image of Margaret Jellinek, cold and dead, with the pillow on her chest wouldn’t go away. Molly couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  Other pictures kept springing into Molly’s head, too, ones that were alive, almost like a little movie. Hands taking the pillow out from behind Margaret Jellinek’s head and forcing it down over her face. A brief moment of struggle, then stillness. The hands discarding the pillow, its work done, and leaving it where it falls, there on Margaret Jellinek’s chest.

  Who would do such a thing?

  There was only one candidate. The man who had been with her right before she died. The redheaded stranger with the bushy mustache—the man who may have shown up again at the cemetery driving a Mercury Sable and who might have driven by the house a dozen times over the last few days. Had he somehow found out about the emerald ring worth forty-five thousand dollars that was supposed to be on a chain around Margaret Jellinek’s neck? People had been murdered for much less; nothing at all had been taken from Molly’s mother by her killer. Except her life.