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Carly’s early estimation of Isabelle took a shift. Maybe she wasn’t the spoiled brat she’d seemed when they arrived last night. What fifteen-year-old wouldn’t be upset to be dragged across the country in the middle of the night without any warning?
“Thank you. I’ll be in the attic if you need me. He won’t need to eat for at least another hour.”
Even an hour away from the tension in the living room would be welcome.
***
The missing surprise was still missing, but Lucas hadn’t expected to find it.
After two hours of opening every drawer in the furniture in the attic and poking through every piece of clothing, Lucas and Carly found nothing to indicate the surprise from the Fabergé egg had ever been with the items she’d inherited.
Carly’s dark hair had come partly loose from her ponytail, and she sat on the top step of the attic and exhaled. “I’m not surprised. If the surprise had been with the egg, it should have been somewhere in the chest. You even checked for a false bottom or side.”
He propped one foot on the rung of an old chair and nodded. “I checked all the drawers for false bottoms. I don’t think it’s here—which means our next logical step is finding the family that adopted your grandmother’s sister. Do you think it’s time to clue your sisters in on the search for her? Maybe it would defuse the anger I sensed downstairs.”
He hadn’t brought it up yet, but maybe enough time had passed that she’d be calm enough to discuss what he’d walked in on. The way her sisters treated her was a puzzle to him. There seemed no good reason for them to be so angry with her.
She uncapped a bottle of water and took a swig, and he did the same to give her time to decide if she would answer. Or not. Why should she trust him with the truth of what was clearly an unsettling family situation?
She twisted the cap back on her bottle and set it on the attic floorboard. “They’ve been mad ever since I turned twenty-five.”
So her sisters had been this way for five years. “What happened when you turned twenty-five?”
She lifted the platinum chain from around her neck to show him the dainty cross dangling from it. He’d noticed it before, but what did it have to do with her sisters?
“This belonged to Mom. It was never off her neck when we were growing up. After she died, we wondered what had happened to it, but none of us dared to ask Dad. Then he remarried and took off to California, and we forgot about it. The day after I turned twenty-five, I got a box from him. This necklace was in it along with a note from Mom. She knew she was dying, and she left the necklace to me.”
“But why did he keep it from you until you turned twenty-five?” And an even bigger question was this: How could a necklace have the power to disrupt the entire family dynamic?
“In the letter Mom said she didn’t want me to have it until my sisters were old enough to understand. Her mother had given it to her when she married, and it had belonged to her mother. It was supposed to pass down to the oldest daughter. Which was me.”
He nodded. “Makes sense.”
“I think my sisters could have accepted it if it had been only the necklace, but there were also some bonds that matured when I turned twenty-five as well. The payout was for fifty thousand dollars. I was married then, but I planned to split the money with my sisters.” She looked down at her hands, and she swallowed. “The money was in our joint banking account, and I had written out checks for Emily and Amelia before going to a flea market. Eric was working so he didn’t go.”
Lucas tensed, already sensing how this was going to go down. “He spent the money?”
Her hands twisted in her lap, and she nodded. “He put a down payment on a new house.”
He blew out a breath. “Wow, just wow. And your sisters didn’t take it well?”
“I never told them. I didn’t want them to hate Eric. They didn’t know I’d planned to share it—they only knew I’d gotten an inheritance from Mom and they hadn’t.”
“So why did she leave the money only to you?”
Her face went pink, and she bit her lip. “When the girls were thirteen and fifteen, they found some cash our mom had saved. It was in a baggie in the kitchen drawer. Two hundred dollars was a lot of money to them. It was a lot to our mom too. They took it and went clothes shopping. Mom had a fit about it, and she didn’t think they’d put the money in the bonds to good use. I always believed she would have wanted me to split it with them once I was sure it wouldn’t be frittered away.”
“But Eric’s actions prevented you from doing that.”
“It was too late to change. The money was gone, and Eric thought he was doing the right thing by trying to use it for our future.”
Even now she was making excuses for him. Maybe she hadn’t been the poor wife he’d thought. “Did he know you planned to split it with them?”
She nodded. “I’d told him, and we argued about it. We could have gotten the house without that big down payment, but cutting that much off the mortgage made the payments easier. When I left on Friday morning for the weekend, I thought he understood how important it was to me to share with my sisters. By the time I got home Sunday night, it was done.”
“How’d he close on a house without you?”
“I’d signed before I left, and he was handling the last of the closing. So it was too late to change when I got home.”
