“Nancy, hey. You’re not supposed to—”

“Yes, I know.” She shook coffee grounds off the paper. The page was covered with scribbled handwriting, marked up with small edits, some words crossed out, others scribbled in:

will come as a shock to you girls, and no doubt you think me Machiavellian and foolish for creating this elaborate system of checks and balances, but after what happened to my father, after what this thing did to my marriage, I feel I cannot be too careful. Just please know this: I made these arrangements not because I do not trust you, but because I love you, and because you love each other. Love, like any precious thing, should be protected by every means possible. The older I get, the more I understand that it is the only thing worth protecting.

Then a couple of lines, both of which had been savagely crossed out, as if Lucia had been frustrated, searching for the right words:

The necklaces are the key to

You must use the necklaces together to discover the secret of

The writing continued with a new paragraph:

You are each in your own unique way great lovers of beauty—music, literature, and the visual arts, and so I devised the

And the page ended. She could hear Lucia’s soft, accented voice echoing in her head.

“What is that?” Liam picked his way across the rubble.

“It’s a letter.” Her voice cracked, broke. “To us. From Lucia.”

She held it up for him. He scanned it rapidly and met her gaze, his mouth grim. “Wow,” he said. “That’s very weird.”

“A draft,” she whispered. “It’s a first draft of a letter to us.”

“Right.” He paused, thoughtfully. “But if this is the draft…”

“Then where the hell is the finished version?” she finished.

They stared at each other. She wanted to grab his arm, for balance. The ground beneath her was just a thin crust of apparent normality, and beneath it, an abyss of dark, shifting possibilities.

“Why didn’t we find the finished letter?” she demanded. “Why?”

He pondered it. “Could she have mailed it to you?”

“Eight days have gone by. It takes two, four at most, for a letter to get to the city. It was an important letter. She was putting a lot of thought into it. This did not get forgotten, or lost in the mail. No way.”

He finished the thought. “You think it got lost in some more sinister way.”

“‘After what this thing did to my marriage’?” she quoted softly. “What thing? What the hell is this thing that she’s talking about?”

“Maybe it’s what she installed the safe for,” he suggested.

She glanced up at him, startled. “Safe?”

His eyes widened. “She didn’t tell you?” Nancy’s blank face answered his question. He whistled silently. “A few weeks ago, she hired me to install a hidden safe. In her closet upstairs. That’s how we met. Sorry I didn’t say something before. I assumed you knew.”

The woman from the forensics team came into the kitchen and frowned at her. “Miss, I asked you please not to touch anything.”

“I found something.” Nancy held out the letter. “The investigating officer needs to see it. Please, be on the lookout for more pages.”

The lady twitched the sheet of paper out of Nancy’s fingers with her own gloved ones. “I’ll bring it to her attention. Since you can’t keep your hands to yourself, could you wait outside until we’re finished?”

The lady sternly escorted the two of them out onto the stoop, and they looked at each other, feeling abashed as naughty children.

“I want to look at that safe,” Nancy said fretfully. “Not that I could open it. I don’t have the combination. I don’t imagine you…?”

He shook his head. “Lucia had to choose the combination herself.”

Nancy chewed her lip. “I wish I had a copy of that letter. God knows when they’ll let me see it. I wanted to show it to Nell and Vivi.”

“One second.” Liam went to his truck and pulled a paper from his dashboard. He plucked a pencil from his shirt and scribbled against the hood of his truck. He handed it to her. It was the text of Lucia’s letter, written out in a bold, angular cursive script.

“It’s maybe not word for word, but that’s the gist of it,” he said.

“That’s incredible! Do you have a photographic memory?”

“Not really. In an hour, I wouldn’t be able to write more than a rough paraphrase. And it has to really interest me. Otherwise I don’t retain a damn thing.”

Nancy broke eye contact and busied herself folding the paper into a pocket-sized square. “Well, thanks for being so interested, I guess.”

“Anything to do with Lucia and you interests me. Don’t thank me for something involuntary.”

“Involuntary?” She let out a self-conscious snort. “Like sneezing?”

“More like breathing.”

His low, quiet response abruptly halted that very bodily function to which he was referring. She shoved the square into her pocket. “Um, great. Thanks. Since they’re not going to let me in, I might as well—”

“The investigating officer’s going to want to talk with you,” Liam said. “I told her you were on your way. She should be back soon. You haven’t had breakfast, have you?”

She floundered, thrown off course. “I…um…huh?”

“Breakfast?” His subtle smile gleamed. “First meal of the day? Familiar with it?”

“Ah, I’ve…I’ve had coffee,” she offered.

“You’ve got me beat, then,” he said. “There’s a diner up there on the main strip. We could get some food before you talk to the cop.”

She started groping for excuses. Calm down, birdbrain. At mealtimes, normal people get food without reading any big, hidden meanings into it. Lighten up. Her stomach wasn’t in line with the lecture, though.

“Lunch would be great,” she said faintly.

Chapter

4

Nancy regretted her decision when she was seated across from Liam in the pink, madly mirrored interior of Luigi’s Diner. She wished she’d left her hair loose, worn contacts instead of glasses. Something low cut. Not that she had any cleavage to speak of.

He just waited, sipping his tea, and after a couple of minutes of that, her control snapped. “What is it?” she demanded. “What the hell are you waiting for? What are you looking at?”

He discreetly looked away. “I was looking at you. You look…”

“What?” she snapped. “Unapproachable? Unfeminine?”

His mouth twitched. “No, not at all.”

“What, then?” she almost shouted.

“You look good, Nancy.” His voice was velvety, soothing.

Nancy wrapped her arms across her chest. “Sorry. Those long, significant silences of yours are making me twitchy. I appreciate you being nice, but tell me the truth. I look like hell, don’t I?”

His eyes narrowed. “You look stressed and scared. But that doesn’t keep you from looking good. I’m sorry about the long, significant silences. They’re hardwired into me. I’m not much of a chatterbox.”

“That’s okay.” She stared down into her coffee and fished Liam’s copy of Lucia’s letter out of her pocket. “I am scared. I’m scared that things didn’t happen the way the cops said they did. She wrote this letter, but we didn’t find it. And your classic butthead burglar looking to trade a TV or a diamond for a hit of crack or meth—that guy is not going to take this letter. That guy does not give a shit about this letter.”

Liam nodded. “No. You’re right. He doesn’t.”

His quiet agreement rattled her even more. She realized she’d been hoping that he would talk her down from this terrifying line of reasoning. “So who did take it? And what the hell is this ‘thing’ she’s referring to, and what’s the deal with these pendants? And if she had this great big hairy family secret, why did she not tell us before?”