The Necklace They Gave Me Last novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Safe on Marlow Street

Dermot drives her to her mother's shut-up apartment after her cards are frozen. In the safe is the founder necklace her father told the board was sold.

Headlights swung across the oak trees and stopped beside me at the gate.

Dermot leaned across the seat and pushed the passenger door open.

"Get in," he said.

"I'm calling a car."

"Your card is declined. Dorian was on the phone with the bank during the toast."

I stared at him.

"You saw him freeze my accounts, and you stood there."

"I saw him on a call. I only guessed what it was when you looked at your phone."

He said it flatly, with both hands on the wheel.

"Next time, guess faster," I said.

He took that without answering.

It was the longest sentence he had said to me in three years.

I had no cash and no ride, and sixty phones were still pointed at the lawn behind me.

I got in and shut the door.

He pulled out onto the county road before I had my seatbelt fastened.

"Where?" he asked.

I held up the card from the butler's charm.

He read the address at the next stop sign, and his jaw moved.

"Your mother's apartment. Nobody's opened that door since she died."

"Somebody has the key. I do."

"Susannah, your father will have people on that street by morning."

"Then drop me at the corner and go back to your dinner."

"I'm not going back to that dinner."

"Why not? You got your necklace."

He took the black stone out of his jacket pocket, rolled down the window, and held it out in the dark.

Then he pulled it back in and put it away again.

"Because of what it cost you," he said.

He did not say anything else for the first hour.

Then my phone buzzed with a text from my brother.

"Come back tonight and apologize to Dad on camera. I'll unfreeze your cards in the morning."

I stared down at the screen.

"Don't answer him," Dermot said, without looking over.

I typed "No" and sent it.

The city came up around us in the dark, and I watched his hands on the wheel, the knuckle he had broken at nineteen, the cuff he had unbuttoned.

I knew those hands.

I knew exactly where they had been three years ago, in the pool house, on the night of my mother's anniversary.

I had woken in the grey light to my father's name on my phone, and I had left Dermot asleep.

"I'll set terms," I said, as we turned onto Marlow Street.

He glanced at me.

"A week," I said. "Separate rooms. You drove me here, so you can sleep on the couch and leave in the morning. And no touching."

"No touching," Dermot said.

"None."

"Fine."

He parked in front of number fourteen, a narrow brownstone with the shutters closed.

The iron key turned in the lock on the second try.

The door swung open on a hallway that smelled of dust and old lilies.

Sheets covered every piece of furniture in the front room.

On the mantel, a framed photograph had slid on its stand.

I straightened it.

My mother stared out at me, laughing, in a green dress.

She wore a gold chain with a heavy dark pendant at her throat.

I had never seen it before in my life.

My chest tightened, and I carried the photograph into the bedroom with me.

Behind her bed there was a built-in cabinet, painted shut, and under the paint a keyhole.

The iron key fit.

The door opened on a steel safe with a dial.

"What's the combination?" Dermot asked from the doorway.

"I don't know."

I knelt and put my fingers on the dial.

My mother had been a careful woman.

I tried the date of my own birthday.

The dial clicked and the handle gave.

Inside was a velvet case no bigger than a book.

I lifted the lid.

A gold chain lay in the grey satin, and from it hung a pendant of dark green stone as big as a quail's egg, set in a ring of gold leaves.

I knew it from the photograph.

It was cold, and it was heavier than it looked.

Dermot made a sound behind me.

I looked up.

His face had gone completely white.

"Dermot?"

"That's the founder's necklace," he said. "That's the Sterrett piece itself. The first one, from eighteen eighty."

"You've seen it?"

"In your father's study, once. In the glass case. Before your mother died."

He came into the room and bent over the case without touching it.

"Susannah, your father told the board it was sold. Fifteen years ago, to pay the estate taxes."

"It's not sold."

"No," he said. "It's been sitting in a wall in Brooklyn the whole time."

I closed my hand around the stone.

"Then what did my father give everyone tonight?"

Dermot stared at the case, and then at me.

"Copies," he said. "He gave them copies."

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