Chapter 14 - The Missing Pearls
The velvet box was gone.
Nate turned the service corridor upside down before Marta took his arm. "Stop. Think. Who handled the cart?"
The hotel coordinator had moved everything from the ceremony to a locked storeroom. There, beneath ribbons and unopened gifts, Nate found the box. It was empty.
The pearls were missing, along with the small envelope his mother had hidden beneath the lining years before. As a boy, he had watched her tuck a brass key inside it.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Owen asked.
"I forgot. It was one of her silly habits. She called it her secret pocket."
"Your mother wasn't silly," Marta said sharply. "She kept important things where people who chased money would never look."
Security footage showed a maintenance worker entering the storeroom during the cancelled reception. He wore a borrowed badge. The worker had not been on the staffing list.
Nate brought the clip to the investigators. They identified him as a former employee of Graham's. That afternoon officers located the man at a roadside motel. The pearls were in his car, still wrapped in tissue. The key was gone.
"Who has it?" Nate asked the detective, Marisol Vega.
"We are asking him that," she said. "And we need you to stop trying to run the investigation for us."
Nate had the good sense to apologize.
Vega told them the safety deposit box had been accessed that morning using a key and a forged authorization letter. The bank employee had challenged the identification, and the visitor fled before opening the box.
"So whatever he wanted is still inside?" Rachel asked.
"It should be. The bank has secured access pending verification."
Nate sat down hard. His mother had protected something for years without explaining why.
May you like
Then Vega showed him a photograph of the person who tried to open the box.
It wasn't Graham. It was Sloane's mother, Patricia Avery.
