“By the way, it was an anxiety attack, and he’s fine now. I was quite annoyed at being called away, and I was planning to go back to the party. I called my sister at the hospital in Miami to see how her husband was. He’s fine, but Nell wanted to talk to me. She took the phone and went in the hall and started in on an incoherent story about her father
taking Landy’s necklace away from her and I had to save it.”
“Why would he take his daughter’s necklace from her?” Gemma asked.
“My brother-in-law thought it came from the church jumble sale. He thought it might be valuable and someone could be missing it.”
“Nice guy.”
“He is,” Tris said. “But the truth was that Nell had lied to her mother about where the necklace came from.”
“Ahhhh,” Gemma said. “And the plot thickens.”
“Right. My devious little niece stole the necklace from me.”
“Okay, so now I’m confused. Wouldn’t you have noticed that you owned a necklace encased in lead and silver?”
“I would have if I’d ever seen it. Nell told me over the phone that she just happened to find the necklace behind the man.”
Gemma smiled. “I guess you know what that means.”
“Oh yes. Every child who has ever lived in this house since it was built has been fascinated by ‘the man.’” He motioned for her to follow him as he walked toward the fireplace. On the far end of the big mantel, a four-inch square of wood had been inserted. On it was carved the profile of a handsome young man. He wore the stiff collar of the early nineteenth century, and his hair curled about his neck. His cheekbones were high, his chin firm. He looked almost exactly like Tristan.
“An ancestor of yours, I take it,” Gemma said.
“I assume so. I always thought he looked like my father, but my mother said he looks like all the Tristans. The name goes back a long way in my family. Anyway, no one knows who he is for sure, and as kids all of us wondered about him. One of our favorite rainy day things to do was to make up stories about him. Colin used to say he was a man who fought for justice in secret.”
“That sounds like him,” Gemma said, smiling. “It’s my guess he was the father of Louisa’s son.”
“That’s what I think too, but that wasn’t something the adults were going to tell the children, was it? Whoever he is, no one today knows for certain why he was chosen to be immortalized in the end of a fireplace. My mother wanted to take the tile out and frame it. She was always afraid it might catch fire, but Dad wouldn’t let her.” Tris looked at Gemma. “It’s a good thing she didn’t.” Reaching out, he touched the bottom left corner of the square, then the top right, then he pushed in the middle. The little square sprang open to reveal a hole inside the mantel.
“Nell figured out the code to open that?”
“All by herself,” Tris said.
“I am proud to know her.” Gemma leaned forward to look inside the hole. “It looks as though it was made especially to hold the necklace in its box.”
“That’s what I think too.” He pushed it closed, then stepped back and motioned for Gemma to try it.
She got it on the second try. “Truly amazing that the child figured that out.”
“And told no one!” Tris added. “She knew that if she did, someone would take the box away from her.”
“Then she lied her way into getting her mother to help her open it,” Gemma said in admiration. “And it was very clever of her to hide it in plain sight around the neck of her teddy bear. It was as though she was daring any adult to see what she’d done.”
“That’s my dear little niece,” Tris said. He went back to the dining area and they began to clear the table. “So, anyway, Nell was on the phone to me and practically hysterical because her father was going to take the necklace away from her. Of course all the problems were caused by the lie she’d told, but she didn’t want to own up to that little detail.”
“Interesting that she was telling you the truth of what she’d done and not her parents.”
Tris gave a little laugh. “Why do you think she loves to stay with me? I let her get away with murder. You should have heard Addy when she found out that I let Nell ride in Mr. Lang’s truck with him.”
“He’s not—?”
“No, no,” Tris said. “No deviant sexual behavior, but the man is eighty-five years old and he’s still driving.”
“In that case, I agree with Nell’s mother,” Gemma said.
“Yeah, me too,” Tris said. “It won’t happen again, but the problem is that I let Nell wrap me around her fingers, and she knows it. She knew that I’d be more interested in her story than in trying to teach her not to steal. I leave that up to her parents.”