asked.
“Nope.” He picked up a small draw-string canvas sack. “What’s this?”
We both looked at the contents as he spilled them into his hand. Scoobie held a bunch of shiny stones that looked like diamonds and three bracelets that appeared to be gold, and two that looked like heavy-duty, rust-colored plastic.
Our eyes met. “This is worth at least ten cups,” he said.
CHAPTE R TWO
“WOW.” I bent to pick up a bracelet that had dropped on the floor and Scoobie dumped the rest of the bounty on the card table.
“Wonder how long it’s been there?” he mused.
I glanced back at the wall. “It’s newer wall board than the rest of the house. That’s why I was having trouble pulling it down all the way. Still, it’s probably been there two or three decades, at least.”
We stared at the jewelry. “Who owned this place?” he asked.
“Same woman who had stuff in the auction, Moira Peebles. She hadn’t paid taxes for the eighteen months before the hurricane. That’s why the house was in the tax sale so soon after Sandy.”
Aunt Madge told me that Mrs. Peebles had deemed herself fed up with tourists tromping through her yard and had moved in with her daughter in Newark. I also knew that the house’s value would have declined when the real estate bubble burst, so the storm could have been simply one more reason to let go of the house.
“Yeah, I remember now,” Scoobie said.
“I looked at the first few pages of the title search. She owned it for less than twenty years. Before that, the woman who owned it had it for maybe thirty-five years.” As an appraiser, I’m used to looking at all kinds of documents related to real estate. But while I’d glanced through all the paperwork at settlement a couple of weeks ago, my focus had been more on all the work to do before I could move in than on a pile of papers.
Scoobie’s eyes went to the shell-shaped, battery-operated clock that hung crookedly on the wall that separated the living room from the kitchen. “I’d like to stay and play bob for baubles or something, but I have a couple of things to do before I go back to campus.”
“You want a ride?”
“Nope. Bus as usual. You okay with having this stuff here?”
“Probably better if I take it to Aunt Madge’s.” I grinned at Scoobie before my eyes went back to the jewelry. “She’ll probably know about somebody who had stuff like this stolen thirty years ago, and maybe she even knows the person who owned this house back then.” Aunt Madge is a walking local historian. On the other hand, she prides herself on not being a busy body, so there was a chance she wouldn’t know any really good gossip about possibly stolen jewelry.
“It might not be something sinister,” Scoobie said, and I detected his smile before I looked at him. “Could be an eccentric homeowner hid it and her descendants have been looking for it for decades. They’ll be happy it never made it to the landfill. If you get another reward you can actually furnish this place.”
As I waved goodbye to him from my front porch—my porch! —I reflected on the last few months. It wasn’t just the hurricane and Aunt Madge and Harry’s wedding that cluttered my thoughts.
My boyfriend George Winters, local reporter and a good friend to Scoobie, broke up with me, and it was pretty much my fault. Not that I’d tell him that. I’d also helped solve a murder that happened not long after Sandy, and the victim’s parents had insisted I take the reward they had offered. That’s why I had money for the down payment.
I can hardly wait to move in. Only the volume of dust and general look of a construction site are keeping me, and my cat Jazz, at the Cozy Corner a little longer.
I thought for a moment about the luxury condo Robby and I had owned in Lakewood. He hadn’t been able to do a large refinance on it, but he’d gotten a small home equity loan with my forged signature. That money had made its way to casinos along with any