The Passion of the Purple Plumeria Read Free Page A

invulnerability to minty-fresh breath.
    Okay, maybe not the minty-fresh breath, but everything else and then some.
    But here was the kicker: Somehow, somewhere, the legend had started that the jewels were hidden in Selwick Hall.
    It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? A treasure in Indian jewels hidden in an English gentleman’s residence. We’re not even talking a grand estate, just a pleasant, reasonably unpretentious gentleman’s house of the sort that spring up like mushrooms in Jane Austen novels, closer to the Bennet house than to Pemberley. Ridiculous, yes, but Jeremy believed it—believed it enough to rifle through my notes in search of clues. Jeremy believed, and Colin . . . Well, let’s just say he didn’t entirely disbelieve it.
    It had become something of a running joke between us over the past two weeks. Stay too long in the bathroom? “What were you doing in there, looking for the lost jewels of Berar?” Lose an earring? “Perhaps it’s gone to find its friends.” You get the idea.
    We hadn’t, however, actually done anything constructive about looking for them. With the threat of a full teaching load staring me in the face, I’d been knuckling down on my dissertation. I had enough experience of ungrateful undergrads (genus
Harvardensius undergradius annoyingus
) to know that I would be spending the fall term fully employed fielding e-mails proffering inventive excuses for missed classes and late papers. Colin, meanwhile, was hard at work on the novel he was convinced would make him the next Ian Fleming. In the evenings, once our respective papers had been put away, neither of us was particularly inclined to hunt around the house with flashlights like a pair of attenuated Nancy Drews. With only two months left, we had far better things to do.
    Like quiz night at the local pub. If only either of us knew anything about science, we would have been undefeated. As it was, the vicar trumped us every time.
    One of these days . . .
    Only we didn’t have that many days left. I hated thinking that way. I couldn’t stop thinking that way. I needed an off switch for my internal monologue.
    “It makes no sense,” said Colin for the fiftieth time. “What would a rajah’s ransom in jewels be doing in a house in Sussex?”
    “Things turn up in strange places all the time,” I said. For example, library books, which possess a disconcerting ability to move from place to place, seemingly of their own volition.
    “We’re not talking about a stray pair of socks,” said Colin.
    “That would be great. Can’t you just see it? ‘King’s Ransom in Jewels Found in Sussex Sock Drawer.’” Why not? Colin had an odd habit of sticking odds and ends in his sock drawer, from cuff links to credit card receipts. I’d learned, when in doubt, to check the sock drawer. Occasionally, there was even a pair of socks. “Hey, everything else seems to be in there.”
    Colin didn’t seem to share my amusement.
    I fished out a loofah that had got knocked over into the bath. It still had the Body Shop tag attached and smelled faintly of raspberry body wash. “Seriously, though. How did the rumor get started? There must have been some origin to it all.”
    “No smoke without fire?” Colin rinsed his toothbrush and shook it out in the sink. “I don’t know. I remember my father telling me about it when I was little—not in a serious way, mind you. Just as another family story.”
    “What did he say?” Colin didn’t talk about his father much. I knew that he had been a great deal older than Colin’s mother and that he had been involved in some branch of the secret services, but that was about it. It was after he died that Colin had thrown over his old career in finance and moved back to Selwick Hall.
    Sometimes I wondered what that other, earlier Colin had been like—not that I was going to trade in the one I’d got.
    “These were children’s stories,” Colin emphasized. “Once upon a time and all that.”
    I