Meet Isabel Puddles

Book 1: Mitten State Mystery

by M.V. Byrne

Genres: Cozy Mystery

Synopsis

To the tourists and summer residents, Kentwater County is a picturesque community of small-town charm, fruitful farmland, and gorgeous freshwater beaches. To middle-aged widow Isabel Puddles, it's where she enjoys breakfast every morning at a local café with her childhood best friend and spends her evenings cozying up with a good book and her devoted Jack Russell Terrier, Jackpot. In between, Isabel makes ends meet through a variety of trades—preserving pickles, baking pies, working the counter at her cousin's hardware shop, and occasionally helping "fix up" the hair of corpses at the local funeral parlor.



When Isabel discovers a two-inch nail embedded in the skull of Earl Jonasson, it seems the octogenarian may not have died of a stroke. His son is quickly arrested when his alibi doesn't check out. But Isabel has known Earl Jr. since they were kids and can't believe he'd murder his own father, regardless of his financial difficulties. As gossip about Earl Sr.'s land and insurance policy money starts to spread around the county, Isabel finds herself conducting her own investigation to clear her friend's name. But real detective work isn't like Jessica Fletcher's Murder She Wrote mysteries, and she's meeting dangerous suspects who don't like Isabel poking around in their business . . .

Release date: November 24, 2020

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 338

Sample

Isabel Puddles was no hero. At least she didn’t think so. But if you asked anybody in her hometown of Gull Harbor, Michigan, a charming harborside hamlet tucked into the stoic, tree-lined shores of Lake Michigan, Isabel—Iz or Izzy to her family and friends—was the biggest thing to come out of Michigan since Gerald Ford, Henry Ford, and the Ford Mustang combined.

“Yep . . . she’s a regular Miss Marple,” Kayla, the waitress at Isabel’s favorite breakfast haunt, was fond of saying whenever the topic of her sleuthing skills came up.

Frances Spitler, another breakfast regular, had a slightly less demure take on the crime-solving abilities of the woman who had been her best friend since kindergarten. “More like Sherlock Holmes with a C cup.” Frances was famous in her own right for saying pretty much whatever popped into her head.

Isabel and Frances started meeting for breakfast at the Land’s End nearly a decade before when the breakfast special was just $2.99. It was now up to $6.99. But in the summertime, when rich Chicagoans and Milwaukeeans sailed across the “Big Lake” to Gull Harbor to summer on their yachts; and well-heeled Detroiters, Hoosiers, and Buckeyes drove north to open their summer homes for the season, Gull Harbor’s population soared. And so did the price of the Land’s End breakfast special, which, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, skyrocketed to $9.99. But for regulars like Isabel and Frances, the price stayed fixed at $6.99. And for Isabel, that included a couple of extra rashers of bacon, which usually found their way onto her plate if Chet Morris was working. He had had a crush on Isabel since junior high social studies, but, sadly for Chet, his unrequited love could now be expressed only through slices of thick-cut maple-smoked bacon.

Spending nearly ten dollars, including tip, on breakfast was still pricey for Isabel Puddles, but despite her overburdened checking account and her innately frugal nature, and because she had never in her life been able to cook an over-easy egg the way she liked it, Isabel still had breakfast at the Land’s End with Frances almost every morning.

The last time Isabel had cooked a proper breakfast at home was the morning her husband died, but she was always quick to point out that these events were unrelated. Like the good wife and mother she had always tried to be, Isabel had eaten scrambled eggs the way Carl liked them, and the only way her kids would eat them. For more than twenty years she never let on, or even admitted to herself, that she really didn’t care for scrambled eggs at all. She liked her eggs over easy and basted with butter the way her mother cooked them. Isabel Puddles was known to be an exceptionally good home cook, but she was no match for her late mother Helen’s kitchen wizardry.. . . Over-easy eggs remained her blind spot.

It was around the time that Isabel had become a widow that Frances decided it was time to retire. After twenty years working as a secretary at a local canning factory where her husband, Hank, was a first-shift foreman, Frances decided her shift was up. Daily breakfast for Hank ended the day after she retired. “The only way you’re getting breakfast out of me at six thirty in the morning anymore is if I get a job at the McDonald’s drive-through!” she ranted defiantly after Hank objected to his wife’s revised breakfast policy. Frances was late to embrace feminism, but she got up to speed pretty fast once she figured it out.

“Poor Hank,” Isabel once remarked to Frances. “He married Harriet Nelson and ended up living with Gloria Steinem.”

And so the Land’s End Breakfast Club was born—two independent, middle-aged women finally enjoying breakfast on their own terms, and with no dishes to do.

Isabel and Frances were as close, and as different, as two people could be. Frances was brash and to the point; Isabel, circumspect and thoughtful. Frances was brutally honest; Isabel, cautious and diplomatic. Frances was excitable and high strung; Isabel, calm and measured. But these were guidelines, not rules, and on occasion, if the circumstances called for it, they flipped the script. What never changed after forty-plus years of friendship was their unconditional love for each other and a fierce loyalty, going back to the first day of kindergarten, when Jacqueline Klinger bullied Isabel out of her chocolate milk. Thanks to Frances’s intervention—after finding her new classmate Isabel sitting on a swing and crying—Jacqueline Klinger ended up wearing that same chocolate milk all over her head, and all over her crisp white, Raggedy Ann pinafore. . . and Frances ended up in the principal’s office.

Isabel returned the favor the following year, when their first-grade teacher, a mean old battle-ax named Miss Marlin, came up behind Frances and flicked her ear so hard, it made her cry, just for whispering to Isabel during morning announcements. Miss Marlin returned from lunch that afternoon to find several thumbtacks planted on her chair, waiting to greet her rather large posterior. Their occasional recollection of the shriek that came out of Miss Marlin made them laugh out loud to this day. Theirs was an unbreakable bond, and although it had been strained a time or two over the years, it was a bond that always held fast.

Unlike Frances, Isabel was shy by nature, and not somebody who wanted or needed the sort of attention that had been recently visited upon her, so playing the role of local hero was more a burden than anything else. Her snowballing notoriety as a small-town crime fighter was becoming more and more difficult to deflect, but it would appear she was stuck with it, at least for the time being. Her reluctant celebrity began a few years after her husband, Carl, died, very suddenly, following a heart attack. Carl’s modest life insurance policy covered his funeral expenses and paid off some bills, but that was about it. Both her kids were out of college, so there wasn’t that expense, but if she was going to survive, Isabel knew she had to go back to work. But doing what? She had long ago given up her “career” as a hairdresser, which was a job she enjoyed about as much as she did scrambled eggs, but as a middle-aged widow with no college degree, Isabel didn’t have much choice. The Michigan economy was a mess, and jobs were hard to come by, so eventually she started doing hair again, converting the mother-in-law apartment attached to her garage to a hair salon. She also managed to toggle together a handful of other part-time ventures—enough to keep the lights and the heat on, and keep herself and the dog fed. But in the years of widowhood that followed, she never really felt she was ever in the clear financially. There always seemed to be an accumulation of bills and an assortment of other expenses looming, along with the occasional big-ticket surprise expense, so she was continuously on the lookout for new revenue streams to fish. She was open to any and all possibilities. Provided she was physically able, and it was legal, Isabel was game.... Which was how she ended up accepting a job doing hair and makeup at a local funeral home.

It was not a job she particularly relished taking on, and she wasn’t anxious to meet the person who would, but it was more money than she could pass up for an afternoon’s work, so she braced herself and decided to at least give it a try. Not only would she be helping out her bank account but she would also be helping out a dear old friend who was in a bind, and who happened to be the owner of the funeral home. Little did Isabel Puddles know how fateful this decision would be or where it would eventually take her....

Although she never finished college, Isabel did graduate from the Whitehall Beauty Academy, with honors. But putting her skills to work on the newly departed was not something that had ever occurred to her—and why would it? Still, when it came to postmortem makeovers, she was not a complete novice. Isabel had in fact provided this slightly cringeworthy service once before, not for money but purely out of love and a sense of duty. And it was just her luck that she seemed to have a flair for it. This unexpected addition to her résumé happened after her favorite high school teacher, Gladys DeLong, passed away.

For more than half a century, Miss DeLong had been a pillar of the community, a beloved high school teacher, and a revered figure in Gull Harbor. Gladys came from a prominent Grand Rapids family that for many years owned an impressive summer home on Lake Michigan. Her father had made a fortune in office furniture but died penniless, and their stately summer home was now an elegant, very pricey bed-and-breakfast. Gambling was rumored to be the cause of Raymond DeLong’s downfall, although nobody ever knew for sure. But while the getting was good, Gladys was sent east to Miss Porter’s School and went on to Smith College. When she decided to become a teacher, she returned to the place that brought back her happiest childhood memories: Gull Harbor, Michigan. Although Gladys DeLong’s pedigree was highly unusual for such a small town, she was anything but pretentious, never exhibiting any hint of snobbery, unlike many of the summer people who paraded around town with their noses in the air, and with far less to be snobbish about.

Isabel had Miss DeLong for both her junior and senior years, first for English lit, and then for American lit. Later in life—long after Isabel Peabody had become Isabel Puddles and raised a family, and after Miss DeLong had retired, the two became close friends when Gladys began volunteering at the Gull Harbor Library a few days a week. Isabel, who was an avid reader, thanks in large part to Miss DeLong’s influence, was a library regular. For years they had been chatting at the front desk in hushed tones, mostly about books, gardening, the weather, Isabel’s kids, and recipes they had recently tried or wanted to try, all of it peppered with a healthy dose of local gossip, along with Gladys DeLong’s dry, but razor-sharp wit. Every few weeks, the two would get together for lunch, and Gladys always came to Isabel’s annual Christmas Eve party with her famous curried shrimp dip and mango chutney, an appetizer as exotic for Gull Harbor as it was delicious. Isabel was convinced that some of her guests came only for the shrimp dip.

Gladys was a handsome woman of Dutch descent—a staunch, no-frills, midwestern matron. In Isabel’s memory she never wore much, if any, makeup, and her long, thick salt-and-pepper hair was worn in a bun that always looked about ready to come undone. Round tortoiseshell glasses completed her professorial look. No slave to fashion—but then who needed to be in Gull Harbor, Michigan?—Miss DeLong owned a half dozen or so classic knit suits, with skirts that fell just below the knee. The suits came in various shades of beiges, grays, and blues, some patterned, some not, and looked to have been purchased sometime in the late 1950s, probably in some posh New York City department store. Her impeccably made suits were always accessorized with a smart print scarf—of which she seemed to have many—along with an impressive collection of simple but elegant gold brooches, always worn on her left lapel. Isabel could still hear her revered teacher clicking through the halls of Swift Lather High School, always in a hurry, her plain black purse hooked around her elbow, an armful of books or loose papers, and wearing the same pair of sensible black heels. In retirement, Miss DeLong segued seamlessly from schoolmarm to librarian with no costume change required, although she had taken to wearing shoes that looked slightly more orthopedic, and she had done away with the scarves and the brooches. The suits gradually became a little snug over the years, but she once admitted to Isabel why she had more or less maintained her weight all these years. “I’m Dutch . . . I’m too frugal to buy new ones.” Isabel could relate—if she couldn’t find something she liked that fit her on the clearance rack, then she was done shopping.

Isabel last saw Miss DeLong at the library in August of that summer, just a week or so before she passed, when Isabel came in to return a book, rather sheepishly. It was the latest James Patterson novel, and she wasn’t at all sure that the woman who had introduced her to William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens was going to approve of her former student reading anything so commercial. Gladys took the book and winked at her, then leaned over the desk and quietly confessed, “I’ve read everything John Grisham has ever written.” Isabel laughed. So had she.

That particular day they chatted about who had the best sweet corn that season and who had the juiciest tomatoes (the battle of the farm stands was an ongoing one in Kentwater County), and Gladys lamented about how the wisteria she had planted when she bought her house in 1966, although beautiful to look at, had become so prolific that it was overtaking her garage and making it almost impossible to get her car in and out anymore. Isabel then checked out a book by a new author Gladys thought she might like, and they made plans to get together for lunch again before the Labor Day weekend. She never dreamed it would be the last time she ever saw Gladys DeLong again . . . alive.

After hearing at breakfast just a few days later that Gladys had dropped dead trimming that out-of-control wisteria herself, Isabel was devastated by the news. At eighty-six, on a stepladder, with garden shears in hand, it was a fittingly noble way to go, but the despair Isabel felt losing someone who had been so much a part of her life for so long was hard for her to take in. Without Gladys, the town instantly felt different to her, and she was going to miss her teacher and friend terribly. Isabel feared she was reaching that age where good-byes were going to start becoming more common than hellos.

Later on that dismal day, Isabel drove by Miss DeLong’s neatly kept Cape Cod cottage on Westbury Road and saw her equally well-kept, twenty-five-year-old light blue Buick still parked in the driveway. She slowed to a stop and stared at the wisteria, blooming victoriously, fondly remembering her friend until she was struck by another crashing wave of sadness, and slowly pulled away. Isabel continued on her way to the Cook Funeral Home in Hartley—a little town about five miles southeast of Gull Harbor—where a viewing was scheduled for that afternoon. With a year-round population of only about 750, Gull Harbor wasn’t large enough to support a funeral home of its own, nor were any of the other surrounding villages and hamlets in the county, and the summer people seemed to prefer dying at home, so if you were a local who died in Kentwater County, Cook’s was probably where you were going to end up.

Isabel was a Gull Harbor girl, but Hartley was her parents’ hometown, as well as her grandparents’ and great-grandparents’, on both sides, before them. The Peabodys had been in Hartley ever since Great-Grandfather Manchester—“Chester”—Peabody arrived from England in the late 1800s. Chester escaped a childhood of abject poverty in London to seek his fame and fortune in the Michigan lumber industry. . . but failed. He did, however, manage to convince the town’s most beautiful girl, Zelda Gerber, a doctor’s daughter, to marry him. Ironically, he did end up in the lumber business, managing a lumberyard. The couple lived modestly on Chester’s salary, and along with a small inheritance from Zelda’s father, they were able to send all three of their kids to college, which was quite a feat at the turn of the twentieth century. Chester and Zelda’s offspring managed to do pretty well for themselves. Their two girls, Madeline and Marjorie, both gifted with their mother’s beauty, married well and moved to the East Coast, never to return to Hartley. Their son, Isabel’s grandfather, Charlie Peabody, moved back to Hartley after college and, being a shrewd investor, eventually became a local land baron of sorts, owning an entire city block in Hartley known as the “Peabody block.” Isabel’s grandmother, Hazel, was a MacGregor, another prominent family in Hartley, who owned a furniture store in town, and another in nearby Wellington. But after the Great Crash of 1929, both families found themselves in “diminished circumstances,” as her grandmother Hazel used to say.

Hartley was the county seat, and although it was about five times the size of Gull Harbor, it was still a very small town. But because it had the only traffic light in the county, was home to the county fairgrounds, and had its own highway off-ramp, it was practically a metropolis by comparison. With a timeless stateliness, less beachy and casual than Gull Harbor, Hartley was a dignified old town with beautiful old homes—some in better shape than others—lining either side of the main drag, State Street, with its canopy of hundred-year-old maples. A few of the grandest old homes hugged Hartley Lake, a man-made lake Charlie Peabody had helped develop in the 1930s, and where he later built the family home. The old Peabody home was not as grand as some of the others on Hartley Lake, but it was a handsome old Queen Anne revival with a wide, sloping lawn and a sweeping view of the lake and the town beyond it. Isabel had very fond memories of her grandparents’ house on Hartley Lake, and in fact every holiday season she was invited to a Christmas party hosted by the “new” owners, Robert and Bonnie Bagley, who purchased the home after Grandmother Peabody died. The Bagleys were convinced Hazel Peabody, known as the consummate hostess, was still there with them, but given the eerie, unidentifiable racket they heard in the attic from time to time, Hazel Peabody was not as gracious in spirit as she had been in life.

So although Gull Harbor was home, Isabel also felt very much at home in Hartley. She still had family there, she did her grocery shopping there, she went to church there, and she worked part time at her cousin Freddie Peabody’s hardware store, also in Hartley.

After parking her old minivan on State Street, just up from the Cook Funeral Home, she sat back and took a moment to reflect on what lay ahead. She had been to Cook’s more times than she cared to remember, but knowing Miss DeLong was in there now was especially unsettling for Isabel. She hoped she would find her old friend Gil inside to help her get through this. Gil Cook was now a third-generation funeral director, and the two went back many years.

Hartley and Gull Harbor kids all went to the same high school back in those days—Swift Lather High School—named after a wealthy and eccentric lawyer who gained fame, and a fair amount of fury, for being a card-carrying, FDR-LOVING Democrat in a staunchly Republican county. There was no stauncher Republican in Kentwater County than Isabel’s grandfather Charlie, but surprisingly he and Swift Lather were great friends and had been for decades, despite Charlie’s overt contempt for President Roosevelt, and Swift’s similar feelings toward Herbert Hoover. Swift was a true philanthropist, giving money away anonymously wherever he saw a need, and defending anybody in the county who needed defending, whether or not they could afford it. He was a small-town hero in Kentwater County, revered despite his “radical” politics. Charlie Peabody had done his fair share of service to his community, too, but in the end, it was Swift Lather who had the high school named after him and not Charlie Peabody. “I’m sure the Roosevelts were behind that decision,” Charlie snorted to his wife when he heard the news.

It was the start of their freshman year at Swift Lather when Isabel Peabody and Gil Cook first met, and Gil asked Isabel to the homecoming dance. She accepted, and although they enjoyed each other’s company, nothing romantic ever developed. When she met Carl Puddles in the fall of their sophomore year, the handsome new transfer student from Wisconsin, she was immediately smitten by the boy from that mysterious land of cheese across Lake Michigan. But despite being jilted, Gil Cook still adored Isabel, and vice versa, so the two had remained the best of friends all these years. Frances was sure Gil was still carrying a torch for her, a suggestion Isabel dismissed as nonsense.

Carl, a star athlete, and Isabel, a cheerleader, dated for the remainder of high school. When they became the Asparagus King and Queen in the spring of their senior year—Kentwater County was, after all, the asparagus capital of Michigan—it was as if the Fates had deemed them Kentwater County royalty, destined to one day marry, raise a family, and reign happily ever after. But that plan went south the following fall when they went off to Michigan State, where Isabel excelled and Carl struggled. When she got pregnant eighteen months later, they married quickly before anybody could do the math, left college, and moved back to Gull Harbor. The plan was to return to school together after the baby got a little older, or at least that was Isabel’s plan. She was determined to go back and finish her two remaining years and get her teaching degree. But in the meantime, she was happy to stay home with the baby, while Carl went to work for the County Road Commission. He eventually got his degree in civil engineering by going to night school at a nearby college, which the county paid for. In exchange, he committed to working as the county engineer, which he did . . . for the rest of his life. But Isabel remained a stay-at-home mom, first with their daughter, Carly—not named after Carl, as he liked people to think, but after Carly Simon, her favorite singer at the time—and a year and a half later, a son, Charlie, named after Isabel’s grandfather, joined the family. She never intended to give her children rhyming names, and she was still apologizing to them for it today. Sadly, Isabel’s dream of going back to school and one day becoming a teacher like Miss DeLong was one that faded away over the years. Not finishing college was one of her biggest regrets in life, although there had been times when marrying Carl Puddles was pretty high on the list, too.

Isabel took a few moments more to collect herself before heading into Cook’s. According to the paper, Gladys DeLong’s viewing was to begin at 3:00 p.m., and although it was already 3:15, the place looked empty. But it was a weekday, so most people wouldn’t be arriving until after work. She thought about coming back later herself, but then decided to go in and have some alone time to quietly reflect on her friend without having to engage in a lot of conversation.

She finally made her way up the cobblestone path and to the front door, took a deep breath, and entered the impressive carved-wood foyer, where she was immediately greeted by a young woman she had never seen before in her life. Over her shoulder was a young man in a suit, also a complete stranger. The woman approached her with a friendly smile. “Hello . . . Thank you for coming.” She took Isabel’s hand with both of hers. “I’m Elise Phillips.” The young man slowly approached, barely managing enough interest to shake Isabel’s hand and mumble a hello. “And this is my brother Stephen DeLong. . . . Gladys was our father’s sister.” Stephen was looking down at his phone before the introduction was even over. “We live in California. We haven’t really seen our aunt in . . . how many years has it been, Stephen?”

He shrugged. “Ten? Twenty?”

Elise continued, “I’m afraid our father is not in very good health and just too frail to travel. He asked us to come on his behalf and see to everything.” Isabel remembered the never-married Gladys DeLong talking about a younger brother in San Diego, as well as a nephew and niece, but never with any overwhelming fondness or attachment.

Somewhere in their mid-thirties, the two were very attractive, well dressed, suntanned, and both had very white, perfect teeth. She then remembered Gladys telling her that her brother was a dentist. Isabel found the niece quite pleasant, but the nephew’s slightly surly attitude began to work her nerves almost immediately. She knew the type. Many of the summer people had that same condescending attitude toward the locals, treating them like a collective of hayseeds unable to comprehend the sophisticated, citified world they hailed from. The contempt many locals had for the summer people was far better disguised, because, snobby or not, they were the bread and butter that would get many of them through another long Michigan winter without starving.

Isabel had mixed feelings about the summer people. She was a fair-minded woman and didn’t like to paint with too broad a brush, but she could see why many of the locals were less than enamored of them. She had limited interaction, but by and large, she felt that they were agreeable enough, although she had met some real doozies. But rather than focus on the bad apples, she counted her blessings instead, feeling a little sorry for these summer folks who could spend only a few weeks out of the year in what she considered to be the most beautiful place on Earth. They were stuck in places like Chicago or Detroit or Milwaukee—cities she had visited and couldn’t wait to leave—so she could understand why living in places like that might tend to make some of them a little unpleasant. Isabel Peabody Puddles was a small-town girl and proud of it. She wouldn’t leave Gull Harbor for anything in the world.

As kids Isabel and the other local children always made “summer friends,” but those friendships were not only fleeting, they were not friendships the parents of their summer friends encouraged very much. Most of them considered the local children not quite good enough for their children. Isabel never forgot overhearing the mother of a boy from Bloomfield Hills, an upscale Detroit suburb, sitting on the back porch with her friends, drinking gin-and-tonics, in broad daylight, and referring to Isabel as a “pretty girl, but she’s a bit down-market.” Isabel and the woman’s son, Drew, were on their way to see a matinee together, but they had stopped in the kitchen for cookies and lemonade, which was when she overheard the remark. The family’s housekeeper, a lovely African American woman named Lucy, was standing at the sink and also heard the slight. Lucy just shook her head slowly in response. Isabel wasn’t exactly sure what “down-market” meant, so later that evening at the dinner table she asked her mother. Helen Peabody tried to convince her fourteen-year-old daughter that it was meant as a compliment, but Isabel could tell from the steam coming from her mother’s ears that it definitely was not. Regardless of where she fell on Drew’s mother’s “market scale,” the first time young Isabel Peabody ever took a puff of a cigarette, had a sip of beer, or on one occasion became an unwitting accomplice to shoplifting, there was a summer kid spearheading the crime. And the first time any boy ever tried to cop a feel, it was that presumably “up-market” boy from Bloomfield Hills . . . in the middle of a matinee.

Frances was far less tolerant of the summer people. When a Chicago woman at the Land’s End sitting a few tables over scoffed at the toast she was served with her breakfast, proclaiming to Kayla that “no restaurant in Chicago would ever dare serve such cheap white bread for toast!” Frances spoke right up, and in a voice loud enough for everybody to hear, offered to drive the woman down to Lake Michigan so she could “swim home in time for breakfast tomorrow morning!”

After offering her condolences to Gladys’s niece and nephew, Isabel approached the casket in the somber fashion one does, but as she got closer, she was helpless in preventing her jaw from literally dropping open. At first glance it appeared that whoever had been assigned to do Gladys DeLong’s hair and makeup either had a very inappropriate sense of humor or had at some point worked for Barnum & Bailey. The second glance was not any better. Isabel slowly turned to the niece and nephew, her jaw still open, wearing a pained expression. The niece looked concerned as well, but only managed to shrug her shoulders. Her brother was texting.

As “The Old Rugged Cross”—one of the Cook Funeral Home’s hit parade of hymns—wafted through the funeral parlor, Isabel took Gladys’s family aside. Speaking in a hushed tone, as if she didn’t want Gladys to hear, she shared her concerns. “I’m sorry . . . but this just isn’t the Gladys DeLong I knew—or anybody knew, for that matter.”

The nephew managed to look up from his phone and chime in, “It’s like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? meets The Golden Girls.”

“Stephen, stop it,” his sister scolded.

Isabel looked at Gladys again. “I do remember that gray suit . . . and the earrings.” She recalled Miss DeLong talking about buying the pearl cluster earrings on a trip to Paris after college.

The niece smiled. “She had the suit hanging in the closet with a note. I remember the earrings, too. I don’t know that she ever took them off. They’re going with her, of course.”

Stephen looked up from his phone again, this time with an expression that indicated he wasn’t necessarily i. . .