First Impressions Read online

  Eden gave a sigh. “Those blasted jewels!”

  “Jewels?” Jared asked as he sat back down, then said, “Oh, yeah. In the book. You know, I didn’t have time last night to read that, so why don’t you tell me about it?”

  “You don’t think that spy was searching for those jewels, do you?”

  “I have no idea. Could have been. We’ve always thought that maybe he swallowed your name to keep you from being thought to be part of his professional life.” He leaned his head back against the damp wall. “So tell me about the jewels.”

  “How about if I tell you the truth?”

  “I’d like that.”

  “I thought you would. It’s been my experience that liars love to hear the truth from others.”

  Again, Jared gave a one-sided smile. “You have me pegged exactly. I took on this job of risking my life for my country just to have the opportunity to lie. It’s what I live for.”

  Eden had to smile. “Okay, so maybe there is some truth in your story, but…Anyway, the jewels. You see, I’m cursed with knowing the truth through Mrs. Farrington, so I know there are no jewels to be found. How much do you want to know? From the beginning or just the facts, ma’am.”

  Jared looked at his watch again. “We have lots of time, so entertain me.” He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “Tell me every word of the story. Maybe there’s something in there that could help me figure this thing out.”

  Eden couldn’t resist saying “Once upon a time” and smiling. Except for genocide and murder and revenge, it was a great story. Or maybe because of those things it was a great story. She started to tell a cut-and-dried version about what had happened to the necklace, but then she thought, Why not tell all of it? She’d written the entire story in her fictionalized version of the Farrington family, and she’d even told the truth, as revealed by Mrs. Farrington, of what happened at the end. She sincerely hoped that her telling of the family secret wouldn’t cause any of the Farringtons to come back from the dead and haunt her.

  “It was a necklace made for a French duchess,” Eden began. “A stunningly beautiful necklace of three sapphires, each one the size of a quail’s egg and surrounded by diamonds. It was said that the duchess’s rich old husband bought the necklace for her, but she wore it—and nothing else—to bed with her lover. Her lover was the head gardener, and it was said that the son the old duke loved so much was actually the gardener’s child.”

  Taking a breath, Eden leaned back against the wall. McBride still had his eyes closed, but she could tell that he was listening intently, and he was enjoying the story.

  She continued. “A young Farrington son, on his Grand Tour, was traveling through the French countryside when the French Revolution broke out. By chance, he was staying in a small village on the very night when the villagers decided they’d had enough of the debauchery and greed of the old duke and were going to end it all. I don’t know what the duke had done to make the villagers hate him so. There was something about a young boy in the village, but I don’t know the details,” Eden said. “And if Mrs. Farrington did, she didn’t tell me, and I certainly didn’t ask. I do know that they set the duke’s great manor house on fire. As the villagers were celebrating his death, one of them paid a visit to the outhouse, and that’s where he found the duke hiding.

  “Of course they murdered the duke, then they went in search of his wife, who, I was told, was as bad as he was. But she had dressed as a peasant woman, so she escaped. She knew that a young, rich American man was staying in the village, so she went to him. Under her dirty clothes she was wearing all her jewels, which I was told were so many that she could hardly stand up under the weight of them.

  “For all that the duchess was very beautiful and the young Farrington wasn’t handsome at all, he was quite clever. The duchess offered him a pearl necklace if he’d get her out of the country, but he held out for the prize of her collection, the sapphire and diamond necklace. Since she was in no position to bargain, she agreed. He hid her under the seat of his carriage to get her to the coast, then he stowed her away in a trunk as they crossed the Channel. I can’t imagine how horrible the trip must have been for the poor woman!

  “When they reached England, she gave him the necklace, and they parted company. Unfortunately, no one knows what happened to the duchess after that, and since there’s no record of her name, I couldn’t research her. The young Farrington man went home to Arundel with the necklace sewn inside his coat. A few years later, when he got married, he had the necklace delivered to his bride an hour before the wedding, and that was the first time anyone in his family saw it.

  “Mrs. Farrington told me that the necklace became what was most important in their family. They were called the Farrington Sapphires, and they would be taken out to be worn by the mistress of Farrington Manor only three times a year. People would come from miles around just to see them. The family developed traditions about who could wear the sapphires, and when. Each Farrington daughter could wear them on her wedding day, but only if the family approved of her husband. First cousins could wear the necklace once in her lifetime, but second cousins never. On and on it went. Mrs. Farrington said that it got to the point of being ludicrous, and many fights and long-standing feuds came about over that necklace.

  “It stayed in the family until the late 1800s, and that’s when the lies and the mystery began.”

  Pausing, Eden took a moment to get her breath. McBride was still listening intently. Smiling, she continued. “Mrs. Farrington told me that her great-grandfather, Minton, was a man cursed with bad luck. If he bought a racehorse, it broke a leg the next day. If he bought timberland, there would be a hurricane that turned all the trees into toothpicks. If he bought land for cotton, it would flood. Whatever the poor man planted, died. Mrs. Farrington said that if he’d just left things alone, he would have been fine financially, but he wanted to prove to his relatives that he could do as well as they had, so he tried to expand.

  “I was told that the real reason he worked so hard to be a success was that he had a beautiful wife and that he was trying to win her love. But since he was as awkward and as socially inept as he was homely, he couldn’t do it. It was said that she had married him for the Farrington Sapphires and that it broke his heart and his spirit because he knew that’s what she truly loved.

  “Now here’s where the secret comes in. Because the poor man failed in everything, in the end he had to do the unthinkable and sell the necklace in order to pay the bills to keep Farrington Manor running. When he returned from the trip to New York, where he’d secretly sold the necklace, he found the safe open and empty, and his wife dead on the floor. She’d been strangled. That same day, a handsome young man who’d worked for the Farringtons for years—a notorious womanizer—was found dead in the swamp. Everyone said that he’d stolen the necklace, been interrupted by the wife, so he’d killed her, then he’d run off into the swamp, where he’d been bitten by a poisonous snake. When the necklace wasn’t found on him, it was decided that he’d hidden it somewhere on the plantation, and that’s how the story of the missing necklace got started. The story has been printed in a hundred books, and it’s caused many years of problems with people searching for the Farrington Sapphires.”

  Jared opened his eyes and leaned forward. “The Farrington man either killed the wife or her lover or both.”

  “You’ve seen and done too many bad things,” Eden said primly. “Unfortunately, though, you’re right. On his deathbed, Minton Farrington told his eldest son the truth of what had happened. It seems that Minton had overheard his wife and her lover plotting to steal the necklace and run away together. Mrs. Farrington said that this was what made her great-grandfather want to get rid of the necklace. He decided that the sapphires were cursed and that his bad luck was caused by them, so he took the necklace to New York and sold it.

  “When Minton returned to Farrington Manor, it was late at night, and there was his wife, dead on the library floor, the safe sta