“Before you deny it, the charms have dates engraved on them,” Russ said. “Dates like your birthday.” He maneuvered the charms around and jabbed his index finger at a birthday cake.
She turned away and covered her mouth. Ryan couldn’t see her expression, but her body trembled, giving them a nonverbal answer.
This was Mia’s bracelet.
* * *
Mia wrapped her arms around her waist. How could anyone have gotten a hold of her bracelet and put it on that hand? And how did it relate to the threat or the fire?
Could this be a setup of some sort? Or was Russ trying to trick her into confessing to being behind these incidents? But she had nothing to confess. Nothing other than the fact that she’d once owned this bracelet. She had to tell him that, but the words were stuck in her throat.
Didn’t help that Ryan was looking at her like she had two heads. Did he think she’d been hiding this bracelet from him? She had to set that right.
“I had a charm bracelet when I was a kid.” She spread the bag with the thick chain across her open palm. The cool metal slashed a line across her hand. The bracelet seemed alive, like a snake reaching out to bite her.
She couldn’t hold it any longer. She thrust the bag back at Russ. “It’s my bracelet, but I don’t know how it ended up in that box. It was disposed of the summer I moved here.”
“Disposed of?” Russ asked. “How? Where?”
Mia had never talked to anyone outside of a therapist about the summer she’d lost her mother. Not even Ryan. She probably should have, but she only told him about the accident. Not her father’s unbelievable behavior immediately following it.
She would certainly never share the gut-wrenching details with Russ now. But she could give him enough information to understand that barring a miracle—barring the fact that the evidence was in his hands—this could not be her bracelet.
She would make the telling brief. She rattled through the details of the car accident then stopped to fight back the tears that always threatened when she remembered her mother. She looked at Ryan. Found compassion. Guilt for the way she’d treated him when she’d left ate at her, so she turned to Russ. His sympathetic expression was nearly her undoing.
She looked at her feet to get through the telling. “My father was distraught over Mom’s death. He didn’t want to see anything that reminded him of her, and he certainly didn’t want to go back to our home in Atlanta. After deciding we would live here, he convinced Uncle Wally to get rid of everything we owned in Atlanta. Sell our house and dispose of all of our stuff. All Dad let us keep were the things we’d brought up here. Minus Mom’s stuff, of course.”
“Sounds harsh,” Russ said.
“It was. But we got over it.”Liar. You’re still carrying the pain of his ruthless treatment around.
“What if Wally didn’t get rid of everything?” Ryan asked. “Maybe he kept the bracelet.”
“Not likely. Uncle Wally had a picture of my mom. He gave it to me at her funeral. When my dad found out, he threw it in the fireplace and threatened to kill Uncle Wally if he gave me anything else. There’s no way anyone would want to stand up to that rage again.”
“So if Wally didn’t keep it, who does that leave?” Russ asked.
“No one. My dad would never have asked for the bracelet. All of the charms were from special times with Mom. It would bring him too much pain. And David was fifteen. No teenage boy would want his little sister’s bracelet.”
“Then maybe someone had a replica made,” Ryan said more to Russ than to Mia, as if he felt the need to defend her. “To hurt Mia. To get her to leave.”
She thought about the charms. Could they be duplicated? She ticked them off one at a time, mentally stroking them as she traveled along the length of the silver chain.
When she reached the end, the answer struck her. “Check the penny from Stone Mountain. When you smash a coin in one of those machines, it stamps the year into the copper. They could easily smash the penny, but how would they replicate that date?”
Russ laid the bag on his palm and flipped the penny over. Mia stared at the bracelet. As it moved, piercing rays shooting through the window glinted from the charms as if the bracelet were sending out a warning.
“It says 1999. This is the real deal.” Head bent, Russ jiggled the charms again. “Assuming, and this is a big assumption, this warning and the fire are related, then the bracelet points toward someone from your family. Access to your old bracelet would most likely be restricted to your family and, of course,” he looked at Mia, “I need to keep you on my list.”
She stared at him. What was with his need to consider her a suspect, and what could she do about it?
He shoved the bag back into his pocket. “We might be able to get prints or DNA from the bracelet. Especially if we get Sierra Rice on board.”
“Count on me to pay whatever it costs.” She let relief color her words. “I haven’t touched that in so long my prints won’t likely be on it and this will clear my name.”
“Not necessarily,” Russ said. “I don’t want to have to say this, but you could have hired someone to put the bracelet in the box just like you did to start the fire.”
What? She did not expect him to go in that direction.
