Alternate Side(63)

“I suppose.”

Rachel laughed. “I think that’s exactly what I said. But anyhow, I realized everyone would wind up here, and we’d all go to the same bars, and the same parties, and it would be like a continuation of my childhood. And I don’t want that. You didn’t have that. When you came here it was a brand-new life for you.”

“I’m not arguing, Bug. This is a really smart and mature decision. I’m gobsmacked and awestruck.”

“SAT words,” said Rachel.

“Right,” said Nora.

“Are you mad at Christine?”

“Why? Because she treated you like a grown-up? Wow, you really underestimate me. When do you start?”

“Two weeks after commencement. I’m staying with her until I get an apartment. I’m hoping for an August first move-in.”

Oliver’s and Rachel’s commencements were a week apart. “Oh, Jesus, talk about crazy,” Charlie had said. “Two days of events with one, two days of events with the other. Like a triathlon for the parents.”

“Three days of events,” Nora had said. “But I talked to a woman once who had twins at different colleges whose commencements were on the same day. I’m just relieved we don’t have to deal with that.”

Nora and Rachel turned onto the museum block shoulder to shoulder, in the companionable silence of two people, one of whom had had something momentous to say, one of whom knew she was going to hear it, and both of whom had gotten it over with. Phil had thrown off his blanket and turned his face, with its stubbled chin, to the thin April sunshine.

“Beautiful day,” he said to Nora.

“Phil, this is my daughter, Rachel. Rachel, this is Phil.”

“Hi, Phil,” said Rachel, shaking his hand, which made Nora proud.

“That’s so you,” Rachel said, when they’d moved down the block. “To know a homeless guy.”

“He’s not really homeless.”

“That’s even more you, to know a faux-homeless guy.”

“Stop picking on me,” Nora said.

“I’m not picking on you. I’ve decided not to pick on you anymore.” Rachel put her arms around Nora. “My little Mommy,” she said, standing on tiptoes so she could put her chin on the crown of Nora’s head.

“Want to come up and meet my new assistant?”

“Richard?” Rachel said. “Love him. Love. We’re phone friends. That girl you had before was just the worst. Tell Richard I’ll meet him in person the next time. I’m late for brunch. I might go shopping after.”

“Nice girl!” Phil shouted down the block when Rachel had disappeared.

“Yep,” Nora said, and went inside, where one of their curators, a young woman they’d just poached from Tiffany’s, was waiting. “We have a major problem,” she said before Nora was even halfway across the lobby.

“We’ve got a major problem,” Nora said when she finally got through to Bebe, who refused to carry a cellphone. “I didn’t come this far to answer my own phone,” she’d said when Nora asked why.

“Which is?” Bebe said. Nora could hear the clank of dishes and realized her assistant had probably tracked Bebe down at The Breakers in Palm Beach. She had told Nora the hotel had the best ni?oise in the world, although Nora suspected there was probably someplace in the country of France that would argue with that.

“The star of Kashmir,” Nora said. “Annabelle says she thought that it was sitting a little oddly on its stand when she looked this morning. She took it to the gemologist, who looked at it carefully, and says it’s a copy. A very good copy, but a copy.”

There was a long silence. Nora thought Bebe was thinking, then realized she was chewing.

“So?” Bebe said.

“So? Bebe, that necklace is one of the most valuable pieces in our collection. The insurance estimate was eight million dollars, and that was four years ago. Even then they thought it was low.”

“It was low. Norman said it was worth at least ten, and that was when the market was depressed.”

“So what I’m telling you is that it’s gone, and there’s a copy in its place, which is a major crime as well as a major disaster for the museum. We should call the police and the head of the security firm immediately. We also need to figure out how to handle this so the PR fallout won’t be terrible. My understanding was that we had a fail-safe system here.”

The greatest hazard of running a museum of jewelry, she had learned early on, was security. Unlike a significant Vermeer, say, or the skeleton of a T. rex, an important necklace was both portable and fungible. A thief might not be able to dispose of it as configured, but it could be turned into a handful of stones and still be valuable.

Nora had been happy that they had gotten publicity nearly everywhere for their innovative display cases, which were designed to deliver voltage sufficient to disable a two-hundred-pound man if they were broken or opened without a complicated computer authorization. One of the local TV reporters had even volunteered to be zapped by one of the cases, but the museum’s insurance firm thought that was unwise. “You accidentally kill somebody on camera, it would be bad,” the security chief said. “But trust me, we tested it on one of our guys, and it worked.”