Post #261681 by procinema29 on Thu, Oct 19, 2006 3:30 PM

"The Necklace"

PART TWO

“You are Marcus Baily?” Her crisp voice carried well over the courtyard.

“Yes. You must be Miss Phillips.” I moved slightly towards the front steps.

“Come inside.” She vanished into the house. This woman did not seem grateful for my presence, but I learned some time back that jobs are worked for all sorts of people with all sorts of temperaments, and that one can’t be too picky. I went inside.

The interior was dingy, as I’d expected, and lit with dusty lightbulbs in archaic-looking hanging lamps barely holding themselves together, but the ceiling was impressively high, the hand-carved molding exquisite. There wasn’t much in the sizable livingroom--a couple of pieces of furniture here and there, a large ceramic cat and a few bookshelves. The wallpaper, not too old, was nonetheless starting to bubble and peel. Amazingly, the original hardwood floor was intact and fresh, though it may have been sixty or more years old. I guessed that it had been covered by carpeting for a long time, and that the carpet had been removed fairly recently, for the glossy varnish coat looked almost new.

My employer was sitting in an easy chair near the fireplace. “Sit down, please,” she said, with a slight smile crooking up one side of her mouth. “I’m glad you’ve come.”

I sat down, feeling more at ease. “Now, this job you have for me--”

“It’s a small job,” she said, “and I need someone to do it, though it may not be in your specific line of work. I hope it does not take more than an hour or two of your time.” A purse sat on the floor next to her chair; she bent laboriously and reached into it, producing a small stack of crisp bills and placing them on a table nearby. “I am prepared to pay you five hundred dollars if you succeed in completing it.” She paused oddly.

At that moment, a number of thoughts went through my mind concerning the nature of the job. She saw my eyes widen, I think, for hers did, and she smirked a bit. “You have a fertile imagination,” she said, “but I want you to find something, something very dear to me, and as soon as you possibly can. It’s something I’ve lost--a necklace of pearls, with a large emerald teardrop.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Is this necklace somewhere inside the house where you can’t get to it? It seems like a very simple thing to find.” I almost began to say something about the payment being ridiculously high for the task, but kept my lips shut. The money of insane people spends as well as any other.

“It’s true. You don’t understand.” She got up, and walked stiffly over to a large front window overlooking the courtyard. “A long time ago...” She paused, and took a breath. “A long time ago, I had a sister named Claire. She was very beautiful, far too beautiful for her own good, and mine. You see we were always in competition with each other, and we always quarrelled. This was more of a nuisance and a hindrance than anything else, and I would have forgotten our problems--if only she’d just let me have Anthony. Anthony was a stockbroker, a fine man, and quite handsome. I fell in love with him the night we met at a party.”

I interrupted to ask how these things related to the task at hand. “Let me finish, and you’ll see,” she said, somewhat sharply. “Anthony and I had been seeing each other for just a few days when Claire began her attempt to take him from me. And she succeeded, distracting him with her audacious charms, and tempting him with revealing gowns she would wear only on nights when he came to see me. I soon realized I had to take action if I was to keep Anthony for myself. I began behaving defensively, and eventually our arguing drove him away from both of us. The necklace I want you to find is my only memento of that time, and bitter though my memories are, I cherish it deeply.”

“I’ll find it,” I said reassuringly.

She looked at me for a moment, seeming doubtful about whether to go on, then bade me to the window. “Look out there. Do you see how the road goes around that bend?” The blacktop road that had brought me to the house veered off to one side of it, and continued around the hill the large house was built on. “No one goes out that way; the hillside’s eroded and the paved road, what there’s left of it, is dangerous and slopy. Around the bend and apiece down the road is what remains of another house, a guest house. Claire lived in that house for many years. She and it were destroyed in a fire in nineteen seventy. Please don’t listen for sympathy in my voice, because there isn’t any.” I was finding all this a bit much, and she noticed this, but she continued: “Now, I have had this necklace since nineteen fifty-five. I’ve always kept it in a lacquer jewelry box. About two years ago, I woke up and discovered it missing. I searched high and low in the house, to no avail. Do you know where I found it?”

I said I hadn’t a guess.

“Outside, on the road--off towards where the road goes around that curve.”

“That’s very strange,” I agreed.

“I brought it back inside the house. It stayed there for a couple of months, and then it disappeared again. I went looking for it in the same place, and found it further up the road--and closer to my sister’s house. A few months later it happened again, and I found the necklace yet closer to her house. It was all I could do to take the necklace back, for I shudder at the thought of even seeing the ruins, and try never to go near them, and I never set foot in them.

“The necklace disappeared again this morning. I searched all along the road, going as close as I could to the place--but I couldn’t find it.” She sat down again, and presented this in summary, her eyes gleaming: “I am sure my sister means to do me harm, and to take from me all that I enjoy in this life. But I will step no closer to the house than I have, because I am equally certain that she is there, you see!”

“You believe the necklace to be inside the ruins.”

“Yes, and you must get it back for me, before she takes it farther away...farther, where it cannot be retrieved!” She seemed very excited now, possibly because I was making an effort to take her story seriously. And I was certainly serious about considering the job. The way the stack of bills sat on the table, it was understood that I was not be be paid until the task was accomplished. Herein lay the conflict, because if the situation she described was imaginary, then there was no necklace to be found in the ruins, I would return empty-handed, and I would not be paid.

Hell to it, I thought. I’ve come all the way here, and I don’t see how climbing around that bend and taking a glance around will do me any harm.

“If it’s out there, I’ll come back with it. Don’t worry,” I told her, and started for the door.

Outside, the sun continued to blaze brilliantly; I saw some storm clouds off in the distance, and the breeze indicated they were probably coming in this direction; but they looked to be hours away, so I was not concerned with rain impeding my progress. I was actually looking forward to the hike, and, judging I wouldn’t need the tool kit, decided then to leave it behind.

I turned to find my employer standing at the front porch. A faint smile glimmered on her face, and in spite of how I felt about the job, it pleased me to think that my acceptance of it had somehow brightened her day.

“I’ll be on my way,” I said.

“Be careful. Please,” she well-wished.

I started for the ruins, trying to keep the image of the money in my head, and resolving to think no more about the questionable aspects of this task until I was well on my way down the road and unlikely to turn back.