“There were slippers that were dried up now and gnarled as if they were driftwood. An open box of powder had been tossed into the contents, and it still had a bit of sweet fragrance after all this time. A couple of perfume bottles were broken, and there was a small leather book with lots of pages of writing, but all of the writing had almost faded away. It looked like purple cobwebs.

“The mildew had gotten to everything, ruining all this finery and in some places covering the wool garments with a slimy blackness, making them a total loss.

“ ‘But this is sheer waste,’ I said out loud. I gathered up the pearl necklaces, of which there were three, and all of the five cameos, including two I had to take off the old blouses, and I went downstairs with these treasures and sought out Jasmine, who was washing some bell peppers for supper at the kitchen sink.

“I told her what I’d found and laid out the jewelry on the kitchen table.

“ ‘Well, you shouldn’t have gone up there!’ she declared. Much to my surprise, she got ferocious. ‘You just run wild these days, you know it? Why didn’t you ask me before you went up there, Taw-quin Blackwood?’ And on and on she ranted in that vein.

“I was too busy looking at the cameos. ‘All the same theme,’ I said again, ’ ”Rebecca at the Well,” and all so very pretty. Why did they get thrown up there in a trunk with all those things? Don’t you think Aunt Queen would want these things?’ Of course Aunt Queen had at least ten cameos of ‘Rebecca at the Well,’ I knew that much, though I didn’t know how she had come by the first of them, and if I had known I would have been more engrossed than I already was.

“At supper I told Pops all about it and showed him the loot, but he was no more interested in this than in anything else, and while Jasmine read me the riot act about meddling where I didn’t belong, Pops just said in his dead voice:

“ ‘You can have anything you find up there,’ which made Jasmine quiet down at once.

“At bedtime, I gave the pearls to Big Ramona, but she said she didn’t feel easy taking them, that there was a story to them and all the things that were in that trunk.

“ ‘You save them for some day when you get married,’ she said. ‘And you give those pearls to your new wife. You have them blessed by the priest first. Remember. Don’t you give them away unless they’re blessed by the priest.’

“ ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing,’ I told her. ‘A pearl necklace blessed by the priest?’