Probably nothing, she’d told herself again and again. But she had to find out.

She looked at her uncle as he downed half his tea in a single swallow. “I won’t wear them,” she said, “if you don’t want me to.”

David leaned against the cold wood stove and, too, watched their uncle intently. “Yeah, Barky. Now’s the time to come clean.”

But Barky got up and rotated his thick shoulders a bit, stretching, and announced he had to slop the pigs. When he reached the screen door, he pulled off his baseball cap, put it on again and turned to the niece and nephew he had raised from infancy. His expression was gentle, but there was an intensity to his gaze Ashley had rarely seen in him. “I have faith in you,” he said. “Now have faith in yourselves.”

2

The tiara and choker, two stunning pieces of diamonds and pearls, arrived from Switzerland late the following afternoon, and Ashley promptly shoved the black velvet-bound cases into her lingerie drawer, under her silk camisoles and tap pants. The prospect of her wearing them in public hadn’t sufficiently unnerved her uncle. She didn’t know why she’d expected it would. In more than four years, he’d calmly maintained he knew nothing whatever about the jewels in the Swiss vault, the money, any of it.

Except Ashley and David had never believed him. They had decided that somewhere in his deep dark past, in the years before he’d been saddled with two infants, Bartholomew Wakefield must have been a jewel thief. Or known a jewel thief. Or something.

How else could his niece and nephew come into an anonymous fortune in jewels and cash?

But he wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t take a penny from them, wouldn’t even look guilty. And that was strange. It just didn’t add up.

It was also something she and David were trying to accept. As their long-suffering attorney had told them, “Ashley, David, whoever made you both millionaires went to a great deal of trouble to remain anonymous to you. Perhaps that’s something you should respect.”

Perhaps. But Ashley didn’t really think so.

On Labor Day weekend, Ashley got the news that some hundred white-sided dolphins had stranded themselves on the tidal flats of Cape Cod Bay. An experienced and avid pilot, she bowed out of a yacht party on Cape May and flew her Cessna 172 down to Wellfleet. Once there, she bummed a ride to the beach with a couple of reporters. The New England Oceanographic Institute was coordinating the rescue efforts. An institute volunteer since college, Ashley had helped out at countless strandings, but the mystery and the tragedy of the scene never ceased to affect her.

With a jolt, she saw her skinny photographer. He had on an orange flight suit and pretended to be taking pictures of the dolphins, but Ashley knew what he was after. Her. She ignored him. In overalls and a sweatshirt, she checked in with the director of the institute’s marine mammal stranding program, who was in charge on the beach, and was asked to instruct volunteers on how best to help the stranded mammals.