On the back of the label of the lone bottle of Chateau Margaux 1973 in Tobias Hawthorne’s collection, there was a drawing. A pencil sketch of a dangling, tear-drop crystal.
“Jewelry?” Grayson ventured a guess, but I’d already been in the vault.
“No,” I said slowly, picturing the crystal in the drawing and thinking back. Where have I seen something like that before? “I think we’re looking for a chandelier.”
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There were eighteen crystal chandeliers in Hawthorne House. We found the one we were looking for in the Tea Room.
“Are we going up?” I asked, craning my neck at the twenty-foot ceilings. “Or is that thing coming down?”
Jameson strolled over to a wall panel. He hit a button, and the chandelier slowly lowered to eye level. “For dusting purposes,” he told me.
Even the thought of trying to dust this monstrosity gave me palpitations. There had to be at least a thousand crystals on the chandelier. One wrong move, and they could all shatter.
“What now?” I breathed.
“Now,” Jameson told me, “we take it one by one.”
Examining the individual crystals took time. Every few minutes, I brushed against Jameson or Grayson, or one of them brushed against me.
“This one,” Grayson said suddenly. “Look at the
irregularities.”
Jameson was on top of him in a heartbeat. “Etching?” he asked.
Instead of responding to his brother, Grayson turned and handed the crystal to me. I stared at it, but if there was a message or clue contained in this crystal, I couldn’t make it out with my naked eye.
We could use a jeweler’s loupe, I thought. Or—
“The flashlight,” I breathed. I reached inside the leather satchel. Locking my hand around the flashlight, I took a quick breath. I held out the crystal, then shined the light through. The irregularities caused the light to refract just so. At first, the result was incomprehensible, but then I flipped the crystal over and tried again.
This time, the flashlight’s beam refracted to form a message. As I stared at the light projected onto the floor, there was no missing the words—the warning.
DON’T TRUST ANYONE.
