SHAKESPEARE’ SECRET (7 page)

Hero ran into the house, shaking her hair away from her face. Gingerly, she leaned her sodden backpack against the door.

“My goodness! You're wet to the bone,” Mrs. Roth exclaimed. “Let me get you a towel.”

Hero looked around. The inside of the house was not so different from the outside: shabby, cluttered, interesting. There were books everywhere, spilling out of the dark bookcases in the living room, stacked high on the dining-room table, even heaped on the piano in the corner. There were also flowers—marigolds,
snapdragons, roses—stuffed haphazardly in odd-looking containers all over the room. A gleaming, ornately carved staircase curved away from Hero, and an old glass milk bottle filled with tiger lilies perched on the bottom step. On the wall straight ahead, a cluster of photographs hung next to a faded map of Australia and two large gilt-framed oil paintings of the ocean.

Mrs. Roth appeared with a thick blue towel in her outstretched hand. Hero buried her face in it. It smelled sweet, like detergent, and musty at the same time, as if it had been in the closet awhile. When she finished rubbing herself dry, she peeled off her shoes and socks and followed Mrs. Roth into the kitchen. A wreckage of bowls and baking supplies littered the countertop.

“I've made muffins,” Mrs. Roth explained. “Blueberry, just put them in. Tea?” She filled the kettle and began pulling her china cups and saucers from the cupboard. “What a heavy rain! I love summer storms. They make the house feel so cozy.”

Hero nodded. “My mom says that when it rains you never feel like you should be anywhere but home.” She sat down at the table and looked through the window at the rain-drenched garden. “Hey, I asked my dad about Mr. Murphy. He said the reason Mr. Murphy was so interested in his job at the
Maxwell was because of Mrs. Murphy. She was descended from some Englishman who might be the real Shakespeare.” She told the rest of the story, trying to remember all the details, looping back to correct herself, her words tumbling over one another. As Mrs. Roth listened, her eyes widened, and finally she slid into a chair and rested her chin in one palm. The teakettle whistled untended.

“Well, isn't that astonishing,” she said when Hero finished. “I had no idea.” She shook her head slowly. “Eleanor said the Veres were English nobility but she never mentioned Shakespeare. If it's true—well, does your father really think it could be true?”

“He's not sure,” Hero answered. “He says there's no proof. No one's been able to explain why Edward de Vere would try so hard to keep it a secret that he wrote the plays.”

“Well, that
is
curious, isn't it?” Mrs. Roth agreed.

She poured their tea. Hero held the cup with both hands and lowered her face into the warm vapor. “You were going to show me something, remember?” she said. “The other day?”

“Of course I remember. I didn't want to bring it up in front of Daniel.” Mrs. Roth sounded almost apologetic. “He's a dear, and I don't like deceiving
him. But he
is
the son of the police chief. I'd rather not put him in the position of having to lie to his father. Or of having to tell his father the truth, for that matter.”

So she hadn't told him anything after all. Hero smiled at her, feeling a warm swell of gladness that something remained a secret. “Yeah,” she agreed. “Who knows if you can trust him?”

“Oh, I trust Daniel,” Mrs. Roth said decisively. “I'm a notoriously good judge of character. But I'm not sure it's wise to trust him with information about the diamond. More for his sake than for ours.”

Hero felt like asking Mrs. Roth if she knew about Danny Cordova's suspension last year. How trustworthy was a kid who'd been thrown out of school? But instead she changed the subject.

“What about his dad? His dad seems to think the diamond's still somewhere at our house, too.”

“Yes. But he doesn't have as good a reason as I do.” Mrs. Roth pushed back her chair and left the room. When she returned she held a small cardboard box in her hands.

“The day after Arthur Murphy decided to sell the house to your parents, he brought this to me. It was the last time I saw him.” She lifted the flap of the box
and gently tilted it over the table. There was a rustle of tissue paper, then a musical clinking sound. Hero caught her breath.

There in front of her was a glittering coil of gold, a heavy chain gleaming with pearls and rubies. An empty pendant dangled from the middle.

“Oh!” cried Hero. “The necklace!”

She lifted it, still unable to breathe, and felt its cool weight settle in the furrows of her palm. It amazed her that something so old and fragile could seem so imposing. She was almost afraid to touch it. The rubies and pearls caught the light. The gold still glistened gamely.

“It's beautiful,” Hero whispered.

“Yes, isn't it?” Mrs. Roth took the necklace and spread it on the table between them.

Hero saw that the chain had small, shimmering gold beads alternating with lustrous white pearls. Blood-red rubies set in gold brackets studded the length of the chain at regular intervals. The ornate golden pendant hung at the bottom, bordered by rubies, with a
teardrop-shaped pearl dangling at the base. It was forlornly empty.

“So this is where the diamond was?” Hero asked.

“Yes, there in the center. It was a pyramid cut, square at the base, rising to a point.”

Hero turned the pendant in her hand, looking at the rubies. On the back, she saw something faint etched in the gold. “What's this design? It looks like a bird.”

Mrs. Roth nodded. “It's faded. I can't really tell. But it looks like a bird holding a tree branch, doesn't it? Eleanor said that animal designs were quite common in the jewelry of the period.”

Hero kept squinting at the back, holding it closer to the kitchen light. She touched the surface with her index finger. Suddenly she had an idea. “Can I have a piece of paper and a pencil?” she asked.

Mrs. Roth pulled out one of the kitchen drawers and handed her a notepad and a stubby, pockmarked pencil. Hero pressed the paper against the back of the pendant and rubbed the pencil across it in dark strokes until the design appeared. She looked at it closely. “Are these initials?”

Mrs. Roth squinted at the page. “I hadn't noticed that. Yes, it looks like letters, doesn't it?
A
something. What's the second one?”

Hero shook her head. “It's pretty worn down. Maybe an
E?”

“Hmm,
AE.
Some Vere ancestor, I suppose.”

Hero gently nudged the necklace into a circle again. “It's so small,” she said. “It's almost like a choker.”

“Yes. That must have been the style. Or their necks were smaller in those days.”

Hero tried to imagine the necklace clasped around a woman's slender throat. “How old is it?” she asked.

“Well, sixteenth century, so almost five hundred years old. Eleanor thought that it dated from the mid-1500s.”

“I've never touched anything that old before.” Hero stroked it lightly, full of wonder.

“Nor have I,” Mrs. Roth said, smiling at her.

“But why did Mr. Murphy give it to you? I mean, it's so old and valuable, and it had been in Mrs. Murphy's family for such a long time. Why did he leave it here with you?”

Mrs. Roth tilted the box again and reached inside. She pulled out a note card, creamy white with a navy monogram emblazoned across the front. “This was also in the package,” she said, handing it to Hero.

Hero opened the note card. Inside, in bold cursive, it read:

Hero frowned, puzzled. “It's from Mr. Murphy?”

“Yes.”

“Is he giving you the necklace to keep?”

Mrs. Roth looked away, her face shadowed. She didn't say anything. Hero waited, but the silence gathered in the kitchen, as heavy as the downpour outside the window.

At last Mrs. Roth spoke. “They had no one else. No . . . children, no other family to give it to. I think Arthur wanted me to have it because he knew it would mean something to me.”

“But you can't wear the necklace without the diamond in it.”

“No,” Mrs. Roth said. “I don't think that was his intention.”

“Then what?” Hero wondered. “Does he think you know where the diamond is? Does he expect you to find it?”

Mrs. Roth took the necklace from Hero and curled
it in her hand, closing her fingers over it. “Read the back of the card,” she said.

Hero turned the note card over and read, printed neatly across the back:

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“Oh, my dear. For someone named after an illustrious literary character, you have an alarming ignorance of English literature.”

“We don't even study English literature in school,” Hero protested. “I don't think you do that till seventh grade.”

Mrs. Roth shook her head in mock dismay. “Is that an excuse? It's from a poem by Dylan Thomas. It's about dying. About how to die, really.”

Hero kept looking at the card. “I don't get it. Did Mr. Murphy write this on the back? Why?”

“Because it's quite like Eleanor, I think. He wanted to remind me of her. And perhaps it has something to do with the diamond.”

“Like a clue?” Hero asked eagerly. She studied the verse more closely. “Is he trying to tell you where he hid it?”

Mrs. Roth sipped her tea. “Let's not get ahead of ourselves.”

“But you said that he thinks you know where the diamond is. He wants you to find it.”

“Actually, Hero, you said that.” Mrs. Roth seemed tired. She rubbed her forehead. “I don't know what Arthur thinks or what he wants to happen. It was horrible for the two of them during those last few months. All that uproar about the diamond, badgered by the police and the insurance investigators. And the whole time, Eleanor was dying. Even after she was gone, people were still talking about the diamond, the Murphy diamond. How much it was worth. Where it might be hidden. Would he get away with it. The poor man's wife had died, and nobody would leave him alone. It was all very . . . disappointing.”

Hero looked out at the rainy day. “But why would Mr. Murphy give you the necklace unless he wanted you to have the diamond, too?”

Mrs. Roth opened her hand and stared at the necklace, absently touching the chain. “I imagine that he simply wanted the necklace and the diamond to be in the same place, as they'd been for over four hundred years. I think he wanted to put things right.”

Abruptly she placed the necklace back in the box, folding the cardboard flaps closed. She seemed
subdued, though Hero couldn't figure out why. They sat in silence for a few minutes.

Finally Hero asked, “Should I go now? You seem kind of tired.”

“I'm sorry,” Mrs. Roth said. “I'm not being a very good hostess, am I? It's just that—” She hesitated. “I miss my friend.”

Hero felt a pang of envy. She tried to remember the last time she'd had a friend she liked well enough to miss. Not Kate or Lindsey, certainly.

The buzzer rang in the quiet kitchen, and Mrs. Roth hurried to open the oven door. A rush of heat filled the room, full of the fruity smell of the muffins. She carried the tin to the table and rested it on a pot holder between them.

Hero dropped a hot muffin onto her plate and blew on it, watching the steam swirl in the air. She had so many questions she wanted to ask, but she wasn't sure if Mrs. Roth was still in the mood to answer them.

After a minute, she said, “If the diamond is at my house, why do you think the police didn't find it? They would know where to look better than we would.”

“True,” said Mrs. Roth. “And you should have seen the mess they made. The house looked as if it really
had
been burglarized, by the time they finished with it.”