Chapter 12 — TESS

I asked Tess Marchetti to meet me and she said no.

Then two weeks later she said yes, and we met at a place on Milwaukee near where the bank used to be, which she chose, and I do not think that was an accident.

I brought the whole file.

The order book page from 1978.

The catalogue page.

The buyer file.

The box file with the four notices and the address on them.

She read it in order, all the way through, and she did not say anything for about twenty minutes, and when she got to the page with 1400 North Kelvyn Road on it she put both hands flat on the table.

She said, "She told me they sold it."

She said, "She told me that for twenty years and I thought she was — "

And she stopped.

I said, "You thought she was confused."

Tess said, "I thought she was sick. She had a lot of things she believed. She thought the state took her mother's ring and I thought it was one of those."

She said, "It was the only true one."

I want to be very careful about what happened next, because it is the part that is most easily got wrong.

I offered her the ring.

She said no.

Not softly.

She said, "What am I supposed to do with it? Wear the thing that ruined her? Give it to Junie?"

I said, "Then tell me what you want and I will do it if it is in my power."

And Tess Marchetti thought about it for a long time and said, "I want it written down somewhere that she wasn't lying."

Not money.

Not the ring, not the name, not the firm, not one dollar of the sixty-one million.

A record.

She wanted a piece of paper in a government office with her grandmother's name on it that said: this woman owned something and it was taken correctly and it was still hers.

Which, as it happens, was the one thing I could actually give her, and I had known how to do it since 1999, and it had never once occurred to me to look.