Blood Rubies Read Online Free PDF Page B

said. “And those are lilies of the valley.”
    â€œI like the moss.”
    The cake was as tasty as I expected, rich and creamy and sweet, but not too sweet. I felt myself purr.
    â€œWow.”
    I took another bite. It was even better than the first.
    â€œI want to tell Heather how good it is.”
    I turned toward the window where Heather and Jason and the other couple had been seated, but they’d already left. I glanced into the lounge. Peter was still at the bar, staring at the muted wall-mounted TV, eating a hamburger, a lonely man eating alone. I felt sorry for him, and sad.
    I’d known a girl in college whose life was forever changed by a boyfriend’s breakup. She’d been blindsided by his end-of-the-semester-I-need-some-space “Dear Jane” letter, weeping for days, unable to get out of bed. She missed her finals, didn’t take the makeup exams, and flunked out. She wrote him daily missives pledging enduring love and promising to change in whatever ways he wanted. When he read her letters in open court, offering them as evidence in his petition to get a restraining order against her, she’d tried to kill herself, ending up in a mental institution. I’d felt stunned and horrified at her breathtakingly fast downward spiral, and helpless. I heard later that after a few months of hospital care, she’d recovered her equilibrium. She moved back in with her folks and went on to graduate from a different college. Four years later, she’d married a nice fellow from her hometown. Last I heard, they had three kids. What frightened me was how totally I’d misjudged her mental state. I’d known her pretty well, and it had never occurred to me that she was fragile.
    Ty took my hand as we walked to the central garage.
    â€œPeter is trying to spoil Heather’s wedding. I wish I could do something.”
    He squeezed my hand. “You have a good heart, Josie, but you can’t always fix things.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œTalk to me about Fabergé eggs.”
    I laughed, surprised. “Now?”
    â€œYeah. Take your mind off Heather’s troubles. How did Ana get the idea for those cakes?”
    â€œHer family owns an important Fabergé original—or so the story goes.”
    â€œYou don’t believe it?”
    â€œI’m reserving my opinion. Of the fifty Imperial eggs known to have been produced by Peter Carl Fabergé, forty-two are extant. The Yartsin family believes theirs is the fifty-first produced, the forty-third extant. They’re convinced that it’s the real deal, the last egg commissioned by the tsar as his annual gift to his wife, Empress Alexandra, in 1917. Ana says that when the Bolsheviks seized the Fabergé workshops, this egg, the Spring Egg, was one of the few treasures that Fabergé was able to save as he fled. Afraid that it would be confiscated like everything else in his workshops, Fabergé crafted a unique hiding place: He hid the egg in plain sight, inserting it in a snow globe, certain that to a layman’s eye, it would appear to be a cheap fake, a novelty knock-off sold as a souvenir.”
    â€œThat sounds like a movie, doesn’t it? The master craftsman escaping one step ahead of the marauding bad guys, then working by candlelight to fabricate a hiding place for a treasure.”
    â€œIt gets better. According to the story passed down through the Yartsin family, Fabergé gave the Spring Egg snow globe to his wife, Augusta, for safekeeping. Augusta and their eldest son, Eugène, escaped Russia by sleigh and on foot, making their way through snow-covered forests until they reached Finland. Fabergé escaped separately, alone. His ruse worked, and the egg went undetected. Augusta sold the snow globe to a Swiss art dealer shortly after her husband’s 1920 death. Ana’s great-grandfather, Serge Yartsin, bought it as an Easter gift for his wife in 1922, and it has been