THE NECKLACE
On a very hot, tropical morning about twenty million years before this present day, a hungry beetle, minding its own business, scuttled up a courbaril tree. The beetle, having a brain the size of a punctuation mark in a book, unknowingly scuttled into oozing, sticky sap. Splurchh.
The beetle’s scuttling days were cut short. Just. Like. That. Meanwhile, the sap continued to ooze. It flowed down, down, down the tree, carrying off the beetle to wet soil. Soon, a freshwater current found the sappy beetle and swept it away to a mangrove swamp. There, it sank deep into the muck.
Thwurrp. Blunnck. Blip. And there it stayed for millions of years, hardening into amber.
That is, until a spring day in 1959, when Jorge Ortiz, barefoot and shirtless, chiseled the chunk of amber out of layers of lignite rock 130 feet below the ground. He held the rock in his hand and licked it. Yes, licked it, which revealed the golden amber and the beetle inside. Incidentally, the flavor was not especially good, but Jorge had tasted worse. His sister’s sancocho, for one thing. Like eating boiled feet. But times were hard, and Jorge would eat a wheelbarrow full of rock if he could make a few pesos doing it.
Jorge sold the amber to the village jeweler, Leandro Gil. Leandro spent months fashioning it into a necklace. The beetle inside was as close to a pet as Leandro ever had, and as he worked on the necklace late into the night, he told the beetle his dreams, his fears, and all the secret things he kept close to his heart.
Leandro eventually sold the necklace to an American tourist, Finnigan Drake, who gave it to his daughter, Margorie. Margorie took one look at the necklace, shouted “Pineapple!” and promptly shoved it into her mouth before her father could stop her. Pineapple was Margorie’s favorite food and favorite word. (Margorie was one and a half.)
Worried that keeping the pineapple-looking necklace might result in little Margorie not seeing age two, Margorie’s parents gave the necklace to their neighbor, Janice Freeman. Janice was petrified of two things: bugs and rudeness. So she accepted the necklace, but only to be polite.
Janice couldn’t be rid of the necklace fast enough. She gave it to her mother, Dinah, that same day. Unlike Janice, Dinah wasn’t petrified of anything, and she wore the necklace while skydiving and refereeing pro wrestling matches. To prove that she wasn’t even afraid of death, she lived to be 107. When she died, all of her belongings that Janice didn’t want (which was most of them) were sold at a garage sale.
Ezra Platz, a garage sale fanatic, offered Janice twenty dollars for the amber necklace, which she accepted immediately and with an abundance of enthusiasm. Ezra gave the necklace to his niece Myra when she graduated from art school. She always liked the color yellow. And she had a thing for bugs. She drew pictures of them. Bugs had it easy, was how Myra saw things. Bugs led simple lives and didn’t ponder life’s big questions, such as “Who am I?” and “What am I supposed to do?”
Bugs, thought Myra, didn’t feel lost like she sometimes felt.
Myra kept the necklace for several years and then passed it on to its present-day owner, her daughter, whose name was Tildy Gubbers.
CHAPTER 1
Tildy
In the middle of Daddy Lou’s auction house, Tildy Gubbers was surrounded by poodle lamps. And they weren’t the least bit interested in her problems, she could tell. They certainly weren’t interested in the business with her mama.
They just sat there, staring at her with their flat, painted-on black eyes while Tildy was overcome with a peculiarly awful feeling. It had started in her head, moved into her tonsils, and settled unpleasantly in her gut.
It felt like something was missing.
She had to admit it was strange to have such a missing sort of feeling when there were tables loaded with stuff all around her. The stuff, in addition to the poodle lamps, was all kinds of collectibles. Antiques. Knickknacks. Bric-a-brac. Gewgaws. Notions. Sundries. Curios. There were a lot of names for the things people bought at her father’s auction house.
“What could be missing?” said Tildy, running her hand through her short hair. She had posed the question to one of the pink poodle lamps in front of her. It had an annoyed expression on its face. But maybe that was more likely to do with the electric cord coming out of its butt. In any case, it didn’t answer.
The poodle lamps, along with everything else that had been spread out on the tables, had belonged to a local collector named Frederica Verne. A lady who had lived just outside of town in a trailer next to an old crumbly-down farmhouse. A lady who had amassed so much stuff in that farmhouse that there wasn’t any room left for her to even scratch her armpits. (Not that she ever had cause to do such a thing. That’s just the way townspeople described her situation: “She’s got so much jam-packed in that house of hers, the poor woman can’t even lift up her arms to scratch her pits.”)
Incidentally, Ms. Verne seemed to be missing nothing. The woman had twenty of everything. At least while she was alive. Now that she was dead she was probably missing a lot. Because by this time tomorrow, thanks to Tildy’s father, Daddy Lou, all her stuff would belong to somebody else.
Gubbers Appraisal & Salvage Auctions, which was the name of Daddy Lou’s auction business, had been passed down from a long line of Gubberses. All of them named Lou. The business was in the same cinder-block garage where Daddy Lou’s grandfather, who was known as Big Lou, had started it more than eighty years before.
The auction house was just one room, big enough to fit about a dozen cars, and a tiny office and even tinier bathroom in the back. There was a wide wooden door at the front that was always propped open during business hours to let some light in the place. Air, too. Which was a good thing because there were no windows, and even though it had been a very long time since it was an actual garage, the place still stank like motor oil and old wet towels. Tildy was used to the stink because for the last 186 days, she’d spent a lot of time there after school and on weekends.
A lot, a lot.
That was just one of the many ways Tildy’s life had changed after her mama left.
“What could be missing?” said Tildy again. She checked the pockets of her shorts. Honey lip balm, a ball of lint, and her anatomy notebook and drawing pencil. All there.
“I’ll tell you what’s missing,” said Leon Monteforte, who was suddenly beside Tildy. “Good taste, plain and simple.”
Cripes. Leon.
There were times when Tildy felt like she was being punished for a terrible thing she’d done in a past life. (Not that Tildy one hundred percent believed in past lives, but it was a worthy explanation.)
This was one of those times.
Leon was eleven, the same as Tildy, and he lived next door to the auction house in an apartment above his grandparents’ tavern. They’d been in the same class at Roselark Elementary since kindergarten. Leon said it was something called kismet. Tildy didn’t know what kismet was, but if it meant somebody following you around all the time even when you didn’t want them to, then yeah, it was kismet all right.
Leon’s straight hair came down to his chin and was always parted in the middle. It hung right in his face, and sometimes the ends got caught in his mouth when he talked. This didn’t seem to bother Leon, not even one iota. But Tildy, no matter how much she tried to pretend that Leon’s hair clogging up his mouth wasn’t (1) distracting and (2) really gross, couldn’t help but fantasize about pulling a pair of scissors from her pocket and taking care of things once and for all.
“Any chance Ms. Verne had a thing for candlesticks?” said Leon.
“Huh?” said Tildy.
“You know, candlesticks. Sconces. Taper holders. That is to say, lighting of the non-electrical variety. And preferably without poodles.”
“State your purpose, Leon,” said Tildy.
“I need a candlestick for my séance,” he said. “I’m going to summon the spirits of those gone before.” He managed to blow out a few strands of hair before sucking in some more.
It was hard not to look at his haired-up mouth.
“Listen here,” said Tildy, “I’ve got to get helping my daddy. I’m supposed to be running tickets today, so I don’t have time—”
Leon touched Tildy’s arm. His fingers were warm. “I heard your mama’s back.”
It was no surprise that Leon had heard about Tildy’s mama. The whole town of Plucketts, Maryland, knew that Myra Gubbers had left her family 186 days before without so much as a note or a phone call, so it was only a matter of time before everybody found out that yesterday morning she had shown up at their doorstep out of the blue. There were no secrets kept in this tiny town, even when you wanted them to be.
“Yeah,” said Tildy. Because what else was there to say? Tildy was glad her mama came back. But who was to say she wouldn’t leave again?
Daddy Lou said that her mama had felt stuck. That’s why she’d left. And even though she was back she needed time to get used to being here. Which is why she stayed home today instead of helping out at the auction like she always had before. Daddy Lou also said that Mama needed things to be peaceful around the house. And not to bother her or cause her any upset. Or she might leave again. Daddy Lou hadn’t said that last part in those exact words, but that’s what he’d meant. “Think of her as an egg,” he’d told Tildy. But Tildy didn’t want to think of her mama as an egg.
Tildy Gubbers was allergic to eggs.
“So,” said Leon, “what about a candlestick?”
“A what?” said Tildy, whose thoughts were still lingering on her mama’s unexpected return.
“A candlestick for my séance. Yeesh.” Leon straightened his back so that his eyes, somewhere behind the hair curtain, were even with Tildy’s shoulders. “I’m going to summon spirits with my newfound psychic abilities. But I need to set the kind of mood that’s inviting to the spirits of those gone before. And nothing says ‘Welcome, spirits!’ like the flicker of candlelight. Everybody knows that.”
“Since when do you have psychic abilities?”
“Since I went to Grandmother’s church revival last weekend.” Leon stepped closer to Tildy. “I heard a voice,” he whispered. “Right there in the middle of Preacher Eddie’s homily, I heard it. It was the voice of my dead grandfather. He wanted to know why there were grapes in the chicken salad sandwiches.”
Tildy didn’t think someone would come all the way back from the dead to ask about sandwiches. Last regrets, unfinished business, and sweet revenge, that’s what people came back for. If they came back at all. But she decided not to tell Leon that because if there was one thing she knew about Leon Monteforte, it was that he pretty much thought he knew everything and he wouldn’t stop talking until you agreed with him or until your brain turned to cheese. Whichever happened to come first.
Don’t say anything, Tildy told herself. Whatever you do, don’t say a word. And for cripes’ sake, don’t look interested. She made her face stiff and expressionless. Like a zombie. For certain, she thought, a zombie face would put a stop to the story.
Hardly.
“I kept quiet, of course,” Leon went on, “because as I mentioned, it was right in the middle of Preacher Eddie’s homily, so I didn’t have a chance to answer my dead grandfather’s question. But as soon as Preacher Eddie was done, I told Grandmother what had happened, and she said, lo and behold, I must have the Gift, so now that I know I have it, there’s no stopping me. I’m going to see how many spirits I can summon. Which brings me back to needing a candlestick.”
Tildy looked across the room to where Daddy Lou was auctioning off a taxidermied pheasant wearing a seersucker apron and a matching bonnet. Marguerite, her little sister, was standing on a milk crate and holding the dressed-up pheasant over her head so that all the customers could get a good look. Tildy noticed some candlesticks on the table behind her sister. “Over there,” Tildy told Leon as she pointed to where Marguerite was standing. “But you’ll need to get a number first before you can bid on anything.” She started to walk away.
“The thing is . . . ,” said Leon, biting his thumbnail. Tildy stopped.
“I don’t have the traditional means to buy them.” She looked at him. “Huh?”
Leon patted the empty pockets of his wrinkle-free khakis. “Unfortunately, I’m without funds. But perhaps we could barter? After all, I have the Gift. And before, I heard you say that something was missing. Maybe I can use the Gift to help you find it, in exchange for a candlestick, of course.”
Before she could think about what she was doing, she said this: “All right, Leon. Fine. Whatever.”
