“May I help you?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Jan. “I need a quick appraisal.”

There was a loud buzz, Jan’s cue to pull on the door handle. Once inside, she approached the counter.

“What were you looking to have appraised?” the woman asked politely.

Jan set her open purse on the counter and discreetly picked half a dozen diamonds from the bag inside. She held them in her hand for the woman to examine.

“I was wondering if you could give me a kind of ballpark idea what these might be worth. Do you have someone who can do that?”

“I do that,” the woman said. “Is this for insurance purposes? Because the way it usually works is, you leave these with me, I’ll give you a receipt for them, and when you come back in a week I can give you a certificate of appraisal-”

“I don’t need anything like that. I just need you to give them a quick look and tell me what you think.”

“I see,” the woman said. “All right, then. Let’s see what you have.”

On the glass counter was a desktop calendar pad, about one and a half by two feet, a grid of narrow black rules and numbers on a white background. The woman reached for jeweler’s eyepiece, adjusted a counter lamp so it was pointing down onto the calendar, then asked Jan to put the diamonds in her hand onto the lit surface.

The woman leaned over, studied the diamonds, picked a couple of them up with a long tweezerlike implement to get a closer look.

“What do you think?” Jan asked.

“Let me just get a look at all of them,” she said. One by one, she studied each of the six stones. She never said a word or made a sound the entire time.

When she was done, she said, “Where did you get these?”

“They’re in the family,” Jan said. “They’ve been passed down to me.”

“I see. It sounded as though you had more of them in your purse there.”

“A couple more,” Jan said. “But they’re all pretty much the same.”

“Yes, they are,” the woman said.

“So what do you think? I mean, just a rough estimate, what would you say they were worth? Individually, that is.”

The woman sighed. “Let me show you something.”

She set one of the diamonds on its flattest side directly on one of the black rules on the calendar. “Look at the stone directly from above.” Jan leaned over and did as she was told. “Can you see the line through the stone?”

Jan nodded. “Yes, I can.”

The woman turned and took something from a slender drawer in a cabinet along the wall. She had in her hand a single diamond. She straddled it on the black line beside Jan’s stone. The two diamonds looked identical.

“Now,” the woman said, “see if you can see the line through this stone.”

Jan leaned over a second time. “I can’t make it out,” she said. “I can’t see the line.”

“That’s because diamonds reflect and refract light unlike any other stone or substance. The light’s being bounced in so many directions in there, you can’t see through it.”

Jan felt a growing sense of unease.

“What are you saying?” Jan asked. “That my diamonds are of an inferior quality?”

“No,” the woman said. “I’m not saying that. What you have here is not a diamond.”

“That’s not true,” Jan said. “It is a diamond. Look at it. It looks exactly like yours.”

“Perhaps to you. But what you have here is cubic zirconium. It’s a man-made substance, and it does look very much like diamond, no question. They even use it for advertisements in the diamond trade magazines.” To prove it, she reached for one sitting atop the cabinet and turned through the pages. Each one was filled with dazzling photos of diamonds. “That’s fake, that’s fake. This one, too. The security costs for photo shoots would be astronomical if they used real diamonds for everything.”

Jan wasn’t hearing any of this. She hadn’t taken in anything after the woman said what she had were not diamonds.

“It’s not possible,” she said under her breath.

“Yes, well, I suppose it must be a bit of a shock if your family’s been leading you to believe these are real diamonds.”

“So this stone,” Jan said, pointing to the real diamond and thinking ahead, “wouldn’t break if I hit it with a hammer, but mine would.”

“Actually, they both would,” the woman said. “Diamonds can chip, too.”

“But my diamonds, my cubic…”

“Cubic zirconium.”

“They must be worth something,” Jan said, unable to hide the desperation in her voice.

“Of course,” the woman said. “Perhaps fifty cents each?”

Barry Duckworth pulled his car over to the shoulder. Fifty yards ahead, police cars were parked on either side of this two-lane stretch of blacktop northwest of Albany. The road had been built along the side of a heavily wooded hill. The ground sloped down from the left, then, just beyond the shoulder where Duckworth had parked, it dropped off steeply into more forest.

That was where a passing cyclist had noticed something. An SUV.

When the first rescue team had shown up, ropes were used to get down to the vehicle safely. The rescue team members knew it was going to be tricky, moving an injured person back up the hill to the ambulance, but it turned out that wasn’t going to be a problem.

There was no one in the Ford Explorer, and nothing to indicate that an occupant had been injured inside it. No blood, no matted hair on the cracked windshield.

A check of the plates showed that the Explorer belonged to Lyall Kowalski, of Promise Falls. Soon the locals learned that the wife of the man who was the registered owner of the vehicle was missing. And that was when someone put in a call to Barry Duckworth.

The night before, about twelve hours before getting the call about the SUV, Duckworth had paid a visit to the Kowalski home to tell Lyall that his wife, Leanne, had been found in a shallow grave near Lake George.

The man wailed and banged his head against the wall until it was raw and bloody, and then his dog began to howl.

Duckworth didn’t get in touch with the man when he heard about the car being found. He decided to take a drive down, see it for himself, and learn what he could before informing him of the development.

Standing at the top of the hill, he could see the path the SUV had taken. Grass had been flattened, dirt dug up. The Explorer had nicked a couple of trees on the way down, judging by the missing bark. A towering pine had brought the car’s trip to an end when it plowed into it head-on.

The first thing Barry thought was, Huh?

What was the Explorer doing here? If you looked at a map, Promise Falls was here in the middle, Lake George was up here to the north, and Albany was down here to the south. How did Leanne’s car end up at the bottom of this hill, but her body up in Lake George?

“Someone ditches the car here hoping it won’t be found,” he said to himself, “but leaves Leanne’s body so somebody’s sure to find it.”

The local police, who’d been down to the car several times before Duckworth arrived, said they’d found a gas station receipt on the floor for early Saturday afternoon. An Exxon just off the interstate north of the city. Duckworth took note of the location, then made sure everyone at the scene understood that the Explorer was linked to a homicide, and that it needed to be sent to a lab as soon as they figured a way to get it back up that hill.

On his way to the Exxon, Duckworth’s cell rang, interrupting thoughts about what sort of snack foods they might sell at the gas station. He was thinking maybe a Twinkie. He hadn’t had a Twinkie in weeks.

“Yeah?”

“Hey, Barry. How’s it hanging?”

“Natalie. How you doin’, my dear?” His encounters with Natalie Bondurant were often antagonistic, but he liked her.

“I’m doing just fine, Barry. Yourself?”

“Couldn’t be better. Your client decided to make a full confession yet?”