Frank said, “It wasn’t stolen. Your brother took it. I’ve spent fourteen years finding it, and the reason I couldn’t tell you is that if you knew who had it you’d have gone straight to him, and I needed to know what he’d done with it first.” He told me my brother had taken the ring because he’d been desperate for money in 2011, but he hadn’t sold it. He’d given it to someone as collateral, and that person had kept it all these years. Frank finally found the trail three months ago and discovered something that made him stop looking for the ring and start looking for the person who had taken it.
He said the $2,600 wasn’t for the jewelry. It was the amount he’d paid to get a copy of the original paperwork, because the ring had been transferred more than once and the last person who had it claimed it belonged to her. Frank had been meeting her secretly because she knew my brother, and she had one thing that changed everything: a photograph of my mother wearing the ring the week before it disappeared. “Your brother didn’t take it for himself,” Frank said. “He took it because Mom asked him to.” I couldn’t understand why my mother would give away the ring she’d worn for forty years.
Then Frank opened the jewelry box and showed me a folded note underneath the velvet lining. It was my mother’s handwriting, dated three days before the ring disappeared. “I gave it to him because he was the only one who knew what happened that night,” she had written. “If he ever tells you I was afraid of him, believe him.” Frank said my brother had kept the note hidden for fourteen years because he’d promised our mother he’d never tell me the truth while she was alive. Then he looked at me and said, “She’s been gone nine years, and your brother still hasn’t told you what she was afraid of — but I know, and that’s why I couldn’t give this ring back to you until now.”
