Eva had used a personal shorthand, mostly consisting of initials, but they were pretty easy to decipher. And there were very few appointments. On Monday mornings at nine there was an S.M., a staff meeting. Wednesday noon, lunch with J. Jordan. Maddie ran her finger over the initial. Had Eva been so focused on her business that she’d had to pencil Jordan in to spend time with her? She thought of the easy relationship she’d always had with her father, the constant companionship he’d offered. And she felt sorry that Jordan had missed out on that.
“Find something?”
Maddie met Jase’s eyes. He was seated on the floor across the coffee table from her, his long legs stretched out. “Just that Eva has Jordan penciled in for lunch every Wednesday.”
“That was your sister’s doing. They’d go out to lunch, and Jordan would either produce tickets for a matinee or she’d make your mother go shopping with her. She thought Eva spent too much time focused on her work and insisted that she take at least Wednesday afternoons off. Jordan had some theory that the time they spent visiting a museum or seeing a play would actually foster Eva’s creativity.”
“Jordan sounds just like my dad. He was always nagging me that I worked too much.”
“Was he right?”
“I didn’t think so at the time. I wonder if Eva’s focus on work was one of the reasons they broke up.”
“You may never find out the answer to that,” Jase said.
“But if I find enough pieces, maybe I can put the puzzle together by myself.”
He smiled at her then, slowly. “You’re absolutely right.”
She nodded and shifted her gaze determinedly to the appointment calendar. “For tonight, I have a big enough challenge with this particular puzzle.”
“Patience is a requirement if you want to find all the pieces.”
Maddie would have settled for just two pieces that would lock together. Every puzzle needed that first match.
The week after the robbery Eva had jotted J.C. in the five-o’clock Wednesday slot. Jase had confirmed that was the day she’d come to his office. The next day he’d left for South America.
Twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, P.T. had been noted in the same time slot. Since Eva’s routine had been to visit the gym on her way home from work, Maddie guessed that P.T. stood for personal trainer. Except for lunch with J., none of the initials jotted in various time slots seemed to connect to anyone who worked at Eva Ware Designs or members of the Ware family who stood to profit from the will.
Scattered randomly on each page were doodles that Maddie suspected were the beginnings of design ideas. Some were elaborated upon in more detail on a later page. Others were abandoned or scratched out.
In Maddie’s mind, Eva had used the semi-empty pages of her appointment calendar to test out new ideas—or perhaps to help her think through problems. On a hunch, she flipped through the earlier months and noted that the doodling had increased after the date of the robbery.
And that meant exactly what? Hadn’t they already surmised that Eva suspected someone on the inside of pulling off the robbery? Maddie had been so hoping that the appointment calendar would provide them with a new clue.
Discouraged, she glanced again at Jase who was sorting through the clippings and sticky notes that Eva had stuffed inside the appointment calendar. On the dining table on the upper level, they’d dumped the contents of Eva’s tote bag and discovered nothing more than what had tumbled out when Michelle had dropped it—a wallet, a pack of matches and a sketch pad half-filled with embryonic designs.
Every so often Jase would pause and scribble something on a piece of hotel stationary. Maddie was doing the same on a message pad she’d located by one of the phones. His list was longer than hers. But then he was a trained investigator.
Jase glanced up at her, then at the pizza they’d smuggled into the Donatello. “Do you want another piece?”
“Go ahead.”
He reached for the last slice, folded it neatly in half with one hand, and took a bite. With his other hand, he continued to lift and examine the various pieces of paper Eva had stuffed into her calendar.
She glanced back down at the two pages that captured the last week of Eva’s life. It was the fourth time she’d gone over them. There had to be something she’d missed….
The only unusual thing was that on the day before Eva had been run down, she’d scratched out P.T. and replaced it with another doodle. This one looked vaguely familiar. Perhaps it was a revision of an earlier sketch.
Frustrated, Maddie tapped her pencil on the notepad. “I’m getting nowhere. If Eva confronted either Michelle or Cho at work with her suspicions, she wouldn’t have had to write it down. All she records are standing appointments. Other than that, she used her calendar to sketch design ideas.”
Jase swallowed a last mouthful of pizza. “It’s the same with the papers she slipped into the book.” He held up an advertisement torn from a glossy magazine. In the margin was what Maddie guessed to be an earring in the shape of a spiderweb.
Eyes narrowing, she reached for it.
“What?”
“The design.” The moment Jase handed it to her Maddie placed it carefully next to the page she’d been studying. “It’s the same one she drew in the five o’clock time slot the night before she was run down.”
Rising, Jase stepped over the coffee table and knelt down next to her so that he could study the drawing too.
“I don’t think it’s a design,” he said. “It’s the logo for the club that’s being advertised—the Golden Spider.”
Quickly, Maddie scanned the ad. There were quotes from newspapers and magazines extolling the virtues of the Golden Spider club as one of Manhattan’s premier night spots—“the latest place to be seen in the Big Apple.” The in place to be. Then she saw it. The text was layered over a faint drawing that matched what Eva had doodled in her appointment calendar and again in the corner of the ad.
Frowning, she flipped back through the pages to the night of the robbery. Then using one finger she began to skim down each page until she found what she was looking for. A week after the robbery, on the day she’d visited Jase at his office, Eva’d sketched the same spiderweb. “Here it is again. I assumed it was an idea for a piece of jewelry, but maybe not.”
Jase strode to the dining table on the level above them. “Something’s tugging at the back of my mind. I’ve seen it before someplace.”
Maddie studied him. The energy that he always seemed to keep tightly leashed was much closer to the surface. “You think it means something?”
“Maybe.” First he leafed through the sketch book. “Nothing here.” Then he picked up something from the table. “Well, hello.” He tossed it to her.
Maddie caught the matchbook, and her heart skipped a beat when she got a close look. “The Golden Spider.” She glanced up at Jase.
“I’d say we have a clue.” He descended the two steps and began to pace. “I’m still thinking that I saw that design before. Some place besides the matchbook. I saw a lot of jewelry sketches pinned to the wall while we were in the workroom at Eva Ware Designs. Would your mother have seen a logo like that one and purposely sketched it with the idea of turning it into a piece of jewelry?”
“I…don’t know. We’ll have to ask Jordan.”
“No.” Moving forward, Jase dropped to his knees beside her and grabbed her shoulders. “I’m asking you. You’re more like your mother than you realize.”
A skip of panic moved through her. “I don’t think so.”
“You’re both designers. Your brains are hard-wired in a certain way.”
“That doesn’t mean I know her.”
“Fine.” But he disagreed with her. Maddie was coming to know her mother more and more. The problem was she wasn’t quite comfortable with that knowledge. Releasing her, he picked up the message pad she’d been taking notes on and held it for her to see.
Maddie studied the doodles she’d made in the margins. She hadn’t even been fully aware of drawing them. A few were designs she’d been experimenting with for quite a while.
She drew in a deep breath and let it out. “I sometimes do that when I’m worried or thinking through a problem.”
“Yeah. From the looks of it, your mother had the same habit. So now I want you to take your best guess. Would your mother have seen something like the spider design and ‘borrowed’ it as the basis for a piece of jewelry?”
“No,” Maddie said firmly.
Jase nodded. “Then she had to have some other reason for her doodles. My theory is that your mother came across it in the ad or on the matchbox, or some other place. Either way she started thinking about it or worrying about it. I can’t imagine that she was doodling this because she was a regular visitor at the Golden Spider. You with me so far?”
Maddie thought of the desk in Eva’s apartment, piled high with sketch books, littered with drawings. It had been a potent testimonial to what Eva had done when she got home from the gym or the store every night, and it argued forcefully against her mother having had any nightlife. Come to think of it, Maddie herself didn’t have a nightlife either. How many evenings did she return to her studio to work? There was a sudden tightness around her heart that had her rubbing her fist against it.