Chapter 6

At three o'clock, with the tent still full, Willa Gadsden walked back to the head of the white-clothed table.

Nobody stopped her this time. She came up from the kitchen side the way she had come for forty-one years, and she walked the length of the table, and ninety people watched her do it, and the noise in the tent went down like water draining.

Cordelia was at the head of the table in a fresh linen dress, wearing the garnets. Necklace, earrings, the case in her handbag. Nadine Boykin sat two chairs down with a legal pad. Curtis Amaker sat beside her with a folder. Trip was at the far end. June was beside her grandmother with a crayon in her fist and her braids tied in blue ribbon.

Willa set the folded paper down on the cloth in front of Cordelia, and then she smoothed it flat with her palm, corner to corner, the way she smoothed tablecloths.

A dock. A boat. A man in a ball cap carrying a gold rectangle as tall as his chest, with rays coming off it like a sun. Blue letters on the hull: MISS CORDELIA. Wobbly blue words underneath: UNCLE TRIP'S SECRET. And in the corner, in a second grader's hand: Oct 3.

For a moment nothing happened at all.

Then June leaned over, put her small finger on the blue letters, and read them out loud.

"Miss Cordelia."

Cordelia stopped chewing. The napkin slid off her lap and she did not pick it up. Her jaw stayed exactly where it was, mid-bite, and her eyes came up off the drawing and went down the table, past the flowers, to her son.

One by one, ninety guests turned to look at Trip Prescott.

Trip set his fork down. He looked at his daughter. He looked at the drawing. He looked at his mother, and something in his face came apart like a knot giving way.

"I took it," he said. "I took the painting."

The tent was silent enough to hear the marsh.

"I owed Rolly Tift thirty-eight thousand on a charter deal in Savannah and I couldn't tell anybody and I couldn't ask her." He nodded at his mother. "Ezra Moultrie's gallery on Bay Street gave me cash for it in three hours. I carried it out on my own boat at six in the morning on the third. I didn't know June saw me. I didn't know she drew it."

Curtis Amaker was already writing.

"Where is it now," he said.

"Savannah. He's holding it. He wants eighty-five for it and I don't have eighty-five and neither does-" Trip stopped.

"Neither do I," Cordelia said. Her voice was flat and old. She had taken the necklace off without seeming to know she was doing it, and it lay in her hand like something she'd found on the ground. "Not until the estate closes. Not until tonight."

Nadine Boykin looked up from her pad. "Mrs. Prescott, did you know about the painting?"

"Yes."

"And the parure?"

Cordelia looked at Willa. That was the only moment all day when she looked at Willa's face instead of past it.

"On Tuesday she asked me where the painting was," Cordelia said. "In the hall, with the appraiser's card in her hand. And she'd already looked in her ledger. She'd already noticed." She turned the garnet necklace over in her fingers. "And I thought - if she's a thief, then nobody listens to a thief. If she's a thief, it's her word against mine, and mine is worth more, and I only need a few weeks. A few weeks and I could have bought it back and put it on the wall and nobody would ever have known that my son-"

She stopped.

"I never took it," she said. "I never made a dollar off it. I was buying my son's mistakes back for eleven months, one piece at a time, and this was the last one, and I couldn't reach it. So I made her the thief instead."

Willa stood at the head of the table with her hands at her sides and said nothing at all.