Tyler’s comment about dad not liking him reminded me about the day that Tyler had challenged dad about my qualifications to work as a teaching assistant and how it all came about because of my ability to use the field to detect metals. Besides looking for impurities in the metals for dad’s forges, I hadn’t really thought about what other positive uses this ability could be put to. Now I had an idea.
A few years ago, dad had presented me with mom’s jewelry box. She was never into wearing much jewelry, but over the years she’d collected quite a few pieces as gifts. I’m not sure if dad gave me the jewelry box because he always intended to when I go old enough or because he finally came to terms with the fact that mom wasn’t coming back. Either way, the box was in my dresser and I went there to find mom’s engagement ring. Mom always wore her wedding band and it disappeared along with her, but her diamond engagement ring was only put on for social occasions with friends or family and so it was in the box when she disappeared.
Taking out the ring from its resting place in the box, I held it in my hand and admired it for awhile. I’d always loved this ring and it brought back one of my few memories of mom; both of us lying down on her bed after a big family dinner, with her telling me a story and me leaning on her and playing with her hand, twisting the rings around her fingers. I’d felt so happy; so secure. Mom and I were taken not long after that.
I sent out a field to surround the ring and took in the information that it sent to me. The gold was a new metal for me, as the inventory room at the school didn’t have any in it. The really expensive metals were used sparingly and were kept locked up tightly in a safe somewhere. I focused on the gold and made sure that I could recognize it easily before moving on to the diamond. The diamond had a different feel from the metals. My mind interpreted it as a smoothness. It was very easy to recognize.
Wrapping a field around the whole jewelry box, I looked to see what metals I could recognize. I wanted to see I could find other diamonds, without using my eyes. Not all of mom’s jewelry was real and I detected some iron, copper, bronze and brass, along with more gold. I could feel mom’s diamond earrings in the right-hand corner of the bottom drawer of the jewelry box. The earrings were a high-school graduation present from her parents.
There were also materials that I didn’t recognize, so I brought the box down to my floor and took out all of the pieces, laying them out neatly side by side. I examined each carefully with my eyes and the field. Some of the stones, I recognized, like a ruby and an emerald, but others I had to look up on my phone. Only when I looked up the other stones, I found that what I thought were a ruby and an emerald might not actually be those stones. It seemed like a red gemstone could also be a sapphire or a garnet. A green one could also be something called a chrome diopside. Using the app, I could see that were dozens of gemstones that I’d never even heard of.
I made a mental note to see if the mineralogy department at the school had a collection of gemstones that I could study. I was also curious to see if the field could tell the difference between good and bad quality gemstones. If they didn’t have a good enough collection, I had a few artist friends who could point me in the right direction.
Before putting the box away, I added silver to my detection list, along with pearls, freshwater pearls and what I was pretty sure was colored glass.
Dad and I watched an old movie on Netflix after dinner that night and I went to bed right after. Movies weren’t dad’s thing, but Dad was in extra protective mode because of the fire. I was still tired and a bit achy from the day before and I didn’t have any trouble falling asleep.
School the next day was awful. I woke up feeling good, the soreness from the day before was gone and I felt energized. It had been one hell of a weekend and I was looking forward to the soothing drone of the teachers’ voices lulling me to sleep and to quietly hanging out with Eva and James at lunch. With school only just having started last week, there was nothing to stress out about.
The problem started almost as soon as I finished locking up my bike and it didn’t stop all day. Everywhere I went, people were there telling me how brave I was or how stupid I’d been or wanting a detailed accounting of what happened inside the house. Even the teachers couldn’t let it go. Every single one of them brought it up in class and talked about my heroism being an example to blah blah blah. A little praise is nice. A lot of praise can be mortifying. I was sure that everyone would be sick of me by the end of the day. Hell, even I was sick of me. But they weren’t and I got the full hero treatment even as I rode off to meet Andrew. I really hoped that things calmed down by tomorrow. I couldn’t take much more of this. Note to self: If you ever feel the need to save someone, made damn sure that it’s not caught on camera.
I pulled up in front of Mark’s burned-out house. It wasn’t really a house anymore, more like a heap of ashes and debris. The whole yard had been cordoned off and I could see one lonely figure walking around, sifting through the remnants. I called out my greeting and asked him how it was going. As I got closer, it was obvious that it wasn’t going well. Andrew was filthy. He had come ready to get dirty in a pair of old jeans and an oversized blue t-shirt, but it seemed that he had underestimated the task.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Hi Abby. As you can see, it’s not going well. I thought I’d get here early and get a head start, but I haven’t made much progress.” He looked dejected. “I brought some old sifting equipment that I had at home and I’ve been using it, but it’s slow going. I haven’t done any real mining, surface or otherwise, since I was Mark’s age. I remember it being more fun and exciting that this.”
As he spoke, we moved back to the area where he’d been working. He was being methodical and had make a grid pattern to differentiate between places that had been searched already and those still not searched yet. He was being too critical of his efforts. He’d already gone through quite a lot of debris. Unfortunately, what he’d done was only a small portion of the house.
“Are you sure that you’ve been looking in the right area?”
“Actually, I’m not sure at all. I hadn’t been to Mark’s place before. Last year he was in the dorms when I visited him. He only moved into this house a few weeks ago. I asked Mark where his room had been and I worked it out from his instructions.”
“Hmm. The front door was right in front of the path and once I was inside the stairs going up were most of the way to the back and to the left.” I talked as I retraced my steps from Saturday. “I went up the steps and checked out the three bedrooms before I passed the bathroom and the closet and got to Mark’s door. His room was the last one on the end and it faced the back of the house.” I stood in the middle of what would have Mark’s room one floor above and asked Andrew, “Did Mark mention where he kept the pendant.”
“He says that he left it on his nightstand, closer to the window.”
I moved to where I pictured the middle of the bed would have been and extended my field out in a bubble around me. I gathered in all the information from the field and tried to find the diamond in the pendant. Hah! There it was, about five and a half feet away from me and buried under the debris from what I assumed was the roof. It was only about two feet from where the nightstand would have been. It must have hit something or slid down off of the nightstand when the floor collapsed. Now the hard part was figuring out how to find the diamond quickly without making Andrew suspicious. I needed some logical reasoning for looking there.
“I’m standing around where the bed was. If I walk two steps forward and to the left, I should be where the nightstand was.” I took the steps, but I cheated a bit and brought myself closer to the pendant’s location. Now I was only a foot away. “If you’ll pass me the sifter, I’d like to try this area. It should be right around here.”
Andrew handed me the sifter and a trowel, a small gardening shovel. As I bend down, I cheated again and moved myself a few inches closer to the ring and started scooping right next to it. I sifted through the first few trowelfuls and scooped up some more. This time I nabbed the pendant. I had intended to take at least fifteen minutes to find it, but this was really dirty work and I didn’t want to ruin my clothes.
“Is this it, Andrew?”, I was going for innocent naivete. I held up the pendant for him to see. The silver had been charred by the fire. I had expected it to have melted, but I guess the fire wasn’t hot enough for that. Well, it seemed plenty hot to me, so maybe something had protected it. Regardless, the diamond looked fine, if in need of some polishing.
“Yes!”, he shouted excitedly. He came over and took the pendant from me. He held it up to the light to check it for damage. “That’s incredible. You found it in two minutes. I’ve been here for hours, digging in the wrong place.”
“Well, I’d seen the room before, so I had a better idea of where to look.”
Andrew was shaking his head in wonder. “I should have waited for you. I’d have saved all that time and I wouldn’t need a two-hour shower now. Thank you, Abby. You’re amazing.”
I didn’t know what to say to that so I just thanked him and changed the subject, “If you haven’t chosen a place to take it to be reset, I can recommend a few local artists that I work with. They make all sort of jewelry, most of it silver, but they work with other metals too. They can work fast, if you need it.”
“That would be great, Abby. I only need the bracelet in about three weeks. Jake is out of town, touring our mining interests in Europe. He’d have been here to see Mark otherwise. Those two are very close. They share a love of mining that I never seemed to find. I guess it skipped a generation. Jake sees Mark as the future of the company.” I could tell that Andrew wasn’t rueful when he said it. He was proud of this son and he was genuinely happy for him.
Andrew grabbed his sifting equipment and we walked out of the house remains. My head was feeling funny and I had trouble focusing properly, but I managed to send Andrew Angela Fiori’s contact number and gave him two backup artists, in case she was too busy to make the bracelet in time. The disorientation was getting worse by the second.
What was wrong with me all of a sudden? I was fine a few minutes ago and now I was feeling disoriented. I took a deep breath and concentrated on the feeling. What was causing it? My brain was getting overloaded with strange information that I didn’t understand, and it was trying unsuccessfully to make sense of it. I reached my bike and got on it, my brain trying to puzzle out what was happening. Andrew continued walking towards his car and the information seemed to move with him. That’s when I realized that I still had the extended field around me and that it had been reading Andrew this whole time. Holy crap. I brought the field in and the information flow stopped, and the feeling of disorientation disappeared immediately. I’d never had the field extended with people around, except for a few minutes around Mark during the fire and I doubt that I would have noticed any information coming in right then, as I was a tad busy. I remembered getting a headache when I brought him into R1 with me. I thought that it was just the strain of having another person in R1 with me or the pressure of being in the middle of a burning house. It seemed like the field could get a lot of information about a person, but it was like someone was yelling at me in a foreign language and I’d need to learn how to interpret that language, or it would drive me nuts.
Andrew didn’t notice my brain freeze and he packed his car and drove off with a smile and a wave. I stayed sitting on my bike for another minute, considering the implications of being able to read people. What did that even mean? With metals I could feel what they were composed of. Would I start getting a sense of what people were made of? Would the field interpret people’s thoughts as well?