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muscled her daughter into a small room at the far end of the kitchen. Sadly, the room wasn’t far enough away. We could still hear every word the two said.
    “You did, didn’t you?” Trisha shouted. “You canceled the contract. How dare you.”
    “Your expenses are mounting up,” Pearl responded, her voice raspy with anger.
    “I’ve got to live.”
    “Within a budget.”
    Aunt Vera whispered to me, “Trisha is taking a year off between college and grad school. She goes to UCSC, her father’s alma mater.” UC Santa Cruz, a branch of the University of California, was situated in Santa Cruz, a short hop north of Crystal Cove.
    “Is Pearl paying all her expenses?”
    “It would seem so.”
    “That’s pretty gracious.”
    “You and your budgets,” Trisha continued, her voice shrill and unkind. “Why don’t you admit what’s really irking you? It’s my boyfriend. You don’t approve of him. I heard you talking to Bingo when she was over the other day. You called him a lab rat.”
    Pearl said, “I never said that.”
    My aunt and I peeked at Bingo, who flushed red, confirming that Pearl had, indeed, said that. Oops.
    “Daddy liked him, Mother,” Trisha countered.
    “Your father is no longer alive.”
    “Because you drove him to his grave.” Pearl’s husband, a respected geologist, met an early demise. Thanks to foggy conditions, he accidentally drove off a cliff. “You and your witches and your crazy people, and your—”
    “That’s enough. Hush.”
    “Or what, you’ll cut me off completely? You’ve been threatening to do that ever since I moved home. I want my phone turned on, Mother. Do you hear me? Sean has to be able to get hold of me.”
    Bingo cleared her throat and waved a hand at the gawking crowd in the kitchen. “Ahem, everyone. Let’s not eavesdrop any longer. Let’s convene in the den.”
    Aunt Vera latched onto Rhett’s and my elbows. “What a shame,” she said as she accompanied us from the room. “Privacy is so hard to preserve.”
    The crowd followed us into what turned out to be not just a den but also a grandiose display room. I’d heard of the Thornton Collection, but I had no idea of the collection’s vastness. Glass cabinets lined the walls. Each was internally lit, the lights illuminating large irregularly shaped masses of rocks and minerals. A small placard identified each:
azurite from Arizona
,
topaz from Russia
,
hematite from Switzerland
. Among the mix were a number of large gray rocks called
Thorntonite
, named after Pearl’s husband, Thomas Thornton, who discovered the rock a mere week before he died. Where the specimen had come from was anyone’s guess. His last trek had taken him from Yosemite all the way to Mt. McKinley.
    The pièce de résistance of the Thornton Collection, a large blob about the size of a tennis ball of grayish indigo stone, stood inside a glass box mounted on a pedestal at the center of the room. Its placard read:
rough sapphire, Kashmir
. What quality of gem lay hidden inside the blob had to be worth millions. A half-carat cut sapphire ran in the neighborhood of eight hundred dollars. My husband had wanted to buy me a sapphire for my thirtieth birthday. We’d laughed out loud when we heard of the sale of a twenty-two-carat sapphire going at auction at Christie’s for over three million dollars. Of such dreams are memories made.
    “Wow,” I uttered under my breath and moved closer for a better look.
    “Copy that,” Rhett said.
    “Ditto.” Maya, who had closed The Enchanted Garden and joined the rest of the Winsome Witches for the party, drew near. “Can you imagine how many hours it would take to polish that stone?”
    Emma said, “The veterinarian I assist would give an arm and a leg to get her hands on some of the shavings.”
    “Shavings?” I said.
    “When a stone is polished, it leaves shavings,” Emma explained. “Sapphire, if worn or ingested, has been credited with the ability to cure all sorts of mental and