Part 3 — Dianes Ring Returns
I did not sleep that night. At dawn I drove to the double-wide on the edge of town and knocked, and Bev opened the door in her bathrobe. She looked at the ring box in my hand and sat down on her step. She said, Frank, I have been waiting six years for somebody to ask me.
She told me everything while her coffee went cold. Bev had done hair and makeup at Gaines Funeral Home for twenty years, and she loved the work, because it let her give families a last good look at the people they loved. In 2019 she noticed something wrong in the back room. Rings were disappearing before burial.
Mr. Gaines had a quiet arrangement with a jeweler who drove a black Lincoln with dealer plates. Valuable pieces were swapped for costume copies in the preparation room, and the originals were sold. Families never looked closely at a ring on a hand in a closed casket. Diane was one of at least forty.
Bev had not been part of it. She had been afraid. Gaines held a loan on her trailer and hinted that her job and her home would go together. But the day of Dianes service, she could not stand it. She took the real ring out of the swap box, meaning to slip it back, and the chance never came.
She had kept it in a coffee can for six years, hating herself. Last month her grandson, who knew nothing, took it to my shop thinking it was just an old trinket. Bev nearly fainted when she heard. She had not wanted it sold, only to get it back to me, and she did not know how.
Some people do wrong out of fear and spend years trying to find the courage to set it right.
The page three line on the funeral invoice, three thousand eight hundred fifty dollars, was labeled a premium jewelry preservation fee. There was no such service. It was the cost of the swap, billed to the families as part of the package, and I had never forgiven the number. Now I knew exactly what it was.
I drove straight to the Nevada attorney generals consumer office with Bev beside me, and a folder of invoices. An investigator named Ms. Okafor took notes for three hours. Bev agreed to testify, and the state offered her protection from prosecution in return for her cooperation.
The Gaines case went to a judge in the spring. The home lost its license, the owner was convicted of fraud and theft by deception, and the jeweler was fined and barred from the trade. The court ordered restitution to forty-one families, and each received the full value of what was taken, along with the return of any recovered rings.
I put Dianes ring back on its chain around my neck, where it had never been. The inscription still read, F plus D. Til the last light. I took Bev to lunch that week and told her she had done the bravest thing anyone in this town had done in years.
I still run my shop on Fourth Street, but now there is a small sign in the window. Bring me any ring with a story, and I will tell you if it is true. Bev stops in on Fridays, and we have coffee, and we talk about Diane.