Dad had cut her left ring finger off with a knife, removing her engagement and wedding rings. But the ring with three rubies was neither of those. I had a memory of a ring with a rock in it shining in the pool of blood. I did my best to wipe the memory and that other ring from my mind and focus on the ring in the picture. Where had Mom gotten it, and was I now holding the very same ring? It didn’t have any engravings, but a jeweler would be able to tell whether an engraving had been sanded off, maybe even where the ring had come from. It couldn’t be just a coincidence that David had this ring. Who’d know more about my mom’s jewels? The only person I could think of was Maija Hakkarainen. I looked at the clock. Nine thirty may have been too late to call. She and her husband were farmers, so they went to bed early to get up at five and milk the cows. I would wait until tomorrow. I called a service to find information on my mother’s friends. The names Päivi Väänänen and Tiina Turpeinen came up in the Helsinki area, but I didn’t want to call them this late—with common names like that, they might not even be the people I was looking for.
