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Click here((No sex, sorry, guys))
7.
Nettie's mother studied the gold piece. She had finally sat down - she had heard that her mother's grave had been defaced and was beside herself with anger. I didn't have the heart to tell her that her mother was part of the walking dead.
"I have no idea," she said, handing it back to me.
"What's this about family gold, ma?" Nettie asked.
She scoffed, "No such thing. Where did you get that idea?"
"I remember gramma telling something about that -"
"She was full of stories, you know that. Saying her father was in the Civil War or some stupid idea like that." Nettie's mother looked at me. "She was always out for attention. Wanted to be keeper of the family history."
"Was she?" I asked.
She shrugged. "Births, deaths, marriages, photo albums, that kind of thing."
"Do you have anything of hers?"
"Some things," she said. "It's in the cellar..."
For the next four hours, we searched in a damp, musky cellar for a set of sodden cardboard boxes which had been set there for years. At least now Nettie and her mother were talking to each other, as we plowed through the boxes, looking for anything that might have to do with gold.
Then I found a small candy box and opened it. Inside were three blocks of jet. I knew the mineral when I saw it. I studied them closely, and brought them out to the light. One was shaped like the gold crystal. The other one was a blob, and the final one looked like it had a carving on it. I studied it, and couldn't make head or tails of it.
"Anybody got a magnifying glass?"
After Nettie's mom got one, I had also brought it upstairs to better light. The jet piece was a block, and on one side was carved a downward-pointing triangle, while the other side had a deeply grooved line.
"I saw something like that downstairs," said Nettie's mom, pointing to the little blob, "But I thought they were just rocks."
They were more than rocks. I had no idea what they were, though. That gold crystal had something to do with it. "Can you get them?"
"Sure," she said, and went back down into the cellar.
I looked back to the gold piece and, sure enough, the jet one was a twin of it. I frowned - there was a connection here, but what the hell was it?
Roger came upstairs and said to Nettie, "Man, your grandma loved chess."
"Huh, why?"
"Because there must be about twenty chess sets down in one of the boxes I found."
I glanced back at Roger. Something niggled at me, and then I looked at the pair of crystal-shaped pieces. I put them down on their flat ends, and they stood up straight, facing off against each other...
"You have a computer?" I asked Nettie's mom when she came back up, holding three more of the jet blobs in her hand.
Roger pulled out his phone. "I have a smartphone."
"Google 'chess set images'."
"Hold, please." Roger tapped his phone and then handed it to me.
I swiped some images away, then stopped. "Well, son of a bitch," I said.
Roger, Nettie, and her mom peered over my shoulder to see what I was looking at. I had found chess pieces from India that looked like carved pieces of crystal, or lumps of crystal, or blobs of white and black stone. I zoomed in on one picture, a blob of jet, and pointed to the blob of jet sitting on the table in front of me.
"It's a chess set that he's after," said Nettie.
"Who's after?" asked her mom.
"Nobody," Nettie muttered after getting a look from me.
"What's going on?"
I said, "Whoever defaced your mother's grave, I think, is looking for this chess set."
"She wasn't buried with it," her mother said with a strained laugh.
I looked at more images, and realized that the crystal pieces were called something different in India. _Wazir_, or Vizier, he was replaced by the queen when the chess set came to Europe. However, he wasn't like the queen is now - he moved one space at a time on the diagonal.
Remind me to donate another $20 to wikipedia.
"Mind if I take these?" I asked, motioning to the pieces. I wanted to bring it home to try something.
"Bring the gold one back," said her mother. "I can sell that."
Nettie said, "Mom!"
"What? It's doing me no good now."
If this was what I thought, it would be no good to her at all.
I wonder what the mystery is. However, your story is not mysterious enough to have me waiting too long for an update. You seem to be writing fairly regularly again, but if you go for more than a couple of months, I'll probably lose interest completely.