Hale Sanford looked up from her iced-coffee as the other café staff started to come in for work. She stayed up way too late last night, searching for that damned necklace. She was so close and yet it’s still dancing out of her grasp. She could not go on like this, obsessing over a necklace lost seventy years ago. She might lose her job.
She sighed, breathing in the smell of cocoa beans, cakes, and pastries as the counters get filled in. As much as she wished she could drop the issue, she couldn’t. The necklace was such an important part of her family. What made a silver chain worth all of her attention. But it wasn’t just silver. It was a band of silver, with tanzanite pebbles set in an elegant crisscross pattern all around it.
Not only was tanzanite one of the rarest gemstones but it was a stone that changes color with perspective. One person could look at a stone and say it blue, while his buddy could stand elsewhere and says it’s violet. A masterpiece, and it was stolen only weeks after its creation.
The Sanford family spent many years and much money to find it, but it was lost. Some family members, like Hale’s father, the late Jon Sanford, made it their life’s work to find it again and restore honor back into the family. Though most of the family gave up after the first generation declared it gone for good. Hale was not one of them. She was going to follow her father’s footsteps and finish what her ancestors couldn’t. She was going to find-
The restaurant’s door bell rang, and a group of four rowdy boys came in, laughing and making a ruckus. The hostess for the day came out of the staff lounge, saw the boys, and marched right up to them. As she started to yell at the boys to leave because it wasn’t opening hours yet, one of the boys, presumably their leader, stepped forward, and Hale caught her breath.
The argument began anew between the hostess and the group, causing people outside to stop and watch and it brought more staff to the front. Hale heard it, witnessed it, forgot it. Nothing seemed to snap Hale out of her trance. All her attention was on the leader. Or, to be more precise, his neck. Dangling around his neck, winking three different colors in a breathtaking light show, was none other than the necklace. The Lost Sanford Necklace.
Her necklace.
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