He did it slowly and carefully and his own hands put the clasp exactly where it was now. It showed him turn the tray toward Vivian. It showed Vivian look at it for a long time without moving, and then reach out one finger and touch the front stone, and draw her hand back, and fold her hands in front of her. It showed Grant step away with the phone. It showed fifty-eight seconds, by the time stamp, of a woman standing absolutely still beside a necklace she did not touch again.
Then it showed Grant come back.
Ruth stopped the video there. She did not need to show the rest. Everyone in the room had been there for the rest.
For a long moment no one spoke. Marcus stood by the door with his hands clasped behind his back, looking at the floor. Grant was staring at the frozen screen. His face had gone a strange gray color under the tan.
"I put it there," he said. It came out barely above a whisper. "I put the clasp there. I thought..." He stopped. "I don't know what I thought."
"Yes, you do," said Vivian Reed.
He looked up at her.
She had not sat down. She stood on the other side of the round table in her navy dress with her purse held against her side, and she looked at him the way, Ruth suspected, she had once looked at a great many teenage boys who had just been caught doing something they could not explain.
"I'm going to ask you a question," Vivian said, "and I want you to think before you answer it, because I'll know if you're lying. I've had a lot of practice. When I walked through that front door this morning, and you looked at me. What did you see?"
Grant opened his mouth. Then he closed it.
"Take your time," Vivian said.
"There was a woman," Grant said at last. His voice was rough. "In November. She came in and she looked like... she looked like she belonged here. Expensive clothes, the right bag, everything. She talked about her daughter's engagement. I liked her. I trusted her. And she switched a bracelet on me when I turned around, and it was forty-one thousand dollars, and it's been on my record ever since. I'm on a final warning. That call just now was my regional VP reminding me that one more incident and I'm done. And when I turned around and the necklace looked different, I just..." He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. "I panicked."
"That's not what I asked you," said Vivian.
The room was very quiet.
"I asked you what you saw when I walked in. Not what you saw when you turned around. Before the phone call. Before any of it." She did not raise her voice. "You told me yourself, just now. That woman in November looked like she belonged here. So I'll ask you again. When I walked in, did I look like I belonged here?"