Blue Ten

It had been a week since Thomas's grandparents had passed away and already his dad was clearing out their home. Their furniture had been taken away to a charity auction house, their pictures removed from the walls, their clothes bundled up into cases, and the rest of the old tat that they couldn't help but hoard, like old newspapers, utility bills and instruction manuals to equipment they no longer owned, discarded into twenty black bin bags. A lifetime's collection wiped out in a matter of days. It just didn't seem right to Thomas. But then he'd always loved his grandparents more than his dad did.
Whilst his dad busily emptied the kitchen cabinets, Thomas climbed the stairs to the upper floor and stepped inside the master bedroom. It was completely empty now. Never again would he bounce on top of his grandparents bed of a summer's morning and beg to be taken down to the beach, or spend a cold winter's night huddled under the woollen covers listening to his grandfather's elaborate tales of ghost treasures. Those times were nothing but memories.
Thomas sat down on the threadbare carpet, on the spot where his grandparents's bed used to be and spotted something glinting on the floor by the wall. He reached over and grasped it. It was a tiny old metal music box. The silver had tarnished over time but Thomas discovered, as he wound the handle, that the mechanism still worked. It played 'Clair de lune'.
As the tinkle of the notes played Thomas felt a lump rise in his throat. The sorrow of never again seeing the two people he loved so dearly was too much to bear. A lone tear broke the bank of his eye and trickled down his cheek. As it dripped from his chin onto his hand it gave him a sudden chill and an strange, unprompted image of his grandparent's cat, Jewel ,flashed across his eyes. Jewel was adored by Thomas's grandparents. They paid for him to have a dietician, a personal groomer, a personal trainer and once they even paid to take him on holiday with them. They lavished attention on him just as they lavished it on Thomas. But when Jewel passed away a year ago from old age they were devastated. Unable to bear being apart from Jewel his grandparents had the cat buried in the garden, beneath his favourite rose bush.
"Jewel," Thomas whispered to himself. "I wonder why I thought of him."
No sooner had he said it the handle of the music box began to wind all by itself. Thomas was so taken aback he threw the box to the floor and scrambled back toward the bedroom door. As he sat there trembling from fright the handle stopped turning and the music died.
"What you doin' up there, Thomas?" shouted his dad.
"Nothing. Nothing, dad," Thomas gasped.
When he looked back at the music box on the floor his breath caught in his chest. There wedged beneath it, fluttering in a draft, was a piece of paper that wasn't there before. Thomas crept toward it and gingerly plucked the paper from beneath the box. It was a newspaper cutting, so old the paper had turned a murky yellow colour. The headline read 'Lady De Meirs to give away her fortune'. Thomas's eyes skipped across the text to the photograph. Faded as it was Thomas was able to make out a small woman with white hair that looked like a whipped dollop of cream. She was clutching a black kitten. Thomas squinted at the photograph, trying to make out the detail. He couldn't be sure but something inside him made him think the cat was Jewel. There was certainly a likeness, or as much of one as Thomas could make out given black cats in his opinion all looked the same. But there was something strange about the collar. Thomas had always admired Jewel's collar. It was a tatty leather strap, nothing more, and puckered in places, but Thomas always felt there was something rather magical about it, like the magic belts he'd read about in witch and werewolf legend-belts that magically transformed the wearer into animals when worn. The collar on the cat in the photograph looked almost exactly like Jewel's, distinctive because it was wider than most collars he'd seen on cats. But that didn't answer the question of why was this clipping in the bedroom and where did it come from.
Was someone trying to tell Thomas something? Was this communication from beyond the grave? Was it...his grandparents?
A gust of air suddenly whistled into the bedroom and enveloped Thomas in its warm embrace. He gasped. It was his grandparents. He could feel them, he could even smell them. They were all around him, as though they'd never left, as though they'd never died.
Fear and excitement intermingled within him making his heart beat faster and his breathing become shallow and rapid. He knew what he had to do. He had to get outside.
Whilst his dad heaved the black sacks into the back of his four-wheel drive, Thomas slipped into the back garden. He picked up a shovel resting against the fence and strode across the grass to the row of rose bushes at the back of the garden.
One by one he dug up the earth around each bush in search of the last remains of Jewel. When he drove the shovel into the soft ground beside the last bush he hit something solid. Frantically he clawed at the earth with his fingers, digging up huge lumps until he reached something white. Bones. Thin, but firm, they were definitely that of an animal, Thomas was sure of it. Fortunately he didn't have to desecrate Jewel's resting place as he soon found her smooth skull and beneath it the wide leather strap that was once her collar. He unclipped the fastening and deftly pulled it from the ground. Caked in mud he brushed the leather with his fingers, and felt tiny lumps beneath it, as though something hard was wrapped inside the fold. He grabbed the garden shears and carefully chopped the leather strap into little squares. One by one he peeled each leather square apart and to his utter astonishment found inside them ten gleaming, brilliant blue stones. He placed them in the palm of his hand and held them up to the light, admiring how the sun glinted off their facets. He'd never seen anything quite like it. He dived his free hand inside his jean pocket, pulled out the newspaper clipping and read the article. The last line read 'At the time of going to press the location of the fabled 'blue ten' , the world famous blue diamonds, remains a mystery.'