Given that I have an unusually well-developed talent for understanding the actions and motivations of my fellow humans, I feel confident in speculating about how Ms. Melody Scott, young widow and mother, came to be the thorn in my side, my cross to bear, a major pain in the posterior.

I imagine she was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the screen of her cheap, flimsy notebook computer. The color-coded spreadsheet in front of her told a grim, undeniable truth. She was flat broke. Like a fool, she'd married for love, let the man impregnate her, and then, at an age when no one expects such a thing, Death came knocking.

Of course, there was no life insurance and little savings and, having been a housewife most of her adult life, the woman had no notable marketable skills.

In her gut she knew she was sunk, but she couldn't let on.

The children were supposed to be brushing their teeth, preparing for bed, but the muffled thumps and bangs sounded more like an enemy invasion on the second floor of their ordinary little Craftsman house than any sort of ablution ritual. With a soul-weary sigh, the widow probably pushed her chair back and trudged up the carpeted stairs.

Hearing her coming, the little brats would have rushed to the bedroom and put on their most angelic expressions.

"It was nothing, Mother. We were only doing as you told us, getting ready for bed."

Children are inherently dishonest little creatures, always after their own best interest and self preservation. I rather admire that about them. If I'd been more like that in recent days, things might have turned out differently. But, I imagine the widow Scott was too lost in her own grief and misery to put much effort into chiding her brood. Rather, she ordered them to their individual beds--two sets of bunk beds, with a scant five feet of space between them.

"There's something we'd like to speak to you about, Mom."

That would have been Ethan. As the eldest, he'd be the designated spokesperson for the siblings.

Ms. Scott, having been a mother for more than ten years, would immediately be on high alert. If all four children approached her together, it was invariably a request for a puppy, or a swimming pool, or a Disney vacation, or some other thing as far out of the realm of possibility for her right now as a trip to the moon.

"Go on then." She'd pick up toys and clothes from the floor and put them away while the children talked. Single mothers had no spare moments in which to be still or self-indulgent.

"Well, remember what you told us, about needing to go to work and not being sure what would happen with school and all that?"

Being a good mother and a reasonable American, she had gathered the children around the table and held a formal meeting some weeks after their father's untimely demise. During the course of the meeting she praised their maturity and resilience, wept a little with them over the loss of the man they all loved, and then told them she had no idea how they could carry on as usual. Timothy had been the sole breadwinner, and he'd done a mediocre job of it, at best. With him around, she'd been able to be a full-time mother, homeschooling the children, cooking elaborate dinners that would make June Cleaver look like a slacker, hand-stitching Halloween costumes and so forth, all while balancing a shoestring budget. Now, she would need to get a job, and the children would need to learn to make their way among their peers in public school. There would be babysitters or after school care. It would be yet another big change in the world as they'd always known it.

But what about Dillon?

Dillon was special. At four-years-old, he was reading chapter books and whispering math test answers to his older siblings. Public schools wouldn't know what to make of Dillion.

As of yet, Ms. Scott had not formulated a plan for Dillon's education in this post-Timothy reality. "We'll figure something out," she promised him. It was a flimsy promise, to be sure.

"I remember our meeting, yes," Ms. Scott would have said while tossing a sock and a tee-shirt in the hamper.

"Well, Dillon was reading the paper--"

She cut off her son's sentence. "Did you steal the neighbor's newspaper?"

"He just borrowed it. He was going to put it back," Maggie assured her mother. The girl was the peacekeeper of the group.

"Borrowing without permission is stealing," their mother told them, a stern expression on her face.

"But he found something." Ethan returned to the heart of the matter, determined to keep the conversation on track.

"What did you find in your stolen newspaper?" she asked Dillion.

"I found a whole bunch of money. More than we'd need for two or three years."

"He didn't actually find money," Maggie explained. Six-year-olds are invariably literalists. "He found a job for you. It's way cooler than working at the grocery store."

"Oh, yeah? Is NASA hiring astronauts with no education or experience? Maybe there's a cowgirl gig somewhere south of town?"

The little one, the one who was too smart for his own good, was likely the one to explain. "An expensive bracelet was stolen from the Museum. A reward is being offered." Reading the words came as naturally as breathing. forming them on his lips remained a skill to be mastered. "Bracelet" came out as "bwaflet," and "reward" was "wewad."

"A really big reward," Ethan assured her.

"Six numbers in a row," the girl said. She'd recently learned to count past one hundred, but larger numbers remained a mystery. 

Ms. Scott no doubt stood amid her offspring, a bemused expression on her face. "So, I'm to play detective, am I?"

The oldest one would have scowled, as pre-teens often do. "It's not a game, Mom. You said you were praying for answers. Maybe this is your answer."

"It's more money than Dad made in three years," Dillon told her as if explaining something very basic to someone very slow. "It would give us three years to figure things out."

"And all I need to do is solve one simple mystery that neither the police, nor museum security, nor the best private detectives around can figure out. Sounds like a piece of cake."

Freddie, the eight-year-old, the one who looked just like his father and missed the old man so much he still cried himself to sleep every night, had the power to deal the final blow. "We already lost Dad. Does everything have to be different now?"

Yes, thought the widow. But mothers have a way of gently putting their children off when truths are too hard to be spoken. She said something along the lines of, "I'll give it some thought," and then she tucked them in, kissed them goodnight, and went back downstairs to stare at her computer and cry.

Maybe she poured herself a glass of wine. Maybe it was something a little stronger. After the second glass, or maybe the third or the fourth, she clicked out of the spreadsheet and opened an internet browser and typed in the search bar--Dobson Family Ruby Bracelet.

Thousands of search results popped up. The first several pages consisted of recent news reports of a theft from one of the highest security private museums in the world. Police professed bafflement. Museum officials expressed their horror. The family fumed. Local reporters were in their glory.

Among the results on page three or four, the history of the bracelet would have been revealed.

John Dobson, patriarch of a family that made a vast amount of money at some point in Europe's bloody past and managed to multiply it through a variety of avenues most of which were, nowadays, legal, had inherited the bracelet. The central ruby, surrounded by cut diamonds, weighed in at more than fifteen carats. On either side, four more massive, stunning stones glittered. All of these magnificent gems had been set in twenty-four carat gold. By any standards, the piece was worth a small fortune, but the Dobson Bracelet had one special quirk that elevated it to museum quality. According to family legend, and confirmed by every modern test conceived of by man, the bracelet was made more than five-thousand years ago during a time when jewelry was large and chunky and often crudely put together. Somehow, using the tools of the bronze age, someone had been able to craft a piece of cut-gem jewelry as intricately made as any modern laser-cut stone.

Tabloids, prone to reporting speculation beyond the fringe of what most folks considered reasonable, wondered if the bracelet had alien origins.

More respectable publications interviewed artisans and historians, seeking any clue as to who the mysterious creator might have been.

Ms. Scott may very well have spent the entire night traveling down the rabbithole of internet information. Who among us has never been caught in that particular web? Pun intended.

Whatever she found there must have sparked some wild fire in her heart, because by morning, she'd set a course to earn that reward.