On an Island Fluent in Provenance, One Mystery Still Won't Close

The tale making rounds again is the kind Palm Beach collectors know by instinct: jewels stitched into the linings of the grand duchesses' clothing, hidden in plain sight from captors who never thought to look, vanished the moment imprisonment gave way to something worse. A century on, heirs and historians are still trying to account for stones that were never recovered and never definitively explained. No provenance file settles it, no ledger closes the question — only the same unanswered inventory, taken up again by whoever tells the story next.

With reporting from Vanity Fair.