Betrayals
Carla Neggers
Rebecca Blackburn caught a glimpse of the famed Jupiter Stones as a small child.
Unaware of their significance, she forgot about themuntil she discovered the priceless, long-missing gems were the key to a deadly chain of events spanning thirty years and three continentssparing no one. When a seemingly innocent photograph reignites one man's simmering desire for vengeance, Rebecca turns to Jared Sloan, the love she lost to tragedy and scandal.
His own life has changed forever because of the secrets buried deep by their two families. Their relentless quest for the truth will dredge up bitter memories and shocking revelations of misplaced loyalty, dangerous pride and naked ambitionand they will stop at nothing to expose a cold-blooded killer.
Praise for New York Times bestselling author
CARLA NEGGERS
“[Neggers] forces her characters to confront issues of humanity, integrity and the multifaceted aspects of love without slowing the ever-quickening pace or losing the many plot threads.”
—Publishers Weekly on Betrayals
“Enough roller-coaster twists and turns to keep the reader up all night reading!”
—Eileen Goudge on Betrayals
“Readers will be turning the pages so fast their fingers will burn…a winner!”
—Susan Elizabeth Phillips on Betrayals
“Neggers’s engaging romantic mystery neatly blends fiction with authentic detail.”
—Publishers Weekly on Tempting Fate
“Neggers has created yet another well-matched pair of characters and given them a crackerjack mystery to solve—complete with a seriously creepy villain.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Abandon
“When it comes to romance, adventure and suspense, nobody delivers like Carla Neggers.”
—Jayne Ann Krentz
“Neggers keeps the reader guessing ‘whodunit’ to the end of her intriguing novel.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Widow
“A keen ear for dialogue and a sure hand with multidimensional characterizations are Neggers’ greatest gifts as a storyteller…. By turns creepy and amusing, the story engages on several levels.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Breakwater
“[Neggers’s] skill at creating colorful characters and deliciously twisted story lines makes this an addictive read.”
—Publishers Weekly on Stonebrook Cottage
“Suspense, romance and the rocky Maine coast—what more could a reader ask? Carla Neggers writes a story so vivid you can smell the salt air and feel the mist on your skin.”
—Tess Gerritsen on The Harbor
“Neggers’s brisk pacing and colorful characterizations sweep the reader toward a dramatic and ultimately satisfying denouement.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Cabin
BETRAYALS
CARLA NEGGERS
BETRAYALS
To George Maxwell and Rebecca Martin
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
One
The French Riviera
1959
Annette Winston Reed hacked at an onion on the battered worktable in her airy, sun-washed kitchen. Although it wasn’t her nature to fret, she noticed her hands were shaking and she was perspiring heavily. Her underarms and the small of her back were damp, and her eyes burned with lack of sleep. It’s time to buck up, she silently told herself, annoyed by this betrayal of her inner turmoil. She wasn’t going to let her troubles undermine her self-confidence or her sense of fun.
She refused to let Thomas Blackburn get to her. He and his four-year-old granddaughter had come down for the weekend from Paris, a typical presumptuousness on Thomas’s part. Annette hadn’t invited him. A Bostonian like herself, he had known her all her life. She had grown up around the corner from his house on Beacon Hill. But as much as she looked up to him, as much as she’d wanted him to admire her, she couldn’t consider him a friend. He was too old, almost twenty years her senior, and perhaps knew her too well. With Thomas, pretenses were impossible.
He was at the breakfast table overlooking the rose garden, with a mug of black coffee at his elbow and the Paris Le Monde opened up in front of him so that Annette couldn’t miss the latest blaring headline about the jewel thief who’d plagued the Côte d’ Azur for the past eight weeks. He’d been dubbed Le Chat after the Cary Grant character in the popular American movie To Catch a Thief. Once again, the police promised the imminent arrest of a suspect.
This time they weren’t just blowing smoke. Annette knew better.
Thomas hadn’t said a word beyond a simple good-morning. He had come to the Riviera just to visit her, he’d told Annette with his wry smile, knowing she wouldn’t believe him. As always, he had a loftier purpose in mind: to convince her Vietnamese caretaker, a mandarin scholar respected both abroad and in his own country, to return home. Thomas would go on and on about how Saigon needed credible centrist leaders and how Quang Tai could help save his country from disaster, and Annette would pretend a suitable neutrality, despite the prospect of losing her caretaker. She was only sparing herself one of Thomas’s notorious lectures on not being shortsighted and selfish; she suspected he already knew she didn’t want the bother of having to replace Quang Tai.
She sighed, frantically mincing one half of the onion. Her eyes had begun to tear, and if she didn’t slow down and be careful, she’d likely chop off the end of a finger. Thomas wouldn’t keep quiet for long. It wasn’t a Blackburn trait.
The newspaper rustled as he turned a page, and she heard him take a small sip of coffee.
“All right, Thomas, you win,” she said, whirling around with her paring knife. “What do you want to tell me that you’re trying so hard not to tell me? You might as well spit it out, because you know you’ll get around to it sooner or later.”
Looking slightly miffed at her sharp-sighted observation, Thomas folded the newspaper and laid it on the table. Like all Blackburns, he was a man of impeccable moral and intellectual respectability—the kind of highbrow Bostonian that Annette usually found boring and irritating. For two centuries, the Blackburns had been outspoken patriots, historians, poets, reformers, public servants and eccentrics, if not the best moneymakers. Eliza Blackburn—the patron saint of the family—was one of Boston’s favorite Revolutionary War heroines. Her portrait, painted by Gilbert Stuart, hung in the Massachusetts State House; in it she wore the cameo brooch that George Washington himself had presented to her, in gratitude for her efforts at smuggling weapons, ammunition and information from British-occupied Boston to the patriot forces in outlying areas. The Winstons, on the other hand, had snuck off to Halifax for the duration of the War of Independence. Eliza had also been virtually the only mercantile-minded Blackburn in two hundred years. She’d been the driving force behind Blackburn Shipping, which made a fortune in the post-Revolution China trade, but folded in 1812 with the British blockade and the war. That was that for a Blackburn generating any substantial income. Eliza’s descendants had been stretching her fortune ever since, and it was beginning to fray.
Annette had heard rumblings that Thomas, Harvard-educated and approaching fifty, was about to launch his own business. He was an authority on the history and culture of Indochina and spent much of his time there, but how he planned to translate that expertise into a moneymaking enterprise was beyond her.
He regarded her with a calm that only accentuated her own nervousness. “Annette, I’d like to ask you a straightforward question—do you know this thief Le Chat?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. How would I know him?”
Her mouth went dry, her heartbeat quickened and she felt curiously light-headed. She’d never fainted in all her thirty years; now wasn’t the time to start. Trying to hide her trembling hands, she set down the paring knife and leaned against the counter. She was dressed casually in baggy men’s khaki trousers and an oversize white cotton shirt, her ash-brown hair pulled up in a hasty knot. If she worked at it, she could look rather stunning at first glance, but she had no illusions that she was an especially beautiful woman. She was too pale-skinned, too large-framed, too pear-shaped, too tall. Her near-black eyebrows were mannishly heavy and might have overwhelmed a more delicate face, but she had a strong nose, Katharine Hepburn cheeks and big eyes that were a ringing, memorable blue—her best feature by far. She’d hated her long legs as a teenager, but over the years she had discovered they had their advantages in bed. Even her husband, not the most passionate of men, would cry out in pleasure when she’d wrap them around him and pull him deeper into her.
“Annette,” Thomas said.
It was the same tone he’d used on her when he’d caught her crossing Beacon Street alone at six years old. Nineteen years her senior, he was already a widower then, with a two-year-old son. Emily Blackburn, so quietly beautiful and intelligent, had died of postpartum complications, the first person Annette had ever known to die. She had only wanted to ride the swan boats in the Public Garden and had explained this to Thomas, assuring him her mother had said it was all right. He had said, “Annette,” just that way—admonishing, knowing, expecting more of her than a transparent lie. Feeling as if she’d failed him, she’d blurted out the truth. Her mother hadn’t said it was all right; she thought Annette was playing alone in the garden. Thomas had marched her home at once.
She was no longer six years old.
“I promised the children I’d take them out to pick flowers,” she said, pulling herself up straight. “They’re waiting.”
She was at the kitchen door when Thomas spoke again. “Annette, this man’s no Cary Grant. He’s a thief who has lined his own pockets with other people’s things and driven a decent woman to suicide.”
Annette spun around and gave him a haughty look. “I quite agree.”
Shaking his head, Thomas rose to his feet. He was a tall, lean man with sharp features and straight, fine hair that was a mixture of dark brown, henna highlights and touches of gray. The scrimpiest of the notoriously frugal Blackburns, he wore a shabby sweater that had probably seen him through his postgraduate studies at Harvard and trousers he’d let out, unabashedly leaving the old seam to show.
“I would never presume to judge you,” he told her softly. “I hope you know that.”
Annette held back an incredulous laugh. “Thomas, you’re a Blackburn. It’s your nature to judge everyone and everything.”
He grimaced, but there was a gleam in his intensely blue eyes. “You’re saying I’m a critical old fart.”
She smiled for the first time in hours. “Not that old. Let’s just say people always know where they stand with you—and you’re a better man than most. Make yourself at home. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”
To her surprise and relief, Thomas let her go without another word.
Taking a gaggle of children flower-picking wasn’t something Annette relished, even on a good day, but they quickly busied themselves plucking every blossom in sight. Surrendering to their enthusiasm, she abandoned her halfhearted effort to separate weed from wildflower and plopped down in the straw grass. It was warm in the sun under the incomparable blue of the Mediterranean sky, and the scent of wildflowers, lemons and sea permeated the air, soothing her restlessness and feeling of inundation. Down through the small field and olive grove, she could see the red-tiled roof and simple lines of her stone mas, the eighteenth-century farmhouse where she’d spent a part of every year since she was a girl. It was as much home to her as Boston was. In many ways, more so, for it was here on the Riviera she could be alone, with just her son and his nanny—without Benjamin, without the pressures of being a Boston Winston and a well-bred woman whose idea of fulfillment was supposed to be making everyone’s life interesting but her own.
The children’s zeal for flower-picking waned faster than she’d hoped, but her nephew Jared, the eldest at nine, launched a game of tag. Quentin was reluctant and terrified, his mother suspected, the girls would beat him. He was seven, a sturdy, towheaded boy with a quiet manner and a head full of dreams and ideas whose execution defeated him. A game of tag was precisely the kind of open, raw confrontation he tried to avoid. He was his father’s son, Annette thought, with a lack of affection she was becoming used to. Even Quentin, however, couldn’t prevail against his cousin’s strong will.
The game got off to an aggressive start, and Annette nudged the flower basket closer to her. She didn’t want the children in their exuberance to knock it over. The flowers wouldn’t suffer; they were mostly rot. But she’d hate to have to explain why she’d tucked a .25-caliber automatic under the calico cloth lining the bottom of her flower basket.
“Bon matin, ma belle.”
She hadn’t heard his approach. She twisted around, but he was concealed behind the knotted trunk of an olive tree, out of the children’s view. Their game was already getting out of hand. Quang Tai’s six-year-old daughter, Tam, a mite of a girl, was beating the socks off the two boys and loving every minute of it, teasing them in her mixture of English, French and Vietnamese. Jared boasted he’d get her next game, but Quentin, ever the sore loser, accused her of cheating. Tam was having none of it. Jared remained neutral in the ensuing squabble, but then they both turned on him. Four-year-old Rebecca Blackburn amused herself by throwing grass on the three older children, becoming more and more daring until they finally paid attention to her.
“You can’t catch me,” she cried jubilantly as the two boys and Tam chased her.
Blue-eyed, chestnut-haired Blackburn though little Rebecca was, Annette had to admire the girl’s spunk. In another thirty years, she’d probably be as sanctimonious as her grandfather.
Mercifully, Tam’s father called from the edge of the field, and all four little monsters scrambled toward him. Annette promised she’d be along in a while and pulled her flower basket onto her lap. The gun had added weight to it.
“You can come out now, Jean-Paul,” she said.
He ambled out from behind the tree and squatted down, dropping a daisy into her basket. Annette tried to check the rush of raw desire she felt every time she saw him. It didn’t work. From their first encounter weeks ago, she had been obsessed with Jean-Paul Gerard. She could never get enough of him; he could never satisfy her, sexually or emotionally. Whenever they made love she wanted more of him. Even after multiple couplings in one night, she’d awaken aching for him. He could tell her a thousand times he loved her, and she would long to hear it again—and yet never believed him. Jean-Paul was twenty-four years old and one of the most popular men in France. She was a thirty-year-old married woman with stretch marks on her breasts and abdomen.
She hated to give him up.
She noticed the sun-whitened hairs on his tanned arms. He was so handsome, so arrogantly French. Leanly built, he was a dark, sleek, wiry man, his eyes a deep brown, soft and oddly vulnerable—and keen. They had to be. He was one of France’s premiere Grand Prix drivers, a risk-taking, desirable man who radiated a generous and unquenchable sexuality. He could have had virtually any woman he wanted. He had chosen Annette. She had never had any illusions that their affair would last, but she supposed she ought to derive some satisfaction at being the one to end it. He curled a loose tendril of hair behind her ear and brushed two fingers along the line of her jaw. “I missed you last night.”
“Jean-Paul…” For nothing at all she’d strip herself naked and make love to him right there in the grass under the olive tree. The children and her caretaker and Thomas Blackburn and her entire future be damned. She licked her lips, parched to the point of cracking, and squinted at her lover, sitting in the shade with the bright morning sun at his back. “Have you seen the papers?”
Nodding, he sighed and sat back in the grass.
“That’s why I called you.” Her voice quavered; she didn’t like that. She cleared her throat and forced herself not to look away. “Last night I became Le Chat’s latest victim. I was at the roulette wheel, wearing a Tiffany diamond-and-pearl bracelet—”
He looked pained. “Ma belle…”
“No, don’t. Let me finish. The bracelet was a gift to me from my husband on our fifth anniversary. There’s an inscription. The police…” Her throat was so dry and tight she felt she would choke. “I gave the police an exact description.”
Jean-Paul accepted her words without apparent surprise or concern. “What else did you tell the police?”
Annette hesitated, then said, “Enough.”
He looked away from her, his soft eyes lost in the shade.
“They’ve gone to your house, Jean-Paul. I would expect they’re there now and have already found my bracelet—”
“You used the key I gave you?”
“Yes. Last night, while you were asleep.”
He turned back to her, assessing her with the same alertness and intensity that had made him one of the finest race-car drivers in the world. This time, his craving for excitement and danger had led him astray.
“I don’t blame you,” Annette said, feeling stronger. “Please don’t blame me. We are what we are, Jean-Paul, and I’m only doing what I have to do. I have no desire to see you in prison, and I’m aware of the acute embarrassment testifying against you in court could cause me. I have a husband and a son I need to respect me—a life that I won’t allow Le Chat to destroy.”
“I should kill you,” he said calmly.
“Perhaps. But then you’d be a murderer as well as a jewel thief.” She dug beneath the flowers and pulled back the calico cloth, removing the gun and a leather pouch. The automatic she held in her right hand, awkwardly; the pouch she handed to Jean-Paul. “I decided to warn you because I don’t want you to be arrested and sent to jail. Here’s twenty thousand dollars. A generous amount under the circumstances and enough, I should think, to get you out of the country and settled elsewhere.”
He bit down on his lower lip, the only outward sign of the effect her words were having on him. “And if I choose not to go?”
“You can’t win, Jean-Paul. Remember who I am. I’m giving you a way out. Consider yourself lucky and take it.”
“What about the Jupiter Stones?”
She took no pleasure in how his voice cracked. In the last five minutes, she’d shattered his life. Better yours than mine, my love.
She said, “I don’t care about the Jupiter Stones. I only care now that you get out of the country before you’re arrested. Jean-Paul, I can’t have what we’ve been together come out. Don’t fight me. You’ll only do yourself worse damage.”
His eyes fastened on the gun, briefly, and Annette blanched at the thought he might actually force her to use it. But all at once he shot to his feet, and before she realized what was coming, he cuffed her hard on the side of the head. She sprawled backward against the tree, biting the inside of her mouth and crying out with pain as she tasted the warm saltiness of her own blood. Only by a miracle did she keep hold of the gun. If Jean-Paul reached for it, she’d kill him.
“Au revoir, ma belle.”
Annette shuddered at the hatred in his voice. But he walked away, quickly disappearing in the thickets, and she brushed herself off and staggered to her feet, fighting back tears. She began to run. Through the field, her flower and herb gardens, across the terrace, and into the quaint stone farmhouse where so long ago her nanny had taught her how to dry herbs and debone a fish. Thank God Thomas wasn’t around. She basked in the house’s familiarity, its welcome.
She made herself and the children tall glasses of iced, fresh-squeezed lemonade and put sugar cookies onto a plate—and, in a few minutes, she began to laugh.
Baroness Gisela Majlath was buried in a simple nonreligious ceremony attended by her closest friends and the tall Bostonian, Thomas Blackburn. As if his vaunted presence could change anything, Jean-Paul thought bitterly, as he hid among a stand of oaks. He stared at the plain white coffin and choked back his sobs lest anybody should hear him. He didn’t want to disturb the funeral. Had the police known their missing Le Chat would be there, they would have sent more than a single uninterested gendarme. And the Bostonian in his frayed, pinstriped suit? What would he have done?
The stiff breeze off the Mediterranean whipped tears from Jean-Paul’s eyes. Thomas Blackburn, he thought, would have done nothing.
Gisela had been a favorite on the Riviera. Her suicide forty-eight hours earlier had caught everyone by surprise and abruptly ended Le Chat’s welcome on her beloved Côte d’ Azur. For weeks, his presence had lent a spirit of romance and adventure to an otherwise ordinary season. With visions of Cary Grant in their heads, eager young heiresses, jet-setters and bored wives of American tycoons had ignored warnings not to wear their valuable, albeit heavily insured, jewels to crowded cafés, parties and casinos. In truth, they had vied to tempt Le Chat to commit one of his daring robberies, each longing for the excitement and attention of being his next victim. After all, he never hurt anyone.
Even Gisela had emerged from her brush with the Riviera jewel thief physically unscathed.
If it had ever occurred. Fact and fancy were often inseparable in Gisela’s quirky mind, an eccentricity that prompted more amusement than outrage among those who knew her. To be sure, her encounter with Le Chat—real or imagined—would never have happened if he hadn’t been stalking the Côte d’ Azur for victims.
Jean-Paul knew that the graveside mourners and the gossips and the snobs would blame Le Chat entirely for her suicide, without looking to themselves for culpability. He believed, however, that they, as much as their now-despised jewel thief, were responsible for her death.
No one had believed Gisela’s blithe assertion that she was a member of the displaced Hungarian aristocracy, never mind that she had possessed the fabled Jupiter Stones until they’d been stolen by Le Chat.
Engaging and vivacious, she had arrived on the Riviera in 1955—from whence no one could exactly say—and immediately made a name for herself with her irrepressible charm and her unique talent for decorating country cottages and farmhouses. She never called the people she helped clients, simply “friends.” Nor did she call herself an interior decorator or formalize what she did into anything as depressingly ordinary as a business. She did favors, that was all. Her “friends” always insisted on paying her, but how, she maintained, was up to them. Few ever caught her actually working. She loved to play and, especially, to take chances—with the roulette wheel, with her treks along the rocky coastline, with men. She had never made an enemy. Or, conversely, a true friend.
She had talked about the Jupiter Stones for years, but had never shown them to anyone—not that anyone had ever asked to see them. Why embarrass her? She couldn’t possibly own anything so valuable. The Jupiter Stones were her good luck charm, she liked to tell people. They were the source of her boundless energy and enthusiasm for life. She rubbed them over her body every night, she told friends and strangers alike, and the stones restored her spirit.
Who could believe such talk?
The Jupiter Stones had existed. They had been a gift from Franz Josef, emperor of Austria, king of Hungary, to his beautiful, haunted wife, Empress Elisabeth. The exacting monarch, who ruled the troubled Hapsburg empire for sixty-eight years until his death at eighty-six in 1916, had had his court jewelers search the world for ten exquisite corundum gems, not just the coveted cornflower-blue sapphire or pigeon’s-blood ruby, but in the other colors in which corundum was found: white, yellow, orange-yellow, green, pink, plum, pale blue and near-black. Each stone was perfectly cut, each given a name by Franz Josef himself. Four were named for the planets with a variety of corundum as their stone: the yellow sapphire was called the Star of Venus, the orange-yellow sapphire the Mercury Stone, the beautiful pigeon’s-blood ruby star-stone the Red Moon of Mars and the velvety cornflower Kashmir sapphire the Star of Jupiter. Individually the ruby and the cornflower-blue sapphire—each flawless, each cut into a perfect six-sided star—were the most valuable. But as a whole, the unique collection was worth a fortune.
In tribute to his wife’s unusually simple tastes, Franz Josef left the remarkable stones unmounted. He presented them to her in a ruby-red velvet bag embossed with the imperial seal. Elisabeth, it was said, took them with her everywhere. She was an incurable wanderer, and it was on one of these wanderings that she seemed to have “misplaced” the Jupiter Stones. Unlike her husband—and cousin—Franz Josef, Elisabeth, “Sisi” as she was known affectionately, wasn’t an orderly person. A lover of riding and endless walks, she was generous and careless with her possessions; she could have lost the unique gems or simply given them away—as she did so often with her things—on a whim. She never said. Whatever their fate, the fabled stones weren’t discovered among her countless jewels after her assassination in 1898, when, while boarding a steamer in Geneva, she was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist who wanted to kill someone important enough that his name would get into the papers. He succeeded.
Almost sixty years later, Baroness Gisela Majlath claimed the unpredictable empress had given the stones to Gisela’s mother after she, as just a girl of eight or nine, had endangered her own life to help Elisabeth after a riding accident. Gisela had inherited the extraordinary bag of gems when her mother and most of her family were killed in the two World Wars that decimated Hungary. She herself had narrowly escaped death when fleeing Budapest after the Communist takeover in 1948. All she managed to take with her were the clothes on her back and, tucked into her bra, the Jupiter Stones.
It was the sort of tale that everyone loved to hear, though no one believed it.
If Gisela had fled to the west dispossessed and penniless, why hadn’t she cashed in the stones to reestablish herself? They were a family heirloom, Gisela had explained. And of course, they were enchanted; they had saved her from poverty and despair and even death. She couldn’t just sell them as she might ordinary gems.
Everything changed the night she tearfully reported to the police she’d been robbed and described her ten corundum stones in detail, estimating their value into the millions of francs and admitting she had no photographs, no insurance, no proof she had ever seen the Jupiter Stones, much less owned them.
Why didn’t she? The understandably skeptical police had asked what everyone but Gisela considered a reasonable question. She was insulted. Did the police doubt her word?
They did. So did all her friends and virtually everyone in France.
The gossips supplied their own answers. If the stones were in Gisela’s possession—through whatever means—they would have been too valuable for her to afford to keep in any open, honest way. Insurance costs alone would have been phenomenal. She must have come to her senses, capitalized on Le Chat’s prowling about the Côte d’ Azur, and hocked them, saving face by reporting them stolen. In which case, good for her.
But that scenario was far-fetched.
Far more likely she’d made up the stones altogether and had an ulterior motive for claiming she was Le Chat’s latest victim. A craving for attention? For notoriety? Had Gisela, too, yearned for romance and adventure?
Gisela, however, stuck to her story: the Jupiter Stones were hers, Le Chat had stolen them and she wanted him caught and her gems returned to her.
The gossips redoubled their efforts to come up with an explanation for what to them was decidedly unexplainable. What if there were a germ of truth to her story and some manner of stones had been stolen? The idea of flighty Gisela rubbing herself with pretty rocks every night wasn’t altogether implausible. She did have her idiosyncrasies. But did these stones of hers have to be the Jupiter Stones? Of course not. They could have been simple quartz or paste.
And if Le Chat had snatched a bag of worthless rocks…how délicieux.
Enjoying their own fantasies, no one noticed Gisela’s growing despondency. The police didn’t believe her. Her friends were enthralled with the criminal who’d robbed her of her most precious possession. The gossips were having fun at her expense. All these years, she suddenly realized, people had simply been indulging her. Not a soul had believed she had ever had the Jupiter Stones, much less been robbed of them!
Humiliated and despairing of ever seeing her corundum gems again, Gisela had flung herself off a cliff into the Mediterranean.
And everyone suddenly cursed Le Chat and demanded his immediate capture.
Enter Annette Winston Reed, the woman who had led the police to the true identity of Le Chat.
Word had spread rapidly that Jean-Paul Gerard was the culprit, and there was a collective gasp, a suspension of anger and grief, as people realized that if Le Chat wasn’t Cary Grant, he was awfully close. The notion of the handsome, sexy Grand Prix driver amusing himself—he couldn’t need the money—by stealing jewels went a long, long way toward renewing the romance of Le Chat.
But the police had their evidence, and there was precious little romance in their souls. The search was on for their missing suspect.
If they had believed Gisela…
Jean-Paul felt the tears spill down his cheeks, and he watched Thomas Blackburn lay a pink rose on the coffin. If others wondered about his presence at Gisela’s funeral, Jean-Paul did not. “Thomas is a good man,” she would say. “A true friend.”
While the Bostonian closed his eyes in silent farewell, Jean-Paul turned away, whispering, “Adieu, Maman.”
Tam curled up in the middle of Tante Annette’s bed and sobbed quietly so that the other children wouldn’t hear her. They would only tease her for crying. Even Papa had said she needed to be brave. France wasn’t their home, he had told her. But to Tam it was. She didn’t remember Saigon at all.
“Hi, Tam.”
“Go away,” Tam said, looking up at Rebecca Blackburn. She was only four and as big as Tam was at six. It wasn’t fair. Nothing was fair. “I don’t want you here.”
Rebecca climbed onto the bed. “Why not?”
“Because I hate your grandfather!”
“You shouldn’t hate my grandfather,” the younger girl said. “He likes worms.”
Tam sniffled and wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “He’s making Papa and me leave.”
“Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“But you live here.”
“Yes, but I’m not French.” She remembered her father’s words: “Our home is in Saigon.”
“I’ll come visit you,” Rebecca promised, curling up like Tam, her bare feet dirty from digging worms with her grandfather in the garden.
Tam shook her head, crying softly. “You can’t—it’s too far away.”
“My grandfather goes to Saigon all the time. My mom sends him pictures I color, and my dad says we can go see him sometime. We’ll come see you, too.”
“Okay,” Tam said, perking up. “Can you speak Vietnamese?”
Rebecca wasn’t sure what her friend meant, so Tam demonstrated, speaking a few sentences in her native tongue. Her father said they would have to stop speaking French when they were together and speak Vietnamese instead, so she could practice.
“It sounds pretty,” Rebecca said.
Tam smiled. No one had told her that before.
Her American friend jumped down off the bed and started poking around in Tante Annette’s things. She wasn’t really Tam’s aunt, but she said she didn’t like being called Madame Reed because it made her feel like an old woman. Tam adored her. She never criticized any of the children, just let them roam free in the gardens and the fields around the mas. Tam had heard Papa say Annette left them alone because she was bored and couldn’t be bothered with anyone’s needs except her own, but Tam didn’t believe that. Tante Annette was always patient and nice.
“Oooh,” Rebecca said, “look, Tam.”
With her grubby hands, Rebecca dumped out a soft, red bag onto the bed, and a pile of colored stones rolled onto the white spread. White, yellow, green, blue, red, purple, black—Tam giggled. “They’re so pretty!”
Rebecca carefully counted them; there were ten in all. “Do you think Tante Annette will let us play with them?” she asked.
Tam shook her head. “She’d be mad at us if she knew we were in her bedroom.”
“Oh. Do you want to dig worms with me?”
“No, thank you.”
With a shrug, Rebecca skipped out of the room, and Tam was again overwhelmed with loneliness and the fear of returning to a home she didn’t know or understand. She bit down hard to stop herself from crying and fingered the colored stones. She wished she could have them to remind her of Tante Annette and the mas. If she just asked…but no, Tante Annette would never say yes. And even if she did, Papa wouldn’t let Tam accept a gift she’d asked for.
Fresh tears warmed her eyes. Tante Annette had so many beautiful things. Papa said Vietnam was a poor country and they couldn’t expect to have as much as the Winstons did; it wouldn’t be fair to their countrymen who didn’t always have enough to eat. Tam tried to understand.
But she couldn’t bear to return the sparkling stones to the drawer where Rebecca had found them. Making her decision, she quickly stuffed them back into the velvet bag and ran to the caretaker’s house, to her tiny room next to the herb gardens, where she hid them.
“Tam, Tam,” Rebecca was calling excitedly.
Tam was certain her new friend had seen her and she’d have to give the stones back, but Rebecca ran into the caretaker’s house with the longest, fattest worm Tam had ever seen.
“Isn’t it cute?” Rebecca asked.
“Yes, it is,” Tam said, feeling much better.
Two
Boston, Massachusetts
Thirty years later
The waiter for the unhappy vice president of Winston & Reed brought him a second perfectly mixed martini and silently whisked away the empty glass of his first. A thin, gray-haired, punctilious man, Lee Donigan had a low threshold of tolerance for two things: doing someone else’s dirty work and being kept waiting. Rebecca Blackburn had managed to trigger both sources of irritation in one day.
He tried the martini. Excellent. He welcomed its soothing burn. It was his own fault he was stuck with this unpleasant task. He should have investigated the possibility that the award-winning graphic designer his public relations director had hired to revamp Winston & Reed’s corporate look was one of the Blackburns. He had assumed a Boston Blackburn wouldn’t have the gall to take on an assignment with his company. One should never assume.
Particularly, he’d learned the hard way, with a Blackburn.
And especially this one.
A flash of color, a burst of energy—both compelled Lee to look up. Rebecca Blackburn caught his eye from across the busy restaurant and waved, ignoring the maître d’as she made her way to his table. Her electric personality seemed to light up the lunchtime crowd atop the forty-story Winston & Reed Building. In the few times he’d met her, Lee had observed that Rebecca was the kind of woman who never cooled off. She was always on, always moving. When her subtle, grab-from-behind beauty was added to that compulsive energy, the result was one unforgettable woman. Her high cheekbones, strong eyebrows and chin and straight nose provided the drama in her keenly attractive face, the rich, unusual chestnut color of her chin-length hair complementing the pure creaminess of her skin. Lee found himself hoping she was too professional to unleash her temper on him. That she had one he didn’t doubt for a second.
She swept into the chair opposite him, a panoramic view of Boston Harbor under a clear May sky at her back. Lee’s table was the best in the house. His office was just two floors down. He enjoyed working in what was commonly referred to as Boston’s boldest and most luxurious building. He intended to keep his job, even if it meant doing for Quentin Reed what the president of Winston & Reed wouldn’t do for himself.
“Sorry I’m late,” Rebecca said.
There was nothing apologetic in her tone or her expression, and Lee’s moment of guilt drowned under a fresh wave of irritation. The woman had to have known she was provoking just such a lunch as today’s when she bid for the coveted design job with Winston & Reed. She should have restrained herself.
“But,” she went on, “I’ve never been asked to lunch with a vice president who didn’t mean to fire me.”
Fresh words from a damn artist, Lee thought. Her eyes—a vivid, clear blue—met his just for an instant before she smiled and put her water glass to her coral-dusted lips. She looked every inch the stylish professional in a pumpkin-colored jacket over a black skirt—probably, if Lee could believe hall gossip, something she’d picked up for a song at Filene’s Basement. She could afford to shop wherever she liked. Lee had to remind himself that Rebecca Blackburn was a very wealthy woman. She wasn’t going to starve.
He noticed the gold dragons hanging from her ears. They demonstrated her renowned irreverence, her Blackburn independence. Even if they’d been three-dollar costume pieces—and they weren’t—they would have told Lee Donigan that she wasn’t one of them. She stood apart from everyone else at Winston & Reed. She didn’t belong. And she knew it.
He decided not to bother mincing words with her. “You’re right,” he said. “We have to cancel our contract with you, Rebecca.”
“Whose idea?”
“That’s irrelevant.”
He motioned for the waiter and nodded to Rebecca to order, not caring that he was rushing her. She was the one who’d shown up late. She ordered the broiled scrod and a salad, and he made it two. The two martinis had curbed his appetite.
“I’ll have mine to go,” Rebecca said as the waiter started to leave.
The poor fellow looked dumbfounded. “To go?”
She graced him with one of her most dazzling smiles. “Please.”
Lee silently cursed Quentin Reed for being such a pusillanimous jerk he couldn’t tell a woman he’d known since childhood to quit playing games with him and get the hell out of his company.
“I gather you don’t even want to see the proofs,” Rebecca said.
“I don’t see what purpose that would serve.”
But Lee would have loved Rebecca Blackburn to spread her portfolio on the linen-covered table and to give him a good, long look at the work she’d done for his company. As a designer, Rebecca was top-notch. Her preliminary sketches for Winston & Reed had blended the company’s disparate elements, its old Boston traditionalism with its modern boldness and direction. Lee knew she wouldn’t be easily replaced, if at all.
“Are you going to give me any advice?” she asked suddenly.
Her question caught Lee off guard. “I beg your pardon?”
“I’ve never been fired without getting unsolicited advice on how to conduct myself in the future. My favorite was from the president of the Dallas-based oil company where I worked a couple of months about two years ago. He told me I ought to get my pretty little self married and start having babies, but then he changed his mind and said he wouldn’t wish a smart-mouthed nutcase like me on any red-blooded male.”
Lee fervently wished for another martini. His public relations director had alerted him to Rebecca’s résumé and its dizzying list of firms and cities where she’d worked since becoming one of the rags-to-riches business successes of the decade at twenty-five. She and her former roommate at Boston University had created the fun, fast-paced, irreverent trivia game Junk Mind that had become an instant and explosive bestseller. When they’d sold the rights to a Boston-based toy-and-game conglomerate, the roommate had taken a vice presidency with the company and they’d made a fortune. Rebecca, who’d designed the game board now in millions of households across the globe, had continued her drifting. New York, London, Paris, Dallas, Seattle, Honolulu, San Diego, Atlanta—she’d had jobs in them all. Not that she needed to work, but in the short time he’d known her, Lee had gained the distinct impression she didn’t hold a high opinion of the idle rich—or anyone who didn’t work. She’d only been back in Boston five months, making another of her periodic runs at operating her own design studio. But to make a lasting success of a studio, she would finally have to make the commitment not just to her latest project but to a place. Lee didn’t know if she was running from herself, from the tragedies in her past, from her own startling success, or if she was running at all. He wondered if she was just not ready to stay put. With Rebecca, it could be just that simple.
“I’m not going to give you any advice,” he said, smiling in spite of himself. “I only hope you find whatever you’re looking for here in Boston. And I wish you luck, Rebecca.” He extended his hand across the table. “Truly, I do.”
“Would it have made a difference if I weren’t a Blackburn?”
“It would have made a difference,” he said, knowing he shouldn’t, “if you were anyone but who you are.”
Rebecca wasn’t one to turn down a meal Quentin Reed was stuck paying for, but the smell of the fish turned her stomach as the elevator plunged forty stories, its doors sliding smoothly open at the cherry, marble and brass lobby. She started out.
And stopped. No. She wasn’t going to let Quentin off that easily.
She marched back into the elevator, tapped thirty-nine, and nibbled on a sprig of crisp spinach on the way up. She wasn’t afraid of Quentin Reed. She’d run and fetched him baking soda and water the time he and Jared Sloan had peed in the yellow jackets’ nest, and she hadn’t told his mother of their idiocy when she’d demanded to know why the two boys were walking so funny.
The thirty-ninth-floor reception area was, if anything, more opulent than the lobby, but Rebecca had no trouble lying her way past the receptionist into the inner sanctum of the president and chief executive officer of Winston & Reed, Boston’s most prestigious real estate and construction firm. Annette Winston Reed still retained the title of chairman of the board, but the real power of the company now resided with her thirty-seven-year-old son, a circumstance that surprised Rebecca. Annette had never thought Quentin was worth a damn.
His secretary was a well-dressed, highly efficient woman who informed Rebecca she would require an appointment to see Mr. Reed.
“I’m a family friend,” Rebecca said, breezing past her.
On her feet at once, Willa Johnson, willowy and fast, protested, firmly suggesting Rebecca wait while she checked with Mr. Reed—or suffer the consequences of her whisking in security.
“Mr. Reed and I,” Rebecca said, “were kicked out of the wading pool on Boston Common for taking our clothes off. He was five and I was two.” Supposedly, too, Jared had been the one who’d gotten them dressed and hauled them back to Beacon Hill. Mercifully, Rebecca didn’t remember.
With Willa momentarily taken aback at the image of her well-bred boss skinny-dipping on Boston Common, Rebecca slipped into his spectacular office.
Across the room, Quentin Reed slowly hung up his telephone, his pale blue eyes riveted on her. “Rebecca,” he said in little more than a whisper.
It had been fourteen years.
A recovered Willa, about to strong-arm Rebecca out herself, heard the emotion in her boss’s raw voice and retreated, quietly shutting the door behind her.
“Hello, Quentin.”
He was as handsome as ever. Ash-haired, square-jawed, trim, even confident, although Rebecca suspected that was more in appearance than in fact. Quentin had forever been at war with his sensitive nature. He wore a conservative pinstriped suit of exquisite cut.
He cleared his throat. “What can I do for you?”
“Was it your idea or your mother’s to have me fired?”
“You’re not an employee. It wasn’t a question of firing you.”
“Semantics, Quentin. You’re not going to weasel out of this one. You found out about me, told your mama and she said to give me the boot?”
He winced at her bald words, but confirmed her guess with a small nod.
“Does this mean I’m going to have the long arm of the Winston-Reed clan undermining my business in Boston?”
“Of course not.” He rose, and she was surprised at how tall he was. She’d forgotten. “Rebecca, look at this situation from our point of view.”
“I have. That’s why I’m here. You can’t stand the idea of a Blackburn earning a penny off Winston & Reed.”
“You don’t need the money—”
“That’s not the point. Quentin….” She exhaled, wishing now she hadn’t gotten back into the elevator. “Quentin, I was hoping we could put the past behind us.”
He shut his eyes a moment, sighing, and shook his head. “You should have known that’s impossible.”
She supposed she should have. Twenty-six years ago Quentin’s father and hers—and Tam’s—were killed in a Vietcong ambush for which Thomas Blackburn, Rebecca’s grandfather, was directly responsible. It was a lot for anyone to put aside. But she wasn’t going to give Quentin the satisfaction of telling him that.
She told him instead, “Bidding on this project was strictly a business decision on my part.”
“You never were worth a damn as a liar, Rebecca. It’s only your grandfather—”
“Leave him out of this.”
Quentin stiffened. “You’d better leave before we both say things we’ll regret.”
On her way out of the luxurious office, Rebecca debated dumping her fish dinner in the trash, hoping it’d stink up the place. But she resisted, because there’d never been any satisfaction in trying to prove to anyone that the Blackburns still had their pride.
Three
San Francisco
Jared Sloan cursed the sadist who had invented the tuxedo and had another go at his bow tie. It’d been years since he’d tied one. He’d managed all the other parts of the tux with relative ease and probably would have handled the bow tie all right, but he was running late. At least, except for cleaning, his tuxedo hadn’t cost him a dime. His mother—proper Boston Winston that she was—had insisted on buying it for him years ago, and all he’d had to do was resurrect it from the back of his closet. Another failure with the tie, though, and back under his baseball cards it went. He’d wear jeans. Which would embarrass his father and his daughter. He’d never hear the end of what an insensitive lout he was and sparing himself that was worth another try at his tie, and maybe even the six or seven hours he was doomed to spend in his tuxedo. It was a close call.
He smiled at the sound of Mai’s undignified squeal from the entry. “Daddy!” Then she caught herself and calmed her voice to that of a fourteen-year-old would-be sophisticate. “Dad, are you almost done? The limousine’s here.”
Only for you, babe. Jared successfully completed his third try at what was, in fact, a simple knot. He quickly appraised himself in the mirror. The tux’s classic style helped conceal its age; both the Boston Winstons and San Francisco Sloans would be willing to claim him tonight. He had the strong Sloan cheekbones, dark hair, teal eyes and their general rakish, devil-may-care look. His height—he was six-two—and his more powerful build came from his mother, the second of Wesley Sloan’s four wives, who’d exited from Boston society years ago and now lived on the east coast of Canada in what she called self-imposed exile. She’d never been so content.
“Wow,” Mai said when he joined her in the entry. “Don’t you look handsome.”
He laughed. “You’re no dog yourself.”
Mai wrinkled up her pretty face. She was a small, slim girl, wiry and strong, with almond eyes and high cheekbones, a squarish jaw and a reddish cast to her fine, dark hair. From the time she was a tot, Jared had tried to get her to concentrate just on being herself. But lately he’d begun to realize that Mai wasn’t entirely sure who that was. He tried to understand. Her mother, whom Mai had never known, had been Vietnamese. In Vietnam, Amerasians were known as bui doi. The dust of life. The expression broke his heart, for Mai was, in a very real way, the light of his life.
“That’s not much of a compliment,” she told her father.
“Wouldn’t want you to get a swelled head. You’re going to be swimming in compliments by the end of the evening. Ready?”
The glint in her eyes and the way she kneaded her hands together told Jared his only child was champing at the bit, anxious to zip ahead of him to the elegant black limousine waiting incongruously outside their small redwood-and-stucco house on Russian Hill. But she restrained herself. A bright ninth-grader, she had lost none of the energy and exuberance of her early childhood, but was channeling it in new directions. Still, Jared found himself half expecting she’d run out and kick the limousine’s tires, check under the hood, demand to try out every seat and see how every gadget worked, what every button did. A year ago she would have—in fact, her grandfather had told him, had.
Tonight, however, she walked regally out to the monstrous car, careful not to muss her gown made of clear, cool magenta fabric that exquisitely complemented the delicate tones of her skin. She quietly thanked the chauffeur by his first name, George, when he held the door for her, and tucked her knees together and her ankles to one side when she settled back into the leather seat.
Jared came around to the driver’s side and climbed in beside her. He hated limousines more than he did tuxedos. At sixty-five, Wesley Sloan was an internationally renowned architect and could well afford his expensive tastes. The repeated offers he’d made to Jared to join his San Francisco–based firm were enough to make most architects salivate, but Jared, the eldest of Wesley’s three children by ten years, continued to turn him down. He preferred to work solo, in the small studio behind his house, specializing in renovations, restorations and additions— “glorified carpentry,” his father called it. But Jared’s half sister Isabel had recently earned her graduate degree in architecture from UCLA and seemed ready to make the move up to San Francisco, something he hoped would take that last bit of heat off him. Wesley Sloan knew Jared wasn’t going to change his mind, but he wasn’t a man who liked to accept defeat.
If Wesley had known how much his granddaughter enjoyed riding in his limousine, he’d have tried sending it around every afternoon and never mind her father.
It was a cool, damp, foggy evening, the kind that made Jared intensely aware of his aloneness. He watched silently out the window as the car wound its way down the narrow, twisting streets of Russian Hill.
A small crowd was gathered in front of the elegant newly opened San Francisco Villa Hotel, designed by Wesley Sloan. He and his current wife were hosting their annual charity ball, a major social event on the city’s spring calendar. Wesley had issued an invitation to his granddaughter every year since her twelfth birthday. This year, Jared had relented and agreed to let her attend. As he had before her, Mai would have to learn to deal with being a Winston and a Sloan on her own terms—not theirs, not his.
But as much as he believed in her and admired her spirit and self-assurance, she was just a kid. His kid. And he couldn’t stop himself from wanting to protect her.
She tugged on his arm. “Daddy—look.”
Jared was already looking. As the limousine pulled up to the curb, eight or ten huge Harley-Davidson motorcycles materialized out of the fog and formed a menacing half circle around the car.
“George?” Jared asked.
“I don’t know what’s going on, Mr. Sloan,” the driver said. “There’s no way I can pull out—we’re stuck here.”
“Are they going to hurt us?” Mai asked, trying to hide her nervousness.
Jared shook his head. “No, they’ve got too big an audience. I think they just want to intimidate us.”
They revved their engines and made a lot of noise, glowering at their own reflections in the limousine windows. They were an ugly lot—overweight, tattooed, unkempt. Not one wore a helmet. Tough guys. Jared spotted two policemen emerging tentatively from the crowd. A newspaper photographer was clicking madly away.
“To hell with this,” Jared muttered and turned to Mai. “Stay put.”
He threw open the door as far as he could, until it touched the edge of the lead bike, and climbed out, directing his attention at the driver, a mean-eyed individual with a battered leather jacket stretched over his fat gut. Jared asked nonchalantly, “What’s up?”
“We weren’t invited to the party.”
Jared laughed. “Consider yourself lucky.”
The photographer had worked his way around the limousine behind the two policemen, who didn’t appear to be in any hurry to assert their authority.
“Hate to miss a party,” the biker said. He made a point of coughing up a huge clam and spitting so that it landed at Jared’s toes.
Jared wasn’t impressed. The guy and his pals were just getting their kicks intimidating a bunch of rich folks at a high-society gathering, only they’d picked the wrong target. Jared had dealt with scarier people than this.
“You can go in my place,” he said, almost meaning it. “Got a tux strapped to that contraption?”
The biker seemed to appreciate Jared’s humor and started to grin, but then Mai popped her head out behind her father and pulled his hand. “Daddy, please come back inside—”
“Hey—who’s the gook kid?”
Jared heard Mai’s sharp intake of breath and saw the look of amusement her obvious fear and hurt elicited from the biker.
He snapped.
Putting all his weight on the door of the limousine, he lunged toward the big motorcycle. The force of the door hitting the bike’s front tire caught the driver off guard and wrenched the handlebars out of his hands. He couldn’t clear the bike and went down with it, catching his left leg underneath it. Jared didn’t lose any time. He leaped over the fallen motorcycle and jumped on the bastard who’d insulted his daughter.
It wasn’t the other bikers coming to the aid of their trapped buddy or the police jumping into the fray that stopped Jared from beating the guy senseless.
It was Mai.
“Daddy!” she cried.
He released the man’s flabby throat and climbed back over the motorcycle, putting out his arms as Mai ran to him, near tears. He told her softly, “It’s okay. They’re just punks.”
Reluctant to prolong the confrontation, the police let the bikers shove off. Jared noticed he’d gotten grease on his tuxedo and his tie had come undone. So much for sartorial splendor.
He put out his arm for Mai. “Madame?”
She giggled and laid her small hand on his crooked elbow. “I should have helped you beat that guy up.”
“One hothead in the family’s enough.”
The photographer continued to click away, but Jared ignored him and the cheering onlookers as he escorted his daughter to her first charity ball.
Four
Almost a week after Winston & Reed had ousted her, Rebecca found herself painting her nails red and scanning a magazine article on Phoenix. She’d never lived in Phoenix. She wasn’t sure it’d be smart to move there at the beginning of summer, but desert living had an exotically romantic appeal. And there wasn’t much to keep her in Boston. Her fledgling one-woman studio was at a lull.
Of course, painting her nails and reading magazines weren’t going to help that. She wasn’t above scrambling for work. She’d worked in enough studios to appreciate the demands of the graphic design business and knew what it took to succeed. Talent alone wasn’t enough—it also took sheer grit. When she’d first returned to Boston, she’d worked hard. Not wanting to hire anyone until she’d made the commitment to stay, she did everything herself. She was her own account executive, senior designer, office manager, receptionist and gofer.
Her studio occupied several airy rooms in a crummy building a few blocks in the wrong direction from the Boston Children’s Museum. She’d bought the building back before real estate prices in metropolitan Boston had skyrocketed. It was on the site of the original warehouse owned by Blackburn Shipping way back in 1800. Her fellow tenants—none of whom knew she was their landlady—included a grumpy printer she’d never hire to do any of her work, an office supply wholesaler, a caterer, three or four accountants and about a dozen other strange little businesses that didn’t need to rely on walk-in customers.
The telephone roused Rebecca from consideration of becoming the art director for a Scottsdale-based international resort chain. How posh. She could hit the Jacuzzi on her lunch hour and get free vacations.
She flipped on her background-noise tape and picked up the phone. “Rebecca Blackburn.”
“R.J.—what’s that noise in the background?”
Rebecca grinned at Sofi Mencini’s voice. “My office staff busily at work. I read somewhere background noise encourages callers to take a one-woman outfit more seriously—makes them think I’m actually running a business here.”
“Turn it off. I’ve got news.”
Sofi wasn’t one to fool around between nine and five; it was just now ten-thirty. The honey-haired, diminutive cocreator of Junk Mind was Rebecca’s best friend and former roommate, a woman of wit, endurance and determination. Years ago Sofi had arrived at Boston University as the sheltered upper-middle-class girl from the suburbs, while Rebecca had been the outcast Boston Brahmin come home after ten years of exile in central Florida with her mother and five younger brothers. They’d both made their bids for independence—Sofi through one measured, deliberate act of will after another, Rebecca explosively. While Junk Mind was going on, Sofi had gotten her MBA and was ready when opportunity knocked to jump into corporate America. She’d never looked back.
“You’ve made the tabloids,” Sofi said in her no-nonsense manner.
Rebecca laughed. “What, someone found out Winston & Reed axed a Blackburn?”
She grimaced at the unexpected bitterness in her tone. Until Boston, she had never taken a position without believing absolutely that this one would be the right one—that at last she’d found her niche, her home. She always worked her hardest. In terms of design, she invariably performed beyond her employer’s already high expectations. While being fired or quitting did have its liberating side, it also provoked a more difficult emotion, an indescribable emptiness and sense of betrayal, a feeling of loss. But her bid for the Winston & Reed job—even, to a degree, coming back to Boston—wasn’t an attempt just to get work or establish some sense of stability in her life.
What she was doing, she knew, was tempting fate.
“Yeah, I heard about that,” Sofi said. “At least you won’t starve without Quentin Reed’s money.”
“I’m thinking about moving to Arizona and taking up painting cacti. In a pinch I could sell a few off the tailgate of my truck to tourists.”
“R.J., you make me crazy.”
“On the other hand, I’m a designer, not a painter. I wouldn’t be any good at cacti paintings.”
“You don’t need to paint cacti or anything else so quit this poor artist routine.”
Sofi was always ready to poke fun at her friend’s money habits. “So what’s this about the tabloids?” Rebecca asked, steering Sofi back onto the subject.
“R.J., The Score’s got your picture on the front page—and that you’re currently operating a graphic design studio on the Boston waterfront. A reporter weaseled it out of one of the underlings here.”
Rebecca put down the brush to her red nail polish. Sofi’s news, at any rate, explained the messages she’d ignored from a reporter wanting to interview her; he’d never said what newspaper he represented. She didn’t blame him. Not that it would have mattered: she’d quit talking to reporters a long time ago.
“I haven’t gone near a reporter or a photographer in years,” she said.
“I know.”
“Sofi?”
“Think back, R.J. The fall of Saigon. Tam, Mai…”
Rebecca shut her eyes.
Jared.
“Oh, no.”
Quentin Reed hesitated before pushing open the wrought-iron gate that marked the entrance to the Winston house on Mt. Vernon Street. One of the few free-standing houses on Beacon Hill, it was a quintessential Charles Bulfinch design with its pristine Federal lines, brick facade, black shutters and doors. Two huge old elms, coddled against the ravages of Dutch elm disease, shaded the brick sidewalk and front lawn, also a rarity on the Hill. Quentin had walked from Winston & Reed. Any meeting with his mother unsettled him; one called suddenly, with a request that he come at once, made him drag his heels, not so much to postpone the inevitable but to steel himself for it. He stood a moment in the shade, taking in the quiet of Beacon Hill. He could hear birds twittering in trees and shrubs; the crush of Beacon Street and the Common, of downtown Boston only blocks away, seemed distant.
Inhaling deeply, he smelled mowed grass and flowers, not just exhaust fumes, and finally he headed up the brick walk and over to the cobblestone carriageway. His wealthy mother’s cavalier attitude toward security was notorious among her friends, but she refused to change. She had always loved risks and adventure, and hated the idea of living like a paranoid old woman. She considered her inside alarm system, the lock on her carriageway gate, and Nguyen Kim, her full-time bodyguard and driver, sufficient protection.
As he walked around to the rear of the big house, Quentin could feel the critical eyes of generations of Winstons on him. The ghosts, he called them. They’d always been a proud, principled, damnably lucky lot. They’d made their first fortune in the pre-revolution China trade, another in the post-revolution China trade, after they’d returned from the safety of Canada and silenced their critics by pumping money back into Boston’s war-decimated economy. They were there when the Industrial Revolution had arrived and profited from a burgeoning textile industry, and like so many rich merchants and manufacturers in New England, they learned the ins and outs of conservative money management to preserve their fortune. When he married Annette Winston, Benjamin Reed was to apply those principles to her considerable assets. Instead he founded Winston & Reed.
Quentin could still see his father, a Connecticut Yankee never comfortable on Beacon Hill, standing atop Pinckney Street just after a snowstorm, with his bare head in the gusting February wind as he watched his only child careen down the steep hill on his sled. “Keep going!” Benjamin Reed had yelled. “You’ll make the river yet!” He seemed oblivious to the impediments between Quentin’s speeding sled and the Charles River: busy Charles Street, Storrow Drive, the median, fences, the Esplanade. Quentin would always stop at the corner of West Cedar Street, as his mother had instructed him to before he left the house, and wonder if he’d somehow failed his father for not even trying to make the river’s edge. But that was the man Annette Winston had married: filled with grand ideas, but without the drive or the strategic abilities to carry them out.
In 1966, three years after his father’s death, Quentin had left Beacon Hill for good. There was boarding school, then Harvard, Saigon, then a condominium on Commonwealth Avenue and a position at Winston & Reed. He’d since taken a huge apartment in the Winston & Reed–built five-star hotel on the Public Garden, but he’d surprised everyone when he’d opted for a view of Park Square over the more coveted—and expensive—view of the Garden and Beacon Hill. He and his wife, Jane, also owned a house in Marblehead on the North Shore, which Quentin adored. Jane was living there alone for the moment while they worked out problems in their marriage, but he hoped when they were back together they could abandon the city altogether, an idea he wisely kept from his mother. She expected him to return to Mt. Vernon Street. The house was his to inherit.
“Lucky me,” he muttered, wishing his mother would will the damned place to someone else. But to whom? He and Jane had no children as yet. Quentin hoped a family was in their future, but right now he couldn’t be certain his marriage was going to survive. There was Jared, but his cousin hadn’t shown up in Boston since 1975 and wasn’t particularly fond of his Aunt Annette. And Jared’s daughter Mai was out. She wasn’t a part of Boston, of her great-aunt’s view of the Winstons. As usual, Quentin was stuck.
He found his mother in her stone garden house, transplanting pink geraniums into scrubbed terra-cotta pots. Gardening, he felt, was one of those chores Annette Winston Reed pretended to enjoy but secretly loathed. At sixty, she had chosen to play the game of representing the honor, dignity and charm of a bygone era—of being the proper Boston Brahmin dowager. She looked the part well enough with her gracefully graying hair, her reserved style of dress, her unconventional beauty. With age, she’d come into her particular kind of attractiveness; her strong features and height made her seem elegant without being frail. She sat on the boards of numerous nonprofit organizations and was generous with her time, energy and intelligence. People saw her as a well-bred, if formidable, Beacon Hill lady.
Yet there was another side to Annette Reed: the side that had made her the successful, imposing chairman of Winston & Reed, the woman who had led the company since her husband’s death. It was she who had transformed it into a major player in the volatile and lucrative real estate and construction markets of the northeast United States. However, she seemed ambivalent about her power and her business triumphs. Oddly true to her own background and era, in public she credited her husband for his conception of the company and her son for running it. In private, however, she made sure Quentin knew who was in control. Yet, at the same time, she didn’t hide her frustration with him for acquiescing to her will, seeing it not as respect for her abilities but as a sign of weakness in him. Not that she’d have tolerated anything else. Quentin had come to see that his mother’s need to control stemmed not from strength and intelligence, as he had once believed, but from insecurity and selfishness. As for himself, he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.
“Quentin—dear, it’s so good to see you.” She pulled off her gardening gloves. “Kim just put out lemonade in the garden. Shall we?”
As if he had any choice. “Of course, Mother.”
“I was going to come into the office,” she said, leading him out of the garden house, “but I felt this is a private matter properly discussed at home.”
Quentin made no comment at her assumption that he, too, would consider the Winston house his home. She gestured to the chair at the white iron table he’d occupied since boyhood, and he sat down obediently, letting her pour two glasses of fresh-squeezed, lightly sweetened lemonade. There was the ubiquitous plate of sugar cookies as well, their sweet smell mixing with the scents of the garden, an unusually large one for Beacon Hill.
His mother withdrew a folded section of newspaper from the khaki jacket she always wore gardening. “I saw this at the pharmacy earlier this morning and decided I should call you.”
She shook the paper open as she handed it across to him, her hand steady, and Quentin tried to conceal his reaction when he saw the two photographs occupying most of the front page of the popular national tabloid. He could feel himself going pale, could feel his stomach begin to burn. The picture on the left was a famous shot portraying the final American withdrawal from South Vietnam. It was seared in Quentin’s mind for all time. There, again, was twenty-year-old Rebecca Blackburn carrying an infant and supporting the weight of a seriously wounded Jared Sloan as she got them all into a helicopter, only hours before communist troops entered Saigon. Rebecca’s anguished expression—of shock, horror, betrayal, grief and determination—had captured the mixed feelings of so many as the nation of South Vietnam ceased to exist, and two decades of American hopes and promises ended.
The photograph on the right was a recent one of Jared Sloan in San Francisco, decking a motorcycle tough who’d insulted his fourteen-year-old Amerasian daughter, looking on from her grandfather’s limousine. Quentin’s gaze lingered on Mai Sloan. He absorbed every detail of her pretty face with its unusual, distinctive features. He could see Tam in her.
Tam…
After so many years, Quentin was amazed that he still felt betrayed by her, still felt such unrelenting sorrow over how they’d lost each other. She’d died that last day in Saigon. Her child—Jared’s child—had lived. “It’s painful to look at, I know,” Annette said tartly, snatching the clipping from him. “How Jared could let such a thing happen…” She broke off with an irritated sigh. “There’s not much of an article. Fortunately, we weren’t specifically mentioned, but they did find out Rebecca Blackburn’s back in Boston. I’m afraid there could be ramifications for us, Quentin. We should be prepared.”
“Mother, don’t be silly. I haven’t seen Jared in years—”
“That doesn’t matter. He’s your cousin. And if the press should learn Winston & Reed had hired Rebecca—and let her go—we could be in for some nasty publicity.”
Quentin doubted his mother would ever let him forget that he’d inadvertently allowed a Blackburn to come under contract with their company. It was the sort of oversight Annette Winston Reed would never make. He said awkwardly, “You know I took care of that problem in as discreet a manner as I could.”
She scowled. “There shouldn’t have been a problem to take care of.”
“Mother,” he said gently, knowing that trying to defend himself would only make matters worse, “I’m confident I can handle the media should anyone want to pursue this story, but frankly, I doubt anyone will. What would be the point? The Blackburn-Winston thing’s been exhausted twice, in 1963 and again in 1975.”
Annette stiffened, annoyed. “Don’t patronize me, Quentin. Your cousin should have considered us when he decided to attack that fellow.”
“I doubt Jared’s even thought about us in years.”
“I’m sure you’re right about that,” she said bitterly. “Nevertheless, you’ll remain alert, won’t you?”
“Of course.”
“And stay away from Rebecca Blackburn. She’ll only cause trouble.”
“Mother, she’s as much a victim in all this as you or I—”
“A Blackburn a victim?” Annette fell back into her chair with a derisive laugh. “Now who’s being silly?”
Regretting his unthinking comment, Quentin slipped into silence. Once he’d finished his obligatory glass of lemonade and sugar cookie, his mother allowed him to leave, with further promises that he’d do whatever he could to keep her, himself, and Winston & Reed out of the newspapers. He walked back out to Beacon Street, crossing onto the Common and stopping at the Park Street subway station. The vendor there had plenty of copies of The Score. Quentin bought one for himself.
His walk slowed and he felt a little faint, almost sick, as he stared again at fourteen-year-old Mai Sloan. He’d never even met her. He wished circumstances had allowed him to know his cousin’s daughter. Tam’s only child. But that would have meant breaching the unspoken agreement between his mother, Jared and himself. Jared’s illegitimate half-Vietnamese daughter was his concern. In the unforgiving mind of Annette Winston Reed, Mai was an embarrassment to suffer, not a member of the family. To disagree with that summation would have required more courage than Quentin could muster.
And for his part, Jared seemed content with his exile from Boston, from the Winstons and the world he’d known as a child. There were times Quentin envied his cousin his freedom.
He looked again at the photograph, at Mai’s beautiful almond eyes and her father’s livid face, and he sadly realized there was no one he’d risk injury and the notoriety of his picture in The Score to defend. He wondered if Jared regretted the outburst that had landed him on the cover of a supermarket tabloid, but thought not. Jared had always been one to act on impulse, but he willingly accepted the consequences for whatever he did. Quentin had always admired his cousin’s courage, his ability not to look back.
He threw the tabloid in a trash can and crossed over to Tremont Street, trying to blame the tears in his eyes on the wind. “Oh, Tam,” he said, his voice choked, and flagged a cab, wanting suddenly to get back to work and immerse himself in the present. His mother was right about that: thinking about the past and rehashing it—alone, with friends, or on the pages of a gossip tabloid—would only bring them all more pain and anguish.
Best simply to forget, he told himself, yet already knowing he never would.
Annette pinched off a yellow geranium leaf and crumpled it in her hand, amazed at how stupefyingly dull her life had become. She seemed to be paying for her days of adventure and excitement with a proper late middle age. She’d always thought she’d die before she resorted to potting geraniums. And she was only sixty. Life was unmerciful.
Throwing down the leaf, she smoothed the tabloid front page on her worktable and allowed her gaze to linger on Mai Sloan. She was a pretty girl—talented, smart and mischievous, the brief article had said. She took clay and gymnastics classes, had lots of friends at the San Francisco public high school she attended. Annette’s older sister, Martha, had tried to interest her in the child when she was just a baby, showing off cute pictures and telling stories, but Annette had let her know she wasn’t about to forget the shame Martha’s son had brought onto the family. She’d had to be quite brutal about it. Like most people who found themselves pushed up against Annette’s will, Martha had chosen to retreat. Annette remembered her sister’s last words on the subject: “How can you blame an innocent child?”
“I don’t,” Annette had replied. “I blame her father, and since he’s chosen to raise the child—well, he can suffer the consequences.”
Now she and Martha exchanged polite letters between Boston and Nova Scotia. There was no mention of Jared or his daughter, no pictures, no grandmother’s bragging. Mai might never have been born, and that suited Annette just fine. She missed her older sister; she wasn’t afraid to admit it. But their estrangement was a price she was willing to pay to preserve the honor and respect she and Quentin had earned in Boston—and their peace.
Yet Jared’s child didn’t look like anyone’s shame. Her nephew must be a good father, Annette thought, surprised at the rush of relief she felt. Perhaps all had turned out for the best. Quentin wasn’t overly bothered by this most recent flurry of publicity; that was good.
But poor Tam, Annette thought. Still, if she’d lived, would Mai be better off? Would any of them?
Annette sniffed. Why all this second-guessing? What was done was done.
She refolded the clipping and tucked it back into her pocket, then forced herself to put her gardening gloves back on and return to her planting. She wished she had grandchildren. If Quentin would end this ridiculous limbo with his wife and get on with starting a family, perhaps she wouldn’t feel so restless, so unsettled about the future. Perhaps she ought to have Jane to tea and use her influence to encourage a reconciliation.
Annette smiled, imagining how nice it would be to have children playing in the Mt. Vernon Street garden again. She could take them to her mas on the Riviera, show them the olive and lemon trees, let them pick wildflowers in the fields. Yes, life could be enjoyable again, if in different ways than it had been thirty years ago.
She had been acting silly, she decided. There was nothing to worry about. Jean-Paul Gerard could no longer hurt her or anyone she loved. He was dead.
She’d killed him herself fourteen years ago in the hell that had become Saigon.
Five
Jean-Paul Gerard had found the small redwood-and-stucco house on Russian Hill with no trouble, and he stayed out on the steep sidewalk, enjoying the perfect San Francisco day. It was a beautiful city. He’d flown in yesterday after discovering The Score discarded on a bus and had checked out the lay of the land before coming up to Jared Sloan’s today. He’d slept in Golden Gate Park and had eaten cold dim sum for breakfast; he could feel it churning in his stomach now as he waited for Mai Sloan.
According to his rough estimate, she should be heading back from school in just a few minutes.
A mite of a girl came around the corner and skipped down the hill, swinging her book pack. Jean-Paul felt his mouth go dry at the sight of her shining hair, at her energy. She was so like Tam.
When she saw him, her pace slowed, and he knew she was debating crossing the street. He’d had that effect on people for many years, but couldn’t get used to it. Even in the seediest areas of Honolulu, he drew nervous stares from strangers. He was fifty-four years old and could have passed for eighty with his pure white hair and his weather-beaten skin, deeply lined from years of exposure to disease, parasites, bad food, sleepless nights, alcohol and the worst—the very worst—in humankind. A livid welt of a scar ran from under his right eye down his cheek, then jutted left under his chin and finally trailed off down his neck. He didn’t have a lot to live for, and people could tell, with just one glance.
“Mai?” His voice cracked, and he tried to sound less threatening, less scary than he looked. Not daring to step toward her, he went on quickly, “I knew your father in Vietnam.”
Her dark eyes lit up with interest. “You did?”
“And your mother.”
That drew her closer, her book pack dragging on the sidewalk behind her. “I’ve never met anyone besides my father who knew my mother. What’s your name?”
“Is Jared home?”
“Yes—he works out back. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Excited now, the girl pushed open a five-foot wooden gate and led him along a stone walk, flanked with lush greenery, onto a deck. Across a postage-stamp yard was a small shed that obviously had been converted into a studio; a window box overflowed with motley petunias.
“Dad,” Mai yelled over the deck rail, slinging down her pack, “we’ve got company!”
Jean-Paul heard a sound from the door to the house behind him and turned, spotting the U.S. Army issue Colt .45 Jared Sloan held in his right hand.
When Mai whipped around, she paled and staggered back a step. “Daddy…”
“In the house,” Jared said. He stepped out onto the deck. “Now.”
Mai didn’t need to be told twice.
“It’s been a long time,” Jean-Paul said mildly.
“Get out.”
“I have no desire to hurt you or your daughter.”
“Crawl back into whatever hole you crawled out of and don’t come near my daughter again. Understood?”
Jean-Paul nodded. “As you wish.”
He backed off the deck, went slowly down the walk and through the gate, hoping he was concealing his jubilance. Jared Sloan continued to hate and fear him. Yes! That meant that he, Jean-Paul, had secrets yet to tell.
He had leverage.
You’re crazy to go up against these people again. But what did he have to lose? His life had been shattered a long, long time ago.
He could get the Jupiter Stones. There was still a chance.
For you, Maman…
And he could have his revenge. For his mother, for himself. Maybe, at last, there could be peace in his soul. For so many years, it had been too much to hope. Now…he had to try.
Shutting the gate behind him, he found that he was crying. He couldn’t stop himself. Tears streamed down his scarred face, blinding him, and the more he brushed them away, the more they came, until finally he stumbled down the street, letting them come.
There could yet be peace. And justice. Yes, he had to try.
Six
Thomas Blackburn emphatically did not read supermarket tabloids, but anticipating her grandfather’s attitude, Rebecca purchased two copies of The Score at a Fanueil Hall Marketplace newsstand before heading up to Beacon Hill. As was her custom, she avoided the subway and cabs and instead walked from her studio, going as much as possible by way of the renovated waterfront. She loved to stop and watch the seals outside the aquarium, or just take in the changes in the Boston skyline since she’d last lived there.
She resisted taking a good, long look at the tabloid’s front page as she came to the quiet, black-lanterned streets of Beacon Hill. The famous photograph of her, Jared and Mai in Saigon was one Rebecca would never forget. She didn’t own a copy. She didn’t need one. Even after fourteen years, without stimulus and often without warning, she could hear the wailing of newborn Mai Sloan and feel the infant wriggling in her arms, twisting for the milk-filled breast Rebecca couldn’t offer. She could feel Jared’s weight against her, could see him, pale with shock and the loss of blood, his face set hard against his pain. And she could feel her own horror and disbelief, could recall every moment of their agonizing trip home.
Their Chinook helicopter had flown them to a U.S. Navy ship waiting in the South China Sea. Unwittingly, they had become a part of Option IV, the largest helicopter evacuation in history, and among the last Americans to leave Saigon. They were taken to Manila, where surgeons removed two bullets from Jared Sloan’s shoulder. Rebecca had waited until his parents met him there. Then she’d boarded a plane alone to Hawaii, then on to Boston to pick up her stuff, and, finally, back home to Florida. She hadn’t seen Jared or Mai Sloan since.
She had to look at the tabloid picture of a week ago, of the two people she’d gotten out of Saigon in its last tortured hours.
She stared at Jared’s hard-set face. He hadn’t changed. She wished he had. She wished looking at him now she saw a man she didn’t remember so well, hadn’t loved so much so long ago…hadn’t betrayed her.
Mai, in the background, was everything Rebecca would have hoped and expected for Jared Sloan’s daughter. He’d never thanked her for risking her life to get him and Mai out of Saigon, but looking at them now, suddenly Rebecca was glad they hadn’t. Gratitude would only have connected them. It was better for her, and for Jared and Mai, that the cut between them—the separation—had been clean, if hardly without pain.
Rebecca cut down Pinckney Street, walking past a house where Louisa May Alcott had lived, past prestigious Louisburg Square, down to the intersection of West Cedar. It would have been shorter to have gone straight down Mt. Vernon to West Cedar, but that would have entailed walking past the Winston house, which Rebecca preferred to avoid. She had yet to bump into Annette Winston Reed. It was just as well. Rebecca was convinced that Annette had been the chief instigator behind the removal of the historic Eliza Blackburn house from the walking tour of Beacon Hill earlier that spring, something Annette couldn’t have known its current owner had been trying to accomplish for years. Thomas Blackburn made no secret of his distaste at having a guide gather a group of tourists in front of his home, then relate its history and architecture, tell anecdotes about his family and, invariably, close with a sorrowful comment on the “reduced circumstances of Mr. Thomas Blackburn” that had led to the peeling paint on the shutters and trim, the scuffed door, the unpolished brass fittings, the small crack in the lavender glass in the side panel.
Over the years assorted neighbors and historical commissions and even a few politicians had written him letters or told him outright to fix up the place. He’d silenced them by threatening to paint his door vermilion. If a tour guide were particularly courageous—and there were those few—she would tell her group the gory details of the scandal that had led to Thomas Blackburn’s public downfall. In his enthusiasm for “getting the facts,” he had recklessly sent his son Stephen and fellow Beacon Hill resident and friend Benjamin Reed into a fatal Vietcong ambush in the Mekong Delta. Thomas had accepted full responsibility for the incident, but that didn’t halt the failure of his fledgling company or keep President John F. Kennedy from passing him over as his next ambassador to Saigon. Instead the president sent another Boston Brahmin, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Thomas Blackburn had retreated from public life in ignominy.
It all made for juicy walking-tour talk. Thomas had caught one guide at it and ran out of the house, furious not that she’d brought up the touchy subject, but that she’d gotten several of her facts wrong. “People must distinguish,” he’d told Rebecca, “between historical fact and one’s own analysis.”
Nothing annoyed Thomas Blackburn more than sloppy thinking.
Using the key he’d grudgingly given her, Rebecca entered the house through the front door. If shabby on the outside, the place was in reasonable condition on the inside, but certainly no showpiece. How like her grandfather, though, not to care about appearances. She headed straight back to the garden, one of Beacon Hill’s “hidden gardens,” and found him fussing over a tray of wilted seedlings at a bent-up black iron table and trying to blame her cat for their sad condition. “I saw that creature pawing them,” he told Rebecca.
“Oh, you did not. Sweatshirt hasn’t even been out of the house.”
Thomas scowled. Not only did he dislike her cat, but he also had no use for the name Rebecca had chosen. He refused to see the connection between a gray cat and a gray sweatshirt.
“Are they dead?” she asked.
“No thanks to your cat, no. They’re simply in a slight state of shock.”
“From being overwatered, looks like.”
Thomas made no comment, if for no other reason than he would never acknowledge that she might know more about gardening than he did. He was an intrepid gardener, but not a particularly talented or lucky one. His tiny walled garden didn’t help matters. It was little more than a brick courtyard surrounded by raised beds that he and previous generations of Blackburns had planted with shrubs, perennials and annuals. A weeping birch and red maple added beauty and shade, but made the tricky prospect of sunlight trickier still.
“Don’t you want to know why I came back early?” she asked.
“Boredom, I should think. You’ve been painting your fingernails again.”
She knew she should have gotten rid of her red nails before she’d left her studio. She thrust a copy of The Score at him.
Thomas glanced at the two photographs and grimaced, turning away from his seedlings. He looked at his only granddaughter. “Rebecca, I’m sorry.”
She was surprised. “You?”
“None of you would have gone to Saigon if it hadn’t been for me.”
By none, she wondered, did he mean not just her and Jared, but also Tam, Quang Tai, her own father, Benjamin Reed? Rebecca didn’t ask. Over the years, she’d learned not to. She wasn’t afraid of broaching the subject: she just knew it wouldn’t do any good.
“Come,” her grandfather said, “let’s have some coffee and talk.”
Talk? She wondered if he meant his version of “talk” or hers. Rebecca didn’t say a word.
He heated the morning’s leftover coffee in a pan, filled two cups with the rancid stuff, added milk from a jug and handed one to Rebecca, then returned to the garden and fell absently into one of the old Adirondack chairs he’d had outside for as long as she could remember. She sat across from him and tried the coffee. Worse than rotgut. But she didn’t complain, watching her grandfather as he studied her. She could guess what he saw: a talented, rich woman of almost thirty-four settled neither in life nor in love. But could he guess what she saw? A man of seventy-nine, lanky and white-haired, not so straight-backed as he’d once been, not so proud and cocksure. Yet he still radiated the strength of character that came with the knowledge, the terrible self-understanding, that he’d made mistakes. Awful mistakes. His arrogance had left him childless, his six grandchildren fatherless and his daughter-in-law a widow at twenty-eight, and no man should have to live with that. But he had, for twenty-six years.
His thin hair lifted in a cool breeze, and he asked, “Why did you come to me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t dissemble, Rebecca. You do know.”
She looked away. “When Sofi told me about the pictures,” she began slowly, “my first reaction was anger and embarrassment at having the past dredged up again. I didn’t even want to see a copy of The Score. But then…” She sighed, turning back to her grandfather. “I wondered if this wasn’t the opportunity for us to talk. We never have, you know. Not about Saigon in 1975, and not about the Mekong Delta in 1963.”
“Rebecca—”
“Grandfather, have you ever lied to me?”
He didn’t hesitate. “No. Except about the cat…”
“Never mind the cat. About Vietnam.”
“No, Rebecca. I never lied to you.”
She leaned forward. “But you haven’t told me everything, either, have you?”
“My mistakes and my triumphs are my own to live with, not yours. If you’re asking me do I have regrets, I’ll answer you. Yes. Yes, I have many regrets. And not only about your father and Benjamin. I’ve been to the Vietnam Memorial, and I’ve looked at those fifty-eight thousand names and thought about the men and women and children I knew in Indochina who are all dead. And I’ve asked myself what I might have done differently during my years there to prevent what came later. More arrogance on my part, perhaps. But perhaps not. The point is, I’ll never know. If I’ve learned anything in my study of history and my seventy-nine years on this planet, it’s that we have no power to change what’s past.”
Rebecca didn’t listen easily to his words. “What about the future?”
He pulled his thin lips together. “I don’t have a crystal ball. I’ve often wished I did. We can only do our best and carry on.”
“That’s it, then?”
“There’s nothing I can tell you that will change anything.”
“Grandfather,” Rebecca said, controlling her impatience, “I’m tired of ‘carrying on’ without all the facts. That my picture can still make the front page of a supermarket tabloid just reminds me that 1963 and 1975 aren’t going away. They’re going to keep haunting us—me. And I have a right to know the whole truth.”
“Study your history,” Thomas Blackburn said stonily. “You’ll discover that no one ever knows the ‘whole’ truth.”
She swallowed hard and gritted her teeth, but suspected he could tell how angry and frustrated she was. “What do you want me to do, pretend my picture’s not plastered across millions of newspapers?”
“No, Rebecca,” he said, climbing to his feet. “Never pretend nothing’s never happened.”
Without another word, he turned back to his wilted seedlings, and Rebecca sighed to herself, wondering why she’d sought out her grandfather for advice and information, why she’d thought anything had changed. She had hoped the tabloid publicity and the simple fact that she was an adult—not the eight-year-old who’d lost her father or the twenty-year-old who’d lost her first lover—would prompt him to talk to her. There were so many gaps in her understanding of his years in Indochina, his ill-fated company, the scandal that had brought him down and changed her own life forever.
But she should have known better. Over the years, she had come to learn that if Thomas Blackburn only dealt in the truth, it was handed out precious little at a time.
Seven
Mai Sloan rode beside her father with her arms crossed as they drove over the Golden Gate Bridge and up into the hills of Marin County, where her grandfather lived. She hadn’t spoken since they’d left the house. She had refused to pack, so Jared had thrown things haphazardly into a big canvas satchel and said if she ran out of socks or didn’t have clothes that matched, tough. She’d yelled he wasn’t being fair, and he’d said too bad, life wasn’t fair and she might as well learn that now. Usually he made an effort to explain why he’d made a particular decision, but not this time. He’d just told her to get her things together, she was spending a few days with her grandfather. Nothing she’d said—not even when she’d called him a dictator—softened that lock-jawed look of his.
She continued to sulk as they cleared the state-of-the-art security system at Wesley Sloan’s very private home in Tiberon, overlooking San Francisco Bay. Ordinarily Mai would have jumped at the chance to spend a few days there. Granddad had everything. But her father had pulled her from school and refused to tell her what was going on—refused to discuss the white-haired man with the scarred face he’d run off with a gun she hadn’t even known he owned. Was the stranger some nut out to kidnap a Winston-Sloan? Was he connected with the motorcycle gang? What? Jared wouldn’t say. He only instructed her not to leave her grandfather’s property, even to go to school.
“Quit pouting, Mai,” he said unsympathetically as they headed up Wesley Sloan’s driveway. “Some things you just have to swallow.”
“I have to swallow more than most!”
“Not true. You’re one lucky kid.”
“Oh, I know,” she snapped back. “I could be begging in the streets of Ho Chi Minh City like hundreds of other Amerasians left behind in Vietnam. Compared to them I don’t have a thing to complain about. I should always smile and take whatever anyone dishes out, especially my own father, since so many of us don’t have fathers.”
Jared sighed. “You have the right to complain about whatever you want to complain about. Your pain is yours. Just don’t expect me to indulge self-pity. And you’re the one who insists on measuring your life against that of the Amerasians who didn’t get out of Vietnam. You can have empathy for their plight without feeling guilty because you’re here and they’re not.”
She stared out the window, refusing to look at her father. She had been reading books and renting videotapes about the Vietnam War and the country of her birth, even trying to learn some Vietnamese. Her father told her it was normal to be confused at fourteen, urged her to concentrate just on being herself. But who was that? Sometimes she didn’t know. And sometimes she hated herself for not being satisfied when so many other Amerasians suffered prejudice, cruelty and extreme poverty. They had never slept in a decent bed or felt the safety and security she took for granted. Sometimes she hated herself for not being more satisfied. She was so lucky. Why did she want more?
“Are you even going to tell me where you’re going?” she asked.
Jared hesitated, not knowing what to say to his daughter. He hadn’t since The Score had come out and she’d seen the picture of Rebecca, him and herself as an infant. Then the man who had shot him and left him for dead in Saigon had shown up on his doorstep, and that changed everything. Initially Jared hadn’t recognized the scarred face, but then he saw the shock of white hair and the deadness of his soft brown eyes. And he’d remembered. Screams, pain, grief, his own paralyzing fear on that hot, tragic and violent night fourteen years ago in Saigon, when he’d lost Tam…and Rebecca.
He wasn’t going to lose Mai.
Finally, he told her, “I’m going to Boston.”
She whipped around. “Boston! But Dad—”
“Not a word, Mai. You’re not coming with me. Be glad I’ve told you anything at all.”
He could see her restraining herself from the fit she might have thrown a year ago, but she was maturing. She pulled in her lower lip and turned back to the window. She had wanted to go to Boston for years. It was the city where the Winstons had lived for generations, and where her father had grown up. And it was where he had taken her, so briefly, after their escape from Saigon. Jared tried to understand. She felt a part of her was in Boston where her father had grown up, and in Saigon, where her mother had lived and Mai herself had been born. But these were places she couldn’t get to on her own. And Jared refused to take her.
“Are you going to see Rebecca Blackburn?” she asked.
Not if he could help it. Or, he was positive, if she could. The hardest he’d laughed in years was when he saw the 60 Minutes piece on Junk Mind and found out Rebecca Blackburn was rolling in money. Served her right, reverse snob she’d always been. But he hated how much he’d hurt her, and seeing her again would only dredge up all that old pain.
He told his daughter, “I doubt it.”
He had never told Mai about Rebecca’s role in getting them both out of Saigon, nor about the famous photograph of them. She had cursed and screamed at him when he’d showed it to her in The Score, and he hadn’t resented her anger. He’d have been angry, too. Rebecca, he’d explained inadequately, had been a friend.
“Then who are you going to see?” his daughter asked.
“Mai—cut me some slack, all right? We’ll talk another time. I promise. But not right now.”
“I just…”
“I know, kid.”
He parked in front of his father’s house and gathered her into his arms, wanting to hold her forever, knowing he couldn’t. “You mean everything to me, Mai,” he said. “I’m not doing this to hurt you.”
“I trust you, Dad. You know that.”
“Good. Then sit tight and let Granddad spoil you for a few days. I’ll call you. And I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
She tried to smile. “Okay.”
“Now go on.”
“Aren’t you coming in?”
He shook his head. If Mai couldn’t wrangle an explanation out of him, Wesley Sloan just might. His daughter seemed to understand his reluctance, and she hugged him, made him promise again to call, grabbed her satchel and jumped out of the car. He watched her until she turned back at the front door and waved goodbye. He waved back, until finally she disappeared inside.
He headed out of the quiet hills of Tiberon back down to the Golden Gate Bridge and up to Russian Hill, where his house was quiet and lonely without Mai. With grim efficiency, he cleaned and loaded the gun he’d often prayed he’d never have to use. And he sat in his front room, with its fantastic view of San Francisco Bay, and watched the fog swirl in, half wishing the white-haired man would come back. If Mai hadn’t been there, Jared didn’t know what he’d have done, but he’d lived the last fourteen years so that 1975 didn’t have to be her pain, as well.
He clenched his teeth. “It’s not going to be.”
But it already was, he realized, and pushed the heavy thought aside.
The next available flight to Boston left at 8:37 a.m.
He’d be on it.
Eight
Rebecca decided not to return to her studio after her conversation with her grandfather, and retreated to her room on the third floor, overlooking pretty tree-lined West Cedar Street. She had thought she’d never see the day she became one of Thomas Blackburn’s boarders. He’d started taking them in years ago, foreign students mostly. He charged them modest rents in exchange for a furnished room, a shared bath, and parlor and kitchen privileges, and he encouraged them to invite him to dinner when they were cooking something interesting and to discuss politics whenever they pleased. His current crop of boarders included a Nigerian doctoral candidate in economics, a Greek medical student, two Chinese physics students and Rebecca, who could have afforded to renovate the Beacon Hill house with its ancient plumbing and tattered drapes and upholstery and put them all up in decent apartments. But her grandfather and the boarders had their pride, and she didn’t see any need to spend money renting a proper apartment in the city with among the nation’s highest rents when she could stay with family, until she figured out if Boston was where she wanted to be.
The silver light of late afternoon angled through the paned window, and Rebecca pulled up an antique Windsor chair, in need of repair, and stared down at the street. Her grandfather had put her in her old bedroom, with the twin bed she’d had as a child, the marble-topped dresser with its puppy-chewed leg, the worn Persian carpet Eliza Blackburn supposedly had had shipped from Canton in 1798. Thomas had insisted upon the valuable carpet remaining in the upstairs bedroom, where it always had been; Eliza, he’d said, had been a practical woman and had intended her furnishings be used. Rebecca had quoted his words back to him when she’d spilled tempera paint on the carpet. She could still see the faded red and yellow stains. Her own furniture and things were either in storage or up at the old lighthouse she’d bought on an island off the coast of Maine. When the rest of the small, uninhabited island had gone up for sale, she’d bought it, too. She liked owning land, knowing she had places she could go pitch a tent.
She felt unsettled and raw. Looking at the quiet street, she could see herself at seven leaning out the window and nailing twelve-year-old Jared with her squirt gun for harassing her. “You’ll fall, you idiot,” he’d yelled, and she’d laughed and got him again.
She heard the telephone ringing downstairs. Then there was a quiet knock on the door. “Rebecca?” It was Athena, the Greek medical student; she and her landlord would blithely discuss the gruesome details of her anatomy class over the dinner table. “The telephone’s for you.”
Rebecca thanked her and headed down to the kitchen, where Athena was preparing a huge dish of spanikopita and studying pictures of carved corpses. She seemed quite happy with the outdated stove, the unstylish double-width white porcelain sink, the decades-old refrigerator, the shortage of cabinet space. The round oak table that had always been too big for the small kitchen still occupied its spot in front of the window overlooking the garden. As a little boy, Rebecca’s father had carved his name in the table, in the careful, awkward letters of a preschooler. Rebecca had watched her grandfather brush his fingertips across his only child’s efforts, just minutes before they were to bury Stephen Blackburn.
She grabbed the telephone.
“Rebecca,” Jenny Blackburn said, somewhat breathlessly, “why didn’t you warn me? I was buying groceries when I saw your picture. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Mother,” Rebecca replied, thinking about central Florida in late May, the smells, the flowers; it would be getting hot. But her mother wouldn’t notice. A handsome woman in her midfifties, with pale blue eyes and white-streaked dark hair, she had always loved the heat. Sinking into a chair, Rebecca added, “And I had no idea The Score was reprinting that picture or I’d have warned you. Have any reporters been bugging you?”
“A couple of local ones—young. I let them come over and look around the groves, and I answered their questions about what I’ve been doing for the past twenty-six years, which is raising children and citrus. I’ve found it’s easier to bore them than to tell them to go to hell.” She inhaled, then said, “Rebecca, I wish you’d just come home.”
She almost told her mother she had, but thought better of it. Maybe Florida, not Boston, was her home. Jennifer O’Keefe Blackburn made no secret of her disapproval of her only daughter and oldest child’s work and living habits, but she took a laissez-faire approach. “You’re an adult, Rebecca,” she would say, “and capable of making your own decisions.”
Ian O’Keefe—Rebecca’s maternal grandfather—had no such inhibitions. He’d kept his mouth shut thirty-six years ago when his one daughter had married a Boston Yankee, but no more. He didn’t approve of the way Rebecca just didn’t do things the way they were supposed to be done. In February when she’d visited him and her mother, he showed her his address book and pointed out how she’d messed up his B section with all her moving. True to his own convictions, he’d neatly printed each of her new addresses in ink. They were all there, from her first dormitory at Boston University to West Cedar Street. His ink was born of a stubborn adherence to his own ideas about what was right, but he never gave up on her. He’d run out of space under B two moves ago and had had to move into the C section. Rebecca’s five younger brothers had more or less given up trying to keep track of her; when they wanted to reach her, they just called Papa.
“I mean it,” her mother went on, and Rebecca could hear the rising tension in her voice. “You know I hate to interfere in my kids’ lives, but you’ve got no business being in Boston.”
Oh, so that was it, Rebecca thought. The pictures in The Score were her mother’s excuse for letting her daughter know how she felt about her being back on West Cedar Street. As if Rebecca couldn’t have guessed. She said patiently, “My being in Boston didn’t cause this thing in The Score. It was just a fluke—Jared being a hothead. It had nothing to do with me.”
“I hate Boston,” Jenny said.
“I realize that, Mom.”
“It’s that Blackburn pride of yours, isn’t it? You just had to go back. You can’t leave well enough alone. You always have to keep pushing and pushing.”
Rebecca resisted the urge to defend herself, knowing it would only fuel her mother’s frustration—and her worry. Boston hadn’t been an altogether lucky place for Jennifer Blackburn or her daughter.
“What do you hope to accomplish?” her mother asked wearily.
“Maybe,” Rebecca said, “I just think Grandfather shouldn’t have to die a lonely old man.”
It was a moment before Jennifer O’Keefe Blackburn said, “He deserves to,” and slammed down the phone.
Nine
Rebecca Blackburn received the news of her father’s death on a gray winter afternoon in early 1963. She was eight years old. It was Jared Sloan who came to her third-grade class at the private elementary school in Boston’s Back Bay to walk her and two of her younger brothers home. A car had already come for Quentin Reed, in the fifth grade.
“There’s a family emergency,” was all Jared would say.
Just thirteen himself, he took hold of Nate, seven, and five-year-old Taylor and let Rebecca trot along beside him. He had volunteered to collect them and, too distraught to think clearly, his mother, his Aunt Annette and Jennifer Blackburn had let him. Jared was familiar; he wouldn’t scare the Blackburns’ school-aged children.
Rebecca felt her face freezing in the stiff sea breeze. “Where’s Mother?”
“She had to stay with the little ones.”
There were three more brothers at home: Stephen, four, and Mark and Jacob, the two-year-old twins. Once, Rebecca had heard her paternal grandfather fussing to her father about having so many children. “People will think we’re running an orphanage here,” Grandfather had said. Her father, who, like Rebecca, never took Thomas’s grumblings seriously, had asked him since when did a Blackburn care what people thought? Thomas had strong opinions about everything, but Rebecca knew he loved her and her brothers. She remembered when he’d told them the best things came in sixes. When he was home, he liked to take her and her brothers to museums and old Boston cemeteries and let them throw rocks in the Charles River.
Not satisfied, Rebecca asked Jared, “Did something happen to Fred?” Fred was one of their cats. They had four. Grandfather complained about them, too; he said West Cedar Street wasn’t a barnyard.
Jared paled. “No, R.J., Fred’s fine.”
“Good.”
Her mother met them at the door of the Eliza Blackburn house on Beacon Hill. Away in Indochina so much, Thomas had insisted his son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren live there. Right away Rebecca knew something terrible had happened. Her mother’s face was very white and tear-streaked, and she jumped off the steps and gathered her and Nate and Taylor into her arms, choking back sobs. Rebecca tried to cling to Jared. She wished he’d take her down to Charles Street for hot cocoa or ice-skating on the Common, anywhere so long as she didn’t have to hear what her mother had to tell her.
But Jenny Blackburn, trying vainly to smile, thanked Jared and told him his mother was waiting for him at his aunt’s house on Mt. Vernon Street.
“Will you be all right going alone?” she asked him. After all, he had lost an uncle, and, in Stephen Blackburn, a man who had been like an uncle to him.
“You don’t have to worry about me, Mrs. Blackburn.”
Alone with her six children, Jenny told them their father had been killed in the war in South Vietnam, where he and their grandfather had gone to help bring peace. She got out Thomas’s musty globe and pointed to the country so far from Boston. Their father, she explained carefully, had gone with Benjamin Reed to a place called the Mekong Delta, and a group called Vietcong guerrillas had attacked them. Rebecca thought she meant gorillas.
“No,” her mother said, “they’re just people.”
But why would people kill her father? Rebecca kept the image of gorillas. “What about Grandfather?” she asked, still numb with shock. “Was he killed, too?”
Jenny shook her head, and her voice cracked when she replied, “Your Grandfather Blackburn always manages to survive.”
Jennifer O’Keefe and Stephen Blackburn had met in Cambridge, when she was a scholarship student at Radcliffe and he, at his father’s insistence, was pouring more of Eliza Blackburn’s dwindling fortune into another Harvard education for one of her descendants. Stephen was the Boston Brahmin with the impeccable pedigree. Jenny was the lively, straight-talking Southerner who planned to get her education and go home to teach college. When Stephen had shown her Eliza’s headstone in the Old Granary Burying Ground off Boston Common, she’d remarked that her ancestors had been horse thieves and scoundrels.
She hadn’t expected to fall in love with a New England Yankee, but she did, anyway.
And that was all right. Stephen was a kind, funny man—gentle, intelligent, sensual. He possessed none of his father’s sometimes irritating natural incisiveness about people. In true Blackburn fashion, they were both historians, but Thomas had an uncanny knack for zeroing in on a person’s weaknesses and less-than-generous motivations. It could make him difficult to be around.
“He’s a sharp judge of character,” Stephen would say.
Jenny believed him.
She and Stephen were married in historic Old South Church at Copley Square on a warm spring day in 1954, not long after the Vietminh routing of the French at Dien Bien Phu. Stephen had laughingly warned his bride that her new father-in-law would mark events that way. Nothing occurs in a vacuum, Thomas Blackburn was fond of saying. Jenny considered him a harmless eccentric, one of those brainy East Coast types in tweeds and holey boxer shorts. Since his wife’s death in 1933, Thomas had spent as much time in Southeast Asia as he could, and more and more as his son grew up. Stephen worried about his father meddling in that dangerous part of the world. Jenny did not. She had grown up among the lakes and citrus groves of central Florida and knew a survivor when she saw one.
In late 1959, with his fourth grandchild on the way, Thomas had surprised virtually everyone who knew him when he started his own consulting firm, specializing in providing government agencies and private businesses with analysis on the political, social and economic systems of Indochina. If not amiable, Thomas Blackburn did possess intimate knowledge of the region and envisioned his company as a means of working with the people of Southeast Asia and understanding their aspirations.
Within two years, he was able to invite his son to join his firm. With Jenny’s mixed blessings, Stephen accepted.
Two years later, her husband was dead.
Thomas Blackburn escorted his son’s body and that of Benjamin Reed back home to Boston. Three months before, Benjamin had hired Blackburn Associates for advice and information on establishing his new construction firm in South Vietnam. He’d started Winston & Reed with his wife’s money and meant to make a success of it, and he thought the Blackburns could help. Halfway between Thomas and Stephen in age, he had been friends with both men.
The inquiry into the ambush cleared Thomas of specific wrongdoing. He’d planned the excursion into the Mekong Delta and had rushed Stephen and Benjamin into executing it, but he couldn’t have known the Vietcong would attack.
Or could he have?
There was rampant speculation that Thomas, in his zeal for information, had originally arranged a meeting with a group of Vietcong the day of the ambush. He canceled out—chickened out, some said—at the last minute and allowed the excursion to go on without him, apparently hoping nothing would happen if he didn’t show up. Instead the Vietcong attacked, and three people were killed. Thomas had believed his position would compel the Vietcong guerrillas to leave him and his people alone.
Everyone from his daughter-in-law to a host of American military advisors and President Kennedy himself expected Thomas to defend himself against charges that he’d been arrogant or just plain naive.
He didn’t.
“I accept,” he told Jenny, Annette, colleagues, clients, politicians, military men and reporters, “full responsibility for what happened.”
They let him.
He went back to Indochina only briefly after burying his son. His company quickly went bankrupt, and President Kennedy decided against what would have been the bold move of naming Thomas Blackburn his new ambassador to Saigon. Showing no outward sign that any of this was more than he expected or felt he deserved, Thomas continued to refuse to answer the speculative charges against him, but simply retired to his house on Beacon Hill, taking up gardening and indulging his passion for rare books.
By summer, Jenny had recovered enough from the shock of losing her husband to realize she couldn’t continue to live in her father-in-law’s house. She would bump into Annette Winston Reed, also made a widow that terrible day, on the streets and have nothing to say. She could see her own children becoming ostracized, confused because the Blackburn name no longer had the same resonance it once had had. And there was no money. She had six small children and a father-in-law who’d become a pariah, and Eliza’s late-eighteenth-century fortune would stretch only so far.
But more than anything else, there was Thomas himself. Jenny could no longer face him every morning over coffee, listen to him scratch in his garden instead of doing something. Looking for a job. Fighting back. Starting over. Anything.
Finally, she knew she had to make a life for herself and her children away from Boston. She called her father. Of course, he told her, she could come home; he had always hoped she would.
She rented a truck and hired a couple of high school boys from South Boston to help her load it with the few things she and Stephen had accumulated during their nine years together. Her father would arrive later that morning and drive it to Florida, with Rebecca and Nate up front with him. Jenny would take the other children in the car.
Thomas watched stonily from the sidewalk. When Jenny had announced she was moving back “home,” he’d refused to take her seriously. Yet there was the truck blocking the narrow street and the children pouring out to holler and run about in its empty cargo space. He was forced to admit the inevitable.
“You’re running away,” he told his daughter-in-law.
“So what if I am?” She had decided not to let him put her on the defensive. “At least now the children will have air.”
“Air? There’s plenty of air in Boston. Take them up on the roof and let them breathe all the air they want. And what’s the matter with the Esplanade? The children can ride their bikes on the riverbank whenever they want. I’ll take them myself. And there are parks all over the city—too many, can’t afford the upkeep.”
Jenny knew he was baiting her, if relatively harmlessly. “You believe children should play in the streets?”
“Why not? I did.”
Pity you weren’t run over, she thought. But then she’d never have had Stephen, or their children. And she hated herself for hating him; it was perhaps the best reason for leaving.
“What do you think you’ll find in Florida besides alligators and poisonous snakes?”
“Alligators and poisonous snakes,” she snapped back, “are better than a lot of what you’d find on Beacon Hill.”
He smiled faintly. “Touché, my dear.”
She sighed. “It’s too late to argue, Thomas. I’m going.”
“I know.” He touched her arm. “I wish things could be different. I hope you know that.”
“I don’t, Thomas. I only know that my husband’s dead and you’re willing to take responsibility for his death when no one asked you to. Now people are saying you were a communist collaborator, you’re naive, you were duped, you were arrogant. If you’d considered me and the children, maybe you’d defend yourself.”
“To what end?”
She jerked her arm away, scoffing. “It was difficult enough being a Blackburn before this tragedy. Can you imagine what it’s going to be like now? Think of your grandchildren, Thomas. Think what it’s going to be like growing up knowing their grandfather’s accepted full responsibility for the deaths of three people, including their own father. Even leaving Boston isn’t going to make that any easier to deal with.”
Thomas pulled in his lips a moment, then sighed. “You’re right, of course.”
“But that doesn’t change anything, does it?”
“I’m afraid it doesn’t.”
“The Blackburn pride,” she said bitterly, and turned away so that he wouldn’t see her cry.
Without a word, Thomas went back inside. He didn’t come out when Ian O’Keefe arrived and helped Jenny finish packing, and finally she found him in his garden, pinching off wilted daylily blossoms.
“You’ll come visit, won’t you?” she asked.
He turned to her. “Not,” he said, “if what you want to do is forget.”
“It isn’t.”
“Then perhaps I’ll come. Invite me.”
But she never did.
Ten
By noon the day after her picture had appeared on newsstands all over the country, Rebecca gave up all hope of getting any work done. Not that she’d tried that hard. There wasn’t a whole lot to do if she wasn’t going to get out there and take on new assignments. She’d thrown out her red nail polish, used up a dozen cotton balls and ten minutes getting it off her nails, and had done a few bad sketches of the replica of the Boston Tea Party ship just up the road at the Congress Street Bridge.
And answered the telephone.
It was ringing when she’d unlocked her door at eight-thirty and continued to ring most of the morning. She turned down interviews with two Boston newspapers and a regional magazine, but agreed to answer a few questions by a journalism student at Boston University who wanted to know about one of her school’s famous almost-alumni. There were three calls from businesses in metropolitan Boston who offered her assignments; she took their names and numbers and said she’d get back to them. Maybe. The president of a New York advertising firm called to talk to her about becoming his art director. He said he knew her work and had thought about tracking her down for several years, but when he saw The Score at the train station on his way home last night, he decided he had to call. Rebecca listened to his pitch and realized why he had gone in to advertising. She was tempted, told him so, and took his name and number.
An old boyfriend from Chicago called and said he had to be in town on business next weekend, how ’bout dinner? She told him no, but thanks. After seeing Jared Sloan’s picture the last thing she wanted to think about was men.
Half a dozen nonprofit organizations called with very polite, understated requests for money. Two she recognized as reputable and promised them checks, two she hadn’t heard of and asked them to send her more information and two she thought sounded made up and told them to forget it.
And that was enough phone calls for one morning. She put on her message machine and headed over to Museum Wharf, where she stopped for lunch at the Milk Bottle, shaped like its name and located in the middle of the brick plaza in front of the Boston Children’s Museum. She took her hummus salad to a stone bench to watch the crowd, mostly kids, tourists and young, white-collar types looking for a quick meal they could eat outside. It was a gorgeous day.
When Rebecca got up to pepper her hummus, about twenty preschoolers gathered around her bench for a carefully supervised picnic. She remembered taking her youngest brothers on picnics down by the pond at home in central Florida, teaching them about snakes and showing them how to catch frogs and lizards. In her room at night, she would describe all their activities in detailed letters to her grandfather in Boston.
She had hated Florida at first. The oppressive summer heat, the big, strange rooms of Papa O’Keefe’s twenties-style house, the pond in the backyard, the endless citrus groves, the lack of neighbors, the spiders and snakes. It was all so different from Beacon Hill. But her mother had promised her she would come to love the place, and she had, in her own way. That didn’t stop her from wondering what her life might have been like if they’d been able to stay in Boston. Would she have turned out to be another in a long series of impoverished, holier-than-thou Boston Blackburns? At least, she thought, their “wilderness exile,” as Thomas Blackburn called it, had spared her that.
After she took a few more bites of her salad, Rebecca tossed the leftovers and started back toward Congress Street. She’d return to her studio and take on all the assignments she could, maybe think about the advertising job in New York. She needed to work.
A man’s face came at her from the throng crossing the Congress Street Bridge, past the replica of the Boston Tea Party ship, and she stopped cold.
“My God,” she heard herself whisper.
The face was even more battered now and older—so old—but there was still the slight limp, and the tough, sinewy body.
Together, they became the Frenchman from Saigon.
Or his ghost. Hanging back on Museum Wharf, Rebecca waited to see if she wasn’t hallucinating from the pressures of being back in Boston and having her picture in The Score force her to relive the hell of April 1975.
She wasn’t hallucinating.
Rebecca’s heart pounded; this was no coincidence. He had to be on Congress Street because of her. He had spotted her picture in The Score, looked up her studio’s address in the Boston Yellow Pages and here he was.
The crowd thinned out once she’d passed Museum Wharf. Rebecca could easily make out the limping figure in worn, loose-fitting jeans and a faded, short-sleeved black shirt. With his scarred face and snowy hair, he’d never be able to melt into a crowd.
Concentrating on keeping her breathing normal so she wouldn’t do something stupid like faint, Rebecca walked down Congress Street after him. Seeing him was a shock; there was no question of that. Her heart deserved to pound. But she didn’t have any idea whether she should be afraid of him or not.
I suppose you’ll find out if you keep following him….
There were enough people in her building and around outside that she wasn’t too worried he’d try anything. And she wasn’t fool enough to follow him all the way up to her isolated studio. If he went up there, he could ransack the place to his heart’s content.
He wasn’t going to kill her, she told herself. He’d had the chance fourteen years ago and hadn’t.
Of course, by now he might have realized his mistake.
With a quick glance up to check the number, the Frenchman entered her building. Rebecca clenched both her hands into tight, nervous fists and made herself tiptoe up behind him in what passed for a lobby. He had already pressed the up button on the old service elevator.
Before she could say a word, he turned expectantly to her. “I thought that must be you following me.”
His accent was only vaguely French, his voice—its timbre, its intensity—exactly as Rebecca remembered from Saigon, his eyes exactly as soft and brown and strangely vulnerable. He took her in with a sweeping glance, and Rebecca knew he wasn’t seeing a terrified twenty-year-old kid who expected to have her head blown off in the next few seconds. If she hadn’t put the past behind her, she had at least gone on with her life.
She tried not to stare at his ravaged face as she searched for a response. But what was there to say? In 1975, he and his Vietnamese cohort, a tough, brutal man, had murdered Tam and left Jared Sloan dying. Rebecca hadn’t forgotten that night and, she was quite certain, neither had the Frenchman.
He seemed to sense her discomfort and smiled, a surprisingly gentle, tortured smile. “I saw your picture in the paper,” he told her quietly. “I didn’t know until then you’d gotten out of Saigon safely.”
“‘Safely’ might be exaggerating,” she said, the words not coming easily from her dry mouth and tension-choked throat. “But we got out. I’d like to know who you are.”
“I could tell you a name.” He shrugged, and she saw that he was very tanned, his muscles stringy and tough, reminding her of one of Papa O’Keefe’s invincible old roosters. “Would a name change anything?”
“If you just made one up, no. But you could tell me where you came from, why you were there that night in Saigon, why you’re here now.”
“It’s better you ask no questions, Rebecca Blackburn.” Her name rolled off his tongue, as if he’d spoken it many times. Rebecca had to stop herself from shuddering. But he noticed, and said, “Perhaps I shouldn’t have come.”
“Why did you?”
The elevator creaked and groaned as it started its descent. She would run back out into the street before she got in there with him.
If he let her.
She shook off the thought.
“The past,” he said, “sometimes must collide with the present.”
The elevator dinged and the doors opened, but the Frenchman didn’t go in; instead he started back toward the building’s entrance. Suddenly Rebecca didn’t want him to leave. She wanted him to stay and talk to her, but then she remembered the assault rifle he’d used so efficiently that night in Saigon, remembered Tam lying dead in a hot, sticky pool of her own blood. Remembered her own terror and grief and horror. And Jared. Bleeding and in shock, but not dead. Rebecca still didn’t know what she’d have done if both Jared and Tam had died.
Asking the Frenchman to stick around and chat didn’t make sense, no matter how much she wanted answers.
He looked back at her with those warm, strange eyes. “I’m sorry if I’ve frightened you,” he said. “That wasn’t my intention. I was your father’s friend,” he said, “and I believe—I know he would have been proud of you.”
Then he disappeared, Rebecca too stunned by his words to follow him and demand to know what he meant. How could one of the two-man team that had murdered Tam in 1975 have known her father in 1963?
By the time she recovered enough to run back out to the street, the Frenchman had disappeared.
Her legs felt as if they were going to collapse under her, and she stumbled into the elevator, blindly pressing the button for the fourth floor. But her knees began to shake, and then her hands, and by the time she was inside her studio, fumbling into the credenza drawer, her entire body was shaking.
She found the handcrafted silver box her father had brought back from Saigon for her seventh birthday.
Inside was a deep ruby-red velvet bag. Rebecca poured out the contents onto her drawing board.
Ten beautiful colored stones ranging in color from white to near-black glittered up at her.
Rebecca shut her eyes.
Who was she kidding?
She had never really believed the colored stones she’d unwittingly smuggled out of Saigon were an ordinary souvenir. She assumed they’d been Tam’s and that she’d been trying to get them out of the country, a nice nest egg with which to start her new life. Maybe Tam had been killed because of them; maybe not. Whatever the case, Tam was dead and her daughter was living a quiet life with Jared in San Francisco, and Rebecca had gotten used to pretending the stones didn’t exist. It was easier that way: She didn’t have to risk disturbing Jared and Mai’s life with unpleasant questions, nor they hers.
But how had Tam gotten hold of these things?
Fourteen years ago Rebecca had been a scholarship student who didn’t know a thing about gems. But she’d made some money since then, and she’d been around—she’d even bought a few gems of her own.
Tam’s red velvet bag wasn’t filled with just pretty colored stones. Rebecca suspected they were corundum: nine sapphires and one ruby.
She also suspected they were valuable.
She sighed and brushed her fingertips across their sparkling surfaces. So cool, so beautiful. Not worth dying or killing over, in her opinion.
Sliding them back into their bag, Rebecca got on the phone to Sofi. “Don’t you have a friend of a friend or something who’s a gemologist?”
“David Rubin.”
“I need to talk to him,” Rebecca said. “Your place in an hour?”
“Want me to bring the moon while I’m at it?”
“No. If I’m right, we won’t need it.”
Jean-Paul arrived on Mt. Vernon Street less than an hour after he’d left Rebecca Blackburn. He wished he was a better planner, but, as always, he’d acted on instinct and impulse—on feeling rather than cold analysis. He had seen The Score and gone to San Francisco, and then to Boston. First to Rebecca, for no other reason than to see her. Then here, to the Winston house on Beacon Hill—because he had to.
“It’s like a mausoleum,” Annette had told him many years ago. “I hate it. My husband does, too. He’d move in a minute.”
“Then why don’t you?”
She’d laughed. “Because I’m a Winston. If I’d had a brother, he’d be stuck with the place. I loathe primogeniture, but in this case it’d be a blessing.”
It was, of course, a magnificent house, not a mausoleum or anything Annette Winston Reed had ever remotely considered giving up. Jean-Paul went through the unlocked carriageway gate to the back as Annette had instructed him. He had called her office at Winston & Reed and had spoken to her secretary, who’d told him her boss wasn’t in the office today. Jean-Paul had urged her to get hold of Annette at once and left the number of his pay phone.
Annette had called him back right away. The only hint of the mind-numbing shock he’d just given her was a slight hoarseness in her voice.
So she actually thought I was dead.
The thought amused him.
She’d understood they would have to meet in person—if only to convince herself the call wasn’t a nightmare. Reluctantly, but ever the stiff-upper-lip Bostonian, she gave him directions to her house.
Jean-Paul entered the beautiful house in the back, then moved silently through the antiseptic kitchen and down a short hall, where dozens of expensively framed photographs hung on the wall. The people in them were all the same—smiling, rich, perfect. The men were without scars and the women without fear, and Jean-Paul had to make his arms go rigid to keep from knocking the photographs off the wall. The pain was there, the anger, the burning hate. Nearly four years in the Légion étrangère and five years at the mercy of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese in a prisoner-of-war camp had taught him how to control his emotions, but he could feel them exploding to the surface.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/raznoe-17258277/betrayals/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.