Betrayals (2017 Reissue)

by Carla Neggers

  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.

  CHAPTER 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.

  CHAPTER 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 t
hem 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.

  CHAPTER 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 a
rms, 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.