“Not yet. He’s usually an early riser. He’s probably upstairs plotting ways to get me out of here so you two can pretend I don’t exist.”
“Still not one to sit on your emotions, are you?”
For that, she didn’t warn him before he tried Athena’s coffee, which was strong enough to peel paint. All he did was make a slight grimace. That proper Winston-Sloan blood of his had kicked in, she supposed.
He went on, “It wasn’t my idea to throw you out last night.”
“I didn’t notice you asking me to stick around.”
“God forbid I should come between you and your grandfather.”
Rebecca gave him a skeptical look. “Yeah, right.”
“Okay, I admit I was hoping you were thumbing your nose at my cousin and aunt and anyone else who thought the Blackburns would never amount to anything again and were living in the fanciest, most expensive condo you could find. I admit I didn’t want to have this conversation. But you’re making a mistake if you think Thomas has told me anything he hasn’t told you. If it makes you feel any better, he wants me to head back to San Francisco.”
“Sounds good to me.” Rebecca knew she was being petty and immature but couldn’t stop herself. The old hurt had gotten the better of her. “When’re you leaving?”
“I’m not.”
“Why not?”
Jared leaned over the table, and Rebecca saw that his teal eyes were as clear and luminous as she remembered in all her dreams of the first time she and Jared had made love. “You’ve seen our guy from Saigon, haven’t you? He’s in Boston.”
“Did Grandfather tell you that?”
“No. He’s no more going to blab your ‘affairs’ to me than he is mine to you. But it’s a fair guess from his reaction to me—and yours.”
Rebecca sipped her coffee, the mug poised in front of her in both hands. Her fingers weren’t trembling; she hadn’t gulped the coffee. As far as Jared Sloan could see, she was just fine. But she wasn’t. A time and a man she’d thought she’d put behind her had reared up again, and she didn’t know what she was supposed to do.
“R.J., don’t hold back on me,” Jared said, not as a plea or a demand, but a simple, honest request. His gaze remained intense, difficult to ignore. “My daughter’s life could be at stake.”
Rebecca took a sharp breath. “She’s been threatened?”
“No, but this guy tried to kill her when she was just a baby. For all I know, he might try again. He was at my house in San Francisco the day before yesterday and didn’t touch her, but that doesn’t mean he won’t. She’s with my father, so she’s safe for now.” Jared set down his coffee mug, his expression hard and serious and very determined. “Nothing happens to Mai. I don’t care what I have to do.”
Rebecca was taken aback by his vehemence—by how very much he loved his daughter. And suddenly she knew, as she’d only thought she’d known before, that fourteen years ago Jared Sloan had done exactly the right thing in taking unconditional responsibility for the tiny newborn girl. Mai was his daughter. And Tam’s. He had never offered any excuses or explanations. He had simply done what he’d had to do. It had meant losing Rebecca, but as painful as that had been at the time, it was now completely irrelevant.
“You’re right,” she told him. “I did see our man.”
Jared listened grimly, without interruption as she related yesterday’s encounter, leaving out the Frenchman’s comment about having known her father—and David Rubin’s report on Tam’s bag of colored stones. Rebecca still needed time to process both developments before she could determine if they were any of Jared Sloan’s business or if it were even her place to tell him. The stones might not have had anything to do with his relationship with Tam, and her violent death and Mai’s illegitimacy were already enough for Jared and Mai to deal with without Rebecca throwing a fortune in smuggled gems into their faces. But that had been her judgment in 1975, as it was now.
“I don’t know what he’s after,” she said finally. “What about you? Did he say anything—”
“No. I didn’t exactly give him a chance. Mai was there. I just got rid of him and came out here.”
“To see my grandfather.”
Jared didn’t comment.
“Why Grandfather?” Rebecca persisted. “He wasn’t in Saigon in 1975. He hasn’t been there since my father was killed. Look, Jared—”
“R.J., I’m not going to start a war between you and your grandfather.”
“A polite way of saying you’re not going to tell me a thing. Well, fine—don’t.” She set her mug down hard and swept to her feet. “I’ve got enough to do without beating my head against a wall trying to make you play fair. If you’ll excuse me, I have a business to run.”
As she came around the table he caught her by the arm—not hard, not long. But she drew back as if he’d given her an electric shock. His touch called up images of hot nights of lovemaking, reminded her of how much losing him had hurt, of how damned much she’d loved him. And warned her he was as sexy as ever. She could want him again. It wouldn’t take much.
If she were going to be stupid.
“Stay out of this, R.J.,” he said quietly, his voice even deeper, raspier than she remembered. She saw that touching her had an impact on him, as well. There’d never been any doubt in her mind he’d had a grand time for himself making love to her, no matter what had happened between him and Tam.
Rebecca narrowed her eyes at him. “I’m not a kid, Jared. I won’t let you order me around anymore.”
Jared looked surprised. “I never did order you around.”
“Ha! You’ve been telling me what to do since I was two years old.”
“Not a chance. R.J., you were the bossiest kid on Beacon Hill. I never managed to get you to do one thing you didn’t want to do. And, in case you’ve forgotten, we didn’t see each other during the ten years after you moved from Boston to Florida, or the fourteen since you left me to rot in that hospital in Manila. You’ve been free of me about two-thirds of your life.” He held back a smile, his eyes giving off that pirate’s gleam that used to make her groan just with wanting him. “Hey, we’re practically strangers.”
“A stranger isn’t someone who knows—not just guesses, but knows—you were the one who lit the fire on Boston Common that time.”
Jared grinned at their shared childhood memory. “It wasn’t much of a fire, just a few twigs and leaves.”
“You and Quentin and Nate were playing Salem witch trial, and I was the witch. You were going to burn me at the stake. What was I, five?”
“We weren’t really going to burn you—”
“Yes, but the mounted policeman didn’t know that when he smelled smoke and you took off, leaving me tied to that tree.”
“R.J., you know you could have gotten free anytime, and anyway, the fire wasn’t that close to you.”
“The cop didn’t think so. He wanted to find you and stick your toes in it, but I kept my mouth shut.”
“Not out of any sense of virtue,” Jared countered, “but only because you’re a Blackburn and keeping your mouth shut comes naturally.”
“The point is, you’re no stranger and you never will be, no matter how little we see of each other.” She smiled wistfully, wondering if she and Jared, if never strangers, could ever be friends again. If they hadn’t fallen in love, then it might have been possible. Now—she didn’t know. “Good luck with Grandfather. And if I don’t see you before you leave town—well, give my best to your daughter.”
Jared looked at her. “I will, R.J. Thanks.”
Maddeningly, her eyes filled with tears, and she fled, running out the front door and into the cool spring air. It was damp and drizzly, a typical New England morning, and still early.
“I have no wish to discuss with you the matter of a Frenchman who might have known your father,” her grandfather had told her yesterday afternoon.
She’d see what she could find out on her own.
First she’d have
a big, fattening breakfast on Charles Street, and then she’d head over to the Boston Public Library, which supposedly had an impressive amount of information on the man John F. Kennedy didn’t choose as his ambassador to Saigon, one Thomas Ezekiel Blackburn.
It also, Rebecca felt certain, would have something on Empress Elisabeth and her Jupiter Stones, and maybe even information on a rash of robberies on the Côte d’ Azur in the late fifties.
Jared made a fresh pot of more tolerable coffee and went out into the garden, toweling off a chair. The air was cool and damp, but it wasn’t raining at the moment. His coffee was piping hot, just what he needed. He inhaled the steam and tried to settle down. It wasn’t easy to be around Rebecca again.
In a few minutes, Thomas came outside, wearing an ancient sweater over his polo shirt and chinos. He looked a hundred as he pulled out a chair and sat down, not bothering to towel it off. “You’re not on your way back to San Francisco, I see.”
“No. I called Mai last night—she’s fine. Irritated with me for going to Boston without her, but she’ll survive.”
Thomas sighed. “I’m too old to force you to take sound advice when offered. Where’s Rebecca?”
“Gone out. She says she has a business to run, but—”
“But she’s got the bit in her teeth,” Thomas finished for him.
“She told you our man from Saigon was at her studio yesterday, didn’t she?”
Thomas fastened his incisive eyes on Jared. “She mentioned it, yes.”
“You could have told me.”
“I have no intention of repeating private conversations between myself and my granddaughter to anyone, including you, Jared.”
Jared accepted the mild lecture with equanimity, and said, in just as mild a tone, “That’s fine—until your idea of honor and discretion endangers my daughter. Thomas, R.J. knows something, and she’s holding back.”
“What do you want me to say?” Thomas asked calmly.
“I don’t know. Did she give you any indication—”
“No. I agree with you. She’s holding back.”
Jared inhaled, controlling his frustration. “R.J. should get out of Boston. If this guy’s here, she could be in danger.”
Leaning forward, Thomas looked at Jared, his expression surprisingly gentle. “Don’t be protective, Jared. Don’t hover.” He paused and picked bits of wet twigs and yellow pollen off his table. “Rebecca hates that.”
“I don’t give a damn what she hates.”
Thomas smiled. “Don’t you?”
Uncomfortable, Jared jumped up and abandoned his coffee. The Blackburns were getting to him. “I’m going out for a while. I need some air—a chance to think.” He glanced down at the elderly man seated at the battered garden table, wishing the last quarter-century of Thomas Blackburn’s life hadn’t been so isolated and hard. Thomas would say he didn’t mind; he deserved the ostracism he’d endured since 1963. But Jared wondered. He added, “Maybe coming back here was a mistake.”
Thomas was unruffled. “There are two seats available on a nine-o’clock flight to San Francisco. I called myself. I don’t believe Rebecca’s ever been.”
A vision flashed in Jared’s mind of taking R.J. across the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time, taking her to dinner at his and Mai’s favorite Chinese restaurant.
He had to get out from under the Blackburn spell.
“I’ll talk to you later,” he told Thomas, his voice hoarse. He didn’t wait for a reply.
Seventeen
Mai knew she would need cash for her plan. As much as she could lay her hands on. Her grandfather didn’t leave large sums of money lying around for someone to slip unnoticed into a pocket. All she’d managed to grab since her plan had come into her head after dinner last night was a measly five dollars she’d found on top of the refrigerator. She’d pay him back every penny she “borrowed.”
She had set her alarm for 4:00 a.m. and shoved it under her pillow so no one else would hear it go off, but it almost gave her a heart attack when it did. At least she was wideawake. She slipped noiselessly out of bed. The house was cool and filled with strange shadows. Wesley and Maureen Sloan had no pets, so there were no barking dogs to worry about, no cats to streak out of the darkness.
Her first stop was the living room, with its dramatic view of the bay and San Francisco, glittering through the predawn mist. She checked everywhere.
Nothing.
The dining room proved equally barren. She didn’t find so much as a dime at the bottom of a wineglass. It wasn’t like at home, where her father always left the odd twenty-dollar bill and loose change around. She had never swiped a cent from him. It had never even occurred to her to steal from her own father; she’d always relied just on her allowance and own earnings.
He had called her from Boston. “Hey, there,” he’d said, “is Granddad feeding you chocolates and letting you play with all his gadgets?”
Mai had replied that he was, but she would rather be with him in Boston. “Where are you?” she’d asked.
He wouldn’t tell her where he was staying. He just wanted to make sure she was okay, that was all. “Sulk all you want,” he’d added. “It won’t kill you.”
If she had a mother, would her father be as big a pain as he was?
Shivering, Mai went into her grandfather’s study, built on a more intimate scale than the rest of the house, but still large, especially compared to her and her father’s place in San Francisco. Here the view was of the garden, a magnificent, exotic place that would burst with color in the sunlight, but now, before dawn, was dark and spooky. Mai suddenly wished her grandfather believed in drapes. She got to work, going through drawers, pencil holders, filing cabinets, credenzas, anything that could possibly hold cash.
She struck pay dirt in a smooth wooden pear, about eight inches high, that opened in the middle. Inside were five one-hundred-dollar bills.
Mai had hoped for just fifty or a hundred dollars.
Stifling a squeal of victory, she scooped up the bills with one hand.
But how would she ever pay back five hundred dollars? She was saving money for college, and she could earn a fair amount babysitting and doing yard work—but five hundred dollars? She had trust funds set aside for her future, but she’d bet her dad and her grandfather would want the money paid back long before then.
She pushed the two ends of the pear together and retreated to her room, glad to be under her warm blankets, flush with money.
Eighteen
Quentin Reed finished his run with a cool-down walk across the lawn of the Winston house on Marblehead Neck, north of Boston. He had spent the night there, alone. Built in the twenties, it was a gargantuan ocean-gray clapboard house that his mother had always hated, considering it impractical and ostentatious—like her grandfather, the spendthrift Winston who’d built it. Sixty years ago the Winstons were no longer the moneymakers they had been for two centuries, but had adopted the attitude then prevalent among wealthy Bostonians that preserving fortunes was responsible and prudent, but creating them was somewhat unseemly, unless done prior to the turn of the century. This policy of conservative money management had in part led to the stagnation of Boston’s economy during the first half of the twentieth century, until by the late 1950s its credit rating was in the cellar. That was when Benjamin Reed had risked Winston money to launch Winston & Reed.
By his death in 1963, even Annette had come around to the notion that making money wasn’t so awful. She took her husband’s fledgling company beyond even what he’d envisioned. She had the house on Marblehead Neck redone in the early seventies, but continued to prefer the intimacy of Beacon Hill or her mas on the Riviera. Quentin held no strong opinion one way or the other about the house itself: Marblehead Neck jutted out into the ocean and that was all that mattered. Jane was staying at their own oceanside house, until they worked out their marital problems.
They’d had dinner together last night.
“You have to stand up t
o your mother,” she had told him. “Quentin, don’t you see? She’ll respect you more if you quit caving in all the time and start arguing with her once in a while. Damn it, I love you because you’re a decent, sensitive man, but those are qualities of strength, not weakness. It’s time you made her realize that.”
He’d had no counterargument. Maybe he was decent, maybe sensitive. People said he was, but so what? He was also weak, like his father. His mother was the strong one. At the edge of the lawn, Quentin walked out onto a flat boulder hung over a rocky cliff. Twenty yards below the tide was coming in, swirling and foaming among the rocks. The wind off the still-frigid waters of the Atlantic struck his overheated skin and rain-dampened hair, but he hardly noticed the cold. The water’s edge seemed so far away, so unreachable. If he jumped, he couldn’t even be sure he’d hit one of the small tide pools where the periwinkles liked to hide, never mind the ocean. Wherever he landed, he wouldn’t live long. Eventually, the tide would take him.
He shook off the morbid thought. What was the matter with him?
Last night he’d dreamed of Tam. He hadn’t in years. She had seemed so real to him. Every detail about her was etched clearly in his mind: her long, fine, black hair whipping over the front of her shoulders as she turned to him with her dazzling smile. Her delicate and incredibly beautiful face. Her shining dark eyes and small, sensitive mouth. She had seldom worn makeup, and even as an adult she’d resembled a pretty child, a fact that had never failed to incense her. She would call him a racist, sexist American pig, and he would agree and apologize, remarking on her intelligence and self-reliance. They would end up in bed, where she proved herself an artful, skillful lover, very much an adult.
“I can’t live without you,” he had told her so many times.
He had awakened sweating and wretched, with those same words on his lips. For a long time afterward he was positive he could smell the light, expensive perfume she favored. She would never tell him its name; it was her secret, she would say. She had always loved mysteries and secrets.
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