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
