9

SHE BROKE THE SILENCE. “Would you like another beer?”

“Sounds good.” Coltrane had all kinds of questions, but he didn’t want to overwhelm her. Take it slow and easy, he thought.

She locked the front door, then opened the inside garage door and pressed a button that closed each stall. After that, she secured the inside garage door, too.

“Before I get you that beer, would you help me walk the picket line? You know, check the security?”

“Officer Coltrane reporting for duty.” He hoped it sounded like a joke, which apparently it did, because she looked amused as she started down the hallway.

“Carl and the others already locked up, but I feel more comfortable if I double-check,” she said. Past the stairway, they entered the living room and crossed to the sliding glass doors that led onto the deck. There, Tash tried to open the door. “Definitely secure.”

Pensive, she looked out past the white deck toward the darkness on the rocks and the whitecaps on the waves in the black ocean. “I used to love sitting out there, even when it’s cold like this, watching the waves hit the shore, listening to them. Sometimes I can see a freighter on the horizon, its lights moving, heading to mysterious places. ‘So we beat on, boats against the current… ’”

“‘… borne back ceaselessly into the past.’”

She turned to him, surprised. “You know Gatsby?”

Coltrane shrugged. “When I was at USC, one of my photography instructors insisted I take a few literature classes. For some reason, The Great Gatsby really stayed with me, that final image. Randolph Packard had an image like that in one of his photographs. The lights of a freighter on the horizon.”

“Heading to mysterious places,” Tash echoed. She had sounded melancholy, but now she mocked herself. “Probably only to Long Beach. Anyway, for a while, those nights are over.”

She pressed a button on the wall to the right. A faint rumble puzzled Coltrane until he saw metal shutters descending, blocking off the all-glass wall at the back of the living room.

“It makes me feel like I’m in a castle,” Tash said, “except I’m lowering the shutters instead of raising the drawbridge.”

Coltrane followed her into the kitchen, where she turned on an overhead light that reflected off white countertops, creating a pleasant luster. After confirming that a side door was locked, she leaned against a counter, stared down, shook her head, then roused herself. “Almost forgot that beer.”

There were several in the refrigerator. Presumably for the men helping her, Coltrane thought.

“Don’t bother about a glass. The can is fine,” he said.

“You sure?” She poured Chablis into a glass and touched it against the beer can she had given him. “Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

“It doesn’t seem much like New Year’s, does it?”

“I have a friend who keeps emphasizing that it’s a matter of attitude,” Coltrane said, “that we should think of it as a chance for a new beginning.”

“Yeah.” Troubled, Tash sipped her wine. “The question is, a new beginning of what? The start of the really bad times?”

“I don’t think that’s the attitude my friend had in mind.”

Leaning against the counter opposite her, Coltrane had a dizzying sense of unreality. Tash Adler even spoke like Rebecca Chance, her full-throated voice and engaging cadences the same as Rebecca Chance’s in The Trailblazer and Jamaica Wind. She seemed to be in her mid-twenties, the same age Rebecca Chance had been when she disappeared.

“Is something the matter?” Tash asked. “You’re looking at me as if… Have I got something caught in my teeth?”

He laughed. “Not at all. Sorry. I didn’t mean to stare. It’s a photographer’s habit. I can’t help imagining how I would take someone’s picture.”

“Is that what you want to do? Take my photograph?”

“There’s something about the way you’re leaning against that counter.”

“Oh?” She looked puzzled.

Coltrane realized that a compliment about her looks might sound as if he was coming on to her. The last thing he wanted was to alienate her. “The raspberry of the exercise suit you’re wearing is the only bright color in the room. Otherwise, everything’s white. Well, not totally. Those knives in that container have black handles. So do the handles on that toaster and the knobs on the stove.”

“I added those touches of black deliberately,” Tash said. “Without contrast, white isn’t effective.”

“That’s what intrigued me. Your suit makes this room a black-and-white photograph in color.”

Tash considered him. “You’re very observant.”

Coltrane made a modest gesture. “It comes from taking a lot of photographs.”

“No, I suspect taking photographs didn’t make you observant. The other way around. But I also suspect you often see more than you ever wanted to. Not everything’s beautiful.”

Coltrane remembered sighting through his telephoto lens as Ilkovic directed his men to grind up the bones of the corpses that the backhoe had dredged up from the mass grave in Bosnia. “Yes, not everything’s beautiful.”

“I need to ask you something.”

Coltrane inwardly came to attention.

“The reason I asked you to stay.”

Coltrane waited.

“I didn’t want to talk about this in front of the others,” Tash said. “You seem to know an awful lot about Randolph Packard.”

“Since my late teens, I’ve been trying to learn everything I can about him.”

“Then maybe you could tell me something. Do you have any idea at all why he would have included me in his will?”

It took Coltrane several seconds to recover. “You don’t know?”

“I was absolutely mystified when his attorney got in touch with me. Sure, I know who Randolph Packard was, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out why he would have given me that estate in Mexico. It’s like he picked my name out of a hat or something. Totally unexpected. I asked his attorney. What’s his name? Blaine?”

“Yes.”

“I asked Blaine if he knew why Packard had chosen me, but Blaine told me he hadn’t the faintest idea.”

“From what Blaine told me, that seems to be the truth.”

“I didn’t know who besides Blaine to ask,” Tash said, “and by then, I was deep in this mess with whoever…” She gestured toward a wall and whatever lurked beyond it. “I’ve had a lot of things on my mind. So when, out of nowhere, I heard you mention Packard and the estate in Mexico, you could have knocked me over.”

“I have to be honest about something.”

Tash’s dark eyes narrowed, as if she was afraid of what he was going to say.

“I haven’t been entirely open with you,” Coltrane said.

She looked more uneasy.

“The reason I came here wasn’t just to find out if you’d be interested in selling the Mexican estate. I’ve never seen it. Who knows how it’ll strike me if I ever do see it? What I really came here for was to ask you the same question you asked me.”

“Why Randolph Packard gave me the Mexican estate?”

“Yes.”

Tash shook her head in exhaustion. “Please. I have all the mysteries I can handle.”

“But maybe the answer to mine will help solve one of yours. Have you ever heard of an up-and-coming movie actress in the thirties named Rebecca Chance?”

Baffled, Tash considered the name. “No.”

“I’m not surprised. She disappeared before she had the chance to become a star.”

“But what does she have to do with-”

“She was being stalked. The same pattern of letters, gifts, and phone calls. Then one day she vanished.”

“If you’re trying to frighten me even more than I already am…”

“No,” Coltrane said. “I’m trying to help you figure out why Randolph Packard put you in his will. Packard was desperately in love with her.”

“Rebecca Chance.”

“Yes.” Coltrane paused, struck anew by the alluring features of the woman across from him and the uncanny situation in which he found himself. “And Rebecca Chance looked so much like you… you look so much like her… you might as well be the same woman.”