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.