Jared was in the kitchen already slamming chunks of ice into a plastic bag, sure to annoy Rebecca. He started to say something, but Thomas put up a hand. Jared took the hint and let him go on without interruption.

Twenty-Five

Mai had spent the day in a state of nervous anticipation and by early evening was ready to execute her plan. She wandered out to the pool where Maureen, back early from the gallery she ran, was arranging a monstrous vase of flowers and humming to herself. She was a handsome, amiable woman, maybe twenty years younger than Wesley Sloan, though it was hard to tell. She had a college-aged son from a previous marriage and said she considered Mai more of a friend than a stepgranddaughter.

“I don’t feel very well,” Mai announced.

“What’s wrong? Do you have a fever-”

“Just a stomachache. I’d like to stay in my room, if it’s okay. You won’t mind if I skip dinner? I really don’t think I could eat anything.”

“Of course I don’t mind, sweetie. Do you want some aspirin?”

“I’ll be okay, thanks. I think I just need to rest.”

“Well, you let me know if you need anything.”

Promising her she would, Mai had to force herself not to skip back inside. Her dad and grandfather might blame Maureen for not seeing through her ruse, but most likely, Mai knew, they’d be too busy killing her to bother.

But as her dad said, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do and take the consequences.

Going to Boston was something she had to do. It was more important right now than being a nice, obedient teenager. She was afraid for her father, angry at being left out of what he was doing…and sure-so sure-that the white-haired man, her dad’s reaction to him and his sudden trip to Boston all had something to do with her. She was going to find her father and make him tell her what was going on. Make him be fair. She had rights, too. And she wasn’t a chicken. She’d explain to him that it was worse not knowing, worse wondering and being scared, worse thinking maybe she’d caused her mother’s death in Saigon and his breakup with Rebecca Blackburn in 1975.

She could take whatever it was he hadn’t told her.

Instead of going up to her room, Mai slipped out the front door.

George was being dispatched in the limousine to pick up a Parisian couple at the airport who were spending the week as the Sloans’ houseguests in Tiberon. He was out at the pool, getting instructions from Maureen.

Mai slipped into the back of the cavernous limousine and curled up on the floor, hiding underneath a tartan wool throw. It was hot and stuffy, but she’d survive. George wasn’t expecting a passenger. He’d never notice her.

She was right.

He climbed into the car, and in another minute Mai felt the limousine cruising out of the hills of Marin County, over the Golden Gate Bridge and through San Francisco to the airport.

Twenty-Six

Rebecca had given up on Jared’s bag of ice and was trying to cure her raging headache by planting the rest of her grandfather’s impatiens. They were in sorry shape, but just might make it if he left them alone. It was suppertime, and he still hadn’t come downstairs. She hoped he was all right. Maybe she’d been pushing him too hard. Even if he hated being coddled, they both had to remember he was almost eighty, no longer a young man.

Several boarders had wandered back from assorted universities and up to their rooms to unwind or study. Athena had examined Rebecca’s face and pronounced that she hadn’t been hit that hard.

“Not hard enough” was Jared’s unsympathetic remark.

That remark made Athena laugh and forget she’d considered carving him up just that morning. They went inside together to rustle up some supper, Jared obviously having sensed Rebecca needed a chance to pull herself together.

She had told Jared Sloan everything she knew about the Frenchman and what had happened that grim morning of April 29, 1975-except about the bag of colored stones she’d found in Mai’s diaper and what she’d learned about Le Chat and the Jupiter Stones from David Rubin and her library reading.

He wasn’t just the Frenchman anymore, she reminded herself. He was Jean-Paul Gerard. She knew his name now and had to keep repeating it, not because she’d forget it, but because she wanted it to roll off her tongue the way her name did his. For fourteen years she’d hoped he hadn’t been a malevolent part of that night in Saigon. It was the Vietnamese who’d been after the jewels, she’d told herself, and who had killed Tam and would have killed her and Mai if not for the Frenchman.

If not for Jean-Paul Gerard.

She had fantasized that maybe he’d been an Interpol agent and had shot Jared Sloan for his own good, to keep the Vietnamese from killing him outright.

How curiously naive.

Jean-Paul Gerard was a crook in pursuit of ten valuable corundum gems known as the Jupiter Stones. Never mind the complications: Thomas Blackburn’s presence at Baroness Gisela Majlath’s funeral; the Frenchman’s friendship with Stephen Blackburn; his participation in the 1963 ambush; his rescue of Rebecca and Mai, and then his departure from the Tu Do Street apartment without Empress Elisabeth’s nine sapphires and ruby.

Never mind all that. The bottom line was simple enough: Gerard hadn’t been an innocent bystander that night.

Rebecca shuddered and stuck another impatiens in the wet dirt. Should she have turned the stones over to the authorities fourteen years ago? Should she now?

How would Jared and Mai feel when they learned that Tam had been about to smuggle a collection of famous, extraordinary gems out of Vietnam?

How had Tam gotten hold of them?

A worm crawled over her hand, and Rebecca tossed it unceremoniously out of her way and pushed the dirt up around the roots of the plant. Worms had never bothered her. Tam-

“Oh, no.”

Rebecca froze and stared at the worm slinking back into the soft, moist soil.

Shutting her eyes tightly, she could see herself at four digging worms with her grandfather…could see the tears in his eyes and remember wondering why he was so upset. Didn’t he like worms anymore?

She could remember showing Jared her captured worms and could hear him telling her he was going to cook them up for her supper.

And Tam.

She’d told Tam about her worms.

Tam had been crying, too, and Rebecca had tried to cheer her up and-

And she’d found the pretty red bag in Aunt Annette’s bedroom.

“But they were marbles,” she whispered, her knees aching on the brick terrace, the worm burrowed into the dirt. “They were marbles!”

Not marbles: the Jupiter Stones.

“Rebecca?”

Jared’s voice startled her, but he caught her under the arms before she could fall backward and helped her to her feet. She knew she looked awful. She tried to smile and casually brushed her hair back, discovering dirt caked to her hands. That was right; she’d been planting flowers.

“You okay?” Jared asked.

Her eyes focused on the present, on him. His dark hair, his clear, teal eyes. She used to wake up at night and watch him sleep, wishing she could know what he was dreaming. She had loved to hear him laugh and see him smile and had trusted him the way only a nineteen-year-old really in love for the first time could.

He’d taken advantage of that trust, too, but-it was a long time ago.

The things she’d told him tonight had already rocked his balance. The man he’d hated and feared for fourteen years had saved his daughter’s life. Not an easy fact to digest. Not something that slipped neatly into his own version of that night and the recent events surrounding Jean-Paul Gerard’s return.

“I’m okay,” she told him, and found that his presence steadied her. What, she wondered, did hers do to him?