Betrayals. Carla Neggers

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 to the back as Annette had instructed him. He had called her office at Winston & Reed and had spoken to her secretary, who’d told him her boss wasn’t in the office today. Jean-Paul had urged her to get hold of Annette at once and left the number of his pay phone.

      Annette had called him back right away. The only hint of the mind-numbing shock he’d just given her was a slight hoarseness in her voice.

      So she actually thought I was dead.

      The thought amused him.

      She’d understood they would have to meet in person—if only to convince herself the call wasn’t a nightmare. Reluctantly, but ever the stiff-upper-lip Bostonian, she gave him directions to her house.

      Jean-Paul entered the beautiful house in the back, then moved silently through the antiseptic kitchen and down a short hall, where dozens of expensively framed photographs hung on the wall. The people in them were all the same—smiling, rich, perfect. The men were without scars and the women without fear, and Jean-Paul had to make his arms go rigid to keep from knocking the photographs off the wall. The pain was there, the anger, the burning hate. Nearly four years in the Légion étrangère and five years at the mercy of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese in a prisoner-of-war camp had taught him how to control his emotions, but he could feel them exploding to the surface.