Читать книгу Betrayals - Carla Neggers, Carla Neggers - Страница 7

The French Riviera

1959

Annette Winston Reed hacked at an onion on the battered worktable in her airy, sun-washed kitchen. Although it wasn’t her nature to fret, she noticed her hands were shaking and she was perspiring heavily. Her underarms and the small of her back were damp, and her eyes burned with lack of sleep. It’s time to buck up, she silently told herself, annoyed by this betrayal of her inner turmoil. She wasn’t going to let her troubles undermine her self-confidence or her sense of fun.

She refused to let Thomas Blackburn get to her. He and his four-year-old granddaughter had come down for the weekend from Paris, a typical presumptuousness on Thomas’s part. Annette hadn’t invited him. A Bostonian like herself, he had known her all her life. She had grown up around the corner from his house on Beacon Hill. But as much as she looked up to him, as much as she’d wanted him to admire her, she couldn’t consider him a friend. He was too old, almost twenty years her senior, and perhaps knew her too well. With Thomas, pretenses were impossible.

He was at the breakfast table overlooking the rose garden, with a mug of black coffee at his elbow and the Paris Le Monde opened up in front of him so that Annette couldn’t miss the latest blaring headline about the jewel thief who’d plagued the Côte d’ Azur for the past eight weeks. He’d been dubbed Le Chat after the Cary Grant character in the popular American movie To Catch a Thief. Once again, the police promised the imminent arrest of a suspect.

This time they weren’t just blowing smoke. Annette knew better.

Thomas hadn’t said a word beyond a simple good-morning. He had come to the Riviera just to visit her, he’d told Annette with his wry smile, knowing she wouldn’t believe him. As always, he had a loftier purpose in mind: to convince her Vietnamese caretaker, a mandarin scholar respected both abroad and in his own country, to return home. Thomas would go on and on about how Saigon needed credible centrist leaders and how Quang Tai could help save his country from disaster, and Annette would pretend a suitable neutrality, despite the prospect of losing her caretaker. She was only sparing herself one of Thomas’s notorious lectures on not being shortsighted and selfish; she suspected he already knew she didn’t want the bother of having to replace Quang Tai.

She sighed, frantically mincing one half of the onion. Her eyes had begun to tear, and if she didn’t slow down and be careful, she’d likely chop off the end of a finger. Thomas wouldn’t keep quiet for long. It wasn’t a Blackburn trait.

The newspaper rustled as he turned a page, and she heard him take a small sip of coffee.

“All right, Thomas, you win,” she said, whirling around with her paring knife. “What do you want to tell me that you’re trying so hard not to tell me? You might as well spit it out, because you know you’ll get around to it sooner or later.”

Looking slightly miffed at her sharp-sighted observation, Thomas folded the newspaper and laid it on the table. Like all Blackburns, he was a man of impeccable moral and intellectual respectability—the kind of highbrow Bostonian that Annette usually found boring and irritating. For two centuries, the Blackburns had been outspoken patriots, historians, poets, reformers, public servants and eccentrics, if not the best moneymakers. Eliza Blackburn—the patron saint of the family—was one of Boston’s favorite Revolutionary War heroines. Her portrait, painted by Gilbert Stuart, hung in the Massachusetts State House; in it she wore the cameo brooch that George Washington himself had presented to her, in gratitude for her efforts at smuggling weapons, ammunition and information from British-occupied Boston to the patriot forces in outlying areas. The Winstons, on the other hand, had snuck off to Halifax for the duration of the War of Independence. Eliza had also been virtually the only mercantile-minded Blackburn in two hundred years. She’d been the driving force behind Blackburn Shipping, which made a fortune in the post-Revolution China trade, but folded in 1812 with the British blockade and the war. That was that for a Blackburn generating any substantial income. Eliza’s descendants had been stretching her fortune ever since, and it was beginning to fray.

Annette had heard rumblings that Thomas, Harvard-educated and approaching fifty, was about to launch his own business. He was an authority on the history and culture of Indochina and spent much of his time there, but how he planned to translate that expertise into a moneymaking enterprise was beyond her.

He regarded her with a calm that only accentuated her own nervousness. “Annette, I’d like to ask you a straightforward question—do you know this thief Le Chat?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. How would I know him?”

Her mouth went dry, her heartbeat quickened and she felt curiously light-headed. She’d never fainted in all her thirty years; now wasn’t the time to start. Trying to hide her trembling hands, she set down the paring knife and leaned against the counter. She was dressed casually in baggy men’s khaki trousers and an oversize white cotton shirt, her ash-brown hair pulled up in a hasty knot. If she worked at it, she could look rather stunning at first glance, but she had no illusions that she was an especially beautiful woman. She was too pale-skinned, too large-framed, too pear-shaped, too tall. Her near-black eyebrows were mannishly heavy and might have overwhelmed a more delicate face, but she had a strong nose, Katharine Hepburn cheeks and big eyes that were a ringing, memorable blue—her best feature by far. She’d hated her long legs as a teenager, but over the years she had discovered they had their advantages in bed. Even her husband, not the most passionate of men, would cry out in pleasure when she’d wrap them around him and pull him deeper into her.

“Annette,” Thomas said.

It was the same tone he’d used on her when he’d caught her crossing Beacon Street alone at six years old. Nineteen years her senior, he was already a widower then, with a two-year-old son. Emily Blackburn, so quietly beautiful and intelligent, had died of postpartum complications, the first person Annette had ever known to die. She had only wanted to ride the swan boats in the Public Garden and had explained this to Thomas, assuring him her mother had said it was all right. He had said, “Annette,” just that way—admonishing, knowing, expecting more of her than a transparent lie. Feeling as if she’d failed him, she’d blurted out the truth. Her mother hadn’t said it was all right; she thought Annette was playing alone in the garden. Thomas had marched her home at once.

She was no longer six years old.

“I promised the children I’d take them out to pick flowers,” she said, pulling herself up straight. “They’re waiting.”

She was at the kitchen door when Thomas spoke again. “Annette, this man’s no Cary Grant. He’s a thief who has lined his own pockets with other people’s things and driven a decent woman to suicide.”

Annette spun around and gave him a haughty look. “I quite agree.”

Shaking his head, Thomas rose to his feet. He was a tall, lean man with sharp features and straight, fine hair that was a mixture of dark brown, henna highlights and touches of gray. The scrimpiest of the notoriously frugal Blackburns, he wore a shabby sweater that had probably seen him through his postgraduate studies at Harvard and trousers he’d let out, unabashedly leaving the old seam to show.

“I would never presume to judge you,” he told her softly. “I hope you know that.”

Annette held back an incredulous laugh. “Thomas, you’re a Blackburn. It’s your nature to judge everyone and everything.”

He grimaced, but there was a gleam in his intensely blue eyes. “You’re saying I’m a critical old fart.”

She smiled for the first time in hours. “Not that old. Let’s just say people always know where they stand with you—and you’re a better man than most. Make yourself at home. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

To her surprise and relief, Thomas let her go without another word.

Taking a gaggle of children flower-picking wasn’t something Annette relished, even on a good day, but they quickly busied themselves plucking every blossom in sight. Surrendering to their enthusiasm, she abandoned her halfhearted effort to separate weed from wildflower and plopped down in the straw grass. It was warm in the sun under the incomparable blue of the Mediterranean sky, and the scent of wildflowers, lemons and sea permeated the air, soothing her restlessness and feeling of inundation. Down through the small field and olive grove, she could see the red-tiled roof and simple lines of her stone mas, the eighteenth-century farmhouse where she’d spent a part of every year since she was a girl. It was as much home to her as Boston was. In many ways, more so, for it was here on the Riviera she could be alone, with just her son and his nanny—without Benjamin, without the pressures of being a Boston Winston and a well-bred woman whose idea of fulfillment was supposed to be making everyone’s life interesting but her own.

The children’s zeal for flower-picking waned faster than she’d hoped, but her nephew Jared, the eldest at nine, launched a game of tag. Quentin was reluctant and terrified, his mother suspected, the girls would beat him. He was seven, a sturdy, towheaded boy with a quiet manner and a head full of dreams and ideas whose execution defeated him. A game of tag was precisely the kind of open, raw confrontation he tried to avoid. He was his father’s son, Annette thought, with a lack of affection she was becoming used to. Even Quentin, however, couldn’t prevail against his cousin’s strong will.

The game got off to an aggressive start, and Annette nudged the flower basket closer to her. She didn’t want the children in their exuberance to knock it over. The flowers wouldn’t suffer; they were mostly rot. But she’d hate to have to explain why she’d tucked a .25-caliber automatic under the calico cloth lining the bottom of her flower basket.

“Bon matin, ma belle.”

She hadn’t heard his approach. She twisted around, but he was concealed behind the knotted trunk of an olive tree, out of the children’s view. Their game was already getting out of hand. Quang Tai’s six-year-old daughter, Tam, a mite of a girl, was beating the socks off the two boys and loving every minute of it, teasing them in her mixture of English, French and Vietnamese. Jared boasted he’d get her next game, but Quentin, ever the sore loser, accused her of cheating. Tam was having none of it. Jared remained neutral in the ensuing squabble, but then they both turned on him. Four-year-old Rebecca Blackburn amused herself by throwing grass on the three older children, becoming more and more daring until they finally paid attention to her.

“You can’t catch me,” she cried jubilantly as the two boys and Tam chased her.

Blue-eyed, chestnut-haired Blackburn though little Rebecca was, Annette had to admire the girl’s spunk. In another thirty years, she’d probably be as sanctimonious as her grandfather.

Mercifully, Tam’s father called from the edge of the field, and all four little monsters scrambled toward him. Annette promised she’d be along in a while and pulled her flower basket onto her lap. The gun had added weight to it.

“You can come out now, Jean-Paul,” she said.

He ambled out from behind the tree and squatted down, dropping a daisy into her basket. Annette tried to check the rush of raw desire she felt every time she saw him. It didn’t work. From their first encounter weeks ago, she had been obsessed with Jean-Paul Gerard. She could never get enough of him; he could never satisfy her, sexually or emotionally. Whenever they made love she wanted more of him. Even after multiple couplings in one night, she’d awaken aching for him. He could tell her a thousand times he loved her, and she would long to hear it again—and yet never believed him. Jean-Paul was twenty-four years old and one of the most popular men in France. She was a thirty-year-old married woman with stretch marks on her breasts and abdomen.

She hated to give him up.

She noticed the sun-whitened hairs on his tanned arms. He was so handsome, so arrogantly French. Leanly built, he was a dark, sleek, wiry man, his eyes a deep brown, soft and oddly vulnerable—and keen. They had to be. He was one of France’s premiere Grand Prix drivers, a risk-taking, desirable man who radiated a generous and unquenchable sexuality. He could have had virtually any woman he wanted. He had chosen Annette. She had never had any illusions that their affair would last, but she supposed she ought to derive some satisfaction at being the one to end it. He curled a loose tendril of hair behind her ear and brushed two fingers along the line of her jaw. “I missed you last night.”

“Jean-Paul…” For nothing at all she’d strip herself naked and make love to him right there in the grass under the olive tree. The children and her caretaker and Thomas Blackburn and her entire future be damned. She licked her lips, parched to the point of cracking, and squinted at her lover, sitting in the shade with the bright morning sun at his back. “Have you seen the papers?”

Nodding, he sighed and sat back in the grass.

“That’s why I called you.” Her voice quavered; she didn’t like that. She cleared her throat and forced herself not to look away. “Last night I became Le Chat’s latest victim. I was at the roulette wheel, wearing a Tiffany diamond-and-pearl bracelet—”

He looked pained. “Ma belle…”

“No, don’t. Let me finish. The bracelet was a gift to me from my husband on our fifth anniversary. There’s an inscription. The police…” Her throat was so dry and tight she felt she would choke. “I gave the police an exact description.”

Jean-Paul accepted her words without apparent surprise or concern. “What else did you tell the police?”

Annette hesitated, then said, “Enough.”

He looked away from her, his soft eyes lost in the shade.

“They’ve gone to your house, Jean-Paul. I would expect they’re there now and have already found my bracelet—”

“You used the key I gave you?”

“Yes. Last night, while you were asleep.”

He turned back to her, assessing her with the same alertness and intensity that had made him one of the finest race-car drivers in the world. This time, his craving for excitement and danger had led him astray.

“I don’t blame you,” Annette said, feeling stronger. “Please don’t blame me. We are what we are, Jean-Paul, and I’m only doing what I have to do. I have no desire to see you in prison, and I’m aware of the acute embarrassment testifying against you in court could cause me. I have a husband and a son I need to respect me—a life that I won’t allow Le Chat to destroy.”

“I should kill you,” he said calmly.

“Perhaps. But then you’d be a murderer as well as a jewel thief.” She dug beneath the flowers and pulled back the calico cloth, removing the gun and a leather pouch. The automatic she held in her right hand, awkwardly; the pouch she handed to Jean-Paul. “I decided to warn you because I don’t want you to be arrested and sent to jail. Here’s twenty thousand dollars. A generous amount under the circumstances and enough, I should think, to get you out of the country and settled elsewhere.”

He bit down on his lower lip, the only outward sign of the effect her words were having on him. “And if I choose not to go?”

“You can’t win, Jean-Paul. Remember who I am. I’m giving you a way out. Consider yourself lucky and take it.”

“What about the Jupiter Stones?”

She took no pleasure in how his voice cracked. In the last five minutes, she’d shattered his life. Better yours than mine, my love.

She said, “I don’t care about the Jupiter Stones. I only care now that you get out of the country before you’re arrested. Jean-Paul, I can’t have what we’ve been together come out. Don’t fight me. You’ll only do yourself worse damage.”

His eyes fastened on the gun, briefly, and Annette blanched at the thought he might actually force her to use it. But all at once he shot to his feet, and before she realized what was coming, he cuffed her hard on the side of the head. She sprawled backward against the tree, biting the inside of her mouth and crying out with pain as she tasted the warm saltiness of her own blood. Only by a miracle did she keep hold of the gun. If Jean-Paul reached for it, she’d kill him.

“Au revoir, ma belle.”

Annette shuddered at the hatred in his voice. But he walked away, quickly disappearing in the thickets, and she brushed herself off and staggered to her feet, fighting back tears. She began to run. Through the field, her flower and herb gardens, across the terrace, and into the quaint stone farmhouse where so long ago her nanny had taught her how to dry herbs and debone a fish. Thank God Thomas wasn’t around. She basked in the house’s familiarity, its welcome.

She made herself and the children tall glasses of iced, fresh-squeezed lemonade and put sugar cookies onto a plate—and, in a few minutes, she began to laugh.

Baroness Gisela Majlath was buried in a simple nonreligious ceremony attended by her closest friends and the tall Bostonian, Thomas Blackburn. As if his vaunted presence could change anything, Jean-Paul thought bitterly, as he hid among a stand of oaks. He stared at the plain white coffin and choked back his sobs lest anybody should hear him. He didn’t want to disturb the funeral. Had the police known their missing Le Chat would be there, they would have sent more than a single uninterested gendarme. And the Bostonian in his frayed, pinstriped suit? What would he have done?

The stiff breeze off the Mediterranean whipped tears from Jean-Paul’s eyes. Thomas Blackburn, he thought, would have done nothing.

Gisela had been a favorite on the Riviera. Her suicide forty-eight hours earlier had caught everyone by surprise and abruptly ended Le Chat’s welcome on her beloved Côte d’ Azur. For weeks, his presence had lent a spirit of romance and adventure to an otherwise ordinary season. With visions of Cary Grant in their heads, eager young heiresses, jet-setters and bored wives of American tycoons had ignored warnings not to wear their valuable, albeit heavily insured, jewels to crowded cafés, parties and casinos. In truth, they had vied to tempt Le Chat to commit one of his daring robberies, each longing for the excitement and attention of being his next victim. After all, he never hurt anyone.

Even Gisela had emerged from her brush with the Riviera jewel thief physically unscathed.

If it had ever occurred. Fact and fancy were often inseparable in Gisela’s quirky mind, an eccentricity that prompted more amusement than outrage among those who knew her. To be sure, her encounter with Le Chat—real or imagined—would never have happened if he hadn’t been stalking the Côte d’ Azur for victims.

Jean-Paul knew that the graveside mourners and the gossips and the snobs would blame Le Chat entirely for her suicide, without looking to themselves for culpability. He believed, however, that they, as much as their now-despised jewel thief, were responsible for her death.

No one had believed Gisela’s blithe assertion that she was a member of the displaced Hungarian aristocracy, never mind that she had possessed the fabled Jupiter Stones until they’d been stolen by Le Chat.

Engaging and vivacious, she had arrived on the Riviera in 1955—from whence no one could exactly say—and immediately made a name for herself with her irrepressible charm and her unique talent for decorating country cottages and farmhouses. She never called the people she helped clients, simply “friends.” Nor did she call herself an interior decorator or formalize what she did into anything as depressingly ordinary as a business. She did favors, that was all. Her “friends” always insisted on paying her, but how, she maintained, was up to them. Few ever caught her actually working. She loved to play and, especially, to take chances—with the roulette wheel, with her treks along the rocky coastline, with men. She had never made an enemy. Or, conversely, a true friend.

She had talked about the Jupiter Stones for years, but had never shown them to anyone—not that anyone had ever asked to see them. Why embarrass her? She couldn’t possibly own anything so valuable. The Jupiter Stones were her good luck charm, she liked to tell people. They were the source of her boundless energy and enthusiasm for life. She rubbed them over her body every night, she told friends and strangers alike, and the stones restored her spirit.

Who could believe such talk?

The Jupiter Stones had existed. They had been a gift from Franz Josef, emperor of Austria, king of Hungary, to his beautiful, haunted wife, Empress Elisabeth. The exacting monarch, who ruled the troubled Hapsburg empire for sixty-eight years until his death at eighty-six in 1916, had had his court jewelers search the world for ten exquisite corundum gems, not just the coveted cornflower-blue sapphire or pigeon’s-blood ruby, but in the other colors in which corundum was found: white, yellow, orange-yellow, green, pink, plum, pale blue and near-black. Each stone was perfectly cut, each given a name by Franz Josef himself. Four were named for the planets with a variety of corundum as their stone: the yellow sapphire was called the Star of Venus, the orange-yellow sapphire the Mercury Stone, the beautiful pigeon’s-blood ruby star-stone the Red Moon of Mars and the velvety cornflower Kashmir sapphire the Star of Jupiter. Individually the ruby and the cornflower-blue sapphire—each flawless, each cut into a perfect six-sided star—were the most valuable. But as a whole, the unique collection was worth a fortune.

In tribute to his wife’s unusually simple tastes, Franz Josef left the remarkable stones unmounted. He presented them to her in a ruby-red velvet bag embossed with the imperial seal. Elisabeth, it was said, took them with her everywhere. She was an incurable wanderer, and it was on one of these wanderings that she seemed to have “misplaced” the Jupiter Stones. Unlike her husband—and cousin—Franz Josef, Elisabeth, “Sisi” as she was known affectionately, wasn’t an orderly person. A lover of riding and endless walks, she was generous and careless with her possessions; she could have lost the unique gems or simply given them away—as she did so often with her things—on a whim. She never said. Whatever their fate, the fabled stones weren’t discovered among her countless jewels after her assassination in 1898, when, while boarding a steamer in Geneva, she was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist who wanted to kill someone important enough that his name would get into the papers. He succeeded.

Almost sixty years later, Baroness Gisela Majlath claimed the unpredictable empress had given the stones to Gisela’s mother after she, as just a girl of eight or nine, had endangered her own life to help Elisabeth after a riding accident. Gisela had inherited the extraordinary bag of gems when her mother and most of her family were killed in the two World Wars that decimated Hungary. She herself had narrowly escaped death when fleeing Budapest after the Communist takeover in 1948. All she managed to take with her were the clothes on her back and, tucked into her bra, the Jupiter Stones.

It was the sort of tale that everyone loved to hear, though no one believed it.

If Gisela had fled to the west dispossessed and penniless, why hadn’t she cashed in the stones to reestablish herself? They were a family heirloom, Gisela had explained. And of course, they were enchanted; they had saved her from poverty and despair and even death. She couldn’t just sell them as she might ordinary gems.

Everything changed the night she tearfully reported to the police she’d been robbed and described her ten corundum stones in detail, estimating their value into the millions of francs and admitting she had no photographs, no insurance, no proof she had ever seen the Jupiter Stones, much less owned them.

Why didn’t she? The understandably skeptical police had asked what everyone but Gisela considered a reasonable question. She was insulted. Did the police doubt her word?

They did. So did all her friends and virtually everyone in France.

The gossips supplied their own answers. If the stones were in Gisela’s possession—through whatever means—they would have been too valuable for her to afford to keep in any open, honest way. Insurance costs alone would have been phenomenal. She must have come to her senses, capitalized on Le Chat’s prowling about the Côte d’ Azur, and hocked them, saving face by reporting them stolen. In which case, good for her.

But that scenario was far-fetched.

Far more likely she’d made up the stones altogether and had an ulterior motive for claiming she was Le Chat’s latest victim. A craving for attention? For notoriety? Had Gisela, too, yearned for romance and adventure?

Gisela, however, stuck to her story: the Jupiter Stones were hers, Le Chat had stolen them and she wanted him caught and her gems returned to her.

The gossips redoubled their efforts to come up with an explanation for what to them was decidedly unexplainable. What if there were a germ of truth to her story and some manner of stones had been stolen? The idea of flighty Gisela rubbing herself with pretty rocks every night wasn’t altogether implausible. She did have her idiosyncrasies. But did these stones of hers have to be the Jupiter Stones? Of course not. They could have been simple quartz or paste.

And if Le Chat had snatched a bag of worthless rocks…how délicieux.

Enjoying their own fantasies, no one noticed Gisela’s growing despondency. The police didn’t believe her. Her friends were enthralled with the criminal who’d robbed her of her most precious possession. The gossips were having fun at her expense. All these years, she suddenly realized, people had simply been indulging her. Not a soul had believed she had ever had the Jupiter Stones, much less been robbed of them!

Humiliated and despairing of ever seeing her corundum gems again, Gisela had flung herself off a cliff into the Mediterranean.

And everyone suddenly cursed Le Chat and demanded his immediate capture.

Enter Annette Winston Reed, the woman who had led the police to the true identity of Le Chat.

Word had spread rapidly that Jean-Paul Gerard was the culprit, and there was a collective gasp, a suspension of anger and grief, as people realized that if Le Chat wasn’t Cary Grant, he was awfully close. The notion of the handsome, sexy Grand Prix driver amusing himself—he couldn’t need the money—by stealing jewels went a long, long way toward renewing the romance of Le Chat.

But the police had their evidence, and there was precious little romance in their souls. The search was on for their missing suspect.

If they had believed Gisela…

Jean-Paul felt the tears spill down his cheeks, and he watched Thomas Blackburn lay a pink rose on the coffin. If others wondered about his presence at Gisela’s funeral, Jean-Paul did not. “Thomas is a good man,” she would say. “A true friend.”

While the Bostonian closed his eyes in silent farewell, Jean-Paul turned away, whispering, “Adieu, Maman.”

Tam curled up in the middle of Tante Annette’s bed and sobbed quietly so that the other children wouldn’t hear her. They would only tease her for crying. Even Papa had said she needed to be brave. France wasn’t their home, he had told her. But to Tam it was. She didn’t remember Saigon at all.

“Hi, Tam.”

“Go away,” Tam said, looking up at Rebecca Blackburn. She was only four and as big as Tam was at six. It wasn’t fair. Nothing was fair. “I don’t want you here.”

Rebecca climbed onto the bed. “Why not?”

“Because I hate your grandfather!”

“You shouldn’t hate my grandfather,” the younger girl said. “He likes worms.”

Tam sniffled and wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “He’s making Papa and me leave.”

“Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“But you live here.”

“Yes, but I’m not French.” She remembered her father’s words: “Our home is in Saigon.”

“I’ll come visit you,” Rebecca promised, curling up like Tam, her bare feet dirty from digging worms with her grandfather in the garden.

Tam shook her head, crying softly. “You can’t—it’s too far away.”

“My grandfather goes to Saigon all the time. My mom sends him pictures I color, and my dad says we can go see him sometime. We’ll come see you, too.”

“Okay,” Tam said, perking up. “Can you speak Vietnamese?”

Rebecca wasn’t sure what her friend meant, so Tam demonstrated, speaking a few sentences in her native tongue. Her father said they would have to stop speaking French when they were together and speak Vietnamese instead, so she could practice.

“It sounds pretty,” Rebecca said.

Tam smiled. No one had told her that before.

Her American friend jumped down off the bed and started poking around in Tante Annette’s things. She wasn’t really Tam’s aunt, but she said she didn’t like being called Madame Reed because it made her feel like an old woman. Tam adored her. She never criticized any of the children, just let them roam free in the gardens and the fields around the mas. Tam had heard Papa say Annette left them alone because she was bored and couldn’t be bothered with anyone’s needs except her own, but Tam didn’t believe that. Tante Annette was always patient and nice.

“Oooh,” Rebecca said, “look, Tam.”

With her grubby hands, Rebecca dumped out a soft, red bag onto the bed, and a pile of colored stones rolled onto the white spread. White, yellow, green, blue, red, purple, black—Tam giggled. “They’re so pretty!”

Rebecca carefully counted them; there were ten in all. “Do you think Tante Annette will let us play with them?” she asked.

Tam shook her head. “She’d be mad at us if she knew we were in her bedroom.”

“Oh. Do you want to dig worms with me?”

“No, thank you.”

With a shrug, Rebecca skipped out of the room, and Tam was again overwhelmed with loneliness and the fear of returning to a home she didn’t know or understand. She bit down hard to stop herself from crying and fingered the colored stones. She wished she could have them to remind her of Tante Annette and the mas. If she just asked…but no, Tante Annette would never say yes. And even if she did, Papa wouldn’t let Tam accept a gift she’d asked for.

Fresh tears warmed her eyes. Tante Annette had so many beautiful things. Papa said Vietnam was a poor country and they couldn’t expect to have as much as the Winstons did; it wouldn’t be fair to their countrymen who didn’t always have enough to eat. Tam tried to understand.

But she couldn’t bear to return the sparkling stones to the drawer where Rebecca had found them. Making her decision, she quickly stuffed them back into the velvet bag and ran to the caretaker’s house, to her tiny room next to the herb gardens, where she hid them.

“Tam, Tam,” Rebecca was calling excitedly.

Tam was certain her new friend had seen her and she’d have to give the stones back, but Rebecca ran into the caretaker’s house with the longest, fattest worm Tam had ever seen.

“Isn’t it cute?” Rebecca asked.

“Yes, it is,” Tam said, feeling much better.