Betrayals (4 page)

San Francisco

J
ared Sloan cursed the sadist who had invented the tuxedo and had another go at his bow tie. It’d been years since he’d tied one. He’d managed all the other parts of the tux with relative ease and probably would have handled the bow tie all right, but he was running late. At least, except for cleaning, his tuxedo hadn’t cost him a dime. His mother—proper Boston Winston that she was—had insisted on buying it for him years ago, and all he’d had to do was resurrect it from the back of his closet. Another failure with the tie, though, and back under his baseball cards it went. He’d wear jeans. Which would embarrass his father
and
his daughter. He’d never hear the end of what an insensitive lout he was and sparing himself that was worth another try at his tie, and maybe even the six or seven hours he was doomed to spend in his tuxedo. It was a close call.

He smiled at the sound of Mai’s undignified squeal from the entry.
“Daddy!”
Then she caught herself and calmed
her voice to that of a fourteen-year-old would-be sophisticate. “Dad, are you almost done? The limousine’s here.”

Only for you, babe.
Jared successfully completed his third try at what was, in fact, a simple knot. He quickly appraised himself in the mirror. The tux’s classic style helped conceal its age; both the Boston Winstons and San Francisco Sloans would be willing to claim him tonight. He had the strong Sloan cheekbones, dark hair, teal eyes and their general rakish, devil-may-care look. His height—he was six-two—and his more powerful build came from his mother, the second of Wesley Sloan’s four wives, who’d exited from Boston society years ago and now lived on the east coast of Canada in what she called self-imposed exile. She’d never been so content.

“Wow,” Mai said when he joined her in the entry. “Don’t you look handsome.”

He laughed. “You’re no dog yourself.”

Mai wrinkled up her pretty face. She was a small, slim girl, wiry and strong, with almond eyes and high cheekbones, a squarish jaw and a reddish cast to her fine, dark hair. From the time she was a tot, Jared had tried to get her to concentrate just on being herself. But lately he’d begun to realize that Mai wasn’t entirely sure who that was. He tried to understand. Her mother, whom Mai had never known, had been Vietnamese. In Vietnam, Amerasians were known as
bui doi.
The dust of life. The expression broke his heart, for Mai was, in a very real way, the light of his life.

“That’s not much of a compliment,” she told her father.

“Wouldn’t want you to get a swelled head. You’re going to be swimming in compliments by the end of the evening. Ready?”

The glint in her eyes and the way she kneaded her hands
together told Jared his only child was champing at the bit, anxious to zip ahead of him to the elegant black limousine waiting incongruously outside their small redwood-and-stucco house on Russian Hill. But she restrained herself. A bright ninth-grader, she had lost none of the energy and exuberance of her early childhood, but was channeling it in new directions. Still, Jared found himself half expecting she’d run out and kick the limousine’s tires, check under the hood, demand to try out every seat and see how every gadget worked, what every button did. A year ago she would have—in fact, her grandfather had told him, had.

Tonight, however, she walked regally out to the monstrous car, careful not to muss her gown made of clear, cool magenta fabric that exquisitely complemented the delicate tones of her skin. She quietly thanked the chauffeur by his first name, George, when he held the door for her, and tucked her knees together and her ankles to one side when she settled back into the leather seat.

Jared came around to the driver’s side and climbed in beside her. He hated limousines more than he did tuxedos. At sixty-five, Wesley Sloan was an internationally renowned architect and could well afford his expensive tastes. The repeated offers he’d made to Jared to join his San Francisco–based firm were enough to make most architects salivate, but Jared, the eldest of Wesley’s three children by ten years, continued to turn him down. He preferred to work solo, in the small studio behind his house, specializing in renovations, restorations and additions— “glorified carpentry,” his father called it. But Jared’s half sister Isabel had recently earned her graduate degree in architecture from UCLA and seemed ready to make the move up to San Francisco, something he hoped would take that last bit of heat off him. Wesley Sloan knew Jared
wasn’t going to change his mind, but he wasn’t a man who liked to accept defeat.

If Wesley had known how much his granddaughter enjoyed riding in his limousine, he’d have tried sending it around every afternoon and never mind her father.

It was a cool, damp, foggy evening, the kind that made Jared intensely aware of his aloneness. He watched silently out the window as the car wound its way down the narrow, twisting streets of Russian Hill.

A small crowd was gathered in front of the elegant newly opened San Francisco Villa Hotel, designed by Wesley Sloan. He and his current wife were hosting their annual charity ball, a major social event on the city’s spring calendar. Wesley had issued an invitation to his granddaughter every year since her twelfth birthday. This year, Jared had relented and agreed to let her attend. As he had before her, Mai would have to learn to deal with being a Winston and a Sloan on her own terms—not theirs, not his.

But as much as he believed in her and admired her spirit and self-assurance, she was just a kid.
His
kid. And he couldn’t stop himself from wanting to protect her.

She tugged on his arm. “Daddy—look.”

Jared was already looking. As the limousine pulled up to the curb, eight or ten huge Harley-Davidson motorcycles materialized out of the fog and formed a menacing half circle around the car.

“George?” Jared asked.

“I don’t know what’s going on, Mr. Sloan,” the driver said. “There’s no way I can pull out—we’re stuck here.”

“Are they going to hurt us?” Mai asked, trying to hide her nervousness.

Jared shook his head. “No, they’ve got too big an audience. I think they just want to intimidate us.”

They revved their engines and made a lot of noise, glowering at their own reflections in the limousine windows. They were an ugly lot—overweight, tattooed, unkempt. Not one wore a helmet. Tough guys. Jared spotted two policemen emerging tentatively from the crowd. A newspaper photographer was clicking madly away.

“To hell with this,” Jared muttered and turned to Mai. “Stay put.”

He threw open the door as far as he could, until it touched the edge of the lead bike, and climbed out, directing his attention at the driver, a mean-eyed individual with a battered leather jacket stretched over his fat gut. Jared asked nonchalantly, “What’s up?”

“We weren’t invited to the party.”

Jared laughed. “Consider yourself lucky.”

The photographer had worked his way around the limousine behind the two policemen, who didn’t appear to be in any hurry to assert their authority.

“Hate to miss a party,” the biker said. He made a point of coughing up a huge clam and spitting so that it landed at Jared’s toes.

Jared wasn’t impressed. The guy and his pals were just getting their kicks intimidating a bunch of rich folks at a high-society gathering, only they’d picked the wrong target. Jared had dealt with scarier people than this.

“You can go in my place,” he said, almost meaning it. “Got a tux strapped to that contraption?”

The biker seemed to appreciate Jared’s humor and started to grin, but then Mai popped her head out behind her father and pulled his hand. “Daddy,
please
come back inside—”

“Hey—who’s the gook kid?”

Jared heard Mai’s sharp intake of breath and saw the
look of amusement her obvious fear and hurt elicited from the biker.

He snapped.

Putting all his weight on the door of the limousine, he lunged toward the big motorcycle. The force of the door hitting the bike’s front tire caught the driver off guard and wrenched the handlebars out of his hands. He couldn’t clear the bike and went down with it, catching his left leg underneath it. Jared didn’t lose any time. He leaped over the fallen motorcycle and jumped on the bastard who’d insulted his daughter.

It wasn’t the other bikers coming to the aid of their trapped buddy or the police jumping into the fray that stopped Jared from beating the guy senseless.

It was Mai.

“Daddy!” she cried.

He released the man’s flabby throat and climbed back over the motorcycle, putting out his arms as Mai ran to him, near tears. He told her softly, “It’s okay. They’re just punks.”

Reluctant to prolong the confrontation, the police let the bikers shove off. Jared noticed he’d gotten grease on his tuxedo and his tie had come undone. So much for sartorial splendor.

He put out his arm for Mai. “Madame?”

She giggled and laid her small hand on his crooked elbow. “I should have helped you beat that guy up.”

“One hothead in the family’s enough.”

The photographer continued to click away, but Jared ignored him and the cheering onlookers as he escorted his daughter to her first charity ball.

A
lmost a week after Winston & Reed had ousted her, Rebecca found herself painting her nails red and scanning a magazine article on Phoenix. She’d never lived in Phoenix. She wasn’t sure it’d be smart to move there at the beginning of summer, but desert living had an exotically romantic appeal. And there wasn’t much to keep her in Boston. Her fledgling one-woman studio was at a lull.

Of course, painting her nails and reading magazines weren’t going to help that. She wasn’t above scrambling for work. She’d worked in enough studios to appreciate the demands of the graphic design business and knew what it took to succeed. Talent alone wasn’t enough—it also took sheer grit. When she’d first returned to Boston, she’d worked hard. Not wanting to hire anyone until she’d made the commitment to stay, she did everything herself. She was her own account executive, senior designer, office manager, receptionist and gofer.

Her studio occupied several airy rooms in a crummy building a few blocks in the wrong direction from the Boston Children’s Museum. She’d bought the building
back before real estate prices in metropolitan Boston had skyrocketed. It was on the site of the original warehouse owned by Blackburn Shipping way back in 1800. Her fellow tenants—none of whom knew she was their landlady—included a grumpy printer she’d never hire to do any of her work, an office supply wholesaler, a caterer, three or four accountants and about a dozen other strange little businesses that didn’t need to rely on walk-in customers.

The telephone roused Rebecca from consideration of becoming the art director for a Scottsdale-based international resort chain. How posh. She could hit the Jacuzzi on her lunch hour and get free vacations.

She flipped on her background-noise tape and picked up the phone. “Rebecca Blackburn.”

“R.J.—what’s that noise in the background?”

Rebecca grinned at Sofi Mencini’s voice. “My office staff busily at work. I read somewhere background noise encourages callers to take a one-woman outfit more seriously—makes them think I’m actually running a business here.”

“Turn it off. I’ve got news.”

Sofi wasn’t one to fool around between nine and five; it was just now ten-thirty. The honey-haired, diminutive cocreator of Junk Mind was Rebecca’s best friend and former roommate, a woman of wit, endurance and determination. Years ago Sofi had arrived at Boston University as the sheltered upper-middle-class girl from the suburbs, while Rebecca had been the outcast Boston Brahmin come home after ten years of exile in central Florida with her mother and five younger brothers. They’d both made their bids for independence—Sofi through one measured, deliberate act of will after another, Rebecca explosively. While Junk Mind was going on, Sofi had gotten her MBA and
was ready when opportunity knocked to jump into corporate America. She’d never looked back.

“You’ve made the tabloids,” Sofi said in her no-nonsense manner.

Rebecca laughed. “What, someone found out Winston & Reed axed a Blackburn?”

She grimaced at the unexpected bitterness in her tone. Until Boston, she had never taken a position without believing absolutely that this one would be the right one—that at last she’d found her niche, her home. She always worked her hardest. In terms of design, she invariably performed beyond her employer’s already high expectations. While being fired or quitting did have its liberating side, it also provoked a more difficult emotion, an indescribable emptiness and sense of betrayal, a feeling of loss. But her bid for the Winston & Reed job—even, to a degree, coming back to Boston—wasn’t an attempt just to get work or establish some sense of stability in her life.

What she was doing, she knew, was tempting fate.

“Yeah, I heard about that,” Sofi said. “At least you won’t starve without Quentin Reed’s money.”

“I’m thinking about moving to Arizona and taking up painting cacti. In a pinch I could sell a few off the tailgate of my truck to tourists.”

“R.J., you make me crazy.”

“On the other hand, I’m a designer, not a painter. I wouldn’t be any good at cacti paintings.”

“You don’t need to paint cacti or anything else so quit this poor artist routine.”

Sofi was always ready to poke fun at her friend’s money habits. “So what’s this about the tabloids?” Rebecca asked, steering Sofi back onto the subject.

“R.J.,
The Score’
s got your picture on the front page—
and that you’re currently operating a graphic design studio on the Boston waterfront. A reporter weaseled it out of one of the underlings here.”

Rebecca put down the brush to her red nail polish. Sofi’s news, at any rate, explained the messages she’d ignored from a reporter wanting to interview her; he’d never said what newspaper he represented. She didn’t blame him. Not that it would have mattered: she’d quit talking to reporters a long time ago.

“I haven’t gone near a reporter or a photographer in years,” she said.

“I know.”

“Sofi?”

“Think back, R.J. The fall of Saigon. Tam, Mai…”

Rebecca shut her eyes.

Jared.

“Oh, no.”

Quentin Reed hesitated before pushing open the wrought-iron gate that marked the entrance to the Winston house on Mt. Vernon Street. One of the few free-standing houses on Beacon Hill, it was a quintessential Charles Bulfinch design with its pristine Federal lines, brick facade, black shutters and doors. Two huge old elms, coddled against the ravages of Dutch elm disease, shaded the brick sidewalk and front lawn, also a rarity on the Hill. Quentin had walked from Winston & Reed. Any meeting with his mother unsettled him; one called suddenly, with a request that he come at once, made him drag his heels, not so much to postpone the inevitable but to steel himself for it. He stood a moment in the shade, taking in the quiet of Beacon Hill. He could hear birds twittering in trees and shrubs; the crush of Beacon Street and the Common, of downtown Boston only blocks away, seemed distant.

Inhaling deeply, he smelled mowed grass and flowers, not just exhaust fumes, and finally he headed up the brick walk and over to the cobblestone carriageway. His wealthy mother’s cavalier attitude toward security was notorious among her friends, but she refused to change. She had always loved risks and adventure, and hated the idea of living like a paranoid old woman. She considered her inside alarm system, the lock on her carriageway gate, and Nguyen Kim, her full-time bodyguard and driver, sufficient protection.

As he walked around to the rear of the big house, Quentin could feel the critical eyes of generations of Winstons on him. The ghosts, he called them. They’d always been a proud, principled, damnably lucky lot. They’d made their first fortune in the pre-revolution China trade, another in the post-revolution China trade, after they’d returned from the safety of Canada and silenced their critics by pumping money back into Boston’s war-decimated economy. They were there when the Industrial Revolution had arrived and profited from a burgeoning textile industry, and like so many rich merchants and manufacturers in New England, they learned the ins and outs of conservative money management to preserve their fortune. When he married Annette Winston, Benjamin Reed was to apply those principles to her considerable assets. Instead he founded Winston & Reed.

Quentin could still see his father, a Connecticut Yankee never comfortable on Beacon Hill, standing atop Pinckney Street just after a snowstorm, with his bare head in the gusting February wind as he watched his only child careen down the steep hill on his sled. “Keep going!” Benjamin Reed had yelled. “You’ll make the river yet!” He seemed oblivious to the impediments between Quentin’s speeding
sled and the Charles River: busy Charles Street, Storrow Drive, the median, fences, the Esplanade. Quentin would always stop at the corner of West Cedar Street, as his mother had instructed him to before he left the house, and wonder if he’d somehow failed his father for not even trying to make the river’s edge. But that was the man Annette Winston had married: filled with grand ideas, but without the drive or the strategic abilities to carry them out.

In 1966, three years after his father’s death, Quentin had left Beacon Hill for good. There was boarding school, then Harvard, Saigon, then a condominium on Commonwealth Avenue and a position at Winston & Reed. He’d since taken a huge apartment in the Winston & Reed–built five-star hotel on the Public Garden, but he’d surprised everyone when he’d opted for a view of Park Square over the more coveted—and expensive—view of the Garden and Beacon Hill. He and his wife, Jane, also owned a house in Marblehead on the North Shore, which Quentin adored. Jane was living there alone for the moment while they worked out problems in their marriage, but he hoped when they were back together they could abandon the city altogether, an idea he wisely kept from his mother. She expected him to return to Mt. Vernon Street. The house was his to inherit.

“Lucky me,” he muttered, wishing his mother would will the damned place to someone else. But to whom? He and Jane had no children as yet. Quentin hoped a family was in their future, but right now he couldn’t be certain his marriage was going to survive. There was Jared, but his cousin hadn’t shown up in Boston since 1975 and wasn’t particularly fond of his Aunt Annette. And Jared’s daughter Mai was out. She wasn’t a part of Boston, of her great-aunt’s view of the Winstons. As usual, Quentin was stuck.

He found his mother in her stone garden house, transplanting pink geraniums into scrubbed terra-cotta pots. Gardening, he felt, was one of those chores Annette Winston Reed pretended to enjoy but secretly loathed. At sixty, she had chosen to play the game of representing the honor, dignity and charm of a bygone era—of being the proper Boston Brahmin dowager. She looked the part well enough with her gracefully graying hair, her reserved style of dress, her unconventional beauty. With age, she’d come into her particular kind of attractiveness; her strong features and height made her seem elegant without being frail. She sat on the boards of numerous nonprofit organizations and was generous with her time, energy and intelligence. People saw her as a well-bred, if formidable, Beacon Hill lady.

Yet there was another side to Annette Reed: the side that had made her the successful, imposing chairman of Winston & Reed, the woman who had led the company since her husband’s death. It was she who had transformed it into a major player in the volatile and lucrative real estate and construction markets of the northeast United States. However, she seemed ambivalent about her power and her business triumphs. Oddly true to her own background and era, in public she credited her husband for his conception of the company and her son for running it. In private, however, she made sure Quentin knew who was in control. Yet, at the same time, she didn’t hide her frustration with him for acquiescing to her will, seeing it not as respect for her abilities but as a sign of weakness in him. Not that she’d have tolerated anything else. Quentin had come to see that his mother’s need to control stemmed not from strength and intelligence, as he had once believed, but from insecurity and selfishness. As for himself, he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.

“Quentin—dear, it’s so good to see you.” She pulled off her gardening gloves. “Kim just put out lemonade in the garden. Shall we?”

As if he had any choice. “Of course, Mother.”

“I was going to come into the office,” she said, leading him out of the garden house, “but I felt this is a private matter properly discussed at home.”

Quentin made no comment at her assumption that he, too, would consider the Winston house his home. She gestured to the chair at the white iron table he’d occupied since boyhood, and he sat down obediently, letting her pour two glasses of fresh-squeezed, lightly sweetened lemonade. There was the ubiquitous plate of sugar cookies as well, their sweet smell mixing with the scents of the garden, an unusually large one for Beacon Hill.

His mother withdrew a folded section of newspaper from the khaki jacket she always wore gardening. “I saw this at the pharmacy earlier this morning and decided I should call you.”

She shook the paper open as she handed it across to him, her hand steady, and Quentin tried to conceal his reaction when he saw the two photographs occupying most of the front page of the popular national tabloid. He could feel himself going pale, could feel his stomach begin to burn. The picture on the left was a famous shot portraying the final American withdrawal from South Vietnam. It was seared in Quentin’s mind for all time. There, again, was twenty-year-old Rebecca Blackburn carrying an infant and supporting the weight of a seriously wounded Jared Sloan as she got them all into a helicopter, only hours before communist troops entered Saigon. Rebecca’s anguished expression—of shock, horror, betrayal, grief and determination—had captured the mixed feelings of so
many as the nation of South Vietnam ceased to exist, and two decades of American hopes and promises ended.

The photograph on the right was a recent one of Jared Sloan in San Francisco, decking a motorcycle tough who’d insulted his fourteen-year-old Amerasian daughter, looking on from her grandfather’s limousine. Quentin’s gaze lingered on Mai Sloan. He absorbed every detail of her pretty face with its unusual, distinctive features. He could see Tam in her.

Tam…

After so many years, Quentin was amazed that he still felt betrayed by her, still felt such unrelenting sorrow over how they’d lost each other. She’d died that last day in Saigon. Her child—
Jared’s child—
had lived. “It’s painful to look at, I know,” Annette said tartly, snatching the clipping from him. “How Jared could let such a thing happen…” She broke off with an irritated sigh. “There’s not much of an article. Fortunately, we weren’t specifically mentioned, but they did find out Rebecca Blackburn’s back in Boston. I’m afraid there could be ramifications for us, Quentin. We should be prepared.”

“Mother, don’t be silly. I haven’t seen Jared in years—”

“That doesn’t matter. He’s your cousin. And if the press should learn Winston & Reed had hired Rebecca—and let her go—we could be in for some nasty publicity.”