Betrayals. Carla Neggers

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СКАЧАТЬ than a lot of what you’d find on Beacon Hill.”

      He smiled faintly. “Touché, my dear.”

      She sighed. “It’s too late to argue, Thomas. I’m going.”

      “I know.” He touched her arm. “I wish things could be different. I hope you know that.”

      “I don’t, Thomas. I only know that my husband’s dead and you’re willing to take responsibility for his death when no one asked you to. Now people are saying you were a communist collaborator, you’re naive, you were duped, you were arrogant. If you’d considered me and the children, maybe you’d defend yourself.”

      “To what end?”

      She jerked her arm away, scoffing. “It was difficult enough being a Blackburn before this tragedy. Can you imagine what it’s going to be like now? Think of your grandchildren, Thomas. Think what it’s going to be like growing up knowing their grandfather’s accepted full responsibility for the deaths of three people, including their own father. Even leaving Boston isn’t going to make that any easier to deal with.”

      Thomas pulled in his lips a moment, then sighed. “You’re right, of course.”

      “But that doesn’t change anything, does it?”

      “I’m afraid it doesn’t.”

      “The Blackburn pride,” she said bitterly, and turned away so that he wouldn’t see her cry.

      Without a word, Thomas went back inside. He didn’t come out when Ian O’Keefe arrived and helped Jenny finish packing, and finally she found him in his garden, pinching off wilted daylily blossoms.

      “You’ll come visit, won’t you?” she asked.

      He turned to her. “Not,” he said, “if what you want to do is forget.”

      “It isn’t.”

      “Then perhaps I’ll come. Invite me.”

      But she never did.

      Ten

      By noon the day after her picture had appeared on newsstands all over the country, Rebecca gave up all hope of getting any work done. Not that she’d tried that hard. There wasn’t a whole lot to do if she wasn’t going to get out there and take on new assignments. She’d thrown out her red nail polish, used up a dozen cotton balls and ten minutes getting it off her nails, and had done a few bad sketches of the replica of the Boston Tea Party ship just up the road at the Congress Street Bridge.

      And answered the telephone.

      It was ringing when she’d unlocked her door at eight-thirty and continued to ring most of the morning. She turned down interviews with two Boston newspapers and a regional magazine, but agreed to answer a few questions by a journalism student at Boston University who wanted to know about one of her school’s famous almost-alumni. There were three calls from businesses in metropolitan Boston who offered her assignments; she took their names and numbers and said she’d get back to them. Maybe. The president of a New York advertising firm called to talk to her about becoming his art director. He said he knew her work and had thought about tracking her down for several years, but when he saw The Score at the train station on his way home last night, he decided he had to call. Rebecca listened to his pitch and realized why he had gone in to advertising. She was tempted, told him so, and took his name and number.

      An old boyfriend from Chicago called and said he had to be in town on business next weekend, how ’bout dinner? She told him no, but thanks. After seeing Jared Sloan’s picture the last thing she wanted to think about was men.

      Half a dozen nonprofit organizations called with very polite, understated requests for money. Two she recognized as reputable and promised them checks, two she hadn’t heard of and asked them to send her more information and two she thought sounded made up and told them to forget it.

      And that was enough phone calls for one morning. She put on her message machine and headed over to Museum Wharf, where she stopped for lunch at the Milk Bottle, shaped like its name and located in the middle of the brick plaza in front of the Boston Children’s Museum. She took her hummus salad to a stone bench to watch the crowd, mostly kids, tourists and young, white-collar types looking for a quick meal they could eat outside. It was a gorgeous day.

      When Rebecca got up to pepper her hummus, about twenty preschoolers gathered around her bench for a carefully supervised picnic. She remembered taking her youngest brothers on picnics down by the pond at home in central Florida, teaching them about snakes and showing them how to catch frogs and lizards. In her room at night, she would describe all their activities in detailed letters to her grandfather in Boston.

      She had hated Florida at first. The oppressive summer heat, the big, strange rooms of Papa O’Keefe’s twenties-style house, the pond in the backyard, the endless citrus groves, the lack of neighbors, the spiders and snakes. It was all so different from Beacon Hill. But her mother had promised her she would come to love the place, and she had, in her own way. That didn’t stop her from wondering what her life might have been like if they’d been able to stay in Boston. Would she have turned out to be another in a long series of impoverished, holier-than-thou Boston Blackburns? At least, she thought, their “wilderness exile,” as Thomas Blackburn called it, had spared her that.

      After she took a few more bites of her salad, Rebecca tossed the leftovers and started back toward Congress Street. She’d return to her studio and take on all the assignments she could, maybe think about the advertising job in New York. She needed to work.

      A man’s face came at her from the throng crossing the Congress Street Bridge, past the replica of the Boston Tea Party ship, and she stopped cold.

      “My God,” she heard herself whisper.

      The face was even more battered now and older—so old—but there was still the slight limp, and the tough, sinewy body.

      Together, they became the Frenchman from Saigon.

      Or his ghost. Hanging back on Museum Wharf, Rebecca waited to see if she wasn’t hallucinating from the pressures of being back in Boston and having her picture in The Score force her to relive the hell of April 1975.

      She wasn’t hallucinating.

      Rebecca’s heart pounded; this was no coincidence. He had to be on Congress Street because of her. He had spotted her picture in The Score, looked up her studio’s address in the Boston Yellow Pages and here he was.

      The crowd thinned out once she’d passed Museum Wharf. Rebecca could easily make out the limping figure in worn, loose-fitting jeans and a faded, short-sleeved black shirt. With his scarred face and snowy hair, he’d never be able to melt into a crowd.

      Concentrating on keeping her breathing normal so she wouldn’t do something stupid like faint, Rebecca walked down Congress Street after him. Seeing him was a shock; there was no question of that. Her heart deserved to pound. But she didn’t have any idea whether she should be afraid of him or not.

      I suppose you’ll find out if you keep following him….

      There were enough people in her building and around outside that she wasn’t too worried he’d try anything. And she wasn’t fool enough to follow him all the way up to her isolated studio. СКАЧАТЬ