Wendy Hornsby - The Color of Light

“Whatever else Chuck might be,” she said, “I can’t imagine he’s a sneak thief. But I’m glad you changed the locks.”

While Jean-Paul cooked, Mom and I talked about the last few house details to be sorted out. I told Mom we should be finished with everything by the following afternoon and be back in LA later that night.

“And then what?” she asked. I knew her question was several layers deep. Jean-Paul, the Normandy project, my situation with the network, the future for her and me once the house-our last physical link-was gone, were all wrapped in there somewhere.

“I leave for France August first,” I said.

There was a long pause. I knew that my discovery of Isabelle and her family in France had opened old wounds, a fresh reminder of Dad’s affair. And though she fought it, she couldn’t help but feel that in some way I, too, was betraying her by getting to know Isabelle’s family. She always tried to sound supportive, but I had come to expect long pauses before she could bring herself to utter words of encouragement for the film about my grandmother, Isabelle’s mother, in Normandy.

I heard some false starts before she said, “Margot, is it possible that the break-in had anything to do with the questions you have been asking about Trinh Bartolini?”

“It’s very possible.” I hadn’t told her about Larry or being shot at by Lacy, and I didn’t intend to. She’s not the only one in the family who can keep secrets.

“Margot, dear.”

Uh-oh, I thought, this conversation was about to get very serious. Only my mom called me Margot, my legal name. And when she pronounced that name as she did then, with a ton of gravitas, I knew to be prepared.

“Margot, dear,” she repeated. “On your account, I have been on the receiving end of a two-pronged browbeating delivered independently by my oldest and dearest friend, Gracie, and your Uncle Max, whom I raised from the time he was a scruffy little nose-picker until he was a licensed attorney.”

“What have I done now?” I asked, making a note of the nose picking.

“Not you,” she said. “It’s what I didn’t do. They both have the idea that by not telling you about Isabelle as soon as you were old enough to handle the information, I actually put you-your very life-in jeopardy.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But there’s no point beating yourself up about it now.”

“Except,” she said in stentorian tones. “They both have decided that if I don’t tell you what you want to know about Trinh, I might be putting you in jeopardy again.”

“Dear God,” I said. “What do you know?”

“Where to begin?” She sighed heavily. “All right, yes, there was another man, but it wasn’t what you think. Trinh learned from the Red Cross that her sister Quynh was missing. Then she was contacted by someone who had proof of some sort that Quynh was being held for special punishment because she had American relatives. This person told Trinh he could get Quynh out of Vietnam, but it would be expensive. Trinh persuaded Bart to take out a second mortgage on their house to get the money. After they paid, they were told that the price had gone up. Bart, who is no man’s fool, understood they were being extorted and went to the police.”

“Did he go to Chuck?”

“More likely he went to the police chief,” she said. “There were always issues between the Rileys and the Bartolinis. Chuck was a Vietnam vet, and he brought a whole lot of ugly opinions home with him.”

“Did the police do anything?”

“I have no idea,” Mom said. “Whatever they did, if anything, it didn’t stop anything. Trinh had no money of her own, and the extortionist kept after her, telling her horror stories. So she asked an old friend for help, but he turned her down, too.”

“Was the friend Thai Van?” I asked.

“Yes, it was. She didn’t ask him for money; she was too proud for that. She wanted him to use whatever connections he had in Vietnam to find Quynh, to learn whether she was even alive. But Van said it was too dangerous to ask questions, meaning dangerous for Quynh, but I think it was too dangerous for his group as well. He and Trinh had a terrible argument about it; she was desperate.”

“And Trinh told you all this?”

“She didn’t have anyone else to talk to, and she was really very frightened.”

“Father John is in the business of listening.”

“Father John told her to pray. And so far, that hadn’t worked for either her or Quynh,” Mom said.

“Where does the other man come in?”

“She was told she could pay Quynh’s ransom with something other than money.”

“With sex?”

“I’m afraid so. I told her she would be crazy to do that. We argued about it, and she stopped talking to me.”

Her voice broke and it took her a few moments to get control again. After a long breath, she said, “Maggie, I made a terrible mistake. Rather, your father and I did. When Trinh told me that she was being blackmailed for sex, your dad went straight to the FBI.”

“You probably should have done that in the beginning.”

“It was a mistake,” she said. “Trinh was dead within the week.”

Sometime deep in the night I awakened, naked, a lovely ocean breeze blowing across my skin. Jean-Paul was sprawled on his back, snoring softly, one arm under my pillow and the other across his bare chest. I got up quietly and went to the bathroom.

The day had been warm. Our old house had no air-conditioning because it is so rarely necessary. In the evening, as is our habit in the summer, I had opened all the upstairs windows and bedroom doors to let the breeze off the Bay cool the upper floor so it would be comfortable for sleeping. But before we went to bed, I had closed them all again, or thought I had, except for the windows in our room and Max’s.

On my way back to bed, more awake than before, I realized there was also a breeze coming from across the hall. I slipped into a shirt Jean-Paul had draped on a chair and went to the door to look out. We had left the door ajar to listen for Max. When he got home from his dinner with Father John we were already asleep. But he made enough noise that it registered with me that he was in and had locked both of the deadbolts on the front door.

The house was absolutely still. I could hear Max snoring in the room next to ours and Jean-Paul’s steady breathing behind me, but nothing more except the wind in the trees in the yard below. The door to my old bedroom moved gently back and forth in rhythm with the wind. Out of habit, I thought, I must have left the windows open in there. The breeze was lovely and we were on the second floor, so I pushed the door further open to let the air flow through to our room. Because I was up, again out of habit, I walked on down the hall to take a look at the entry through the mirror in the stairwell. Everything appeared to be as it should be.

I went down the stairs to double-check on things. There was no need to do this. All the downstairs doors and windows had new locks that we carefully secured before we went up to bed, and I’d heard Max shoot both front door bolts. I think that, because it was to be my last night in the house where I grew up, I went down out of nostalgia more than anything, a last nighttime look at the old place, its familiar shapes and shadows.

When I got to Dad’s den, I went inside and checked the window the burglar had gone out through on Thursday night-it was closed and locked-and stopped to look around. There were empty spaces where Dad’s big chairs had been; his bookcases were dark hollows. But I could still feel his presence in the room, imagine that the susurrus of the wind outside was him rustling papers on his big desk. Satisfied that all was secure, I said good-bye to Dad again and turned to go back upstairs to bed, to curl into the contours of Jean-Paul’s body and fall asleep again to the lullaby of his quiet breathing.