Carla Neggers - Betrayals

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.