“Yeah.” Troubled, Tash sipped her wine. “The question is, a new beginning of what? The start of the really bad times?”
“I don’t think that’s the attitude my friend had in mind.”
Leaning against the counter opposite her, Coltrane had a dizzying sense of unreality. Tash Adler even spoke like Rebecca Chance, her full-throated voice and engaging cadences the same as Rebecca Chance’s in The Trailblazer and Jamaica Wind. She seemed to be in her mid-twenties, the same age Rebecca Chance had been when she disappeared.
“Is something the matter?” Tash asked. “You’re looking at me as if… Have I got something caught in my teeth?”
He laughed. “Not at all. Sorry. I didn’t mean to stare. It’s a photographer’s habit. I can’t help imagining how I would take someone’s picture.”
“Is that what you want to do? Take my photograph?”
“There’s something about the way you’re leaning against that counter.”
“Oh?” She looked puzzled.
Coltrane realized that a compliment about her looks might sound as if he was coming on to her. The last thing he wanted was to alienate her. “The raspberry of the exercise suit you’re wearing is the only bright color in the room. Otherwise, everything’s white. Well, not totally. Those knives in that container have black handles. So do the handles on that toaster and the knobs on the stove.”
“I added those touches of black deliberately,” Tash said. “Without contrast, white isn’t effective.”
“That’s what intrigued me. Your suit makes this room a black-and-white photograph in color.”
Tash considered him. “You’re very observant.”
Coltrane made a modest gesture. “It comes from taking a lot of photographs.”
“No, I suspect taking photographs didn’t make you observant. The other way around. But I also suspect you often see more than you ever wanted to. Not everything’s beautiful.”
Coltrane remembered sighting through his telephoto lens as Ilkovic directed his men to grind up the bones of the corpses that the backhoe had dredged up from the mass grave in Bosnia. “Yes, not everything’s beautiful.”
“I need to ask you something.”
Coltrane inwardly came to attention.
“The reason I asked you to stay.”
Coltrane waited.
“I didn’t want to talk about this in front of the others,” Tash said. “You seem to know an awful lot about Randolph Packard.”
“Since my late teens, I’ve been trying to learn everything I can about him.”
“Then maybe you could tell me something. Do you have any idea at all why he would have included me in his will?”
It took Coltrane several seconds to recover. “You don’t know?”
“I was absolutely mystified when his attorney got in touch with me. Sure, I know who Randolph Packard was, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out why he would have given me that estate in Mexico. It’s like he picked my name out of a hat or something. Totally unexpected. I asked his attorney. What’s his name? Blaine?”
“Yes.”
“I asked Blaine if he knew why Packard had chosen me, but Blaine told me he hadn’t the faintest idea.”
“From what Blaine told me, that seems to be the truth.”
“I didn’t know who besides Blaine to ask,” Tash said, “and by then, I was deep in this mess with whoever…” She gestured toward a wall and whatever lurked beyond it. “I’ve had a lot of things on my mind. So when, out of nowhere, I heard you mention Packard and the estate in Mexico, you could have knocked me over.”
“I have to be honest about something.”
Tash’s dark eyes narrowed, as if she was afraid of what he was going to say.
“I haven’t been entirely open with you,” Coltrane said.
She looked more uneasy.
“The reason I came here wasn’t just to find out if you’d be interested in selling the Mexican estate. I’ve never seen it. Who knows how it’ll strike me if I ever do see it? What I really came here for was to ask you the same question you asked me.”
“Why Randolph Packard gave me the Mexican estate?”
“Yes.”
Tash shook her head in exhaustion. “Please. I have all the mysteries I can handle.”
“But maybe the answer to mine will help solve one of yours. Have you ever heard of an up-and-coming movie actress in the thirties named Rebecca Chance?”
Baffled, Tash considered the name. “No.”
“I’m not surprised. She disappeared before she had the chance to become a star.”
“But what does she have to do with-”
“She was being stalked. The same pattern of letters, gifts, and phone calls. Then one day she vanished.”
“If you’re trying to frighten me even more than I already am…”
“No,” Coltrane said. “I’m trying to help you figure out why Randolph Packard put you in his will. Packard was desperately in love with her.”
“Rebecca Chance.”
“Yes.” Coltrane paused, struck anew by the alluring features of the woman across from him and the uncanny situation in which he found himself. “And Rebecca Chance looked so much like you… you look so much like her… you might as well be the same woman.”
“What in God’s name are you talking about?”
Coltrane hesitated.
He told her everything.
“Photographs?”
“And movies that Rebecca Chance was featured in. But you’re right to zero in on the photographs. They’re what’s truly important. Because Packard took them. Because he hid them.”
“And Rebecca Chance is identical to me?”
“So much so that I thought I was hallucinating when I first saw you.”
“This is… I can’t…” She stared at him. “Show them to me.”
Coltrane blinked in surprise. “What?”
“I want to see the photographs.”
“But I don’t have them with me. I can come back tomorrow and bring-”
“Now. I want to see them. Take me to them.”
Tash’s emotion was so intense that for several moments Coltrane wasn’t able to move or speak. He found himself saying hesitantly, “All right… sure… if that’s what you…”
“I’ll just need a second upstairs.”
“We’ll be going into L.A.”
“You don’t have to worry about driving me back. I’ll follow you.”
“I wouldn’t mind driving you back. It’s just that…” A misgiving nagged at him. It had nothing to do with showing Tash the photographs. If anybody had the right to see them, it seemed to him that she did. His uneasiness came from another source, something to do with the parallel between Rebecca Chance’s stalker and Tash Adler’s stalker and…
Mine. With a shudder, he realized that in order to help Tash, he had to be as cautious now as he had been when Ilkovic was hunting him. He had to put himself in her place, to imagine that he was the person in danger.
“It’s better if I drive you,” Coltrane said.
Tash paused on her way from the kitchen. She looked mystified.
“If someone is watching your house, he’ll follow you when you follow me, and he wouldn’t have much trouble. A Porsche isn’t inconspicuous.”
“That’s what Walt said.” Tash sounded disheartened. “Get rid of the Porsche, or at least rent something bland until this jerk is in prison. I’ve already reduced my movements until I’m practically living in a box.” She shook her head stubbornly. “I’m not going to let that bastard take anything more away from me.”
“But you don’t have to drive the Porsche.”
“What am I going to do, run behind you and bark at your tires?”
It sounded so unexpectedly humorous, they stared at each other and found themselves laughing.