The Diamond Secret by Ruth Wind Page A

house and washed my face with cold water. He forced a brandy down my throat.
    When I'd finally fallen asleep, he talked my father into letting him take me away for a holiday for a few weeks, just until the worst of the shock wore off. Somewhere warm, where the sun could bake away some of my slashing pain.
    My grandmother—that would be Sylvie, the Frenchwoman I'm named for—adored Paul, and from that summer in Nice, knew we had a special bond. My father was absent that year, racing or drinking or otherwise trying to kill himself. I sometimes wonder if he remembers any of it.
    We went to Tahiti, Paul and I, ostensibly so that he could teach me about the great painters who'd done their work in that land, the French Gauguin, first, of course, but also van Gogh. He booked a cabana on a beach, where we heard the turquoise waters swishing up on the white beaches. Wind rustled the pine trees. It was so far away. So exotic.
    We swam. We studied painters—Gauguin and van Gogh, Matisse and Boullaire. We explored writers, too—Robert Louis Stevenson, a restless Scot, and Jack London, whom I liked, and Melville, who bored me. He read aloud from the journals of Pierre Loti, and I liked that, too.
    Paul coaxed me to eat with papayas and mangos and delicate monkfish. He bought me rosary beads made of polished coral, to remind me that I'd always have a mother. At night, he stayed up late long after I went to bed, drinking. I don't know if he loved her as a woman, or merely as a friend, but his grief was true and deep.
    There is a photo from that trip that still sits on my mantle. Paul is tall and tan, his beard grown out a few days worth on his chin. His hair is longish, lionlike. He looks thin to me, his hands too big for his wrists, his cheeks gaunt. I am leaning on his shoulder, my head sideways so my crown is against his neck. We both look haunted.
    And yet, at the end of a few weeks, we returned to Nice, where my father was living. Paul went back to Paris.
    And things were all right for a while. Then my father moved us to Brazil.

Chapter 10
    The next most important element of the 4 C's of diamond grading is color . Color is classified by letters, ranging from "D," colorless, to "Z," yellow. The final category of color rating is "fancy", such as red, pink, blue, and strong yellow. Many are highly prized. One famous example is the vivid blue Hope Diamond.
    —www.costellos.com.au
    B ack in the present, in the darkness of my cousin's caravan, I startled as my sleep foot took a dream step into a void. For a moment, I lay there blinking, confused over my location, the strong smell of oranges in the room, the unfamiliar—
    I looked at the man attached to the hand on my hip.
    Oh. Yes.
    I glanced at the digital clock. We'd only been lying here maybe an hour, if that. What had startled me into wakefulness? I stared into the dark, listening, but heard only the whipping, roaring wind and rain. It must have been—
    Car doors slammed. Next to me, Luca bolted upright. He pressed fingers to my lips before leaping up to peer out the window. He swung back and bent down close to whisper, "There is someone out there."
    I shifted, tried to find the comfortable hollow in the bed that I'd been so enjoying a moment ago. "I'm sure it's just a neighbor. Let's sleep."
    "I do not think your neighbors are carrying baseball bats, no?"
    "What?" I stood up to look out the window. Rain was pouring down still, the darkness nearly absolute except for the pool of light that glowed from the caravan itself, not so much light under most circumstances, but more than enough on such a dark night to show me a small car and the three men headed our way. "Who are they? How did they find us?"
    "I do not know."
    I dived for my shoes, jamming my feet into them hard. "What do we do?" My mind was full of images of a drug lord garroted, his throat spilling blood down his white shirt front.
    Luca turned, putting his hands on my upper arms. "Listen, Sylvie, get out of here, go back