died, and she might very well have killed a man herself. There was no telling how many other lives had been lost, or bought and sold, in the quest for this particular pot of gold.
Dollars and cents, she mused as she looked down at her neat columns and totals on the notepad. But it had become much more than that. Perhaps like many of the carelessly wealthy, she’d often skimmed over the surface of life without seeing the eddies and currents the less fortunate had to pit themselves against. Perhaps she’d always taken such things as food and shelter for granted until the last few weeks. And perhaps Whitney’s own personal view of right and wrong often depended on circumstances and her own whims. But she had a strong sense of good and bad.
Doug Lord might be a thief, and in his life he might’ve done innumerable things that were wrong by society’s standards. She didn’t give a hang about society’s standards. He was, she’d come to believe, intrinsically good, just as she believed Dimitri was intrinsically bad. She believed it, not naively, but completely, with all the healthy intelligence and instinct she’d been born with.
She’d done something more while the others had slept. Restless, Whitney had finally decided to glance through the books Doug had taken from the Washington library. To pass the time, she’d told herself as she flicked on a flashlight and located the books. As she’d begun to read about the jewels, the gems lost over the centuries, she’d become caught up. The illustrations hadn’t particularly moved her. Diamonds and rubies meant more in three dimensions. But they’d made her think.
Reading through the history of this necklace, that diamond, she’d understood, personally, that what men and women craved for adornment, others had died for. Greed, desire, lust. They were things Whitney could understand, but passions she felt too shallow to die for.
But what of loyalty? Whitney had gone back over the words she’d read in Magdaline’s letter. She’d spoken of her husband’s grief over the queen’s death, but more, his obligation to her. How much had the man Gerald sacrificed for loyalty and what had he kept in a wooden box? The jewels. Had he kept his heritage in a wooden box and mourned a way of life that could never be his again?
Was it money, was it art, was it history? As she’d closed the book she had been left uncertain. Whitney had respected Lady Smythe-Wright, though she’d never quite comprehended her fervor. Now she was dead for little more than having a belief that history, whether it was written in dusty volumes or glittered and shone, belonged to everyone.
Marie had lost her life, along with hundreds of others, with rough justice on the guillotine. People had been driven from their homes, hunted, and slaughtered. Others had starved in the streets. For an ideal? No, Whitney doubted people often died for ideals any more than they truly fought for them. They’d died because they’d been caught up in something that had swept over them and carried them along whether they wanted to go or not. What would a handful of jewels have meant to a woman walking up the steps to the guillotine?
It made a treasure hunt seem foolish. Unless—unless it had a moral. Maybe it was time Whitney discovered her own.
Because of this, and because of a young waiter named Juan, Whitney was determined to find the treasure, and to kick dust in Dimitri’s face when she did.
She faced the morning confidently. No, she wasn’t naive. Still, Whitney held to the basic belief that good would ultimately outdo bad—especially if good was very clever.
“What the hell’re you going to do when the batteries on that thing run down?”
Whitney smiled up at Doug before she slipped the thin, hand-held calculator and her notepad back in her bag. She wondered what he would think if he knew she’d spent several hours during the night analyzing him and what they were doing. “Duracell,” she said sweetly. “Would you like some coffee?”
“Yeah.” He sat down, a bit leery of the way she poured and served so cheerfully.
She looked exquisite. He’d figured a few days on the road would leave her a bit haggard, a little rough around the edges. He scraped his palm over the stubble on his own chin. Instead, she looked radiant. Her pale, angel-blonde hair shone as it rippled down her back. The sun had warmed her skin, bringing up touches of rose that only