The Diamond Secret by Ruth Wind Page B

thought. It hadn't slowed, didn't appear to be stopping. Maybe I was getting a break, finally.
    And maybe that was because I was finally going to do the right thing by taking the jewel to the Glasgow inspector who'd invited me here.
    "I am here," Paul said.
    "It's okay. I think I'm safe, finally." I paused. "Thank you."
    "My pleasure. Good night, Sylvie," Paul said.
    The phrase brought back a thousand memories. I pushed them down into their box. "Goodbye," I said, and hung up.
    Then I started the car and headed north once again. There were still monsters about. It would do to be careful.

Chapter 12
    Marbode, Bishop of Rennes (1061–1081), wrote "De gemmarum," on the spiritual and medicinal attributes of gems. In a book lacking in the expected Christian symbolism, Marbode describes diamond: "This stone has aptitude for magical arts, indomitable virtues it provides the bearer, nocturnal spirits and bad dreams it repels, black poisons flee, disputes and screams are changed. Cures insanity, strikes hard against enemies. For these purposes the stone should be set in silver, armored in gold, and fastened to the left arm."
    T he weather settled a bit into a normal sort of rain. I thought of my father and wondered again where he might be staying. I could use a little advice. Not that he'd ever been particularly wise, you understand, but I could be fairly sure he had no hidden agenda. That was a lot more than could be said of anyone else in this little drama.
    I thought of Luca and I wondered if he was still alive.
    I thought of the Katerina, tucked into my bra, and all the trouble she'd gotten me into.
    I thought of Paul and the summer I was fifteen and about the awful school year in Brazil when I learned to fight.
    At the end of that academic year, Paul arrived to whisk me away to his apartment in Paris. I was exhausted and withdrawn, tense as a street cat. Which I suppose, in some ways, I'd become.
    Paul was furious with my father for neglecting me so, but in his defense, my father was in terrible condition himself, swirling downward in a spiral of self-destruction. I don't remember if he raced—he must not have, since I was staying with him in Rio. There was a woman at the start, then quite a lot of them, all lush, ethnic beauties who were nothing like my slim, pale Scottish mother.
    It's hard to remember, too, how Paul discovered my plight. Perhaps my grandmother was worried about me—she repeatedly asked my father to let me come live with her, go to school in Ayr, have regular meals and a regular life, but he wouldn't hear of it—and sent Paul to investigate the situation. Perhaps he only visited and made sense of it himself. I have no memory of it. The year is a blur of survival challenges.
    It would make a good television show— Reality: Rio Girl Gangs.
    Ha.
    Somehow, anyway, Paul discovered the miserable truth of my situation. That we were living in a hovel, and I was virtually on my own in a city of millions, attending a school at which I did not know the language and the girls beat me up on a regular basis, with the meanest of girls right in my own building.
    I still want to kill them, those girls, though perhaps I owe them a great debt. They made me tough.
    Paul sent me an airline ticket to Paris at the end of the term and I flew in on a Tuesday in May. He picked me up at the gray airport on a soft sunny morning. I had brought little with me—most of it shoved from my drawers into an oversized rucksack—and I was jetlagged, heart-sore, soul-ragged. I felt like an orphan.
    He stood there waiting in the gray, grim, cigarette-stained airport with its Jetson styling, tall and loose-limbed in a pale green cambric shirt that showed off the warmth of his olive-toned skin. His hair was a little long, wavy in the back, the dark, dark ends just touching his collar. To me, he looked like everything good and safe and real in the world.
    My defenses dissolved as I moved toward him, and like a very small girl, I flung myself into