Betrayals

Seventeen

Mai knew she would need cash for her plan. As much as she could lay her hands on. Her grandfather didn’t leave large sums of money lying around for someone to slip unnoticed into a pocket. All she’d managed to grab since her plan had come into her head after dinner last night was a measly five dollars she’d found on top of the refrigerator. She’d pay him back every penny she “borrowed.”

She had set her alarm for 4:00 a.m. and shoved it under her pillow so no one else would hear it go off, but it almost gave her a heart attack when it did. At least she was wideawake. She slipped noiselessly out of bed. The house was cool and filled with strange shadows. Wesley and Maureen Sloan had no pets, so there were no barking dogs to worry about, no cats to streak out of the darkness.

Her first stop was the living room, with its dramatic view of the bay and San Francisco, glittering through the predawn mist. She checked everywhere.

Nothing.

The dining room proved equally barren. She didn’t find so much as a dime at the bottom of a wineglass. It wasn’t like at home, where her father always left the odd twenty-dollar bill and loose change around. She had never swiped a cent from him. It had never even occurred to her to steal from her own father; she’d always relied just on her allowance and own earnings.

He had called her from Boston. “Hey, there,” he’d said, “is Granddad feeding you chocolates and letting you play with all his gadgets?”

Mai had replied that he was, but she would rather be with him in Boston. “Where are you?” she’d asked.

He wouldn’t tell her where he was staying. He just wanted to make sure she was okay, that was all. “Sulk all you want,” he’d added. “It won’t kill you.”

If she had a mother, would her father be as big a pain as he was?

Shivering, Mai went into her grandfather’s study, built on a more intimate scale than the rest of the house, but still large, especially compared to her and her father’s place in San Francisco. Here the view was of the garden, a magnificent, exotic place that would burst with color in the sunlight, but now, before dawn, was dark and spooky. Mai suddenly wished her grandfather believed in drapes. She got to work, going through drawers, pencil holders, filing cabinets, credenzas, anything that could possibly hold cash.

She struck pay dirt in a smooth wooden pear, about eight inches high, that opened in the middle. Inside were five one-hundred-dollar bills.

Mai had hoped for just fifty or a hundred dollars.

Stifling a squeal of victory, she scooped up the bills with one hand.

But how would she ever pay back five hundred dollars? She was saving money for college, and she could earn a fair amount babysitting and doing yard work-but five hundred dollars? She had trust funds set aside for her future, but she’d bet her dad and her grandfather would want the money paid back long before then.

She pushed the two ends of the pear together and retreated to her room, glad to be under her warm blankets, flush with money.