“Are you all right?”

She hesitated. Was she? “More or less.”

“Your uncle was here Monday morning—and an attorney from San Diego. They wanted to discuss the jewels and the trust, but, of course, I couldn’t violate client confidentiality and provide them with any information. I’ve been concerned those photographs might stir up some trouble. Have they? Where are you now?”

She pretended not to hear his questions. “Evan, I need you to arrange to get the rest of the jewels from Geneva. Use a bonded courier—and warn him the assignment could be more dangerous than last time. Tell him especially to watch for a blond apelike guy, about five eleven.”

Evan inhaled. “Ashley, perhaps you should come to the office and we should go over this.”

“Can’t, Evan. When the jewels get to New York, get an expert to have a look at them. Tell them they might be Hungarian. I’ll be in touch.”

She rented a car, and in the heat of middle Tennessee, she began her self-imposed mission. After nearly thirty years, she was checking out the story Barky had told her and David of their roots.

Bartholomew Wakefield and his younger brother, Richard, had been born in Warsaw, their mother Polish, their father English. When World War II was upon them, they moved to London, where they fought against the Germans. During the war, their father was killed in a bombing raid. Shortly after, their mother died of cancer. At the war’s end, the two brothers decided to emigrate to the United States.

But Richard fell in love with a young English girl whose family, like millions of others throughout Europe, had been decimated during the war. Mary Winston joined the Wakefield brothers, and soon she and Richard were married.

They ended up in Tennessee, where they found work on a dairy farm near Nashville. Richard and Mary lived in a cottage on the farm, and Bartholomew rented a room in a boarding house. They worked hard and pooled their savings to buy land.

In 1957, after years of infertility problems, Mary Winston Wakefield bore twins, and she and Richard named them Ashley and David.

Four months later, they were orphans. Richard’s tractor fell on him in a freak accident, and his wife ran out to help him...and she, too, was crushed while trying to extricate her husband. They died together, hours later, in a Nashville hospital. Bartholomew headed north with the infants and settled on a hundred and fifty acres in the fertile Connecticut River Valley of west central Massachusetts.

Barky had never articulated to his niece and nephew his feelings that day, but they had whispered to themselves, usually at night when they couldn’t sleep, and had tried to imagine. They respected his courage and loyalty in taking on infant twins, and they knew he had made sacrifices. He worked tirelessly. He had never married. And he never, never asked for anyone’s pity or thanks, especially theirs.

And, in turn, they had never questioned his version of the facts.