Betrayals

by Carla Neggers

  The run had only been marginally cathartic. He had already notified his secretary he would be in late, but maybe he’d skip going into town altogether. He could just stay here and walk on the rocks. They’d be slippery in the persistent drizzle; he’d have to be careful.

  Or not.

  He smiled bitterly in the cool wind. It would be a tragic accident, wouldn’t it? Would his mother miss him or revel in the attention her grief would elicit? First the young widow, now the childless mother.

  “Jesus,” Quentin breathed, trying to shake off his depression.

  He started back toward the house, his wet sneakers squishing with every step and bits of grass sticking to his legs. He remembered how he’d once fantasized about living here with Tam, filling the giant house’s cavernous rooms with their children. As he progressed across the drizzle-soaked lawn, he could almost see them running to him, crying “Daddy” as he scooped them up.

  Why couldn’t Tam have continued to love him? Why couldn’t she have forgiven him?

  Then he realized a figure was coming across the lawn, not a child, but a man. Quentin blinked, thinking his imagination had run wild. Yet as he drew closer, the figure remained, becoming clearer, and he saw the shock of white hair, the limping gait.

  The Frenchman. Jean-Paul Gerard.

  Quentin slowed, but didn’t bolt, as perhaps would have been smart. He could easily outrun the older man. Still, no matter what Quentin did, the Frenchman had always been able to find him in Saigon. He would find him in Boston, as well, if that was what he meant to do.

  When they were face-to-face, Quentin cleared his throat and said, “You’ve come to kill me.”

  Gerard laughed the terrible laugh of Quentin’s nightmares. “Don’t tell me—you also thought I was dead. Or did you only hope I was?”

  “I haven’t thought about you in years.”

  More laughter. But there was no corresponding twinkle in the Frenchman’s dead eyes. The laughter faded, and he said, “Liar.”

  True enough. “What do you want?”

  “Not to kill you,” Gerard replied, matter-of-factly. “No, my friend. Nothing will ever be that easy for either of us. I have no wish to harm you. Our arrangement from Saigon is finished, for both of us.”

  Their “arrangement” had been nothing short of blackmail. Quentin had arrived in Saigon in October of 1973—nearly eight months after the Paris Peace Accords—despising those of his Americans who’d exploited the country they were supposed to help and protect, who’d supported an underlife of prostitution, drugs and desperation. Then, so easily, so stupidly, he had become one himself. Preying on the fears of a beautiful Vietnamese woman, he had gotten her to fall in love with him—or at least pretend she had. When he’d gone home to Boston and didn’t return fast enough to suit her, she’d assumed the worst. She never even gave him a chance. Instead, she had fallen into Jared Sloan’s arms, and Quentin had come to wonder who had used whom.

  But Gerard hadn’t blackmailed him over his love affair with Tam. Through his own naiveté, Quentin had gotten involved with a network of American civilians running drugs into the United States. Jean-Paul Gerard had found out and threatened to bring his “evidence” of Quentin’s involvement to the head of Winston & Reed—unless Quentin paid. So Quentin complied. Thousands of dollars he paid, until his only escape was to admit everything to his mother and beg for her help. Her solution was to make him stay home. So he did, in August 1974, accepting his first management position at Winston & Reed, but expecting—hoping—Tam would understand that he really did love her and would return for her.

  But he had never gone back to Vietnam. What would have been the point? He would have had to defy his mother and risk another encounter with Gerard. And Tam had found another man.

  Quentin envied how relaxed the Frenchman looked, as if he didn’t even feel the chilly air and drizzle. “Your mother has something I want,” Gerard said calmly.

  “That’s absurd.” Quentin couldn’t hide his shock. What could Annette Reed and this troll have in common? “My mother wouldn’t have anything a lowlife like you would want.”

  Gerard grinned, his stained and missing teeth revealing decades of abuse. “You don’t think so? She’s a very rich woman, my friend.”

  “If it’s money you want—”

  “It’s not. None of this need concern you, but it can, if she refuses to cooperate.”

  Quentin summoned what courage he could. “Stay away from her. If you—”

  Gerard waved him silent. “Please, I don’t have time for this ‘protective son’ nonsense. Your mother needs no one’s protection, least of all yours. She has a valuable collection of sapphires. I want them. If I were you, I’d make sure she gets them to me.”

  “You’re mad.”

  “If not by now, then no doubt soon. But that changes nothing, my friend. The sapphires.” Gerard’s eyes were piercing, suddenly very much alive. “You tell her, all right?”

  Stunned, Quentin watched the frightening man limp back across the lawn, moving with confidence and a strange dignity. He continued down the driveway and disappeared beyond the evergreens that gave the grounds privacy and an air of seclusion. If he’d wanted to, Quentin could have chased him. Demanded answers. Throttled his thin, ravaged figure. But despite his scars and limp and advancing years, Jean-Paul Gerard had proven himself a surprisingly resilient man.

  Did he have proof of what Quentin had done in Saigon? Would he have to go to his mother again and beg her help to keep the one stupid mistake he’d made fifteen years ago from continuing to hang over his head?

  Quentin shuddered. As usual, he simply didn’t know what to do.

  Jean-Paul climbed into the nondescript sedan he’d stolen out of the Boston Common garage. He had no money for rentals. Satisfied that he’d put the fear of God into Quentin Reed, he drove out to Route 1 and headed back down to Boston, keeping within the speed limit. Annette would know he wasn’t going to give up. He’d keep turning the screws harder and harder, until she surrendered the Jupiter Stones.

  “Yes, Maman,” he whispered, “we will succeed.”

  He stopped along the way for coffee and candy bars, his staples the past few days. He’d dozed no more than an hour or so at a time since he’d seen The Score in Honolulu. There would be time for sleep later. He needed to stay awake. Last night he’d seen Annette’s bedroom light on well past midnight and imagined her plotting ways to kill him, and he’d seen Jared Sloan come to the Blackburn house on West Cedar Street.

  They were a problem, Jared Sloan and Rebecca Blackburn.

  He would deal with them next.

  In Boston, he left the stolen car on Cambridge Street at the west end of Beacon Hill and felt no remorse. He’d picked a car with a near-empty tank of gas and was leaving it half-full.

  Quentin showered, shaved and dressed, and feeling more in control of himself if no calmer, he dialed his mother’s Mt. Vernon Street number from the bedroom telephone.

  He hung up before she could answer.

  She would be coming into the office later today. He would see her there and talk to her in person. He would have to be careful. Even under pressure, his mother had extraordinary self-control, but Quentin hoped he would be able to see through any smoke screen regarding the Frenchman and these sapphires he was after.

  Had his mother once done something stupid for which Jean-Paul Gerard was trying to blackmail her?

  Impossible.

  More likely, Gerard was using what he had on Quentin to force him to get his mother to relinquish something valuable—sapphires—that she had acquired through legitimate means. Quentin would once again be the loser: his mother would relinquish the gems to protect him and keep what he’d done fifteen years ago from coming out and embarrassing them both. She would hold his mistake over his head forever.

  He couldn’t let that happen. She wasn’t a woman to understand and never one to forgive. If he intended ever to gain her admiration and respect, he couldn’t let Saigon resu
rface.

  What if he could get the sapphires and give them to Gerard?

  Mulling over that possibility, Quentin went out to his car and finally decided that whatever he chose to do, he couldn’t afford to make a mistake. If he did, the Frenchman would be waiting. And so would his mother.

  “I often wonder what this company would have become if your father had lived,” she had once told her only son. “Don’t be like him, Quentin.”

  Too late, Mother, he thought. I already am.

  Nineteen

  For the first time in twenty-six years, Thomas Blackburn walked to the end of West Cedar Street and turned up Mt. Vernon. Staying away from the Winston house was the one concession he’d made during his self-imposed exile; he and Annette Reed simply didn’t need to bump into one another. If anyone was going to move off Beacon Hill, it would have to be her. Occasionally he’d spot her on Charles Street, and would do his best to avoid her without ducking behind lampposts or otherwise going out of his way. He assumed she did the same.

  Billowing gray clouds had again gathered over the sun, and although it was morning, the temperature was dropping. Thomas could feel the dampness in his chest as he headed up Mt. Vernon Street. All he needed now was to have a heart attack and drop dead in front of Annette’s doorstep. She’d be mortified, and his grandchildren would never forgive him.

  He grunted with morbid amusement. What would Rebecca do with the Eliza Blackburn House? He’d left it to her in his will. She was the eldest of the grandchildren, and with her substantial fortune she could afford the taxes and upkeep. Sometimes he’d wished his own stubborn pride had permitted him to take her money and fix up the place, but that wasn’t his way—and it would have spoiled the perverse pleasure he’d taken in thumbing his nose at the Annette Winston Reeds of the city by continuing to take in student boarders and refusing to paint the shutters. Yet Thomas hoped all that would be finished by his death. He hoped his granddaughter could enjoy spending her money to restore the famous house, and that his descendants could understand what he’d done and why, and take pride again in being Blackburns.

  That was what he wanted, he thought: a future in which, even if no Blackburn chose to live there, Eliza’s beautiful home was returned to its original gracefulness and charm and put back on the Beacon Hill walking tour. It would be a fitting symbol of the restoration of the Blackburn name.

  He suspected it was what Rebecca wanted, as well. Although she hadn’t admitted as much to him, he was convinced it was the chief reason she had come back to Boston. Time, her success, her money, her extraordinary spirit and talent—they were all to erase the stain Thomas Blackburn had put on the family. Two centuries of excellence, high standards and achievement had crumbled with his one terrible mistake.

  But Rebecca was being naive, and perhaps so was he. It would take more than his death and her accomplishment to make things right again on Beacon Hill. No matter what the Blackburns did, there would be Annette Winston Reed to remind everyone that her poor husband was dead, along with Thomas’s own son and his Vietnamese friend, and that Thomas Blackburn had killed them.

  His heart was thumping along rather erratically when he came to her house on Mt. Vernon, but he was only perspiring lightly and his chest pain had abated. From here on he’d be fine. Damned if he’d give her the satisfaction of dropping dead at her feet.

  The front gate was open. Her flowers were in better shape than his. When he was just a little boy, Thomas remembered his mother walking him over to the Winston house. She had pointed to it as an example of high-style Adam architecture and remarked on the elliptical fanlight, the Palladian window in the second story above the elaborate front entrance, the two end chimneys, the roof balustrade, the cornice-line modillions and dentils. An art historian, she had taken up the cause of architectural preservation immediately after the signing of the Armistice; if still alive, she would have gladly signed letters protesting her son’s neglect of the Eliza Blackburn House.

  His mother had lived to see her only grandson married and her first great-grandchild born. She had adored Jenny O’Keefe almost as much as Stephen had, even understood her ambivalence about raising a family in the city and leaving her own father alone in Florida, coping with the lofty expectations people had of anyone—including herself—bearing the Blackburn name. “Being married to a Blackburn can be a devilish experience,” she’d said.

  Thomas shook off his daydreams and rang the doorbell in Annette’s gleaming, perfect entrance.

  Nguyen Kim opened the door. Thomas had heard about him from the neighbors and one of his student boarders from the early 1980s, a Vietnamese refugee studying at M.I.T. who had seen Kim on Mt. Vernon, and he made her nervous. Probably, she said, Kim had saved his own skin in 1975 without even considering the fate of his countrymen.

  Thomas inclined his head politely at the straight-backed Kim. “I’d like to speak with Annette.”

  “It’s all right,” the lady of the house said from within the large foyer. Kim quietly withdrew, and Annette came into the doorway. “Well, Thomas, it’s been a long time. I was wondering if you’d show up. You might as well come in before the neighbors see you.”

  “They wouldn’t give a damn. People don’t care about what you do as much as you’d like to believe they do.”

  She feigned amusement. “Already lecturing me?”

  “Just stating the facts.”

  “Go to hell,” she said mildly.

  Leaving the door open, she went into the formal parlor. Thomas assumed he was expected to follow and did. For the first time in more than a quarter-century, he really looked at Annette. Time had had its effect, but she was still a striking woman, more regal perhaps, more withdrawn. She’d been so high-spirited and deliberately unconventional as a girl, so adventurous and irrepressible as a young woman. If only she’d been more comfortable with who she was, if she could have applied her energies to building a company sooner. What if she hadn’t been born to money, influence and rigid expectations? She could have founded a company like Winston & Reed, anyway. But perhaps not. Being born a Winston was just an excuse for the mistakes she’d made. As much fun as she’d been in her youth, Annette was selfish and self-absorbed, and one needn’t be rich to have those faults.

  Playing the polite hostess, she offered him sherry, but he shook his head. “You’ve turned into the kind of grande dame you always despised.”

  She shrugged. “People change. I’ve grown up, Thomas.”

  Opting not to go into the office today, she had put on her gardening clothes and supposed she looked like any other frumpy Beacon Hill housewife. What did she care? Thomas knew her accomplishments; she didn’t need to “dress for success” to prove herself to him. I don’t even need to prove myself to him—who the hell’s he? After a sleepless night, she had hoped a morning in the garden would allow her to think. Those damned pictures in The Score and Jean-Paul’s ultimatum had shattered the fragile status quo that had existed in her life—in all their lives—for the past fourteen years. That Thomas Blackburn had chosen now of all times to invade her life wasn’t unexpected; his timing was notorious.

  Annette felt his incisive gaze on her as she sat on the edge of a Queen Anne sofa. Knowing her guard was standing in the hall, she said in a normal voice, “Kim—would you bring coffee, please?”

  Thomas remained standing, looking rumpled and old. “Why did you let me in?”

  She gave him a cool smile. “Would you believe pity?”

  “No.”

  “Anyone else would. You’re a broken old man, Thomas. You’re right—I shouldn’t worry if anyone saw you outside. People around here don’t talk about you anymore. Most don’t even realize you’re still alive.” She leaned back, wishing she could look as relaxed and unconcerned as he did. Yesterday had been a harrowing day. “No, Thomas, the only reason I let you into my house without a fight was to spare myself the torture of having to listen to whatever threat or promise you cooked up to get me to agree to have this conversati
on. So go ahead. What’s this all about?”

  “Jean-Paul’s in town.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Her answer was too abrupt, her voice too cold. Annette didn’t like that because it indicated Gerard’s reappearance had disturbed her. She preferred to show Thomas Blackburn she was absolutely in control and unafraid, that she had the upper hand. Kim entered the room with an elaborate tray of coffee and warm scones, a pot of wild strawberry jam and whipped butter. He set it down on the antique table in front of her and poured two china cups, offering one to her guest first. Thomas accepted. With Annette served, Kim withdrew. As always, she appreciated his absolute discretion and efficiency.

  With deliberate nonchalance, she sipped her coffee, set it down and pulled a needlepoint pillow onto her lap. She’d made it herself, painstakingly needlepointing a trailing arbutus—the Massachusetts state flower—in the center, another of those tiresome proper ladies’ hobbies she’d taken up to fill the lonely hours of her semiretirement, when she wasn’t undoing Quentin’s mistakes at Winston & Reed.

  Thomas went on, “He wants the Jupiter Stones, doesn’t he?”

  “Presumably. That, however, isn’t my problem. I don’t have them. I don’t care whether or not you believe me, Thomas,” she went on, “but I assure you if I had the damned things I’d have given them back to him years ago. They were a stupid bit of revenge for what he did to me. I had no idea he’d hold the grudge for thirty years.”

  “You ruined his life,” Thomas pointed out.

  “He ruined his own life.”

  “I suppose it depends on one’s point of view. It must have come as an enormous shock to you to discover your twenty-four-year-old French lover was a jewel thief. How did you feel about turning him in?”

  She ignored his half-sarcastic, half-critical tone. “I did what I had to do.”