Mai hunched over toward the passenger door. “That’s okay.”
“You’re still worried about that man, aren’t you?”
Nodding slowly, Mai decided not to mention that she was also worried about her great-aunt. Going off with her to Marblehead had suddenly not seemed such a good idea when the Frenchman had pounced on the Reed car. Why had he told her to run? Why had he looked so scared?
“Do you know who he is?” Mai asked.
“I have no idea. Mai, I don’t want to worry you needlessly, but…well, dear, I believe he’s the man who killed your mother. Any proof we could get would be in Saigon—Ho Chi Minh City now. We’ll talk to your father about him after we get to Marblehead, all right?”
Mai shut her eyes tight, trying to squeeze back the tears. She wanted to talk to her dad now. She didn’t trust Annette Reed. No wonder her dad hadn’t let her come visit Boston. His aunt was weird.
“Calm down,” Annette said. “Everything will be fine.”
The minute the car slowed down, Mai thought, she was going to jump out and run and call the police to bring her father to her.
Annette, however, gave no indication she’d be slowing down anytime soon.
Jean-Paul had Rebecca’s truck cranked up to seventy as he negotiated the intricacies of 1A and corrected his passenger on the mistakes in detail she’d made in her rendition of the events of the past thirty years. The general scope of Annette’s wrongdoing—and his own—she had exactly right.
“So in 1959,” she said, “you and Annette had an affair and she framed you for a series of jewel robberies you didn’t commit. Why didn’t you stand up for yourself?”
“The evidence was against me—Annette had planted one of her own bracelets in my house and said I’d stolen it from her. And, Rebecca, who do you think would have believed me? I was a daring Grand Prix driver. She was a proper Boston housewife—”
“Who got her kicks stealing jewels from her wealthy friends and acquaintances.” Rebecca winced. “I guess you were caught between a rock and a hard place.”
“She warned me I was about to be arrested and paid me to get out of the country—to avoid the embarrassment of our affair coming out.”
“Did she realize you knew she was Le Chat?”
“No, she still doesn’t.” Jean-Paul gripped the steering wheel, remembering her attempt last night to get him to believe Thomas was Le Chat. A clever way, he now saw, to get them both out to the relative isolation and privacy of the Winston house on Marblehead Neck. He added, “She’s convinced it’s her secret.”
“And that’s what started everything else?”
“That and my own greed, my own inability to let the past be.”
“You wanted the Jupiter Stones?”
“Yes.”
Rebecca turned and stared out her window. “I have them, you know.”
Jean-Paul stopped breathing. “What do you mean?”
And she told him…about Tam at six and herself at four in Annette’s room…about infant Mai screaming on the helicopter and Rebecca scooping out the fortune in gems…about hanging on to them for the past fourteen years thinking Tam must have been planning to smuggle the jewels into the U.S., and that the Vietnamese who’d killed her had been after them.
When she finished, Jean-Paul was unable to speak.
Rebecca looked at him. “You’ve always thought Annette had the Jupiter Stones, haven’t you?”
He nodded, the slow, dull, agonizing ache of regret working its way through him.
“That night in Saigon,” Rebecca said. “You had no idea Tam had the stones?”
“No,” he whispered. It was nearly impossible to utter a word. “She must have figured out everything and threatened Annette….” He broke off, choking back tears. “If only I’d left well enough alone.”
“You risked your own life in an attempt to save Tam’s—and you did save mine, Mai’s, Jared’s. You shot Jared to keep the Vietnamese from killing him outright, didn’t you?”
“Yes…”
Tam, he thought. Beautiful, stubborn, determined Tam. All these years she’d had the Empress Elisabeth’s gems. Had she realized their monetary value? With the Jupiter Stones, she could have bought herself a new life in any country in the world. But not Tam, Jean-Paul remembered. At twenty-two she had wanted love and happiness…a life with Quentin Reed. So she had used the valuable gems—the stones that could damn Annette as a liar, a jewel thief, and even a murderer—as a means to get what she wanted.
Help me, Madame Reed, Jean-Paul could hear her saying, and I’ll return the Jupiter Stones to you. Let me have Quentin…let me have a life.
It was all so clear to him now.
Aah, Maman, I’ve failed you again.
Beside him, Rebecca asked, “What happened to you after that night?”
Annette, he explained, had slipped into Saigon to make certain Tam and her baby didn’t get out. As South Vietnam had collapsed, her network had scattered, and, in any case, she was unwilling to delegate this particular nettling problem. Not until he had spotted her hired assassin going into Jared Sloan’s apartment had Jean-Paul realized she was even in the city. Knowing he was probably too late, he had raced after the Vietnamese, but already Tam was dead. Jean-Paul told him Annette had sent him as backup.
Afterward, Jean-Paul had gone after her.
“I didn’t know where she was,” he said, in a neutral tone that surprised him. “That gave her an advantage.”
She had shot him in the face and left him for dead in an alley.
Jean-Paul regained consciousness in a communist Saigon. All around him were bo dois, communist soldiers. His face was shattered, and his recovery, in hiding, was slow. It was eighteen months before he could escape with dozens of refugees in a fishing boat, a grueling experience for which even his years as a POW hadn’t prepared him.
He got as far as Honolulu before his body gave out again, to malnutrition, dehydration, infection. The next months he spent on the streets just trying to stay alive. How could he possibly take on Annette Reed? He saw her picture in a magazine, read about her in cast-off copies of the Wall Street Journal. She was untouchable.
You’ve survived, he’d told himself. Be glad of that.
Not until he’d seen the copy of The Score had he known Rebecca, Jared Sloan and Mai had gotten out alive. He could have found out but hadn’t. The picture was like a call to action. His final chance.
Stupidly, arrogantly, ridiculously, he had thought he could succeed this time in compelling Annette to give up the Jupiter Stones and to bring her to justice for the crimes she’d committed.
But Annette had never had the Jupiter Stones.
“I should have stayed in Honolulu,” he told Rebecca.
She smiled with tragic understanding. “Isn’t hindsight wonderful?”
As they drove on, she had her own gloomy thoughts to fight. She loved Jared. Nothing had changed after all. If anything happened to Mai…
“If you knew for certain you were doing the right thing,” her grandfather had often said, “you wouldn’t be making a difficult choice.”
No crystal ball.
He had chosen silence in 1963. Twelve years later, Jean-Paul had chosen to risk his own life to keep Annette from adding to her body count. Jared had chosen to claim Mai as his own child and raise her.
Not easy choices, maybe not even the right choices—but they’d had to make a decision. And all choices, all decisions, had ramifications.
Was that something Annette understood? She had tried to kill Mai once already…her own granddaughter.
“We’ll get Mai away from her,” Jean-Paul said, reading Rebecca’s thoughts. “Annette knows I was hesitating about going to Marblehead. She’s using Mai to lure me.”
“What do you think her strategy is?”
“To blame the last thirty years on your grandfather,” he replied calmly, “and to kill him and me.”
“But that’s crazy!”
He fastened his w
arm, soft eyes on her. “Think about it, Rebecca. Is it?”
Thirty-Six
The Winstons’ house on Marblehead Neck was much as Thomas remembered from his first visit there with Emily, before World War II, but he wasn’t the same man he’d been. As he stumbled on the slippery rocks and shivered in the biting ocean wind, he could see Annette as a little girl, climbing up to him, her hands filled with seaweed and periwinkles, her cheeks rosy and her eyes bright with triumph.
“Look, Uncle Thomas, look! Do you think I’ll find a mermaid, too?” she’d asked.
“Keep looking,” he’d said. “You never know.”
“I’m going to show Father.”
Minutes later, Thomas had seen John Winston angrily marching to the edge of the rocks with little Annette’s treasures and flinging them as far as he could, and her mother taking her sobbing daughter inside to wash her hands and change her dress, telling her there were no such thing as mermaids.
All more than a half century ago and yet, Thomas thought, clearer in his mind than anything that had happened last year.
Behind him on the rocks, Nguyen Kim commanded him to stop. Thomas was perfectly glad to oblige. He’d read somewhere that balance and the legs were the first to go as one aged, and from this billy-goat climb down to the water’s edge, he could attest to that theory’s veracity.
They had come to a relatively level area of barnacle-covered boulders and tide pools below the tide line, well out of view of the house. With the gathering storm, the tide was coming in high, with huge, frothy swells. Already Thomas could feel the icy spray of the roiling waves on his face. Had Annette, he wondered, made her plan according to the weather, or were the turbulent seas just another of her happy coincidences?
He turned around, and Kim pointed to a rock and ordered him to sit.
“Barnacles are sharp,” Thomas said.
Kim grinned. “Good.”
Annette’s Vietnamese bodyguard had met Thomas on the lawn and, without a great deal of fanfare, had revealed the gun tucked in his waistband and suggested Thomas lead the way down to the rocks.
Thomas had hoped the bastard would trip and accidentally shoot off his own balls.
He sat on the rock. The barnacles pricked his rear end, but it wasn’t that uncomfortable—preferable, he supposed, to a bullet in the head, although that might be next.
“I gather Annette doesn’t want me killed in her living room,” Thomas commented.
Not answering, Kim removed a length of rope from his back pants pocket.
Thomas stiffened his jaw so that his teeth wouldn’t chatter, but the cold had reached into his bones. “Afraid I’d come back and haunt the place, isn’t she?”
“Your hands,” Kim said.
With a resigned sigh, Thomas crossed his hands behind his back, and Kim immediately came round and whisked the rope around his wrists, Kim repeating the move with Thomas’s ankles, the knots tight enough that what little circulation he had to his extremities was immediately cut off. He’d always had an irrational fear of having to have a hand or foot lopped off, but supposed that’d be a luxury now.
“You always were efficient,” he said mildly.
Kim fastened his hard eyes on him. “I’ve only done what I had to do to survive.”
“And what, might I ask,” he said, unflinchingly meeting the Vietnamese’s gaze, “is so bloody important about your surviving?”
“You’re going to die today, old man.”
Thomas gave him a cool, appraising look. “As I should have twenty-six years ago?”
Not responding, Kim gave the ropes at his captive’s hands and feet a final tug and bounced back onto his feet.
“Nguyen Kim,” Thomas said, rolling the name around in his mind, as if he hadn’t made up his mind yet whether he recognized it or not. “Quang Tai’s friend, weren’t you?”
“I knew him.”
“Did you know you were signing his death certificate when you tipped off your Vietcong friends on Annette’s behalf?” Thomas’s gaze didn’t let up. “That was you, Kim. Tai trusted you. He told you my itinerary—and you, brave fellow, told the insurgents.”
Kim remained impassive. “I was doing a job,” he spat. “On your stomach!”
But Thomas wasn’t fast enough for Kim, who grabbed him by the shoulder and thrust him onto a huge, flat boulder. Thomas felt the sharp barnacles bite into his cheeks.
“You’re going to drown, old man,” Kim said.
His feet crunching on the barnacles, he hurried off, leaving Thomas trapped at the water’s edge, unable to do much beyond listening to the rhythmic sounds of the approaching tide.
Jared’s call to Sofi Mencini shook him. She had gone over to Mt. Vernon Street herself, but saw no sign of Annette, Rebecca, Mai, Thomas or Jean-Paul. “I’m worried, Jared,” Sofi had said.
“So am I.”
“David’s putting the stones in a safe at the store, but I’m calling the cops.”
Jared agreed. “I’ll join you as soon as I can.”
Through the hotel’s glass front doors, however, he saw Quentin climbing out of his white Porsche and smiling graciously at the uniformed attendants rushing to serve him.
Jared surged forward. An attendant moved to open the door, but not fast enough, and Jared banged through it, sensing the already suspicious eyes of the security guards on him. He didn’t care. He jumped in front of Quentin, grabbed him by the front of his shirt, and smashed him up against his car.
“Where’s my daughter?”
Quentin squirmed in terror. “Jared…what’s wrong with you?”
“Answer me.”
“She’s with Mother. I thought—she said Thomas had called and you and he and Mother were all going to meet in Marblehead.”
Jared froze. “Your mother has Mai?”
The attendant with the keys said tentatively, “Mr. Reed, you want me to get security out here?”
“No, it’s all right,” Quentin managed to say, Jared’s grip on him already loosening. “What’s going on, Jared? I saw Mai myself. She’s fine. She looked a little tired, that’s all.”
“When did they leave?”
“A half hour ago, something like that. Jared, Mother’s not a monster. I know she said some pretty cruel things about Mai at first, but that’s over. They seemed to be getting along—” Quentin swallowed, white-faced. “Thomas didn’t invite you to Marblehead? You don’t know anything about it?”
“No.”
“Jared, is he going to hurt Mother and Mai? He’s an old man, and it just never occurred to me…”
Jared started for Rebecca’s car, but stopped abruptly and turned to Quentin, still sprawled against his Porsche. “Answer me this, Quentin. Did Tam come to you for help getting out of Saigon in 1975?”
“What? No, I never heard from her after I left. I know that was wrong, and I don’t blame you or her for what happened. I—I guess I was just stupid. I did really care about her, you know.”
Jared felt as if his entire world was on fire. Tam didn’t go to Quentin for help, she went to Annette. He stared at his cousin. “Then you don’t know.”
“What?”
Mai’s your daughter….
“Get in,” Jared said, pulling open the passenger door to Rebecca’s car. “We’ll talk on the way.”
Thirty-Seven
All in all, Annette thought as she followed Mai onto the rocky coastline of her Marblehead Neck house, it was a solid plan.
It would be difficult to blame everything on Jean-Paul. He’d suffered too much. He’d had to flee his country; he’d endured five years as a prisoner of war; he’d been shot in the face. He was a decidedly seedy character, but still peculiarly sympathetic, unable to elicit the kind of hatred a highbrow like Thomas Blackburn could.
For all his talk of suffering, had Thomas ever really suffered? Ha! He’d lost his pusillanimous son—who would have died in Southeast Asia sooner or later. His daughter-in-law had fled back to the swamps of Florida with her passel
of children, but there wasn’t a Quentin among them. Had Thomas ever had to make the difficult choices to save a family member the way she had Quentin?
No, Thomas Blackburn wouldn’t stir up much sympathy.
With him, Gerard and Mai dead, Annette could cover her tracks and she’d be believed. There’d be no ravaged, white-haired Frenchman to counter her, no scrawny old Boston Brahmin who’d known her for her entire life, no fourteen-year-old Amerasian girl who looked too much like a Reed to pass for half-Winston, half-Sloan for much longer.
She would explain the tragedy in simple terms.
In 1959, Thomas Blackburn, in desperate need of funds for his new business venture, stole jewels from people his young friend Annette Reed had mentioned or introduced to him during his weeks in and out of France. When he was about to be caught, he’d framed the popular race-car driver Jean-Paul Gerard for his crimes.
In 1963, Thomas had caused the deaths of the three men, and the horrible five-year imprisonment of Jean-Paul Gerard out of his own arrogance. Jean-Paul had come to France looking for vengeance and a particularly valuable collection of gems Thomas had stolen from the Baroness Gisela Majlath, the Empress Elisabeth’s Jupiter Stones. Thomas, however, had given the stones to Annette—presumably his way of paying favor to her for having accidentally led him to his rich victims. She’d thought the stones were just an amusing gift. It had never occurred to her that they might be the Jupiter Stones; indeed, aware of the dwindling Blackburn trust, Annette had assumed the stones had no real value beyond the sentimental.
In any case, Thomas had assumed he would no longer have to worry about the young Frenchman whose life he’d destroyed.
In 1975, he’d gotten the shock of his life. The daughter of his old friend Quang Tai had contacted him with an unpleasant ultimatum. She had discovered the Jupiter Stones among Annette’s things when she was a little girl back in 1959, finally realized their significance and put together that Thomas Blackburn had been Le Chat. She’d already realized he was responsible for her father’s death. Now she could use what she knew to get something she wanted: a life in the United States. If Thomas didn’t cooperate and help her, she would expose him. She whipped herself up into a frenzy thinking she would succeed and, as a result, erroneously seduced herself into believing Quentin would look after her.
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