CHAPTER 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.
Thomas’s answer to Tam’s ultimatum came in the predawn hours of April 29, 1975.
Fourteen years later, Jean-Paul Gerard had tried once more to get hold of the Jupiter Stones, only Thomas put him onto Annette. An unsavory character to be sure, the Frenchman did, after all, have a bone to pick with her from his failed attempt to frame Quentin in 1974. So he’d come after her.
For reasons no one would ever know for certain—the main parties being dead—Thomas Blackburn had lured Jean-Paul Gerard and Annette Reed to Marblehead, each presumably, with a different story. Annette had gone so far as to take her nephew’s daughter, thinking it was to be a peaceful gathering.
How wrong she’d been.
Annette realized events not yet carried out might require her to adjust the ending to the sorrowful day, but her present rendition involved a relatively straightforward scenario: Thomas kills Jean-Paul, but given his advanced age, he slips and falls into the ocean, drowning. Mai also drowns. Thomas dupes Annette into letting him take the girl out to the rocks, where he ties her up in an effort to use her predicament to lure a suspicious Jean-Paul out into the open.
“Definitely not a bad plan,” Annette said to herself. If Rebecca or Jared tried to counter any of her facts, she’d just challenge their conclusions and demand to see their proof. And there’d be no proof: Thomas, Jean-Paul and Mai would all be dead.
Of course, with them gone, Annette could always revise her story as necessary.
She would, of course, have made a valiant attempt at saving her grand-niece’s life.
The girl was getting tired. “Aunt Annette,” she said, “it’s raining awfully hard. Don’t you think we should just go back to the house?”
“No, no, it’s just around that pile of rocks over there. Trust me, Mai, there’s nothing quite like the Atlantic Ocean during a storm.”
“It’ll be safe?”
“Of course.”
Jean-Paul, where the devil are you?
Annette spotted Kim on the rocks down near the water and waved, and when he raised one hand in answer, she knew he had Thomas Blackburn.
Finally.
Mai didn’t see him. Annette directed her over the last pile of rocks, but the girl was obviously losing patience, and perhaps wondering what this stormy trip down to the ocean’s edge was all about.
“Wow—look at the waves.” Mai pointed, looking around at her father’s aunt, but Annette could tell she was just being polite. The girl added, “They really are incredible.”
They clambered over a large boulder, finally coming to the level, secluded area where Annette had suggested Kim take Thomas.
He was there, lying motionless on his stomach, his hands and feet tightly bound. His fingers were a ghastly white from the cold and lack of circulation. For a moment Annette thought he was dead, and she let out a sob, amazed at how awful she felt. Then he moved, raising his head and looking around at her, his face smeared with blood from the sharp barnacles. The tide was rushing in, coming closer and closer with each fierce wave, and the cold, clear seawater was lapping at Thomas, seeping underneath him. If the waves didn’t take him, he’d die of exposure within hours.
Mai saw his bloody, skeletal face and screamed.
“It’s all right,” Annette said quietly. What an ending, she thought…but it wasn’t her fault. When people had left her alone, she hadn’t bothered a soul.
Kim jumped lightly from a rock, landing between her and Mai. He said something in Vietnamese to the girl, but she stared at him in mute terror.
“She doesn’t speak Vietnamese,” Annette said. “Let’s not prolong this, Kim. Deal with her as you have Thomas, if you please.” I’ll have to tinker with my story to include their hands being tied, she thought. Even if Kim has a chance to unbind them before the end, there will be signs they were tied.
Mai’s eyes widened at Kim’s approach, and she edged back against the bank of rocks, away from the water.
“Mai,” Thomas yelled, “run!”
She hesitated, not that it would have mattered if she’d bolted: Kim was extraordinarily fast. He seized the girl, and she began kicking and screaming, crying for her father to help her.
Annette couldn’t bear it.
Thomas saw her look of discomfort and grunted. “You’ve never had to be a party to your own handiwork, have you? Stay, Annette. Watch.”
“I don’t have to defend my actions to the likes of you.”
“You won’t get away with this, you know.”
She snorted and made herself laugh. “I already have. You pride yourself on doing what you have to do to protect your family. Allow me that same pride.”
“This isn’t pride, Annette—this is desperation.”
Mai was screaming now, a gutsy thing to do in Kim’s heartless grip, and he smacked her hard across the side of the face and told her to shut up.
Annette had to look away.
“What kind of woman would murder her own granddaughter?” Thomas asked in a low voice.
“I’m protecting my son.”
“No, you’re not. You’re protecting yourself. You think Quentin’s weak, but he’s not. You’re the one who’s weak, Annette. Weak and insecure, frightened. I should have seen that thirty years ago, but my vision of you was always clouded by the misunderstood, unhappy child you’d been. I didn’t want to see the selfish, evil woman you’d become. Annette, think of what you’ve done. And all because you couldn’t admit to being a bored housewife who’d turned to stealing jewels from her friends.”
Annette shuddered. So he knew. The chilly wind and the rain had soaked her to the skin, but she paid no attention, trying to shut out Mai’s screams and Thomas’s smug look.
“You were Le Chat,” Thomas said. “Rebecca knows. I’m sure she’s told Jared by now, Quentin, the police. Annette, don’t compound what you’ve already done by adding more bodies to your conscience.”
“You have no right to judge me. I made a few mistakes—”
Even in his agony, Thomas’s eyes were clear and uncompromising, that riveting Blackburn blue that, Annette knew, would haunt her forever. “Mistakes, Annette? Benjamin, Stephen, Tai, Tam—mistakes? That was murder.”
A monstrous wave crashed ashore, spraying all of them with icy froth as it rushed between the rocks and crevices and almost inundated Thomas. The frigid water swirled four inches deep around him, under him, and he gritted his teeth against the cold, his entire body quaking, until the surf receded.
Kim had finished with Mai and dumped her onto the wet, barnacle-covered rocks beside Thomas.
Annette went over to the sobbing girl and squatted down, stroking her shining, wet hair with one hand. “I’m sad this is the way things have turned out, Mai, but I want you to know I had no choice.”
“Don’t believe her, Mai,” Thomas said calmly. “She could have chosen the truth.”
Mai shook off Annette’s hand, called her a hateful bitch and flapped like a seal, managing to throw the older woman off balance. Annette went sprawling, landing on one knee. The barnacles cut right through her pants. Kim was beside her in an instant and offered to shoot Mai and Thomas both and be done with them.
“No, that’s all right,” Annette said, letting him help her back onto her feet. That was what she got for trying to be nice. “I don’t want any bloodshed while I’m around. Just let the tide do its work. Jean-Paul should be here soon. Do not underestimate him, do you hear?”
“Don’t worry,” Kim said.
She gave him a withering look. “Don’t patronize me. None of us would be here now if you hadn’t underestimated him in the first place. Do your job, Kim. You’ve been paid well enough for it. Now, if you don’t mind, I have to go.”
And she about-faced, walking fast and never once looking back at the girl and the old man trussed up on the rocks, waiting for the tide.
* * *
“Get down.”
Jean-Paul didn’t wait for Rebecca to obey, but shoved her onto the floor of the truck as they came to a stop behind Annette’s Mercedes. The rain was coming in blinding sheets now. Jean-Paul shut the truck off. As it rattled into silence, he warned Rebecca to stay down.
“I don’t want to do anything that would jeopardize Mai’s safety,” he said. “Annette’s bodyguard is out on the rocks. I’m going to find out what he’s up to. You stay here until I get back, all right?”
“Jean-Paul—” She broke off, grabbing his hand, her eyes huge and strangely bright in the gloom of the early afternoon. “Be careful.”
“I will, ma petite.” He squeezed her hand gently. “And I’ll look after your grandfather if I can. I’ve resented him for many years, but that’s not important now. I can see I was wrong about him. I always thought he knew about me.”
“That you weren’t Le Chat?”
“That,” he said, “and that I’m his son.”
Rebecca stared at him, speechless.
Jean-Paul smiled. “You see why I care about you? Your father and I were brothers.”
* * *
Annette reveled in the softness of the grass under her feet after her treacherous climb in the drenching rain back up to the house, and she ducked in through the side door. She grabbed a towel from the bath off the kitchen and went upstairs to peel off her wet clothes before she came down with pneumonia.
You can pull this off—just don’t think about Thomas and Mai. You’re doing what you have to do. Be strong!
As she wrapped the towel around her head, she stood naked in front of her bedroom window and saw a decrepit truck in the driveway. Rebecca’s, she thought with a fresh wave of panic. Before she could get hysterical at the prospect of having to include Rebecca Blackburn in her scheme, Annette saw Jean-Paul’s figure limping across the lawn.
Good…
She tugged open the drawer to her mother’s old tiger maple dresser and took out dry clothes, pulling the towel off her hair and wishing she could take time to blow-dry it. The warmth would feel wonderful after being out on the rocks. A long time ago—even before Le Chat—she had learned never to act out of desperation. That meant always having a contingency plan in case things began to unravel.
France was her contingency plan. Her personal jet was waiting at a private airport.
A feeling of calm came over her, and she began to hum as she got dressed.
* * *
The water never receded entirely now, and the cold had penetrated every fiber of Thomas’s being, until he could no longer rely upon his own sense of coherency. It was pure agony. Worse was having Mai next to him, in the same unholy predicament, sobbing for her father.
“Mai,” he said, coughing just to clear his head. “Mai, listen to me. We must use our ingenuity.”
She sniffled and fastened her dark, lovely eyes on him, her terror slicing at his very soul. “The tide’s coming in. We’ll drown.”
“Did you know when it’s training its SEALs the navy does something called drown-proofing?”
Tears streamed down her face, but she managed to shake her head.
“They do,” Thomas said. “They bind their hands and feet and toss the young men into the water and make them swim.”
“And they survive?”
“Yes, they survive. Now, do you think you can roll over me and get to my other side? You’ll be farther from the water.”
“You’ve been out here longer….”
“Please, don’t worry about me. You’re smaller and younger—Mai, can you do it? It’ll hurt. Barnacles are nasty beasts, but if you can stand it, perhaps you can shelter yourself from the tide and hang on until help gets here.”
“My dad—”
“He’ll come, Mai. I’m sure of it.”
Another wave surged over the rocks and almost covered them this time, but Thomas was numb to the cold. He could see Mai’s small body lift in the water, then smash down onto the barnacles. At this rate, she wouldn’t even make it to high tide before being swept onto a wave and battered against the rocks, or even sucked out into the ocean.
“Mai…”
The pain had revived her. Biting down hard, she rolled onto her side, her back up against his side and groaned as the barnacles cut into her bound hands and wrists. The rain pelted onto her face as she used her momentum to carry her up onto Thomas’s back.
He welcomed the warmth of her body on his.
“Hold on through the next wave,” he told her, his voice hoarse.
The wave came, a huge swell that inundated him, but mercifully, only caught Mai underneath. Thomas could feel himself sinking into the barnacles. He couldn’t keep up the effort. His body would simply give out.
“I think,” Mai was saying, “if I get off you just right I can sit up and maybe kind of crawl backward up onto the rocks. Should I try?”
Oh, Thomas thought, to be fourteen again. Her energy helped energize him. “Of course you should try.”
“But if that woman—”
“We need to worry about the ocean right now.”
“Why is she doing this to us?”
“Because she made a mistake a long time ago and couldn’t face up to what she’d done. So she kept compounding that mistake until now, and she feels she has no other choice.”
“I hate her.”
“Yes, but she wasn’t always like this, Mai. She’s an insecure and frightened woman, and that makes her very selfish and mean. I’m not making excuses for her. Everyone’s afraid sometimes. It’s how we act when we’re afraid that shows us what we are. Do you understand that, Mai?”
“I’m going to roll off you now and try to sit up. Okay?”
He smiled even as he heard yet another wave coming at them. “Okay.”
* * *
“Your father and I were brothers.”
Either Jean-Paul Gerard had gone nuts, Rebecca thought, or there was another fly squirming in the ointment. Right now it didn’t matter which. Crouched down, she climbed back up onto the seat of her truck and peered over the dashboard.
Nothing but wind, rain, gray sky, gray ocean. Jean-Paul had already disappeared down onto the rocks.
Staying low, Rebecca cracked open the passenger door and slipped out, leaving the door slightly ajar, although with the crashing surf and howling wind, probably no one would have heard it even if she’d slammed it. And who’s around to hear it? The place looked dead. She shuddered at her terminology. Grandfather, Mai—they had to be around here somewhere. Given what Jean-Paul had told her, she was positive this was where her grandfather had come.
Annette was going to make him her scapegoat…again.
Hunched over, Rebecca used the Mercedes as cover and crept onto the walk, the flagstones slippery in the pounding rain. She moved quickly, but no one came out and shot her or grabbed her and took her away. Should I have trusted Jean-Paul? What if I’ve been gullible and he’s no good after all?
She shook off the doubt and kept moving. The walkway branched off, heading to the front of the house in one direction and around back in the other. She picked the one going around back and stood. If someone saw her, so be it. She tried to look innocently oblivious to what was going on and totally unafraid, but neither was easy.
She went all the way round to the side entrance, nearest the ocean. The door was unlocked. Inside the house was quiet and warm, as beautiful as Rebecca remembered from her few visits there as a child. As she recalled, she’d always gotten into trouble for one thing or another.
There were wet footprints in the kitchen. Fear rising in her throat, Rebecca followed them out into the hall and into the front entry.
Annette came down the stairs, buttoning the cuff of her shirt. “Why, Rebecca—hello.” She sounded cheerful, and even smiled. “What are you doing here?”
“Where’s Mai?”
“Out on the rocks with your grandfather. I was just looking outside. The weather’s turned rather nasty—it’s insane for Thomas to keep a child out there in these conditions. He wanted to show her the surf at high tide during a storm.” Annette came to the bottom of the stairs, her cuff buttoned. “I hope nothing’s happened to them.”
Rebecca stiffened, restraining herself, and headed back to the kitchen.
“Where are you going?” Annette demanded, following.
“I’m calling the police.”
“Why—Rebecca, obviously you’re upset about something. What? What on earth’s going on?”
Rebecca resisted the temptation to turn around and scream for her to just stop, but this was no time to lose control. She hunted around for a telephone.
A loud crack sounded outside.
Gunfire.
Annette shuddered visibly, and the color drained from her face. “What…”
“Save it,” Rebecca said.
And she was out the door and running.