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 resurface.

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.”