“Then deal with Annette.”

He sat back in the dim light of the hot night. “I’ve tried.”

Of course he had: Thomas wasn’t surprised. And Annette hadn’t come to him for help. “What did she say?”

“She told me I could rot in hell.”

Two days later Annette returned to Boston without a word about the Jupiter Stones. Barely a week later she got her wish: Jean-Paul Gerard, the only survivor of a Vietcong ambush that killed Stephen Blackburn, Benjamin Reed and Quang Tai, was taken prisoner by the communist guerrillas.

Thomas had arranged for the information-gathering excursion into the Mekong Delta, into an area considered secure, although he knew there were risks. In a country at war, there always were. He hired Jean-Paul to drive the Jeep. He was good, he was tough, and it seemed Annette had called his bluff about the photographs. He had become friends with both Stephen and Benjamin, and regardless of how much he despised Annette for having betrayed him in 1959, he didn’t want to jeopardize those friendships. Thomas hoped Jean-Paul, however slowly and painfully, was putting his past mistakes behind him.

Originally the trip was planned for just Thomas, Jean-Paul and Tai. At the last minute, however, Benjamin decided he wanted to go along and see for himself what was happening in the countryside, and Ambassador Nolting asked to meet with Thomas.

Stephen went into the Mekong Delta in his father’s place.

From the analysis of the grim scene afterward, Tai was killed instantly, and Stephen was wounded in the leg, managing to take out at least one of his attackers with the army-issue Colt before he was killed with a bullet to the head. Two other guerrillas were killed with Gerard’s assault rifle, which was never recovered.

Wounded in the abdomen, Benjamin Reed was left to die a slow, horrible death.

It was a fact the authorities kept from his widow. At first, Thomas had heartily agreed.

Within days, however, he’d decided Annette shouldn’t have been spared a single heart-wrenching detail of the massacre.

“You went to bed with a viper, my friend,” Tai had told him one night not long after Annette’s second departure.

“You knew?”

“Yes, but I knew, too, your common sense would prevail and you would extricate yourself from her spell.”

Thomas smiled. Tai had worked for Annette Reed for five years and had a right to dislike her. “Next time my love life fires up, I’ll run the lady past you.”

But Tai was deadly serious. “Thomas, she has contacts all over the city. With the crime bosses, with the police, with the Vietcong. She can find out anything she wants to find out and hurt anyone she wants to hurt. She used her time in Saigon well. She has the means to do whatever she wants.”

“For heaven’s sake, she was so green she could barely find her way to her hotel-”

“She worked fast, my friend. Trust me. I think she will use her contacts to keep tabs on her husband and make money for Winston & Reed. But don’t trust her, Thomas.” Tai smiled halfheartedly. “And don’t get on her bad side.”

But it was too late for that.

Thomas had nothing to go on but his gut feeling, Tai’s words and his own knowledge of Annette, but he believed-he knew-she had found out about his plans and had passed the word to the guerrillas.

As he combed the city for information, he discovered enough to convince himself that Tai was right. She had the contacts, the money, the will. In one fell swoop, she would have gotten rid of two of her ex-lovers. Jean-Paul, the jewel thief and blackmailer. Thomas, the middle-aged fool.

He couldn’t root out proof that Annette was anything more than the wealthy, bored woman from Boston who had spent lots of money in Saigon and talked lots of crazy talk no one hadn’t heard before. He turned Saigon inside out and upside down. There was nothing that would stand up in a court of law.

And then the rumors began to circulate. “You’re hurting, Thomas,” his last friend in the state department had told him. “People around here think you were skipping out on a tête-à-tête with the VC that day.”

Annette’s doing. Her stink was everywhere, but she was safely in Boston, mourning her lost husband and clamoring for additional military aid to the South Vietnamese government.

Finally, Thomas accepted full responsibility for the tragedy that had claimed the lives of three people he loved and possibly a fourth he had only just met. If he was right and Annette had tipped off the Vietcong, then pointing his finger at her-especially when he had no tangible proof-was madness. There was the rest of his family to consider-Jenny, the children. Would Annette threaten them if he attempted to expose her?

Thomas wondered if he was being paranoid and simply looking for some way to avoid his own culpability. Common sense should have told him to stay out of her bed. Common sense should have told him to be more careful when it came to arranging excursions into the Mekong Delta.

He looked into taking Tai’s ten-year-old daughter Tam back to Boston with him, but friends had taken her in and assured him she would be well cared for. Thomas wept for her and wondered if she still dreamed of the stone mas on the Riviera, the beautiful roses her father had cultivated, the smell of lemons and flowers and the Mediterranean Sea.

Should he have left Tai to return to his life in southern France?

“I would have come back,” Tai had told him. “Remember that, my friend. You’re a hard man, Thomas, but harder on yourself than on anyone else. No matter what happens to me or to my country, I don’t want you to blame yourself.”

Dear God, how could he not?

A month after her husband’s death, Annette became chairman and president of Winston & Reed.

With the ambush, Thomas Blackburn lost all credibility. His company went bankrupt, and his chance at the ambassadorship to Saigon evaporated. If nothing else, he had put Vietnam on the front pages, and few in the American government wanted that. There were still those who preferred to do their work there quietly, effectively and fast.

Thomas returned to West Cedar Street, to his house not a half mile from Annette Reed’s, and he prayed to God that with himself and Jean-Paul Gerard out of the way, she was finished.

Twenty-Eight

Annette poured herself a glass of brandy and wandered from room to room in her big, empty house, skipping only Kim’s quarters in the apartment she’d made for him in the basement. She moved briskly, angrily, through the house, talking to herself, wondering if this was the sort of thing crazy old women did. But she’d been doing it for years, ever since Jean-Paul Gerard had come back to haunt her first in 1963, then again in 1974, and again in 1975, and again now.

She didn’t have his Jupiter Stones.

But she wasn’t going to let him ruin her life over them or anything she’d done out of self-defense.

The past was past.

She was a different person than what she’d been thirty years ago. Couldn’t he see that? Couldn’t Thomas? People grow up, she thought. They go on with their lives. They forget the mistakes they’ve made and the wrongs that have been committed against them. They don’t hold grudges forever.

She had lived an exemplary life. She didn’t deserve to keep suffering like this.

And damn you, Thomas, I have suffered.

Whenever she thought about sweet, gentle, boring Benjamin…well, she simply couldn’t. She hadn’t taken a lover since his death. Twenty-six years of celibacy: her way of honoring her husband’s memory, of punishing herself for the miscalculation that had led to his death…but that really was Thomas’s fault. He had known Benjamin hadn’t belonged on that excursion into the Mekong Delta. He should have stopped him from going.