“You think I have no feelings-you think I don’t care about what I’ve done to you.” She brushed tears from her eyes, but Jean-Paul was unmoved. “Thomas came to see me earlier. Were you out here then? Did you see him?”

“What if I did?”

“Then you know I’m telling you the truth.”

“All right. I saw him.”

She smiled. It wasn’t much, but at least she had penetrated his skepticism. “Thomas told me he has the Jupiter Stones.”

Nothing. Jean-Paul didn’t even move.

“Did you hear me? Thomas has the Jupiter Stones.”

“I heard you,” he said, almost inaudibly.

“Gisela was his friend and he betrayed her. He stole the stones that meant so much to her. And he’s bred the hatred between us all these years. He let me go ahead and turn you in as Le Chat. Jean-Paul, he could have stopped me. He let me ruin your life. Then when you turned up in Saigon in 1963, he arranged the ambush in order to kill you. Why do you think he backed out at the last minute? Because he knew what was going to happen.”

“And what about 1975?” he asked.

She hesitated only for a moment…seeing Jean-Paul coming out of Jared Sloan’s Saigon apartment…feeling that same terror she’d felt when she’d recognized him…feeling herself jump and shudder when she’d fired her gun into his face. And the relief. Feeling the washing, cleansing, beautiful relief that at least she was free of him.

Only, of course, the invincible son of a bitch had lived.

“I was in Saigon to stop the assassination that night,” she said quietly. “Tam had discovered Thomas was responsible for her father’s death and tried to blackmail him into helping her get out of the country. Thomas’s answer was to hire that assassin to kill her. I didn’t know he was responsible-I only just figured that out. But I knew she was in danger. I wanted to help her, Jean-Paul. All right, I didn’t want her as a daughter-in-law, but we were close when she was a little girl. I don’t care if you don’t believe me, but I shot you because I thought you’d been a part of the killing-”

Jean-Paul remained impassive. “I only want the Jupiter Stones.”

Annette clenched her fists. “And revenge against me for things I’m telling you I was duped into doing to you!”

“Not anymore. Revenge would give me little satisfaction.”

“I made a mistake. Thomas has the stones. He’s had them all these years and he’s known you thought I had them. He’s been using us both.” She slumped, exhausted and defeated, and waved a hand in despair. “I don’t know why I’m trying to explain myself to you. I know you hate me-you deserve to. But to make amends for my own idiocy, I’ll get the stones from Thomas for you. Come to my house on the North Shore after lunch today. Let’s end this, Jean-Paul, before someone else gets hurt.”

Jean-Paul leaned forward, his face very close to hers. “I’ll be there, Annette, but I warn you-if you do anything stupid, I’ll kill you, as I should have thirty years ago.”

“You don’t believe me-”

“What I believe makes no difference. Give me back the Jupiter Stones, and we’ll be finished.” He brushed a curl off her forehead. “Sleep well, ma belle.”

Thirty-One

Mai didn’t relax until she was sitting on the subway into Boston, with Logan Airport and the long, long transcontinental flight behind her. She had hoped to be able to take a cab, but she had only twenty dollars left after buying her plane ticket-and she was lucky to have that much. Because she was over twelve she could buy a ticket without an adult. However, she had to pay full fare, and since she was flying on short notice, a one-way ticket was more expensive than she’d anticipated. But if she waited and took the 12:30 a.m. flight, she could get a cheaper fare. It meant hanging around the airport awhile, risking that her grandfather might figure out what she’d done and come after her, and staying up all night.

The other choices, however, were to go back to Tiberon and face the music or steal her way onto an earlier flight. What did airlines do to stowaways?

She’d bought the ticket for the red-eye.

She wasn’t too worried about getting around Boston. Given her longtime desire to go there, she’d bought a dozen different guidebooks and had practically memorized them all. She knew that the subway would take her downtown and she could walk to Winston & Reed, the Winston house on Mt. Vernon Street, the Eliza Blackburn House, even Rebecca Blackburn’s studio. Surely her father would be at one of those places. But where to begin?

It was just eight or so California time, after eleven in New England. Mai exulted in how much Boston met her expectations and in her adeptness at getting around in a new city. Her grandfather would just be getting up now and discovering her note. She hoped he’d understand. Her dad wouldn’t-no question about that. He’d probably send her to reform school.

But she was worried about him, and if he couldn’t understand that, then maybe she belonged in reform school. He’d always told her everything, always included her-but not this time. She didn’t know who the white-haired man was or why her father had reacted to him like that, with a gun and that mean, mean-looking face. She didn’t have any brothers or sisters, no cousins yet, and she’d never known her mother. She adored her grandparents but most of the time it was just her and her dad. She couldn’t stand the idea that something would happen to him. What would she do without him?

She wiped tears off her cheeks with the backs of her hands and blamed them on the stiff wind as she walked across the wide plaza of Government Center, up toward Beacon Hill. She would try her great-aunt’s house or the Eliza Blackburn House first. Her grandmother, who’d grown up on Mt. Vernon Street, had shown Mai pictures of the Winston house when she had visited Nova Scotia last summer. She thought she’d recognize it when she saw it. And the address of the Eliza Blackburn House was listed in one of her guidebooks, with an acidic comment about its current state of disrepair.

Her dad would be okay, she told herself.

And so would she.

Jared cursed and fumed and tried to hold back his terror as he drove Rebecca’s car out to Logan Airport. She had offered a choice of the car or her truck. Thomas had muttered something about how many vehicles one person needed. A recording of a heart-stopping bestselling thriller had come on when he’d started the engine. Only R.J. The cornered innocent was about to bloodily uncorner himself when Jared popped the thing out. He settled for silence.

And speed.

And his relentless anxiety.

Mai.

“The little devil stole a few hundred dollars from me and made her escape like this was some kind of prison,” Wesley Sloan, more worried than annoyed, had told him. “She must have slipped into the car with George when he went to the airport. She left a note saying we shouldn’t worry, she was joining you in Boston and would be fine.”

Mai the optimist.

“I’m sorry, Jared. She’d pleaded illness yesterday afternoon, and we just left her alone for the night. I didn’t check on her until this morning.”

“Dad, it’s all right. I don’t blame you.”

“It’s not as if she’s been kidnapped. Jared, she’s a resourceful girl. She’ll manage. I’m on my way out to the airport now to find out what I can, but if I were you, I’d get out to Logan as soon as possible and check every incoming West Coast flight.”

Jared hadn’t wasted any time.

He got stuck in tunnel traffic and made a wrong turn in the airport and had to fight traffic to come back around and try again. Then he had to wander around forever to find a place to park. He cursed and fumed some more.

It was nearly noon and had been a bad morning from start to finish. Sleeping too late, getting up to the cold, raw reality of what had gone on between him and R.J. in the night. Loving her. Wanting her again. Not wanting to mess up her life again. Quentin was his cousin and that wasn’t one of those things anyone could change.