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.