Carla Neggers writing as Anne Harrell, 1990

The French Riviera

1959

Annette Winston Reed hacked at an onion on the battered worktable in her airy, sun-washed kitchen. Although it wasn’t her nature to fret, she noticed her hands were shaking and she was perspiring heavily. Her underarms and the small of her back were damp, and her eyes burned with lack of sleep. It’s time to buck up, she silently told herself, annoyed by this betrayal of her inner turmoil. She wasn’t going to let her troubles undermine her self-confidence or her sense of fun.

She refused to let Thomas Blackburn get to her. He and his four-year-old granddaughter had come down for the weekend from Paris, a typical presumptuousness on Thomas’s part. Annette hadn’t invited him. A Bostonian like herself, he had known her all her life. She had grown up around the corner from his house on Beacon Hill. But as much as she looked up to him, as much as she’d wanted him to admire her, she couldn’t consider him a friend. He was too old, almost twenty years her senior, and perhaps knew her too well. With Thomas, pretenses were impossible.

He was at the breakfast table overlooking the rose garden, with a mug of black coffee at his elbow and the Paris Le Monde opened up in front of him so that Annette couldn’t miss the latest blaring headline about the jewel thief who’d plagued the Côte d’ Azur for the past eight weeks. He’d been dubbed Le Chat after the Cary Grant character in the popular American movie To Catch a Thief. Once again, the police promised the imminent arrest of a suspect.

This time they weren’t just blowing smoke. Annette knew better.