Hamish laughed. “Visiting his wife’s grave.”
Zach swung to look at his friend’s shining eyes and twitching mustaches, dripping with rain. “My God. You’re actually enjoying this, aren’t you?”
Hamish laughed again. “Some Irish immigrant getting his throat slit for a few dollars down on Gallatin Street, now, that might be sad, but it’s still just routine. But this”—he rubbed his hands together—“ this is going to be like a puzzle. This is the fun part of police work.”
“I don’t like puzzles,” said Zach, his voice hardening. Once, he had liked puzzles. He’d even been a bit cocky about his ability to solve them . . . until two years ago, when someone had taken a fiendish delight in showing Zach he wasn’t nearly as good at puzzles as he had thought, and a girl named Rachel who’d loved him had ended up dead because of it all. “Besides,” he added dryly, “I’m a cavalry officer, not a policeman.”
“Aren’t you, then?” Hamish’s broad hand slapped him on the back hard enough to make him stagger. “Look up provost marshal in the dictionary, lad.”
Zach nodded to where the gatekeeper was hopping nervously from one foot to the other, his lantern swinging back and forth to cast eerie, erratic patterns of light and shadow across the surrounding tombs. “Did he see anything?”
Fletcher shrugged. “Who knows? The fella doesn’t seem to understand more than ten words of English. You wouldn’t happen to speak German, would you?”
“Speak it?” said Zach with a smile. “No.”
“We’ll have to get someone out in the morning who can talk to him.”
Sloshing toward the immigrant, Zach lifted the lantern from the man’s hand and sent him back to the gatehouse with a nod of his head and a shouted, “Danke schön.”
Fletcher peered at him through the driving rain. “I thought you didn’t speak German.”
“I don’t.” Zach held the lantern aloft. They were surrounded by a seemingly endless expanse of marble crypts, small houses of the dead lined up one beside the other along crisscrossing avenues of rank grass and scattered broken stones. Water sluiced from the edges of the peaked roofs, beat against forlorn inscriptions. Here and there some of the older tombs had cracked and broken open, allowing shadowy glimpses of dull brass, splintered wood, and weathered bones. “So exactly who is this doctor?” he asked as they set off down the central alley.
“His name’s Henri Santerre,” said Fletcher, falling into step beside him. “Runs—or rather, used to run— the Hospital de Santerre on Bienville, in the old quarter. It’s the only private hospital in the city that’s managed to stay open through the war and occupation, which tells you something about him.”
“Any family?”
“Not much. He’s a widower. Lives with his sister Elise Santerre on Conti. There,” said Fletcher suddenly, nodding toward two blue-coated soldiers huddled near the far wall, its stacks of small, brick-built, ovenlike crypts barely visible through the teeming rain. “Down that way.”
They took off to the left. As they drew closer, Zach could see that beyond the soldiers stood a woman he supposed must be the dead man’s sister. A small, fineboned figure dressed all in black, her hair hanging in dark, wet hanks around a pale face, she had drawn off to one side and stood rigidly waiting, as if unwilling to remain too close to the men in blue. It didn’t surprise him. Of all the people in this city, it was the women who had been the most open in expressing their hatred and contempt for the Union army. It was why Butler had promulgated his infamous Woman Order.
Zach barely glanced at her as he turned his attention to the white-headed body that lay sprawled awkwardly against the entrance to a crypt with the name MARET chiseled above the door. Rain washed over the old man’s pale, wrinkled cheeks, soaked his short beard, pooled with the blood on his vest where a dark wooden shaft protruded from his chest.
The rain ran into Zach’s eyes and he wiped it away, along with a film of cold sweat that had sprung up on his forehead. Stepping onto the base of the grave, he hunkered down beside the body and let the lantern light illuminate the still face. The scent of crushed jasmine came to him, mingling bizarrely with the smell of damp and decay and blood. The doctor’s eyes were closed as if he were sleeping peacefully. Reaching out, Zach touched the man’s still warm neck. “Are you certain he’s dead?” Zach asked the trooper who had come to stand beside him.
“Wouldn’t you be,” said a young female voice lightly accented with French and husky with what sounded like hatred, “if someone shot a crossbow bolt straight through your heart?”
CHAPTER THREE
Zach glanced up at the woman in soaked black bombazine who stood beside him, her face pale and wet and young, her fine dark eyes unlined by age and snapping with blatant enmity. This was not Henri Santerre’s sister.
She was exquisite in that way only the French can be, built long of neck and small of bone, with an impossibly tiny waist and high, round breasts and an aristocratic carriage that spoke of châteaux and salons and midnight flights from the guillotine. There clung to her an air of delicateness, of fragility, even, oddly belied by that fierce light shining from her eyes and the earthy fullness of her lips. Even with her hair plastered to her face and rain dripping from the tip of her small, upturned nose, she was both formidable, and stunning.
“I’ve seen men live an uncomfortably long time with some god-awful wounds,” Zach said, straightening slowly.
“No doubt.” Her gaze swept him to linger tellingly on his saber and Colt before returning to meet his eyes. “No doubt you have administered many of those wounds yourself.”
Zach twisted around to stare at Fletcher. “What is she doing here?”
The majestic red mustaches twitched. “Allow me to present Madame de Beauvais. She was with the gentleman when he was killed.”
Zach swung back to stare at the calm, unbelievably self-possessed woman before him. “You saw it happen?”
“Yes.”
Most women who had witnessed a murder would have gone into hysterics, or fainted, or both. Not this one. He found himself impressed and intrigued and suspicious, all at the same time. “Couldn’t you have chosen a more pleasant evening to pay a visit to the cemetery?”
She blinked against the rain. “Dr. Santerre’s wife and my mother both died on the same day, in the yellow-fever epidemic of eighteen forty-nine. We come here every year, to pray, and to lay flowers at their graves.” Her gaze fell to the crushed, bloodied jasmine sprays at their feet, but if she felt any emotion at all, it didn’t show on her face.
God, Zach thought, but she was a cool one. “Did you see who did this?”
Instead of answering, she studied him through narrowed eyes. “Why is the army involved in this? Wouldn’t it be better handled by the New Orleans police?”
Zach grunted. “There is no New Orleans police force. Not anymore.”
“Because you’ve thrown most of them in prison!” she said, her coolness momentarily deserting her.
“Most of them,” Zach agreed. He hooked his thumbs in his sword belt and leaned into her. “Now, are you going to tell me what happened, or not?”
Beside them, Hamish drew out a battered clothbound notebook and a pencil he held poised midair, ready to write. She glanced at the captain and his notebook, then away. “We always visit my mother’s grave first,” she said, staring into the rain-filled gloom of the night. “The Santerre crypt is farther down the row. Usually, I say an entire rosary. This time I didn’t.”
The outward display of calm was illusory, Zach realized, studying her. There was a fine trembling going on inside her, although she was doing her best to control it. Control it, and hide it. Her need for self-protection was partially a reaction, he knew, to the color of his uniform; as far as she was concerned, he was her enemy, and one didn’t willingly show weakness to an enemy. But he suspected it went beyond that. A woman like this would not willingly show any weakness. “Why did you stop?” he asked. “Did you see someone?”
“
No. No one. I wanted to hurry because of the storm.” Her slim throat worked as she swallowed. “I was just standing up when the crossbow bolt came from behind me.”
“Crossbow bolt?” Zach repeated incredulously.
Again, that lifting of the chin, that flare of something much like contempt as she swung her head to study him again. “What do you think it is?”
The attempt to provoke him was both deliberate and damnably successful. Setting his teeth, Zach hunkered down on his heels and squinted at the shaft protruding from the doctor’s chest. “Can’t be. It’s too small. And it’s made of wood.”
He expected her to make another one of those acerbic remarks of hers. When she didn’t, he glanced up to find her staring off into the distance again. Rain fell about them, rushed in the stone-lined gutters at their feet, streamed down her stiff, pale cheeks. She suddenly looked wet and tired and quietly, profoundly shaken by grief and fear, and all the anger she’d aroused in him dissipated instantly.
“Here,” he said, unclasping his cape as he stood. “Take this. You’re soaked through. You’ll become ill.”
The blue cloth swirled between them. She jerked back as if it were poisoned, her eyes flashing fire, those magnificent lips curling in contempt, her voice hoarse with emotion. “Never.”
They stared at each other through the rain-filled darkness. “All right. Don’t take it.” He let the cape settle back about his shoulders. “Where do you live?”
She hesitated, her jaw tight, then answered. “On the rue Dumaine, between Royal and Chartres.”
“Captain Fletcher will escort you home.”
“Thank you, but I have no need of an escort.”
He allowed himself to smile, a fierce, tight smile that held no warmth. “I beg your pardon, madame, but at the moment I have only your word when it comes to who you say you are and where you live.”
Her nostrils flared as she sucked in a quick, high breath. “I see. Very well.”
The night about them was hot and silent except for the rain. Zach held her angry gaze for a long, significant moment. She was a young woman, he thought; a young woman recently widowed, judging from her deep mourning. She had come here to pray for her dead mother, and instead she had witnessed the brutal, violent murder of an old friend. She should have seemed vulnerable. She should have provoked in him nothing more than pity, and perhaps a chivalrous urge to protect the weak. Instead, she had deliberately antagonized him, and he found his reaction to her to be both violent and explicitly, damnably carnal.
Abruptly turning his back on her, he caught Fletcher’s eye, and snapped, “Get her out of here.”
Henri Santerre’s sister Elise was old, older even than the doctor, Zach thought, studying her as she sat in a wing chair to one side of an empty fireplace, her hands folded in her lap, her back held stiffly, determinedly straight. In the soft glow of the flickering light cast by a single candlestick, her hair shone white and thin against the pink of her scalp, the bones of her wrists and face looking fragile and painfully obvious beneath her aged, wrinkled flesh. But the intelligence in her pale gray eyes was still sharp and lively, and the only tremor in her voice was one of grief.
“It was kind of you to come, Major,” she said now, her gaze steady as she returned his stare. “Thank you.”
It wasn’t true, of course, and they both knew it. He wasn’t being kind, coming here, tonight, personally, to tell her of her brother’s death. He was here because, whatever Butler might have said, the murder of a respected old doctor in a cemetery was hardly the kind of incident one could rely on simple soldiers to handle.
Zach glanced around the front room of the Santerre town house, where they sat, his gaze taking in the high plaster ceiling and formal, overstuffed furniture shrouded now with white cotton covers for the summer. Even the gilt gas jets had been covered with tulle to prevent fly specks, for in this climate, no one was willing to suffer their heat, whatever the inconvenience. From the distance came the sound of the cathedral bell, chiming the hour, the dull thud clanging on and on, and he leaned forward in his own chair and came to the point now as she’d known he would. “I’m sorry, but I need to ask if you have any idea who might have wanted your brother dead.”
She sucked in a quick breath and sat, thoughtful and still for a moment, before shaking her head. “No. But Emmanuelle could probably answer that question far better than I.”
“Emmanuelle?”
“Emmanuelle de Beauvais.”
“Ah.” Zach shifted his attention to the black felt hat with its gold embroidered crossed cavalry swords that dangled idly from his fingers. The woman in mourning from the cemetery. Even the mention of her name was enough to awaken something within him—a quickening, an interest that had little to do with duty and murder. “And why is that?” he asked.
He looked up in time to see the aged skin at the corners of her eyes pucker in a way that left him wondering what she’d read in his face. “She has helped him, always, at the hospital.” The soft, melodic French accent was similar to, and yet not quite the same as, that of Madame de Beauvais. “You see, the Hospital de Santerre was my brother’s dream, but it was actually begun by the three of them together—Henri, Emmanuelle’s father, Jacques Maret, and her husband, Philippe de Beauvais.”
“Her father and husband are both doctors?” It would do much, Zach thought, to explain her calm demeanor in the presence of death.
“Were. Jacques Maret died in the great yellow-fever epidemic of eighteen fifty-three.” She paused, her lips pressing together, and he knew she was going to make him ask for the rest of it.
“And Philippe de Beauvais?” he prompted, obliging her.
“Philippe was killed in the war. Two months ago.”
Two months, Zach thought. It did much to explain the young widow’s obvious hatred of his blue uniform, but he’d still swear there was more to her animosity than that.
“Emmanuelle always wanted to be a doctor herself, you know,” Elise Santerre was saying. “But it’s not allowed for women to become doctors.” Something about the way she said it made Zach wonder if this old woman might not have had similar dreams herself, once; ambitions that society didn’t allow someone of her sex to fulfill.
He asked more questions, about the hospital, and about the old man’s acquaintances and habits, but it wasn’t until sometime later, when he was leaving, that Elise Santerre said suddenly, as if she could hold it back no longer, “Is it possible Henri was killed by mistake?”
At the base of the steps Zach turned sharply, his head falling back as he stared up at her. “Why? Can you think of someone who might want Madame de Beauvais dead?”
“No. No, of course not,” she said quickly.
But for the first time that evening, Zach had the feeling the elderly woman was being less than honest with him.
Emmanuelle stood in the doorway of her son’s darkened bedroom and listened to the gentle rhythm of his breathing. “Dominic,” she whispered, but quietly, because he was sleeping and she had no desire to disturb him. She only felt the need to say his name, just as she had felt the need to come here, to the door that communicated between her room and his, and assure herself that he was safe. Safe and alive.
He looked small in his big mahogany bed with its high footboard and mosquito net–draped half-tester. Odd, how long it had been since she had thought of him as young, for he was eleven now and growing rapidly toward manhood. But a child of eleven was still heart-stoppingly vulnerable. It was such a dangerous place, New Orleans. Even before the coming of the war and all its attendant miseries, life was precarious here, a constant battle against yellow fever and typhus and swamp sickness. Death could come too easily in this city, too quickly. Standing in the dark, watching her son sleep, Emmanuelle felt her heart fill with a love for him so deep and powerful that it seemed dangerous, and she found she had to curl her hands into fists and hold them clenched at her sides to keep from going to touch her fingertips to the reassuring warmth of his cheek, an ac
tion that would surely awaken him.
She turned, meaning to go back to bed. Instead, she went to sit beside one of the open French doors of her room overlooking the empty, rain-soaked paving stones of the rue Dumaine. She thought it must be late, for she could no longer hear the roar from the cabarets along the waterfront, only the endless rush of water, slapping into puddles and dripping from the eaves and running off the edges of the banquettes.
The breeze rustling the ferns and potted rosemary on the gallery felt warm and muggy against her face, but when she wrapped her arms across her chest she realized she was shaking, deep, soul-wracking tremors of horror and grief and fear. She kept seeing over and over again in her mind’s eye the penetrating impact of the crossbow bolt striking deep into her old friend’s chest, the bright spurting flow of his blood, the startlingly swift ebb of life and intelligence from those pale gray eyes.
Blood and death: frightening, even horrifying, sights to most people, but not, surely, to a woman like her, a woman who had devoted her life to healing and to the study of medicine. It was the suddenness, she decided, the violent deliberateness of Henri Santerre’s killing, that had shaken her. That, and her own grief at his loss.
She kept thinking of things—like his study of native medicines, or the paper he’d been writing on the dangers of phlebotomy, and now would never finish. Or of his plans to open a ward devoted solely to maternity cases, once the war was over. She tried to tell herself it was better he had died, thus, in the fullness of a productive life, rather than wasting away at the end of a frustratingly debilitated old age. Yet the sense of the incompleteness of his dreams gnawed at her, perhaps because she knew how much it would have annoyed him.
And because she needed him so badly.
It shamed her to realize, deep down in what she felt to be the smallness of her soul, how much of her grief, like her fear, was for herself. She had lost, in one swift stroke, a dear friend, a respected mentor, and a badly needed business partner. Now, the burden of keeping the hospital open through the devastating hardships of war and occupation would fall to Emmanuelle alone.
Midnight Confessions Page 2
