Midnight Confessions

by Candice Proctor

  CHAPTER TEN

  She didn’t start to shake until Hans was outside helping the major into a hack.

  She was on her way up to the second floor to look in on Emile Rouant, the young Confederate lieutenant. It was, after all, why she’d been on her way to the hospital when she’d come across that violent scene in the rue Conti. But she’d only made it halfway up the stairs when she felt herself begin to tremble so hard, she had to press her back against the wall and close her eyes and admit to herself—finally, honestly—that it wasn’t just some vague fear. That she actually knew, deep down in the fundamental core of her being, that Henri Santerre had died in her place, that someone—someone—wanted her dead. Someone who not only knew how to shoot a crossbow, but who had also known exactly where to find a crossbow that was small and easy to notch and reliably lethal.

  She could think of only two men who fit that description: Antoine La Touche, who had hunted the swamps and bayous of Beau Lac with his cousin Philippe as a child, and who had given Philippe the vampire-killing set in the first place, and Philippe himself. But Antoine had no reason to want to kill her, and Philippe . . .

  No, she thought, pushing away from the wall and continuing up the stairs, angry with herself for her suspicions as much as for the humiliating moment of weakness and terror. Antoine would be as incapable of murder as Philippe. And Philippe was dead.

  She found Lieutenant Rouant wracked with fever and begging deliriously for someone to do something, anything, to make the pain in his nonexistent arm go away. They worked for hours, she and Hans, bathing the lieutenant’s hot body with vinegar water and dosing him with opium. Just after four o’clock, Rudolph, the big Senegalese who had worked as a nurse at the hospital for ten years or more, arrived to take over, and Emmanuelle dragged herself the few blocks to the house on the rue Dumaine for a couple of hours sleep and a quick breakfast with Dominic. She made it back to the hospital again by ten o’clock, just after Henri’s funeral mass, but by then Rouant had slipped into a deep sleep that wasn’t really sleep at all. He would not live to see another dawn, and she knew it.

  She was sitting in Henri’s worn old leather desk chair, her hands lying limply in her lap, her gaze fixed unseeingly on the exuberantly lush growth of the banana trees and elephants ears and ginger lilies that half-obscured the high brick walls of the courtyard, when a voice behind her said, “Sleep is not an indulgence, ma chère. And you look as if you’ve been depriving yourself.”

  She brought her head around. “Antoine,” she said, and rose quickly to take his hands in hers and kiss his cheek, as was the French custom among friends. She’d never understood the Americans, who stiffly shook hands with strangers, and then never hugged or kissed or touched their friends in any way. “Thank you for coming.”

  He cocked his head to look down at her. His mouth was smiling, but his eyes were narrowed with a concern that shamed her, when she remembered how she had actually, for one brief moment, let herself suspect him of having tried to kill her. “What’s wrong? What’s happened now?”

  She let out her breath in a tired sigh. “One of the wounded men in the hospital. He’s dying.”

  “Ah.” He let go of her hands to flick her cheek with his fingertips. “You must learn not to take each death so hard, bébé. There are too many of them.”

  She searched his thin, aquiline face. “Did you speak to Claire?”

  Two tight white lines appeared to bracket his mouth. They were not close, Antoine and his younger sister. “She won’t tell your provost marshal about Philippe’s vampire-killing kit, if that’s what you’re worried about. Not that I think it need concern us too much, anyway. The crossbow might be unusual, Emmanuelle, but I doubt it’s unique. There must be others like it.” He paused, then gave a sharp laugh. “Well, obviously there must be at least one more like it, since one was used to kill Henri Santerre.”

  Emmanuelle shook her head, a sick feeling gripping her stomach. “The set you gave Philippe is missing, Antoine. Someone has taken it.”

  “Mon Dieu.” He went to stand at the window, one arm draped over the brace of his crutch, the other bent elbow propped high against the frame as he tapped his teeth thoughtfully with one knuckle. “No wonder you don’t want the Yankees to learn of it.”

  “Where did you get it?” She saw the glitter of wicked amusement in his eyes when he swung his head to look at her over his shoulder, and said quickly, “Eh bien, you don’t need to tell me. Only, did they know who you are? I mean, would they tell?”

  “I’m not sure. You probably know him better than I do.”

  Emmanuelle shook her head in confusion. “Who?”

  “Papa John.”

  For a long, agonizing moment, Emmanuelle simply stared at him, the blood thundering abnormally loud in her ears.

  “What is it?” said Antoine, taking an awkward step toward her.

  Emmanuelle put up a splayed hand to press her fingers to her lips. “Last night, I told the provost marshal about Henri’s visits to the swamps.”

  “You what?”

  “I didn’t know that’s where the crossbow had come from. I only wanted to give the Yankees something else to focus on besides the hospital.” Something else besides her. “I never imagined . . .”

  “Don’t worry.” Antoine reached out to grip her hand, tightly, in reassurance. “Papa John must know the darkest secrets of half the people in this city. He won’t tell.” His brows twitched together in a worried frown. “Will he?”

  Zach was sitting at a small round table at the Café del Aquila on the corner of St. Anne and Chartres, sipping chicory-flavored coffee and idly watching two elderly Creoles playing dominoes at a nearby table, when a booming New York voice oddly tinged with a bit of Scots said, “And did no one ever tell you, lad, that you’re supposed to rest when you’ve been wounded?”

  “I am resting.” Zach gave his friend a slow smile. “Besides, I’m scratched, not wounded.”

  “Scratched, is it?” Hamish pulled out the metal chair beside him and sat down with a stifled groan that spoke of heat and exhaustion and sore feet. “I know three lads from Ohio who’re wishing that’s all it was.”

  “You found them?”

  “Aye.” Hamish took off his hat and used it to fan his damp red face. The day had turned sultry and overcast, although the light was still bright enough to hurt the eyes. “I also talked to your Englishman’s particular friend. Turns out he’s a flashy gambler who used to spend most of his time riding the paddle wheelers up and downriver. Swears Yardley spent the evening with him, although there’s no one to back up the tale.”

  Zach turned to signal the waiter for two more coffees. “Could Yardley be in debt?”

  “I’m looking into that. He runs in rough company for a doctor, that’s for sure. And from what I hear, Santerre wasn’t too pleased about it.”

  “Yardley says he was also a particular friend of Philippe de Beauvais.” Zach paused while the waiter set their coffees on the table with a discreet thump of indignation. They weren’t good for business, Yankee uniforms, but no establishment in New Orleans would dare refuse to serve one. A month or so ago, when a shoe store owner had refused to sell a Union soldier a pair of boots, General Butler had ordered the man’s store confiscated and his entire stock auctioned off.

  Hamish leaned forward. “What do you think that means?”

  “I’m not sure. But I have another name you can add to your list.” He paused while Hamish pulled out his notebook. “A young German named Hans who works at the Hospital de Santerre as a nurse. According to Madame de Beauvais, he was wounded last May, presumably in the war. See what you can find out about him.”

  Hamish nodded, then looked up, his eyes shining. “You havena asked about that wee crossbow bolt.”

  Zach took a slow sip of his coffee. “My, you have been busy this morning.”

  “Aye. I’ve found a gentleman by the name of La Barre who says he used to own a brass-trimmed oak box fitted out as what he calls a va
mpire-killing kit.”

  “A vampire-killing kit?”

  “That’s right.” Hamish’s heat-limp red mustaches twitched. “Everything a body could need to kill a vampire, should he happen to meet one: a wooden stake, a cross, a vial of holy water, and a miniature crossbow with four silver-tipped wooden bolts.”

  “So what happened to it?”

  “He claims he gave it to some voodoo king as payment for a love charm. Last spring.”

  “Did the charm work?”

  Hamish grunted. “He dinna say. But he did tell me the name of the voodoo king he claims he gave it to. An old black man who lives in the swamps out toward Bayou Sauvage. A man they call Papa John.” He reached for his coffee and shook his head. “I’ve heard of voodoo queens and voodooiennes, but I sure never heard of any voodoo king.”

  “I’ve heard of this one,” said Zach, his gaze lifting to the iron-fenced square across the street. A Greek in a fez had set up a stall and was selling ice cream between a blanket-wrapped Choctaw hawking blowguns and a mulatress in a red tignon who thumped the side of her wooden tub and shouted, “Bière douce. Ginger beer, cold.”

  “He came here from the revolts in Saint-Dominque.”

  Hamish rubbed a beefy hand across his face. “The slave revolts? I don’t think I like the sound of this.”

  Zach shook his head. “It didn’t start as a slave revolt. It started with the coloreds fighting the whites, when the gens de couleur libres on the island discovered that the French Revolutionaries weren’t as genuinely attached to the principles of liberté and égalité as they liked to pretend.”

  Hamish grunted. “All I know is that by the end of it, there was hardly a white man, woman, or child left alive on that island.” The big New Yorker took a long, noisy sip of his coffee and slowly raised his gaze to Zach’s face. “Exactly how’d you come to know so much about this Papa John, anyway?”

  “According to Madame de Beauvais, Henri Santerre used to visit him.”

  “She told you that? A voodoo king? What would our good doctor have to do with a voodoo king?”

  Zach dropped a few coins on the table and stood up. “It seems they shared an interest in native plants and old Indian cures.”

  Hamish cast a desperate glance at the sky. “We won’t get there and back before dark.”

  Zach smiled. “There’ll be a full moon.”

  Hamish pushed back his chair with a loud scraping of metal over flagstones. “Oh, now that’s reassuring. We’re going out to some alligator-infested swamp, in the dark, to talk to a murderous ex-slave who collects the dirt off dead children’s graves and mixes it with the blood of virgins, and I’m supposed to be thankful for a full moon?”

  The sun was sliding inexorably toward the west by the time they left the neatly tended gardens, raised cottages, and Greek Revival–style mansions of Esplanade Ridge behind and struck out into the wilder, wetter land beyond, a land of cypress swamps and black bayou waters and the furtive rustlings of unseen creatures. At first, the land was still fairly settled, with tumbledown huts perched on stilts and cows grazing in fields and swishing unconcernedly at flies with their tails, while boys fishing for their supper stared silently at the two Union officers riding past.

  This was country, a far different world from the city of New Orleans with its theaters and tightly packed town houses and delicately scented ladies with parasols and Paris gowns. Gradually, even the shanties with their plank walls and smoking cook fires grew more scattered, the rutted dirt road turned into a track, and then the track became a path half-obscured by gloomy thickets of cypress and pale green willows trailing wispy branches that stirred sluggishly in the muggy breeze.

  “I knew I shoulda waited until tomorrow to talk to you about voodoo kings,” Hamish said, then swore as his horse shied violently at the rusting remains of an old indigo vat thrusting up through the canebrakes beside them. Something slithered through the reeds up ahead to disappear into the black water with a splash that had Hamish’s horse shying again, and the air suddenly seemed filled with the whirling chirrup of insects and the hoarse calls of ducks and geese and the swift black shadows of what looked like bats, although it was too early, surely, for bats?

  “He’ll be expecting us today,” Zach said.

  “Expecting us? How in the name of all that’s holy— or unholy—could he be expecting us?”

  Zach grinned. “If you know about him, he knows you know about him.”

  “Huh,” Hamish said, then swore once more when the hoot of an owl set his horse to cavorting nervously again. “At least we’ve finally got ourselves a good solid suspect.”

  Zach tilted back his head, his gaze drawn to the giant dragonflies—mosquito hawks, they called them here— swooping through the air. “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “What?” Hamish slewed around awkwardly in his saddle to stare back at Zach. “But . . . he has the crossbow.”

  “Yeah. Which is why I can’t see him committing murder with the one weapon sure to lead us to him. Jamestown weed or crushed love beads would be more his style.”

  “And that wouldn’t lead us back to him?”

  “Not in a place like New Orleans.” Zach drew rein sharply as a peculiar, mushroomlike structure materialized out of the shadows before them.

  He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting—some squatter’s shack, perhaps, built of scrap lumber and bits of tar paper, such as one might find lining the batture between the levee and the river; something crude, predictable, familiar. Well, there was nothing crude or familiar about this strangely elegant hut of peeled cypress logs and reeds that rose high on stilts in the center of a clearing ringed by ancient cypress trees. Built in the round, with a steeply pitched, conical thatched roof, it looked for all the world as if it had been plucked up from the jungles of Africa only to be dropped down here, whole, in the swamps of southern Louisiana.

  “I don’t think I got it quite right,” said the tall, bone-thin black man who stood in the open doorway at the top of a set of steps that was really more like a slanted ladder fashioned of peeled saplings tied together with some kind of reed. “But it’s close.”

  “How old were you when you left?” Zach asked, nudging his reluctant horse forward.

  The old man’s eyes gleamed. “Twelve. Or thereabouts.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Hamish demanded, looking from one to the other.

  “The house,” said Zach, swinging out of the saddle. “And Africa.” He tilted back his head to stare up at the old man. “Are you going to climb down, or shall we come up?”

  “Please,” Papa John said, stepping back. “Come up.” Hamish made a kind of strangling noise, deep in his throat, but Zach pushed him up the ladder. The old man smiled, showing large, even teeth yellowed by age.

  His skin was the dark ebony of a pure African, his age-lined face marked with a zigzag pattern of tribal tattoos at once hideous and oddly beautiful. The contrast between that dark, savagely marked flesh and the snowy white frills of the dress shirt he wore was startling. He must be eighty years of age, at least, Zach figured, from what he’d been told. And yet the big man still held himself proudly erect, with only a faint shimmer of silver showing in the black of his close-cropped, woolly hair as it caught the fading daylight streaming in the openings that served as windows.

  Inside, the house was essentially one large room, scrupulously clean and simply furnished with a cot, table, and chairs made of the same logs as the hut, and a small, curiously carved chest that stood beside the cot. Bunches of dried plants dangled from the exposed rafters, their pungent aroma mingling with a medley of other scents, the dampness of the swamp and the tang of the freshly peeled logs and the warmth of kerosene from the lamp that had been lit against the gloom. No smoking tallow candles here.

  Except for the herbs and other plants overhead, there was little in the room to suggest the occupation of its inhabitant. But a red cloth had been suspended from the ceiling to curtain off one side of the
hut, and it was to this that Hamish went at once, jerking it back to reveal row after row of shelves cleverly fitted into the curving recesses of the walls and filled with everything from bundles of blackened Spanish moss to mysterious blue glass vials with white porcelain tops and crudely hollowed-out wooden bowls overflowing with cowry shells.

  Hamish had leaped back, leery of the snake voodoo practitioners were said to keep, but the only identifiable creature Zach could see was a large white cat stretched out motionless along one shelf. It lay so still that at first Zach thought it must be dead. Then its head swung around to stare at them through wide, unblinking green eyes, and Zach thought, if Papa John keeps a snake, it can’t be here.

  “No, I don’t have a snake,” said the tall black man in a slightly amused voice. He still stood near the doorway, his hands dangling loosely at his sides. “And what you’re looking for is not here, either.”

  “How do you know what we’re looking for?” demanded Hamish, his voice belligerent, his manner every inch that of the New York City policeman.

  The black man’s lips parted in a slow, malignant smile. “You mean, besides the dirt of children’s graves and the blood of virgins?”

  Hamish was a good enough policeman to keep most of the effect those words had on him from showing on his face. But he couldn’t stop his eyes from widening, or the drops of sweat that were rolling down his flushed cheeks despite the breezy coolness of the hut. “Where is it, then?”

  The old man lifted one shoulder in a careless, dismissive shrug. “What use have I for a vampire-killing kit? That’s white men’s foolishness.” Even after sixty years or more, the lyrical French of the islands still accented his English, still influenced every gesture. “I sold it, last spring.”

  “That a fact?” said Hamish, his arms linked across his beefy chest. “Who’d you sell it to?”

  From its perch on the shelf, the white cat suddenly stood up, stretching, then jumped down to pad across the floor to the man beside the door. Papa John stooped to scratch its ears, his attention seemingly all for the cat. “He didn’t tell me his name, and I didn’t ask. I’d never seen him before.”