Midnight Confessions

by Candice Proctor

  “Ah.” Hamish straightened with a creaking of stiff knees and a half-smothered groan. “We’ll have to send the body over to the army hospital. See if they can figure it out.”

  “Yardley came to see me this afternoon, at headquarters.” Zach pushed away from the wall. “When I was with the Old Man.”

  Hamish looked around in surprise. “What the hell for?”

  “That’s what I came here to ask him.”

  Hamish stooped to pick up the velvet pillow at his feet and toss it onto a nearby chair. “Have you looked around?”

  Zach shook his head. “Not much. I was waiting for you. This is your profession, not mine.” He had read the letter Yardley was writing to his mother, a caustic, dry-witted observation on the heat and the humidity and the Yankee occupation of the city that had told Zach nothing.

  He left Hamish leafing through the papers in the front room and went back into the bedroom. Beneath its film of mosquito netting, the bed was made, although a vague depression in the center suggested someone had lain down on the counterpane. Lighting the brass lamp on the bedside chest, Zach let his gaze drift around the room. It was like the other rooms in the cottage, small but elegantly appointed, the furniture expensive without being ostentatious, everything carefully, artistically arranged, then ignored and allowed to slip into a lazy kind of disarray that suggested the man himself.

  Zach pulled open the top drawer and began a methodical search of the room. He knew a vague, uneasy sense of intrusion, of poking into things that were private, things that Yardley, in life, would have objected violently to letting Zach see. He didn’t really expect to find anything here. If Charles Yardley’s death was linked to anything, Zach thought, it was to that tall, whitewashed building on the rue Bienville and the people who worked there—or who had been treated there.

  Straightening, he moved to run his gaze over the litter of objects decorating the mantel. He was an unsentimental man, Charles Yardley. There was little of the personal or intimate even here, in his bedroom. Things of beauty, yes: intricately carved small ivory chests, tastefully framed architectural renderings of the churches of Christopher Wren, a silver flute lying on an end table atop a pile of sheet music. But nothing to suggest the passions that lived within the man—except, perhaps, that fondness for beauty and music.

  Lifting the flute, Zach studied the score that lay beneath it, Le Rossignol-en-Amour. “I think of you whenever I hear this,” someone had written across the top in a delicate black script. “Now, when you play it, perhaps you’ll think of me.”

  Zach held the flute lightly, thoughtfully, in one hand. Then he set it aside and went over the room again, looking for something he might have missed. Ten minutes later he found it, a wedge of paper lying forgotten in the pocket of a heavy winter overcoat.

  It was only a small piece of paper, folded over twice. “You must come to me tonight,” someone had written in a hasty scrawl. “You make me burn as no man has ever done. Ever. Don’t fail me.” The script was the same as that on the music. Only, this time, the writer had signed a name, of sorts. de B.

  De Beauvais.

  “Finding anything in there?” called Hamish, his tread heavy as he crossed the parlor to stand in the open doorway, his hands braced against the frame at his side.

  “No. Nothing.” Zach turned, the sweat on his face drying into a thin, cold film, the folded paper with its damning signature already in his pocket.

  A haze veiled the waning moon and stars, leaving only a faint glimmer to light the night. Zach walked the top of the levee, his gaze fixed on the dark and thickly rushing mass of the river, a fierce and building anger mingling with a sick kind of dread within him.

  It was happening again. One death, and then another, and another, and there didn’t seem to be anything he could do to stop it. So far, his best suspect was a dead man who could just as easily be a victim himself. And beyond that, what did he have? A voodoo king living in an African hut out toward the Bayou Sauvage, a man with an extensive knowledge of poisons and an eerie way of knowing what was going on deep in the guts of a man? An enigmatic German emigrant with a fierce ambition to become a doctor and a tragically maimed foot, legacy of someone’s betrayal—some woman’s betrayal? A high-strung, crippled brother with enough reason to kill his sister and her lover, and perhaps, by some twisted extension of logic, the old doctor who had allowed it all to happen under his nose? But not Charles Yardley—unless, of course, Yardley had been Claire’s lover, too. Yet even then, Zach could see no reason for Antoine La Touche to send someone to kill Emmanuelle.

  And then, of course, there was Emmanuelle de Beauvais herself.

  Zach turned his back on the river, the cool wind blowing hard enough now to buffet his back and rattle the saber at his side. One by one, the lights in the city below were winking out. They were his responsibility, the people in those houses down there. He was doing his best to protect them from the depredations of yellow fever and the unsettled, desperate refugees flowing into the city, and even the sticky fingers of the Brothers Butler. But in this, he was failing them.

  Burying his hands deep in the pockets of his coat, Zach fingered that small, telltale wedge of paper. If the old man had in fact been killed by mistake, then that left the four of them, Philippe and Emmanuelle, Claire and Yardley. Two men, two women, bound together in a twisted web of passion and betrayal and death. Someone was killing them, methodically, ruthlessly. Someone who thought he—or she—had a damn good reason to kill. Someone who wouldn’t stop until they were all dead.

  Standing at the crest of the levee, the wind almost cold against his back, Zach knew it again, that sick clenching deep in his belly. It could so easily have been Emmanuelle who’d died tonight. And he was so afraid, so terribly afraid, that he might not be able to protect her, that he might not catch the killer in time. That she might die, too.

  She’d said she didn’t believe in love. Not a love that went beyond the sweet intoxication of attraction, beyond the desperate, possessive need of the moment, beyond the scalding hot rush of lust. But he believed. He believed in a love that could be not only all-consuming and passionate, but noble and enduring. A love that could last into eternity. Perhaps it’s a kind of luck, he thought, what happens to love. Perhaps the endurance of love says more about the honesty of the man and woman who love than about the quality of their love. Because when two people are honest with each other, when they love the person who is really there and not some false image that has been created for them—or that they’ve created for themselves—when they’re open about who and what they are, about what they want, then the chance of disillusionment is surely lessened, the chance of growing apart reduced.

  Well, Emmanuelle de Beauvais wasn’t being very honest with him. From the beginning, he’d known that, known she was hiding parts of herself from him, important parts. He’d known, but it hadn’t stopped him from desiring her, hadn’t stopped him from falling in love with her—or at least, with the parts of her she’d let him see. But he couldn’t help wondering what it was she was hiding. And a part of him—the part of him that was Ben Butler’s provost marshal—acknowledged that it might be something terrible indeed.

  He found her in the chapel on the second floor of the Hospital de Santerre. She was kneeling at the rail before the altar, her head bowed, her hands clasped in prayer, her face bathed golden by the morning light streaming in the tall, clear windows beyond her. His uneven step on the tiled floor brought her head around, and she made a quick sign of the cross and rose to her feet. She looked pale and shaken and very, very afraid.

  “You’ve heard?” he said, stopping before her.

  He saw the surge of rampant fear in her eyes, her chest lifting as she sucked in a quick, shuddering breath. “Not long ago.” She brought up one hand to rub her forehead, then let her hand drop. “Mon Dieu. Who is doing this?”

  He knew a swift, powerful urge to take her in his arms and comfort her. Instead, he said, his voice cold and hard, “Why didn�
�t you tell me you’d slept with him?”

  Her head snapped back as if he had slapped her, her nostrils flaring, her eyes widening as she stared up at him. Her eyes were the blue-green of a coral sea, deep and hurting. As he watched, the hurt faded, subsumed by anger and a fierce, icy control. “I didn’t think it was any of your business. I don’t recall asking you for a list of who you’ve slept with in the last ten years.”

  “The people around me aren’t dying.”

  “I see.” She drew in a deep, shaky breath. “It’s not my lover who wants to know, but Ben Butler’s provost marshal. My mistake.”

  She would have pushed past him, but he grabbed her arm, his fingers digging into the stiff black cloth above her elbow, jerking her around to face him again. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She held herself very still in his grasp, her voice even, controlled. The voice of a stranger. “I didn’t think it was relevant. I still don’t.”

  “What about Henri Santerre? Did you sleep with him, too?”

  At that, she jerked her arm from his grasp, and he let her go. “How can you even suggest such a thing?” Anger flashed, then disappeared again behind cold scorn. “Next you’ll be asking if Claire La Touche and I were lovers.”

  “Were you?”

  She simply stared at him, her breath coming hard and fast, her face a frozen mask. “How did you find out?” she demanded. “About Charles and me?”

  “From this.” He held the crumpled wedge of paper out to her, and after a moment’s hesitation, she took it. In the hush of the chapel, the rustle of the paper as she unfolded it sounded unnaturally loud. She stared at it in silence for a long moment, then said softly, “How unlike him, to keep such a thing.”

  “I doubt he meant to. It was in one of his pockets.” From the distance came the peal of the cathedral bell, ringing out over the city. “Were you still seeing him?”

  “Who wants to know? Ben Butler’s provost marshal, or my lover?”

  “I want to know.”

  Turning away, she went to stand beside one of the tall, narrow windows overlooking the street below. “No,” she said after a moment. “I wasn’t still seeing him.”

  Zach stayed where he was, one hand gripping the pommel of his sword. “Why not? What happened?”

  She lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Nothing dramatic or unusual. He found someone who interested him more.”

  Zach knew her better now. Knew when she wasn’t being quite honest with him, knew when she was holding something back. “And you?” he said, pressing her, wanting to hurt her, wanting to make her hurt like he was hurting. “Did you still burn for him?”

  He saw her stiffen, although she kept her face turned away from him. “I didn’t kill him in a jealous passion, if that’s what you’re asking.” A silence fell between them, a silence broken only by the rumble of a wagon from the street below. Then she said, “How did he die? Do you know?”

  “According to the autopsy, he was smothered. Someone probably found him on the sofa, asleep, and held a pillow over his face.”

  “Poor Charles.” In one brief display of weakness, she hugged her arms over her stomach, her shoulders hunching forward as if around some inner pain. Then she straightened, visibly struggling to hide all the hurting, frightened bits away before she turned to face him. “He said he was going to see you yesterday. Did he?”

  Zach shook his head, aware once again of that urge to take her in his arms and comfort her, to tell her it was all right sometimes to give way to pain and weakness and fear, to tell her she didn’t always need to be so damned in control of her emotions. The only time this woman let herself go, it seemed, was in bed.

  “He tried,” Zach said, his voice as impersonal as he could make it. “I was in a meeting. By the time I got to his house, it was too late.” He kept his gaze on her face. “Did he tell you what he wanted?”

  “He was afraid. He thought someone was following him, watching him.”

  “He didn’t know who?”

  “No. He never actually saw anyone. It was just a feeling he had.” A sad smile touched the edges of her lips, then faded. “Charles didn’t put much stock in such things as feelings, intuitions. He was badly rattled by it.”

  “He was a good friend of Philippe’s,” Zach said, strolling over to stare at the chapel’s simple altar, “wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  Zach glanced back at her over his shoulder. “Did he know? Did your husband know you were sleeping with his good friend and colleague?”

  Her gaze fixed with his, she slowly nodded her head.

  “How?” he demanded, walking right up to her again. “How did Philippe find out?”

  “Charles told him.”

  Jesus, Zach thought. What kind of a marriage did she have? “And was he angry? Philippe, I mean.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She let out her breath in a long, tired sigh. “Because Philippe was in love with someone else.”

  He leaned into her. “Who?”

  She met his gaze squarely, her beautiful eyes wide and frightened and lying, lying. “I don’t know.”

  “You know,” he said, and turned away and left her there, in the golden light of the deserted chapel.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  An afternoon breeze stirred the drying berries of the Chinaball tree in the courtyard and brought down a drift of crepe myrtle blossoms that scuttled across the paving stones in a shimmer of soft pink and white. Emmanuelle leaned her head back against the worn green leather of Henri Santerre’s old office chair and let her breath out in a long sigh, her gaze on the scene outside the window, her hands falling idle in her lap.

  It was over. They had dedicated their lives to building up this hospital—she and her father, Henri Santerre, and Philippe. Endless hours and sleepless nights, so much sacrificed over the years. And now it was over.

  She heard the thump of a crutch on the wooden floor behind her. A man’s cold, bony hands descended on her shoulders, gripping her tightly. “Alors,” said Antoine La Touche, swinging her chair around so that she faced him. He looked thinner, more unwell than ever, his eyes bloodshot, his mouth drawn down with worry. “I’ve just heard. What is wrong with these Yankees? Why can’t they stop this?”

  Emmanuelle laid her hand over one of his and tried to smile reassuringly up at him, although she doubted she succeeded very well. “They’re doing everything they can, Antoine. I honestly believe that.”

  Hitching his crutches around, he sat on the edge of the desk and leaned forward to fix her with a scrutinizing gaze. “And you, bébé ? How are you holding up?”

  She let her own gaze drift around the high-ceiling, book-lined room. “It’s not easy, closing this place down.”

  He took her hand again and held it between both of his. “There is no way around it?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve been fighting a losing battle for weeks now. I’ve known that. But I can’t fight this. You can’t have a hospital without a licensed physician.” They’d looked into trying to find someone to help them, before, she and Charles Yardley. But with virtually every able-bodied doctor in the city gone to join the Confederate war effort, only the very old and the very young were left, and they were all—even the interns—already overwhelmed.

  “What will you do with your patients?” Antoine asked, his gaze still fixed on her face.

  “I’ve spoken to the sisters at the Hôtel de Dieu. They can take some. And Lewis over at Charity Hospital said he’d take the rest.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Antoine said suddenly, his grip on her hand tightening. “You’ve done everything you could.”

  She squeezed his hand, a wry smile tugging at her lips. “I know that rationally. And yet . . .” She paused. “I’m not always rational.”

  “Huh.” He flicked her cheek with his fingertips. “You’re one of the most rational, levelheaded, competent people I’ve ever known. When this is all over, when the war is over, you can r
eopen.”

  A painful lump of emotion swelled Emmanuelle’s throat, forcing her to swallow, hard. “This building was mortgaged to pay the fines Butler levied on everyone who had contributed to the Confederate war effort. By the time the war is over . . .” She shook her head again, unable to continue.

  “Emmanuelle.” Antoine leaned forward, his face pinched, intense. “I don’t understand what’s been happening around here, but I do know one thing: You are in grave danger. Now that you no longer have the hospital holding you here, please . . . will you leave New Orleans?”

  She let out her breath in a long, shaky sigh. “Philippe’s parents are taking Dominic to Beau Lac, at the end of the week.”

  “Then go with them. You must. For Dominic’s sake. You know that. He needs you alive.”

  “I know, but . . . how can I? There’s so much to be done.”

  Sliding off the edge of the desk, he tucked his crutches under his arms and gave her a cocky smile. “Tell me what to do first.”

  It was late by the time Emmanuelle took the mule car out Esplanade Avenue, the towering oaks and magnolias mere black silhouettes against a mellowing turquoise sky streaked by the setting sun with high, fluffy stripes of orange and violet tinted clouds. Lately, she’d taken to encouraging Dominic to spend his days and even many of his nights here, on the outskirts of the city, where bullfrogs croaked in the nearby bayous and fireflies flitted through the live oaks. It seemed healthier, surely, than letting him roam the old quarter with its crowded streets and seedy cabarets, its burned-out warehouses and busy wharves. Healthier, and safer. Yet as she approached that big white house with its classical pediment and double galleries wrapped with cast iron, she was conscious of a sadness deep within her, a profound sense of loss and guilt that went beyond the closure of the Hospital de Santerre.