Midnight Confessions

by Candice Proctor

  Dominic was her dearly beloved son, her firstborn and only child, the center of her existence and the light of her life, yet she’d seen him so little these last months, since Philippe’s death, and then Henri’s. She tried. She tried, always, to be there to take breakfast with him, to share his dinner and talk with him about his day. She tried to find the time to walk with him along the levee, to go blackberry picking, to picnic in the park. But it never felt as if it were enough. And she had, always, always, this sense of being pulled apart, of neglecting one responsibility for the other, of failing him, failing the hospital, failing herself.

  Perhaps, she thought, letting herself in the garden gate, perhaps in some ways it was better that the hospital was closing. She couldn’t keep it going on her own. And a boy needed his mother, especially a boy who’d already lost his father.

  “Maman.” At the foot of the steps, Emmanuelle paused, her head turning toward the stables. “Maman,” Dominic called again, racing across the lawn, a string of catfish dangling from one raised arm. “Look. I caught the biggest, and the most.”

  “You always catch the biggest and the most,” she said, laughing, as he skidded to a halt before her.

  “Only when you’re not there,” said Jean-Lambert, limping up, his weight resting heavily on Baptiste’s arm. “Bonsoir, ma petite.” He leaned forward to let her reach up and brush a kiss against his cheek. “You’re looking tired.”

  “I am tired, Papère,” she said, linking her arm through the old man’s and nodding to Baptiste, who turned away.

  “Come, Michie Dominic,” said the big black man, lifting the string of fish from the boy’s hand. “Let’s go show these to Celeste and see if she can’t fry some up for your supper, hmmm?”

  “I heard about that English doctor,” said Jean-Lambert, his voice hushed as he watched Dominic take off at a run toward the kitchen. “That Charles Yardley. It’s troubling, very troubling.” He brought his gaze back to Emmanuelle’s face. “Come to Beau Lac with us, child. You must.”

  There was a weathered old swing at one end of the porch, and they sat there, sharing an unvoiced reluctance to leave the freshening breeze and sweet smell of moonflowers and honeysuckle. Emmanuelle leaned her head back, her eyes wide as she stared up at the stars beginning to wink at them from out of the purpling sky. “The people here still need medical attention,” she said, feeling guilty, torn. And yet without the hospital behind her, she wondered, how many would call on her, a woman, with no official medical certification?

  “The fighting in the area has lessened, which means fewer military casualties to fill the wards at Charity and the Hôtel de Dieu,” Jean-Lambert said gently. “Besides, doctors are scarce in the river parishes, too, you know. You could do much good there.”

  The chains holding the swing creaked gently in the stillness of the evening. A lazy, peaceful image beckoned, an image of moss-draped oaks and still black waters, of a hip-roofed French plantation house with thick brick piers and wide, shady galleries. Her gaze still fixed on the distant stars, Emmanuelle sucked in a deep, painful breath and let it out again in a long sigh. The urge to go was strong, to leave behind the terror of the Yankee-occupied, heat-festering, suddenly dangerous city and lose herself in the safe, healing rhythms of the countryside. She thought of quiet, undemanding days spent riding the fields or fishing for bass with Dominic and Jean-Lambert on the lake, and she knew a gentle yearning mingled with a fierce sadness that was like a grieving for something lost.

  There could be no peace for her at Beau Lac, not now, but it offered her a sanctuary of sorts, and she wasn’t too proud to admit how badly she needed that, how badly she needed a place of refuge, a haven, far from the reach of an unknown but ruthless killer. Far from Zach Cooper with his darkly stirring eyes and hard-driving body and whispered words of a love that could last forever.

  She felt it keenly, the sense of emptiness, of desolation that had been riding her all day, ever since that cold, brief confrontation in the chapel. It was there, deep inside, a kind of protective numbness beneath the tide of fear and grief that had come with the news of Charles Yardley’s death, with the acknowledgment of the heartbreaking inevitability of the hospital’s closure. She supposed, in some way, this inner deadness was a blessing. Because she wasn’t sure she could bear the pain she knew lurked beneath it.

  She never should have allowed them to happen, those breathless nights of endless passion. She knew that now, had always known it so surely that she wondered how it had ever come about. How had it happened, she wondered, that they had come to this? She a widow of less than three months, fiercely loyal to the South however critical she might be of its peculiar institution, a woman who hated violence and this killing business of war. And he, this man who had made war his business, who strode her city as a conquering enemy, who had begun by believing her capable of murder, and who now thought—what?

  She could hear the croaking of bullfrogs in the distance, the stirring of the banana trees in the warm breeze, the melodic laughter of an African voice carrying from the back of the house. This was her world, this the life she had made for herself twelve years ago. And if she had dared to hope, in the warm embrace of the night, that she might know some other future than this narrow, lonely existence, that she might know love and grasp at an eternity of joy and laughter, then what she had seen in those hard, dark eyes this morning had warned her, surely, of the dangerous, seductive lure of hopes and dreams.

  “Emmanuelle,” said Jean-Lambert, the swing creaking softly as he shifted toward her. “Come to Beau Lac with us.”

  “I’ll come,” she said, and knew an inner pain so sharp and piercing, it took her breath. But it faded quickly, submerged beneath that rising tide of numbness and an overwhelming, quite sudden sensation of exhaustion.

  They called them shotguns, these narrow houses one found concentrated in the poorer sections of the city, the idea being that if someone fired a shotgun in the front door, the blast would pass through each room in succession and then out the back. There were a lot of shotgun houses in the Irish Channel, most built of gunwales from barges that had come down the Mississippi and then been broken up for their lumber. But some were more substantial structures, built of milled wood, still only one room wide but with high front gables and cast-iron railings and slender Italianate or neo-Grecian columns embellishing their tiny facades.

  As soon as Zach turned into the narrow street off Tchoupitoulas, he knew which house belonged to Fra Spears and her four sons. He could see it, halfway down the block, the shutters freshly painted, the front stoop scrubbed, the shallow front yard free of all traces of the trash and weeds that disfigured so many of the shacks and tenements that surrounded it. And as he drew closer to the tiny, painstakingly maintained house, Zach found himself wondering what had driven her so far, this widowed German woman and her four boys, and why she had chosen to come here, to New Orleans, with its fierce storms and killing heat, its yellow-fever epidemics and endemic swamp sickness.

  A man sat on the house’s narrow front porch, a tall, slim young man idly strumming a guitar and watching Zach’s approach with a narrowed, steady gaze. “Guten Morgen, Major,” said Hans Spears, his hands stilling for a moment on the strings as Zach drew nearer.

  “Good morning.” Zach paused with one foot propped on the bottom step as he stared up at the young German. A neat stack of books and papers lay on the wicker table beside him, untouched.

  “You’ve come to talk about Charles Yardley,” said Hans, his fingers moving again to pick out a sweet, sad melody. It wasn’t a question.

  “May I come up?”

  Hans nodded, his attention all for the music he coaxed from his guitar.

  “Did you know him well?” Zach asked, his gaze hard on the other man’s face.

  “Not as well as I knew Philippe, if that’s what you are asking.” The words were calm, cool, but Zach could see a muscle ticking nervously in the other man’s cheek.

  “Tell me,” said Zach, proppin
g one hip on the edge of the porch’s iron railing to take the pressure off his aching leg. “Are you afraid?”

  Hans brought his hand down on the strings in a loud, discordant crash. “You mean, am I afraid I might be next?” He swung his head to look over one shoulder at Zach, his thin face drawn and held tight. “Of course. Wouldn’t you be?”

  “Yes.”

  He put the guitar away from him and lurched up to go stand at the top of the steps, his hands tucked up beneath his arms, his gaze fixed on some distant, unknown point. The sun was fierce today, the sky a brilliant blue, the air so humid, the world seemed to drip. “Who’s doing this?” he said, his voice shaken, yet still controlled. “Who, and why?”

  “I don’t know.” They had a lot in common, Zach thought, Emmanuelle and this self-possessed, self-disciplined young German. “I thought maybe you could help me figure that out. Maybe think of someone who was treated at the Hospital de Santerre recently, someone who might have a grudge against the people who worked there? Someone who might have threatened them.” Hamish was still plowing his way through a long list of patients, looking for someone with a grudge, but it had always struck Zach as an unlikely way of finding their killer.

  The boy looked thoughtful for a moment, then shook his head, the muscles in his throat working as he swallowed. “I can think of no one.”

  “What about that day at the hospital last May, before Philippe de Beauvais was killed? The day of the quarrel between Claire La Touche and Charles Yardley. You were there, weren’t you?”

  “Not at first. I came in near the end, with Santerre.” That clear, steady gray gaze swung around to fix on Zach’s face. “Why?”

  “Everyone involved in or even present at that quarrel is now dead. Everyone except you and Emmanuelle de Beauvais.”

  “You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t lie awake and think about that?” He flung out one hand in a swift, savage gesture. “I try to read, to study, and the words simply blur before my eyes.”

  Zach stared down at that neat pile of books, and the open notebook beside it. The notebook was a common enough one, bound in black cloth worn rusty by time and use. But it was the delicate, slanting script that drew Zach’s attention, and held it.

  “What exactly is this?” he said, reaching to slip the notebook from beneath the volume holding it open.

  “Some notes Philippe gave me, from when he was in medical school. He thought I might find them useful.” The German’s eyes narrowed in sudden interest. “Why?”

  “Philippe?” Zach’s fingers tightened around the notebook, almost crushing it. “This is Philippe’s writing?”

  “Yes.”

  Sweet mercy, thought Zach, as all the events of the recent past spun about in his head and realigned themselves in a new pattern of sudden, startling clarity. Sweet, sweet mercy.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  He thought he might find her at the Hospital de Santerre, but she wasn’t there. No one was there except the big Senegalese nurse who answered Zach’s shout with slow, ponderous steps and said, “Ain’t nobody here no more. They gone. All gone. She closin’ this place down, didn’t you know that? Now Dr. Yardley done got his-self kilt, cain’t have no hospital without no doctor, uh-uh.”

  Leaving the tall, whitewashed building on Bienville, Zach stood on the sunbaked banquette and listened to the dull clank of the cathedral bell in the distance, ringing the Angelus. She hadn’t told him, that morning he’d found her in the chapel. She hadn’t told him she would be closing the hospital, just as she hadn’t told him the truth about that folded slip of paper he’d found in Charles Yardley’s coat. Emmanuelle might very well have slept with Yardley herself; the more Zach thought about it, the more he decided she probably had. But the de Beauvais who had written that desperate, passionate note, who had burned for the Englishman as for no other, had been not Emmanuelle, but her husband.

  Philippe de Beauvais.

  He found the door to the dark, narrow passageway of the house on the rue Dumaine open, and followed the sound of a woman singing to the courtyard. There, all was confusion, the paving stones littered with trunks and cases, some closed, some half-packed. He paused in the arched opening to the yard and the singing stopped abruptly as Rose looked up from where she knelt before an open trunk and saw him.

  “What you doing here?” she said, her face closed and unfriendly, her French accent unusually pronounced. “We’re busy. Leaving for Beau Lac, we are, come Friday.”

  “Where is Madame de Beauvais?”

  Rose bent over the trunk and busied herself with rearranging the contents. “She doesn’t want to see you.”

  How much, Zach wondered, staring at that regally inclined neck and rich café au lait skin; how much did this tall, beautiful mulatto know about the people whose lives she’d shared for so many years? How much did she know about him? “She doesn’t exactly have a choice,” he said quietly.

  “Ah.” Rose tilted her head, an unfriendly, humorless smile touching her lips as she stared at him across the sunny yard. “So you’re here as a Yankee and not as a lover, hmmm?”

  “You can take me to her, or I’ll announce myself,” Zach said, his jaw hardening. “The choice is yours.”

  He expected her to stand then, and lead the way up the curving flight of steps. Instead, she simply shrugged and bent over her packing again. “Announce yourself. She’s up in Dominic’s room. You know where it is.”

  She had the French doors and shutters of the bedroom at the back of the house thrown open wide, although the sun was high in the clear blue sky and dazzlingly hot. He knew she must have heard his uneven step on the stairs, the scrape of his spurs, but she didn’t look up when he paused in the doorway from the hall. She stood beside a case that lay open on the bed amid a jumble of boy’s clothes, her back to him, a shirt in her hands.

  “You should have told me you were leaving,” he said quietly.

  “Because I’m still a suspect?” She did look around then, although her hands continued the work of folding the shirt with quick, sure movements. “All I can think about is getting my son away from here. Going someplace where he can be safe. Where I’ll be safe.”

  “Is that the only reason you’re leaving?”

  She bent to place the folded shirt in the case. “It’s the main one.”

  Zach glanced around the room, at its shelves jammed with books and all the clutter of a boy’s life. “Where is he? Dominic, I mean.”

  “He has a friend who lives over near Rampart Street. He’s there.” She reached for another shirt. “Why?”

  “Because you lied to me. Again.” She went quite still, and he saw it, that brief flash of guilt and fear before she hid it behind her habitual mask of sangfroid. He walked right up to her, close enough that when he leaned into her, his face was only a hand’s span from hers. “I can see you thinking, now, which of my many, many lies has he discovered? ” She didn’t say anything, and he turned away, one open palm slapping at the high bedpost in frustration. “You know, I might be a lot closer to catching this killer you’re so afraid of if every other word out of your mouth wasn’t a lie.”

  “Are you going to tell me what you’re talking about?”

  Zach went to stand beside the open French doors overlooking the courtyard below. “I saw Hans Spears this morning. He’s a bit nervous, too. So nervous, he’s been having a hard time bringing himself to look over the medical notebooks your husband so kindly lent him.”

  “What exactly are you saying?”

  He swung to face her again, his gaze hard on her white, drawn face. “That note I found in Charles Yardley’s house. You didn’t write it. Philippe did.”

  She stared at him, unblinking, for a moment. Then she let out her breath in a long, pent-up sigh, her hands coming up to brush her hair off her forehead. “I didn’t exactly lie to you.” She brought her gaze back to his face, her chin lifting. “I slept with Charles, too.”

  “What, the three of you, together?”
/>   “No!”

  He gave her a mean smile. “My apologies. I’m reaching the point where I’ll believe almost anything.” The sound of running feet, pounding up the stairs, drew Zach’s attention to the hall. A boy’s shout echoed up the stairwell, followed by Dominic’s unmistakable laughter, and Emmanuelle lost whatever color she’d had left in her face.

  “Get your hat and gloves,” Zach said. “We’re going for a walk.”

  They turned toward the river and the cathedral, a tense silence between them. The heat in the streets was thick and oppressive, the high stucco walls of the Spanish-style houses sun-drenched and close and echoing with the booming clatter from a ship unloading down at the wharves.

  “Tell me about Philippe,” Zach said, his gaze hard on the profile of the small, fine-boned woman who walked beside him.

  She said nothing for a moment, her eyes downcast, one hand fisted tight around the sunshade she carried. Like her clothes and her hat and her gloves, the sunshade was black. “I was seventeen when I met him,” she said at last, her voice coming out strained, hoarse. “You must understand that until then, even back in France, books and medicine had been my entire life.” She paused, and he had the sense that she was lost in the past, trying to recapture the girl she once had been. “There aren’t very many men who are comfortable with a woman like that. It didn’t take me long to come to the conclusion that if I wanted to be a woman—a desirable woman—then I couldn’t be a doctor, too. And I was determined to be a doctor.”

  He tried to imagine her as she must once have been, young, eager, easily hurt. “So you resigned yourself to being a woman men found undesirable.”

  She let out a short, startled laugh. “Yes, I suppose you could say that.” Her gaze lifted, her eyes narrowing as she squinted up at the high tiled roofs of the surrounding houses. “And then I met Philippe.”

  “He was different?”

  She nodded, her face still turned away from his. “Philippe told me I was both beautiful and brilliant.” A sweet, sad smile touched her lips. “I think I would have loved him for that alone. He saw me as both a woman and a man.” She glanced sideways at him. “If that makes sense?”