“No. The eight black men and one small mulatto boy who attacked me there were hired. By you.”
She tilted her head slightly, her expression serene and faintly contemptuous. “They said I was responsible, did they, these black men? And you believed them?”
He had no proof, of course, and she knew it. Even if he could find the men responsible, it would still be only their word against hers, and they were black, while she was white, and a de Beauvais. “Tell me, madame,” Zach said, going to stand at the railing beside her, his gaze not on her but on the vast fields of sugarcane stretching out beyond the gardens below, “does your husband know you killed your own son?”
“I killed no one, Major.”
“No. You get others to do your killing for you.”
“My son was killed by Yankees,” she said in that same calm, even tone. “His life might have been a shame, an abomination, even, but he died a hero’s death.”
Zach swung his head to look at her. “That’s why you betrayed him, was it? So that he would die honorably in war, rather than disgrace the family name with his unorthodox behavior?”
Her nostrils flared on a quick intake of breath that fluttered the black lace at her throat. It suddenly struck him as the greatest abomination of all, that she should be wearing mourning for a son whose death she had deliberately caused. “You think I don’t grieve for my son’s death?” she said, her voice throbbing. “I do. Four sons I bore, and not one remains. All I have left in this world now is a little boy who isn’t even mine to raise.”
“You have your husband.”
She surprised him by smiling, a tight smile that curved her lips but brought no warmth to those hard gray eyes. “Let’s say you’re right, Major. Let’s say I was the one who betrayed Philippe. What would you arrest me for, hmmm?”
“The murders of Henri Santerre, Claire La Touche, and Charles Yardley.”
She shook her head, the smile still firmly in place. “I told you, Major, I killed no one.” A quiver of distaste passed over the aged, aristocratic features. “Although I will not pretend to any sadness over their deaths. Claire La Touche might have been born and raised a lady, but she had the instincts of an alley cat.”
“Her family mourn her,” Zach said quietly.
“Only because they don’t know what she was. If they knew, they’d be more than happy to be rid of her, believe me.”
“And Charles Yardley?”
Again, that flash of disdain. “The world is better off without him. He was another such as my son.”
“He was also a dedicated doctor. As was Henri Santerre.” Zach pushed away from the railing in an almost violent gesture that brought him right up close to her. “All those people you killed, trying to keep the secret of your son’s life from becoming known, and all you succeeded in doing was calling attention to the very thing you were trying to hide.”
She held herself very still, only her head tipping back as she stared up at him. “Do you think me such a fool, Major? I keep telling you I have killed no one, and you simply refuse to believe me.”
She was too arrogant, too proud of a woman to lie. He saw that now. She might not have admitted setting those men at Congo Square to kill him, but she hadn’t denied it, either. And he knew quite suddenly and with awful, terrifying clarity, that he’d been wrong. Whether or not she set those men on him, she had certainly betrayed her own son. But Marie Thérèse de Beauvais hadn’t killed Henri Santerre or Claire La Touche or Charles Yardley, and she hadn’t tried to kill Emmanuelle.
He thought of Emmanuelle telling him about how Dominic had learned to shoot a crossbow from his grandfather, and about Dominic saying proudly, My papère knows lots of things you don’t know, about the bayous and the swamps and all the animals and plants that live there.
Dominic saying, She and Papère took the pirogue out on the bayou.
Sweet mercy. Zach’s fingers closed on the older woman’s shoulders, shaking her hard. “Where are they? Where has Jean-Lambert taken her?”
Her composure never slipped. “You’re too late, Major.”
He thrust her away from him almost violently, his breath coming hard and fast, shuddering his chest, turning his voice into something raspy, savage. “Jean-Lambert didn’t know, did he? He didn’t know you were the one who betrayed Philippe. He thought it was Emmanuelle. He found out about the argument at the hospital and he blamed her for Philippe’s death. He blamed them all, and so he killed them all, one by one. Not to silence them, but to punish them. And you . . . you let him do it. You let him kill them. Even your own grandson’s mother.”
The arrogant complacency was gone now. Something ugly twisted the older woman’s features, brought a throb of hatred to her voice. “I blame her more than anyone for what happened. She was a nobody, a poor doctor’s daughter, yet I allowed her to marry my son. I thought she could control him, the way I have controlled his father all these years. Oh, yes,” she said, when Zach’s eyes widened in surprise. “His father has the same tendencies. But never has there been one breath of scandal. If I could do it, she should have been able to do the same.”
“Where are they?” He couldn’t be too late. Couldn’t be, couldn’t be . . .
“Do you think I fish the bayous? How would I know?”
“Dominic,” said Zach suddenly, his head lifting as the sound of a dog’s barking carried on the warm breeze.
“You can’t mean to involve the child in this,” she said, starting forward as if she would stop him. But Zach was already running down the stairs, his spurs and saber jingling.
“You’re too late, Major,” she called after him from the top of the stairs as his feet crunched the shell drive. “Too late.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Emmanuelle had always loved fishing on Beau Lac. It was said that once, the mighty Mississippi had rushed through here on its way to the Gulf. But the river had long ago changed its course, so that now the sweeping oxbow was only a quiet lake of willow and cypress-shaded dark water draining off through the tangled swamps and waterways of the Bayou Crevé toward the Gulf Coast and Biloxi beyond.
They had come here often through the years, she and Jean-Lambert, fishing for bass from an old pirogue. In the past, she’d always found a measure of peace and contentment adrift on the still black waters, but this time, that comfortable sense of serenity eluded her. Again and again, she found her gaze lifting to the thickly growing stands of creeper-draped cypress that marked the entrance to the wilderness stretching away to the east. Somewhere in there, Philippe lay buried, his grave lost, unmarked and untended.
“I think of it often, as well,” said Jean-Lambert, his gaze following hers. “He shouldn’t have been left out there, alone.”
Emmanuelle reached to close her fingers about his gnarled old hand in a quick spasm of shared grief. “When the war is over, we can send people in there, to look for him.”
“It will be too late, by then,” said Jean-Lambert, and she knew he was right. She’d seen potato vines and elephants ears and angel’s trumpet completely obscure the foundations of a burned-out house in one hot, humid season of luxuriant growth. In another two or three years, no one would ever find those graves.
Slim and beautiful, a snowy egret rose from the edge of the marsh. Emmanuelle watched it take to the sky, her head falling back, her eyes narrowing as she squinted against the dazzle of the hot afternoon sun. She felt oddly close to Philippe, on this lake. And she decided that perhaps it was good that she had come to Beau Lac, after all, even if she couldn’t find peace here. Perhaps, here, she could eventually make some sense of her life. Make sense of herself.
“Why did you do it, Emmanuelle?” Jean-Lambert asked softly. “Why did you tell the Yankees about him?”
She brought her gaze back to the old man’s sad, drawn face, and knew a strange chill that seized her heart and made her blood run cold. “It wasn’t me, Papère.”
He sighed, the tired sigh of an old, sick man. “It was Claire, then. I kne
w it had to be one of you.” Setting aside his fishing rod, he began to push the pirogue away from the shallows near the shore. “Philippe told me about what happened, that day at the hospital,” he said, his attention all for his work with the paddle. “You, Claire, the Englishman. Because of it, he decided he was going to join the army.” He glanced up at her suddenly. “Did you know that? After he took the Confederate gold to Biloxi, he planned to just keep going. He told me he was hoping to get killed. He was tired of living a lie, he said, tired of pretending to be something he wasn’t.” He paused, and the silence filled with the rustle of the breeze through the tops of the cypress trees and the slap of the thick dark water against the pirogue’s narrow bow. “My only surviving son, and he wanted to die.”
Emmanuelle stared at the familiar, beloved face of the man before her. “Papère,” she said slowly, still not quite believing it, not wanting to believe it. “Was it you? Was it you who killed all those people?”
“Santerre was an accident,” he said, as calmly as if they’d been discussing the best bait for bass, or which of their favorite snags to try. “You tripped. I regret the mistake. I really do.”
“Papère,” she said again, her voice low, intense. “I didn’t betray Philippe.”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. You were all to blame. The three of you. It was because of you Philippe left New Orleans. And because of you he was killed.”
She stared at the ever-widening expanse of duckweed-coated water. They never came out this far. “Where are we going?” she asked, keeping her voice level.
“The lake’s quite deep in the middle. Did you know?”
She threw a quick glance toward the shore, where Baptiste sat with his back against the trunk of an oak, his hat tilted forward over his face as if he were asleep. She was thinking about calling out to him, when Jean-Lambert said, “He won’t help you.”
And she understood, then, how he’d done it—how they had done it. “Those two black workmen the gatekeeper at the cemetery saw,” she said. “It was you, wasn’t it? You and Baptiste.”
A faint smile played around the old man’s lips. There was nothing even faintly suggestive of the African about his features, but years of riding through the cane fields had tanned the skin of his face and hands to a sunwarmed brown that was darker than that of more than a few quadroons. “No one ever pays attention to the comings and goings of slaves,” he said, his blue eyes shining. “All I needed was some old clothes, and a broad-brimmed hat to pull low over my face. That gatekeeper saw Baptiste’s black skin, and never gave us another thought.”
“And Charles Yardley? Did you have Baptiste kill him?”
“Baptiste watched him, and put the opium in his brandy to deepen his sleep. But I was the one who held the pillow over his face. I wouldn’t ask Baptiste to do that.”
“Why not? What’s the difference?”
“There’s a difference,” Jean-Lambert insisted, but she knew from the vague tightening of his lips that it bothered him, having to use Baptiste, and she wondered at the big black man. Had he done nothing to try to stop his master? Nothing at all? “I wouldn’t have involved Baptiste if I hadn’t had to,” Jean-Lambert was saying. “But I couldn’t do it by myself. Not anymore.”
Emmanuelle glanced back at the silent figure waiting so patiently, so faithfully, on the shore. It would have been easy for Baptiste to have slipped the vampire-killing kit from Philippe’s room. Easy. Easy for him, too, to have put it back.
“I didn’t need his help with Claire, though,” Jean-Lambert was saying, almost proudly. “She actually came to me, complaining of sick headaches and how hard it had become to find laudanum since the war. She knew I’d be able to get her some. I even told her I’d mixed in a few extra herbs, to help her headaches, just in case she noticed the taste.”
For as long as Emmanuelle had known him, Jean-Lambert had had an interest in plants and their uses. He kept an extensive herb garden here, at Beau Lac, in addition to his small plot in the city; foxglove and rosemary, henbane and tansy, and she’d never given it a thought. Not a thought.
“So why hire an Irishman to kill me?” she asked, watching him dip the paddle into the dark water. “Why not just try to shoot me again? Or poison me, like Claire?”
Jean-Lambert shook his head. “After what happened with Santerre, I was afraid to try something like that again. And I couldn’t use poison. Not with Dominic in the house.”
Dominic, Emmanuelle thought, her stomach clenching with fear and panic and despair. Dominic, waiting for them, back at the house. Dominic, unable to come fishing because his dog was missing.
Overhead, a red-tailed hawk soared high above the gap in the trees that was Beau Lac. All around her, the buzz and whirr of insects was like a constant, high-pitched, warning hum. They would be in the middle of the lake soon. She’d thought, at first, that he meant to take her into the swamps on the far side. Now she wasn’t so sure. “What are you planning, Papère?”
“We will drown, my child. Together. Here.”
“Papère . . .” Emmanuelle leaned forward, her gaze hard on his aged, beloved face, her heart thumping so wildly in her chest that she could barely catch her breath. “Think of Dominic. What is this going to do to him?”
“It will be hard on him, losing us both. I know that. But he’ll still have Marie Thérèse. It’s odd, isn’t it? She loves him far more than she ever loved any of her own sons. She even tried to have that Union major killed, because she was afraid you’d marry him and take Dominic away from here. She thinks I don’t know. But I know.”
“Papère, listen to me.” They would be in the middle of the lake soon. Dangerous currents were there, Philippe had told her; strange eddies that alternately sucked you down and tossed you around like a cork. Long, long ago, in the halcyon days of their first summer together, he had taught her to swim, but the thought of trying to swim in petticoats and hoops brought a tight twist of fear to her stomach, and stole whatever breath she had left. “Papère,” she said again, her hands gripping the edges of the pirogue beside her. “This is something you never would have done before you became sick. You have always been one of the kindest, gentlest people I know. Please, don’t do this.”
“They say drowning is a peaceful death, if you don’t struggle and simply give yourself up to it.” He was no longer looking at her but at the tangled mass of cypress and hackberry and willow that marked the edge of the swamps where Philippe had died. And she knew, then, that Jean-Lambert was ready to die, that he’d made up his mind to die, and that unless she acted quickly, he was going to take her with him.
As hard as she could, she threw her weight sideways. The pirogue rocked down and back, once, violently. She saw Jean-Lambert’s startled face, heard his enraged cry. Then the near edge tipped beneath the surface of the lake, and the boat flipped.
She felt her side smack against the water with an impact that jolted her. Then she plunged fast and deep as a thick, dark wave closed over her head to steal sun and sky and air.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The ridge that Zach Cooper followed had once been a riverbank. Cheniers, the Creoles called them, these winding spits of high land dotted with oaks and pecans. It was the quickest, surest route, Dominic had told him, to that bend in the lake where the bass grew big and fat and Jean-Lambert had kept a pirogue since the days when Spain ruled Louisiana and the Indians who had made this trail were still a force to be reckoned with.
Zach sent his borrowed chestnut at a reckless gallop down the narrow, shadowed path, heedless of the hackberry branches that occasionally slapped his face. It was like a live thing, the fear in his gut, the fear that tore at his insides and stole his breath, so that he had to keep reminding himself to breathe.
Up ahead, a broad expanse of sun-shimmered water appeared through a break in the high green wall of moss-draped cypress. Zach urged the chestnut on harder, faster, its hooves sliding in the deep, damp humus of the bank as he hurtled down the slight slope to the la
ke’s edge. He could see them now, Emmanuelle and her dead husband’s father, their pirogue riding low in the water and unexpectedly far out toward the center of the lake.
Then the pirogue pitched sharply sideways. “Emmanuelle,” Zach screamed, driving the terrified chestnut snorting and splashing right into the lake itself. He heard Jean-Lambert’s cry, saw Emmanuelle plunge deep. And then all he could see was the pirogue’s smooth wooden bottom and a high, wide wash of dark water spreading out into emptiness.
She was surprised at how cold the water was. She felt it first on her hands and face, and through the thin lisle of her stockings, the shock of the sensation opening her eyes on a strange green watery world. Then the wide hooped skirts of her mourning dress must have acted like a kind of buoy, bobbing her up. Her head broke the surface, and she sucked in a deep gasp of air, her hands flailing. She banged her knuckles on something smooth and realized it was the pirogue’s paddle. Grabbing it, she looked about wildly, searching for the near shore. She saw a blur of green trees rising above the water and kicked out toward it, the paddle clutched to her.
She knew she had a minute or two, surely no more, before the waterlogged weight of her clothes would drag her down again, and she was afraid the slender paddle wouldn’t be enough to keep her up. She could taste her fear, cold and thick as bayou water in her mouth. She kicked again, and felt something bony and grasping wrap around one ankle.
She twisted about, the paddle gripped in both hands, and saw Jean-Lambert’s hand gripping her leg. For a moment she thought he’d latched on to her in a desperate attempt to save himself. Then she saw the smile on his face, and she knew he still wanted to die. Wanted her to die with him. And unless she could loosen his grasp, now, he was going to kill her.
Her fist tightening on the paddle, she swung it at his face, hard, hard enough that she felt the impact of it all the way up to her shoulders. His fingers slipped off her ankle, and she kicked out again toward the shore.
Midnight Confessions Page 34
