Oliver had taken the Black Cross, but he had given Nicole and Brian two gifts in return. Nicole had emerged from her coma with no adverse effects and today she was back to a completely normal life. For now, Brian was spending half his time at his latest acquisition - Galerie Toussaint in New Orleans - getting to know the clients and the inventory. The information Oliver had left in the packet corroborated the records provided by his accountants, and the ten-million-dollar purchase price was a bargain he couldn't pass up. It still carried the Toussaint name, just as Oliver had asked.
Now that they had a reason to spend time in this town they loved so much, he and Nicole bought a second-floor condo on a quiet street a few blocks north of the gallery. She was considering sitting for the Louisiana bar exam and opening a practice here. New Orleans was a wonderful, strange, quirky, dirty, mysterious and alluring place like no other on Earth. They were glad to spend time here and happy to once again be safe with each other - at least for now.
_____
Six months after Oliver's disappearance, a developer bought several dilapidated structures on St. Ann Street, where he was going to build condominiums. He had a permit under the Historic Preservation Act to remove four houses dating to the 1700s, all of which had been vacant and in serious disrepair for decades. One morning a bulldozer operator began demolishing the first of the old structures. He brought the huge scoop up to remove a second-story wall, and when the plaster came crashing down, he stopped to see what he’d uncovered. There was something up there - something that had been hidden inside the wall. He yelled to his crew chief and the work stopped as everyone gathered around to see what it was.
Once they realized what they had on their hands, they called in the medical examiner's crew, who removed a wrinkled, desiccated corpse. The discovery made the evening news as just another example of the strange, eerie and weird things that are part of the French Quarter's history. The story went viral and the police had to close a block of St. Ann Street as tourists flocked to see the house where the body was hidden. Was it a tale straight from Edgar Allen Poe's horror stories? Had the person been buried alive? Tour companies had a heyday for a few weeks until the authorities allowed demolition to recommence and the houses all came down at last.
Since the body was mummified, the coroner asked for assistance from a forensic archaeologist at Loyola University. They ultimately released their findings, announcing that the body was that of a very old Creole woman who had died sometime before 1800. Given the positioning of the limbs, the experts opined that the person was already dead when her body was put inside the wall and covered with plaster.
The coroner's findings were more newsworthy than the discovery had been. Investigative reporters researched the house, learning that it was built sometime in the 1700s by a Haitian immigrant named Pierre Duplanchier, who lived there until his death. He was one of New Orleans' founding fathers and there was no explanation as to why he might have walled up the body of a woman - perhaps a servant, given that she was Creole - in his house. The state paid for a pauper's burial and the unidentified mummy was laid to rest in an unmarked grave.
Back in 1804, Felicite Duplanchier had taken a secret to the grave. Her mother, Celine, had died at the house in the arms of her lover and protector, Pierre, who was so stricken with grief that he couldn't bear to lose her. He wept and wailed for weeks, refusing to tell anyone she was dead for fear they'd take his beloved away. She had no family to question where she was, and once she died, her body soon mummified like the others who took the elixir. Pierre begged his daughter to help him keep Celine nearby, and as bizarre as she thought the plan was, she consented.
Two hundred and thirty years after her daughter, Felicite, had walled up her body in the upstairs bedroom she shared with Pierre, Celine Toussaint rested at last.
_____
Over a year had passed when a drifter and sometimes lobsterman named Jean-Claude Baille was bicycling one afternoon along the shoreline near Cap-Haitien, Haiti. He saw something sticking out of the sand and stopped to dig it up. Since Jean-Claude's relatives were all practitioners of voodoo, he knew at once what the object was and he became very excited. He had to get to his house and fast.
"Welcome home, little one!" he said in Creole as he dusted sand off the Black Cross, put it in his basket and got on his bike. "Some people gonna be very happy to see you!"
You can see the Duplanchier family tree as it really looked here:
http://bit.ly/2ohv9Dm
Thank you!
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bill Thompson, whose first book The Bethlehem Scroll won the prestigious EVVY award for fiction, is a former corporate entrepreneur and an avid student of history. The Black Cross is his eleventh novel.
He’s traveled extensively and particularly enjoys the ancient Mesoamerican sites in Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. When he’s not writing he’s often off in the remote jungle where there’s plenty of adventure. (There also must be a martini at five o’clock. That’s a requirement.)
Bill, his wife and a bunch of dogs live in Dallas, Texas.
The Black Cross (Brian Sadler Archaeological Thrillers Book 6) Page 21
