by Greg Iles
The front door of the house bangs shut. Pearlie. I cross the bedroom and lock the door. Then I open my camera case, bring out my SLR, and fit a standard 35mm lens and cable release to it. Damn. I forgot to unload my tripod from the trunk of my car.
Someone raps sharply on my bedroom door. A rush of déjà vu tells me that rhythm belongs to Pearlie.
“Catherine Ferry?” calls a throaty voice as familiar to me as my mother’s. “You in there, girl?”
“I’m here, Pearlie.”
“What you doing home? Last time you came back was…I don’t know when. Why you didn’t call ahead?”
I can’t waste time trying to explain the situation. “I’ll be out in a few minutes, okay?”
Grabbing my car keys, I slide up the window, climb out, and run to my car. Tripod in hand, I climb back into the bedroom, close the curtains, and set up the tripod almost directly above the footprints. Pearlie is still knocking on the door. After mounting the camera and aiming it downward, I switch on the lights and shoot a reference photo of the floor. Then I close down the lens aperture by two f-stops, take a ruler from my dental case, and switch off the overhead light. The ruler has copper wire wrapped around the inch markings. The copper will fluoresce when sprayed with luminol. Laying the ruler alongside the glowing footprint, I spray both ruler and bloodstain with more of the chemical and wait.
“What you doing in there?” Pearlie demands. “Did Natriece mess up something?”
“I’m all right!” I snap. “Just give me a minute.”
I hear the muted chatter of Pearlie interrogating the little girl.
As the greenish-white glow begins to increase in intensity, I open the camera shutter with the cable release and look at my dive watch. To capture the faint glow of luminol in the dark, I need a sixty-second exposure. My hands are shaking badly, but the cable release will keep the camera from vibrating. This time the tremor isn’t from medication or alcohol withdrawal. It’s fear. The same sickening panic I felt at the LeGendre crime scene, and at the Nolan scene before that. If it weren’t for the child’s footprint, I’d assume the boot print was made with deer blood. Whitetail often wander onto the grounds of Malmaison, and my grandfather has been known to shoot a buck now and again, sometimes from the window of his study. But the child’s footprint is there…
When my watch hits the sixty-second mark, I close the shutter. Then, to be sure I capture the prints, I open the lens aperture by one f-stop and repeat the procedure. By then Pearlie is squawking through the door.
“Catherine DeSalle Ferry! You open this door!”
The familiar ritual of crime scene photography is calming my nerves. Habits have great comforting power—even bad habits, as I discovered long ago.
“Answer me, girl! I can’t read your mind like I used to. You’ve grown up too much and been gone too long.”
I smile in spite of my fear. The year after my father died—the year I stopped speaking—only Pearlie was able to communicate with me. The stoic maid could read my emotions in a glance, from the curl of a lip to the angle of my downcast eyes.
“I’m coming!” I call, going to the door.
As soon as I turn the knob, Pearlie pushes open the door and stands with her hands on her hips. Over seventy years old, she is tall, thin, and tough as gristle, with chocolate brown skin and clear traces of Caucasian ancestry in her facial features. Her eyes still flash with intelligence and wit, and her bark—though intimidating to strangers—is considerably worse than her bite. Around my grandfather and my mother, Pearlie displays the quiet dignity of a nineteenth-century servant. She can vanish as silently as a ghost when certain whites enter a room, but around me she is much more animated, treating me as she might a daughter. She still wears a starched white uniform, which you don’t see much anymore, and a shiny, reddish brown wig to cover her grizzled white hair.
I’ve missed her more than I realized. For her part, I see a mixture of pique and excitement in her eyes, as though she doesn’t know whether to hug me or spank me. Were it not for Natriece’s fear and the odd scene in the bedroom, Pearlie would undoubtedly crush me to her chest.
“Answer me this minute!” she demands. “You ain’t been home since your grandmother’s funeral, and that’s been a year now.”
“Fifteen months,” I correct, fighting a new wave of emotion that I can’t afford to face right now. Last June, my grandmother drowned on DeSalle Island. Part of the sandbar she was standing on simply slid into the Mississippi River. There was no warning. Four people saw it happen, yet no one could save her. No one even saw her surface after the bar collapsed. Catherine Poitiers Kirkland was an excellent swimmer in her youth—she taught me to swim—but at seventy-five, she’d been no match for the mighty current of the Mississippi.
“Lord, Lord.” Pearlie sighs. “Well…why didn’t you call to say you was coming? I would have cooked for you.”
“It was an impulse.”
“Ain’t it always with you?” She gives me a knowing look, then pushes past me into the bedroom. “What’s going on in here? Natriece told me they’s a ghost in here.”
I see the little girl standing just outside the door. “There is, in a way. Go look at the carpet by the foot of the bed.”
Pearlie walks over to the tripod, bends at the waist, and examines the floor with the eagle eye of a woman who has spent decades eradicating the slightest specks of dirt from “her” house.
“What’s making that rug look like that?”
“Blood. Old bloodstains hidden in the carpet fibers. It’s reacting with a chemical that Natriece sprayed on it by accident.”
“Blood?” Pearlie says skeptically. “I don’t see no blood. That looks like them Halloween teeth you used to wear when you was a child. Vampire teeth, like Count Dracula.”
“It’s the same principle. But there’s blood there, you can count on that.”
“Blood the only thing make that stuff glow?”
“No,” I concede. “Some metals will do it. Household bleach can do it. Have you spilled Clorox in here? Or in the laundry room and then tracked it in here?”
Pearlie purses her lips. “Can’t say I have. Can’t say I ain’t either. Could have done, I guess.”
“I’ve seen lots of stains like this. Blood has a particular kind of glow with luminol. And I’m ninety-five percent sure I’m looking at blood.”
“Well, I don’t hardly see nothing now.”
“It fades pretty quickly. That’s why I took pictures of it.”
Pearlie always minimized the negative aspects of any situation. Part of what she was paid for, I suppose. I even used to hear her sing an old Johnny Mercer song to that effect while she worked: “You got to ac-cent-uate the positive, e-lim-i-nate the negative…”
“Could be deer blood,” Pearlie suggests. “Or armadillo maybe. Dr. Kirkland shoots armadillos round here all the time. They always digging up the yard, nasty things.”
“There are tests that will tell me whether the blood’s human. You know, it would take a lot of blood to make prints this well defined. There’s a boot print, and also the print of a child’s bare foot.”
Pearlie stares down with mute skepticism.
“Have there been any children around here since I left?” I’m an only child, and my aunt Ann, despite three marriages, has no children. “Has Natriece been around here much?”
Pearlie shakes her head. “My kids live in Chicago and Los Angeles, you know that. And Natriece only been to this house two times before this. She never been out here that I know about.” She turns and glares at Natriece. “You ever been in this room before, child?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Answer me straight, now! I ain’t one of them soft teachers you got at school.”
“I’m telling you true!”
As Natriece pooches out her lower lip, I kneel and study the fading image of the bare foot. Pearlie’s right; it’s nearly vanished. “Natriece, will you take off your flip-flop and put your foot over here?�
�
“In blood?”
“Not in it. Just hold your foot above the rug.”
The little girl slips off her yellow flip-flop and places a callused foot in my waiting hands. I hold it just above the dying glow of the footprint. It’s almost a perfect match.
“How old are you, Natriece?”
“Six. But I be big for my age.”
“I think you’re right.” I had guessed her age as eight, so her foot is probably about the size of a normal eight-year-old’s.
Pearlie is watching me with a worried look.
“Where’s Mom, Pearlie?”
“Where you think? Gone to Biloxi again.”
“To see Aunt Ann?”
“What else? That Ann draws trouble like my Sheba draws tom-cats.”
“What about Grandpapa?”
“Dr. Kirkland gone off on another trip. He supposed to get back later today, though.”
“Where has he been? The island?”
“Lord, no. He ain’t been down there in a good while.”
“Where, then?”
Pearlie’s face closes. “I ain’t supposed to say.”
“Not even to me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Pearlie…”
The maid sighs and cocks her head at me. She and I have kept each other’s secrets for years. Pearlie kept quiet about my sneaking in and out of the house as a teenager, which she usually witnessed while smoking on her porch in the wee hours. I kept quiet about occasional male guests staying over at Pearlie’s house. Pearlie was never officially divorced, but she’s been alone since she was thirty, and as she often said, she might be old, but she wasn’t dead.
“You won’t say I told?” she asks.
“You know I won’t.”
“Dr. Kirkland gone to Washington.”
“Washington, Mississippi?” Washington is a small town about five miles east of Natchez, and at one time the territorial capital of Mississippi.
Pearlie snorts. “Dr. Kirkland wouldn’t waste five minutes out there, unless there was timber to buy out that way.”
“Then where?”
“Washington, D.C., girl. He go up there all the time now. I think he must know the president or something.”
“He does know the president. But that can’t be who he’s seeing. Who is it?”
“I can’t tell you what I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows.”
“Not Mom?”
“She act like she don’t. You know your grandfather.”
I want to ask more questions, but Natriece doesn’t need to hear them. I cut my eyes toward the child, who is trying to reach one of the silk dragonflies hanging in the corner of the room. Pearlie gets the message.
“Run outside and play for a few minutes, Treecy.”
Natriece pooches out her lip again. “You told me I could have a sno-cone if I was good.”
I laugh despite my sense of urgency. “She promised me the same thing lots of times.”
“Did you get it?” Natriece asks with severity.
“If I was good, I did.”
“Which wasn’t too often,” Pearlie snaps, taking a step toward Natriece. “If you don’t go play right this minute, you ain’t getting no kind of cone. You’ll be eating brussels sprouts for supper.”
Natriece makes a face, then darts past Pearlie, just out of reach of the old woman’s spanking hand. I close the door. Pearlie is again studying the carpet where the bloodstains are hidden.
“How is Natriece related to you? Granddaughter?”
Pearlie laughs, a deep, rattling sound. “Great-granddaughter.”
I should have guessed.
“That’s what’s wrong with black peoples round here nowadays,” she says. “These little girls getting theirselves pregnant at twelve years old.”
I can’t believe my ears. “They don’t do that alone, do they? What about the men who get them pregnant?”
She waves her hand dismissively. “Oh, mens gonna be mens no matter how many shows Oprah runs about child mamas. It’s up to us old ones to teach these girls how to act. But they all too far from the church now, these young people. Mm-mm.”
The last two syllables carry such finality that I know it’s fruitless to argue. “Pearlie, I want to talk to you about the night Daddy died.”
She doesn’t turn away, but neither does she say anything. She doesn’t respond in any overt way, though I detect a deepening in her dark eyes. There are different levels of awareness in Pearlie’s eyes, the way there are in the eyes of most black people of her generation. In Natchez prior to 1965, a black person could witness a fatal shooting between two white people and see nothing at all. Such an event was “white folks’ business,” and that was that. I hate to think what sins lie concealed beneath that outdated rubric. Instead of prodding her further, I wait in silence.
“You done asked me about that a thousand times, baby,” she says, closing her eyes against my scrutiny.
“And you’ve put me off a thousand times.”
“I told you what I saw that night.”
“When I was a child. But I’m asking you again. I’m thirty-one years old, for God’s sake. Tell me about that night, Pearlie. Tell me everything you saw.”
At last the eyelids open, revealing dark brown irises that have probably seen more of life than I ever will. “All right,” she says wearily. “Maybe it’ll finally settle you down.”
Chapter
7
Pearlie sits on the edge of my old bed and looks at the wall, her eyes cloudy with remembrance. “The truth is, I didn’t see much. If I’d been sleeping in my house, I might have, but I was in the big house tending to your grandmother.”
She stops talking, and for a moment I fear she means not to continue. But she swallows and goes on.
“Mrs. Kirkland was having pains that turned out be her gallbladder. She had to have it cut out the next night. Your granddaddy wanted to do it, but she wouldn’t let him. Anyway, I heard a gunshot.”
“What time?”
“About ten-thirty, I guess. Rifle, I thought. That cracking sound, you know? It woke up your grandmother. I said Dr. Kirkland probably just shot a buck that wandered up out of the woods, but Mrs. Kirkland told me to call the police.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“How long did it take them to get here?”
“Ten minutes. Maybe a little longer.”
“And you only went down to the garden after the police got here?”
She nods slowly. “But I phoned down here to make sure you and your mama was okay.”
“Who answered?”
“Dr. Kirkland. He told me everything wasn’t okay, but that I should stay with Mrs. Kirkland. I panicked and made him tell me you was all right. That’s when I figured out something had happened to Mr. Luke.”
Mr. Luke…Pearlie’s term of address for my father.
“He was supposed to have left for the island about nine, but I just had a feeling. I went out to the back gallery of the big house and looked down. When I saw Mr. Luke lying under that tree, it broke my heart. Lord, let’s don’t talk about that.”
“Did you speak to Mom when you phoned down?”
“No.”
I close my eyes. Blue police lights flash behind them, illuminating the great U created by the rear of Malmasion and the two slave quarters, painting the streaking rain with a sapphire glow. Tall men wearing uniforms and caps stand talking to my grandfather amid the roses, deferring to him like soldiers to a senior officer. I open my eyes before the memory can go any further.
“This is what I remember being told,” I murmur. “Daddy and Grandpapa both heard someone prowling the grounds. Daddy was in here, Grandpapa in the main house. They met outside, talked a few seconds, then started checking the grounds separately. Both had guns, but Daddy was surprised by the prowler. They fought in the dark, and Daddy was shot with his own rifle.”
Pearlie nods sadly. “That’s what Dr. Kirkl
and told me.”
“Is that what he told the police?”
“Course it is, child. That’s what happened. Why you ask me that?”
Without realizing it, I’ve already formulated an answer to her question. “Because I think that bare footprint on the carpet is mine. And I think I put it there on that night.”
Pearlie shakes her head. “That’s nonsense, child. You ain’t never got over losing your daddy, that’s all. You been trying to make sense of it for twenty years, but there ain’t no sense to things like that. Not unless you God hisself. Then you understand everything. But that’s the only sense there is. Ain’t none for you and me.”
I ignore Pearlie’s simplistic philosophy, however accurate it might be. “Talking to Mom about that night was like pulling teeth. When she did talk, she told me conflicting stories. She heard the shot, she didn’t hear it. She saw one thing, then she didn’t see it. What do you think about that?”
Pearlie gives me a rare unguarded look. “You say you’re grown up now…and I guess you are. Old enough to hear this, anyway. Your mama didn’t see anything that night, baby. She was taking your father’s sleeping pills back then. Or his pain pills. Whatever he took for his war wound and his nerves.”
Nerves…Pearlie’s euphemism for post-traumatic stress disorder. “You’re saying that was a habit?”
“Girl, your mama swallowed most everything Mr. Luke got from the doctor back then. She had nerve problems herself. Your daddy went to Dr. Tom Cage back then, and I think Dr. Cage prescribed enough for the both of them. Your mama wouldn’t hardly go see a doctor.”
I make a mental note to find out if Dr. Cage is still alive. “So Mama was unconscious when Daddy was shot?” I close my eyes and try to visualize something—anything—before the blue lights appeared, but nothing will come. “So it was only when you came down to the garden that you saw me walk up to the body?”
“That’s right.”
“Where did I come from?”
Pearlie hesitates. “From this house, I think. Or behind it, maybe. I’m not sure.”
I try again to recall something fresh from that night, but the impassable gate that guards that information from my conscious mind remains locked. “Pearlie, who do you think that prowler was? What was he doing here?”
