“They ruled that it was ‘death by natural causes.’ Specifically, a cerebral hemorrhage. Apparently his blood pressure surged, and another blood vessel in his brain burst.”
“You don’t think that’s how it happened?”
“I keep speculating, what if the same person who jumped me at the carnival had also paid Dad a visit the next day? There wouldn’t have been any need for a physical attack. Dad was already weakened by one stroke. Some strategic intimidation would have done the trick.”
“Do you have any evidence of that?” she asked, her tone telling him she didn’t like where his thoughts were leading.
“No. Nobody at the nursing home heard anything. Nobody saw anyone who wasn’t supposed to be there. But all that proves is that the staff wasn’t paying attention to one sick old man while they got the ambulatory residents to the dining hall.”
“So you’re saying you think someone wanted to make sure he didn’t talk?” she asked.
“I think so, yeah.” He grimaced, speaking quickly now. “I’ve been waiting until people left. Now I need your help. Come into the office.” Untangling his hand from hers, he strode down the hall.
She followed.
“Are the blinds closed?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Probably she wondered what all this had to do with the previous conversation, and why he was going into the closet and pushing a filing cabinet out of the way.
“I’ve been studying up on the Theresa Granville case. And I’ve done a bunch of looking around the house—” He stopped and gave a harsh laugh. “At night, when my guests were asleep and I wouldn’t disturb anybody. I found a door of some kind in here. I can feel the outline with my fingers, but I can’t find any way to open it. Could you take a look at it for me?”
She came up behind him, and he felt her breast press against his arm as she leaned forward. For a moment he saw the wall. The image wavered, then abruptly cut off, and he knew this time she was the one who had closed her eyes. He felt a little shiver go through her.
“We could just stop prying into your father’s private stuff and go up to bed and make love,” she said in a shaky voice.
His breath caught. “Is that what you want to do?”
“Very much. Living with you all week and not being intimate has been…difficult. A couple of times I almost sneaked out of my room and into yours. But I didn’t want to give your aunts any ammunition to use against the Gypsy woman.”
He half turned and stroked his fingers down her arm. “When you’re blind, you don’t know who’s watching you. If I’d been sure the coast was clear, I would have come to your room. But I didn’t want to give them anything to talk about, either.”
“So here we are…alone,” she said.
He ached to make love with her. Once more. Just once more—if that was all he could have with her. He almost pulled her into an embrace, but he stayed where he was. “The thing is, you might hate yourself in the morning.”
“Why?”
“I remember when you didn’t much like Louis Boudreaux’s son, now we’re going to find out how my father made sure your cousin got convicted.”
She drew back. “You’re certain of that?”
“The Gypsy murder was the most important case that ever hit Les Baux. If any case is tainted, it’s that one.”
“I guess we’d better find out,” she whispered. “Do you happen to have a flashlight? I can’t see much back here.”
He laughed again, breaking some of the tension. “I didn’t think about that. I’m pretty sure Dad had one in the utility drawer.”
While she was off getting it, he sat with his hands balled into fists at his sides, wanting to get this business finished. Finally she returned, and he heard the light snap on.
“Well?”
She expelled a breath. “There’s a seam in the wall. I guess you’re right. It’s some kind of rectangular covering—not exactly a door. There’s no handle and no hinges.” She was silent for several moments. “I think you open it by sticking something under the edge. A knife blade or a screwdriver.”
“Do it!” he said, the order coming out low and angry. Damn his father! Damn him!
Again he could do nothing but wait for her to come back, his tension and his frustration almost unbearable. He would have liked to do this in private, but that wasn’t an option.
Again Alessandra returned, and he heard the scrape of metal against plaster, then a thunk as she set the covering down on the closet floor.
“Well?” he demanded.
“There’s a recess inside. And some folders.”
He didn’t have to tell her to pull them out. “Let me get more light,” she murmured as she stood and crossed to the desk.
He followed her, then began to pace the room. Maybe they could have tried the trick with the shared vision again. But he was too keyed up to sit still.
“What are the folders?” he asked.
“They, uh, they don’t have names. They have letters and numbers—like the ones you found on the folder before the nursing home called.”
“Is there one with the same notation—52PM?”
He heard her shuffling through the materials, then stop abruptly. “Yes,” she whispered.
“What’s inside?”
“Some of the same notes we saw before,” she answered. “And…uh…” She gasped, sending a shock wave through him.
Chapter Eight
Alessandra stared at the photograph buried among the notes.
“What have you found?” Wyatt demanded, coming up behind her and cupping her shoulders with his hands—making contact. And she knew at once what he was doing.
They had done it before, shared her eyesight. And each time had been like stepping into another universe where the physical laws were beyond her understanding.
Bending her head, she stared down at the crisp, color image lying on the desk.
She was looking at a photograph of a piece of jewelry. An intricately made brooch with small red and white stones worked into a flower design. Rubies and diamonds. She knew that from the newspaper articles that had been written about the murder.
The leaves around the flowers were gold. And on one she could see a mark. It was clearly a fingerprint.
A bloody fingerprint.
Wyatt sucked in a sharp breath.
“You’re seeing what I see?” she asked, although she didn’t really need confirmation.
“Yeah. I believe so. You’re looking at Theresa Granville’s famous brooch, the one she was wearing the night she was killed. It was one of the chief pieces of evidence tying Carlo to her—because it was found in his bedroom.”
“Yes,” she breathed. The facts of the murder had been burned into her consciousness.
“Of course, when it was found in Carlo’s room, there was no mention of a bloody fingerprint,” he went on, like an instructor at the police academy presenting a case to the students. “So now we have something that didn’t come up in the trial. Something Detective Louis Boudreaux knew about but excluded from the official report.”
“Why would he do that?”
Wyatt made a low, angry sound. “Because he assumed Carlo was guilty—and he wanted a conviction. I’d be willing to bet this isn’t Carlo’s fingerprint. That would have been a little inconvenient at the trial—trying to explain why Theresa’s jewelry bore somebody else’s bloody fingerprint.”
“It could be her fingerprint,” Alessandra said, still trying to come to grips with this new development.
“I’d be willing to bet it isn’t.”
“You’re saying your father deliberately withheld this photograph?” she asked carefully.
“Yeah. That’s what I’m saying. There’s a term for it. It’s called exculpatory evidence. Evidence that would tend to exonerate the accused. My father withheld the photograph so it wouldn’t interfere with your cousin’s conviction.”
The pain radiating from him was more than she could bear. Setting down the ph
otograph, she turned and wrapped her arms around him.
He made a strangled exclamation. “Don’t you get it? My dad—the fine upstanding cop—withheld evidence that might have gotten your cousin off.”
“And you had the decency and…and the guts to find that evidence and share it with me. Even when you were afraid of what you’d find, you went ahead.”
He gulped in air. “Everything I thought about my father was false.”
“Don’t say that. Probably he thought he was doing the right thing.”
“You’re defending him?” Wyatt asked, his tone incredulous.
“No. But I understand why he did what he did. Carlo was a troublemaker. He was having an affair with a married woman. The wife of the mayor. That would have been bad enough if he’d been a local guy. But he was one of the Gypsies.”
“Don’t make excuses for my father,” Wyatt said harshly.
“I’m not. I’m just trying to tell you I understand.” She pressed her head against his midsection, speaking rapidly, desperate to share what was in her heart. “And I want you to know that your letting me see this photograph overwhelms me. You are so strong, Wyatt. Another man would have left this evidence where it was. You were pretty sure you weren’t going to like what you found. But that didn’t stop you.”
His voice was low, barely above a whisper when he answered, “I became a cop because I believe in upholding the law. That hasn’t done me much good.”
Lord, she knew what he meant. It had gotten him blinded. And now it had made him lose respect for his father—a man he had obviously idolized and loved deeply. In her eyes, that only made his own sacrifice all the more heartrending.
“Maybe we’ll find out that this evidence doesn’t mean what we think it means.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it.” Wyatt sighed. “I’ve got friends in the department in New Orleans. I’ll get them to run the fingerprint.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. It might not amount to anything.”
“Wouldn’t it make them reopen the case?” she asked in a shaky voice.
“I don’t know. They might have some way to get around it.”
She hesitated then, wanting to say more, but afraid to take the next step. Finally she decided that she didn’t have much to lose.
“I’d like to tell Valonia,” she said.
“It might give her false hope.”
“I’ll take that chance. And…and I have another reason.” She plunged ahead. “It might make them see you differently. You didn’t let prejudice against my people stand in the way of helping my cousin. And you didn’t let your feelings for your father stand in the way, either. I want them to understand that.”
He sighed again. “It might not make any difference.”
She looked at her watch. It was after midnight, and the carnival would be closing for the evening. “I’d like to tell them,” she persisted. “I’ll go out there and do it now. Then I’ll come right back.”
“No!”
“You want to keep the evidence a secret?”
He shook his head. “That’s not what I mean. I don’t want you at the carnival by yourself. If you go, I’ll come with you.”
She thought about that. “All right. But would you be insulted if I asked you to wait outside when I go in to talk to Valonia?”
“No. I understand why. But we’d better put this back where we found it before we leave. I wouldn’t want it to disappear.”
“You think it could?”
“Yeah,” he muttered.
They replaced the folder in its hiding place, and Wyatt pushed the filing cabinet back into place. Then they went outside and climbed into his father’s car.
The ride to the carnival took about fifteen minutes. It wasn’t far from town, she mused as they pulled into the parking lot. But it might as well be in another universe.
Suddenly she was felt uncertain. She’d been outraged by the way the authorities had treated Carlo. They’d seen him as Gypsy riffraff from the carnival, and in their minds that had made him guilty of murder. Her anger had grown as the trial had progressed and he’d been convicted. But her anger was nothing compared to his mother’s anguish.
Valonia had never been the same since Carlo’s death sentence. How would she react now?
There were still vehicles in the parking lot when they arrived at the carnival grounds. Unfortunately teenage boys with nothing better to do were tooling around, some of them driving pretty fast.
“What?” Wyatt asked as she pulled him out of the way of a battered sedan.
“Kids hot-rodding,” she replied, wondering why the police didn’t come out here and send the young men away—before two of them crashed into each other. Or they hit one of her people.
Wyatt kept hold of her arm as they stepped onto the darkened midway, the wood chips cushioning their steps as they passed the closed booths.
She slowed when they neared the fortune-teller’s tent. She hadn’t been there in days. Valonia and Sabina had taken over for her, and she was grateful.
Now she hoped she could do something for her aunt.
They turned onto the lane that led to the family trailers. When they passed the spot where her own home had been, she gasped.
“What?” Wyatt asked again, and she heard the frustration in his voice.
“My trailer’s gone. I knew it would be. But it’s different seeing the empty space. It’s like I don’t belong here anymore,” she murmured, then cut off the words abruptly, wondering if they made Wyatt uncomfortable.
Since arriving, she’d felt uncomfortable herself. Actually, stepping back into her own environment made her realize how little chance she and Wyatt had of staying together on any long-term basis.
She was from the carnival. He was from town. And the two had never blended. Such as when Carlo had had an affair with Theresa Granville.
She tried to shake off the negative thoughts, realizing that she wasn’t in the best frame of mind for making critical evaluations.
Still, it was almost a relief when they arrived at Valonia’s trailer and she could ask Wyatt to wait for her.
“Of course,” he answered.
When she heard the edge in his voice, she wondered if he was having thoughts similar to hers. Well, they’d deal with their personal problems later. Right now, she was going to talk to her aunt.
Her knock on the door was answered with a low, “Come in.”
She stepped into the hallway and walked quickly to the living area.
Valonia was seated on the small sofa under the back window. The room reflected the flamboyant tastes of their people. The sofa was covered with a bright rectangle of red-and-yellow fabric. The rug had an intricate flower pattern.
But none of those dominated the room. Instead, what drew the eye was the wall of photographs, all of Carlo. They showed him as a baby, a child, as a teenager, a young man working at the Ferris wheel. In a cluster by themselves were the photos of him that had appeared in the paper after his arrest and conviction.
Some of the older photographs were enlarged and framed in gold. Others were snapshots gathered into carefully arranged groupings.
Valonia’s hawklike eyes fixed on Alessandra. “I’m glad to see that you’ve returned to your senses. It’s about time you left that man and came back to your people. He’s worthless. Blind. He got what he deserved.”
At the older woman’s callous words, Alessandra’s insides churned, but she kept her features calm out of respect for her aunt. “Don’t say things like that. Wyatt isn’t worthless. He helped me discover something that may help Carlo.”
“I don’t want to hear anything that man has to say. His father was our enemy, and he is, too.”
Alessandra wanted to shout out a protest, but she understood her aunt’s pain and managed to keep her voice even. “Don’t judge him before you hear. He’s been busy with his father’s funeral, but as soon as he could, he went back to the materials from the murder investigation.
”
“Those papers are all lies!”
OUT IN THE HUMID NIGHT, Wyatt leaned toward the door, all his attention focused on the conversation inside the trailer.
When he hadn’t been able to hear Valonia speaking, he’d opened the door a crack—then held his breath as he waited to find out if she suspected he was eavesdropping. But she was apparently too focused on her niece to pay attention to anything else.
He’d known that the old woman was angry. He hadn’t realized the depths of her anguish. Apparently she wasn’t able to listen to Alessandra’s words, because the thoughts spinning around in her head were too powerful.
He wondered if it would help if he went inside.
Then he quickly discarded the idea. There was no way Carlo’s mother could listen to him. If anyone was going to get through to her, it had to be someone she loved and trusted—Alessandra.
ALESSANDRA HAD almost reached the end of her rope. Firmly she said, “Valonia, please, listen to me. Don’t jump to conclusions. Wyatt didn’t just look at the official papers—he went searching for more evidence. And he found something his father had hidden. A photograph that shows Theresa Granville’s brooch. The one they had at the trial. The one they said they found in Carlo’s room. Only, this picture showed a bloody fingerprint on the brooch.”
Her aunt stared at her as though she could hardly believe what she was hearing. “No! He wouldn’t do that for you—for us.”
Alessandra shook her head. “I know it’s hard to believe. But he wasn’t thinking about himself. He was thinking of Carlo—and of you.”
Valonia looked stunned. “No,” she said again. “No, it can’t be true—I cursed the three of them. I cursed him.”
Alessandra felt her blood run cold. She knew of her aunt’s rumored gifts. But she had never in her wildest imagination considered that Valonia had such power—or that she would have taken such a terrible step.
“You cursed him?” she breathed. “What curse?”
“I cursed them all. I said the words. I did the ceremony. Out in the swamp. I cursed the sons. Justice is blind,” the old woman whispered. “Love is death. The law is impotent.”
Gypsy Magic Page 7
