The Black Cross

by Bill Thompson

  "I do know that," she answered softly. "He thought very highly of you, Mr. Sadler. He told me how quickly you had learned the business and how nicely Bijan Rarities was prospering under your watch. He didn't offer compliments lightly, but you were a special friend to him. I could see it in his face every time he spoke of you."

  He asked if he could look around for an hour or so and she immediately agreed, adding that he could use Oliver's office. "I haven't mustered the courage to go in there myself," she admitted, wiping away a tear. "That room was his sanctuary, you know? It's hard enough believing that he's really gone. Going into the office, where he surrounded himself with the things he loved most ... that's just too much for me right now."

  It was a wistful, melancholic feeling sitting in his friend's chair behind that beautiful desk Nicole had admired so recently. There was a poignant moment when he opened the middle drawer and saw the gold Dunhill fountain pen that was always close at hand. Who used fountain pens these days? Brian had once laughed to Nicole when describing how old-fashioned many of Oliver's habits were. Now it was one more tragic reminder of their loss.

  He opened the manila envelope Oliver had left for him and saw a handwritten letter and a lot of business papers. He put it back in his case to read later. He only had a short time here and he wanted to make good use of it.

  He began by pulling out the drawer with the secret compartment. He didn't expect to find anything and he wasn't disappointed. The hiding place was empty. Oliver had said the cross was hidden in a piece on the showroom floor. But what if instead he had given it to Eve before she made him jump that night?

  Maybe that's the reason Eve hasn't contacted me. What if she had forced Oliver to hand it over? That could be the answer but he still had to search for it. He couldn't chance Betty's selling the piece with the cross inside.

  His primary reason for coming to the gallery had been to do a quick walkthrough and examine the more significant antiques on the floor. He would undoubtedly be back in New Orleans before his forty-five-day option period was up, but if he could get some ballpark estimates of values today, it might make the decision easier. While browsers came and went, he strolled through the aisles, jotting descriptions and price estimates in his notebook. He opened drawers and doors as he went, just in case he came across the cross, but didn't find it. He focused on pieces he believed could fetch a hundred thousand or more, and when he was finished, he'd listed nearly forty. There would be more in the warehouse, but he was convinced that the inventory value alone could be far higher than the purchase price.

  Before he left, he explained what the Black Cross was, described it and asked Betty if she’d heard of it.

  Oliver never mentioned it, she said, nor did she recall ever having seen it.

  "He told me it's hidden somewhere in the store," Brian advised. "Make sure you examine anything you sell before it leaves. I need to find it."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  His phone rang while he was at the gate, waiting to board his flight to Dallas.

  The moment he heard her say, "Hello, Brian," he sensed something was wrong. She didn't sound like herself and her voice seemed filled with tension.

  "Hey, babe. Are you okay?"

  "You need to come home."

  There was a pause and then he heard a different voice.

  "Hello, Mr. Sadler."

  Eve Frere.

  "What the hell ..."

  "You'd better come home soon. Your wife needs you very much." The line went dead.

  He called back and immediately got voicemail. She had turned Nicole's phone off.

  He called a private aircraft operation at the New Orleans airport, hoping to find a faster way to get home. His flight was leaving in thirty minutes; if it departed on schedule, he would be in Dallas faster than by chartering a plane. The latter would require getting to the fixed base operator's terminal by taxi, waiting for a pilot to arrive and perform preflight checks, filing a flight plan and then flying to the same airport he was going to himself. Just at that moment there was a boarding announcement. He'd be in Dallas faster by staying where he was.

  He considered calling their building's night security guard, but he decided against it. This was voodoo and it wasn’t something easily explained to outsiders. For a fleeting moment he thought of calling the detective in New Orleans, but he talked himself out of that too. It would be a waste of time. Same thing with the Dallas police. How do you tell a cop there's a witch in your house? There was nothing to do but get home fast. He knew what Eve wanted and as scared as he was, he was certain Eve wouldn’t harm Nicole until she got it.

  The next ninety minutes were the longest of Brian's life, but finally he was back in Dallas. He ran through the terminal, shoving past other passengers and prompting angry responses. He drove like hell, screeched into the porte cochere at his building, left the car running, threw his keys at the doorman and ran to the elevator without saying a word.

  The condo was dark - the only illumination was from moonbeams streaming through the patio windows. He flipped on the light, but there was no one in the room.

  "Nicole!" No answer. He opened the bedroom door and found them.

  Nicole lay face up on the bed with her eyes closed. Her chest moved up and down as though she were in a light slumber. Eve and Marcel were sitting across the room. Eve looks older, he thought as he ran to Nicole's side and shook her gently

  "Wake up, baby. Wake up. I'm home."

  Nothing.

  "She can't hear you," Eve said with a nasty smile. "I want the cross."

  "Goddammit, what have you done to her?" He ran to Eve and jerked her out of the chair, her seventy-pound body yielding easily to his strength. He threw her to the floor and she cried out in pain. Although she looked like a helpless girl, he knew exactly what she was and he had no compunction about hurting her.

  "I'll kill you ..."

  "You really shouldn't kill her," Marcel rasped hoarsely. "If you do, it's your wife's death sentence. You need Eve to bring her back." He grinned, revealing several holes where teeth once had been.

  Brian began to panic, and that was exactly what Eve was counting on. Her powers were waning so quickly that if things got out of control here, she wasn't sure she could react. She had to scare him into giving her the cross before it was too late.

  "Where is it?" she said evenly as she picked herself up and straightened her white pinafore, looking as if she'd simply fallen on the playground.

  Brian shouted, "Oliver has it. But you killed him, so now you'll never find out where it is. You're getting older, aren't you? I can see it. You've aged since I saw you in Guatemala just a few weeks ago. I don't know why it's so important that you need the cross, but I don't have it! Now wake her up!" He shook Nicole again.

  "Don't trifle with me. Your wife won't awaken until I make it happen, and I won't bring her out until you give me the cross. Either Oliver had it or you do. You just got back from New Orleans. Did you get it while you were there? Is it here in this house? Or at your gallery? You must cooperate with me, Mr. Sadler. You have no choice. Your wife will die if you don't."

  That elicited a cough-riddled laugh from Marcel. "She's right, you know. If Eve doesn't wake her up, she'll eventually die of starvation. Or thirst."

  Suddenly Nicole slipped her hand into his. She was still slumbering - the action was something one might do during sleep - but it startled Brian.

  It startled Eve too. She shouldn't be able to do that, the girl thought nervously. Nicole was barely under the spell.

  "Nicole! Nicole, can you hear me? Wake up, sweetie! Wake up!" He patted her cheek and there was the fleeting hint of a smile.

  Eve shot a glance at Marcel and he shrugged. Her spells had never failed, but now she was in trouble. Brian had commented that she looked older and she knew it was true. She could see changes every day. She wasn't a child any more. In a matter of weeks her ten-year-old body had blossomed. She had even used their old sewing machine to alter her pinafore. She
had budding breasts now; she was ten pounds heavier and two inches taller. She was a teenager and without the elixir - and the cross that was the key to creating it - she'd be thirty in no time. Then fifty, and seventy.

  She stood, pointed a finger at Nicole and began to chant in Creole. She had to keep the spell alive.

  Brian wasn't going to let her make things worse. He lunged forward and knocked her to the floor, landing solidly on top of her. She cried out in pain but kept muttering the words.

  "Shut up!" he yelled. He put his hand over her mouth and quickly drew it back when she bit his index finger, leaving a bloody gash. Enraged, he backhanded her so hard that her head fell back and hit the floor. She lay still; at least for the moment she wasn't going to be hexing anyone. Brian ran back to Nicole.

  His wife's eyes were still closed, but she moved slightly when he took her hands. Brian rubbed them and kept an eye on Marcel, although he knew he had nothing to fear from the old man. He spoke quiet, reassuring words to his wife, telling her that things were all right and urging her to wake up.

  Eve sat up quietly, touched her hand to a nasty welt under her left eye and winced. She wanted to hurt him - and the woman too - but she had known even as she attempted the last spell it wasn't going to work. Her mother, Justine, could make a man faint fifty years after taking her last dose of the potion, but Justine's powers lasted only because her body was so used to it. She'd been taking the stuff for two hundred years before Marcel stole it from her. Eve was only eighty-three. She'd ingested the potion a fraction of the time her mother had, and her deterioration was happening much faster. She had to get the cross, but she was losing the only advantage she had - her ability to control others. She had to get away and think of a solution. She looked at Brian and saw that his full attention was on his wife. He wasn’t looking her way. She grabbed Marcel by the hand, pulled him out of the chair and walked out of their house before Brian realized she was gone.

  He sat by Nicole's bedside all that night and until noon the next day. She looked to be in a light slumber, relaxed and calm. She tossed and turned, she murmured and smiled as if she were dreaming, and she patted his arm now and then. But she never woke up. Unsure what to do next, Brian called the neurologist who'd treated Nicole after her car wreck, her doctor but also a good friend. He began with the caveat that this was a bizarre situation, and by the time he explained, the doctor agreed. He made a rare house call, checked her vitals and said she was in a light coma. She looked fine and he thought she was in no pain or danger. He recommended she be moved to a private facility, where she could be monitored and receive intravenous sustenance until she awoke.

  "Brian, I've known you for years and I know you aren't lying about what happened to her. You've been to some strange places in the world and seen more crazy stuff than most people. But voodoo? You put the words voodoo trance in a medical record and somebody's going to leak it to the press. Then you're going to end up with a lot of unwanted publicity. I'm going to admit her to a discreet private facility that'll be perfect for her and a short drive for you. When I admit her, I'll describe the coma as a reactive event related to her accident several years ago. She almost died then, and delayed reactions sometimes do occur. The staff won't think a thing about it."

  "Should I stay close by?" He explained that he needed to go out of town to get to the bottom of all this and put an end to it, but he'd stay in Dallas if the doctor thought he should.

  "She's doing fine. In fact, her coma is so light I'm confident she will come out of this soon. Don't go so far that you can't get back fast if she wakes up. I imagine the first thing she's going to want is you."

  "And vice versa," Brian replied.

  By late afternoon Nicole was situated in a pleasant room with a large window overlooking a calm, quiet pond with a couple of swans gliding across it. He was happy with the venue and glad that once she woke she'd see a peaceful, serene setting. A nurse had begun an IV drip to keep her hydrated and fed while she was asleep. She looked perfectly calm and appeared to be in no discomfort at all.

  He had to arrange security for Nicole, but he had to be discreet to avoid explaining what was happening and risking their refusing to allow her to stay. There was a retail strip center across the street and it was easy to position a security guard there without drawing attention. If the girl and the old man approached the entrance to the clinic, he would call the police and explain that they were out to harm Nicole. It would have been better to have a guard at her door, but under the circumstances this would have to do.

  Before leaving that afternoon, he gave them all his contact information. He lived only fifteen minutes away, he told the nurses, and they promised to call if anything changed.

  At home that evening he finally took time to look at the bulging envelope from the safe deposit box. The first thing was a three-page letter written in longhand and dated two weeks ago. Next were two yellow legal pads filled with information, again in Oliver's handwriting. Last were a series of computer-generated spreadsheets with row after row of numbers. He read the letter first.

  "I've been less than forthcoming with you and Nicole and for that I apologize. I felt it necessary to withhold certain information about my family that didn't seem relevant in the past. Now that things are vastly different, you must know the truth."

  What did that mean? Were there secrets in his family?

  Everyone has secrets. God knows I do, Brian thought. But what were Oliver's, and why was he compelled to tell me in a posthumous letter?

  "I put this letter in a safe deposit box because I fear for my life as long as I am connected to the Black Cross. To get it back, Justine Quantin and Eve Frere would kill me without a care, and if you are reading this, then one of them likely has succeeded. By now you have been offered an opportunity to buy the gallery my family started so many years ago. I won't try to sway your decision except to tell you how much you and Nicole mean to me personally. It's been a pleasure knowing you and being part of your lives. Likewise, your involvement in mine has been one of my greatest pleasures.

  "I also want to give you full disclosure so you can make an informed decision. The business is debt-free - it has been ever since my great-grandfather insisted a Toussaint would never go into debt. You're a businessman. You know that inventories and financial statements sometimes are generated to reduce potential tax liability. This envelope contains my secrets - my estimates of the true value of some pieces, descriptions and locations of items not on the books that are worth millions, and the like. My ten-million-dollar offer to you is a bargain. Read what's here and you'll agree it's good for you and it's good for Tulane. Why am I offering it so cheaply? Because I want the gallery to continue operating. It's been in my family nearly two hundred years. On that subject, I hope you'll keep the name, but if you choose to change it, that's your prerogative.

  "And now I must reveal what I've kept from you and Nicole. I've told you many times that my family has been in this city for centuries. That's true, but it's not the entire story. They’ve been here since the founding of New Orleans, just like the Duplanchier family. I showed you and Nicole a Duplanchier family tree with holes in it. I wasn't truthful about that. I know the entire Duplanchier lineage back to Pierre, but I needed your help. I presented you with a mystery so you'd be intrigued and help me find the cross.

  "The truth is that many members of the Duplanchier line lived very long lives indeed. You'll recall that Pierre came to New Orleans in 1699 on le Moyne's boat. My grandmother many times removed - a Creole named Celine Toussaint - was on that same boat. Like the Duplanchiers and the Laveaus, she was involved in voodoo too. She had been a servant in the household of a wealthy man - old Pierre himself, whose wife, Anne Saucier, had succumbed just one year earlier to smallpox. After her death, Pierre decided to relocate from Haiti to the Americas. People of means often traveled with household staff, and Pierre brought Celine, who was obviously a servant he trusted and relied upon.

  "The Duplanchier journal you fo
und in Haiti was real, I'm pleased to advise. Pierre wrote the last entry on June 13, 1699, the day before he left Haiti. Pierre labeled this book 'part one' because it was the end of one chapter of his life. He left the journal in Haiti and somehow hundreds of years later it ended up in the hands of a vendor who sold it to you. I have Pierre's second diary - the one that begins with the boat trip and goes until his death in New Orleans, but his first one was immeasurably helpful to me. I deeply appreciate the danger and risk you faced to make that trip and get the book."

  Three pages of the journal were the most fascinating, he continued. They were Pierre's packing list - line item after line item of things that he was bringing to America. There was a checkmark by each one, marks Oliver speculated had been made by Celine as she packed her master's items into a steamer trunk. "Most of the things were mundane - clothing, quills and ink, hand tools, tobacco, pipes and the like - but one page was illuminating. There was a listing for a black cross and below it was name after name of exotic plants. Out of maybe twenty I only recognized a few. When I looked the others up, I found they had been extinct for centuries. The last item was a bottle with 'twenty drams of decocted concentrate.' Pierre not only brought along some of the elixir itself, he also packed all the ingredients necessary to keep making it. In my opinion, this is absolute proof that Pierre was both a voodoo priest and that he had Columbus's Black Cross.

  "Speaking of which," his letter continued, "After I picked up the cross from you in Dallas, I brought it directly back to the store. I mentioned earlier that I hid it safely away in one of the pieces on the floor. The Duplanchier journals are in there too. So is the logbook. I think it's one of the rare early copies from the 1500s. You made quite a haul when you bought those books. I couldn't have done better myself." Clipped to the page was a photo of a beautiful seven-foot-tall breakfront. It had to be the piece where he'd hidden them.