She shook her head, hard. “My sister loved you, all of you—her ‘blue star soul mates’ she called y'all. She chose Sean, but she used to say that if she could have she would have married all three of you.”
He really had to leave. He couldn't seem to stop himself from shuddering.
“Sean was lost to her,” Abby was saying. “Whether he drowned or he left her, he was gone from her life. She needed you, and you were good for her.”
He must have just up and walked away from her without another look or word after that, for now he found himself standing outside, alone on the narrow gallery. The night was alive with locust-song, the magnolia trees so full of fireflies it looked as if they'd netted the stars right out the sky. Only two nights ago he had sat out here on these steps, waiting for her. He had walked home with her, made love to her, lost her.
His head fell back and he looked up. The trees had left some stars in the heavens, but there were black holes now where the rest had been. His eyes burned, and so he closed them, but it didn't ease the pain.
Bridey.
She had been a friend to him all his life, through everything. He would love her forever for that.
Wood creaked behind him, and he spun around, startled. Roibin Doherty came swaggering out the door, laughing over his shoulder, but he stopped when he saw Rourke. Fiorello Prankowski came out the door after him.
The sergeant was smiling as he looked Rourke over. Half sober, he seemed meaner, more dangerous. In the shadowed light spilling out the door, his eyes glittered as if made of milk glass. “You're like the friggin' plague, Rourke,” he said. “The way folk're all the time comin' up dead around you.” He took a step, pushing his face in close. So close Rourke could see the gray stubble of beard in the creases of his cheeks and the bellowing of his nostrils as he breathed, the red wetness of his lips and tongue as he spoke. “You're sweating, boy. I can smell it on you.”
“We're all sweating, Roibin. It's hot,” Fio said. He laid his arm across the older man's shoulders, steering him down the steps, past Rourke. “Come on, I'll buy you a beer.”
Rourke watched them go off down the street together, toward the speakeasy on the corner. He closed his eyes again, feeling suddenly tired beyond death. “Shit,” he said under his breath.
He felt rather than heard another noise in the doorway behind him. He turned more slowly this time.
Casey Maguire stood at the threshold. The black crepe paper framed his head, accentuating the pale austerity of his face. He seemed to be holding himself too still, as if he were afraid to move. As if his guts had all caved in.
Daman Rourke stood with his head bowed before his wife's grave.
The stars and moon burned hot in the night. Beyond the cemetery, the roofs and chimneys and treetops looked etched with acid out of a sky the red-black color of tarnished copper. Nothing stirred, no breath of wind. Still, shadows lurked and capered among the rows of white-painted brick crypts and granite sarcophagi. A city of the dead.
In the first couple of years after Jo's death he would come out here to the old St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 off Basin Street and trace the letters of her name where they'd been cut into the marble of her tomb, and it would hurt so bad, as if he were carving their replica onto his heart. Yet even then a part of him had known that more than Jo, he had been mourning every woman who had ever left him.
So when she came to him on this night, a woman in black silk, walking though the high peristyled tombs, she looked like something he had dreamed.
“I knew that I would find you here,” she said.
“Remy,” he answered, her name barely a whisper. He thought he was probably still flying high on Mamma Rae's wine. His blood felt on fire and the world seemed bright and jagged as shards of glass. He wanted to touch her, to run his hands down the curve of her breast, to press his lips into the hollow of her throat.
He wanted her to touch him and he waited for it, but she turned away, toward Jo's tomb.
“How did she die?”
“She had a defect in the walls of her heart,” he said. His voice sounded strange, even to himself.
“And now you've lost another love. Mrs. O'Mara. I read about her in the newspaper…. Read between the lines.” She turned back to him, and starlight caught at the sheen in her eyes. He sensed a deep sadness in her, dark and dreadful. He saw her hand come up, as if through the mists of a shattered mirror. She traced the bones of his face with her fingertips, touched his mouth.
“People don't change,” she said. “Especially from up close. They only seem more elaborate.”
He grabbed her wrist and thrust her hand down between them, and then somehow his fist was in her hair and his mouth was coming down over hers.
He almost couldn't stop. He tightened his grip on her hair, pulling her head back, pulling her mouth away from his. “Sweet Jesus. What do you want from me?”
She rubbed her breasts against his chest, rubbed her belly against his, rubbed slow and sensuous. “Do you dare to love your women without conditions, Day? Or do you judge them by the worst thing they've ever done?”
He let go of her hair, his hand sliding around her jaw, his fingers brushing her wet and open mouth. He knew that, no matter what, she would always be his obsession.
“I can't save you, Remy,” he said.
Her breath caught, then she laid the palms of her hands on his chest and gently pushed herself away from him. Her mouth moved into a smile that was horrible in its pain. “Oh well, some other time, maybe.”
She left him, then, to become a wisp of a shadow flitting among old cracked and sunken crypts, brushing along the crumbling cemetery wall, becoming lost in the wet, black velvet of a southern night.
The sun was bleaching the sky white as bone the next morning as the cortege bearing the earthly remains of Charles St. Claire turned off Esplanade Avenue and drove through the big iron gates of St. Louis Cemetery No. 3.
The pallbearers lifted the casket out of the hearse and carried it down a narrow brick path toward the St. Claire family crypt—a flamboyant affair with miniature columns and capitals and pediments, and double bronze doors with big wrought-iron handles. The priest and altar boys led the way, and the widow walked within the shadow cast by the coffin. A long line of mourners followed her, wending like a slow, sun-drugged snake through the raised and narrow whitewashed tombs. The tabloid reporters crowded close, snapping hundreds of photographs of the coffin and the widow's tragic face.
Only the two cops stood watching from a respectful distance.
“One thing about being your partner,” Fiorello Prankowski was saying, “is that you're always full of surprises. Is it a fact what was in the Morning Call yesterday evening about Remy Lelourie's daddy running off to live in sin with your mama?”
When Rourke didn't say anything Fio went on, the growl in his voice deepening. “And did this fact just slip your mind, or does it qualify as one of them southern secrets that keep springing up around this case the way mushrooms do down here after a hot, steamy rain?”
“It was a long time ago, is all,” Rourke said.
“Uh-huh.” Fio's glare burned into the side of Rourke's neck for a moment longer, and then he looked away. He took off his hat and fanned his face with the brim. “Jesus, it is friggin' hot.”
It was hot. Rourke could feel the heat from the bricks rising up through the soles of his shoes. This cemetery was only a couple of blocks from Bayou St. John, and they could smell the sun-cooked algae and hear the frogs croaking.
“I'd like to meet the dumbfuck who came up with this rule,” Fio said.
He waited a beat, then carried on, as if Rourke had obliged by saying, What rule?
“The rule that says us hardworking homicide dicks've gotta drag our asses out to a cemetery on a hot Saturday morning in July just because the stiff's killer might decide to show up for his funeral. Since most victims get done in by somebody they know, it oughta go without saying that that somebody's gonna be there when they bury him,
right? But have you ever known a killer to break down and confess at a funeral?”
“Back in my grandmama's time,” Rourke said, “a banker killed his wife, confessed at the cemetery when the priest got to the part about this vale of tears, shot himself in the head, and fell into the open tomb. They just sealed the family crypt up right then and there. Buried two bodies with one funeral.”
Fio was glaring at him so hard his eyes looked sore. “That's one of them made-up New Orleans stories, isn't it?”
New Orleans funerals, Rourke thought, were even further complicated by the belief that if the dead person was a relation of any sort, no matter how distant or removed—if you'd gone to school with him, or with any of his siblings, if you were a friend of his mama, or of his grandmama—then you went to his funeral. If the dead man was well connected, half the city could show up to send him off.
Marry a beautiful Hollywood starlet and get yourself gruesomely murdered and they might as well sell tickets.
Remy Lelourie was beautiful, in a simple black dress that made her seem impossibly pale and frail, and a hat with no veil. But then she'd want the world to see her face. To see innocence betrayed. To see grief inconsolable yet subdued, for she was of the Creole aristocracy. No weeping and wailing and tearing of hair.
Last night her hair had smelled of sweet olive. She had been no drug-induced hallucination. He could still feel the imprint of her body against his, still taste her mouth.
He knew why she had come, what she had wanted from him. She was like a wolf caught in a trap, gnawing off its own leg to get free. He'd told her he couldn't save her; he'd made her think he didn't want to. If she could lie, then so could he.
“Some families have designated mourners,” Rourke said.
Fio was wiping the wet from the inside of his hat with a splayed thumb. “Huh?” He looked up at Rourke, blinked the sweat out of his eyes, and slapped the hat back on his head. “No, don't tell me. I don't want to hear it.”
“Someone in the family, like a maiden aunt. She watches the newspapers to see who's died and is getting waked and buried, and then, if the acquaintance is only a slight one, she'll go as a representative of everybody else in the family. That way the proper respects get paid, but without a lot of undue inconvenience.”
“Well, if that isn't just peachy keen. Now we gotta consider that maybe the killer's got some designated family mourner coming here in his place. Nope. Uh-uh. I'm gonna stick with my conviction that the Cinderella Girl did it. She's the widow, so we knew all along she'd show up, and this way we won't be getting any surprises.”
The casket had disappeared through the doors of the crypt, which was nearly buried itself beneath a mound of wreaths and bouquets of flowers. It took a long while for the mourners to disperse. Fio left to have a word with the priest, who ministered, they'd been told, to both the Lelourie and St. Claire families.
Rourke sat down on a small green wire bench, beneath the pathetic shade cast by the cemetery's whitewashed brick wall. He'd told Fio he wanted to rest awhile, coddle his aching ribs, but he had his own rule about funerals. Once the dead was good and buried, he liked to see who-all came back.
The first one to come was Miss Fleurie.
Rourke hadn't seen her among the mourners, and he doubted he would have missed the long purple dress decorated with black-dyed egret feathers. She had brought a single white rose, but she didn't lay it down with the profusion of other flowers. Rather she tucked it into the outstretched, prayerful hands of a marble Madonna. She stood for a moment as if in silent salute, and then walked away.
The widow came next, but if she had wanted a moment for private grief or gloating she wasn't given the chance. Jean Louis Armande must have been lingering out of sight behind the crypt, for he appeared as soon as she arrived. The lawyer bent over her hand, kissing it, holding it for just a little too long. He spoke and she listened, and then she reached up and gently, lightly, touched his cheek. He spoke again, pleading perhaps, for he spread his hands as if in supplication. She listened, shook her head. He seized her hand again, kissed it hard, and turned away, and almost stumbled over the raised edge of the crypt.
She watched him walk away from her and then she turned back to the tomb. She laid her hand on the open bronze door but didn't go inside, where Charles St. Claire now lay, where Julius St. Claire had been lying these past eleven years. He wondered how much of them she still carried in her heart; he wondered if you can mourn the ones you kill.
A movement deep at the back end of the cemetery caught Rourke's eye. He watched, his gaze burning with the heat haze and filming over with his sweat, while a woman in a shapeless, faded black dress made her slow, tentative way down the narrow brick path.
Her steps faltered when she saw Remy. For a moment Rourke thought she might turn away, but then she came on. Remy saw her and seemed to be waiting, although when she arrived they neither spoke nor touched. Minutes passed while they stood side by side before the St. Claire crypt, while the sun burned mercilessly and the humid air thickened. Just when Rourke thought they might stay that way forever, they seemed to turn of one accord and go into each other's arms.
From where he sat beneath the cracked and crumbling cemetery wall, it looked to Rourke as though Belle Lelourie was the one who needed and was taking the most comfort.
Chapter Twenty
ALL HER LIFE BELLE LELOURIE HAD WANTED TO BE A Mardi Gras queen.
She would spend hours imagining how it would be. Someday, someday, someday. Someday she would be standing, there, on the white balcony of the Boston Club in a pink satin dress and a wide-brimmed hat with a long, trailing ribbon, Queen of Rex. The crowd below would look up at her with admiring eyes and say, Why, there is Belle Lelourie, the most beautiful girl in New Orleans.
She loved the parades. Each float was a sparkling confection of gold leaf and silver tissue and rainbow silks and satins, a magical kingdom pulled along by unicorns. “Those aren't unicorns, you silly ninny,” Remy always said. “They're mules dressed up in white robes and their horns are made out of papier-mâché. They're the same mules that'll be back to pulling the garbage trucks come morning.” Belle, though, would just shut her ears to her sister's sour words.
The krewes on the floats would throw beads and doubloons out to the crowd, and Remy would always make such a spectacle of herself, jumping up and down and waving her arms, shouting, “Throw me something, mistah!” Belle didn't care about catching those cheap throws. She had no need of glass beads when someday she would wear the real thing.
One Mardi Gras night, though, when she was twelve, a thing happened that was both marvelous and scary.
She always loved the night parades the best, when even Remy could not deny the magic. The Negroes in their red robes carried the flambeaux to light up the floats, their torches bobbing and flaring as they danced and strutted to the beat of the bands. Great wreaths of black smoke swirled up into the night and the floats rode by on rings of fire. The pounding rhythm of the drums, the undulating dancers, the whirling flames—it all stirred something inside Belle.
That night, though, that night was special.
That night the King of Comus came floating by on a gauzy white cloud, wrapped up in a glittering double rainbow. Remy, who was being hateful as usual, laughed and said, “Why, look at the silly old fart. He's as drunk as a peach orchard sow,” when the king did the most astonishing thing. He leaned over from his perch high atop his golden throne and pointed his diamond scepter right at Belle, and he smiled.
She stared, with her mouth and eyes open wide in surprise and wonder, and she didn't see the man who was standing next to the king throw the string of purple beads at her until it was too late. The beads struck her in the chest and fell to ground, and the crowd surged around her, trying to get at the special trinket. They knocked her into the float, and she almost fell beneath the flatbed's iron wheels. She stumbled and reeled and got too close to the sizzling oil being flung from the whirling flambeaux, and her coat caug
ht on fire.
Suddenly Remy was there, tackling her around the waist and throwing her into the street, which was littered with mule and horse droppings and crushed beads. Remy beat out the flames with her hat and hands, and Belle would have been grateful if her sister hadn't been laughing so crazy and saying, “Sakes alive, Belle. You nearly got burned to a bacon crisp, just like Joan of Arc,” and with that strange look she could get in her eyes sometimes. It scared Belle, the things Remy did and said, and that look she would get in her eyes.
Every year on Mardi Gras night when the last parade was over—even that year she caught on fire—Belle would go stand outside the French Opera House on Bourbon Street and watch the Queens of Rex and Comus, and their courts, all arriving for the ball in black lacquered carriages. She would say the words like a chant, a prayer: Someday, someday, someday that will be me. Someday, she would wear a gown of seed pearls and French lace and white satin dancing shoes on her feet—and, oh, wouldn't those thin little shoes be plumb wore out by the end of the night? The most exciting moment would come at the stroke of midnight, when a young man wearing the beautiful jeweled and spangled mask of a prince would lead her out onto the floor. She would pretend not to know him, of course, but she would know. Her gloved hand would tremble in his, and his arm would be strong around her waist. He would whisper in her ear a confession: I have loved you all my life, pretty little Belle Lelourie, and now it is time that I made you my wife. It is time you came home at last, to live with me at Sans Souci.
And she would know joy. Absolute joy.
It didn't come to Belle like a thunderclap out of the blue. Rather it came slowly—ominous rumbles, way off in the distance, coming from behind sneaky ol' black clouds that could all of a sudden bring rain upon you when you didn't even see them coming: the realization that not only would she never be chosen queen, she would never even be invited to the ball.
Because of the Scandal, of course. The Scandal, which no one ever spoke of, yet which lived in their house like an invisible mold, decaying things, rotting and befouling the air. Never mind that she was a Lelourie and as pretty as can be. Her father was living in another house with a woman not his wife, her mother was a recluse, and her sister was running wild and crazy. No girl with such a background would ever be chosen Mardi Gras queen.
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