by Jana DeLeon
“Gone?” Maryse tried to hide her disappointment. Why had Hank left? At this point, he couldn’t be found guilty of anything except being stupid, and that wasn’t a crime or half the people she’d ever met would be in jail.
Luc handed her an envelope. “He left this in the room.”
She took the envelope and opened it, pulling the papers from inside. It was a signed divorce decree. No note. Only Hank’s signature, putting an end to the marriage that never really was. She supposed he figured it was the least he could do for her. Maryse passed the papers to Mildred, who gave an exalted cry and waved them in the air at Sabine, who cheered.
Brian Stephens smiled. “Well, I guess if you guys don’t need anything else from me, I need to report back to New Orleans and fill them in on this latest angle in our case against the chemical company. Luc can explain the rest.” He gave everyone a wave and exited the room.
Maryse looked over at Luc. “The rest of what? I mean, I guess with the killer being Johnny—” Maryse choked a bit and had to clear her throat before continuing. “He said it was all because of the illegal dumping, so I guess that’s relevant to your case, right? But I still don’t understand why he thought I was getting evidence against the chemical company.”
Luc looked at her and sighed. “I think I do.”
Maryse stared at him in surprise. “How can you know?”
“I can’t know for sure, but I have a damn good idea what happened. One of those plants you sent for testing was selected from a contaminated area. When the head honchos at the chemical company realized that you pulled a plant from contaminated water and shipped it off to a lab in New Orleans, they assumed you were on to them and put pressure on Johnny to fix the situation.”
Luc stared down at his feet for a moment. “I’m really sorry, Maryse, that it was Johnny. I know you thought he was your friend. If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think he was in his right mind any longer. The desperation that goes along with a terminal illness can break people. Obviously he wasn’t strong enough to do the right thing.”
Maryse sniffled. “I know. I keep trying to tell myself it wasn’t personal, and it certainly wasn’t about my dad, but it’s hard, you know? I mean, Johnny claimed this dumping is what gave my dad cancer in the first place, and he never spoke up. What kind of man does that?”
Mildred stepped over to Maryse and put one hand on her shoulder. “No man does that, honey. When it comes down to it, there’s just no excuse good enough, and we’re all going to have to live with that.”
Maryse shook her head. “I guess that explains Harold’s comments about the irony of life. He wasn’t special forces—Johnny was. Harold was the mess cook.”
Luc nodded. “I’m sure you’re right.”
Maryse took a deep breath. “Then I guess it’s just a matter of going through my notes to find the contaminated area. I documented every location that I got plants from. It has to be one of the more recent ones or they wouldn’t have panicked, right?”
Luc stared her straight in the eyes but didn’t respond, and his hesitation made her nervous. “What?” Maryse asked. “What are you not telling me?”
“We’ve already found the contaminated area,” Luc said.
“But how?”
“The agency found the informant, and he gave us some of the dumping spots. I sorta broke into your lab and copied your notebook back when I first got here. Then things got weird with your inheritance and everything else, and for awhile I totally missed the clues that were right in front of me. But when I started thinking about everything, it made sense. The illegal dumping, your cancer tests, and the recent success that Aaron reported…well, I checked your notes and compared it to the information we’d gotten through our informant.”
Maryse didn’t know whether to be happy that the contaminated area was already identified and could be cleaned up, scared to death that she’d been hanging out in it, or mad at Luc for stealing her data. And despite all that information, she still couldn’t help feeling that there was something missing from his explanation. Before she could question what, Luc sat on the couch next to her and took her hand in his.
“I hate to be the one to tell you this, Maryse, but your trials were a sort of false positive.”
Maryse stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“You didn’t discover a plant that cured cancer. What you discovered was a plant loaded with radiation from the illegal dumping.”
Maryse’s head began to spin. It couldn’t be true. She was right there, right on the verge of the solution. “No,” she whispered.
Luc looked at her with sad eyes and squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry, Maryse. So very sorry.”
Maryse stared at him, unable to think, unable to breath. Blooming Flower had never had a magical cure. She’d simply given her dad the radiation treatment he’d refused, courtesy of a contaminated plant. Maryse’s entire career, her whole adult life, had been a farce. There was no cure, at least not one in Mudbug Bayou, and she was no closer to saving lives that she had been before her advanced degrees and thousands of hours of extra work. And even worse, she’d unknowingly endangered everyone else in the process of trying to find a cure that didn’t even exist.
She rose from the couch, unable to face the people in the lobby, her friends, her family who had unconditionally believed in her. Believed the lie. “If you guys don’t mind,” she said, “I’d like to be alone for a while.” She hurried out of the lobby without waiting for a response, not wanting to see the disappointment, the pity, that would probably line every face in the room. All she wanted was to lock herself away in her room until the disappointment was gone.
And the fear.
All this time, Maryse had thought she was right on the verge of success. It’s the only reason she hadn’t launched into panic over Sabine’s test. She thought she’d be able to help her friend if things turned out for the worse.
But it had all been a lie.
Maryse stared at the ceiling in the hotel room…but it hadn’t changed, not once in the last two hours of her looking at the same spot the painters had missed next to the fan. She sat up in bed, feeling claustrophobic and restless. She needed to get out of the hotel, away from the town and the people and out into her bayou where she felt at home. Where things made sense. But the only way out of the hotel was down the stairs and through the lobby, since setting off the alarm with the back door probably wouldn’t be a good idea given the situation.
She got out of bed and opened the window, hoping for a breeze or something to make her feel less like a caged animal, and noticed the drain pipe just outside the ledge to her room. She leaned further out the window and reached one hand over to test the strength of the pipe when Helena’s voice boomed next to her.
“What the hell are you doing? Don’t tell me you were gonna jump. After all we’ve been through, you want to end it now? And from the second floor? You’d probably only break your foot.” Maryse slid back inside the window and stared at Helena before sinking onto the bed in a huff. “I was not going to jump. And where were you? I kept expecting to see you around, and then finally I wondered if everything had finally, well, you know…”
“Made me disappear,” Helena finished. “Afraid not.” She sat on the bed and frowned. “I just figured you had enough to deal with without me hanging around the room and only you and Luc seeing me, so I sat behind the front desk and took it all in.”
“Then you heard everything?”
Helena nodded. “I heard everything.” She gave Maryse a shrewd look. “And I know what you’re thinking.”
Maryse shook her head. “You couldn’t possibly.”
“You’re thinking everything you’ve done in life was a waste because the cure wasn’t real and the only relationship you had wasn’t exactly a success.” She stared at Maryse for a moment, but Maryse wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of knowing she was right.
“The worst part is,” Helena continued, “there’s a grain of truth to
all of that.”
Maryse sat bolt upright on the bed and glared at Helena. “You’ve got a lot of nerve saying something like that to me. You of all people.”
Helena held one hand up before she could continue her barrage. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. Well, not exactly. Oh, hell, I never could get things out right. Might have made life a lot easier if I’d ever learned some tact.”
“It’s apparently not too late.”
Helena grinned. “Why start now when the only people it would benefit are you and Luc?”
“Why indeed?” Maryse sighed. “Please just go away, Helena. I’ve got enough to think about without you mucking things up more.”
“Not until I have my say.”
“You’ve had your say for years, and it’s been nothing but aggravation and trouble. You’ve got five more minutes of my life, Helena, then I will pitch myself out that window.”
“Fair enough.” Helena took a deep breath. “The reason I implied that some of your life has been a waste wasn’t because the cure turned out to be a fake, and it certainly wasn’t because you married my useless son—that one is totally on Hank.”
“Then why…”
Helena gave her a sad smile. “It’s because in looking for the cure, you shut yourself away from the very society you purported to want to save. How do you even know people are worth saving anymore if you don’t get out of that swamp and meet any?”
Maryse started to fling back a retort but clamped her mouth shut, remembering that Sabine had said the same thing. “I meet people,” she said finally.
Helena snorted. “Yeah, that Dr. Do-Kiddies being one of them. You’ve locked yourself away from the world, Maryse, and I know you think you had a good reason to do so, but I’ll be the first to tell you that if you don’t change, you’ll regret it. I do.”
Maryse stared at her. “You regret your life? But you had everything…well, maybe not in the husband and kid department, but the money, the respect of the town.”
Helena waved one hand in dismissal. “Respect? Oh, please, I was tolerated by this town, and that was all my own fault. For all intents and purposes, I was the biggest bitch on the face of the Earth. Oh, I might have done a couple of good things with my money, but I never really lived myself. I even chose to marry Harold because I knew I’d never really love him so I wasn’t in danger of being hurt.”
“I don’t understand. Why would marriage have to hurt?”
Helena sighed. “That’s my own hang-up. My childhood was miserable. My father was a tyrant who barely tolerated girls and remained angry with my mother until the day he passed for producing a daughter rather than a son, then having the nerve to die while giving birth.”
Maryse stared at Helena in disbelief, unable to comprehend that degree of spite. Unable to imagine a childhood spent with a man who blamed his only child for the gender she’d been born with.
“He died when I was eight,” Helena continued, “and all I can remember is being relieved. Then guilty because I was relieved, you know?”
Maryse nodded. “I can see that.”
“I stayed fairly locked away from the world with a guardian, a tutor, and a live-in nanny. But when I turned twenty-one and gained control of my inheritance, that’s when the circus started. People who’d never spoken a word to me in my life practically lined up at the gate of my house with their hand out. I couldn’t even walk into town without someone hitting me up for money—business loans, medical bills, scholarships, it never seemed to end.”
Suddenly, Maryse understood. “So you became the biggest bitch in Mudbug because all anyone wanted from you was your money. And you funded the orphanage because you could relate to children that didn’t have anyone looking out for them.”
Helena nodded. “That was what I told myself—convinced myself was a good reason. But I was wrong, Maryse. Dead wrong.”
“How so?”
“There are good people in this town, people who wouldn’t have wanted a thing from me. People like your mother, and you, and Mildred.” She smiled. “And even your nutty best friend. By shutting myself off, I denied myself the pleasure of friendship, of knowing what it felt like to have someone care for you that wasn’t being paid to do it.”
She gave Maryse a hard stare. “My life could have been so much more, and it took dying to realize that. Don’t make the same mistakes I did, Maryse. This world would be a much better place with you in it.”
Maryse looked at Helena, decked out in blue jeans, the “dead people” T-shirt, and neon blue Nikes. A far cry from the unrelieved black she’d always worn. But it was too late to share her newfound style with anyone. Too late to leave a different mark on this Earth. Because for everyone but Maryse and Luc, Helena was already gone, and Maryse had stopped living so long ago that she’d been dead longer than Helena.
Maryse didn’t even try to hold in the tears as they rolled out of her eyes. She cried for Helena, the little lost girl and the older lost woman. She cried for herself—the life she’d never bothered to live and had almost lost—and the realization that she still had an opportunity to change it all before it was too late.
She looked up as Helena rose from the bed. “Where are you going?”
“My five minutes are up,” Helena said. “And I’ve probably given you enough to think about.” She walked to the door, then looked back. “There is one last thing.”
Maryse looked up at her. “What’s that?”
“When Johnny broke into your room, I ran out of the hotel desperate to find a way to help. Luc was sitting in a car across the street from the hotel, and if I had to guess, he’d been there for a while and wasn’t planning on moving.”
“He was watching the hotel,” Maryse said. “You sent him to save me. That’s how he knew.”
Helena nodded. “Luc LeJeune is no Harold or Hank Henry, Maryse. And I think I overheard him say he needed to pick up some stuff at the office first thing in the morning before he cleared out of town.” And with that, she disappeared through the wall.
Maryse rose from the bed and pulled on her shoes, knowing with a certainty she’d never felt before exactly what she needed to do. But first, there was someone else who needed to hear Helena’s speech.
Chapter Nineteen
Despite the fact that it was darn near sunrise and nobody had really slept the night before, Maryse figured she’d find Sabine in her shop. Peering through the window of Read ’em and Reap, she saw Sabine sitting at her table in the center of the room, eyes closed and her hands covering a crystal ball. She was wearing her purple robe, one she brought out for only two reasons—stress or trying to contact her parents.
Maryse sighed. All the drama with Maryse and the land and Sabine’s own medical worries had probably driven her to the edge. But none of that was going to prevent her from what she needed to do. She took the last couple of steps to the shop entrance and pushed the door open.
Sabine looked up in surprise when the bells over the door jangled, then realizing it was Maryse, her expression changed to worry. She jumped up from her chair and hurried over. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Is everything okay?”
“Actually, I’m not all right.” Maryse smiled. “I’m fantastic. I just had an interesting conversation with Helena.”
Sabine studied her for a moment. “Are you high? Did the paramedics give you some drugs or something?”
Maryse’s smile faltered a bit. Okay, so obviously telling people to take their lives back wasn’t her strong suit. How in the world was it that Helena, of all people, did this so much better? Maryse took a deep breath and repeated Helena’s story from the beginning. Sabine listened in rapt attention, her eyes growing wider until Maryse wrapped it up with Helena’s ultimatum on living life and regrets.
“Wow,” Sabine said when Maryse finished. “Helena didn’t pull any punches.”
“No.” Maryse took a deep breath and pushed forward. “And neither do I.” She placed her hand on Sabine’s arm. “You’re not living
either, Sabine. Your obsession with your parents has kept you so grounded in the past that you have no future.”
Sabine stared at her in surprise, then pulled away her arm. “How can you say that? You know what it’s like not to have a parent. How can you blame me for wanting to know something, anything, about mine?”
Shit. This wasn’t going so well. “That’s not what I meant. Look, Sabine, I’m just excited by my new outlook on life. I want you there with me…like you always have been.”
Sabine’s angry expression softened, but before she could speak, a glow of bright light appeared a couple of feet from the table, and they both stared in disbelief. “What the hell?” Maryse asked as the light swirled round and round, something slowly taking shape in the center. Please, God, no more ghosts. She didn’t think her heart could take the strain.
As the shape took form, Maryse realized they were looking at a young couple, smiling over at them. The man was tall and thin, the woman petite and slender. Their haircuts and clothes betrayed the era of their existence, and Maryse knew they had been gone from this world for some time. The woman looked directly at Sabine and extended one hand. A flash of silver at the woman’s neck caught Maryse’s eye and she cried out. “Her necklace. Sabine, look at her necklace.”
