by Eva Pohler
“You didn’t have to meet us at the gate, Honey.”
“I know.” He put an arm around her waist. “I missed you.”
Ellen wrinkled her brow. Was Mercury in retrograde? Had the stars realigned? “Are you sure everything’s okay?”
Paul had tears in his eyes. “Let’s talk when we get home.”
Ellen’s stomach was in knots as they picked up their bags and walked to the car. Tanya and Sue tried to make small talk, but Paul’s mood had affected everyone.
The drive to drop off Sue and Tanya was spent in awkward silence. Ellen worried about her children, wondering if something had happened to any of them. By the time they were alone in the car, Ellen couldn’t take it any longer.
“Talk to me, Paul,” she demanded.
He glanced over at her as he turned onto their street. “I thought I’d lost you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“These last months that you’ve been gone,” he said. “I felt like I’d lost you. Like you’d given up on us and had moved on. I even thought you might be having an affair.”
Ellen took a deep breath, relieved that her children were okay.
“Paul, I…”
“When you sent that text the other night, I cried myself to sleep like a baby. The relief was real, Ellen.” He sucked in his lips, fighting back tears and no longer able to speak.
She was at a loss for words as he pulled into the driveway, but as he helped her with her bags, she squeezed his hand. “Sometimes I did feel like giving up, Paul, but only because I felt so out of touch with you.”
“I know,” he said. “It’s my fault.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“I am.”
“But…”
“I worked so many hours, showing houses, even on weekends,” he said. “Any free time, I spent on the golf course. I should have spent more of my time with you and the kids.”
“You did spend time with us.”
“Not a lot, Ellen. Not really. And then, when the kids left…well, I never spend time with you. It’s my own damned fault.”
“Let’s go inside.”
He helped her carry her bags into the house.
After they changed clothes, they went to the den to talk.
“I know this house flipping thing you got going is important to you,” he said. “And I’m happy for you. But I think you and I need something to do together, too—something more than just watching television.”
“I’m shocked to hear you say that. Count me in. What would you like to do?”
“Didn’t we used to say that we wished we lived in a house on a lake?” he asked.
Ellen laughed. “That was a long time ago.”
“Do you still wish it, even a little?”
“I would love it. We could have a little boat. You could fish. I could paint, maybe even do a little reading. It could be nice.”
“Let’s start looking,” he said. “What do you say?”
Ellen smiled. “Let’s do it.”
Ellen sat in her art studio on All Saints’ Day sitting before a large blank canvas. The night before, an idea had come to her, suddenly, like the strike of an unseen snake coiled in the grass. She’d had a vision of Delphine Lalaurie cradling the devil baby as she handed him over to Marie Laveau.
The image had been vivid, as if Ellen had been standing on the corner of Royal Street watching as Marie Laveau stood on the front stoop beneath the portico of Lalaurie Mansion. Ellen had watched as the voodoo queen rang the bell and waited. A slave opened the door, but it was Delphine who stepped from the house with the baby in her arms. The two women did not look at one another. Instead, they each gazed down at the child with loving smiles on their faces.
It was that one moment—the two formidable foes smiling at a common object of love—that Ellen meant to capture on canvas. She took up her brush, dabbed it in paint, and began.
A week later, Ellen was having lunch at Sue’s favorite restaurant with her friends when her phone started ringing. By the time she’d unzipped her purse and found her phone, she’d missed the call.
“You should keep your phone on the table, like I do,” Sue chastised.
“I think that’s rude,” Ellen said, half-teasing. “Oh, my gosh! It was from Cecilia Nunnery!”
“Do you think she finally got in to see her father?” Tanya asked before taking a sip of her water.
“Let’s find out,” Ellen said, pressing the call-back icon on her phone.
Within seconds, Cecilia answered.
“I just left Angola Prison,” Cecilia said over the speaker.
Ellen, Sue, and Tanya leaned over the table, listening closely to Ellen’s phone.
“And?” Sue asked. “How did it go? Was he angry?”
“Well,” Cecilia began. “At first, he was confused. He didn’t recognize me.”
“I bet that wasn’t very easy for you,” Ellen said.
“It’s been thirteen years,” Cecilia began. “I’ve changed a lot in thirteen years.”
“Of course, you have,” Tanya said. “So, what happened then?”
“He started crying,” Cecilia said. “He couldn’t even speak for the longest time. I cried, too.”
“I can only imagine,” Sue said.
“So, while my daddy cried, I told him how happy I was to learn that he was still alive, and how sorry I was that he’d been stuck in prison. I told him that I had heard what had happened, and that I was going to do everything I could to get his sentence reduced. I told him, with good behavior, he could get out on parole in as few as five years. I said that my mama couldn’t wait to see him. He stopped me right there and asked about her. I told him about the FEMA trailer and about how she’s waiting for me to rebuild our house. And I told him how her face lit up when you told her he was alive. I told him she was waiting at the gate to see him, but he needed to add her to the list. I said, ‘Daddy, please tell me you will let us back into your life. We love you and have missed you so much.’ He couldn’t answer. His whole body was shaking in a terrible, ugly cry. But then he nodded, and he waved the guard over. And when he could speak, he asked the guard to let my mama in. Oh, ladies, I wish you could have seen it. They weren’t allowed but a brief hug and kiss, but the looks on their faces.” Cecilia paused, and the sounds of sniffles came through the speaker.
“We’re so happy for you,” Tanya said through her own tears.
All three of them were crying. The people at the tables next to them, who could hear Cecilia over the speaker phone, were crying, too.
“We have something else we want to tell you,” Ellen said. “Two things, really.”
“Okay. I’m listening.”
“We want to offer your mother a job managing the condos we’re having redone on Chartres Street. There’s a guesthouse she can stay in until…”
“Oh, really?” Cecilia asked. “Mama, they’re offering you a job, until…until what?”
“We want to have your parents’ house rebuilt,” Sue said. “We’ve already contacted Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation, and they’ve agreed to use our donation to build your parents’ house. It won’t be like it was. They want to make it sustainable and stuff.”
“Oh, my God!” Cecilia shouted.
Now the whole restaurant was smiling and in tears.
“Oh, my God!” Cecilia said again. “Mama, did you hear that? My mother is sitting next to me in the car. We’re pulled over, outside of the gate. She’s crying her eyes out again, but she’s nodding her head, just like my daddy did. I hope she doesn’t have a heart attack. Take a deep breath, Mama.”
“We’ll call your mom and let her know when the guesthouse is ready, okay?” Ellen asked.
“Thank you!” Maria cried into the phone.
“And please keep us posted on your father’s case,” Tanya added.
“I will!” Cecilia said. “I promise!”
The weekend before Thanksgiving, Ellen, Sue, and Tanya met with Michael Ro
uchell in the courtyard of their new condos on Chartres Street for a final walk-though. Maria and Cecilia Nunnery were there as well, with the good news that Jamar’s court date had been set. As they stood together in the courtyard in the cool autumn air with the sound of water flowing in the fountain beside them, Ellen felt like she was in an episode of HGTV, just before the big reveal. The condos wouldn’t be furnished; nevertheless, she couldn’t wait to see how the floors, finishes, countertops, and fixtures looked together in the final product.
As they walked through the units, Ellen, Sue, and Tanya couldn’t say enough good things. By the end of the tour, they were thanking Michael for his excellent work.
“I want to thank you again for recommending me to the Louisiana Historical Society for the work we’ve been doing on the Lalaurie Museum,” he said, when they’d returned to the courtyard. “Will you come back next month for the grand opening?”
Ellen had brought her painting of Delphine Lalaurie, Marie Laveau, and the devil baby with her. Michael had promised to find the right place to mount it in the museum.
“Do you have to ask?” Sue said with a laugh.
“Well, ladies,” Sue said as they were about to board their plane to New Orleans from San Antonio in early December, “mark this date down in history. Our husbands are actually going on a trip with us for once.”
“Show us a good time, and we might go more often,” Dave, Tanya’s husband, said with a grin.
“His idea of a good time might be very different from ours,” Tanya said as they entered the gate to board.
“As long as he likes good food, we’ll get along just fine,” Sue said.
“Hear, hear for good food,” Paul said with a wink.
Ellen was pleased to be sitting beside her husband on a plane to anywhere. More than once, she caught him smiling at her. Their relationship had taken such an unexpected turn, almost as if it were brand new again.
“What are you grinning about?” she finally asked him.
“How nice it is to be sitting here with my pretty wife,” he said.
Ellen’s mouth dropped open. She couldn’t recall the last time he’d called her pretty. She wasn’t even sure that he ever had. He’d said she looked, “nice,” but never “pretty.”
“Keep that up, and you’re not going to get any sleep on this trip,” she whispered.
He laughed. “That’s all right with me.”
Once they had landed, they rented a van and drove straight to the condos on Chartres Street to introduce their husbands to Maria Nunnery and to show them the property. The units had already been rented out to two young families with children. Two boys were playing in the courtyard when Maria led Ellen and her friends and their husbands to the first unit and knocked on the door.
The men were impressed with the investment. After a celebratory dinner at Antoine’s, they drove a few blocks to the new Lalaurie Museum’s grand opening. It was a semi-formal affair, for which they had all six suffered traveling in their dressy clothes. It began with a self-guided tour, during which cocktails and hors d'oeuvre were served by waiters in tuxedoes. Elevator music played softly in the background. The exhibit began with Ellen’s painting, along with this text:
The stories you may have heard about Madame Delphine Lalaurie, her husband, Dr. Louis Lalaurie, and the catastrophic fire that burned the original house in 1834, may or may not hold up to the facts presented to you today in historical documents recently unearthed.
The sconces on the walls lit the displays of copies made from the doctor’s medical journals, Jeanne Blanque’s letters, and Delphine’s diary. Translations to English were printed in a symmetrical display beside each copy. They were arranged to tell a story, beginning with Delphine’s first marriage to Don Ramon when she had just turned thirteen years of age.
When she reached the end, Ellen was pleased. The exhibit did a beautiful job of exonerating Delphine without making her into a martyr. The exhibit also treated the subject of Marie Laveau and the child she called the “devil child” with great respect.
“It’s a work of art,” Tanya said. “Just like your painting, Ellen.”
“I’m really happy with the way it turned out,” Sue said. “Aren’t you, Ellen?”
Ellen glanced at Paul, who beamed down at her with pride.
“I’m very happy with the way it turned out,” she said. “All of it.”
***THE END***
Click here to purchase the next book in The Mystery House Series, The Hidden Tunnel.
Thanks again for supporting me and my work. Your comments and reviews mean so much to me, and your reviews are especially important in advancing my career.
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For free ebooks from Eva Pohler in both young adult fantasy and adult mystery/suspense, including The Gatekeeper’s Sons, Vampire Addiction, The Purgatorium, The Secret of the Greek Revival, and The Mystery Box, please visit: https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/e4o8n7
Here’s a list of all my books:
The Gatekeeper's Sons (#1)
The Gatekeeper's Challenge (#2)
The Gatekeeper's Daughter (#3)
The Gatekeeper's House (#4)
The Gatekeeper's Secret (#5)
The Gatekeeper's Promise (#6)
The Gatekeeper's Bride (#0)
Hypnos: A Gatekeeper's Spin-Off Series (#1)
Hunting Prometheus: A Gatekeeper's Spin-Off Series (#2)
Storming Olympus: A Gatekeeper's Spin-Off Series: (#3)
Charon's Quest: A Gatekeeper’s Novel
Vampire Addiction: The Vampires of Athens Series (#1)
Vampire Affliction: The Vampires of Athens Series (#2)
Vampire Ascension: The Vampires of Athens Series (#3)
The Purgatorium: The Purgatorium (#1)
Gray's Domain: The Purgatorium (#2)
The Calibans: The Purgatorium (#3)
The Mystery Box: A Soccer Mom's Nightmare
The Mystery Tomb: An Archaeologist's Nightmare
The Mystery Man: A College Student’s Nightmare
The Secret of the Greek Revival (Mystery House #1: San Antonio)
The Case of the Abandoned Warehouse (Mystery House #2: Tulsa)
French Quarter Clues (Mystery House #3: New Orleans)
