But the Past, that was different.
The Past was always there, and she believed that the Long Hall would go on curving into a pale blue infinity and the Shimmer would never end.
Selena went deeper into the calm, and she thought about how the deaths of Clete and Jack Redding might be made to happen, and, in a little while, she had her answer.
* * *
At peace with that decision, she lay back on the satin cover of the king-size bed, held the gold locket close to her heart, and let it take her away, let it take her back.
Above all she remembered the light, that golden afternoon glow that filled her bedroom as the sun moved across Jackson Square and a jasmine-scented wind stirred the curtains.
The sunlight turned all the white things in her bedroom, her four-poster bed with its linen comforter, the dresser covered in lace, the stone fireplace, it all turned from pale white into liquid gold as she lay there listening to the music coming up from the square, a small band playing, horns and a guitar, a woman singing a song that was new that very year, the “Saint Louis Blues.”
And that soft afternoon there were the familiar voices in the other rooms, soft and gentle, loving cadences, and the faint tinkle of glasses touched.
Beatrice and William, Bea and Will...and the locket Will had given Bea in 1909, on their second anniversary...how many years ago now...she was five now, five this golden afternoon—that she remembered very well because of the cake they had made earlier in the day, the white cake with five glowing candles.
So now it was 1914 and there was talk of trouble far away in the East, wherever that was, Chicago or New York maybe, and the people in the street were gathering together in the square or strolling along under the galleries of the Pontalba Apartments, talking right underneath her windows, looking at wrinkled newspapers and arguing about someone called the Kaiser and somebody named Sarajevo and it was all too confusing for a little girl to understand.
She held the locket in her hands and sometimes she put it in her mouth and bit it... The locket comforted her, the locket was soothing and warm, and tasted of skin salt and it smelled of Bea’s perfume—Bea wore it between her breasts on a chain of thin gold and when she leaned over to kiss Selena good-night it would swing out in the glow of the oil lamp on her night table and she could smell Beatrice’s scent.
This was Selena’s Home Dream, and she went back to this place whenever she could, but she needed the locket to take her there. Without the locket she could not open the memories. They remained elusive, dim, shadowy.
And the locket had a way of slipping away from her, of falling through rips in the fabric of time—she would have it in her hands—and then time would ripple and her memories would fade—and it would be gone from her—and it seemed that much of her existence in this web of time she was trapped in was spent in an eternal chase for that eternally receding golden locket.
It was the only key to the few memories of happiness she had ever known. It was a drug and a torment to her, and the Shimmer had condemned her to this never-ending hunt.
But she had found it again.
And now, with the locket once again in her hands, it was all rich and dense and perfectly present, and the blissful dream-memory went on for timeless days and endless nights, a never-ending sequence of golden afternoons and soft aromatic nights, with the gliding moon or the golden sun shining in through the curtains, and the music floating in from Jackson Square...
* * *
Selena lay on the bed in her suite at the Alcazar and felt the first tremors of the dark thing coming... Her chest tightened and she tried to turn away from it, to go back into the dream, but she could not, not this final time...and now came the hammering on the door and the angry voices and the sound of shattering glass and then the fearful voices, and her mother screaming, screaming, and then, suddenly, silence.
And now—as always—she could never stop this no matter how often she faced it—the black shape bursting into her room, ripping apart the gauzy fabric of her dream—the thin darting wiry black figure with the knife, a shadow against the sunlight, a silhouette only, and the blade stained with red shimmering up in a glittering arc in the sun...and then swiftly down, piercing her belly—the wild black thing shrieking at her and the knife shimmering in the golden light—pain, pain, pain—and then a great white light filling the room...and then...the Shimmer...and the Shimmer took her away...and she never got home again.
the truth about truth
A Sunday afternoon in New Orleans in August, deep down in the delta, terrain as flat and hot as a cast-iron skillet, hazy heat like a steam bath, the old city rising up and closing in around them as they rolled down Canal Street, passing the La Salle Hotel and the Jung—famous for its rooftop ballroom, the shops and bars all in full swing as they got closer to the French Quarter.
The humid air was heavy with the greasy smoke from wood fires and the choking fumes of the cars and trucks rattling along beside them. Dark green streetcars, as heavy as Tiger tanks, packed with people, clanked and screeched down the rusty tracks, and from over the low roofs of the Old Quarter they heard the steam whistle blast from a riverboat pulling away from the landing and heading out onto the Mississippi. Now and then they picked up a burst of French horns and jazzy piano coming from the open windows of a passing bar, and the sidewalks were crowded, black and white and every shade in between.
There was a hum in the air itself, a high-pitched vibration, and under that a deeper rhythmic pounding that Jack finally realized was just the background thrum of New Orleans in the fifties.
He rolled the window down as far as it would go, shifting in the old leather bench seat, sweat dripping off him, his uniform shirt drenched. He looked at Clete, behind the wheel. He seemed to be handling this sauna of a city better than he was.
“I know I’m not supposed to tell you stuff about the future, Clete, but someday there’s going to be a thing for your car called air-conditioning, and it’ll keep your car cool and nobody will have to die from this fricking heat.”
Clete looked over at him, grinned around his cigarette. “Already got that on Cadillacs and Buicks and Oldsmobiles. Man, you do look like a boiled crawdaddy.”
“I feel like one.”
“Yeah well no offense but you smell like a dead bat. I’m gonna put us in a couple of rooms at the Monteleone. Place is air-conditioned. Mostly. You can have a shower, change your clothes, get that uniform cleaned.”
“What about my sidearm? I can’t wear a patrol belt with civilian clothing.”
“I’ve got spare shoulder rigs in the truck.”
“Are we going to meet your guy with the NOPD?”
“Court of the Two Sisters, just along Royal from the hotel. She’ll be there at five.”
“She?”
* * *
The Court of the Two Sisters turned out to be a wisteria-shaded courtyard filled with tables and lit by lanterns, a secluded garden that you reached by going through two ornate wrought-iron gates that, according to Clete, were a gift from Queen Isabella of Spain.
“How’d you know that?”
“Mary Alice. This is her favorite place in New Orleans. It was started by a couple of Creole sisters back in the 1850s. Supposed to be haunted. There she is.”
Clete was looking in the far corner of the courtyard where a young woman in a pale green sundress was sitting at a round table covered in pinkish linen, set out under a spreading canopy of flowery wisteria vines.
Her head was down and she was reading something on the table in front of her, possibly a file of some kind. She was very blonde and her hair glimmered like fire in the sunlight that filtered through the vines and lay in scattered pools on the cobblestone floors. Lanterns hung from the wisteria vines and the table, like all the others, was set with candles.
It was a lovely place, cool and quiet even in the steam heat of August. B
arbara would have loved it, and Jack was wondering what, if anything, he could do about Barbara and Katy from here in 1957—shoot the bartender at the Alcazar was the only idea that had come to him—when the woman lifted her head, saw them, smiled and stood up as they reached the table. And, of course, the woman was Pandora Jansson.
Or at least her identical twin in another life. Jack managed not to stop dead in his tracks—thinking Anson Freitag and now Pandora—but he slowed so abruptly that Clete had to step around him to get to the table, giving Jack a look as he passed him. The woman—Pandora—was smiling at Clete as she shook his hand, obviously a meeting of good friends.
“Annabelle, thanks for coming. Jack, this is Annabelle Fontaine. Annabelle, this is Jack—”
A momentary hesitation, which she noted.
“Kearney,” Clete finished, giving Jack his wife’s maiden name.
Annabelle smiled at Jack and he saw a momentary flicker of an unidentifiable emotion in her eyes and the lines around them—although strong looking and tanned—just like Pandora—she wasn’t as young as he had first thought, now that he was seeing her clearly. Maybe in her midthirties, just like Pandora. The puzzled look was still there, although veiled now, as she gave his hand a strong masculine shake and said, “Kearney? Are you related to Clete’s wife?”
She had the rolling cadences of the Deep South, and her voice was low and throaty, a whiskey baritone. Jack felt the sensual heat coming off her, almost a visible erotic radiation, like an aura, and his blood was rising up to her.
“Yes, in a roundabout way,” said Jack, controlling his voice because his throat was a little thick. Clete, taking a seat at the table, was watching them with interest, a little smile on his lips. Annabelle released his hand and took her seat, lifting the hem of her sundress a bit as she sat, and sunlight shimmered across her knees and a brief flash of strong white thighs.
Bare-legged, no stockings.
Christ, thought Jack, as he pulled in his chair, trying not to stare at her, I’m fucking doomed.
Apparently she had noted his accent.
“You’re not from around here?” she asked.
Clete stepped in.
“Jack’s with the Florida Highway Patrol, the Criminal Investigation Division. He’s based in Jacksonville too. We’re sort of...associates.”
“I know why Cletus is here, but what brings you to New Orleans?” she asked, looking at him with a disturbing intensity.
Clete put a hand up and said, “No, first some food and something to drink. We’ve driven all night and most of the day, and if I don’t get something to eat I’m going to fall over and die.”
Which they did, and a lot, platters of seafood and salad, crayfish in a spicy Cajun sauce, French bread with olive oil and oregano and, eventually, three bottles of Dom Pérignon, which Jack had never had before because it was insanely expensive, but here in this time period it was $25 a bottle.
They kept it light all through the first courses, Jack letting Annabelle and Clete do most of the talking since his grip on the current events of 1957 was pretty sketchy. He gathered that Annabelle had retired from Naval Intelligence at the end of the war and—after an apparently disastrous love affair with a Marine officer—had found herself in New Orleans, where an old friend from the Navy had persuaded her to come onto the NOPD in their Intelligence Division.
She had accepted the offer, and was now a detective in the plainclothes section of the 8th Division, which covered the French Quarter.
And no, she wasn’t married or currently engaged, questions Jack didn’t ask but he managed to infer from the table talk.
When the third bottle was sitting upside down in the silver bucket, the sun had set and the cool of the evening was sifting down through the wisteria canopy. Annabelle called for coffee all around, and she ordered a chocolate parfait for herself, which she ate with what seemed to Jack to be a wonderfully erotic appreciation.
After dessert the mood at the table became much more focused.
Jack realized then that they did everything differently in New Orleans in the fifties; they did it all slowly, and they savored it as it went drifting past. As far as he was concerned, right now at any rate, looking at Annabelle Fontaine, if he had to stay here, he’d be fine with that.
Clete took a sip of his coffee, sighed, offered cigarettes to Annabelle and Jack, both of whom accepted, lit Annabelle’s cigarette and flipped the Zippo to Jack.
“So, Annabelle, here’s the thing, why Jack is here. He’s looking at the same woman, this Aurelia DiSantis.”
She turned to Jack, eyebrow raised.
“And what has she done that has brought you into it?”
“Basically, I think she’s a serial killer.”
Both Clete and Annabelle gave him a puzzled look.
“What’s a serial killer?” she asked, and Jack realized the term hadn’t been invented yet.
“Sorry, I mean, I think she’s making her living going from victim to victim, getting close, getting access to money, jewels, bank accounts, and then she kills the victim and takes the money.”
“So, a serial killer, yes? And where has she been doing this serial killing?”
“Jacksonville. Amelia Island. St. Augustine. My own case with her involves kidnapping and the murder of two people at Amelia Island, and the poisoning death of a third, a young woman.”
“And you think this is the same woman that Cletus is investigating?”
Jack looked at Clete, who pulled two photographs out of his suit jacket and laid them side by side on the table. Annabelle picked them up, studied them by the candlelight.
One was the surveillance shot Clete had taken at the Monterey Court, and the other one was Jack’s photo of Diana Bowman at the Carousel Bar in the Monteleone.
“You’re right. That’s the same woman.”
“We think so.”
“And what name do you know her by?”
“Diana Bowman.”
Annabelle shook her head as if confused, uncertain, looked down at the file folder she’d been reading when they arrived, picked it up and took out several sheets of paper.
“Cletus asked me to see what I could learn about this person. Apparently he’s asking for...a friend.”
She said this with a sly smile.
Clete said nothing, and so did Jack. Annabelle took that in, noted it and went on.
“Okay. So, I went into the Parish Registries and other city records looking for an Aurelia DiSantis, born on the date that Cletus got from her Louisiana driver’s license. You won’t be surprised to hear that there was no such person born on that date, or on any date within five years either way. Nor was she ever issued a Louisiana driver’s license, so what she has must be a forgery. Which was useful, since there are only three places you can get a convincing forgery of a Louisiana driver’s license. I went to all three places, one in Metairie, one in Slidell and the third in Angola Prison.”
“Angola?” said Jack.
She sighed.
“I’m afraid so. The facility has all the equipment needed, and the prison has all the forgers you could ever hope for.”
“Angola Prison deals in forgeries?”
Clete laughed.
“Jack, you think Florida is corrupt. We’ve got nothing on Louisiana.”
“And I am afraid that the NOPD is the most corrupt police force in Louisiana,” said Annabelle, with a sideways smile. “Which is saying a great deal. But, in a way, things are much easier when almost everyone is corrupt.”
“How?”
“You can get things done, if you are willing to pay, and Cletus’s...ahh...friend...was very willing to pay for what we would call...special consideration.”
“Meaning you bribed the hell out of a whole bunch of people?”
She smiled again, but now it was not so kindly.
“Precisely. And who I bribed is none of your affair, is it? Any more than it is my affair to ask Clete who his wealthy friend really is, or why I am being told that you are a Kearney when you are so obviously related to Cletus by blood. You could be his grandson, if he ever lives long enough to have one, which I doubt. But I do not ask, do I?”
Although deeply shaken by the comment—why grandson instead of son or even brother?—Jack smiled back. “Hey. No offense.”
“Then don’t be offensive,” she said, her voice a low throaty purr.
“And what did you get?” said Clete, leaning into the tension. Annabelle held Jack’s look for a heartbeat longer, long enough to make her point, and then she turned to Clete.
“It is not necessary to actually go to Angola to arrange for the forgery. That would have been foolish under any circumstances. Especially for a woman. There is a place here in town where the Angola forgeries may be arranged. I will not tell you where that place is since it is in an NOPD-controlled building. The woman who commissioned the forgery did not leave her name, but she paid so much money for it that the person who met with her...”
“So a woman?” asked Jack.
“Yes, and yes, she answers the description of the woman you are both interested in. So, the person thought it worthwhile to have her followed when she left the building...just in case she might have been an agent of some higher level of law enforcement.”
“Like the FBI or Treasury?” said Clete.
“Exactly.”
“And...”
“And the woman wandered through the streets of the French Quarter for a very long time, moving erratically, stepping into shops and then back out again quickly, changing directions, and once even entering a bar and leaving by the back door.”
“Shaking a tail,” said Jack.
“Yes. But not successfully. She was an amateur. Finally, after much walking about, she arrived at what appeared to be her residence, where she used a key to enter an apartment on the upper floor.”
The Shimmer Page 18
