She surprised a quick laugh out of him. “Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite that way.”
“I’m not wrong, Sergeant. I’m just afraid that it took me too long to figure it out.”
She was just about to sign off when Sergeant Gaudet blindsided her all over again. “One more thing, Ms. Byrnes.”
Somebody walked right over Chastity’s grave. “Yes, sir?”
“Why didn’t you tell me that your father was Charles Francis Byrnes?”
That quickly, any equilibrium Chastity had held on to vanished. She actually caught herself looking over her shoulder, as if Chuck would suddenly walk down the hall. And the funny thing was that somebody was indeed watching her.
Standing there right by the X-ray machines, his gray hair dull in the vast lobby, his eyes cold and watchful.
Not her father.
Max.
Chastity almost laughed. She fought the unholiest urge to run. From Max, from the police, from James and Kareena. From every one of them who thought they knew what the worst of her was. Especially from the ones who thought they understood.
They didn’t.
They wouldn’t.
And there was Max, standing there as if he were trying to impress on her how terrified she should be of him.
Chastity made it a point to turn away from him and focus on stepping forward in line.
“Why do you want to know about my father?” she asked Gaudet, and realized that her voice was no more than a whisper.
“I was checking on your background,” he said. “And of course, there was the trial. I saw his picture. He and your brother-in-law look quite a bit alike, don’t they?”
It took every ounce of control Chastity had not to turn around for another look. She felt him, though, like a shard of glass in her back. “Yes, Sergeant. They do.”
“Could it be your father?” he asked. “The man we’re looking for?”
She squeezed her eyes closed. Fought through the sudden shakes and sweats. “No, sir. My father is an opportunist and a predator. But I don’t think he has the mind to plan murders like these.”
“Can you tell me why?” he asked, as if it were that easy.
Water. Water and laughter and panic.
And of course the shame. Red, swamping shame that never gave her peace.
“No, sir. I…uh, maybe later.”
Not in an airport. Not in public. Not anywhere.
“All right, Ms. Byrnes. I understand.”
Chastity almost burst out laughing. Max had enticed her to a park in an attempt to shatter her, and here the sergeant damn near did it with an innocent question. Because she heard it. The taint of pity in his voice.
He must have read something of the record. He knew what she’d said at that trial ten years ago. He thought he could understand just why she’d be so ashamed to share with him any information about her father.
He didn’t, of course. Because he didn’t know what she hadn’t said at that trial. What she hadn’t said to a living soul. He didn’t know what had sent her to the streets at fourteen. What had sent her to James’s apartment twelve years later looking for absolution and penance.
She was angry at Max. She was afraid that he could harm her friends. But she wasn’t terrified of him. Not like she was terrified of her father. And she didn’t want anyone to know why.
She didn’t want anybody to know that her father, who had made her nights such a living terror, had done much worse than teach her to fear him.
He’d trained her to want him.
Twenty-Two
At noon the next day the doors to the Clements Funeral Home opened for the viewing of Frankie Mae Savage. A fresh thunderstorm was swamping the city, sending people scurrying for cover and cars skidding for purchase. Thunder cracked and snapped overhead. Wind tortured the trees, and water pooled six inches deep in the roads.
Chastity had to take an extra Xanax just to get in Kareena’s car. By the time she ducked under the front porch of the funeral home, she was a bigger puddle than the ones she bolted through on the way from the car.
“You better take some more drugs,” Kareena advised, casting a wry eye at her ashen appearance, “or they gonna lay you out by mistake.”
“I’m fine,” Chastity insisted, shaking water from her hair, as if that were all that was the matter. She hadn’t slept again the night before, even after knowing that they’d fooled Max with the airport gambit. “I appreciate your bringing me, Kareena.”
Kareena chuckled, her head on a swivel as they proceeded through the front door. “Well, it’s a cinch James wouldn’t be let in the front door. Besides, you think Kareena’s gonna miss this?”
The room they entered was basic poor funeral home, with tile floors, plastic stained glass windows, and plain walls. Frankie’s casket was closed and flanked by branches of blue and white candles. Flower arrangements crowded the walls and floor, and mass cards filled the guest book stand. People of all races and ages and economic levels had come to mourn, and not a few of them wore the traditional white of voodoo instead of mourning black.
In one corner, a thin, wrinkled black man in a pristine white suit was sprinkling some kind of liquid from a Dixie cup at the wall, and in another, a stunning model-sized woman in flowing white poured cheap champagne into plastic glasses.
At the core of the room, though, there was grief, and it was loud and it was heartfelt. A tiny black woman was being picked up off the floor by two hefty young men. She was rocking back and forth and imploring her lord to save her. At least a dozen other people wailed a minor counterpart.
This, Chastity thought, was how to send somebody off.
It struck her that she felt much more at home here than she had with the icy, precise ritual for Susan Reeves. This wake held all the messy, operatic grief that always attended death in the African American community. It was a drama Chastity knew well from her own inner-city ER, and one she envied.
“Do you see anybody to talk to?” she asked Kareena, wishing she didn’t feel so responsible for the anguish that ricocheted off these walls.
But Kareena was on a field trip to voodooland, her attention on the guy who was still sprinkling the corners.
“It’s rum,” Kareena said, motioning to him. “Yamaya loves rum.”
Chastity sighed. “I wonder if she’d mind sharing.”
“Try the champagne. It’s another favorite.”
“Not till I’ve talked to somebody. Do you think Frankie’s mother would talk to me? I think she’s the one moaning in the front row.”
She was the woman in the front row wearing her best Sunday-go-to-meeting dress and rocking a solemn-eyed two-year-old boy in her arms. Frankie’s little boy, Chastity thought. Cossetted and comforted and the center of attention, unlike little Margaret Jane, who’d been banished to the periphery and left beyond family.
“You sure you want to start with her?” Kareena asked.
“No, she’s not,” came a voice at Chastity’s shoulder.
A hard little hand clamped at her elbow, and Chastity turned to find that she was being glared at by a tiny walnut of a woman in a white suit and gold lame Sunday hat.
“Tante Edie,” she said, gaping. “What are you doing here?”
Tante Edie barked an incredulous laugh. “Well, now, that’s a funny question comin’ from you. I was just gonna ask you the same thing.”
Chastity had to blink a couple of times. For a fortune-teller from Jackson Square, Tante Edie looked amazingly like a Bible School teacher. “I’m trying to find my sister. And I’m trying to prove who killed Frankie.”
Tante Edie squinted up at her, as if pulling her into focus. “You ever take my advice?”
“Which advice?”
The little woman gave a great sigh. “You didn’t. You’d look a lot easier, you did. Go jump that boy, girl. He ain’t gonna hurt you.”
“Yeah,” Kareena said, “but she might hurt him.”
Tante Edie squinted at Kareena, which just made K
areena grin. “I know who you are,” Kareena announced. “I’ve seen you at the square.”
“And you haven’t had the courage to walk up like a human and ask for a reading. I got no time for you.”
Kareena laughed. “Mais yeah, I’ll come see you,” she said. “Then we’ll see who’s afraid of who. But first we got to finish this, yeah?”
Tante Edie looked right at Chastity. “Yeah. You do have to finish it. Now, what do you think you can do here?”
Chastity looked right back. “Ask for any help I can get.”
“To do what?”
“I have to find my sister before her husband does.”
Tante Edie looked at her for a long moment. “Frankie seemed to think you down here to help him, that husband.”
“I was. But that was before I got to know him. Now, I have to stop him before he kills anybody else.”
Tante Edie’s eyes went fierce, her little body trembling with emotion. “You have proof he’s the one? The one kill Frankie and my little Willow?”
If she’d had the time or luxury, Chastity might have been afraid of those wise old eyes. “I’m working on it. But my first priority is to help get my sister to safety. Then I’ll have the time to see Max gets his due.”
Oddly enough, Tante Edie smiled. A hard smile, the kind cops use when they hear handcuffs click. “Oh, you don’t worry ’bout that,” she said. “He’ll get his due, and you won’t have to wait for the police to do it. He do bad things to a child of Yamaya, he better believe she notice.”
“Yamaya, she not in the business of revenge,” Kareena objected. “It’s not her way.”
“She own the shallow water,” Tante Edie retorted. “That kind of salt water bein’ swept up the swamps right now before that hurricane. She comin’ for that boy, I think.”
“That’s a hurricane comin’, old woman,” Kareena argued. “Anybody know that hurricanes belong to Oya. Maybe Erzulie Youx Rouge. Not Yamaya.”
“Oh, you know so much?”
“More than you, seems like.”
Chastity couldn’t stand it any longer. “While this is very illuminating,” she interrupted, “it doesn’t help me find my sister. Besides, Tante, last I talked to you, I didn’t get the impression you believed.”
The old woman flashed crooked yellow teeth at her. “I never turn my back on any power, girl. You never know when you might stumble over the truth by accident.”
True words, Chastity thought blackly. Except the truth she kept stumbling over so far hadn’t much helped her.
“What I need to stumble over,” she said, holding on to her patience by her fingertips, “is my sister. Do you think there might be anybody here who can help me?”
Tante Edie squinted at her a few more moments, obviously making her assessment. “Give me your hand.”
Oh, Chastity didn’t want to do that. Not when people had already begun turning their way. People who obviously knew about Tante Edie, and certainly seemed to know the connection between Frankie Mae and the preternaturally blond woman in their midst.
Tante Edie huffed and flicked her hand in Chastity’s direction. “You don’t have much time, girl. You want to waste some more?”
So Chastity fought the chills that had started to crawl down her back and laid her hand in that gnarled little palm. She battled the sudden, sharp contact and kept her eyes open by will alone.
Tante Edie wasn’t looking at Chastity’s hand. She was looking at her eyes. The rest of the room watched Tante Edie, hushed like a church as the host was being raised. Even Kareena stood still, her mouth open and her eyes avid.
Ten heartbeats.
Twenty.
Chastity fought hard to stay still as she endured that tiny woman’s scrutiny.
Finally, abruptly, Tante Edie let go. “Luscious, come here, honey.”
Chastity took a step back to catch her breath. Just then the tall, elegant woman who’d been passing champagne approached.
“Yes, Tante?”
“See these girls to the ladies’ room, you hear?”
Kareena opened her mouth. Chastity kicked her. Then she turned to find that the woman who was taking her to the ladies’ room had an Adam’s apple and big knuckles.
“The ladies’ room?” she asked instinctively.
Luscious raised a precisely penciled eyebrow at her. “You got a problem with that?”
Considering the fact that the elegant Luscious had about eight inches and fifty pounds on her, Chastity merely shook her head. Luscious nodded hers and motioned them on like a tour guide.
“Back here. They got fainting couches and real towels and everything. It’s real nice.”
The rest of the crowd saw the approval given by Tante Edie and turned back to their conversations.
“You get down to the Quarter?” Luscious asked, her hips swaying off her five-inch heels as she led the way. “I’m in a lovely gender illusion act at Miss Mamie Eloquence’s Club every night. You should stop by.”
“When I have time.”
And the city wasn’t underwater. And her sister was safe.
“In fact,” Luscious said, “I was at Eddie’s party when they found that nun. It’s all so awful, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. Could I talk to you about that, do you think?”
Luscious came to a stop in the back hallway right beneath the pictures of the funeral home founders and waggled an elegant set of press-on nails at her. “Well, you’re not quite my type, honey, but sure. After my surprise.”
“Surprise?”
The three of them were standing before a closed door that definitely did not say Ladies.
“Why, yes, sugar. Did you know I did magic?”
Chastity was out of patience. “Excuse me—”
Luscious turned the doorknob with one hand and waved with the other. “Voila!”
And then she pushed open the door to show Chastity what was inside.
It was Kareena who reacted first. “Get down,” she breathed right behind Chastity. “No wonder everybody mistake her for you.”
Chastity couldn’t move. She couldn’t quite close her mouth. She kept wondering how bizarre this was all going to get, when it was already beyond any bizarre she’d ever known in her life.
She gulped, and then she gasped, and then she damn near just sat on the floor and sobbed.
“Faith?”
Her sister stood up from where she’d been sitting on a couch. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.
Faith. Precise, professional, poised Faith. Faith, who had always been the one in charge, the one to aspire to. She was disheveled and wan and fidgety. She was glaring at Chastity as if she’d burst in on a private moment.
But she was there.
After all this time, she was standing right there in front of Chastity. Chastity felt it like a gut punch, just sucking all the air out of her and replacing it with white noise.
And damn it if Faith looked not a day older than the last time Chastity had seen her. Her hair was just as blond, though still in that damn chignon, and her waist as thin, even in the faded red Mardi Gras T-shirt that didn’t seem to belong to her and jeans that didn’t fit.
If Chastity hadn’t seen her sister flinch when that door slammed open, she might have thought that her own suspicions about Max had been wrong. That somehow this was all some big drama concocted by Faith for attention. But nobody could mistake that defensive posture. The quick, protective cringe of a terrorized person.
“Well?” Faith asked, re-gathering her control. “Why are you here? Didn’t they tell you to go home?”
Chastity blinked. “I needed to make sure you were okay.”
“I’m okay. Now get the hell home.”
They weren’t moving. They stood there on either side of an open pressboard door as if there were a force field between them. Rigid and uncertain and off balance.
Chastity wasn’t sure what she’d thought she’d feel when she finally saw Faith again. Closure? Acceptance? Comfort?
She felt none of those. She felt stifled and afraid and impatient.
And angry.
She’d spent the last two weeks desperate to find her, and Faith had greeted her as if she’d interrupted her homework. She was feeling disoriented again. Panicked. Overwhelmed.
She just wished she knew which of a thousand questions she should ask first. So she asked the wrong one.
“Should I really be calling you mom?”
At least she got a reaction. Even though it wasn’t the one she wanted.
Faith stiffened, her face suddenly showing her age. She breathed in slowly though her nose. She shrugged.
“They wouldn’t let me get an abortion.”
Ah. Well, that certainly felt better.
And before an audience.
Chastity just wasn’t sure what else she was supposed to withstand.
“Why did you go to St. Louis?” she asked, foundering badly.
Faith threw off another shrug and reminded Chastity of Mrs. Reeves with her posture and her assumed dignity.
“I needed to get away from here. Susan thought Max would never suspect I came to see you.” She laughed, looking anywhere but at Chastity. “I never thought Max would think of contacting you.”
“Why’d you come back?”
“Where else could I go? I don’t know anybody else.”
If Chastity hadn’t spent her life within thirty miles of where she’d suffered her own nightmares, she might have thought worse of Faith. But Faith hadn’t even left home until she was twenty-eight, and then only because her mother had dragged her. Chastity couldn’t really be surprised that she’d run back to the familiar.
“You didn’t think to wait there for me?” she asked anyway.
Faith was glaring now. “You came down here to help Max. What was I to think?”
“You were to think that maybe I’d do everything I could to stop another man from abusing a helpless female. After all, you sure as hell know I’ve made it a point to do that before.”
“I know you shattered every—” But she broke off, just shy of saying too much. Especially before witnesses.
But Chastity heard the rest of the accusation. She’d heard it often enough in the weeks during her father’s trial. During the days when her mother had wandered the house, not knowing how to fill her days without a husband to tell her what to do. She’d heard it in the years since, when she’d replayed every one of those scenes a million times in her head in her struggle to understand.
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