The Death of Perry Many Paws (14 page)

         
Sylvie came from a prosperous family but they had lost everything in the Civil War. They were now living with her great aunt, who had a small house in the French Quarter. The four Darcantels and her great aunt and uncle were all crammed into this little house and barely getting by, but when they went out they wore their best clothes and paraded around the city as if they were still prosperous. When Roger met Sylvie he assumed her family still had money. She certainly led him to think so. She would have him pick her up in front of one of the mansions in the Garden District. She pretended she lived there but the truth was that she and her mother worked there as seamstresses for the Bettencourt women, the ladies of the house. At the end of the work day, if Roger were coming to pick her up, she would change into one of her beautiful dresses left over from when the family was wealthy, and meet him at the front door of the house, leaving the door open
enough so he could see how ornate and well appointed it was. But she never let him inside
.

         
Sylvie told him that her parents did not approve of him because he was a Northerner, and the truth was that they probably wouldn’t have approved of him had they ever known about him. Sylvie kept her secrets and lived in her own little world where she was still the daughter of a wealthy man living in a beautiful home in the richest part of the city. Roger was enchanted with her and believed everything she told him, as it fit in with his dreams, too. Before long he asked her to marry him and she agreed. She also told him they would have to elope because her parents would not allow her to marry him. By now Roger had made a lot of money in New Orleans and was anxious to return to Birdsey Falls, build his castle and get on with his life. Eloping and moving north seemed like the ideal plan. He and Sylvie spent many evenings together talking about the house they would build, the grandest and richest house in all of Birdsey Falls
.

         
Sylvie didn’t have money but, a skilled seamstress, she had made herself dozens of beautiful dresses. She now began making her own trousseau and led Roger to believe that she was shopping in all the best shops in New Orleans and going to all the most stylish dressmakers. Instead she was taking her old dresses and updating them with pieces of lace and velvet she had left over from sewing for the Bettencourt women. She would sneak scraps and sometimes full yards of material from the sewing room and take them home to the French Quarter, where she would sit up late into the night making nightgowns and lingerie. Everything she made was beautifully crafted
.

         
All was going well until Roger’s ego intervened. He decided that if he met Sylvie’s father he could impress him with his old family money and charm him with his business acumen and dashing personality. He was sure Sylvie’s father would recognize and appreciate a man like
himself, prosperous, smart and cunning, a man who knew his way around. He decided to call at the Darcantel house, unannounced
.

         
Of course, nothing was what he expected. The butler answering the door insisted that the house was owned by a family named Bettencourt, not Darcantel. When Roger kept insisting that Sylvie Darcantel lived there, the butler informed him that Sylvie and her mother worked there but lived in the French Quarter, and gave Roger the address. Roger rushed to the address in the French Quarter and banged on the door, demanding to see Sylvie. The door was answered by her younger brother, Alain, who explained that Sylvie was at work. Roger forced the boy into telling him that the Darcantel family was impoverished and the father’s prosperous pre-war business was now owned by carpet bagging Northerners
.

         
Roger staggered away from the little house in shock.. He loved Sylvie but his ego was bigger than his heart and the love quickly plunged into anger and then hate. He left the French Quarter and returned to his lodgings and his business, vowing never to see Sylvie again
.

         
It was several days before the butler at the Bettencourt house mentioned to Sylvie the man who had come to call on her, mistaking the Bettencourt house for hers. Between that and Alain’s report of Roger’s visit, she knew she’d been exposed. She felt remorse but was sure that the love she and Roger shared would overcome her deception and they could still get married and move to Birdsey Falls to the castle of her dreams that Roger had promised to build her. When it looked like Roger was no longer coming to call on her, she assumed he was angry but felt she could charm him back to her. She turned for help to an old Creole woman, the cook at the Bettencourt house. Sylvie knew that this woman made potions and charms and had helped many young women who secretly came to the back door of the house for her help. The woman agreed to make her a potion to get Roger back and Sylvie faithfully used it, to no avail. By this time it was dawning on her that
since Roger hadn’t even bothered to confront her and let her explain why she had lied, perhaps he didn’t love her as much as he had professed. But what finally turned her heart from burning love to seething hatred was an announcement in the
New Orleans Daily Picayune
: Roger Behrends had married Martha Littlefield and they were planning to make their home in Birdsey Falls once Mr. Behrends had completed his business in New Orleans
.

         
Sylvie went back to the old Creole woman. This time she didn’t want a love potion, she wanted revenge. She wanted voodoo. The nature of the curse that was put on Roger Behrends was never known. These things are secret. But Martha never made it to Birdsey Falls to live in the house that Roger had originally planned to build for Sylvie. While in New Orleans, Martha quickly became pregnant and was not able to travel. Shortly after having her portrait painted with her baby, she died. Roger immediately returned to Birdsey Falls and married Evelyn Dudgeon and, when she died after giving him several children, Genevieve Alden. Roger led a fairly normal life, but on October 2 of every year of Roger’s lifetime, the last day Sylvie ever saw him, a black cat appeared in the garden of the Behrends castle in Birdsey Falls and a white handkerchief, supposedly from Sylvie’s trousseau, appeared somewhere in the house. It had the initials “SB” on it for Sylvie Behrends, a name she never got to use
.

I handed the story back to Cam. “Poor Sylvie. I feel so bad for her sitting up late at night sewing her trousseau and being in love with such a jerk. I wonder what happened to her.”

Cam shrugged his shoulders. “Since no one knew about her romance with Roger, her reputation was still intact so she probably met some nice man and was able to use all her new clothes on her honeymoon with him.”

“Perhaps his last name started with a ‘B’ so as not to waste all the monogrammed handkerchiefs and who knows what else.”

“Yeah, she deserved that,” Cam agreed. “It is a sad story. I wonder if …”

“Cam! I just realized something!” I grabbed the story from him and flipped to the last page. “Here’s the last paragraph. Listen to this. ‘Roger led a fairly normal life, but on October 2 of every year of Roger’s lifetime, the last day Sylvie ever saw him, a black cat appeared in the garden of the Behrends castle in Birdsey Falls and a white handkerchief, supposedly from Sylvie’s trousseau, appeared somewhere in the house. It had the initials “SB” on it for Sylvie Behrends, a name she never got to use.’ Well, what do you think?”

“Um. It’s not October 2, so the handkerchief shouldn’t have appeared in the house?”

“No, it’s not October 2, but that’s not what I mean.”

“Okay, but …?” Cam cocked his head like Mycroft does when he is listening to you, only somehow it wasn’t nearly as cute.

“October 2. That’s the day Roger Behrends was haunted. One day each year …” I reminded him.

“Go on.”

“Uncle Franklin had a stack of newspapers in his cottage, one for April 1 each year. One paper for the same day each year and …”

“But it’s a different day. Same pattern but …”

“What day was Uncle Franklin murdered?” I prompted.

“Jesus. It was October 2.”

had forgotten that I’d promised Diane to go to lunch at Bugg Hill with her parents. I persuaded Cam to go into work since I wasn’t going to be home alone and then quickly showered and dressed. Bugg Hill was no Ashland Belle, so although I thought I should at least be clean, I didn’t feel I needed to dress up.

As if I didn’t have enough on my mind already, when I looked at the calendar to confirm the lunch date I also noticed that my period was ten days late. I’m forty-seven and I’ve heard that people in the perimenopause stage, sort of the training time before actual menopause, will miss periods. This hadn’t happened to me. So far I was extremely regular and had missed a period only once in my entire life and I had Abbey to show for it. Could I be pregnant? Maybe I had complained about empty nest too much the last two months and
someone
had misinterpreted and thought I needed a replacement child. I looked at myself in the mirror. I did look a little pale and tired. But I’d had a pretty rough night. I pushed at my jelly stomach. I had been three months pregnant with Abbey before my stomach had even started to round out the tiniest bit. I had a good six-month pregnancy look going already and, at most, I could only be about three weeks pregnant. What would I look like by nine months? Oh, God, why was I thinking like this? I didn’t want to have a baby. Cam might, but his fifty-year-old
body didn’t have to carry it. Between the break-in last night and worrying about my period, I was in a very low mood by the time Diane arrived to pick me up.

I didn’t have to make much small talk because she spent the whole ride over to Bugg Hill on the phone with various children. Kara, her eighth grader, called from the nurse’s office at school to say she had a headache. Diane gave the nurse permission to give her an aspirin and send her back to class. Immediately after Kara’s call, Kristen, her sixth grader, called to ask if she could walk home instead of taking the bus because the boys on the bus were too stupid and noisy. Diane reminded her that they lived five miles from the school, so walking seemed like a bad idea. She would have to tough it out on the bus. Then Kevin called from college to report he might be getting a “D” in math and wanted to drop the course. Diane told him it was only October so he had plenty of time to get his grades up and, if he was planning to be an engineer, dropping math was a really bad idea and failing it was even worse. I was just beginning to think that if I heard the phone purr one more time I might grab it and throw it out the window. I had missed my period. These children had no concept of what real problems were.

The entrance to the Bugg Hill Senior Living Home is a hand-painted sign with an arrow. Unlike Ashland Belle, there were no cottages here or magnificent plantation-style building. Bugg Hill was just one two-story building that snaked around a large lawn with a minimum of landscaping. Diane’s parents were waiting for us in the modest lobby.

“From the look on my dad’s face I’d say they are having gourmet mac and cheese today,” Diane whispered as we greeted them both with hugs.

“Mac and cheese today, girls! You’re in for a treat. It’s
gourmet
mac and cheese, so be prepared!” Ted, her father, announced. Ted was so average, I was surprised his wife could even identify him in a crowd. He was average height, average weight, thinning hair that was average
for someone in his seventies. His features were even. Even his wrinkles were symmetrical. He had absolutely no distinguishing features at all.

Ted linked his arm in mine and escorted me to the dining room. Ashland Belle has tablecloths, chandeliers and brocade upholstered chairs in their dining room. The dining room at Bugg Hill was card tables and chairs and fluorescent lights overhead.

“Tonight there’s a big bridge championship in here. Things might get a little ugly,” Thelma warned us. Like her husband, Diane’s mom was fairly plain looking, but she did have one distinguishing feature: a nose that was about three times larger than it should have been for her thin face. It was so large it seemed in danger of falling off every time she moved her head. I sometimes wondered how her parents even kissed. Oddly enough, Diane was very attractive. There’s no accounting for DNA.