American Gothic (12 page)

Lavalle poured himself a cognac, noting with dismay his trembling hands. Absent an answer that explained the violent and strange deaths of two people, there was always the consolation of civilization, Lavalle told himself, lifting the glass of amber liquor to his lips.

18

Henri Tortue

“E
XCUSEZ MOI”

Lavalle sat up in the dark. “What is it?”

“The prefect of police is here, Doctor,” his housekeeper said.

The doctor struck a match and lighted the lamp on the bedside table and picked up the pocket watch. It was midnight.

“Merde,”
Lavalle muttered, guessing why Toussaint had come.

Jean-Pierre Toussaint was standing in the hall at the bottom of the stairs, holding his grand hat in his hands. For once he was not smiling. A series of unsolved murders could complicate life even for a policeman with connections in the capital.

“It has happened again,” Lavalle said, not making it a question.

Toussaint grunted. The door opened and Nathaniel Peregrine came in.

“What the devil brings you out at this hour?” Lavalle asked, shaking his friend’s hand. “Don’t tell me anything has happened to…”

“No, Lady Fairweather is fine, but that’s more than I can say for the girl I found in my garden.”

“If you would be so good as to get your things, Doctor,” Toussaint said. “We need to accompany him to Maison de la Falaise to investigate.”

They brought the body back to the hospital, to its morgue, putting the corpse on an angled tin table with a hole at one end, connected to a hose that emptied into a sump in the floor. Along the back wall was a table containing a scale, and the implements, some surgical in nature, along with saws and hooks and tools that looked as if they belonged in a butcher’s shop.

The young woman, somewhere between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, lay on her back, the hands and feet splayed outward, a small white towel draped over her pelvis for the sake of decency. Her mouth hung slackly open in death; the eyelids were parted just enough to reveal two moon-shaped slivers of white. Though in life the woman’s skin had been dark black, her complexion had turned an ashen, claylike hue. The gray coloration was exaggerated to a considerable degree by the fact that the body had been almost completely drained of its blood.

“I do not know how a woman can bleed to death without a wound,” Peregrine said.

“That is precisely the question,” Lavalle agreed, putting on the black rubber apron he wore for autopsies. He had tried to dissuade Peregrine from witnessing the postmortem examination, but the American expressed interest in observing the procedure. His intellectual curiosity and cool detachment from what most people would have been squeamish to see was impressive, Lavalle thought.

“Is it possible that the wound healed itself?”

Lavalle looked at Peregrine across the cadaver. “Have you ever known wounds to heal themselves in the dead body of a person or animal?”

“What other explanation could there be? Perhaps it is an unknown tropical disease that causes the blood to—I don’t know what—disappear.”

“My suspicion with the first cases leaned in that direction,” Lavalle said.

“There have been others?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“I am sorry, my friend, but it is a police matter,” Lavalle said. “You are perceptive to suspect a disorder of the blood is involved. I have not yet ruled it out. There are many such maladies in the tropics that medicine is only beginning to study.”

“Blood diseases were your specialty in Paris,” Peregrine said.

“That is so,” Lavalle said, selecting a scalpel. “It was one of the reasons I decided to open a hospital here. The children of the island suffer from a rare disorder of the blood that deforms their red blood cells into a sickle shape. I have made some progress in my studies of the subject. But this…”

Lavalle waved his scalpel over the naked body.

“I am at a loss to explain these deaths. There are disorders that attack the blood, but I know of nothing that would destroy the blood itself. Perhaps some monstrous pathology of the spleen is involved. The spleen filters old and damaged blood cells from the body. Perhaps if the organ became cancerous or infected in some way not yet documented in the medical literature, it might play a role.”

“Can you tell from an autopsy?”

“I will certainly remove the spleen and examine it for abnormalities, along with the other organs. I have done so with the other people who exhibited the same symptoms in death. Unfortunately, I have discovered nothing remarkable in the bodies in the previous autopsies. It is tempting to conclude there is no pathological explanation for this phenomenon.”

“Meaning?” Peregrine asked.

“That this is a job for the prefect of police.”

“You think these people were murdered.”

“Most definitely,” Lavalle said. “This girl has been almost perfectly exsanguinated. The involvement of an external agency is a virtual certainty.”

“What kind of external agency?”

“An animal or a human.”

“But who would take this girl’s blood?” Peregrine asked. “And why?”

Lavalle shook his head. “I do not know.”

“Doctor,” the policeman said, “the procedure when the blood is taken from one person and put into another—how do you say?”

“A transfusion,” Lavalle said.

“Yes, yes,” the policeman said, his smile returned. “You do transfusions here at the hospital.”

“Of course. It is the only effective treatment for the tropical anemia I have been studying. But one would not need to take that much blood. Perhaps in a war, with a ward filled with desperately wounded men, but even then there is no doctor I know of who would stoop to such barbarism. Not even the Germans.”

As a Frenchman, Lavalle had a special dislike for Germans.

“Blood must be transfused immediately if it is to be of any use. There is no means to refrigerate it on the island.”

“That’s not exactly true,” Peregrine said. “I have a refrigeration unit at my house.”

“Is that so?” Toussaint said, his smile growing brighter.

“I use it to refrigerate wine, not blood,” Peregrine said. “You’re welcome to have a look.”

“Maybe I will,” Toussaint said.

“Be my guest,” he said, turning his attention back to Lavalle. “Doctor, is it possible that there is a person or persons on the island with a rare disease that requires massive transfusions to keep them alive?”

“Anything is possible, but I know of no such condition. This is not the sort of place where people have access to the equipment or the knowledge for such procedures. Something else is afoot, something criminal, I fear.”

“Maybe the local juju man needs fresh human blood for his voodoo spells.”

Toussaint’s smile remained intact, but Lavalle had the distinct impression that the comment made the policeman uncomfortable. The giant policeman stared back at the American long enough without answering for it to start to feel uncomfortable, though Peregrine did not seem to be the least concerned.

“I am going to begin,” Lavalle said to relieve the difficult moment. “You gentlemen may wish to take a step back. There shouldn’t be much blood when I open her, but you don’t want to get body fluids on your clothing.”

It was almost dawn by the time Lavalle finished.

Toussaint and Peregrine were in his office, where they’d gone to wait while he closed the body and cleaned his instruments. The atmosphere in the office was dense with cigar smoke. Lavalle’s bottle of rum was sitting on the desk, three quarters empty. Peregrine was sitting on the corner of the doctor’s desk, swinging one leg.

“Can I buy you a drink?” Peregrine said and poured liquor into a glass.

“Salut,”
Lavalle said, lifting the drink.

“Another long night for us, Doctor,” the grinning policeman said.

“Oui.”
Lavalle drank the rest of the rum and reached for the bottle.tx>“Grim work.”

“One becomes used to it,” Lavalle told Peregrine. He slumped in his chair, and when he looked up saw Peregrine and Toussaint looking back toward the wide-eyed orderly standing in the doorway with a constable.

The body was lying over the constable’s mule in front of the hospital. It was a man wearing only ragged trousers, tied facedown on the mule led by a frightened-looking constable. Lavalle knew who it was just by looking at the dead man’s heavily muscled arms and back. It was the teamster who had tried to drive off with the hospital’s supplies. He told the orderly and constable to get the man down. The men untied the body and lowered it into the dusty street.

“Jean-Pierre,” Lavalle said, turning on the prefect of police, his hands clenched, his head throbbing.

“What is it, Doctor?” the smiling policeman said. “Do you recognize this man? He is not from the coast. I do not believe that I have ever seen the fellow before.”

Lavalle squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.

“Get a stretcher and bring him to the morgue,” he said, walking away from the others. “Fortunately, I have two autopsy tables.”

Lavalle had another drink alone. He didn’t know why he would be shocked that the prefect of police tried to cover up his involvement with the man he had savagely beaten the day before. But what was Lavalle to do about it? Toussaint was the law in that part of the country, not the expatriate Frenchman.

Toussaint and Peregrine were both leaning over the body when Lavalle came into the morgue.

“Perhaps you gentlemen would like to conduct the postmortem,” Lavalle said, barely controlling his anger.

“You should see this, Doctor.”

“Yes, take a look, Lavalle,” Peregrine said. “Toussaint told me about your little dustup with this rogue.”

“
I
did not put a hand on the man,” Lavalle said.

But as Lavalle joined the others, he knew immediately what they were talking about. It had been too dark out on the street to see what there
wasn’t
to see: no broken nose, no split lip, not a single sign of the thrashing Toussaint had given the man on the road outside of town. He pushed his way between Peregrine and the policeman and pressed his hands against either side of the man’s rib cage. No swelling, no evidence of broken or bruised ribs, not even a contusion to the skin.

“It is impossible,” Lavalle said.

Toussaint opened the door and called his constable over. “Go find Henri Tortue.”

“Henri Tortue? What are you doing?”

“Who is Henri Tortue?” Peregrine asked.

“The local voodoo priest,” Lavalle said, too appalled to exercise discretion.

Toussaint glowered over the doctor. “Are you finished with them both?”

“I must do an autopsy on the teamster.”

“There is no reason to waste your time with this fellow.”

“I insist.”

“No, Doctor, I insist,” Toussaint said. “Henri Tortue will know what to do.”

“
Mon Dieu!
What can a witch doctor do?”

“Take the bodies to the graveyard, cut off their heads, and bury them in the proper way.”

“Why on earth would you cut off their heads?”

“Because, Monsieur Peregrine, it is the only way we can ensure the dead will not rise from their graves to walk the night.”

“As vampires?” The American was a little too fascinated with the macabre details to suit Lavalle’s taste.

“
Mais non,
monsieur.” The grin returned to Toussaint’s face. “We may be backward here, but who believes in vampires?”

“Then why cut off the corpses’ heads?” Peregrine asked.

“To keep the dead from becoming zombies, of course. Why else?”

19

The Queen

L
AVALLE HAD TO move a painting off the couch to have a place where he could sit down. The sitting room in Peregrine’s house was like the residence of a prosperous art dealer. Paintings were propped against walls and furniture, as if a new consignment were being prepared for a gallery opening, though there were no art galleries in Haiti. Over the mantel was the giant image of a purple orchid—lush and wet with dew, frankly sensual. Peregrine had set the watercolor in front of a Matisse he had brought with him aboard his yacht. The American did have talent, but Lavalle considered it an act of hubris to cover a Matisse with an amateur effort.

The budding artist had learned much from his teacher, though other than the subject, there were few similarities between their styles. Lady Fairweather’s paintings were exactingly detailed representations of reality; she was an impeccable draftswoman and colorist. In contrast, Peregrine’s art was given over to emotion, expression, and an almost Oriental sort of earthly pleasure. His lighting was always dramatic and unnatural, flowers depicted as they might have looked at midnight when illuminated for a fraction of a second by a burst of lightning. He gave his pictures strange, mystical titles, like
The Night Watcher, The Sentinel,
and
The Omen
.

The floor in the room needed sweeping, Dr. Lavalle noted as he toughed a silk handkerchief to his nose. Dr. Lavalle had noted dozens of small signs of deterioration at Maison de la Falaise. He had spoken to Peregrine about letting the gardens and mansion slip into decline, but the American’s only interest was painting—and, Lavalle suspected—conquering Helen Fairweather.

There were footsteps in the hall. Marie France walked by, wiping her hands on her apron. She gave the doctor a look. Lavalle did not know what to make of Marie France’s smiles. They certainly were not intended to imply warmth or even subservience. She was an enigma. It was the same with all the islanders, including his own servants and even the people whose children’s lives Lavalle had saved. Perhaps a white man could never truly be at home on the island or learn to be comfortable with its mysteries.

Lavalle crossed and uncrossed his legs, took out his watch to check the time, put it back into his vest pocket.

Nathaniel Peregrine did not seem to be burdened by the same sense of alienation. Maybe it would come with time, Lavalle thought. Or maybe something about Peregrine—perhaps it was part of being an American—made him comfortable with being an outsider, a solitary, alone.

Except Peregrine would not be alone on his estate if he made a conquest of Lady Fairweather.

“Dr. Lavalle has already arrived,” Marie was saying out by the entry. “He is in the salon.”

Lavalle looked up, smiling. He was not disappointed.

“This is a surprise!” Lady Fairweather said, and came toward him as he rose to meet her. She kissed him on the cheek, a gesture of friendly intimacy but, alas, nothing more. By God, she was lovely, Lavalle thought, his heartbeat quickening. He could not look on a woman as handsome as Lady Fairweather without feeling desire well up in him. He was, after all, a Frenchman.

“I did not know Nathaniel had invited you to supper, Michael.”

“I stopped by to have a look at one of his boys who is a bit under the weather.”

“Nothing serious, I hope.”

“A minor shoulder injury. Nothing broken.” Lavalle put his hands in his trouser pockets and nodded at the painting of the giant flower angled up against the nearest chair, its silky inner chamber glistening suggestively with dew. “Tell me honestly, Helen: What do you make of these odd pictures Peregrine has been painting? They put me in mind of Sigmund Freud’s writings, though I don’t suppose you’ve heard of him.”

“And thank you, Lord, for the precious gift of friendship. Amen.”

“Amen,” Peregrine said. He gave Lavalle an arch look, waiting to see if he’d play along for the lady’s sake or stand by his convictions—at the risk of offending Lady Fairweather, no doubt to Peregrine’s own advantage.

“Amen.”

And how could he resist? Helen was so lovely that evening that even Lavalle, an athiest and a scientist, would have gladly worshipped Lady Fairweather as a goddess if she would have allowed it. After a year in mourning black, she had forsaken her widow’s weeds for fashionable clothes. She wore a white chiffon dress to the dinner party that emphasized the long, graceful curve of her neck—which was left deliciously bare, except for a simple diamond choker. (How Lavalle yearned to rain kisses up and down the naked declivity betwixt neck and shoulder!) Her long chestnut hair was done up in an elegant way that made Lavalle remember the women of Paris with a particular kind of longing. Her eyes sparkled with wit, and her complexion was even more radiant than usual.

Sitting there, gazing at her across Peregrine’s table, Dr. Lavalle decided the time had come to admit it to himself: He was falling in love. It was not just the medicine in him talking. He despaired for the fact that it had taken him this long to know how he really felt, with his American friend now in the game and clearly at something of an advantage over him in the competition for Lady Fairweather’s affections. If Helen knew the truth about the twin daggers of lust and love twisting in Lavalle’s gut, she did nothing to let on. Peregrine, on the other hand, had been shooting Lavalle knowing glances throughout supper. Was it possible that he had guessed Lavalle was smitten? It was all an object lesson in why Lavalle disapproved of love, as a matter of principle. Rationality flew out the window when love entered the room. The results of such experiments were impossible to predict, and could be unpleasant, something Lavalle knew only too well from personal experience.

They made small talk while the food was served, Marie France standing at attention by the sideboard, watching her subordinates like hawks. The two serving girls seemed strangely detached, even by island standards. It was almost as if the girls were in a hypnotic trance. Perhaps they were drugged, Lavalle thought; islanders who were too poor to buy rum sometimes smoked hemp. If so, it was but another sorry example of how little control the present master of Maison de la Falaise had over the running of his estate. Lavalle looked at Helen, hoping she noticed the same thing, but she only rewarded him with a smile that made Lavalle feel weak.

“So what do you make of all this awful business?” Peregrine asked the doctor as soon as the servants were dismissed.

“What business exactly do you mean?” Lavalle said, looking up from his plate and the food he had hardly touched. “You don’t mean…” He inclined his head toward Lady Fairweather, with a slight shake of the head.

“You needn’t worry about protecting my sensibilities,” she said. “I know all about the dreadful deaths. People talk, you know.”

Lavalle frowned.

“The first of these unfortunate deaths occurred at Fairweather House, Michael,” Lady Fairweather said. “I was the one who covered the poor girl, for mercy’s sake.”

“Yes, of course.” Lavalle cleared his throat. “Still, it’s hardly an appropriate topic of conversation for the supper table.”

“I don’t know why not,” Peregrine said. “It’s a major topic of speculation in our little corner of Haiti.”

“It is practically the only thing the servants speak of,” Lady Fairweather said. “They are terrified. All the people are.”

“And with good reason,” Peregrine offered in a sober voice.

“Bah!” Lavalle said with a wave of his fork. “The islanders have always been frightened. Fear and ignorance go hand in hand. A little education would go a long way here.”

“What do you think killed those people, Michael?” Lady Fairweather asked.

Lavalle shrugged and speared another bite of pork.

“It’s quite a mystery, isn’t it, Lavalle: people bleeding to death but without any visible wounds. Although the stranger thing is that there
are
wounds, they just heal themselves. The dead do not heal. Do they, Doctor?”

“Non.”

“And yet…” Peregrine said, pressing him.

“I do not know. I have insufficient data to render an opinion.”

“I don’t agree with what the people are saying—that there’s something supernatural involved,” Lady Fairweather said. “But what explanation could there be? Is there some medical explanation?”

Lavalle put down his fork and knife. His appetite was lost, which was a pity. Despite Peregrine’s other deficiencies as a householder, his staff set an excellent table.

“I can think of none.”

“Then perhaps the cause
is
voodoo,” Peregrine said.

Lavalle looked at his host. He thought he was joking, but he couldn’t be sure.

“You’re joking.”

Nothing changed in Peregrine’s face, in his eyes.

“I hope you’re joking,” Lavalle said.

“Then what, Michael?”

Lady Fairweather was looking to him with such an expression of trust that Lavalle wanted to storm out of the room in shame, because the truth was he didn’t have the least idea what scientific explanation could account for the bizarre particulars surrounding the rash of fatalities. Yet there could be opportunity hiding within his medical impotence to stop the strange plague. Lady Fairweather was deeply committed to the welfare of the poor and ordinary, a common affliction of those born to privilege. That fact that he was committed to
her
cause could not hurt
his
cause.

“I have already confessed that I do not know, but the origin of these deaths is something I intend to uncover—and cure—if it takes every ounce of my energy.”

She was beaming at him. “I can’t think of a more important cause today in our little corner of the world.”

“I don’t expect it will be easy. I will need help. I might even need your assistance.”

“All you have to do is ask, Michael.”

“Just say the word, Lavalle.”

“That’s very generous of you both,” Lavalle said, and smiled, trying to look as if the offers moved him emotionally. It was likely that he could find ways to occupy Lady Fairweather. Her time would be better spent assisting him at the hospital than giving Peregrine painting lessons so that he could continue producing lurid portraits of tropical flora. His American friend’s help wouldn’t be required, unless, of course, Lavalle could think of some delicate laboratory equipment Peregrine would have to travel to New Orleans to collect.

“I have been pondering the question endlessly since the first sad case,” Lavalle said, leaning back and adopting the tone he had used as a young professor at the medical college. “Perhaps the root cause is a virus. Or it could be a genetic disposition, like the sickle-blood-cell phenomenon I have been studying. The only thing that seems for certain is that blood is at the root of things. But since one of the remarkable features of this bizarre malady is that there is no blood left in the bodies to study, it is difficult to pursue that angle.”

“Like the case of the dog that didn’t bark in the Conan Doyle story.”

“I beg your pardon, Peregrine?”

“The popular series about Sherlock Holmes, the detective. The solution for Mr. Holmes in one of the stories turns on him realizing that a dog that normally would have barked at a stranger the night of a murder didn’t. Ergo, the killer was someone with whom the dog was familiar.”

“If only medical mysteries were as easily solved,” Lavalle said.

“You will think of something and find the answer,” Helen said, putting her hand over his. “As it says in Matthew, ‘Fear them not therefore: for there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.’ ”

Lavalle looked away from her, at a loss to think of a reply except to remind her that quoting Scripture was a ready resort of the naive, the poorly educated, and the superstitious. Peregrine was staring at him, evidently relishing Lavalle’s discomfiture.

“ ‘And fear not them which kill the body,’ ” the American said, still smiling at Lavalle with a certain hit of victory, “ ‘but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.’ ”

“Peregrine, you surprise me,” Lavalle said with disapproval.

“Yes,” Lady Fairweather said with considerably more enthusiasm than Lavalle. “You
do
know the Bible!”

“I plan to start a hematological survey of the local population,” Lavalle said, desperately improvising, for he couldn’t think of a single passage of Scripture with which to redeem himself.

“You would study people’s blood?” Peregrine asked.

“Not everybody’s blood. I doubt everybody would agree, and besides, I haven’t the resources. But I would examine a statistical cross section. It could prove revealing.”

He looked at Lady Fairweather, thinking of the opportunity such a survey would give him to make up lost ground with her.

“In Paris, my area of specialization was disorders of the blood. It is one of the reasons I chose to come to Haiti—to study the anemia found here among a segment of the population.”

“Let me be the first to volunteer,” Peregrine said.

“And you must test me, too,” Helen said.

“I’m sure what we’re looking for will be found, if it exists to be found, in the blood supply of the indigenous population. The solution lies in the peasantry.”

“You never know,” Peregrine said. “The broader the sampling is, the more statistically representative it will be.”

“That is true enough.”

“You can draw a sample of my blood, too. It will set an example for others to follow. We must show that we support Michael’s important research.”

“And you never know,” Peregrine said, “maybe you’ll discover I’ve caught this dread disease and be able to figure out a way to cure me.”

“It would be my sacred duty to try,” Lavalle said, his eyes on Lady Fairweather’s. “I am a physician. I am here for the people in their time of need. Indeed, that is why I came to this island to open a hospital for the children.”

“You are a saint, Michael,” Lady Fairweather said, her awe of Peregrine’s Bible knowledge forgotten.

Lavalle shot a glance at his rival, as if to boast the reversal of fortunes:
Advantage Lavelle
. His eyes quickly returned to the ravishing Lady Fairweather. She was a feast for the eyes! Peregrine set a fine table, but the lovely Helen was by far the dish he most wanted to taste. If the American hadn’t been sitting at the table with them, Lavalle would have taken Lady Fairweather up in his arms and pressed his lips against hers. He was perhaps a move or two behind in the game, but the chess match was far from over. A chance remained for him to capture this queen.