Blood Memory (5 page)

“Daddy?” I whisper. “Is that you?”

He doesn’t answer.

He never does, but tonight the aching loneliness that accompanies thoughts of my father isn’t so severe. Valium pads the edges of the pain, easing my descent into sleep. For years I’ve suffered from nightmares, and lately the alcohol I use to deaden them seems to have made them worse. But the Valium is an unfamiliar drug, as fresh and potent as the first drink I ever swallowed.

Tonight sleep enfolds me like the ocean depths on a free dive, a bright upper layer that deepens in color and density as I descend, swimming down, down, down, away from the chaos of the surface, into the blue cathedral of the deep. My sanctuary from the world and from myself. No thoughts here beyond the exigencies of survival. Only peace, the bliss of entering a place where but a handful of humans can go without bottled air, where death is a constant companion, where life is sweeter for the awareness of its fragility.

Here I am weightless.

Shapeless.

An astronaut drifting through deep space without a tether, unconcerned that her life support systems have shut down, that her body must sustain itself or die. Anyone with a lick of sense would kick madly for the surface.

Not me.

Because here I am free.

I don’t know how long I float this way, because time means nothing here. What I do know is that I must be sleeping, because on a real free dive, time means everything. Time is the remaining oxygen dissolved in your bloodstream, the only currency that can buy you depth, and depth is the holy grail, the point of the whole mad exercise. Or it’s supposed to be, anyway. That part confuses me, actually. Because you can never reach the bottom. Not in the real ocean. It’s only back on land that you can do that.

Surfacing now. I know because the sea has slowly stopped trying to drive my wet suit into every opening in my body, and blue-white lightning is flashing above me. A sudden storm? I tense against the inevitable clap of thunder, but it doesn’t come. When the lightning flashes again, a strange sound registers in my mind. Not thunder—not even the lap of waves against the dive boat. It’s the
snick
of a camera shutter. When I finally break through the surface, I smell acetone, not the ozone that follows a lightning strike. Blinking in confusion, I call out, “Sean? Sean, is that you?”

A dark brown forehead and saucer eyes rise above the footboard of my bed. A nose and mouth follow, the mouth agape in wonder. I’m looking into the face of a black girl of about eight. She has the frozen look of a child who has entered a familiar yard only to find a strange dog waiting for her.

“Who are you?” I ask, half wondering if the girl is real.

“Natriece,” she says, her voice almost defiant. “Natriece Washington.”

I glance around the room, but all that registers is the sunlight pouring through a crack in some curtains. “What are you doing here?”

The girl’s eyes are still wide. “I be here with my auntie. I didn’t mean to make no mess.”

“Your auntie?” The smell of acetone is stronger now.

“Miss Pearlie.”

Suddenly it all comes rushing back. The phone call from Sean. The corpse in the house on Prytania Street. The zoned-out night drive to Natchez. What an irony to find that you do crazier things sober than you ever did drunk.

“What time is it?”

The child gives an exaggerated shrug. “I don’t know. Morning time.”

Pushing down the covers, I crawl to the foot of the bed. The contents of my forensic dental case are spread across the floor in disarray. Natriece is holding my camera; its flash must have caused the “lightning” that awakened me. Among the instruments and chemicals on the floor lies a spray bottle of luminol, a toxic chemical used to detect latent bloodstains.

“Did you spray any of that, Natriece?”

She solemnly shakes her head.

I gently take the camera from her grasp. “It’s all right if you did. I just need to know.”

“I might’ve sprayed a little bit.”

I get out of bed and pull on my pants. “It’s okay, but you need to leave the room while I clean it up. That’s a dangerous chemical in that bottle.”

“I’ll help you clean up. I knows how to clean.”

“Tell you what. Let’s go visit your auntie, and then I’ll come back and deal with this. I haven’t seen Pearlie in a long time.”

Natriece nods. “She told me nobody was out here. She just unlocked the door to get Mrs. Ferry’s wash.”

I take the little girl’s hand and lead her to the door, then flip off the light and walk into the hall. Natriece lingers behind, standing with her back to me, looking into the dark room. “Did you leave something?” I ask.

“No, ma’am. I just looking at that.”

“What?”

“That there. Did I do that?”

I look over the girl’s head. On the floor near the foot of my bed, a greenish blue glow hovers in the darkness. The luminol has reacted with something on the carpet. The chemical registers false positives with several compounds, one of them household bleach.

“It’s all right,” I tell her, dreading my mother’s reaction to the mess Natriece has made.

“Freaky,” she says. “That looks like
Ghostbusters
or something.”

Stepping around Natriece, I look down at the luminescence on the floor. It’s not diffuse, as I had thought, but well defined. Suddenly, an eerie numbness spreads through my body.

I’m looking at a footprint.

I felt the same numbness twenty-three years ago, when my grandfather turned away from the first corpse I ever saw, knelt before me, and said, “Baby, your daddy’s dead.”

“Natriece, stay back.”

“Yessum.”

Actually, it isn’t a footprint at all, but a boot print. I only register this fact because now another ghostlike image has taken shape beside it. The image of a bare foot, much smaller than the boot.

A child’s foot.

With slow insistence, a percussive hiss intrudes into my concentration. Subtly at first, but growing steadily to a soft roar. It’s the sound of rain drumming on a tin roof. Which makes no sense, because the slave quarters has a shingle roof—not tin—and I’m standing on the first of two floors. But I’ve heard this sound before, and I know it for what it is. An auditory hallucination. I heard the same metallic patter a week ago, at the Nolan murder scene. Just before my panic attack. I was staring down at the retired CPA’s naked corpse and—

A rapid beat of footsteps startles me from my reverie. Natriece has bolted down the hall. A scream cuts the air in the bedroom.

“Nanna! Nanna! Nanna!”

Checking my watch, I wait for the glowing footprints to fade. False positives generally fade quickly, while the luminescence caused by the hemoglobin in blood lingers like an accusation.

Thirty seconds pass. I look around the bedroom, this strange shrine to my childhood. Then I look back at the floor. A minute now, and the glow shows no sign of diminishing.

“Come on,” I whisper. “Fade.”

My hands are trembling. I want to run for Pearlie, too, but I’m no longer a child. My eyes blur from the strain of focusing so hard. Could that be the imprint of my own foot? Bloodstains can endure for decades on some surfaces.

“Fade,”
I plead. But my plea does no good.

I’ve been drinking for over fifteen years. I’ve been sober now for forty-eight hours. I’ve never needed a drink so badly in my life.

Inside my mind, instinct is at war with itself. As I stare down at the two glowing footprints, half of me wants to run, the other half to lock the door. I want photographs of the prints, but to get them I’ll have to act quickly. Once the chemical reaction that causes the blood hidden in the carpet to luminesce is complete, it can’t be repeated.

The front door of the house bangs shut.
Pearlie.
I cross the bedroom and lock the door. Then I open my camera case, bring out my SLR, and fit a standard 35mm lens and cable release to it.
Damn.
I forgot to unload my tripod from the trunk of my car.

Someone raps sharply on my bedroom door. A rush of déjà vu tells me that rhythm belongs to Pearlie.

“Catherine Ferry?” calls a throaty voice as familiar to me as my mother’s. “You in there, girl?”

“I’m here, Pearlie.”

“What you doing home? Last time you came back was…I don’t know when. Why you didn’t call ahead?”

I can’t waste time trying to explain the situation. “I’ll be out in a few minutes, okay?”

Grabbing my car keys, I slide up the window, climb out, and run to my car. Tripod in hand, I climb back into the bedroom, close the curtains, and set up the tripod almost directly above the footprints. Pearlie is still knocking on the door. After mounting the camera and aiming it downward, I switch on the lights and shoot a reference photo of the floor. Then I close down the lens aperture by two f-stops, take a ruler from my dental case, and switch off the overhead light. The ruler has copper wire wrapped around the inch markings. The copper will fluoresce when sprayed with luminol. Laying the ruler alongside the glowing footprint, I spray both ruler and bloodstain with more of the chemical and wait.

“What you doing in there?” Pearlie demands. “Did Natriece mess up something?”

“I’m all right!” I snap. “Just give me a minute.”

I hear the muted chatter of Pearlie interrogating the little girl.

As the greenish-white glow begins to increase in intensity, I open the camera shutter with the cable release and look at my dive watch. To capture the faint glow of luminol in the dark, I need a sixty-second exposure. My hands are shaking badly, but the cable release will keep the camera from vibrating. This time the tremor isn’t from medication or alcohol withdrawal. It’s fear. The same sickening panic I felt at the LeGendre crime scene, and at the Nolan scene before that. If it weren’t for the child’s footprint, I’d assume the boot print was made with deer blood. Whitetail often wander onto the grounds of Malmaison, and my grandfather has been known to shoot a buck now and again, sometimes from the window of his study. But the child’s footprint
is
there…

When my watch hits the sixty-second mark, I close the shutter. Then, to be sure I capture the prints, I open the lens aperture by one f-stop and repeat the procedure. By then Pearlie is squawking through the door.

“Catherine DeSalle Ferry! You open this door!”

The familiar ritual of crime scene photography is calming my nerves. Habits have great comforting power—even bad habits, as I discovered long ago.

“Answer me, girl! I can’t read your mind like I used to. You’ve grown up too much and been gone too long.”

I smile in spite of my fear. The year after my father died—the year I stopped speaking—only Pearlie was able to communicate with me. The stoic maid could read my emotions in a glance, from the curl of a lip to the angle of my downcast eyes.

“I’m coming!” I call, going to the door.

As soon as I turn the knob, Pearlie pushes open the door and stands with her hands on her hips. Over seventy years old, she is tall, thin, and tough as gristle, with chocolate brown skin and clear traces of Caucasian ancestry in her facial features. Her eyes still flash with intelligence and wit, and her bark—though intimidating to strangers—is considerably worse than her bite. Around my grandfather and my mother, Pearlie displays the quiet dignity of a nineteenth-century servant. She can vanish as silently as a ghost when certain whites enter a room, but around me she is much more animated, treating me as she might a daughter. She still wears a starched white uniform, which you don’t see much anymore, and a shiny, reddish brown wig to cover her grizzled white hair.

I’ve missed her more than I realized. For her part, I see a mixture of pique and excitement in her eyes, as though she doesn’t know whether to hug me or spank me. Were it not for Natriece’s fear and the odd scene in the bedroom, Pearlie would undoubtedly crush me to her chest.

“Answer me this minute!” she demands. “You ain’t been home since your grandmother’s funeral, and that’s been a year now.”

“Fifteen months,” I correct, fighting a new wave of emotion that I can’t afford to face right now. Last June, my grandmother drowned on DeSalle Island. Part of the sandbar she was standing on simply slid into the Mississippi River. There was no warning. Four people saw it happen, yet no one could save her. No one even saw her surface after the bar collapsed. Catherine Poitiers Kirkland was an excellent swimmer in her youth—she taught me to swim—but at seventy-five, she’d been no match for the mighty current of the Mississippi.

“Lord, Lord.” Pearlie sighs. “Well…why didn’t you call to say you was coming? I would have cooked for you.”

“It was an impulse.”

“Ain’t it always with you?” She gives me a knowing look, then pushes past me into the bedroom. “What’s going on in here? Natriece told me they’s a ghost in here.”

I see the little girl standing just outside the door. “There is, in a way. Go look at the carpet by the foot of the bed.”

Pearlie walks over to the tripod, bends at the waist, and examines the floor with the eagle eye of a woman who has spent decades eradicating the slightest specks of dirt from “her” house.

“What’s making that rug look like that?”

“Blood. Old bloodstains hidden in the carpet fibers. It’s reacting with a chemical that Natriece sprayed on it by accident.”

“Blood?” Pearlie says skeptically. “I don’t see no blood. That looks like them Halloween teeth you used to wear when you was a child. Vampire teeth, like Count Dracula.”

“It’s the same principle. But there’s blood there, you can count on that.”

“Blood the only thing make that stuff glow?”

“No,” I concede. “Some metals will do it. Household bleach can do it. Have you spilled Clorox in here? Or in the laundry room and then tracked it in here?”

Pearlie purses her lips. “Can’t say I have. Can’t say I ain’t either. Could have done, I guess.”

“I’ve seen lots of stains like this. Blood has a particular kind of glow with luminol. And I’m ninety-five percent sure I’m looking at blood.”

“Well, I don’t hardly see nothing now.”

“It fades pretty quickly. That’s why I took pictures of it.”

Pearlie always minimized the negative aspects of any situation. Part of what she was paid for, I suppose. I even used to hear her sing an old Johnny Mercer song to that effect while she worked:
“You got to ac-cent-uate the positive, e-lim-i-nate the negative…”

“Could be deer blood,” Pearlie suggests. “Or armadillo maybe. Dr. Kirkland shoots armadillos round here all the time. They always digging up the yard, nasty things.”

“There are tests that will tell me whether the blood’s human. You know, it would take a lot of blood to make prints this well defined. There’s a boot print, and also the print of a child’s bare foot.”

Pearlie stares down with mute skepticism.

“Have there been any children around here since I left?” I’m an only child, and my aunt Ann, despite three marriages, has no children. “Has Natriece been around here much?”

Pearlie shakes her head. “My kids live in Chicago and Los Angeles, you know that. And Natriece only been to this house two times before this. She never been out here that I know about.” She turns and glares at Natriece. “You ever been in this room before, child?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Answer me straight, now! I ain’t one of them soft teachers you got at school.”

“I’m telling you true!”

As Natriece pooches out her lower lip, I kneel and study the fading image of the bare foot. Pearlie’s right; it’s nearly vanished. “Natriece, will you take off your flip-flop and put your foot over here?”

“In
blood
?”

“Not in it. Just hold your foot above the rug.”

The little girl slips off her yellow flip-flop and places a callused foot in my waiting hands. I hold it just above the dying glow of the footprint. It’s almost a perfect match.

“How old are you, Natriece?”

“Six. But I be big for my age.”

“I think you’re right.” I had guessed her age as eight, so her foot is probably about the size of a normal eight-year-old’s.

Pearlie is watching me with a worried look.

“Where’s Mom, Pearlie?”

“Where you think? Gone to Biloxi again.”

“To see Aunt Ann?”

“What else? That Ann draws trouble like my Sheba draws tom-cats.”

“What about Grandpapa?”

“Dr. Kirkland gone off on another trip. He supposed to get back later today, though.”

“Where has he been? The island?”

“Lord, no. He ain’t been down there in a good while.”

“Where, then?”

Pearlie’s face closes. “I ain’t supposed to say.”

“Not even to me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Pearlie…”

The maid sighs and cocks her head at me. She and I have kept each other’s secrets for years. Pearlie kept quiet about my sneaking in and out of the house as a teenager, which she usually witnessed while smoking on her porch in the wee hours. I kept quiet about occasional male guests staying over at Pearlie’s house. Pearlie was never officially divorced, but she’s been alone since she was thirty, and as she often said, she might be old, but she wasn’t dead.

“You won’t say I told?” she asks.

“You know I won’t.”

“Dr. Kirkland gone to Washington.”

“Washington, Mississippi?” Washington is a small town about five miles east of Natchez, and at one time the territorial capital of Mississippi.

Pearlie snorts. “Dr. Kirkland wouldn’t waste five minutes out there, unless there was timber to buy out that way.”

“Then where?”

“Washington,
D.C.,
girl. He go up there all the time now. I think he must know the president or something.”

“He does know the president. But that can’t be who he’s seeing. Who is it?”

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows.”

“Not Mom?”

“She act like she don’t. You know your grandfather.”

I want to ask more questions, but Natriece doesn’t need to hear them. I cut my eyes toward the child, who is trying to reach one of the silk dragonflies hanging in the corner of the room. Pearlie gets the message.

“Run outside and play for a few minutes, Treecy.”

Natriece pooches out her lip again. “You told me I could have a sno-cone if I was good.”

I laugh despite my sense of urgency. “She promised me the same thing lots of times.”

“Did you get it?” Natriece asks with severity.

“If I was good, I did.”

“Which wasn’t too often,” Pearlie snaps, taking a step toward Natriece. “If you don’t go play right this minute, you ain’t getting
no
kind of cone. You’ll be eating brussels sprouts for supper.”

Natriece makes a face, then darts past Pearlie, just out of reach of the old woman’s spanking hand. I close the door. Pearlie is again studying the carpet where the bloodstains are hidden.

“How is Natriece related to you? Granddaughter?”

Pearlie laughs, a deep, rattling sound. “
Great
-granddaughter.”

I should have guessed.

“That’s what’s wrong with black peoples round here nowadays,” she says. “These little girls getting theirselves pregnant at twelve years old.”

I can’t believe my ears. “They don’t do that alone, do they? What about the men who get them pregnant?”

She waves her hand dismissively. “Oh, mens gonna be mens no matter how many shows Oprah runs about child mamas. It’s up to us old ones to teach these girls how to act. But they all too far from the church now, these young people. Mm-
mm.
”

The last two syllables carry such finality that I know it’s fruitless to argue. “Pearlie, I want to talk to you about the night Daddy died.”

She doesn’t turn away, but neither does she say anything. She doesn’t respond in any overt way, though I detect a deepening in her dark eyes. There are different levels of awareness in Pearlie’s eyes, the way there are in the eyes of most black people of her generation. In Natchez prior to 1965, a black person could witness a fatal shooting between two white people and see nothing at all. Such an event was “white folks’ business,” and that was that. I hate to think what sins lie concealed beneath that outdated rubric. Instead of prodding her further, I wait in silence.

“You done asked me about that a thousand times, baby,” she says, closing her eyes against my scrutiny.

“And you’ve put me off a thousand times.”

“I told you what I saw that night.”

“When I was a child. But I’m asking you again. I’m thirty-one years old, for God’s sake. Tell me about that night, Pearlie. Tell me everything you saw.”

At last the eyelids open, revealing dark brown irises that have probably seen more of life than I ever will. “All right,” she says wearily. “Maybe it’ll finally settle you down.”