Ciji Ware (18 page)

“Sure. As I said before, down here it’s just a manner of speech. A habit. Like saying ‘dude’ in California, I suspect. No offense meant.”

Corlis sensed that he was both teasing and serious.

“None taken,” she replied, striving to make her tone light.

King rose from his chair and glanced around the crowded restaurant. “Well…” he suggested, pulling back her chair, “we’d better get goin’.”

“You’re right,” she agreed, noting the time. “This is going to be the deadline from hell today. Oh! I still have to pay our check!”

“Lunch’s on the house.”

“It can’t be!” she said, exasperated. “I
have
to pay. It’s an ethical thing! I—”

“Oh, now sug—Ace, don’t worry about it. It’s a present. To both of us.”

“Lunch? But why?”

“I saved a couple of buildings in this neighborhood,” King shrugged. As they left the restaurant, he added, “Professional courtesy, y’know?”

Corlis was about to continue her protest but merely heaved a resigned sigh. “I don’t have time to argue.”

And within minutes King’s dented station wagon pulled up next to her car, double-parked, and escorted her to the Lexus.

“Pretty snazzy, there, California. Very nice paint job,” he added, opening the driver’s door for her.

“Spoils of war,” she answered as she slid behind the wheel and turned on the ignition. “Thanks for sharing your po’boy!”

Flashing a grin at her through the open car window, he replied, “Glad you liked it.” Then he cuffed her gently on the chin. “You take the best of care now, okay, Ace? See ya on TV.”

Chapter 8

March 11

Corlis found herself with a couple of free hours in the afternoon of the following day and made her way to a complex of buildings at City Hall on Poydras Street, where New Orleans’s building records were housed. By three o’clock, she was installed at a bare, steel-legged table at the end of a row of ten-foot-high metal bookcases. Acres of books, ledgers, and accordion-pleated portfolios ran the length of the basement where the oldest archives were kept at a temperature that felt to be subzero. A check of the 1830 census records produced an “H. Girard, bachelor” living on the Rue Royale. Thanks to a helpful clerk, several bulging, dust-clad files now crowded her desk, identified by handwritten labels penned in a spidery script that declared them to be residential records of the:

700 Block of the Rue Royale

1750–1850

At number 728 Royal Street, in the French Quarter, the owners of record were listed in chronological order, including a name that caused her heart to pound erratically.

Henri Girard, merchant. Deceased December 21, 1837.

Here was proof: The corpse in the opera clothes had truly lived—and died. Corlis ran her forefinger along the line that listed his long-forgotten name.

Next to the files for Royal Street, the archivist, at Corlis’s request, had deposited on her desk another startling collection of stiff manila folders. These contained permits, plans, maps, and correspondence relating to building construction during the first half of the nineteenth century in the burgeoning American Sector. One file, in particular, riveted her attention.

600 Block of Canal Street

City of New Orleans

1803–1850

For two more hours, Corlis sifted through a mountain of documents on her borrowed desk. Her thin linen suit jacket did little to protect her from the blast of air-conditioning overlaid with dank, musty air. She hunched her shoulders against the advancing current and briskly rubbed her upper arms in an effort to warm herself.

Several papers provided startling glimpses into the nineteenth-century origins of the screen-shrouded buildings that now figured in the controversy over Grover Jeffries’s endowment of the university professorship. Corlis’s labors yielded the plot map number of the buildings that had indeed been constructed around 1840 in an area of the city where little development had taken place before. With this in hand she hoped to trace their ownership by consulting early editions of the
City Directory
. If she were able to
link
those feisty nineteenth-century entrepreneurs—whoever they may have been—with their modern-day descendants still residing in New Orleans, a television story about the battle to prevent the demolition of those Greek Revival beauties would be more powerful.

Another blast of air-conditioning wafted from the overhead vents. Corlis shivered again and reached for the accordion-pleated file folder for the 600 block of Canal Street. With the ease of a seasoned researcher, she stacked the papers to one side, flipped open her slender reporter’s notebook, and made a systematic inventory of the subject matter the documents contained before she started the daunting task of reading the pages one by one.

She glanced at her watch. It was a quarter to five. The city archives would be closing any minute now, so she’d have to come back when she could steal some time away from her regular reporting duties. Swiftly she began sequestering the old documents in their proper containers. As she handled the aged material, a distinctive scent of mold rose to her nostrils—a blend of dust and odors from centuries past.

Far off in the distance, she thought she could hear the muted sounds of the river—a steamboat hooting, signaling its imminent departure from the Toulouse Street Wharf—or perhaps a massive freighter was heading downstream toward the Gulf of Mexico, sounding its warnings to smaller craft passing by.

Not possible… where I’m sitting is too far up Poydras Street to catch the sounds of river traffic…

Corlis picked up a fragile-looking plot map labeled with the date 1838. A grid of brown lines depicted the perimeters of the
carrè de la ville
,
now called the Vieux Carrè—the Old Quarter, presently the French Quarter. On the left-hand side of the grid, a street identified as Canal clearly denoted the open area of land as it appeared a few years before the Greek Revival structures had been built. Even earlier, in the eighteenth century, the property in question had apparently been part of a former plantation bordering the first town settlement. By the early 1830s, it had been ripe for development, thanks to an influx of newcomers from northern American territories and especially from Kentucky, following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

For some peculiar reason the map’s singularly earthy scent and the paper’s fragile texture began to produce odd, tingling sensations coursing up Corlis’s arm. Mesmerized by the document, she traced with her forefinger the outline of the 100 block confines of the French Quarter, bordered on the downriver side by Canal Street. She rested her nail on the two-dimensional rendering of the old dirt levee that she had read somewhere had been constructed after 1718 to prevent the Mississippi River from overflowing its boundaries and flooding the tiny outpost.

Sounds of life on the waterfront suddenly became louder, and she found herself imagining tall-masted ships and long, sleek barges riding low in the water, poled by muscular slaves to destinations along the riverbank. Her fingers grazed the spot where the map’s elegant calligraphy marked the area presently known as the Toulouse Street Wharf that had served as a dock for the latest in sail and paddle wheel technology.

Like
Showboat
.
Like in the days when the original owners of
those beautiful buildings on Canal Street traded sugarcane and cotton and shipped their products to buyers around the world…

Corlis’s hand resting on the antique map began to tremble, and her vision blurred. The sketch of the old levee holding back the river water swam before her eyes, and then, just as suddenly, it appeared to take concrete shape. Her breath caught as she watched the barricade’s mounded black, loamy soil—pungent and warm—miraculously rise to a height that allowed a wonderful view of a three-masted ship on the wide Mississippi. The vessel was slowly making its way through a thicket of other wooden masts toward a dock bustling with robust stevedores. Members of the crew waited at the railings for the order to throw lines overboard so they could secure the graceful deep-sea craft to the shore.

“Oh my God!” Corlis whispered hoarsely as a wave of panic began sweeping over her.

It’s happening again!

***

“When do you plan to tell Julien about the deed to the Canal Street property?” Randall McCullough inquired of Ian Jeffries.

Jeffries, a portly man of medium stature, was fashionably dressed in chocolate-colored trousers with a matching tight-bodied coat, neckcloth, and opalescent breastpin. He stood on the wharf in the warm April sun and gazed speculatively at the variety of ships and river craft moored near the riverbank, six vessels deep.

If one wasn’t privy to the truth about the underhanded rogue—as McCullough and his wife, Corlis, certainly were—Ian Jeffries presented the reassuring demeanor of a successful man of business. For all the world he seemed a New Orleans “comer” in the parlance of a city recovering nicely from the money crisis of the previous year, and the earlier devastating cholera and yellow fever epidemics of 1832–33.

“Will you broach the subject of that Fouché woman’s damnable trick while Julien remains here in New Orleans, or wait till you both get to Reverie?” pressed McCullough.

“For mercy’s sake, Randall!” admonished Corlis before the plump-faced Jeffries could supply an answer to her husband’s question. “Poor Monsieur LaCroix’s bound to be far more upset to hear of his father’s stroke and Henri Girard’s death than that his father’s fool partner has deeded over a few acres of company land to his mistress in his will!”

“Hush, Corlis!” Randall McCullough said crossly. He cast his wife an admonishing grimace that clearly conveyed he wished for all the world that he’d refused to let her come along on this dangerous mission.

“Don’t you hush
me
!”
she retorted.

Hoping to intimidate his wife of four years into silence, McCullough continued to glare at the woman whose small stature belied her assertive, inquisitive nature. Who could have imagined, he mused with mounting irritation, that such a slip of a thing could have survived yellow fever on their journey down the Mississippi River, or that she could have produced a healthy baby boy before the flatboat had even pulled up to the very wharf where Julien LaCroix and his bride of one year would soon be disembarking?

“You overstep yourself to speak of subjects that do not concern you!” he scolded.

“Nonsense, Randall,” Corlis retorted. “Why are you and Ian making so much of such a small parcel, when the LaCroix family owns—”

“ ’Tis not for you to determine what is of importance here, or what Ian and I should say to Julien—or even
when
and
where
we should say it!”

Randall allowed his glance to rest briefly on his wife’s thickening waist, concluding that Corlis had become even more irritable and plainspoken during this second pregnancy. In another month he would insist that she completely withdraw from polite society.

Ignoring his scowl, Corlis turned to Randall’s new partner. “Ian,” she appealed, “the poor gentleman’s been abroad for more than a year now. ’Tis my opinion you will alienate Monsieur LaCroix if you press your own cause too soon. The man will be deeply shocked to hear—before he’s barely set foot on Louisiana soil, mind you—that his father is without the facilities of speech or movement, and that the plantation’s affairs are in such terrible disarray.”

“Not to mention Henri Girard’s mishandling of Reverie’s cotton and cane sales here in the city,” Ian Jeffries added grimly.

“Suicide was too good for ’im, I say,” Randall muttered grudgingly.

“Randall!” Corlis rebuked him sharply, glancing over her shoulder. “If anyone were to hear you…” She stared at her husband, aghast, unable to disguise her disdain. What a blustering fool he was, she thought silently. The worst of their Scottish race!

She glanced momentarily at his broad chest and muscular shoulders. She recalled with some embarrassment now how drawn she’d been to this mercurial man in the beginning of their unorthodox relationship. How foolhardy, indeed, had she been to risk her virtue within the circle of the brawny arms of a carpenter. Randall McCullough had been hired by her banker father to build the family mansion in Pittsburgh. Six weeks of her impetuously succumbing to the man’s infamous charms had predictably rendered her
enciente.
Within a fortnight of the discovery that she was expecting a baby, she’d become the hapless bride in a hasty wedding ceremony. By summer’s end she was floating south down the Ohio, and ultimately the Mississippi River, only to wind up in this steamy bog that was New Orleans.

Corlis made a valiant attempt to ignore the heat as she shifted her glance away from Randall. She wondered what strange malevolence had taken possession of both her husband and his building partner, Ian Jeffries. The two men had met on that intolerable riverboat full of tricksters and gamblers that had whisked them down the Mississippi in the autumn of 1834. Jeffries had boarded the craft at the Reverie Plantation’s dock en route to New Orleans, and the two Scotsmen had come together like beaten eggs. Yet as partners they hardly had the common sense of one man. Their elaborate schemes to strike it rich in this busy port had so far come to naught, and in fact, they might well have resulted in an arrest for out-and-out extortion.