Ciji Ware (43 page)

André’s carriage was waiting outside the Bates’s Saddlery. Corlis ran to the vehicle’s opposite side as he hopped aboard and yanked furiously on the reins. Somehow she managed to climb up onto the seat beside him, just as the vehicle careened around the corner and headed for the Lower Garden District, where Corlis knew André, his brother Avery, his sister Margaret, and her husband all lived in a graceful pillared house on Orange Street.

Surprisingly, André neither slowed the horses nor attempted to eject Corlis from the speeding carriage. Instead, he continued to snap his reins smartly against his horse’s rump as the light, two-wheeled carriage sped forward. Corlis found herself grasping his arm and staring up into his frozen countenance.

“Please…
please
,
André,” she begged. “There
must
be a way to put an end to this treachery. I’ll do anything I can to help you stop Ian and Randall. They’ve stolen from me as well! We shall go to the authorities! Perhaps your fellow bankers would—Slow
down
!
You’ll kill us both!”

However, André Duvallon barely heard the frantic woman at his side.
What did it matter if he lived or died, or if his bank failed?
he thought with a crushing sense of futility. His life had ceased the night he had discovered Henri dangling from a rope. The ghastly sight told the hideous tale. Henri Girard had leaped off an office chair to escape the cruelty of those grasping, avaricious American devils! He had gone for help, only to return and find Henri’s body cut down and taken to the Rue Royale.

And now André finally understood why the dearest man in all the world had abandoned him to this living hell.

***

At Miss Pearl’s Saddlery, a jazz quintet blared from the small cabaret that adjoined the restaurant. As the band swung into a raucous number, Corlis sat bolt upright in her booth and gazed at the leather rein she was still holding. Her heart pounding, she winced at the sound of laughter and applause that had roused her from—
what
?

“Hey there, Corlis!” a voice inquired sharply. “What’s going on? Are you asleep or something? Where are Virgil and Manny? I thought WJAZ was treating y’all to dinner?”

“King!” she said, barely above a whisper. “What are
you
doing here?” She blinked several times, attempting to clear the cobwebs from her brain, and gazed at him across the wooden booth.

“I picked up the message that you’d called,” he said, looking at her speculatively. “I called you back at the station, and the assignment editor said you, Manny, and Virgil had come here to celebrate the broadcast tonight.” He glanced around the restaurant. “Where are the guys?”

“We were
supposed
to be celebrating, courtesy of Andy Zamora,” she replied with a shaky laugh. “Before we could even sit down, they were dispatched to the airport on some cockamamie story that didn’t need a reporter. I was… ah… just sitting here, waiting for my dinner.”

“You looked like you were hypnotized by that old horse rein. It took me a while to get your attention,” he said with a worried frown. “You sure you weren’t in outer space again?”

“What’re you doing here?” she asked, ignoring his question.

“Thought I’d come tell you in person how good I thought your series was,” King said, regarding her closely. “I watched all three nights.”

“Oh… thanks,” she replied weakly.

While King hailed the waiter to place an order of his own, Corlis stared overhead at the bridle and its dangling reins in an attempt to regain her bearings. Why in blazes had this very space been transformed into a genuine livery stable and then suddenly transformed back again? She reached for her glass of iced tea and took a deep draught.

It had happened
again
…
only this time she was frightened down to the toes of her sling-back pumps!
What was poor André Duvallon going to do?
she wondered distractedly, peering across the table at King. And furthermore, was this man who had just taken a seat across from her truly a direct descendant through a sibling or paternal cousin of the tortured Monsieur Duvallon?

Whoa, there, Corlis! Better disregard whatever happened when you had a whiff of that bridle rein. Concentrate on the present
—
pronto!

She was acutely aware that she was sitting, à deux on a Friday night, in one of the most popular watering spots in New Orleans, with the very man Grover Jeffries and Lafayette Marchand claimed was exerting undue influence on her journalistic judgment. She glanced nervously around the restaurant. This was precisely the kind of situation that could cause major trouble for them both, yet somehow all she could think of was how relieved she was to see King again.

“King… you and I haven’t spoken in a few days, but—”

“I know,” he interrupted. “I’ve been upriver since Tuesday.” He gazed forthrightly into her eyes and added somberly, “A dear family friend passed away suddenly, and I’ve been trying to help her son get her affairs in order before the funeral tomorrow.”

So
that
was why there had been such a long silence, Corlis thought, feeling ridiculously giddy. She gazed at his sorrowful features and felt instantly ashamed.

“Oh, King… I’m
so
sorry,” she replied softly. “Was it someone you were close to?”

King’s expression softened. “Do you remember the day I walked you through the Good Times Shopping Plaza, and I told you about our cook, Emelie?”

Corlis nodded, recalling how King had paused in the midst of their tour and angrily smashed the side of his fist against the concrete wall.

“Oh, no…
not
the woman you called your black mother?” she cried. She impulsively seized his hand and encased it with both of hers. “Oh, King… how really sad. Had she been ill?”

“I don’t think that Emelie ever adjusted to being displaced from that Creole cottage on Tchoupitoulas Street,” King said slowly. “Last year her memory began to fail, and then she simply lost the will to go on. Her son said that she’d just sit on his porch in an ol’ rockin’ chair… tears streaming down her face most of the time.”

King’s voice suddenly cracked, and Corlis felt her own throat close. From everything she had surmised about the lack of closeness between King and his parents, Emelie’s death was obviously a bitter loss to him.

“Will your family attend the funeral?” she asked, unsure for what else to say.

“My aunt Bethany would, but she’s down with a bad spring cold, and my grandmother Kingsbury… well, she’s as fragile as Emelie was…” He glanced at their joined hands and gave hers a soft squeeze. Then his blue eyes caught hers. “Would you consider coming to the funeral with me, sugar?” he asked softly. “We can drive across the lake to Covington and stay tonight at an ol’ cabin on some land my family still owns. It’s only about ten miles from there to the Dumas place. I guarantee… it’ll be real Louisiana…”

For an instant she heard the smooth, intimidating voice of Lafayette Marchand in her ears. She pushed the thought from her mind and continued to hold King’s hand between her own. Then she reached up and grazed the fingers of her right hand along King’s jawline.

“Sure, sugar…” she said in a lightly teasing tone of voice that belied her emotion. “I’d be honored to be among Emelie’s mourners.”

***

King waited in the blue Jaguar on Julia Street while Corlis ran up the stairs to her apartment. She filled Cagney Cat’s water dish to its brim, poured a pile of dry kibble into his dish, and did her best to ignore his reproachful stare as she swiftly packed a small overnight bag.

The drive along the twenty-four-mile concrete causeway that stretched across a dark and silent Lake Pontchartrain passed swiftly while King recounted numerous tales about Emelie’s role in the Duvallon household. Corlis listened attentively. Yet, a small voice in the back of her mind continued to fret about the nature of Grover Jeffries’s threats and her boss’s recent edict not to fraternize with King unless the interchange was strictly business—an injunction that she was obviously ignoring.

And then there was the dilemma she and King faced concerning the state of
their
relationship, though what
that
actually was she could not explain, even to herself. There could be no doubt that the Hero of New Orleans felt
something
toward her. As for Corlis, she’d known for some time now that she was… well…
crazy
about the man sitting to her left in the driver’s seat.

Aunt Marge would have a cow if she knew I was zipping along in King’s Jag, heading for his cabin in the bayou!

“He’s a source, with a capital
S
!”
Corlis could just hear the veteran journalist scold. “There are no exceptions to this rule while the business with Grover Jeffries and the fate of the Selwyn buildings remains unresolved.”

It’s a conflict of interest, Ms. McCullough… and it could get you fired.

Oh, for Pete’s sake!
she complained silently as she peered through the dark at the exotic moonlit landscape whizzing by. As far as her TV minidoc was concerned, she’d reported the facts of the controversy as she saw them and wouldn’t change a word of what she’d broadcast,
regardless
of her feelings for Kingsbury Duvallon! And if she was lucky, no one would even know that she’d attended the last rites of King’s family retainer in this remote, moss-draped Louisiana outback. Emelie’s funeral had virtually nothing to do with the Selwyn controversy, and surely Andy Zamora, King’s buddy, would understand if she offered a dear friend her moral support in the wake of Emelie’s sudden death. Besides—

“You okay, sugar?” King asked, reaching across the luxurious leather seat to touch Corlis’s left arm.

“W-Wha—?” she stammered, turning to study his handsome profile as he drove in the semidarkness.

“You’ve been so quiet. I’m sorry to have gone on so about Emelie. It’s just—”

“Oh no, King!” she hastened to assure him. “I love hearing all your stories about what it was like growing up as you did… and about what Emelie meant to you. I’m only sorry I never met her. She sounds like an absolute dear.”

“Emelie Dumas was certainly that,” he agreed soberly, pointing to a roadside sign that announced they’d reached their destination.

***

The community of Covington, on the other side of the lake, was silent, too, when King’s car made a right turn down a narrow tarmac road. Corlis gazed in awe at the large houses set back from the road. Many of these residences, King explained, were constructed in a spacious style commonly seen in the West Indies that featured white pillars, wide verandas, and tall windows, shuttered for the night.

“Somehow,” Corlis commented, “I never expected to see so many pine trees.”

“They provide an odd counterpoint to the tropical feel of the place, don’t you think?”

“If it weren’t so muggy,” she agreed, peering to her right, “I’d think I was in the High Sierras!”

King wheeled his sleek blue car off the paved road and down a smooth dirt track for several yards.

“The main house on our last property upriver burned to the ground during World War Two,” he related as they drove past two hulking brick chimneys. Their outlines stood starkly against the night sky. “Unfortunately, the Kingsburys were completely out of cash when that happened, and the place was never rebuilt. I use the old slave cabins when I come out to Bayou Lacombe to go fishing.”

“How many acres have you still got?” Corlis asked, fascinated and slightly spooked by the sight of the ghostly remains of the Kingsbury family’s lost glory.

“Oh… only about twenty-two acres now,” he said, shrugging as he pulled the car in front of one of two small log cabins set fifty yards from a swampy pond. “My folks inherited fifteen acres and what’s left of the main house. Daphne and I got the rest and an old slave cabin each. Used to be about four hundred acres in all. My grandparents sold almost everything in the fifties to a developer who then sold big chunks to rich white folks wanting to flee New Orleans’s crime and poverty. You know the old story,” he continued. “The developer made a fortune, and the Kingsburys paid their inheritance taxes.”

“Very
Gone with the Wind
.”

“Very,” King agreed with a grim smile.

Through the windshield Corlis gazed at the two wooden structures that featured slanting shingle roofs flanked by tall pine trees.

“You know, this place could be smack in the heart of Yosemite National Park!” she said.

“Maybe those trees and the cabins could,” King said with a smile as he turned off the ignition, “but have a look at Bayou Lacombe.”

“It’s awfully dark out here,” she said doubtfully, peering through the gloom. “I get a sense that there’s water nearby…”