Ciji Ware (49 page)

Corlis had not met this branch of André’s family with whom the bachelor made his home, and she wondered if they were aware of how desperate the man had become.

“No, André!” Corlis cried with sudden resolution. “ ’Tis not as dire as you think. Ian and Randall are bullies! They have vulnerabilities as well. I know that I could probably—”

He bestowed on her a look of pity. “If I cannot fathom a way to stop their calumny, surely you, a mere woman, cannot either.”

Corlis was reeling with the shock of it all. She could no longer avoid the plain fact that she had mortgaged her own future and
her
good name to her husband who was an out-and-out swindler. She seized André’s hand and held on to it, willing him to pay her heed. He had been kind to her, even if his interests had never been romantic. In fact, she realized with a start, André Duvallon could be said to be the only person she had come to know in New Orleans who even approached the status of being a friend.

“Listen to me, André!” she begged. “My father is a banker in Pittsburgh. I know it doesn’t hold out much hope, but let me inform my husband of the penalties he faces for practicing such blatant extortion. And believe me,” she assured him, “Randall and Ian’s own finances are precarious, to say the least. That’s probably why Ian Jeffries is so desperate to get you to pay him the five thousand dollars he demanded this afternoon.” She attempted to smile encouragingly. “If Randall and Ian know that
I
am aware of their skullduggery—”

“No!” André exclaimed fiercely. “You musn’t let on that you know any of this.”

“Why ever not?” Corlis demanded. “ ’Tis outrageous that they think they can succeed in intimidating—”

“I do believe, my dear Corlis,” André said ominously, “that Ian Jeffries would not hesitate an instant to do you—or your husband, for that matter—bodily harm.” His shoulders sagged. “I have never been certain that Henri’s suicide wasn’t a staged affair and that Ian Jeffries may have made it
appear
as if Henri hung himself.” He raised his head, his expression haggard. “No. Go, please. Your presence and your fruitless offers of help only add to my burdens. Just go.”

Corlis stared at the beaten man with an overwhelming feeling of dread.

“Promise me you won’t do anything rash,” she pleaded. “Promise me we can speak again tomorrow, and I shall give you a report… from behind enemy lines, so to speak.”

She was certain now that she must plan her own escape from New Orleans. She had a premonition that her only chance to sort out her life was to get as far away from this place as possible. She would pawn her last gemstone bracelet, if she had to, she thought, her mind racing. It was a bauble she had utterly forgotten about until just this instant. She had sewn it into the hem of her traveling suit the night she eloped with Randall. Fortunately her husband didn’t know of its existence.

Corlis laid a hand on André’s finely tailored sleeve. “At an earlier time, you were kind to me when I was feeling terribly distraught myself,” she said. “I consider you a friend, André. Please say I may call on you tomorrow?”

“As you wish,” he replied wearily. “I shall ask one of my servants to drive you home. Forgive me for not seeing you to the door.”

Without further conversation André left the parlor. His footsteps echoed down the hallway, leaving Corlis no recourse but to let herself out of his elegant front door. While waiting for André’s carriage to appear, she stood on the veranda, gazing through a thicket of lush greenery toward the wrought-iron garden gate. Her mind whirled with events that had unfolded in stunning and rapid succession.

Preoccupied with her churning thoughts, Corlis was unaware that André soon reentered the parlor following a brief conversation with his groomsman. He immediately sat down at a small desk positioned against a wall to the right of the front fireplace. Taking quill pen in hand, he swiftly scratched an explanatory missive addressed to Julien LaCroix. In it he revealed the relationship of Julien’s father to Martine Fouché and Lisette, as well as Jeffries’s and McCullough’s blackmail and extortion plots. He paused for a long moment then commenced to write again.

And so, dear Julien, I ask your forgiveness for not acting sooner to protect both your interests and those of my beloved Henri. Use this foul information I give you concerning those two scoundrels as a battering ram against the American scum. Tell Ian Jeffries and Randall McCullough that you intend to show this letter to every banker in New Orleans, if you have to, to turn the blackguards’ shameful game against them and shut them up forever. As for me, I will no longer have to endure the infamy sure to be heaped upon me by my own class.

I am deeply sorry, however, that in revealing the truth to you of this damnable situation, I must also disclose the unholy links that connect you and Martine Fouché.

I have long believed that white men’s lust for an enslaved people will wreak havoc on generations that succeed our own. To live a lie, to live in the shadows as plaçage demands, may I say from sad experience, is to live a kind of slow death. In honor of Henri’s memory, I ask that you tell those two swine that if they do not leave New Orleans immediately, you will reveal to the weekly journals the story of how these wretched Americans extorted us, causing your father’s attack of apoplexy and virtually hounding to death two men who strove to live honorably, despite the unusual affection by which Henri and I felt ourselves possessed.

Let God be our judge and not the likes of those avaricious rogues with our blood on their hands. Let Him decide which of us has committed the greatest sins.

Yours in truth,

André Duvallon

André addressed the front of the letter to
Julien LaCroix, Reverie Plantation
.
He secured it with molten sealing wax into which he pressed the flat surface of his gold signet ring. Next he summoned a servant, who swiftly put the missive into the custody of the waiting carriage driver with instructions to continue upriver after seeing Mrs. McCullough safely back to Julia Street.

Corlis had remained on the veranda, wondering why it was taking so long for André’s groomsman to bring the carriage around. Suddenly the loud, unmistakable crack from a discharging pistol rent the air.

She whirled in place, ran to the front door, and rattled the brass knob. It was locked. Just at that moment she heard the sound of horses’ hooves coming along the side of the house.

“Oh, God! No!” she cried over her shoulder as the driver brought the carriage to a halt. “Come here! Quickly! It’s Mr. Duvallon!” she screamed at the bewildered servant. She began to pound on the front door with her fists. “Let me in! Oh, André… please, please let me in!”

The groomsman leaped down from André’s carriage, and in three strides, reached the veranda. “Massa André tol’ me not to disturb him no mo’—”

“André!”
she shrieked, continuing to hammer on the door with all her might.

She sprinted the length of the wooden porch, cupped her hands over her eyes, and peered into the front parlor through the glass window. There, on the floor near the armoire, lay the handsome young banker, a ragged bullet hole laying waste to the side of his silken dark head. Next to the body was an overturned glass of absinthe, its peculiar chartreuse color dissolving into the crimson pool of blood spreading across the floor.

A few feet away on the plush Persian carpet in front of the fireplace lay a blue-and-white Spode bowl that had been swept from its perch on the mantelpiece. Miraculously, the bowl was unbroken. The flower petals it had contained were strewn everywhere—almost as if André Duvallon were already in his grave.

Corlis did not recall the carriage ride back to Julia Street, nor wearily trudging up the stairs past the nursemaid, who was taking the McCullough children out for their daily walk along the riverfront. Numbly she closed her bedroom door and sank down, fully clothed, on the wide bed that she’d shared with Randall McCullough these last eight years.

Dry-eyed, she stared at the ceiling, mesmerized by the intricacies of the sculptured plaster moldings that fanned out in a wheeled design from the chandelier. She was faintly aware that someone nearby was wailing, the sounds growing louder and more desperate in her ear, until she realized, with a start, that the shrill, keening cries were coming from her own lips by way of some despairing black hole piercing her heart. She shoved her fist to her mouth, scraping her knuckles, willing herself not to think about the way in which André’s head had been—

“No…
no
!”
she cried silently. Everything would be all right if she simply focused her attention on the memory of the unbroken blue-and-white porcelain bowl that lay upon the floor. She should think only of that lovely piece of Spode that had been overflowing with fragrant potpourri…

And then she remembered the scattered petals, fallen like pastel snowflakes in all directions, their melancholy scent filling her with horror and regret, until she thought she would truly suffocate. All she could see was a crimson tide of blood washing over the polished cypress floor, engulfing the dried rose petals in a scarlet sea. And she was grateful that there was no one present in the flat on Julia Street to hear her mournful cries.

Only the walls.

Chapter 21

April 19

Corlis was startled to feel arms embracing her and a deep voice demanding, “Sweetheart! What’s the matter?”

In response, she pressed her moist cheek against the comforting surface of a zippered jacket. The fabric served as a convenient sponge for tears that were coursing down her cheeks for reasons that seemed unfathomable to her at the moment.

“Corlis… darlin’!” the voice persisted. “Why are you crying? What’s happened?”

She opened her eyes and found herself standing next to a table where the familiar blue-and-white Spode bowl sat heaped with dried flowers.

“Oh, glory…” she whispered, fighting off a vision of André Duvallon lying in front of the rosewood armoire that stood not five feet from where King now held her in his arms. Then suddenly that memory triggered another recollection: the terrible sense of sadness she’d experienced when King’s friend, Dylan Fouché, had entered her bedroom on Julia Street with a burning sage smudge stick and tinkling bell in hand… the very same room where her ancestress may well have mourned, alone, the tragic death of a man who had abruptly taken his own life with a pistol shot to the head.

“Corlis, what on earth happened in the space of ten minutes to bring you to tears?” King questioned softly.

“Is that how long you were gone upstairs?” she said, barely above a whisper.

“ ’Bout that,” he confirmed. He grasped her gently by both shoulders. “C’mon, now, sugar. What gives? Do we have ourselves a serious case of buyer’s remorse?”

“I saw your ghost just now…” she disclosed slowly. “You may think I’m crazy, but I saw André Duvallon right here in your living room. And he
did
shoot himself over near that armoire. If I’m not entirely out of my mind, I think he was the brother-in-law of some earlier Kingsbury relative of the Duvallons.”

“Well… well,” King said, putting a protective arm around her shoulders and guiding her toward a small settee covered in moss-green silk. “Aren’t you the clever reporter to find out all that information from the phantom of the parlor,” he teased gently. “So the Kingsburys and Duvallons have gotten into each other’s hair
twice
in two different generations. How New Orleans.”

“Oh, God… who knows if a George Kingsbury was really married to André Duvallon’s sister, Margaret, in the 1840s?” She shook her head despondently. “This stuff’s getting pretty heavy, King.”

“What stuff—exactly—are you talking about?” he asked intently.

“The… ghosts… visions… trips back in time… whatever they are,” she said weakly.

“Here… sit down, sugar,” he urged. “Can I get you a glass of water?”

“No, nothing,” Corlis said, declining to take a seat. “Let’s leave, okay? I… I’d rather not stay… in this room,” she finished weakly.

King took her by the hand and led her down the hallway toward the back of the house. “I can now vouch for the saying ‘you look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’ By the way,” he asked gently, “how often do you encounter these otherworldly characters?”

Corlis halted midway to the kitchen door.

“Promise me you don’t think I’m a complete loon?”

King gave her shoulders another squeeze. “Look, Ace… I’m the one who first
saw
this guy in my front parlor, remember? I don’t exactly advertise that fact to people on the street, but who am I to say you’ve lost your grip?” He guided her into the kitchen, adding, “I want you to sit here and tell me all about it.”

However, before she could elaborate further, a short, stocky figure suddenly appeared at the screen door in the pantry.

“Well, well,” declared the balding man who appeared to be in his midfifties. “Took the Jag to the funeral, did you?” The man gave Corlis the once-over as he advanced farther into the kitchen. “That must’ve impressed everybody. Did you give our regards to the Dumas family?”