Courir De Mardi Gras (3 page)

“No. I only have an hour to find my Delta connection, and in this place, it won’t be easy.”

Mr. Salesman nodded, patted her hand once more, wished her luck, and warned her away from strangers. “Any one of them could be this Philly Slasher, you know.”

Suzanne found the stairs to the monorail, waited for the next car to her concourse, and easily made her flight. No need to call Paul. Surely, airport security had released him by now. It wasn’t as if he was armed, and definitely, Paul wasn’t dangerous.

Her new traveling companions, an exhausted couple who had been on the road since 5:00 a.m., dozed for most of the flight. She regretted being unable to draw some information about Port Jefferson from her fellow travelers since they were Louisiana natives, but spent her time in solitude dismissing Paul Smith from her mind and conjuring up images of what the son of a man who danced all night would be like. She favored a flashing smile, a graceful stance, and a witty repartee.

In preparation for meeting this dream man, Suzanne retired to the restroom, hunched over the tiny lavatory mirror, shook out her twist and fluffed her hair around her shoulders. She applied a lighter shade of lipstick and a little more blusher. Suzanne Hudson was now totally prepared to meet the possibly dashing Georges St. Julien. To hell with businesslike—though she would have described all their correspondence typed by his secretary on letterhead and signed “Georges W. St. Julien” as very, very businesslike.

She spent a two-hour layover in New Orleans browsing through gift shops selling voodoo dolls, Mardi Gras masks, and pralines until Bayou Aviation called her flight. A handful of people clustered in the waiting area. They filed down a flight of stairs and out on to the tarmac where the small commuter plane sat. The unexpected warmth and humidity of the air made the arm carrying her wool coat sweat. On the horizon, thunderheads welled up from the Gulf. She considered the idea of lightning storms in middle of January. Oh well, Suzanne, you’re not in Philly anymore.

The passengers negotiated a narrow set of stairs and crowded aboard, a half dozen businessmen with briefcases claiming the front cabin seats. She sat with a gangling serviceman, PFC Boudreaux, in the tail section. Private Boudreaux had a great deal of trouble arranging his limbs to fit the small seat. Mercifully, the flight lasted less than an hour.

Private Boudreaux, speaking with a strange accent not exactly French and certainly not a twang or a drawl, told her he was glad to be going home where he could get some well-seasoned food. For sure, his mama would have a nice, hot court-bouillon or gumbo on the stove. She questioned him about Port Jefferson and learned it lay “nort” of Lafayette, a tee-tiny town on Bayou Brun.

“Dey have one helluva basketball team for such a hick place, but dey got dis coach was once in da pros,” the private confided. His high school team lost to them every season. He remembered this one game, the retelling of which took up the rest of the flight.

She envied Private Boudreaux a little when they debarked across the tarmac toward the smallest terminal of the day’s travel. The businessmen dispersed throughout the building, some heading for the car rental counter, others shaking hands with acquaintances, some picking up bags and departing by taxi. Private Boudreaux, however, waded into a pool of loving relatives.

Suzanne got out of the way of the family reunion at the baggage pickup and looked for her escort. Nope, not a single handsome, dashing man worthy of Dr. Dumont’s attention waited for her. She heaved her heavy suitcases from the carousel and, pulling one and dragging the other full of books, moved toward the exit doors.

“Miss Hudson?” An extremely tall man she’d struggled past without a second glance approached. He wore a gray suit with a subdued striped tie and leaned over like a person who had practiced poor posture all his life—or perhaps because of his height, had spent a decade bending to look people in the eye. His own eyes were a pallid gray overwhelmed by the dark frames of his glasses, no longer Harry Potter in style, but more ultimate nerd lacking only a strip of adhesive tape on the bridge. An application of greasy cream kept his dark hair from falling into his face as he bent over. He had nice full lips, but no flashing smile, no smile at all.

Swallowing her romantic illusions, she answered, “Mr. St. Julien?”

“George, please call me George.”

No foreign French “s” on the end of his name. He was simply a plain old George.

“Suzanne.” She offered her hand. He took it clumsily in his large, long-fingered, and loose grip, gave one shake, and dropped it.

“Suzanne, then.” He pronounced it “Suz-ahn”, giving the name she’d never cared for a much more sexy and sophisticated quality. At home, her family called her Suz-anne or Suzy. She looked at him more closely for other hopeful signs and found none.

George hefted her bags very easily for a man who had much more height than breadth and started off toward his car. A steel gray Honda Accord waited in a no-parking zone. An overweight security guard was writing down the license plate number prior to issuing the announcement that the car would be towed if not moved. George reached the vehicle three paces before her on those long legs, even though he didn’t hurry.

“Leaving right now,” he told the guard. “Didn’t want to waste money on airport parking,” he explained. Obviously not a big spender.

Being of average height, she never felt short before this instance and had difficulty keeping up with him. The man stood at least six five, probably taller. After holding the door for her, he bumped his head climbing into the driver’s seat. He had the front seat pushed back as far as possible to make room for his legs. Even so, he occasionally shifted uncomfortably throughout the drive of over an hour. Suzanne did wonder why he hadn’t invested in a car with more leg room for the ridiculously tall.

Mr. St. Julien, George, hardly said a word unless she posed a question. He steered competently through the small city traffic and took the highway running with dart-like straightness across the flat terrain bisecting farmland into neat halves containing trailers and cattle and uniform stretches of plowed ground that he said, when asked, would later be planted in soybeans. Clouds continued to move in from the Gulf, covering the landscape like a woolly Quaker blanket about the same color as George’s eyes and the interior of his car. Like the couple from New Orleans, travel time caught up with her on the long drive. Her head bobbed against the window. Suzanne dozed.

George turned off the highway. Potholes galore pitted the rural road and jolted her awake as the car took the turns in the hill country. George slowed from his consistent fifty-five mph to a creeping thirty-five as she blotted a tiny drop of drool from the corner of her lips with a tissue.

“Sorry, jet lag, I guess,” she apologized.

“No problem. I’m not much of a conversationalist.”

To say the least, she thought. The land had lost its openness. Trees hung over the road, their branches low enough to testify to a total lack of heavy truck traffic. They swung around a bend and came to a stop before a red light. She had ample time to read the historical marker planted at the crossroads.

“Port Jefferson, Incorporated in 1840. Once a ferry crossing and later a center of the steamboat trade, the town is now known for its cotton and yam industries.”

Thus far, she had probably made the same impression on George St. Julien as he made on her—dull and indifferent. Time for some brilliant repartee.

“Thomas Jefferson or Jefferson Davis?” she asked.

“What?”

“The man they named the town after.”

“Neither. Eli Jefferson, a steamboat captain and cotton broker, founded the place, though my great aunts will debate that. They had the marker erected and omitted old Captain Eli. Up until ten years ago, they tried to have the town renamed St. Julien since our family settled here first when the place was just a ferry crossing.”

“What stopped them?”

“My mother. She said she was tired of being humiliated by crazy old women and would put them in Pineville if they kept it up.”

“Pineville?”

“The state mental hospital.”

“Oh.”

They took a sharp left turn when the light changed and by-passed most of Port Jefferson cluttering the road between the stoplight and the bayou in the distance. At the top of a fairly steep hill, they turned again onto a shell road bordered at regular intervals by young evergreen magnolias with neatly pruned, whitewashed trunks and dark, drooping leaves waiting patiently for the arrival of spring. George drove even more slowly and winced when a shell pinged against the side of the sedan.

“I plan to hardtop this road if we can get enough tourists out here to see the house.”

They pulled into a parking area. Magnolia Hill presented a blank white stucco face pierced here and there by windows like large, dark eyes. A small ell with a screen door stuck out of one end of the rectangular building. From this angle, she couldn’t imagine what a tourist would pay to see. The screen door burst open, and the doorway filled with a rotund woman the color of milk chocolate.

“Ya’ll come in now. Coffee’s on.”

“My housekeeper, Birdie Jones. Birdie, this is our guest, Miss Suzanne Hudson.”

“Pleased to meet you, Miss Suzanne.” Birdie smiled broadly, nodded, and wrapped her hands in her white apron.

“I want to take her around the front first. Please serve coffee in the parlor today.”

“Sure thing, Mr. George.” Birdie, chuckling and shaking her head at the change in routine, went back into the kitchen.

The front of the house on its bluff overlooked Bayou Brun. Now, this was a vista tourists would pay to photograph. Ancient magnolias stretched their tips toward the clouds and brushed the earth with their lower leaves. They formed irregular clumps on a neatly mowed lawn. Obviously, these trees had been singled out when someone cleared the woody ridge in 1842. No one path led down to the river. No matter which way a visitor went, a tree blocked the course and caused a veering to the left or right. Some of the small groves, dense enough to hide behind or in, must have provided spots for delicious lover’s games once upon a time.

“On late spring nights, the whole yard smells of lemon from the blooms.”

Caught up in a vision of uniformed cavaliers and crinolined ladies playing hide-and-seek in the fragrant, moonlit arbors, Suzanne glanced expectantly up at George and waited for his next words.

“Makes me sneeze,” he said. Turning toward the façade of Magnolia Hill, he continued, “This column has some Yankee bullet holes. There’s half a cannon ball lodged in another. That should interest the guests. How they managed a gunboat barrage from the bayou with all the trees in the way, I don’t know, but the Jeffersons surrendered fairly quickly, moved into town, and let the Yankees take over.”

“I thought Magnolia Hill had been in your family for over a hundred years.”

“It has, but old Captain Jefferson built the place exactly where the bayou becomes too shallow to navigate a steamboat. That way he had the convenience of not having to cart his goods up the hill from town, and he avoided the heat and mosquitoes down in the bottoms. The St. Juliens weren’t much until after the war, only French farmers with a hoard of kids and six or seven slaves. Eli Jefferson built most of the town except for the Roadhouse and the St. Julien place.”

“He must have been a remarkable man.”

“My mother thought so.”

She examined the eight rounded brick pillars, carefully stuccoed, smoothed, and whitewashed to resemble marble. The brickwork showed through where the minié balls and cannon shot lodged. The columns had been left unpatched for posterity as if to say, “Look what the Damn Yankees did to our home.”

She’d studied enough in advance on the area to realize with most of the traffic coming by river, the house put its best face toward the water and turned its back on the muddy roads to the rear. Unfortunately, the university library contained about three sentences on Port Jefferson, and it had been too late to borrow any material. Having no intelligent comment to make on the Battle of Magnolia Hill, she felt as if her ignorance about the project showed as lavishly as a petticoat when they crossed the flagstone terrace.

She grew more comfortable in the front hall. The mansion had the typical two rooms deep, three rooms wide with a central hall pattern. Being more English than French in style, the important rooms for entertaining sat on the first level, not the second, and tall ceiling to floor windows took the place of French doors.

Birdie had placed the coffee service in the parlor to the right. A settee of rosewood and red velvet and a pair of matching, tufted petticoat chairs that appeared to be real John Belter faced each other across a square of Brussels carpet. Blocking the way to the seating, a massive round table reared up on legs snaking out from the central pedestal like the paws of an angry dragon. A single crystal bowl full of wax fruit ornamented its center.

Between the tall windows with their view of the magnolias sat that Victorian curiosity, a tête-à-tête, with its joined seats facing in opposite directions so that courting couples could share intimacies and strain their necks at the same time without snuggling too close. On the mantel, a gilt clock chimed four under its glass case. To one side of the fireplace stood a fire screen that appeared to be made of eighteenth century needlework. Charmed by its miniscule scene of women in panniered dresses strolling in a formal garden, Suzanne went to it immediately.

“That was Mother’s favorite piece.”

George nodded toward a portrait reigning over the room. Not an oil painting but a nicely executed, hand-tinted photograph of a woman who had height and grandeur, even on film. She wore her light blonde hair pulled back from her face. Her steely gray eyes had a piercing quality that her son’s eyes lacked. She did not smile. She did not lean against the rococo chair on which one hand rested with its red, polished nails pointing downward. The lady wore a strapless ball gown ornamented with pearls around her neck, but Suzanne had the feeling Mrs. Jacques St. Julien could have posed naked with the same icy and elegant repose. She wouldn’t have called the mistress of Magnolia Hill gangling or horsey at all, more like imposing and imperial. Suzanne chose to sit down for coffee with her back to the disturbing portrait.