Dead End (4 page)

“Fashionable headpiece. He doesn’t mind?”

The man had always had a sly tongue. “Gaston is safety-minded. Glad you like the brain bucket…helmet to you.” The bucket in question was a lined steel bowl, custom fitted with straps to fasten under the dog’s neck, camouflage-painted, and equipped with a lanyard to make sure it didn’t fall forward over his eyes.

She took the poodle out of his carrier, removed his bucket, and slipped the pouch from her shoulders.

“This isn’t easy.” Marc surprised her with that. He picked up a pen from Cyrus’s desk and rolled it between long fingers. “I’ve regretted what happened—”

“Why?” Reb forced a laugh. “We were kids. Or I was. You helped me settle when I wasn’t doing a good job on my own. Forget it.”

He stood the pen upright on one thigh and didn’t answer her.

“That was nice of you,” she told him. “To get the old times out of the way.”

His black eyes made contact again, and he studied her sideways. She actually wished she weren’t dressed in a too-tight T-shirt, cutoff jeans, knee and elbow pads, and a pair of black work boots with no socks visible.

“Ooh, ya-ya, it’s a hot one,” she said.

Marc crossed his own nicely scuffed brown boots at the ankle and folded his arms. Everything about him had matured. She looked away. She wasn’t seventeen anymore, and she wasn’t going to mistake nostalgia for interest in this man, other than as a male specimen worthy of study.

“It’s been a long time,” he said.

“Thirteen years,” she said, and instantly wished she hadn’t let him know she’d been counting.

“Now you’re thirty.” He shook his head as if he’d said she had a foot in the grave.

“Not quite thirty,” she said. “But you’re thirty-five. Amazin’. How is your family?”

“Mother’s good. She likes Florida. My father died a few years back.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. My father’s dead, too. Two years.”

“That’s too bad. I remember the two of them playin’ chess together every week.”

So did she. And she remembered dogging Marc’s footsteps out at Clouds End. She must have been annoying.

“You became an architect,” she said. Silence with him was intolerable.

“I did. I’m in partnership in the Quarter. I’m lucky to do what I like doing. Where you practicing?”

She watched his face carefully, waiting for him to show disbelief. “Here. I took over my father’s practice. That means I get paid in chickens and crawfish—which don’t balance the books—but I’m happy enough.”

He was good at hiding what he thought. “You don’t say. At the house on Conch Street?”

“Uh huh.”

There was nothing relaxed about this encounter. She wished Cyrus would come back and set her free. But then, she also wanted more time to look at Marc, to listen to him. He didn’t wear a wedding ring. Heat crawled up her neck. Aw, she should let up on herself. Any single woman who still had a pulse ought to expect to respond to a sexy man.

She tapped a foot.

Marc clasped his hands behind his neck and didn’t take his eyes away from her.

Gaston had sidled up to a member of his least favorite species, the male human, and settled his bottom on one of those expensive brown boots. Reb prayed he wasn’t planning to make his opinions known.

Her pager vibrated at her waist, and she checked the display. “Excuse me.” Peggy Lalonde was two months from her due date and very nervous. Reb pulled her cell phone from the nylon pouch that hung from a cord she wore draped across her body. Peggy picked up at the first ring, and Reb listened to a list of questions. When the woman paused for breath, Reb said, “Peggy, I think I forgot to tell you you’re the healthiest pregnant mom I’ve ever known. Keep on doing what you’re doing. There’s no need to cut back on any activities.” Peggy rushed in with references she thought backed up a need to be very worried. This time Reb broke in. “May Lynn is a hairdresser, not an obstetrician or a midwife. If you were spotting or having a lot of premature contractions—and pain—I might suggest you rest more. Going to bed for ten weeks and having the foot of your bed put on eight-inch blocks is an outrageous suggestion…That means I think May Lynn should stick with highlighting and brow-waxing and leave the practice of medicine to me. Don’t give any of this another thought.”

She prepared to switch off, but Peggy had a parting piece of information.

“Well,” Reb responded. “If she doesn’t do waxing, maybe it’s time she started. Widening one’s horizons is good for the mind. Go take a nice walk in the park.”

“This is why you went to med school, to practice in Toussaint?” Marc said when she put the phone away.

The derision was there after all. Reb balanced Gaston’s bucket on her knee. “I wanted family practice. Why not in Toussaint? People get sick here just like anywhere else.”

“Did you know Bonnie Blue?”

No reply came immediately to mind. What did he want with Bonnie Blue? He couldn’t have known her. “Want some animal crackers?” She pulled the bag from Gaston’s pack and offered them. “Sweetened with fructose. Not bad.”

He cupped a hand for her to pour in a pile of crackers, and she did the same for herself. “Bonnie was a friend of yours?” she asked.

Marc shook his head and chomped one cracker after another.

“How do you know about her?” she asked.

“I still get the Toussaint paper,” Marc said. “I more or less keep up. This town has had more than its share of excitement in the past few years. What with those sick murders a couple of years back—they managed to hit the news in New Orleans, too—and now this suspicious death. But I only know
of
this recent woman, not about her.”

Reb felt her scalp tighten. She wanted to forget the women who had met such bizarre deaths. The law might have a man behind bars for the crimes, but that didn’t put her mind at rest. “I didn’t know Bonnie, either,” she said.

He brushed his palms together. “I guess she was a stranger passing through.”

“Why so interested, then?” The crackers tasted like sand to Reb.

If Marc would move his unblinking gaze away from her, she’d feel calmer.

He shrugged and offered a crumb to Gaston, who averted his head. “How did she die?”

“She fell.” And Reb’s heart began to jump around. “They found her on the stone flags at the bottom of the belfry steps in the church and called me. They thought she was still breathing, but it was just breath escaping when they moved her.”

Marc was permanently tanned, but she knew when a tanned man’s face turned bloodless. “What killed her exactly?” he said.

“She probably fell one flight—the middle one—and got pretty banged up, then couldn’t stop herself from tripping down the last stairs and breaking her neck. The coroner in Lafayette thought the same thing.”

Beads of sweat stood out along Marc’s hairline and above his upper lip. He swallowed repeatedly. She wouldn’t have taken him for a squeamish man.

“An accident,” he said.

“That was the way it looked.” And that’s what Reb wanted to believe. She surely did not want to connect recent events in her own life to Bonnie’s death, and if Bonnie’s accident hadn’t been an accident, Reb might have to do that. She shook back her hair.

“Describe her to me.”

A thin woman with arms and legs twisted into abnormal positions—both arms broken. Her neck arched back as no neck was supposed to arch, and enough blood and protruding bone splinters on her face to make her anonymous. “I never really saw her before she died. She had longish dark hair. A lot of gray was covered with dye. Probably a good figure if she wasn’t malnourished. Drug user—or she had been until fairly recently.”

“Fits what I was told.” Marc’s dry, cracking voice was a puzzle “But you never got to know her?”

“She kept to herself. Sang at Pappy’s. As far as I know, no one saw her otherwise after Cyrus gave her a room here. She was a night person. Vince Fox plays the fiddle for the Swamp Doggies. Apparently he met her in the Quarter and took pity on her. Told her she could come here and they’d give her what work they could. That’s all I know.” Except that in her pocket Bonnie had carried a taped-together photo of a baby looking at the camera over a man’s shoulder. The man was just a man, the shot taken from behind him. The baby had big, dark eyes and hair as black and curly as the man’s. Reb had pored over the mangled shot. It meant something. But that was a dead woman’s personal business anyway, hers and the law’s, who had the photo among her scant effects. All efforts to find Bonnie’s path to Toussaint had failed. No relatives had been traced, and as far as Reb knew, the case was closed—or permanently on the back burner.

“You felt sorry for her.” He couldn’t know he’d uncapped the pen and was doodling on a jeans leg.

“Nobody spoke up for her, Marc. She was all alone, and she died all alone, and not a soul seemed to care much—except for Cyrus and Madge, and Oribel.”

“I thought doctors were supposed to be dispassionate.”

“Really?” She could do whatever she had to do, but she didn’t think she’d ever stop caring about people as people.

“Let’s change the subject,” he said. “You’ve still got the reddest hair I ever saw.”

She was too unsettled to take pleasure in a compliment. “It needs a good cut.”

“Don’t do that.”

Reb snapped her fingers at Gaston, who ignored her. She felt overheated again, and the heat of the day wasn’t the reason.

“You were a knobby-kneed, irritating little kid, and a precocious but a pretty gorgeous teenager.” He had the grace to grimace at that. “You are one fascinating woman.”

“Thank you.” Grace under pressure was a virtue. For once she’d control herself and avoid snapping back that he was too tall, dark, handsome, and slick-tongued for his own good. She also wouldn’t suggest he probably went through women like a bayonet through tofu.

“Do you remember my sister Amy?” He timed his questions for maximum impact.

“Not really. She was a lot older, wasn’t she? I remember she was away at school by the time I was particularly aware of her.”

“You don’t know any of Amy’s history in this town?”

This was awkward. “I was told she got into some trouble, but my father didn’t believe in gossip, and anyway, like I said, she was another generation from me and I didn’t pay much attention.”

His hard jaw took on a determined thrust, and he flattened his mouth against his teeth. That memorable mouth had got him into a tight spot or two—Reb knew all about that.

“Reb, people do a lot of talking here. Even if they aren’t gossips. Amy…” He paused. “Amy didn’t have good sense, and she made bad decisions, especially about men. And men messed her up.”

“I wouldn’t think that was anyone’s business but hers.”

“Maybe not. I’d prefer not to discuss this, but is there still talk about Amy—about Chauncey Depew and Amy?”

She thought about it. “Chauncey’s married to Precious. Oribel’s daughter. Chauncey wouldn’t risk having Precious turn on him—not that they’re exactly a picture of connubial bliss. But they never have been, and there’s an interdependence there. He’s a lot older than she is. Precious tries to pretend her husband’s something more elevated than a body shop owner. I can’t figure why she’s got a thing about it. He does very well. But Precious talks about his high-end specialty automobile service.”

“I don’t know Precious,” Marc said. “I’d rather you never mentioned Chauncey and Amy to anyone.”

“You can count on it.” But she’d be lying if she pretended she wasn’t curious.

“Can you recall how Amy looked?” Marc asked.

Reb shook her head slowly. “I don’t think we ever even met officially, although I did see her a few times when I was a kid visiting Clouds End. She was always about her own business. Do you have a photo of her?” He wanted information, and he hoped to get it without revealing everything that was on his mind. The connections he seemed to be making scared her.

“Only from when she was young. Not that she’s old now. Forty-five. She looks older. We were too far apart in age to be close—like two only children. But she’s still my sister. She never stopped loving Depew, not since she was fourteen. He ruined her, but she wouldn’t give him up.”

Why was he telling her all this? “I’m sorry, Marc. When someone you love suffers, you suffer right with them.”

“Amy’s been away from Toussaint for fifteen years. Depew helped her get settled in the Quarter. He didn’t want her here. Not even if she was only passin’ through. They had an understandin’. If she broke the rules, he’d break off the affair. You heard any of this?”

“No,” she said with honesty. “Of course, I was away some years myself.”

“You okay?” he asked abruptly. “You’re jumpy.”

“You’re imagining things.” She’d have to make sure her nervousness didn’t show. Her plan had been to talk to Cyrus about thinking she was being followed, but this interlude with Marc had given her time to change her mind. She was overreacting.

“I still say you’re jumpy,” Marc said, and he leaned forward to watch her even more closely. “Did I tell you I’ll be in town a while?”

He hadn’t. “No.” And the thought didn’t do much to improve her peace of mind.

“I’ve got business here, and I’m probably going to need a little help from you.” He bent to scratch Gaston behind the red, white, and blue bow in his topknot, and the little traitor leaned against his leg. “Reb, I think my sister came back here a couple of months ago. I think Bonnie Blue was really Amy Girard.”

Madge was on the phone when Cyrus walked into the sitting room she used as her second office. She held up a hand and smiled apologetically. “Father Cyrus is looking into that,” she said, waving him to the overstuffed red chair that was her own favorite. She rolled her eyes at him. “That’s true, Mr. Girard’s meeting with Father right now. Yes, William, I most certainly will tell you as soon as I hear something. If I hear something. Yes, but I think I can reassure you that the rumors are exaggerated.”

Cyrus glanced at the common wall between his own office and Madge’s and wondered how things were going with Reb and Marc. Seeing their reaction to one another, he’d had a strong sensation of being an interloper at an intimate encounter.