Fallen (8 page)

When he died, Jessie had started fresh with a house of her own, and had cut off all ties to her past until her father tracked them down when Sara won a scholarship to Tulane and had her name listed in the New Orleans paper.

Her mother had refused to speak to her father. And Sara had been too scared to take the scholarship and move to New Orleans, which would entail defying her mother, who claimed to hate her family and New Orleans, with no explanation as to why. So Sara had gone to Florida State instead, and never found the peace she’d been looking for, the connection to her mother, the need to understand what had motivated her for her entire life. Never got to hear her mother’s true feelings about losing her own mother at such a young age.

Now Sara was the one who had lost her mother, and she hadn’t dealt with it any better than her mother before her had.

“I did grow up here,” Gabriel said, cutting across the street diagonally. “I can’t live anywhere else.” He glanced back. “What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing. The city. Why?” She pushed her sunglasses up on her nose.

“Because you forgot to watch your feet. So I knew you were thinking hard.”

Sara stopped walking. He was right. She’d forgotten to watch for holes in the sidewalk. Yet it made her sound like such a freak. “I wasn’t thinking hard. I was just thinking about the fact that I was smart not to take the scholarship I got to Tulane . . . that it was stupid at seventeen to think that I should leave home and all my friends to come here, where I was born, for no reason.”

“Really? Then why did you want to come here in the first place?”

That was the goddamn rub, wasn’t it? “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” And how completely annoying that Gabriel had homed straight in on the crux of her dilemma. She wanted answers, wanted to know why her mother had made the choices she had. And the truth Sara needed to come to terms with was that there probably were no answers to her questions.

Side hurting again, Sara rubbed it with the palm of her hand, and looked around her. “Where are we, anyway? This isn’t the way we got here, is it?”

“No. We’re going in the opposite direction. To the cemetery.”

Gabriel had expected Sara to protest. It was clearly on her lips to say no, but she surprised him, just like she had with his suggestion to head to Bourbon Street. She had agreed to the cemetery trip simply by following him. Only now they were at the gates of St. Louis #1, having crossed North Rampart to the shortest “Walk” sign ever created, and the cemetery was locked.

“Damn. They close the gate at three o’clock. We must have just missed it.” But he wanted pictures of the cemetery, of Anne’s tomb. The light was still good, the sky a crisp cerulean, and he was here. He didn’t want to come back. He didn’t like the cemetery any more than Sara did, given the way she was rubbing her arms like she was cold, and crossing her ankles, eyes wary.

To Gabriel, the cemetery symbolized the fact that he could never die, that much better people than him left this mortal realm, some far too soon, and he was condemned, by his own misconduct, to walk the earth forever without purpose. The cemetery made him angry, and it frustrated him that he was denied entrance, figuratively and literally. He didn’t often use his strength, chose largely to ignore what he was and what he was capable of, but he wanted in, so he reached out, picked up the lock, and yanked it down.

It broke, separating so that he could easily detach it from the gate. “Look at that,” he said, showing Sara the busted pieces, before shoving the gate open. “Guess we can go in after all.”

Sara made a sound of protest. “Gabriel! It was locked for a reason. They don’t want us in there.”

He was already moving inside, knowing she would follow him. Her fear of the cemetery, of breaking the rules, wasn’t nearly as great as her fear of being left alone. The shells crunched under his feet as he walked, and pausing at the first tomb on the right, he turned back to her. “Come on, Sara. It’s not a big deal.”

“The gate was locked.” She had inched forward, just inside the gate, but she was peeking around like she expected to get arrested for trespassing, or maybe to encounter either a mugger or a ghost.

“I’ll replace the broken lock. But since it’s open, we might as well take some pictures. I’ll show you Anne’s tomb.” He wasn’t sure why he didn’t just let the whole thing drop. Why he didn’t just turn around and take Sara back to his apartment. But he thought she needed to be pushed. Or maybe he wanted to be pushed, and if he pushed her, she’d push back.

They had a lot in common. Both living in a precarious little isolation tent, struggling to survive, to be normal. Kidding themselves. Lying and ignoring the blatant truth—that they were clinging to the edge, one stumble short of going over the side.

“Come on,” he said again, and this time he reached out, took Sara’s hand in his, and pulled her forward into the cemetery.

She sucked in a quick breath and looked up at him with luminous blue eyes. Her head went back and forth, a protest, but at the same time, she walked forward, settling in beside him, her hand light and warm in his. It had been a long time since he had touched anyone, and the sensation of warmth, of her hand lightly shifting in his, their skin caressing, felt so acutely good, so intense and real, that painful longing rose up in him. The desperate need for someone to share pleasure, conversation, time with. Futile, ridiculous wants that he had no business entertaining.

So he let go of her hand and moved forward at a pace he knew she couldn’t match.

He was standing in front of the tomb he had paid for, that held the remains of Anne Donovan, when Sara stopped next to him and said, “It’s very peaceful in here.”

“Yes.” It was. The cemetery was quiet, the sun silently beating down on the many white tombs, casting a shadow over the front of Anne’s tomb. “This is where Anne Donovan is buried.”

“How do you know? There’s no nameplate.”

“It fell off. Marble tends to crack from the moist climate, and then it just drops off without warning.” And he hadn’t replaced it. Wasn’t exactly sure why not, but he hadn’t. “But church records indicate this is the correct tomb. She’s interred in it alone.” Another point about which he felt some guilt. It made no logical sense, given that he knew her soul didn’t reside in the brick structure, but in New Orleans tombs were crowded, families buried together, the bones of three, eight, twenty people, all together in one tomb. It seemed a comfort, an appropriate display of connectedness to other mortal beings. Anne lay alone. In death as she had in life.

“I read that John Thiroux paid for the burial.”

“Yes. She was cremated first.”

“I wonder why.”

Because he hadn’t been able to handle the image of her body, once so young and beautiful, decaying beneath its brutal wounds.

“I don’t know.” It was an attractive tomb, with a wrought iron gate around it, tidy and recently painted, a weeping angel statue resting pensively on top. Gabriel hadn’t wanted that damn angel statue, had been appalled when he’d first seen it a hundred and fifty years ago, but he had given his lawyer at the time the funds for the tomb and had him handle all the details. He’d been too grief- and guilt-stricken, too chronically drunk to make the arrangements on his own, and it was of course the ultimate irony that the lawyer had chosen the symbol of an angel weeping to decorate the top of the tomb.

Lifting his camera, he took shots of the tomb, of the angel.

“It must have been a sad, lonely funeral.”

Gabriel shook his head, wondering if that would have been better or worse than the spectacle he could still see and hear and feel as clearly as if it were the day before. “Quite the contrary. People have an intense fascination for murder. Anne Donovan’s funeral was a crowded, throbbing mob of morbid curiosity seekers. It rained that day, a torrent of steaming, warm water, and the street, the sidewalks, the cemetery, were a sliding, muddy mess. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees with the storm, and there was a fog, so that all you could see was the black hat in front of you, and the tombs rising suddenly out of the mist. A fitting ending to a gruesome death.” And Gabriel had also seen a woman who had approached him, a child’s hand clasped tightly in her own, her face pinched with anxiety, cheeks streaked with tears. She had slapped him soundly, straight across the cheek, penetrating the fog of the air, his brain, the ever-present guilt. It had been Anne’s cousin, or so she had said, and she urged him passage to hell, before retreating, never to be seen or heard from again.

But the irony was that Gabriel had already been condemned to a personal hell long before receiving her vehement request. He was still in it.

Sara leaned against the wrought iron gate surrounding the tomb and stared at the blank spot left by the crumbled nameplate. “No one deserves to die like that. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Yet so true.”

Her arm brushed his, the top of her head only coming up to his chin. Gabriel was surprised again at how petite she was, at how fragile she could look, yet how determined her voice was. “This must be hard for you, because of your mother.”

A sigh slid out of her mouth. “It is.” Fingers gripped the fleur-de-lis spikes of the fence. “Her funeral was similar to Anne’s in that there was tons of media coverage. Spectators. It was noisy and obnoxious, and disrespectful. And everything was happening so fast in those first few days, the police questions changing, always shifting, always looking for something, the media searching for the angle, trying to figure out which way to take the story. I really wasn’t aware of it at the time, I was just numb, trying to help the investigation, trying to deal with the details, and the shock. The police were at the funeral, a good ten strong, in full patrolmen uniform. It was to ensure crowd control, they said, but it was so invasive. And the paper made a big deal out of me showing up with Rafe . . . but the thing is, he cared more about my mom than anyone else. He and I were friends. Of course I would go with him.”

“You went with Rafe?” Gabriel knew that actually from reading the articles online about Sara’s mother’s death, but he wanted to hear what Sara would say about him.

“It was completely normal to go with my mom’s boyfriend given that I don’t have any other family.” A finger slipped under her sunglasses and wiped at her eye, but he didn’t think she was crying. “At the time I didn’t realize he was the primary suspect. It only took the police five days to decide he was guilty and arrest him for murder, but it took nearly a year to acquit him in court.”

“Like John Thiroux.” Him. “Is that why you’re interested in this case? Or is it strictly your mother’s case that you want to solve?”

“No. I want to solve both. Though I don’t think my mother’s murder is solvable at this point. I came more to see if forensics could shed light on Anne’s case, and yes, because there are strange similarities. The weapon used, the method of the murderer—killing them in bed. Boyfriends accused. Boyfriends who discovered them.” And something else that Sara suspected no one else knew, not even Gabriel. That Anne Donovan was the great-grandmother of Jessie Michaels. That before her mother had died, she had received a copy of the original newspaper article announcing Anne Donovan’s murder.

Sara hadn’t told the police, or Rafe, or Gabriel what her mother had gotten anonymously in the mail thirty-six hours before her death, because Sara had the horrible feeling that only one man could have known about the connection, and confirmation of that would shatter her. Some answers were far worse than never knowing at all. She shouldn’t even be talking to Gabriel about her feelings, emotions over her mother’s case, but he was easy to talk to. He stood and listened, and there was never any judgment written on his face. It was like he understood he had no right to cast stones, but at the same time he was capable of compassion, rational discourse.

“I would guess there have been a lot of boyfriends accused of killing their lovers. And I’m sure a large percentage actually did it.”

“Do you think he did it? John Thiroux?” Sara stared hard at the tomb, at the crumbling square where a name and date should have been, but was gone, obliterated, like the woman behind the stone. The surface blurred and crossed in front of her eyes, the heat enveloping Sara and closing up her throat.

“I haven’t read all the documents yet. We don’t have the DNA results from the knife back yet. I don’t know if he did it or not.”

It shouldn’t even matter. But it did. Sara felt that if she could figure out what had happened to Anne Donovan, she could figure out the pieces of her own life. She could triumph over death, let the past go, face the future with hope. Go back to work. Be normal.

The grieving process was different for everyone. Sara found that hers included striving desperately to find ways in which she could exert control, rebel against a universe that dictated her fate.

“We’re going to pick this apart until we have an answer,” she said. “For Anne. For my mother.”

Gabriel made a sound. “It’s for you and me, too, Sara, as much as it is for them. We need to know, don’t we? But the thing is, there may be no answer.”

She believed him, even though she hated it, even though she wondered why it mattered to him. What did he care, really? This was her family, her past, her present, her future. Not his.

The dizziness wasn’t abating, and the cemetery suddenly felt stifling, claustrophobic. “Can we leave? I need a drink of water.”

And without waiting for him, she turned and headed toward the gate, sliding in the gravel in her terry-cloth flip-flops. When she burst out onto the front sidewalk, she felt like she could breathe again. But the anxiety didn’t go away.

She wondered if it ever would.

After stopping for water from a street vendor, Sara had decided to go back to her apartment and try to sleep, and Gabriel figured that was probably the best thing for her. She had looked pasty and clammy in the cemetery, actually swaying on her feet slightly as she turned to leave.