The Bourbon Street Ripper (Sins of the Father, Book 1) (17 page)

“Mama?” asked Samantha, her blue eyes widening. She had hardly ever heard her mother spoken of, other than to hear her father call her “a beautiful woman who could turn the heads of kings and paupers alike.”

“You knew my mama, Auntie Marguerite?” asked Samantha, pressing her hands in front of her in an almost prayer-like fashion. “You knew her when she was alive?”

“Well, not especially,” Marguerite said, a twinge of ruefulness in her voice. “I mean, she died soon after you were born, and she wasn’t exactly from, well, that is… ”

“She wasn’t from good stock,” answered a similar, but much harsher-sounding voice from the doorway of the room. Samantha’s face drew into a tight pucker, as if she were being forced to taste something particularly sour. Turning, she faced a wrinkled woman with a gaunt face, lips that had probably never smiled a day in their life, and a dress that would make a Catholic nun look like a stripper.

“Auntie Gladys,” replied Samantha in a particularly nasal voice. She spoke that way whenever she wanted to show courtesy that wasn’t genuine, and her curtsy was more of a nod than anything else.

“Still not able to show our elders their proper respect, are we, Samantha?” replied Gladys as she approached the child, her eyes like two pieces of coal. “I can see that even with the ridiculous amount of money spent on your etiquette lessons, you cannot manage a single curtsy to your great-aunt Gladys?”

“Oh, come, sister,” interrupted Marguerite. “Samantha is only a ten-year-old girl. And she’s been through so much recently. First her father is murdered, then Vincent is—”

Marguerite’s words were cut short by Gladys. “Do not speak that name before me again, Marguerite. Our brother is dead to us, in name and spirit, despicable man that he was. May the devil feast nightly on his soul.”

“Sister, please.” Marguerite tried to wave the taller and sterner great-aunt off, “not in front of Samantha.”

Feeling a sudden urge to speak, Samantha asked, “Auntie Gladys, what did you mean by saying that my mother wasn’t from good stock?”

While Marguerite looked anxiously between the child and the living mummy that was her older sister, Gladys replied, “I will not fill your head with stories of that irrelevant woman. But suffice it to say that when your father brought her into this house, he committed the second of two grievous sins against the noble Castille family name.”

“Grievous sins?” asked Samantha, honestly curious. “What do you mean? What was the other one?”

“His profession,” replied Gladys, who suddenly looked as if she smelled something very unsavory. “Imagine a Castille, stooping so low as to become a—”

“Sister,” Marguerite said with more vim, “stop it!”

This outburst surprised both Gladys and Samantha, as the latter had always known her younger great-aunt to be meek and easily cowed by her older sister.

Marguerite continued, “Who cares what her mother was? Or what her father did? Samantha is a Castille and”—the pudgy woman winked at the girl—“is growing up to be a fine Southern lady.”

Samantha gave another placid smile, nothing behind it but manners, and curtsied to her great-aunt. This appeared to disarm Gladys enough that the strict-looking woman huffed, said something about being late, and turned, leaving the room with her head tilted up fifteen degrees.

“Don’t mind her,” Marguerite said after her sister was gone. “She’s been angry since… Well, since she was born.” Marguerite winked again at Samantha.

Normally, that kind of joke would make Samantha giggle, but instead she just nodded.

Marguerite offered her hand, saying, “Come on, I think they are about to begin.”

Samantha took her great-aunt’s hand and allowed herself to be led to the drawing room.

There, in that room, were over three dozen people: men and women all dressed up in their Sunday best, children dressed as if going to Easter service, and the five servants who cared for the Castille estate. At the front of the room, near a mantle with a portrait of Vincent Castille in his doctor’s garb, was Kent Bourgeois, dressed in a tailored suit and rifling through a large and impressive-looking document.

As Marguerite led Samantha through the crowd of people, conversations stalled and heads turned. Voices were hushed, but Samantha could make out a few of them. “I bet she’s going to get it all,” said one voice.

“She always was his favorite,” said another voice.

“Lucky little bitch is about to become the richest person in Southern Louisiana,” said a third voice.

“Don’t you mind them,” whispered Marguerite with obvious annoyance in her voice. “They are all jealous of you. Samantha, never forget that you are the star of this story.”

Samantha didn’t respond, only looking out at the sea of faces and wondering who these people were. She knew the Castille family was large, but she had never seen any of them before.

Finally getting to the front, Marguerite joined her sister, Gladys, on a sofa, next to some older gentlemen in expensive-looking suits. Samantha recognized them as her grandfather’s associates from Southern Baptist Hospital. She curtsied to them and got a stern look and a stiff nod in response. With that placid smile, Samantha headed up to where Kent was standing.

“Mr. Bourgeois?” Samantha asked as she approached the lawyer, who stopped what he was doing and looked down at her. Samantha looked around the room to confirm that the face she was looking for wasn’t there. “Where is Mr. Bergeron? Where is Rodger?”

Kent looked troubled as he leaned in some, saying, “He’s not coming, Samantha.”

“What? But why not?” asked the young girl, feeling hurt.

With a small sigh, Kent kneeled down, drawing a few murmurs of disapproval from the crowd. The lawyer put a comforting hand on Samantha’s shoulder before saying, in a low voice, “Well, Samantha, do you remember how you said you couldn’t go to your grandfather’s funeral?”

“Yes,” answered the girl, who remembered adamantly refusing to go.

Kent nodded and said, “It’s similar to that with Rodger. You see, just as you didn’t want to see your grandfather because you… hate him… Rodger doesn’t want to be at the reading of his will because he wants to forget him.”

That made sense to Samantha. She gave the lawyer a small nod and whispered, “Thank you.” That done, she walked over to where her great-aunts were sitting and took a seat next to Marguerite.

“All right,” said Kent, clearing his throat and rapping his knuckles on the mantle. This had the desired effect of getting everyone in the room to stop talking and focus on him. “Let us begin with the reading of the Last Will and Testament of Dr. Vincent Gilles Castille.”

Later that night, young Samantha was on the back porch of her grandfather’s mansion. The guests were long gone, and with them, their sighs of relief or indignant declarations of fighting the will in court.

Samantha sat on the white bench that hung from the ceiling of the back porch, swinging in a halfhearted attempt to lighten her spirits. Nearby, a small plate of angel food cake, her favorite dessert, lay mostly uneaten. A small trail of ants marched triumphantly to and from the confection, carrying off bits and pieces in an almost cartoonish fashion.

“Samantha,” said a soft voice.

Looking up, Samantha saw her great-aunt Marguerite, looking more serious than usual. Sitting down next to the small girl, Marguerite added, “Or should I now call you, ‘Madame Castille’?”

“Call me Samantha, please,” replied the girl quietly. Her gaze cast out over the lake before her, the brackish waters managing to look beautiful in the setting sunlight.

“Okay, then, Samantha,” said Marguerite, inhaling softly. “I wanted to thank you. For having me named your trustee and your guardian. That shows you have a great deal of trust in me.”

“You’re welcome,” replied Samantha, still staring out over the water. “I’m sure you’ll do a great job.”

The pudgy woman smiled as pleasantly as one could under the circumstances. “Do you want to… talk about it? Anything, I mean. Your father, your gra—”

“No,” Samantha replied, looking over at Marguerite, feeling utterly lifeless on the inside. “I want to forget it. I want”—again Samantha gave a smile just for show—“to be happy. That’s what a lady is supposed to do, right?”

To Samantha’s surprise, Marguerite shrugged. “To be honest, Samantha, I don’t know what a lady is supposed to do. I’ve never been good at it like Gladys has, I’ve just”— the woman paused and sighed, shaking her head—“I’ve just kind of had others lead me through all that. But now, I can’t do that. Now, I have to lead you. Which means I have to learn how to be a lady, a mistress, and a mother.”

Samantha slowly turned and looked up at her great-aunt. She felt tears welling up in her eyes, her heart aching. Marguerite looked back, her own eyes tearing up.

“So,” continued Marguerite, “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll do my best to be all those things for you, dear. In return, you don’t smile if you don’t want. You don’t be happy unless you want. You don’t do anything you don’t want to do. Ever. Can you promise me that?”

Samantha looked back out over the lake and thought. A lot of it didn’t make sense, but neither did anything in her life these past few months. Her father had died at her grandfather’s hands. Her grandfather had sabotaged his own trial, waived all his appeals, and gone to the electric chair with a smile.

And here she was, all alone, her own family hating her, and all of New Orleans fearing her. The only people she could trust were her overworked lawyer, her great-aunt, and the detective who had destroyed her family by fingering her grandfather.

And one of them hadn’t spoken to her since he had caught her grandfather and lost his own partner in the process.

“Okay,” Samantha finally said. “I promise. No more fake smiles.”

“Good,” replied Marguerite, who then presented something to her ward.

Looking at it, Samantha was surprised to see that it was the bottle of sherry she had been looking at earlier. Looking up at her guardian quizzically, Samantha said, “But I’m not old enough to—”

“I know that, dear,” said Marguerite with a smile. Handing the bottle to the girl, Marguerite pointed to a piece of blank paper taped to back of the bottle. “This is for when you are happy again. Even if it’s a small, fleeting happiness, when you finally smile, for real, this bottle is yours to drink.”

“All right,” said Samantha, trying to take it all in, and looking quite confused about the whole thing. While she was glad to be given her first bottle of alcohol at such a young age—most young ladies in New Orleans’s elite society didn’t get more than a small glass of wine occasionally until they debuted at sixteen—she didn’t see what this had to do with her becoming happy again.

“Happiness is all your mother ever wanted for you,” Marguerite said as she opened her purse and took out a small keychain. On the metallic chain was a lovely, sparkling red plastic shoe, the word “Comus” etched onto it in gold leaf. She showed it to the girl.

Samantha looked over at the charm, then up at her aunt, then back at the charm. “What’s this?”

Aunt Marguerite smiled as she said, “A keepsake from your mother. Your father, a few years before you were born, took her to the Comus Ball on Mardi Gras. These”—the pudgy woman slipped the free loop of the keychain over the neck of the sherry bottle—“were used to decorate the wine bottles. She thought they were beautiful and begged your father to get one for her. He slipped one off and gave it to her right before the captain’s toast.”

Samantha looked down at the sherry bottle and touched the charm. “What kind of person was my mother? Was she beautiful?”

At that, Aunt Marguerite frowned a little and looked away from Samantha. “She wanted to live in a world she didn’t belong in, dear. Her life was smoke-filled lounges and nightclubs, not caviar and cocktails. But she was a kind woman, at least to your father and grandfather, and yes, she was very beautiful.”

She smiled at Samantha. Those words made little Samantha feel better, and the girl, looking away again, felt a little less dead inside as she hugged the bottle of sherry close to her small body.

“Here, write a reminder on it,” said Marguerite as she took out a fountain pen from her purse. “I write notes to myself all the time. It always helps.” She winked at the girl.

Nodding, Samantha took the pen and, resting the bottle on her knees, started to write, slowly and methodically. The calming waves of the lake crashed on the shore, the lulling sound genuinely comforting, like the pattering of rain on the roof. Samantha loved how the lake was so large that it could actually have cresting waves like the sea. It was very soothing.

But it wasn’t the waves of Lake Pontchartrain that Sam heard. Instead it was the splattering of raindrops on the roof. Coming out of her memory, Sam realized she was still outside on the back porch of her townhome, and a small summer shower had broken out. For a long moment, Sam sat there, looking down at the label on the sherry bottle. Her thoughts were, for the moment, not jubilant at all, but instead were those calm and almost docile thoughts that young Samantha was having, the void of feeling nothing at all.

Then Sam moved, placing the wineglass down on the patio table, and removed the charm, hooking the keychain with one finger to almost wear it like a ring. Then Sam flipped the bottle over to look at the back, where her note to herself was taped, the one that said, “For when you finish a work on time. Go for it, girl!”

For the first time in days, Sam’s head didn’t hurt at all. And for a long moment, she just looked at the label, her mouth tightening and her lips starting to shake. She squeezed the plastic charm a few times. Then she started to peel back the note.

Memories assailed her as she did so. Memories of playing at the park with her father, memories of her grandfather sitting her on his knee and telling her stories, memories of Great-Aunt Marguerite reading bedtime stories to her, and so much more.

When the note from ten years ago was peeled off, Sam saw it. A single, smaller piece of paper, secured with old tape that had long since fused to the glass of the bottle. Written on it, in a child’s well-styled handwriting, were the words: “For when you’re happy again.”