Kindle Edition
HistryMysteries
Amazon
Category:
Mystery/Suspense
Publisher: createspace
Type: Fiction
Pages: 307
Copyright: July 12, 2015
Price: $0.99 (eBook)
Ariane is a woman who moves through time without aging, but not without trouble.
As ageless as the tides, beautiful antiques dealer Ariane Bragonier is a woman with a secret. She lives for two things: love...and revenge.
Dr. Cole Herlihy is a man with a dream. But only the answer to the secret of why Ariane looks exactly like a socialite who disappeared back in 1926 can save his life's work on the study of aging.
Caught between two worlds, Cole and Ariane seek to unlock an ancient riddle on the beautiful, dangerous streets of modern-day New Orleans. As they are pursued by a deadly stranger, they must lay Ariane's past to rest and find a future together.
Excerpt
Ageless
BY LOUISE TITCHENER
When immortality is as much a burden as a blessing
Copyright © by Louise Titchener
All Rights Reserved
Other Titles by Louise Titchener
Gunshy
Malpractice
Hard Water
Trouble in Tampa
Mantrap
Visit my webpage at http://www.HystryMysteries.com
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
Chapter Twenty Five
Chapter Twenty Six
Chapter Twenty Seven
Chapter Twenty Eight
Chapter Twenty Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty One
Chapter Thirty Two
Chapter Thirty Three
Chapter Thirty Four
Chapter Thirty Five
Chapter Thirty Six
Chapter Thirty Seven
Chapter Thirty Eight
Chapter Thirty Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty One
Chapter Forty Two
Chapter Forty Three
Chapter Forty Four
Prologue
DIARY OF ARIANE MARIE BRAGONIER, NEW ORLEANS 1926
Our twentieth wedding celebration was the most brilliant party of the season. I knew it would be the talk of New Orleans for a long time to come.
Late that night I lay in bed next to my husband and gazed up through the shadows at the silk canopy. Images of the evening’s happy triumph drifted through my head. The laughter and congratulations, the music, the elegant food, the women, beautiful in their beaded gowns and flowered headdresses. Charles-so handsome and distinguished.
I turned against the pillow to gaze at his profile. Even at fifty he was still the most attractive man in New Orleans. The gray at his temples, the lines around his eyes—they only added to his air of worldly distinction. He was as appealing to me as when we had met twenty-one years earlier.
I told myself there was some consolation in knowing that for the past two decades I’d made him a good wife. He had said so tonight. “Ariane Marie,” he had whispered as he loosened my dress around my shoulders, “you have given me nothing but happiness. Tonight you were the most beautiful of women.”
As my gown slithered down around my feet, he had stepped back to study the way I looked in my fine underthings.
“The years haven’t touched you,” he had murmured with a shadow of perplexity in his dark eyes. “You are as eternal as spring.”
Now, remembering his words, I gazed at his face sadly, what I could see of it in the moonlight. He slept soundly and wouldn’t awaken. I had seen to that. Did I dare kiss him one last time? But no, better not.
Regretfully, I slipped from the bed. From underneath it, I retrieved a small sack. It contained a change of clothes and the contents of my jewel box. Holding back a heavy sigh, I tiptoed from the bedroom. Outside in the hall I paused. Should I look in on the children this one last time? I took a step toward my daughter’s closed door. Then I hesitated. They were hardly children anymore, my two. Etienne was a young man of eighteen, and Charlotte was only two years younger. Both considered themselves too adult for displays of affection. Charlotte was even more independent than her brother and, I remembered, had invited her friend Alice to spend the night.
I touched my fingers to my lips and blew a rueful kiss. Then I crept down the long central staircase, running my hand over the surface of the polished mahogany bannister, hoping to impress the feel of it on my memory.
At the foot, I turned right and crossed the wide marble entry into the drawing room. Only a stray finger of moonlight found its way through the draped Palladian windows. Yet I unerringly threaded a path to the mantel at the far end of the room. There I glanced around to assure myself that I was alone. All was silent. After the night’s revels, the house slept as if it never intended to awaken.
With a small scratch, I lit a match and touched it to the tip of a candle in a silver holder atop the mantel. The flame leapt up to the large portrait hanging above it, and so did my gaze. The portrait was of me and had been painted just after my marriage to Charles. I remembered the day he’d had it commissioned and the hours I’d spent sitting for the artist. What I had to do next was not going to be easy.
After setting my bag down on the carpet, I dragged a chair over to the hearth. When I had it properly positioned, I withdrew a small object from my bag. I bunched the hem of my long nightgown and stepped up on the chair. Using its seat for a platform, I hoisted the candle in my right hand, steadied myself, and straightened. Suddenly I was eye-level with the woman in the portrait. The painted gray eyes looked back at me calmly. The artist had put a touch of mystery in them.
“You have the most beautiful eyes in the world,” Charles once told me. “They are as clear as water and as mysterious. What do they hide?”
Now he would never know. At least I could spare him that. In my left hand I clutched a tiny pair of scissors. Steeling myself, I lifted them as if they were a dagger. In the candle’s trembling light, I pierced the canvas and cut out the portrait’s face—my face. When it was done my knees trembled so I was afraid they would no longer support my weight. Awkwardly, I climbed down from the chair. Still feeling light-headed, I dropped into it heavily and against the ragged thud of my heartbeats stared at the scrap of canvas in my hand.
This is the face of Ariane Marie Bragonier, I thought. It is the face that Charles Bragonier has loved for twenty years. As if in a trance, I lifted the canvas to the candle and touched its edge to the burning wick. The flame caught and then leapt up from the oil, very nearly singeing my fingertips. Hastily I dropped the bit of canvas into the fireplace. An instant later it curled and blackened. Now, I told myself, I had only one more task.
If anyone had looked out from the windows a few moments later, they would have seen a ghostly figure run across the moonlit lawn to the wooded edge of the river. But no one did. I wondered how long they would talk of this night and speculate about the disappearance of Ariane Bragonier. No one would imagine it the way it had really happened.
On the bank I had hidden a small flat-bottomed boat in some underbrush. It took only a moment to free the light vessel from its hiding place. When it was ready, I set my bag down in it. Swiftly, I pulled my nightgown up over my head and dropped it on the ground. The scissors flashed in the moonlight. Then blood began to drip on the thin white cotton which lay abandoned on the grass. For several minutes I held my hand over it and watched the red stain widen on the white material. Satisfied at last, I stood and, with one final backward glance at the house where my husband and children slept, I stepped naked into the boat and pushed it off the shore and into the river’s strong current.
Chapter One
BALTIMORE 1996
“Are you keeping up the exercise? Still doing the aerobic walking?”
“Prentice looked guilty. “I’m trying to. It’s hard what with the weather and all.”
Cole nodded and looked down at Prentice’s chart. A couple of years ago no one could’ve kept the old man at home. If he wasn’t out bowling, he was out dancing. But now, with shadowed hazel eyes, Cole studied the deteriorating cardiovascular functions he’d mapped.
“How does it look, doc?” With an effort, Prentice pushed himself to his feet and reached for his shirt.
Cole cleared his throat. “Not quite as good as it did last time, but that’s normal.”
“Yeah, normal,” Prentice muttered. “Funny, when I started here at GRC twenty years ago, I didn’t think this was going to happen to me. Crazy, huh? Didn’t think I would ever kick the bucket. Now,” he shook his head and fumbled with a button, “I’m falling apart in slow bits. Tell me the truth. There aren’t many folks my age left in your study, are there?”
Cole hesitated. “We’ve lost about sixty percent.”
“Sixty percent, what’s that? Forty people? Prentice sighed. “When we started, none of us thought we would die. We thought we were immortal, just like a bunch of silly kids.”
Cole nodded his sympathy. Prentice was part of a study group code named Project Methuselah. The group was originally composed of forty-seven men and fourteen women ranging in age from fifty to seventy-nine. Doctors had subjected them to the most rigorous and sophisticated tests then known to cardiology. Prentice’s test results, Cole knew from poring over them, had been remarkable. At seventy he’d had the body of a man half his age and the energy of a teenager. Cole had met Prentice seven years ago. When he was a young doctor specializing in gerontological studies, Cole had been excited about his new job in Baltimore’s Gerontological Research Center. Project Methuselah was one of the few truly scientific longitudinal studies of human aging. To step in as director after thirteen years of data had been collected was a rare privilege.
But he’d soon discovered that it went against the grain for him to look at people the same way he looked at laboratory rats. Over the past seven years he’d gotten to know and like many of his subjects. Coming in at the tail end of the experiment like this, he was forced to watch them sicken and die.
“Worst of it is,” Prentice said as he sat down, huffing slightly, “I don’t really care. Nothing seems to matter much anymore. Just my memories. Like to think about the past a lot. Never was inclined to do that much before, but now—“ Prentice stared off into space, his rheumy blue eyes unfocused.
Cole sat down. He stuck his long legs under his desk and began making notes. Let his next subject wait a few minutes. He looked up when Prentice said, “What do you young medicos studying us old folks at this place really hope to find? The fountain of youth?”
“Maybe.”
“Every living thing born eventually dies. That’s natural law, or do you know something I don’t?”
Cole grinned. “Believe it or not, I do know a few things you don’t, though maybe not where the fountain of youth is hidden. I spent a lot of years at a medical school, remember?”
“Yeah, well tell a man past ninety something that will surprise him.”
“Okay.” Cole put down his pen. “You said that twenty years ago you thought you were immortal. Well, there’s a part of you that is immortal.”
“What? My bones?”
“No, your DNA. It goes on living in the next generation.” Cole found himself putting the thought into words not for the first time. “It’s as if DNA uses us to keep itself going. It discards one generation for the next like a snake discards skin.”
“DNA, huh? Well, I never had any kids. Anyhow, let me ask you something. What if there were someone walking around who was really immortal-who didn’t age and die like the rest of us?”
“I’d like to study that individual, but he doesn’t exist. Some live longer than others, but in the end it’s the same for everybody.”
“Maybe not.”
“Cole cocked his head.”
“Maybe,” Prentice went on stubbornly, “there really is a person who’s got the system beat. I’ll tell you a thing that gave me a funny turn, doc. You know I’ve always liked women? Well, I never got so tangled up with one that I ended in front of the altar. But once I came close. Years ago, when I was a young buck, big and handsome like you, I fell in love. I mean to tell you, I was really in love.” Prentice rubbed bony hands together, his gaze once again unfocused. “Her name was Ariane DuVerlis, and she was a pretty creature. French, you know, and just a little bit mysterious. Well, one look at her, and I was a cooked goose. I even asked her to marry me, but no dice. When I bothered her about it, she took off and all I had left was a picture and a letter.”
Is that why you’re still a bachelor?” Cole asked. “Never got over your broken heart?” His tone was gentle, for this revelation of Prentice’s about an ancient, unrequited love had touched him. He had a soft spot for such things. Faded photographs of bright young faces in antique albums sometimes filled him with a mild, bittersweet despair. All those smiling faces that had aged and passed on were now nothing but ghosts.
“Maybe,” Prentice said, “and maybe not. But that isn’t the point of my story.”
“What is the point?”
“Doc, I saw her yesterday.”
“You saw her?”
I was taking a taxi downtown when I passed her. She was standing outside one of those antique shops on Howard wearing a red suit with a little red hat.”
Cole pictured a white haired woman of about eighty huddled inside a vermilion jacket. He imagined her thin curls flattened by an outdated cloche. “It’s amazing that you recognized her after all these years.”
Prentice shook his head. “No,” he said, his words stumbling over each other, “because you see, she wasn’t any different. She looked exactly the same, as young and fresh as a daisy.”
“You mean she hadn’t aged?”
“Not a bit. Her hair was the same dark color, her was like a girl’s.”
“How long ago did you know her?”
“Fifty years, it’s been fifty years.”
Cole smiled. “And she hadn’t changed? It couldn’t have been the same woman, Prentice. It was just someone who looked like her.”
“She was the image of the woman I loved. It gave me such a turn that I told the cabdriver to stop.”
“You did?”
“Yes, I did.” Prentice thrust out his lower lip. “Got out of the damned cab and walked back to where she was still standing.”
“What happened?”
Prentice pressed his knees together and clasped his hands. “I went to her, thinking it must be like you said, only some young girl who looked like her. That used to happen to me for years after she left. I would see her face in a crowd or the back of her head. It was never her, of course, but for a moment I’d remember her so clearly it hurt. This was different. Up close it was like the years had dropped away and I was a young man again. She stood there in front of me and nothing had changed. It was the same face, the same eyes. It was her.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Ariane, Ariane, what have you done to yourself? You haven’t changed at all! Have you sold your soul to the devil?”
As Cole listened to Prentice’s voice crack, he gazed at the oldster compassionately. He could picture the scene. The old man hobbling toward a beautiful young woman who resembled his lost love and calling to her with his pathetic accusation. It was sad. “How did she answer, Prentice?”
“She didn’t say anything,” Prentice replied forlornly. “She just gave me this pitying look and walked away.”
Chapter Two
THE midnight air along Canal Street stank of river dampness, and fog shrouded the street lamps. Except for a few sleepy winos, the benches along the Moon Walk were deserted. The only sound the sluggish lap of dirty water against the concrete embankment.
Slowly a pearl gray Porsche pulled up across from the entrance to Jackson Square and stopped. A moment later the driver killed the motor and climbed out. The sharp slam of her door awakened one of the winos. Marty had been half asleep, his grizzled head tucked down into his open collar. Now he looked over the top of his bench and saw a blond young woman, a real looker in a black leather coat, tightly belted at the waist. In her gloved hand she carried a paper sack.
Curiously he watched her glance nervously from right to left. She crossed the street and lay the sack down on the pavement next to a staircase which led up to the Moon Walk. As soon as the bag was out of her hands, she hurried back to the Porsche. When the car disappeared around a corner, the old man pushed himself off his bench and stumbled toward the sack. What was in it, he wondered. Food maybe? Or maybe just kittens. Sometimes people left bags of kittens. This world wasn’t no bowl of cherries, to that he could certainly testify. But the bag wasn’t moving. It just sat there, big and bulging with something that filled it almost to the top. After tossing his bottle into a trash bin, for Marty always did that when it was convenient-no point in cluttering the scenery up any more than you had to., he reached down and tested the weight of the bag. Heavy. Now what could it be?
A rubber band twisted into a complicated know sealed the bag tightly. It took several fumbling minutes beneath a fog-blurred street lamp before Marty’s clumsy fingers could undo the tie. When the rubber band was gone and he’d pulled open the bag’s crisp brown folds and peered inside, his reddened old eyes widened. Could that really be what he thought it was? How damn!
He was reaching inside to yank out one of the wads of hundred dollar bills that threatened to spill onto the pavement when an arm came down over his head. It wrapped around his throat so suddenly that he had no time to cry out. It tightened, crushing his windpipe and throttling his scream.
“Say goodbye to the world, Gramps,” a harsh voice hissed.
Marty tried to fight. But only for a moment. He went limp and his assailant stepped back, releasing the body so it could slide to the ground in a lifeless heap. Then the killer picked up the bag and walked away to a dark blue Mercedes parked down the street.
A half hour later the Mercedes pulled through a gate manned by a uniformed guard. A quarter mile up a gravel road that ran through a tunnel of trees, the driver nosed the Mercedes between a Cadillac and a rusty Ford station wagon. Carrying the bag he got out and walked back through newly cut grass to the antebellum style mansion’s read entrance. As he pulled open a door, he glanced at a window on the second floor. Through the crack in its curtain, a dull light flickered. At the sight a slow expectant smile curled the man’s fleshy mouth.
The room behind the curtains was a small bedchamber. It was painted a dark shade of rose and furnished in a heavy Victorian style. Two men occupied it. The one stretched out on the bed with his feet and hands manacled to four carved mahogany posts was a well-preserved sixty. Gray hair fringed his balding head and whorled his nipples. It marched in a line down his chest to his naked belly, where it disappeared into dirty sweatpants. His belly, however, was as flat and muscular as that of a much younger man. Philip liked to keep himself fit. He belonged to an exclusive health club, and for years now he’d risen at dawn to jog through the city’s nearly deserted streets and listen through headphones to his favorite classical music.
The habit had made him easy to snatch. Absorbed in Chopin’s first concerto, he hadn’t even noticed when the blue Mercedes had slowed behind him two days earlier. It wasn’t until an arm like a club had come down around his throat that he’d realized he was in trouble. Now, as he gazed at one of his jailers, he had, despite his years, the dazed look of a boy shanghaied on his way to a birthday party.
“Archie is back,” the object of his scrutiny dropped into the taut silence. “You’ll be happy to hear that your beloved Eden has done exactly as we requested.” The figure in the red velvet wing chair replaced the telephone receiver and leaned back comfortably.
The news flooded Philip with a long wave of relief. Eden had ignored the police and brought the money. Beautiful, beloved Eden, he thought with gratitude and longing. Surely this proved she had married him for love, just as he’d always believed despite the gossip.
He visualized her long, silken hair, her perfect body. In his imagination he could almost hear the bright tinkle of her laughter. Now that these men had what they wanted, he would soon be in her arms, he told himself. Oh, please God, let it be so! Philip’s clenched fists whitened. “That means you’ll let me go, doesn’t it, Egypt? You said you just wanted the money.”
“Surely by now a man of your sophistication has learned never to believe everything he hears.”
In the chair Donato Egypt ran a graceful hand through the ebony curls that clustered around his high forehead and smiled inscrutably. With his smooth olive skin and strong features he was a startlingly handsome man who could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty. Some might have said that his chin was too heavy, the lips a touch too sensual. None would have denied the almost feminine beauty of his lustrous dark eyes, ringed as they were with long, coal black lashes. His loose white shirt and closely fitted maroon velvet slacks underlined his striking looks. As he sat there, very much at ease, with long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle, he might have stepped out of a Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler. One almost expected him to flourish a sword. He regarded his prisoner with a maddening little smile and sipped at a glass of burgundy, obviously savoring each ruby drop.
A discreet knock sounded. The door opened and a man in a pinstriped suit stepped into the room, holding a paper bag. He wore his lank blond hair in a ponytail and had a wrestler’s squat build. “The money’s all there right and tight,” he said in an Irish accent.
Donato straightened. “Ah, Archie, that’s very good. Very good indeed. Any problems?”
“One of the bums who hang around the Moon Walk got a little nosy.”
“You took care of the situation?”
“Right.”
Philip’s gaze darted between the two speakers. A moment earlier he had been relieved and hopeful. As he listened to their chilling conversation, his blood ran cold again. Uselessly, he strained at the bonds holding him to the bed. That bit about the bum who got nosy-the big Irishman must have killed someone, he thought with horror.
Not that Philip had ever doubted that his captors were capable of murder. From the first he had realized that his situation was desperate. But surely, he argued with himself, now that they had the money they wouldn’t do murder. Why would they want to? What was the point?
There were just two things that nagged at his brain. One was the smell. Even in his terror he’d noticed it the minute he’d come into this room. Though the room itself was immaculate, the smell of death pervaded it. Somewhere, hidden behind this velvet façade, something hideous lay rotting. As he’d sweated in this bed hour after hour, he’d realized the odor came from behind the closed door to his left. What in hell could it be? Even as he asked himself the question, his mind froze, terrified of the answer.
Why hadn’t his captors kept themselves masked? For God knows they were both unforgettable. Archie with his bullet head Irish accent, and scarred face was even more striking, than his master. Why had they let him see them as if they didn’t worry about his ever identifying them, which he surely would if he ever got the chance. Why? Again, his mind screeched to a halt in front of an appalling fact.
“You’ll let me go now, won’t you?” he croaked.
Almost as if they’d forgotten he was in the room, both men focused their attention on him with a vaguely surprised air. Languidly, Donato set down his wineglass and stood. Though he was as tall as Archie, his slender elegant build contrasted sharply with his burly henchman’s muscled girth. As Philip stared up into Donato’s features, the reddish light from the crimson stained glass shade overhead gave them a satanic cast, and his smile was far from reassuring.
“Don’t be so anxious to leave us, my friend,” he crooned. “We have some matters to discuss, you and I.”
“What matters?” Philip heard himself quaver. Up until this instant he’d managed to keep some of his dignity. Now he felt weak, frightened, horribly vulnerable. His insides shook, then seemed to dissolve into a river of nameless fear.
“Why, the past, of course. We have a bond, you and I. Did you realize that?”
“A bond?”
Petrified into motionless fascination, Philip watched Donato sit down on the edge of the bed and regard him slyly. “I’ve puzzled you,” Donato said. “How could such as you and I have a bond, you’re asking yourself. After all, we come from such different worlds. Yours one of rank and privilege. Mine-he lifted his palms deprecatingly. “What could we possibly have in common?” His smile widened and his dark eyes glistened with an unholy anticipation. “You can’t even begin to guess, can you?”
Philip moistened his lips. “No, I can’t guess.”
Donato cocked his head. “I’ve been remiss. You’re thirsty, aren’t you? Here, let me offer you some wine.” He got up to retrieve his own half full glass and then curled a hand behind Philip’s head and held the beverage to his lips.
Philip didn’t really want to drink out of the same glass. He was fastidious. But he was also desperately parched and afraid of offering any offense. The wine stung his throat and oozed out of his lips and down his chin. Donato didn’t bother to wipe it away. Instead he dribbled the rest of the blood red wine down the length of Philip’s bare chest. Then he sat gazing at his captive. “Now I’ll tell you what we have in common. Do you remember the Miscreant Club?”
“The Miscreants?”
Donato chuckled. “You remember, of course. How could one who belonged to such an organization ever forget? How long has it been since the Miscreants conducted one of their midnight revels?”
Once again Philip tested the strength of his manacles. The steel only bit deeply into his wrists. “It’s been years, decades.”
“Four decades, to be exact,” Donato agreed. Forty years. Such a long time. Quite long enough to forget everything that happened on that last night when the Miscreants sported in the little cabin on the bayou. You had forgotten Lillie and her granny, hadn’t you, Philip? But you see, someone else didn’t forget. Unfortunately for you, that someone is me.”
Philip gagged. “What is it? What-what do you want?” he stammered. He broke off, his breath sawing his throat as he caught a new sound in the background, a throbbing that was horribly familiar. He could no longer manage the panic that slashed control from his voice. “My God, what’s that?”
“The drum?” Donato asked innocently. “But surely you’ve heard it before. The Miscreants sometimes used it for their inane ceremonies, didn’t they? As I recall they used it that night with Lillie.”
When Philip only stared back in paralyzed silence, Donato tightened his grip on the older man’s neck. “Didn’t they?”
“Yes, but how—“
“How do I know? Donato’s silken voice took on a stinging bite. “Thalassa told me. I was there, but too young to understand. So when I was old enough, she explained it. She told me about how Lillie died at your last ceremony.”
“It was an accident. We didn’t mean—“
“But what happened to Thalassa, that was no accident. Besides, as adults we must learn to take responsibility for out accidents. Now my dear Philip, I have a little ceremony planned for you. Something quite special. Isn’t it, Archie?”
“Oh, indeed, something real special.” At a nod from his master, Archie walked around to the other side of the bed and pulled open the door which had remained closed since Philip’s capture. A stench wafted, so overpowering that Philip began to gag anew.
Donato smiled at the bulky man in the pinstriped suit. As his expression pulled Philip’s gaze in the same direction, a wet stain darkened the light gray fabric of his sweatpants. Archie had taken out a hunting knife. He rubbed the broad pad of his thumb sensuously along its glittering edge.
“First we must put him in the bathtub,” Donato told his henchman. “That way the blood won’t make a mess.”
Chapter Three
BALTIMORE, 1996
The newspaper crumpled between Ariane Marie’s fingers. “Renita, for God’s sake, we’ve got to do something! I need to go to New Orleans.”
“What?” Renita’s coffee cup clattered in its saucer. “What do you mean? Are you talking about a trip to buy antiques?”
“No, this isn’t a buying trip.” Ariane Marie pressed a hand to her lips as if to still their trembling. The paper she’d been reading slid to the floor. “I have to leave Baltimore and move to New Orleans.”
Renita stared. “Are you serious?”
“Yes, yes, I’m dead serious. I’ve got to make arrangements right away, this morning.”
“But why? What’s happened?” She leaned forward. “Is it because of that old man who recognized you?”
“It’s nothing to do with Prentice Gilligan. “Since running into Prentice, Ariane Marie had moped around, depressed. What a shock to see him like that, old and weak when she’d remembered him as vigorous and handsome. At first she hadn’t even recognized him. Then when she did, it tore at her heart.
She had wanted to r each out to him, to comfort him somehow. Yet she’d known she couldn’t, so she’d walked away. Every night since then she lay in her lonely bed remembering, wracked with guilt. But now the hideous story in the newspaper wiped Prentice and everything else from her mind.
Ariane stared at Renita, hardly seeing the dining room table where they had been lingering over breakfast.
“Then what’s got you so upset?” Renita’s brown hand reached for a cut crystal glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. “Why do we have to get out of Baltimore when things have been going so well here? Only last night you were talking about how much you liked your studies at Johns Hopkins. My dance classes at the Peabody are running smoothly. The shop is just beginning to show a profit. The bathrooms are finally wallpapered, and you haven’t even looked at the shipment of Staffordshire from England yet.”
“I know, but none of that matters now. I have to go.” Renita opened her mouth to ask why again, but before she could get the question out, Ariane Marie snatched up the crumpled newspaper and thrust it at her. “It’s because of that.” She pointed at a headline above a half page ad for hosiery.
Renita scanned the print. “Because of a kidnapping in New Orleans?”
“A kidnapping and a murder, a very brutal murder. Read the story, Renita.”
Renita smoothed the page and bent her attention to it. While she was absorbed, Ariane Marie gazed out the window. Rays of morning light slanted in. They should have warmed her but didn’t. She felt horror and an icy coldness. The pain was appalling. Slow tears leaked down her cheeks. It was her fault this had happened, she thought. Somehow it was her fault.
I still don’t understand,” Renita said when she finished reading. “Who is Philip Bragonier? Why does his murder mean we have to pull up stakes again and abandon everything we’ve built here?”
“He’s my grandson,” Ariane Marie answered.
As Cole rounded the corner across from the brass shop, he thought of Frank Bramen. Last month a punk mugged Frank on this spot. Yet Cole’s feet didn’t slow or speed up. Doggedly they thudded against the pavement. Frank Bramen might be a great endocrinologist, but he was a little guy. Cole stood six foot two in his stockinged feet and had shoulders like a stevedore. He’d won ribbons in track and field and played varsity football. Depending on his audience’s intentions, his solid physical presence could be either reassuring or terrifying. Though he jogged every morning before work through what some considered one of Baltimore’s drearier neighborhoods, no one but a Jehovah’s Witness had ever bothered him.
Now, as he headed back down Calvert toward his bachelor apartment, he took a swipe at his sweaty forehead and thanked the calendar that this winter of attrition was finally over. Two more of the subjects in his Project Methuselah study had dropped dead. And what with colds, a bout with a merciless new strain of flu, and an amorphous fog of depression that had settled in after he received the invitation to his ex-wife’s wedding ceremony, Cole hadn’t been feeling so hot himself.
Maggie was now on her honeymoon, presumably basking in the Barbadian sun with her new stockbroker husband. Not much point in dwelling on that, Cole told himself. He focused his thoughts on the two patients he’d lost. They’d been a pair of his favorites-Thelma, a sweet old lady with a feisty sense of humor and a sparkling pair of Irish blue eyes, and Homer, an ex-marathon dance champion who only a couple of years earlier had seemed invincible. Now Prentice Gilligan was the oldest subject in the swindling group. And Prentice hadn’t shown up for his appointment yesterday.
Cole slackened his pace and squinted at the Greek Revival-style row-houses lining the next block. Prentice lived in the third one down. As Cole approached it, he slowed to a walk and then stopped altogether and consulted his watch. Only eight in the morning, pretty early for paying a call on an elderly gentleman. Especially when you were dripping with perspiration and dressed in baggy sweatpants and a T shirt bearing the legend “Aged to Perfection.”
On the other hand, people of a certain maturity tended to be up early, and Cole was kind of worried about the old guy. Prentice no longer had close friends or relatives who were still alive to call on him or take care of him. Just the other day he’d done something odd. He’d given Cole his handgun, a vintage .45 caliber Webley. “Here,” he’d said, “I’ve had this since before World War II. Inherited it from a cousin. I’ve kept it around in case of intruders, but I won’t be needing it now. Take it. I insist. Who knows, it might come in handy.”
Now Cole shrugged away his reluctance to intrude. He climbed the marble slab steps and rang the bell. Five minutes later he still stood outside, a worried frown tugging at his eyebrows. Prentice had to be at home. So why wasn’t he answering? The possibilities were giving Cole a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. After jiggling the lock on Prentice’s front door, Cole slipped his wallet out of a back pocket and used one of his credit cards on the lock. He knew the minute he stepped into the fetid little living room his worst suspicions were t rue. The smell of death was strong.
Trying not to breathe any deeper than he had to, he did a quick check of the lower floor. Nothing. Then, with dread, he climbed the stairs. Cole found Prentice lying in bed with his hand stretched out toward a dog-eared photograph and a yellowed bit of paper. It was as if he’d just dropped them and were trying to get them back. Heart failure, it looked like, sudden and final. The old man’s eyes were open and his hawk nosed profile, as he stared blindly ahead of him, reminded Cole of an image from an Egyptian tomb painting. The pharaoh gazes into the face of the unknown. Cole was about to turn away and go downstairs to begin making the appropriate phone calls when a tattered snapshot near Prentice’s hand drew his attention. A couple of years ago one of the other subjects in Project Methuselah had died while perusing his private collection of pornography. By contemporary standards, the pictures hadn’t been all that shocking. But the discovery had upset his family.
Reluctantly, Cole stepped forward and removed the snapshot and letter from Prentice’s bedclothes. A quick glance told him that the picture was just an innocent yellowed image of a pretty young woman with one of those peculiar hairdos they wore in the forties. A sentence from the letter which caught his eye indicated that it was personal. No reason to leave it around where people who didn’t give a damn about Prentice could see it. Cole folded the picture inside the letter and stuck the two into the empty back pocket opposite the one which contained his wallet.
He gave the body a last long look. Loss swept over him. He’d always known he liked Prentice. Only now did he realize how much he’d cared for the man. Only now did he acknowledge how much he’d looked forward to Prentice’s checkups, to his jokes and cheeky, knowing grin. In some ways Prentice had been like the reprobate uncle Cole had never had but always wanted.
Now to make those damn calls, Cole thought as he plodded back down the stairs. It was going to be a very long day. Through the waves of sadness he found a purpose. He had to be practical, had to take care of details. Tonight he would face his feelings. Prentice had lived and died alone. He deserved to have someone mourn his passing, and Cold found an appropriate irony in knowing that the mourner would be another lonely bachelor-himself.
After all, they had a lot more than their solitariness in common. During these last days Project Methuselah had been central to Prentice’s life. And in some ways Prentice had represented Project Methuselah in Cole’s mind. The project was his life’s work. What would happen to it when all the old ones died off? “Goodbye, old friend,” Cole murmured. “Rest in peace.”
Cole didn’t pull out the picture and letter again until several mornings after Prentice’s funeral. Why did I have to specialize in such a depressing field? Cole asked himself as he dragged his weary body out of bed. He rummaged for his sweat-suit and then headed out to resume his neglected jogging regiment. Why, for instance, couldn’t he have been an obstetrician? That was a cheerful and lucrative medical calling where you conducted life into the world instead of perpetually shepherding it out. As the fingers of a pink sunrise struggled to claw through the overcast sky, Cole listened to the hollow echo of his running shoes on the pavement.
Of course he knew the answer. It was because of Robbie. Robbie was the one he remembered when he attended the funerals of his dwindling flock of Methuselah participants. Robbie, hairless and withered, with his young life sucked right out of him, was the reason why he’d become a medical type in the first place. Sighing, Cole crossed an empty street without slackening his pace. A pale gray drizzle had begun to darken the pavement and slick down the new leaves. Ignoring it, he put his head down without breaking the rhythm of his steady lope.
Three miles and forty minutes later, the sun finally broke through the clouds and Cole began to feel less gloomy. Exercise did that for him. He’d always been athletic, a football star both in high school and college, and good enough that the pros had drafted him. Enticing as those offers had been to a young man with a new bride and very little money, he’d never had to think twice about turning them down. From the first there’d been no question in his mind about going on to medical school. Despite all it had cost him, he didn’t regret the decision. He only regretted not bringing his water bottle with him on this morning run because he was thirsty as hell.
Around the corner from his apartment building squatted the White Café coffee shop. Cole was a regular customer there. When he strolled in, Peggy, the plump little waitress who presided over the breakfast counter shouted a flirtatious greeting. “If it isn’t our handsome doc. How ‘ya doin’?”
“Fine, thanks. You?”
“Okay, I guess.” She slapped down a spotted menu and then poked at her frizzy halo of brassy curls. “Had a perm and a bleach job yesterday. That’s why my hair is standing straight out like I stuck my finger into a light socket.”
“You look fine to me.”
“I look like hell.” She eyes the thick blond hair on Cole’s sweat-beaded forehead. “God, it’s so unfair. Me having to pay a fortune I can’t afford to suffer through hair like this while a big galoot like you walks around with hair any woman kill for.”
Cole chuckled. He’d heard this before. Even Maggie had complained about his golden hair. “That’s life, I guess.”
“Don’t I know? There oughta’ be a law.” She brought him a big glass of juice which he gulped down. He followed it up with coffee, black and strong. While he sat drinking it, he shifted his weight s lightly and felt the crinkle of paper in the back pocket of his jogging pants. A moment after he reached back to see what was making him uncomfortable, he found himself staring down with a startled sense of discovery at a faded photograph of an extremely pretty young woman.
A week ago finding Prentice dead had upset him so much he hadn’t paid much attention to the picture he’d taken from the old man’s bed. In fact, he’d completely forgotten about it. Now, however, he cradled it in the palm of his hand and studied it with growing interest. Who was she, he wondered. One of Prentice’s lost loves? The old guy had had good taste in women. Shifting the snapshot so the fluorescent light overhead fell more directly onto it, Cole examined the small, heart-shaped face. Its light-colored eyes gazed directly out at him with disquieting intensity. She wasn’t the kind of woman a man would easily forget, of that Cole felt certain. He guessed from her dress and quaint hairdo that she had been photographed sometime in the late thirties—more than fifty years ago. All those years, yet Prentice had been looking at her image, perhaps reliving the past when his heart gave out on him. Maybe not such a bad way to die, after all. The romantic in Cole was moved.
Unfolding the brittle bit of notepaper he’d found with the picture, he began to scan it. Immediately he was glad that he hadn’t left anything so personal for strangers to find. It was a letter of rejection, regretful, kindly phrased, but final and, Cole sensed, heartbreaking.
“You mustn’t think I don’t truly care for you or that any of the good times we shared mean any less,” the faded, flowing script assured. “Prentice, you’re a fine man who can offer any woman he chooses a fine future. I can’t be that woman. I wouldn’t make you happy. Believe me, this is the truth. I’m not the one you really want.”
But she had been, obviously, for Prentice had never married. Half a century later he’d died gazing at her likeness. The name Ariane had been neatly inscribed at the bottom of the letter. Like the woman, it was a beautiful name, and unusual. Where had he heard it before? Lifting an eyebrow, Cole shifted his scrutiny back to the picture. He found himself remembering his last conversation with Prentice. Ariane was the name of the woman Prentice had talked about, the lost love he’d run into on the street, or believed he had. Of course, it couldn’t really have been the same female. That was impossible.
“Must be pretty special?”
“What?”
“I was talking about her, the woman in the picture,” Peggy said. “You were staring like she was Miss America or something.
Chapter Four
NEW ORLEANS, 1996
“Evil.”
“Beg pardon, Miss Charlotte?”
“I was just thinking about evil, Moses. These old streets reek with it. That’s the result when you heap up too much history and stir in dry rot. The good gets corrupted and the evil breeds like cockroaches behind a fair-seeming wall.”
“Yes, ma’am.” While Charlotte shook herself, Moses rolled his eyes.
“Go someplace and park,” she commanded. “Don’t leave the car for a minute, not a minute, hear! I don’t want to see the finish ruined by some roving gang of hooligans with nothing better to do but destroy the property of their betters. You must be back here waiting in precisely a half hour.”
Through wire-rimmed lenses, Charlotte squinted down at the diamond-studded watch brooch she wore on the stiff bosom of her gray wool suit. The antique timepiece was the kind that required winding. She hated modern battery-operated gizmos. “Yes, that will be three-thirty on the dot.” After her driver pulled the vintage yellow Rolls away from the curb, Charlotte took a firm grasp on little Annie’s sticky hand. Charlotte stiffened, then scowled at the nine-year-old’s small face.
“You’ve been eating candy again, haven’t you?”
Annie hung her head and gazed down at her skinny legs. They were neatly cuffed at the ankles by the regulation white cotton socks that were part of her uniform at St. Mary’s. “Only a little, Aunt Charly,” she allowed in a small voice. “Sister Bernadette gave it to me. She said it was my reward for having the best arithmetic paper.”
Charlotte pursed her lips and her shoe-button eyes, behind their lenses, glittered. “From now on you tell Sister Bernadette to keep her candy to herself. The sugar will rot your teeth right out of your head.” Task-tasking, Charlotte swiped at Annie’s hand with a lace handkerchief. After the little girl’s palm was clean, she angled her toward the law offices of Durwin, DaVoe, and Foch. As they climbed the rickety steps to the second floor, the sweetish fragrance of rotting wood and insect killer mixed with old floor wax hung in the air. The shabby ambience of the aged brick building which had housed these law offices for the past six decades was deceptive. Messieurs Durwin and DaVoe were scions of a prestigious firm which still served some of the oldest and wealthiest families in New Orleans. Charlotte Bragonier’s family had been one of these.
“I want you to explain this ridiculous will to me again,” Charlotte demanded after ensconcing herself in a comfortably worn leather chair opposite Oliver Durwin.
The balding lawyer folded his hands over his rounded belly. He regarded his elderly client warily. With families connected by a marriage between their second cousins, they had known each other since childhood—that is, Oliver’s childhood. For Charlotte had been a debutante long before Oliver was born. Though she’d been a beauty in her youth, with fine dark eyes and an upright, graceful carriage, she’d also had a very high opinion of herself. It was that, coupled with her merciless tongue that had kept her an old maid, so the gossips said.
Oliver didn’t doubt that they were right. At eighty-six she was still a handsome woman. She was also as sharp-tongued as ever. Her visits to Oliver’s office always shot him straight back in time to the little boy in short pants who’d been so alarmed by her. That was exactly how she affected him now.
“Nothing has altered since last Thursday,” Oliver replied to her demand in measured tones. “You nephew left his entire estate to his second wife. He had the will drawn up a year ago, almost two months to the day after their marriage, in fact there’s no question as to its legality.” He tapped a file on his desk. “I’ve examined it carefully, and everything is in order.”
“No question as to its legality?” Charlotte’s straight nose quivered with righteous indignation. “Piffle! How can you sit there solemn as a fat old toad and say something so utterly absurd? Where do you keep your brains, or have they dried up and flaked away by now?” Her blue-veined hands clenched the carved wood arms of her chair. “Philip was obviously out of his mind when he married that bleached blond baggage, perhaps even suffering from Alzheimer’s. That she could persuade him to write a will leaving his granddaughter and only legitimate descendant penniless proves he didn’t know what he was doing.”
While he struggled to frame a proper reply, Oliver sat blinking. Privately, he didn’t think there was anything crazy about Philip’s May-December marriage. He only wished that he might have such a luscious creature as Eden Bragonier in his own bed. Many was the night during the past year that he lay next to Judith, his gray-haired, overweight, disinterested wife and imagined himself clasped against the pneumatic bosom of the alluring creature his old partner in crime had managed to wed. But these stolen nighttime fantasies were not something he intended to reveal, most particularly, not to Charlotte.
Instead, Oliver darted a quick look at Annie. She was gazing down at her clasped hands. This business had been harder on the youngster than on anyone else, he judged. It was bad enough for her to be placed in her grandfather’s somewhat raffish care when her parents drowned in a boating accident. She’d had to deal with Philip’s remarriage and now the horrifying business of his murder and the unfortunate will. The least Charlotte could do, he thought, was not discuss it in front of her.
Sensitivity to others, however, was not the old lady’s strong suit. “I intend to fight that travesty that Philip allowed himself to be hornswoggled into signing.” She declared belligerently. “I will not allow that woman to cheat Annie out of what’s rightfully hers.”
Oliver rubbed his palms together. “Philip left custody of little Annie,” er, Ariane, to Eden you know. While she was dealing with the kidnapping, she allowed you to keep her.”
“She didn’t allow me anything,” Charlotte cut in. “I simply marched in there and took her away from that den The idea of this child having to live alone with that woman—“ Charlotte folded her lips and breathed very hard through flared nostrils. “I’ll never forgive my nephew, never. The sins of the flesh will reap their own reward. Really, I almost think he deserved what he got.”
Now, Oliver really was shocked. Surely no one deserved the agonizing death that had been dealt Philip Bragonier. The details of what had obviously been a ritual murder had been kept out of the papers. But Oliver had seen the coroner’s report and knew how his old friend had been tortured—tortured by some fiend who was walking the streets, perhaps even stalking another hapless victim. Oliver’s lips formed themselves into a tiny disapproving rosebud. “Nevertheless, Eden is Anne’s legal guardian, and she’s asking that you return the child to her house.”
“Her house? Philip’s house, you mean. Eden never owned more than her underwear. And that’s how she got my nephew to marry her, by taking it off.” As she sat at stiff attention in her chair, her knees pressed tightly together and her silver pompadour trembling with wrath, Charlotte all but glowed with righteous indignation.
“Men are such a pack of fools! Eden Bright can ask for custody of Annie until she’s blue in the face. Now that Philip is gone, I have no intention of allowing my great-grandniece to set foot in that place. However, I didn’t come here to discuss Eden. I’ve already told you, Oliver, I intend to fight this piece of trash Philip called a will. Can I count on you to represent me? Or do I need to look elsewhere?” Charlotte stood and reached for the little girl’s hand. “You think about that, do you hear? I’ll expect a call from you tomorrow morning.”
Clasping Annie’s hand and muttering to herself, Charlotte marched downstairs. Outside, Moses, who knew what was good for him, had the yellow Rolls waiting. After the old lady hustled her young charge inside it and then sank into its plush depths herself, it pulled smoothly away from the curb. Like a pachyderm oblivious of the jungle’s lesser creatures, the majestic automobile rolled through congested afternoon traffic and then swung left.
Twenty minutes later it swept past a pair of twelve-foot wrought iron gates to a wide, column-supported portico at the head of a circular drive. It eased to a stop, and the chauffeur came around and helped Charlotte and Annie out. They stood for a moment, the little girl uncertain while she shifted from foot to foot waiting for her great-great aunt. Charlotte was oddly contemplative. She took off her glasses and rubbed the high bridge of her nose, squinting into the sun so its late afternoon rays defined the web of wrinkles on her cheeks. What was happening to the Bragonier family? She asked herself. Nothing good. That was apparent. The rot started when Mother left us, she thought. Where will it end? Deciding that she didn’t really want the answer, the old lady shrugged. She took Annie’s hand and hustled her into the house.
When the two had disappeared behind carved doors, a slender, dark-haired woman stumbled back to a taxi parked across the street. She had been standing in the shadows of an overgrown live oak, where she could peer through the gate unobtrusively.
“You sure you’re all right?” the driver asked as he watched her collapse onto the backseat.
“Yes, I’m fine.”
She didn’t look any too fine, William thought. He pushed back his cap and scratched his head. In fact, she looked nauseated. He wondered what was going on. Since getting into his cab, his passenger had made some pretty odd requests. All afternoon she’d had him sit parked across from Bel Ombre. Of course, who was he to complain? After all, she’d handed him a wad of money just to give his tires and gas gage a rest. Why should he care if she wasn’t the most sociable individual?
Still, he couldn’t help wonder why the sight of that old mansion made her sink into herself, put that bleak expression into her gray eyes. When the yellow Rolls had swung up the drive, she’d gotten out to have a closer look. Now that she was back, she couldn’t be any whiter if she’d seen a ghost driving that four-wheeled antique. She huddled in the backseat like it was January, not a muggy spring day in New Orleans where people went to Miami to get away from the heat. William wondered if maybe he’d picked up some kind of loony.
“I know it ain’t none of my business, but is there any particular reason why you want me to keep sitting here? I wouldn’t want to do nothing the police wouldn’t like.” He was joking because, crazy or not, she didn’t look as if she could harm a fly. In his business, driving around this spooky city where some mighty peculiar things happened, you had to have a feeling for people who had badness in them.
“It’s nothing illegal,” she assured him in a voice that, despite its control, still sounded stretched tight over a river of tears. “It’s really just curiosity.”
“Curiosity?”
She clasped her hands in her lap. “I’m new in town, but I used to know the Bragonier family.”
William’s gaze remained fixed on his rearview mirror. It was more than curiosity that made his pretty young passenger look so peaked, made her sound as if she wanted to cry. He cleared his throat. “Well, the Bragoniers are a famous family around here. Been important folks in this part of the world since way before I was born. Lively, too.”
“You seem to know quite a bit about them.”
“Happens my aunt works in Miss Charlotte’s kitchen, so I hear some tales. Yes, I do.”
“Really?” His passenger straightened, her expression less weighed down. “Maybe you can tell me something about Miss Charlotte. Does she live in Bel Ombre with her husband, or is she a widow?”
“No, ma’am.” He shook his head. “She never did marry that I heard tell. Been a spinster lady all her life.”
“Never married? I wonder why,” the passenger in the back seat muttered more to herself than to him. William’s eyebrows twitched. Why the hell not? He couldn’t remember the old lady being anything but white haired and sharp nosed as that old witch in “Hansel and Gretel.”
“They do say she’s too bossy for any man. They say she bossed her brother around something terrible.”
“Etienne?”
“Yes, ma’am, that was his name. Then he died, and she started trying to reform her nephew.”
“This is Philip you’re speaking of?”
“Yes, ma’am, the one that got killed. He was quite a favorite with the gossips, always up to some devilment.”
“What do you mean?”
William shrugged. “Oh, just a man-about-town. Then somewhere a year ago, he married a woman young enough to be his granddaughter and everyone was clakin tongues about that. He was the black sheep of the family, you might say.”
“I see.” There was a brief silence. “Do you have any theories about who killed Philip Bragonier?”
William remembered that talking this way with a stranger who was acting peculiar, even one so harmless appearing as this pretty little thing, might be dangerous, and he hunched his shoulders. “Not me. How should I know? Just his kidnappers, I ‘spose.”
“According to the newspaper, the murder was unusually brutal. Doesn’t that indicate—“
William shook his head. “I don’t know nothin’ about it. That’s for the police to solve.” For several minutes they sat in silence. While the woman in the backseat gazed out the side window, William tapped the steering wheel with his thumbnail. What was she thinking about, so sad and serious, he wondered. What was going through that pretty head of hers?
As Ariane sat, frozen on the cusp of her memories, a tiny part of her registered the changed landscape. The fields that had once grown cane and indigo were unrecognizable—sprouting alien growths of shopping centers and gas stations. How could Bel Ombre have survived this encroachment? How could Charlotte have kept it so long.
Charlotte. She closed her eyes, picturing Charly as a child. She’d been such a chubby, imperious little girl. Even in the cradle she’d waved her arms and bawled for her dinner like a frustrated empress. Of course, she’d walked early. One such as her Charly wouldn’t lie helpless on her stomach for long. The image of a nine-month-old Charly toddling through the grass leapt into Ariane Marie’s mind. Those were some of the sweetest days of her life.
Ariane Marie’s fingers could almost feel Charly’s fat, dimpled knees covered by skin as smooth as velvet. Before Charly and Etienne, Ariane Marie had known what it was like to hold a baby in her arms. But those babies had died in infancy, and Ariane Marie’s joy in them had turned to sorrow. For a moment in Ariane Marie’s imagination, she touched her little girl’s soft baby skin. The memory was so strong that she could almost smell the fragrance that had been peculiarly Charlotte’s, a warm, vital aroma as compelling as freshly baked bread.
Now Charlotte was an old woman, living in a house that this cruel and noisy twentieth century was about to eat alive. During her long life Ariane Marie had known many sorrows. Never before had she seen a daughter grown old and wasted while she herself remained fresh and young. It wasn’t right. Ariane Marie felt that somehow her eternal youth had robbed her child. Yet from the beginning, if she’d known how to bestow her mysterious longevity on Charlotte, she would have, gladly. Were there words to describe the pain of this paradox?
If there were, Ariane Marie didn’t know them. She gazed across the road at the shady drive. With a heavy sensation in her breast, she noted the gnarled and mossy live oaks, the mature magnolias with their glossy leaves. “It hasn’t changed,” she heard herself murmur.
“No ma’am,” the driver agreed, “Miss Charlotte isn’t one for change.”
“But Charlotte is over eighty, an old woman now. How much longer can she live? And then—“ Her voice trailed off. Through the mist of tears which had gathered in her eyes, she’d caught the open curiosity in the cab driver’s expression. “I’ve seen enough,” she told the man. “You can take me back to my hotel now.”
Chapter Five
Three days later Ariane Marie gave her old friend and companion a searching look. “Renita, you’ve been in New Orleans only two hours, which is hardly long enough to form a fair opinion. But I can see you’ve got one anyway. What is it?”
“Damp,” she answered, the pursed her mouth up tight. Every line of her small, sturdy figure and normally smiling countenance shouted disapproval.
Ariane Marie sighed. “I’ve heard it said that living in this city is the closest an air-breathing human can get to living in water. I thought you might like that. I thought the climate and Caribbean feel of this place might remind you of your childhood.”
“You of all people should know I don’t wish to be reminded of my childhood,” Renita snapped back.
Ariane Marie smiled slightly, teased by an image of Renita as a little girl. She had been lovely in her compact, brown-skinned toughness. And as the daughter of a Haitian hougain, Renita had needed all her toughness. Against every likelihood, she had become Ariane Marie’s daughter and helped to ease the ache in Ariane Marie’s heart left there when she’d had to abandon Charlotte. Now the years had forced Ariane Marie and Renita to change places, and Renita played the mother’s role in their enduring friendship.
“Besides,” Renita’s small hands darted like expressive birds, “It’s not like Haiti at all in this place. There the sun is golden. Here it’s moldy cheese.
Glancing up through the live oaks arching the shady street, Ariane knew what Renita meant. The two women stood beneath a sieve of greenery. It strained the sun thin and flecked it with moss. The air around them swam in watery green light. Nearby, dust lazed in a pale shaft which had somehow managed to penetrate a canopy of leathery magnolia leaves. Ariane watched the motes group and drift apart in the muggy air like a school of lazy fish.
She contrasted this veiled tropical light with Haiti’s searing brilliance, its colors which burned the eye. Renita was right. Yet to Ariane Marie, coming back to New Orleans felt like coming home.
A big American car rolled up to the curb and squealed to a stop. “This is probably the realtor,” Ariane Marie told Renita. “Her name is Kate Flannagan.”
“She doesn’t want to talk to me.”
“Of course she does. She’ll want your opinion on the house, and so will I.”
“Ha,” Renita said, glancing back at the raised Greek Revival-style cottage behind them. “You’ve already made up your mind.”
Since that was true, Ariane Marie didn’t argue. Even if she’d wanted to debate, there wasn’t time. Sprung from behind the wheel of her big car, Kate Flannagan strode toward them. She was a sturdy, Irish-looking woman in her mid-forties. She wore a graying blond cap of hair, a pink power suit and a big, well-trained smile.
As Ariane studied the freckles under her powder, she speculated on her forbearers. Had they been lace curtain grandees or potato famine immigrants, the kind that New Orleans Creoles had once hired to do jobs considered too dangerous for expensive slaves? It was a testimony to this egalitarian century that Ariane Marie couldn’t tell.
“You must be Ms. Brasseur.” She looked Ariane Marie up and down. Her smile stayed fixed and her eyes assessed.
“That’s me.” Ariane shook her hand. “This is my friend, Renita Oprea.”
Renita nodded. Kate raised an eyebrow at Renita’s cornrows and the dazzling print of her African-style dress and matching head scarf, then focused all her attention on Ariane Marie. “Have you had a chance to walk around the neighborhood?”
“Oh yes.”
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” She waved at the massed azaleas and hydrangeas, the geraniums ablaze in stone pots. In a nearby pecan tree jaybirds made a quarrelsome twitter. Across the street Ariane saw what looked like a mockingbird streak from the branches of an oak. It landed on a birdbath carved in the likeness of a cupid with a libidinous grin. “And quite a historic area, too.” Kate went on. “There are some wonderful stories about the Garden District. Even today many famous people live here. Anne Rice, for instance.”
“Yes, she writes about vampires.” Out of the corner of her eye, Ariane caught Renita’s expression. Ignoring it, she asked, “What’s the crime situation?”
“Oh, it’s very safe here.”
“Really? I saw an article in the paper about a man who was kidnapped from this neighborhood. They found him murdered, his body mutilated. What do you know about that?”
Kate’s eyes shifted. “You’re probably thinking of Philip Bragonier. Terrible thing, but an isolated incident, I can assure you.”
“Where exactly did this happen?
The Realtor’s smile withered like a week-old peach. Unhappily, she pointed at the house across the street with the wicked cherub birdbath. It was an Italianate “villa” style mansion with lacy ironwork and well hidden by the mature greenery that swathed the whole neighborhood and scented it with sweet olive, jasmine, and gardenia.
“There? So close? Oh, God!” Ariane Marie pretended shock, though, of course, she was here only because the place for sale was across the street from her dead grandson’s residence.
“Does that mean you’ve lost interest in looking at this property now? If so, there are many properties I could show you. If safety worries you, I could show you a condominium with a twenty-four-hour guard near the French Quarter.”
All three women glanced back at the house for sale. It was large and square with hideous cracked pillars. “Oh dear, Ariane Marie said, “and I’d fallen in love with this place.” A flash of color across the street attracted her eye. The door on Philip Bragonier’s house slammed shut and a tall, voluptuous young woman marched down the brick steps to the circular drive. She wore a red miniskirt and matching wrapped jersey top designed to draw attention to her ample breasts. Her long legs ended in high-heeled sandals and her blond hair swished around her shoulders, suggesting a large investment in hairspray and hot rollers.
A few quick strides and she came around to the driver’s side of a low-slung gray sports car, the pedigree of which was not recognizable to Ariane Marie since she had never been able to work up much interest in horseless carriages. Instantly the motor sprang to life. The gravel crunched beneath the car’s wide wheels and she was gone, her steel chariot spurting around a shady corner.
“Who was that?” Ariane asked.
Kate Flannagan tightened her mouth. “Eden Bragonier.”
*
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