Rising Tides

EMILIE RICHARDS
Rising Tides

For Maureen Moran, with thanks for her support.

Dear Reader,

I was delighted to learn that Iron Lace and the sequel, Rising Tides, would be re-released in trade paperback this year. The novels were originally published more than a decade ago, and since that time I’ve had many letters asking where they could be purchased. I’m happy to say these new editions will appeal to readers who didn’t find them the first time, as well as readers who did, but would like new copies to replenish their libraries.

Iron Lace and Rising Tides were written before Hurricane Katrina destroyed so much of the Crescent City, including the house where I lived when I was researching the stories. The two novels are set between historic hurricanes, an unnamed one at the end of the nineteenth century, and Hurricane Betsy in 1965. The research was thought provoking. It was also preparation for what was to come, although I was no longer living there to watch Katrina up close. Like the rest of the country, I grieved, but unlike many I was not surprised.

Louisiana is a unique state with a unique identity. I like to think of these books as literary gumbo, exploring the myriad of people, cultures and attitudes that have made it what it is. Once you’ve lived there, no matter where you go, a part of you will always call Louisiana home.

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

EPILOGUE

LETTER TO READER

PROLOGUE

New Orleans, 1965

Dried rose petals, vetiver and death. The three scents pooled in the sultry May air until there was no escape from them. After her first waking breath, Aurore was frightened to take another. More disturbing still was the knowledge that, once again, she had dreamed of Rafe.

As always, he had come to her when she least expected him. Others sometimes came, apparitions who stalked her dreams and the lucid moments when she dared to count the days left to her. But it was only Rafe who came when she was sleeping soundly, Rafe who gathered the events of her life like wildflowers in a summer meadow and presented them back to her.

She forced herself to breathe, but as she did, the air seemed to grow more oppressive. She had forbidden her household staff to turn on the air-conditioning in this wing of the house, and the ceiling fans whirring above her mixed warm air with warmer. Someone had closed her windows as she napped, afraid, she supposed, that she would awaken if a mockingbird shrieked a crow’s call from the branch of a magnolia. Her staff didn’t understand that each waking moment was a lagniappe, an unexpected gift appreciated only by the old.

She was old. She had denied the truth for years, convinced at sixty that activity was an antidote for aging, convinced at seventy that she could ignore death as she had sometimes ignored the other unpleasant realities of life. Now she was seventy-seven, and death wasn’t going to ignore her. Death had loomed beside her bed for weeks, ready to pounce if her will faltered. Had there been one such moment, she knew, she would be gone already, and she hadn’t been ready to die. Not then. Not with stories waiting to be told, secrets waiting to be revealed.

She had almost waited too long. Years ago she could have called her family together, summoned them like an imperious matriarch and forced them to listen to an old woman’s tales. They wouldn’t have dared disobey her summons.

But she had waited. Now, with death waiting to claim her, she knew she could wait no longer. She opened her eyes and saw that the room was growing dark. Twilight had always seemed like God’s indrawn breath, a pause in the progression of time. But there was no time to pause now. Never again.

Something rustled at her bedside, the unmistakable crackle of a starched white uniform. She turned her head and saw that the woman standing there was the gentlest of the nurse-companions who charted the ebb tide of her life. Aurore struggled to form words. “Has Spencer arrived?”

“Yes, Mrs. Gerritsen.”

To Aurore, her own voice seemed a profane rasp in the stillness, but she was pleased it was audible. “How long?”

“He’s been here nearly an hour. I told him you’d want me to wake you, but he wouldn’t let me.”

“He protects me.” She moistened her lips with her tongue. “He always has.”

“Would you like some water?”

Aurore nodded. She could feel the head of the bed lifting as the young woman cranked. “Just a sip. Then…Spencer.”

“Are you sure you feel well enough?”

“If I waited until I felt better…I’d never see him.”

The nurse made sympathetic noises low in her throat as she poured water from a pitcher, then lifted a glass to Aurore’s lips. The water trickled in, drop by drop, until Aurore signaled that she was finished.

“Do you want anything else before I get Mr. St. Amant?”

“The windows. I don’t want them…closed again. Never again.”

“I’ll open the French doors, too.”

Aurore listened as the rustle circled her bed. She heard the slide of windows, and then, from outside, the chirping hum of the year’s first cicadas. The air that drifted in was damp against her skin, primeval in its rain-forest scent and sensation. For a moment she was seventeen, standing on the bank of the Mississippi River, and river mist was rising to envelop her. She was leaning forward, watching barge and steamer make their way against the current. She was leaning forward, waiting for life to begin.

“Aurore…”

Aurore turned her head and gazed at the man who had been her attorney for nearly fifty years.

“How are you, dear?” Spencer asked.

“Old. Sorry I am.”

Spencer slowly lowered himself to the chair the nurse had placed at the bedside. “Are you really sorry? I re member when you were young, you know.”

“You remember too much.”

“Sometimes I think so.” He took her hand. His was dry and trembling, yet still strong enough to enfold hers.

Her mind drifted again, as it sometimes did now. She remembered a day so many years before, at Spencer’s office on Canal Street. The office was still there, despite Spencer’s being well past the age of retirement. She didn’t know why he hadn’t passed on his practice to one of his younger partners, but she was glad, so glad, he hadn’t.

“You were elegant,” she said. “Compassionate. I still thought…you would turn me away.”

“The first day you came to see me?” He laughed a little. “You were so pale, and you wore a hat that cast a shadow across your forehead. I thought you were lovely.”

“But…you couldn’t have liked what you heard.”

“It wasn’t my place to like or not like what you told me. I promised you I would never betray a word of what passed between us. You played with a long strand of amber and jet beads while we talked.”

“Amber and jet.” She smiled. “I don’t remember.”

“The beads passed between your fingers, one by one, like a rosary. There was time for a hundred pleas for intercession before you left my office.”

She lifted her gaze to his. “I’ve learned since that no one…will intercede for me.”

His hand tightened around hers. “Then you’ve learned more than most people ever do, my dear.”

“I want you to file the new will. Just as we wrote it. I want…the old will destroyed.”

Seconds passed by. “You’ve thought this over care fully?”

“It is all…I’ve thought about.”

“Things may not turn out as you wish. More harm than good could result. At the very least, people you love could be hurt.”

“My whole life…I’ve been afraid to tell the truth.”

“And you’re not afraid now?”

“I’m more afraid.” He sat forward, cradling her hand in his lap, but she continued before he could speak. “But even more afraid…the truth will never be told. Others must have the chance to be courageous now…as I never was.”

“This is an act of courage.”

Her mind drifted to two men she had loved. Rafe. And her son, Hugh. Two men who had known what courage was. “No. Not an act of courage,” she said. “The last, desperate act of a coward.”

Twilight deepened into night as they sat together. Finally he spoke again. “Shall I come back tomorrow to see if you’ve changed your mind?”

“No. Will you do this for me, Spencer? Just as we talked about? You’ll go down…to Grand Isle?”

“I’ll do whatever you wish.” He paused. “I always have.”

“No one ever had a better friend.”

“Yes. We’ve been friends.” He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. Then, gently, he placed it at her side. “I have an address for Dawn. She’s in England, taking photographs for a magazine in New York. I could ask her to come home.”

For a moment, Aurore was tempted to say yes. Just to see Dawn, to have her beside her bed, to touch her one last time. Then to be forced to reveal everything to her granddaughter, much as Dawn had once revealed childhood secrets to her.

Everything.

Aurore couldn’t bear the thought. She really was the coward she had claimed to be. “No. It’s best she not come home until…”

“I understand.”

“There’s only so much I have the strength to do.”

Spencer rose. “Then I’ll send her your letter and send the others theirs…when I must.”

“Yes. The letters.” She thought of the letters, which she had dictated herself. And all the lives that they would change.

“You’re tired. And you still have another visitor.”

Aurore didn’t ask who the visitor was. She was certain from the sound of Spencer’s voice that it was some one she would be glad to see.

Aurore knew when Spencer left the room, although her eyes were closed by then. The cicadas’ song grew louder, and she could picture the insects’ hard-shelled, alien bodies sailing from limb to limb of the moss-covered live oaks bordering her Garden District yard. With the windows open, the evening air was redolent of the last of the sweet olives and the first of the magnolias, and it masked the fragrances of an old woman’s life and impending death.

She heard footsteps, but she didn’t have the strength to open her eyes once more. A hand took hers, a firm, strong hand. She felt lips, warm against her cheek.

“Phillip,” she whispered.

“You don’t have to talk, Aurore. I’ll stay for a while anyway. Just rest now.”

The voice was Phillip’s, but for a moment it was Rafe by Aurore’s side. In that instant, she was no longer old, but young once more. Her life was ahead of her, her decisions were not yet made. As she drifted toward dreams, the cicadas’ song became one dearer and more familiar. Phillip was humming one of the songs his mother had made famous when Aurore fell asleep.

CHAPTER ONE

September 1965

The young man Dawn Gerritsen picked up just outside New Orleans looked like a bum, but so did a lot of students hitchhiking the world that summer. His hair wasn’t clean; his clothes were a marriage of beat poet and circus performer. To his credit, he had neither the pasty complexion of a Beatles-mad Liverpudlian nor the California tan of a Beach Boy surfer. In the past year she had seen more than enough of both types making the grand tour of rock bands and European waves.

The hitchhiker’s skin was freckled, and his eyes were pure Tupelo honey. Biloxi and Gulfport oozed from his throat, and the first time he called her ma’am, she wanted to drag him to a sun-dappled levee and make him moan it over and over until she knew, really knew, that she was back in the Deep South again.

She hadn’t dragged him anywhere. She didn’t even remember his name. She was too preoccupied for sex, and she wasn’t looking for intimacy. After three formative years in Berkeley, she had given up on love, right along with patriotism, religion and happily-ever-afters. Her virginity had been an early casualty, a prize oddly devalued in California, like an ancient currency exchanged exclusively by collectors.

Luckily her hitchhiker didn’t seem to be looking for intimacy, either. He seemed more interested in the food in her glove compartment and the needle on her speedometer. After her initial rush of sentiment, she almost forgot he was in the car until she arrived in Cut Off. Then she made the mistake of reaching past him to turn up the radio. It was twenty-five till the hour, and the news was just ending.

“And in other developments today, State Senator Ferris Lee Gerritsen, spokesman for Gulf Coast Shipping, the international corporation based in New Orleans, announced that the company will turn over a portion of its land holdings along the river to the city so that a park can be developed as a memorial to his parents, Henry and Aurore Gerritsen. Mrs. Gerritsen, granddaughter of the founder of Gulf Coast Shipping, passed away last week. Senator Gerritsen is the only living child of the couple. His brother, Father Hugh Gerritsen, was killed last summer in a civil-rights incident in Bonne Chance. It’s widely predicted that the senator will run for governor in 1968.”

Although the sun was sinking toward the horizon, Dawn retrieved her sunglasses from the dashboard and slipped them on, first blowing her heavy bangs out of her eyes in her own version of a sigh. As she settled back against her seat, she felt the warmth of a hand against her bare thigh. One quick glance and she saw that her hitchhiker was assessing her with the same look he had, until that moment, saved for her Moon Pies and Twinkies. Dawn knew what he saw. A long-limbed woman with artfully outlined blue eyes and an expression that refuted every refined feature that went with them. Also a possible fortune.

He smiled, and his hand inched higher. “Your name’s Gerritsen, didn’t you say? You related to him?”

“You’re wasting your time,” she said.

“I’m not busy doing anything else.”

She pulled over to the side of the road. A light rain was falling and a harder one was forecast, but that didn’t change her mind. “Time to stick out your thumb again.”

“Hey, come on. I can make the rest of the trip more fun than you can imagine.”

“Sorry, but my imagination’s bigger than anything you’ve got.”

Drawling curses, he reclaimed his hand and his duffel bag. She pulled back onto the road after the door slammed shut behind him.

She was no lonelier than she had been before, but after the news, and without the distraction of another person in the next seat, Dawn found herself thinking about her grandmother, exactly the thing she had tried to avoid by picking up the hitchhiker in the first place. This trip to Grand Isle had nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with Aurore Le Danois Gerritsen. On her deathbed, Aurore had decreed that her last will and testament be read at a gathering at the family summer cottage. And the reading of the will was a command performance.

The last time Dawn drove the route between New Orleans and Grand Isle, she’d only had her license for a year. South Louisiana was a constant negotiation between water and earth, and sometimes the final decision wasn’t clear. She had flown over the land and crawled over the water. Her grandmother had sat beside her, never once pointing out that one of the myriad draw bridges might flip them into murky Bayou Lafourche or that some of the tiny towns along the way fed their coffers with speed traps. She had chatted of this and that, and only later, when Aurore limped up the walk to the cottage, had Dawn realized that her right leg was stiff from flooring nonexistent gas and brake pedals.

The memory brought an unexpected lump to her throat. The news of her grandmother’s death hadn’t surprised her, but neither had she truly been prepared. How could she have known that a large chunk of her own identity would disappear when Aurore died? Aurore Gerritsen had held parts of Dawn’s life in her hands and sculpted them with the genius of a Donatello.

Some part of Dawn had disappeared at her uncle’s death, too. The radio report had only touched on Hugh Gerritsen’s death, as if it were old news now. But it wasn’t just old news to her. Her uncle had been a controversial figure in Louisiana, a man who practiced all the virtues that organized religion espoused. But to her he had been Uncle Hugh, the man who had seen everything that was good inside her and taught her to see the same.

Two deaths in two years. The only Gerritsens who had ever understood her were gone now. And who was left? Who would love her simply because she was Dawn, without judgment or emotional bribery? She turned up the radio again and forced herself to sing along with Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.

An hour later she crossed the final bridge. Time ticked fifty seconds to the minute on the Gulf Coast. Grand Isle looked much as it had that day years before when she had temporarily crippled her grandmother. Little changed on the island unless forced by the hand of Mother Nature. The surf devoured and regurgitated the shoreline, winds uprooted trees and sent roofs spinning, but the people and their customs stayed much the same.

The island was by no means fashionable, but every summer Dawn had joined Aurore here, where the air wasn’t mountain-fresh and the sand wasn’t cane-sugar perfection. And every summer Aurore had patiently patched and rewoven the intricate fabric of Gerritsen family life.

Today there was wind, and the surf was angry, al though that hadn’t discouraged the hard-core anglers strung along the shoreline. A hurricane with the friendly name of Betsy hovered off Florida, and although no body really expected her to turn toward this part of Louisiana, if she did, the island residents would protect their homes, pack their cars and choose their retreats be fore the evacuation announcement had ended.

Halfway across the length of Grand Isle, Dawn turned away from the gulf. A new load of oyster shells had been dumped on the road to the Gerritsen cottage, but it still showed fresh tire tracks. The cottage itself was like the island. Over the years, Mother Nature had subtly altered it, but the changes had only intensified its basic nature. Built of weathered cypress in the traditional Creole style and surrounded by tangles of oleander, jasmine and myrtle, it was as much a part of the landscape as the gnarled water oaks encircling it. Even the addition, de signed by her grandmother, seemed to have been there forever.

Dawn wondered if her parents had already arrived. She hadn’t called them from London or the New Or leans airport, sure that if she did they would expect her to travel to Grand Isle with them. She had wanted this time to adjust slowly to returning to Louisiana. She was twenty-three now, too old to be swallowed by her family and everything they stood for, but she had needed these extra hours to fortify herself.

As she pulled up in front of the house she saw that a car was parked under one of the trees, a tan Karmann Ghia with a California license plate. She wondered who had come so far for the reading of her grandmother’s will. Was there a Gerritsen, a Le Danois three times re moved, who had always waited in the wings?

She parked her rented Pontiac beside the little convertible and pulled on her vinyl slicker and brimmed John Lennon cap to investigate. The top was up, but she peered through one of the rain-fogged windows. The car belonged to a man. The sunglasses on the dashboard looked like an aviator’s goggles; a wide-figured tie was draped over a briefcase in the rear.

She wrapped her slicker tighter around her. Mary Quant had designed it as protection against London’s soft, cool rain. Now it trapped the Louisiana summer heat and melted against Dawn’s thighs, but she didn’t care. Her gaze had moved beyond the car, beyond the oleander and jasmine, to the wide front gallery. A man she had never expected to see again leaned against a square pillar and watched her.

She was aware of rain splashing against the brim of her hat and running in streams across her boots, but she didn’t move. She stood silently and wondered if she had ever really known her grandmother.

Ben Townsend stepped off the porch. He had no protection, Carnaby-mod or otherwise. The rain dampened his oxford-cloth shirt and dark slacks and turned his sun-streaked hair the color of antique brass. His clothes clung to a body that hadn’t changed in the past year. Her eyes measured the span of his shoulders, the width of his waist and hips, the long stretch of his legs. Her expression didn’t change as he approached. Repressing emotion was a skill she had cultivated since she saw him last.

“I guess you didn’t expect me.” He stopped a short distance from her, as if he had calculated to the inch exactly how close she would allow him to come.

“A masterpiece of understatement.”

“I got a letter asking me to come for the reading of your grandmother’s will.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. Dawn had seen him stand that way so many times, shoulders hunched, palms turned out, heels set firmly in the ground. The stance made him real, not a shadow from her memories.

“I’m surprised you bothered.” She rocked back on her heels, too, as if she were comfortable enough to stand under the dripping oak forever. “Expecting to find a story here?”

“Nope. I’m an editor now. I buy what other people write.”

For the past year, Ben had worked for Mother Lode, a celebrated new magazine carving out its niche among California’s liberal elite. Dawn had read just one issue. Mother Lode obviously prized creativity, intellect and West Coast self-righteousness. She wasn’t surprised Ben had moved quickly up its career ladder.

“You always were good at pronouncing judgment,” she said.

He hunched his shoulders another inch. “And you seem to have gotten better at it.”

“I’ve gotten better at lots of things, but apparently not at understanding Grandmère. I can’t figure if inviting you was an attempt to force a lovers’ reunion, or if she just had a twisted sense of humor.”

“Do you really think your grandmother asked me here to hurt you?”

“You have another explanation?”

“Maybe it has something to do with Father Hugh.”

She tossed back her hair. “I don’t know why it should. Uncle Hugh’s been dead a year.”

“I know when he died, Dawn. I was there.”

“That’s right. And I wasn’t. I think that was the subject of our last conversation.”

That conversation had taken place a year before, but now Dawn remembered it as if Ben’s words were still carving catacombs under her feet. She had been standing beside Ben’s hospital bed on the afternoon after her uncle’s death. A nurse had come at the sound of raised voices, then scurried away without saying a word. Dawn could still remember the smell of lilies from an arrangement on another patient’s bedside table and the tasteless Martian green of gladiola sprays. Ben had shouted questions and waited for answers that never came.

“Did you know, Dawn? Did you know that your uncle was going to be gunned down like a common criminal? Did you know that a mob was on its way to that church to turn a good man into a saint and a martyr?”

“Look, I’m staying,” Ben said. “I don’t know why I was invited here, but I’m going to stay long enough to get some answers. Can we be civil to each other?”

“You’re a Louisiana boy. You know hospitality’s a tradition in this part of the world. I’ll do my part to live up to it.”

Dawn studied him for another moment. His hair was longer than it had been a year ago, as if he had made the psychological transition from Boston, where he had worked on the Globe, to San Francisco. He wore glasses now, wire-framed and self-important. He no longer looked too young to have answers to all the world’s problems. He looked his full twenty-seven years, like a man who had found his place in the world and never in tended to relinquish it.

Her father was a man who also radiated confidence and purpose. Dawn wondered what would happen when Ferris Lee Gerritsen discovered that Ben Townsend had received an invitation to Grand Isle.

Ben waited until her gaze drifted back to his. “I’m not going to push myself on you.”

“Oh, don’t worry about me. Nobody pushes anything on me these days. And nobody puts anything over on me, either. Stay if you want. But don’t stay because you want to finish old conversations.”

“Maybe there’ll be some new conversations worth finishing.”

She shrugged, then turned back to her car for her lug gage, making a point of dismissing him. She had left al most everything she owned in Europe. She reached for her camera case and her overnight bag, but left her suit case inside.

In the distance, thunder exploded with renewed vigor, and the ground at Dawn’s feet seemed to ripple in response. The sultry island air was charged with the familiar smells of ozone and decay. By the time she straightened, Ben was no longer beside her. She watched as he walked down the oyster-shell drive, glad she didn’t have to pretend to be casual even a moment longer.

She might not have understood Grand Isle’s draw for her grandmother, but each year Dawn had been drawn to it herself. The summers had been a time to bask in her grandmother’s love. Nothing else had been expected of her. The sun had been too hot, the occasional breeze too enticing. She had done nothing of consequence on the island except grow up. But Aurore’s pride in her had been the solid ground that Dawn built the best part of herself upon.

How proud had Aurore been before she died, and what had she known? Had she known that Dawn still loved her? That despite her exodus after her uncle’s death, she had still yearned for her family? That falling in love with Ben Townsend so long ago had not been the same as declaring sides in a war Dawn had never understood anyway?

Most important of all, had her grandmother understood that even though Dawn had crossed an ocean, she had never really been able to break free of any of the people she loved?

Louisiana was a statewide Turkish bath, which might explain the inability of its residents to move forward into the twentieth century. Their brains were as steamed as Christmas pudding, their collective vision as fogged by heat and humidity as the air on an average afternoon. On a day like this one, when raindrops sizzled in the summer air, it was possible to see why nothing ever changed, and nothing was ever challenged.

Ben stood on the beach and watched the foam-tipped breakers rearrange a mile of seaweed. Grand Isle was an obscure sandpile, projecting like an obscene middle finger into water the temperature of piss. In the hour since his encounter with Dawn, he had walked nearly the entire length of it.

Louisiana wasn’t Ben’s favorite place. He had been born not far from Grand Isle, but a year ago he had al most died there, too. A year ago he had watched as a martyr was gunned down by bigots and left to bleed away his life, one drop at a time.

Where was Father Hugh Gerritsen now? Ben didn’t believe in heaven any more than he believed that hell could be worse than Louisiana. Somehow, though, he couldn’t believe that Father Hugh’s life had been over between one drop of blood and the next. Maybe he had come back to earth—for a Catholic priest, he’d been surprisingly eclectic in his theology—and even now was toddling around somewhere, preparing to give humanity’s inhumanities one more run for their money.

What would Father Hugh think of his niece? The woman in the violent purple slicker had certainly looked in need of a priest—or a convent. Her legs were a mile long, her hair was a red-brown sweep ending—not accidentally, he was certain—at the exact tip of her breasts. A year in Europe had taken her from a debutante in flowered shirtwaists to a vixen in a pop-art miniskirt.

And those eyes, those challenging, provocative eyes. She had learned to use them, too. She had gazed straight through him as if he had never been her lover. As if he had never accused her of participating in her uncle’s murder.

Hadn’t he known that she would be shocked to see him, and that shock would turn to anger? Maybe. But he hadn’t expected the ice-cold arrogance, the chip on her shoulder as massive as one of the island’s oaks. Whatever Aurore Gerritsen had planned for them, it wasn’t this instant animosity, this reduced equation of a relationship once rich in respect and love.

In the distance, against the stark silhouette of an off shore oil platform, Ben watched fishermen hauling in a circular net filled with the shining, flopping bodies of mullet. Their boat rode the waves, and the net dipped and lurched as they dragged it on board. He winced, empathizing with the mullet who were gasping their last breaths as they struggled to free themselves from a force they couldn’t understand.

He didn’t understand Dawn, and he didn’t understand her grandmother or her reasons for inviting him here. He didn’t understand the malaise that surrounded the Gerritsens’ lives, or how they had failed to detect it. Worse, like the mullet, he didn’t know how to fight what he couldn’t see.

The sun had nearly disappeared. Now, banked behind thunderclouds, it glowed just a short distance from the horizon. Ben knew it was time to return to the Gerritsen cottage. He had given Dawn enough time to get used to the idea that he was back in her life. He had probably given her parents time to arrive, and anyone else who had been invited, too. He trudged across sand and crunched his way through a fifty-yard stretch of wild flowers and sea grasses. Ozone and the herbal essence of the vegetation scented the air. Behind him, as a light rain began again, he heard the triumphant cawing of sea gulls feasting on the mullet the fishermen had missed.

He was halfway back to the cottage when the heavens opened and the rain began in earnest. He was al ready wet, but with darkness falling, his tolerance was disappearing fast. The main road bisecting the island was lined with fishing camps and the occasional store that served them. He headed for the closest one to wait out the worst of the storm.

Ten steps led up to the wood-frame building, which was no larger than a three-car garage. Inside there were two narrow aisles flanked with counters and shelves. Of more interest were the occupants.

The storekeeper was lounging against the counter. A man who’d embraced his fifties without an argument, the storekeeper was balding, stooped and paunchy. When he smirked at the younger man who was standing across from him, his tobacco-stained teeth were an inch too long.

So enthusiastically was he staring and smirking, the storekeeper didn’t even notice Ben. “Well, boy,” he said to the man in front of him, “I might know where the house is, and I might not. Depends on why you want to know. Me, I can’t figure why a nigger’d be looking for Senator Gerritsen’s house after dark, unless he’s got something on his mind he shouldn’t.”

Ben stood in the doorway and watched the other man—a man who, at thirty-seven, hadn’t been a boy for two decades—react to the storekeeper’s words. Ben recognized him. He waited for his reaction.

Phillip Benedict leaned across the counter. “Now if I wanted to kill Senator Gerritsen, coon ass, you think I’d stop here first so you could remember exactly what I looked like?”

The storekeeper cranked himself up to a full five-foot-four, but he needed an additional ten inches to be Phillip’s equal. Actually, Ben concluded, he needed a whole lot more than inches.

“Get out of my store! Go on. Get! And watch your back while you’re on the island. Might find yourself riding the waves facedown if you don’t!”

Phillip had beautiful hands, long-fingered and broad. One of them gathered the material of the storekeeper’s shirt and twisted it so that he couldn’t move away. “It would take a very quiet man to sneak up on me, coon ass. You don’t have that kind of quiet. You got a big mouth. I’d hear it yapping a mile away. So you be careful, ‘cause while you’re yapping, I might just sneak up on you. And you wouldn’t hear me.” He let go of the shirt and pushed the man away from the counter. Then he turned. His eyes met Ben’s. For a moment, he didn’t move.

“Coon ass?” Ben asked.

“Wish I’d coined the phrase.”

Ben looked past Phillip to the storekeeper, who was edging toward the wall. “He’s a mean son of a bitch,” he told the man. “Eats white folks for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Now, I’d be careful. All that, and a friend of the Gerritsen family, too. He’s a good man to stay away from.”

“Both of you get out!”

“Bad for business to be so rude.” Ben picked up a candy bar and fished for some change, which he laid on the counter. “Want anything, Benedict?”

“Yeah. A head on a platter.”

“Next store down the road.” Ben draped an arm around Phillip’s shoulder. “Let’s see what we can do.”

They exited that way, although Ben kept his eye on the storekeeper until they were safely out the door. “About now is a good time to make tracks,” he said at the bottom of the steps. “Do you have a car?”

“Sure as hell didn’t hitchhike.”

“Let’s go.”

When they were both in the car, Phillip pulled onto the road, and they were quiet until he’d taken one of the turns off the main route and parked in front of the is land’s Catholic church. Phillip was the first to speak. “Sun’s going down, white boy. Ain’t safe for niggers or agitators on a backass Looziana road.”

“What in the hell are you doing here?”

Phillip lifted a brow. “I could ask the same.”

Ben tried to imagine how he could explain something he didn’t understand himself. In the meantime, he examined the other man.

Phillip Benedict was a journalist of note. He was widely praised for his insight and biting commentary, but it was his color and his convictions about prejudice and freedom that set him apart from other Ivy League—educated newsmen. From jailhouse interviews with Martin Luther King to his assessment of the achievements of the late Malcolm X, Phillip had reported the struggle for civil rights like a war correspondent. More times than not, he had been right in the thick of battle.

The two men had liked each other from their first encounter, years before. They had been covering the same story in New York, Ben as a young reporter right out of college and Phillip as a seasoned journalist. They had spent a long night together in a Lower East Side bar along with half a dozen other newsmen, waiting for someone to emerge from a building across the street. Phillip had taken Ben under his wing, and with hours to kill they had traded their personal stories. But over the years they hadn’t spent much time in each other’s presence, and over the past year none at all. Their lives and their careers had taken them in different directions.

“I’m not exactly sure why I’m here,” Ben said. “But I was invited to the reading of a will. You?”

“Seems I’ve been invited, too. Aurore Gerritsen was one interesting old lady.”

Ben shifted so that his back was against the car door. He had known from the conversation in the store that Phillip’s presence on Grand Isle had something to do with the Gerritsen family, but he hadn’t really expected this. He had guessed that Phillip was looking for a story.

Or feeling suicidal.

Raindrops glistened in Phillip’s hair and on the dark hollows of his cheeks. He didn’t look any the worse for his confrontation with the storekeeper. In fact, he looked like a man waiting for new challenges. “This is getting stranger by the moment,” Ben said. “Why you?”

Phillip smiled. “You told the man. I’m a friend of the family.”

“I was just trying to keep your ass in one piece. What’s the real reason?”

Phillip shifted, too, trying to make room for his long legs. “Are you entertaining theories?”

“Yeah, and you could entertain a whole lot more than that by coming to a place like Grand Isle and manhandling the locals.”

Phillip took his time looking Ben over before he spoke again. “Do you know why you were invited?”

“How much do you know about the Gerritsens?” Ben reached into his shirt pocket for the Butterfingers he’d bought at the store. He ripped it open and broke it in two, offering half to Phillip.

Phillip declined with a shake of his head. “I just know what I’ve been told.”

“How much do you know about Father Hugh Gerritsen?” Ben asked.

“I know he was killed last year. Over there in Bonne Chance.” Phillip hiked his thumb over his shoulder.

“Yeah. A short sail, or a hell of a trip by car. I was born there, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m there again. I can feel the heat and the damp settling all over me, and I’m back in Bonne Chance.”

“You were there when he died, weren’t you?”

Ben wasn’t surprised that Phillip knew. They had never talked about it, but the story had been covered in the national media. “I was there. But there’s more to it than that. His niece and I…” He shrugged. “Dawn and I were close.”

“That right?”

“All I really know is I’m here, and I’m planning to stay.”

“So am I.”

“You’ve avoided telling me why you were invited.”

“I don’t know for sure.”

“But you could guess if you had to?”

“I got to know Mrs. Gerritsen at the end of her life. My being here has something to do with that.”

“Do you know anybody else who’s coming?”

Phillip gave a half smile that Ben could have interpreted a hundred different ways. “My mother and step father.”

Ben gave a low whistle. He had never met Phillip’s family, but he had heard Phillip’s mother sing a thou sand times. She was Nicky Valentine, a world-famous jazz and blues singer who owned a nightclub in New Or leans.

“Got their invitations the same day I got mine,” Phillip said.

Ben had a hundred questions, but Phillip had a journalist’s natural reticence. Ben would get his answers when they all gathered back at the cottage. “This is going to be even more interesting than I thought.”

Phillip’s smile hardened into something else. “Especially when the senator and his wife find out who’s been invited to their house.”

“I wouldn’t turn my back on him, if I were you.”

Phillip swiveled in his seat and reached for the ignition. “We’ve got questions, both of us, and they need answering. Maybe it’s time we found out what’s planned. But whatever it is, it’s not going to be boring. There’s a story here. Dark and light folks, tapping together to an old lady’s song.”

Ben was silent as Phillip started the car. The rain had slacked off again, but the sky was almost dark. He imagined that everyone who had been invited to hear the will was at the cottage by now. Maybe Phillip was right. Maybe a story would unfold in the next hours. But one thing was for certain. During her lifetime, Aurore Le Danois Gerritsen had been a woman to reckon with. Even now, even in death, she was still determined to have her way.

CHAPTER TWO

At seventy-four, Spencer St. Amant should have had nothing to worry about except whether an afternoon thundershower was going to keep him from taking a stroll down Esplanade Avenue. But while his cronies gathered at the Pickwick Club and talked incessantly about their days in the sun, Spencer sat in his Canal Street law office and directed the parade of fresh-faced Tulane graduates who did his legwork.

He had considered retirement once, a decade before. In a private dining room at Arnaud’s he had thought it over between courses of shrimp remoulade and trout meunière. And when the last bite of trout was vanquished, he had walked back to his office and announced to his staff that the jockeying for position could cease immediately. Someday they would find him at his desk, facedown amid volumes of the Louisiana legal code. Until then, he was still in charge.

Spencer doubted that anyone had ever suspected the reason for his decision. He wasn’t married to the law, and most parts of mediating society’s quarrels didn’t appeal to him. As a youth, he had wanted to fly. He had dreamed of soaring above the clouds like the Wright brothers, exploring every corner of the world stretched before him. Instead, he had stayed on the ground to fulfill his duty to his family.

His duty to the long-dead St. Amants who had taken such pride in the family firm had been discharged long ago. But his duty to the woman he had loved had not. Aurore Gerritsen had never known that he continued his law practice to stay close to her side. She had died his friend and client, more than he could ever have hoped for if he told her the truth.

His duty to her was not yet ended. There were still her last wishes to fulfill. One final act of love.

Despite the rain, Spencer moved slowly up the path to the Gerritsen cottage. As he drew closer, he was re minded of the first time he had gone up in an airplane. The airfield had once been acres of corn, and as the flimsy two-seater began its take-off, he had been thrown from side to side. Decades had passed, many more than he cared to think about, but he still remembered that moment of terror when he had realized that his life was about to be transformed, that something more than a plane had been set in motion and couldn’t be halted.

On the front gallery, he knocked and waited. At the sound of footsteps he waved to his driver, who had al ready deposited his suitcase by the front door. The young man promptly backed down the drive and disappeared with a squeal of Spencer’s own tires. Spencer held himself erect—a considerable feat—and stood back as Pelichere Landry came outside to greet him. She was a stout woman with the dark hair of her Acadian ancestors and an unswerving and clear-eyed devotion to Aurore Gerritsen. She, and her mother before her, had taken care of the Gerritsen family for as long as Spencer had known any of them.

“I’m glad to see you standing there,” he said. “I didn’t know who would be here.”

“Mais yeah, I can tell that.” Pelichere stepped away from him so that she could get a better look.

He felt her appraising gaze and tried to stand a little straighter. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t look so fine.”

“Before I get any surprises, you’d better tell me. Is anyone else here yet?”

“Dawn’s up in her room. I made her eat. Ben Towns end, he came. He went.”

“He’ll be back,” Spencer said.

“The others are coming? Still?”

Spencer nodded.

“Aurore, she always did what she thought was best. Even when it wasn’t.” Pelichere picked up Spencer’s suitcase. “Your room’s ready, and there’s coffee in the kitchen.”

The sound of a car engine chased the lure of both from Spencer’s head. He turned as a dark, sleek Lincoln came to a halt under the oaks. “The senator,” he said, although he was sure Pelichere already knew that.

“Me, I’ve got other fish to fry.” The door banged shut behind Pelichere, and Spencer was left alone to greet Ferris Lee and Cappy Gerritsen. He watched as Ferris got out to open the door for his wife.

Ferris Lee Gerritsen wasn’t classically handsome. He was barrel-chested and broad-shouldered, with a high forehead and gray hair that was still thick enough to require a good haircut. His nose had been broken more than once, and the arrogant thrust of his chin had invited punches, too.

But what was the exact shape of a nose, the cut of a jaw, compared to personal magnetism? He had eyes that crackled with patriotic fervor and a resonant voice that could stroke or destroy. Combined with a rare understanding of the hopes and prejudices of his constituents, his charisma could usher him into the governor’s mansion in 1968.

Cappy Gerritsen, blond and petulant, was dressed as if she were setting out for an afternoon of bridge and gossip. Her white linen shift stopped just above her knees, but it wasn’t short enough to be in poor taste. Many things could be said about Cappy, but never that her taste was poor.

Ferris wasted no time on pleasantries. He spoke be fore he reached the porch. “Maybe we can get down to business before this place is blown to Hades and back.”

“I listened to the forecast on my trip down,” Spencer said. “There’s nothing to worry about yet. Maybe not at all.”

“I’ve tried to reach you a dozen times in the last few days.”

“Have you?” Spencer knew full well that a dozen was a low estimate.

“I don’t understand the point of this. I’m supposed to be in Baton Rouge this week. Why couldn’t we read the will in New Orleans?”

“I’d rather talk about the reasons when everyone’s here.”

Ferris’s expression had been anything but cordial; it grew less so. “And just who’s expected?”

“I’d like to know if my daughter’s arrived,” Cappy said, before Spencer could answer.

“Dawn is here, though I haven’t seen her yet.”

“Well, at least she hasn’t entirely forgotten she has a family.”

Spencer watched Ferris silence his wife with a frown. “Suppose you forget about everybody else for a minute,” Ferris said, “and tell me exactly what’s going on?”

“I’m following your mother’s wishes. That’s all I can say.”

“That’s all you will say. I—” Ferris’s gaze went from Spencer’s face to the drive. A small car, one of Detroit’s newer compacts, was approaching the house.

Spencer wished he had a chair. He also wished for a Ramos gin fizz, although the days when it would have agreed with him were long over. “And who’s this?” Ferris asked.

Spencer watched a tall man unfurling himself from behind the steering wheel. As Phillip Benedict approached, Spencer admired the elegant posture, the strong, even features.

Ferris answered his own question. “Ben Townsend.”

Until that moment, Spencer had noticed only one man; now he switched his gaze to the other. Ben was nearly as tall as Phillip, with the same lithe confidence of movement. The confidence of the young.

Ferris stepped forward. Ben thrust his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. He assessed Ferris before he spoke. “Good evening, Senator Gerritsen.”

“You’re not welcome here.” Ferris didn’t look at Phillip. “Neither is your…friend.”

Spencer crossed the porch before Ben could respond. He extended his hand to Phillip. “Phillip.” Then he turned to Ben and held out his hand. “I’m Spencer St. Amant. Thank you for coming.”

“Hasn’t this gone far enough?” Ferris asked. “I want to know what this is about.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what it’s about, Senator,” Phillip said. He smiled pleasantly, although he was carefully assessing everyone as he spoke. “My name’s Phillip Ben edict. Your mother invited Townsend here and me to hear her will. Now, sure as you’re her representative in the land of the living, I know you’re going to make us right at home.”

“You could never feel at home here.”

“As your mother’s attorney, I welcome Ben and Phillip in her name.” Spencer turned away from Ferris and Cappy, to signal that his business with them was completed. “I just got here myself, but I know there have been beds prepared for you.”

Phillip’s reply was drowned out by the sound of an other car. Both young men turned to see who was coming. Spencer watched a late-model Thunderbird pull up the driveway. No one said a word as the car stopped be side Phillip’s and its two occupants got out. Phillip stepped forward as a man and woman walked slowly to ward him. “Hello, Nicky,” Phillip said.

Nicky stopped a short distance from her son. She nodded to him, her eyes wary; then she looked past Phillip to the porch. “Mr. St. Amant?”

Spencer smiled and stretched out his hand. Nicky introduced her husband; then she paused. “And Ferris Lee,” she said, inclining her head. “Ferris, you probably haven’t had the pleasure of meeting my husband, Jake Reynolds.”

Jake didn’t offer his hand, and Ferris didn’t move. Ben filled the gap by offering his to Nicky. “I’m Ben Townsend.”

Spencer watched them shake. He could not think badly of Aurore, but for a moment he wished that she had made different decisions in her lifetime. “I was just telling the others that beds have been prepared,” he said. “And I’m sure there’s dinner, if you haven’t eaten al ready.”

“Thank you, but we’re going to listen to this will, then we’re leaving,” Nicky said. “Maybe Aurore Gerritsen thought a little black-and-white pajama party would further the cause of civil rights, but I don’t savor the idea of staying in this house tonight.”

Spencer had expected resistance. He applied his gentlest coercion. “It’s much too late to think about driving back.”

“I’m afraid we have as little interest in being guests as Senator Gerritsen has in being our host.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s not that straightforward.”

“Let them go,” Ferris demanded.

Spencer had known that gentleness wouldn’t be enough. Somehow, it never was. He smiled sadly. “I’m afraid that’s not possible, Senator. Your mother stipulated that everyone has to spend the night at the cottage tonight. In the morning, I’ll share all the conditions for the reading of her will. But I’ll warn you now, it won’t hurt any of you to unpack everything you’ve brought. We’ll be spending four nights together.”

“What kind of charade is this?” Ferris asked. “You can’t keep us locked up here. I won’t tolerate it.”

Spencer sighed and remembered that moment when the ancient two-seater had lifted away from the earth and his world had changed forever. “I can’t keep you here,” he agreed. “But there’s one more thing I ought to tell you now. Anyone who leaves before the reading is completed will not inherit.”

Dawn heard Spencer’s final words from the hallway of the cottage. She started for the door, but before she reached it, Nicky Reynolds spoke. “I can’t imagine a woman I never met left me anything so significant that I should let myself be strong-armed.”

The screen door slammed shut behind Dawn. She should have expected it, because standards at the cottage were more relaxed than at any of the other Gerritsen homes. But she hadn’t, and she hadn’t expected to see Ben flinch, as if someone had just aimed a gun at him and pulled the trigger.

“Mrs. Reynolds, if my grandmother asked you here, it couldn’t have been to hurt you.” She walked down the porch steps, purposely concentrating on no one but Nicky and her husband. She had heard her father’s voice, but she wasn’t prepared to deal with him. Dawn had heard of Nicky Valentine Reynolds, of course. Nicky, who had never tolerated segregated audiences in a city famed for them, had always interested her, and the interest factor had just multiplied enormously.

“I’ll be happy to show you to your room,” Dawn said. “There’s a large one next to mine that I think you’ll like. You can see the Gulf if you have the determination.” She held out her hand to Nicky. “I’m Dawn Gerritsen. Please, I hope you plan to stay.”

Nicky lifted her hand with her signature languid grace. She introduced her husband, and Dawn felt her hand disappear into the hard flesh of his. Jake Reynolds was an imposing man, large and muscular enough to feel at ease anywhere. He seemed at ease now, but he stood close to his wife, hip edged toward hers, with the skill of a bodyguard.

Dawn turned so that she could see her parents, too. They had changed little in the months she was gone. Her mother was gazing into the distance. Her father was staring at her, his eyes narrowed, and for once his thoughts were visible for anyone to read. She knew the price she would pay when he got her alone. She spoke to him, as well as to Nicky. “No one here will hurt you. I give you my word.”

“Now that’s interesting,” Phillip said, “considering that the influence of this family couldn’t even keep one of its own from being gunned down like an animal.”

Dawn looked at Phillip for the first time. He was a stranger to her. “I’m sorry. We haven’t been introduced.”

“This is my son, Phillip Benedict,” Nicky said.

Dawn recognized the name. She had often read his work. Before she could respond, Jake spoke. “We’ll be staying. All of us.”

Dawn saw the rising tide of mutiny in Nicky’s eyes. Even angry, she was a stunning woman. Had she lived a century before, she might have danced at the French Quarter quadroon balls. Beautiful women of mixed racial heritage had been the cause of more than one duel in the nineteenth century. New Orleans society had seen fit to create a special place for them—minus the sanctity or the security of marriage vows, of course.

“We’ll stay the night,” Nicky said.

Dawn admired the way Nicky had neither agreed nor disagreed with her husband in public. They would stay the night. Clearly, whether they would stay longer remained to be worked out between them.

She listened as Ben offered to help with luggage. He was standing beside Phillip, and their similarities were more interesting than their differences. Both carried themselves as if they toted precious cargo, as if knowledge hard won set them apart from mere mortals. And although she had never seen Phillip before, he and Ben seemed united in their decision to condemn her and her family.

“Why don’t you come with me,” she told Nicky, “while the men bring your suitcases? You can tell me if there’s another room you’d like better.”

Nicky nodded. As they climbed the steps, Dawn realized that her father and mother were no longer standing on the gallery, but Spencer remained to oversee the settling-in. He looked exhausted.

Inside, she paused in the center hallway, compelled by the oddity of the circumstances to make small talk. “It’s a large house, though it doesn’t look like it from the outside. It was built by an Acadian family more than a hundred years ago. When I was a little girl, I used to lie awake at night and listen for their voices.”

“Did you ever hear them?”

“What would you think if I said yes?”

“That you have imagination.”

“I’m a photographer. Some people don’t think that takes imagination.”

“Some people don’t think singing other people’s songs takes imagination, either.”

Dawn felt the flush of camaraderie. She pointed out the layout of the rooms downstairs, then started up to the second floor. Her mother had disappeared, and Dawn hoped she wouldn’t meet her now. Since she had openly defied her father, she anticipated his appearance with even less enthusiasm.

She led Nicky to the bedroom at the end of the hall way in the addition. It was large and airy, furnished with pine and cypress antiques of straight, simple lines. The bed, a nineteenth-century tester, was draped in hand-crocheted lace.

“This was my grandmother’s room.” Dawn stepped inside. Immediately she was embraced by the entwined fragrances of roses and vetiver, fragrances she would al ways associate with Aurore. “I think you’ll be comfort able here. There’s a private bath.”

“Your grandmother’s room?”

“It’s one of the larger ones in the house, and it was her favorite, because there really is a view of sorts, if you step out here.” She walked to the French doors leading out to a small balcony and threw them open. Immediately fresh air swept into the room, licking at the scents.

“Why are you giving this room to me?”

Dawn faced her. “Why not?”

“You know the answer to that.”

Dawn was afraid she did. She was the daughter of Ferris Lee Gerritsen, noted for his opposition to civil rights, and blood was supposed to tell. “I hope you won’t hold my father’s prejudices against me. We’re not at all the same.”

“You’re not at all what I would have expected.”

“Well, you’re even more.” As a photojournalist, Dawn had learned to quickly assess faces. Nicky was one of those rare women who would be equally beautiful on film or in person. Her dark hair hugged her head in short, soft curls. Her eyes were an impenetrable green, the still surface of a tree-shaded bayou. Her features were broad and strong, sensual, earthy and somehow—and this fascinated Dawn most of all—wise. Nicky was at least as old as Dawn’s own parents, but age seemed only to have intensified her assets.

She realized she was staring. “You were a great favorite of Grandmère’s. I grew up listening to your voice. Seventy-eights at first. Then 45s. Then albums, with your photograph smiling at me from the record rack.”

“Your grandmother was a complete stranger to me.”

“I think you would have liked her.”

Nicky ran her hand over the lace coverlet, but she didn’t answer. Dawn heard footsteps on the stairs and realized that their private moment was about to end. “This situation is extraordinary, Mrs. Reynolds. Please tell me if there’s anything I can do to make it more comfortable for you.”

“It’s not going to be comfortable, no matter what any of us do.”

“You haven’t met Pelichere Landry yet. She was a friend of Grandmère’s, and she takes care of the cottage when no one’s here. I know she’s set out food in the kitchen. When you’ve settled in, please introduce your self, and she’ll show you where everything is.”

Dawn stepped aside as Jake and Phillip entered. Ben was carrying a suitcase, but he stopped in the doorway. Without a word, she moved past him.

“So you decided to come.” Phillip kissed his mother’s forehead, and didn’t have to bend far to do it. She was only half a head shorter than his six-foot-two.

“I don’t know why I did.” Nicky pushed him away before he could answer. She and Phillip had gone round and round about this invitation to Grand Isle since the moment it arrived. She had flatly refused to come, but somehow she had ended up here anyway. “And don’t bother telling me you don’t know why I was invited. You never could lie worth anything. You know a whole lot more about this situation than you’ve let on so far.”

“Have you had supper?” Jake asked Phillip.

“There weren’t a lot of places on the way down where I could have been sure to leave with a full stomach and a full set of teeth.”

Jake laughed, but both men knew the truth behind Phillip’s joke. Black humor, some called it. Both men had theories about that.

“Dawn told me that someone’s set out food for us in the kitchen,” Nicky said.

Jake set down the suitcase he had carried. “Suppose she meant we’ll be eating in the kitchen while the white folks eat in the dining room?”

“No, I don’t suppose that’s what she meant. She was trying to make us welcome.”

“If Dawn’s anything like her father,” Phillip said, “she can charm you right straight to the center of a lie, and you’ll never even know you’ve been there.”

“Would you like me to go down to the kitchen and see if I can get something to bring up?” Jake asked Nicky.

“I’d like that. Phillip?”

Phillip shrugged. “You don’t have to leave us alone, Jake.”

“Think I do.”

Nicky watched her husband leave. His footsteps were no longer audible when she spoke. “I think it’s time you did some explaining.”

Phillip wandered the room, stopping at a bedside table. Wildflowers bloomed in a cut-glass vase, and a handful of novels fanned out along the edges in invitation. “You’re one of the few people who know that Aurore Gerritsen hired me to write her life story. That she dictated it to me chapter and verse.”

“Knowing’s not the same as understanding.”

“Have you wondered just how far she went? How much she told me about her life?”

Nicky didn’t reply.

Phillip faced her. “She left out nothing.”

“How can you know what she left out?” She wandered to the French doors and gazed out over wizened water oaks bending in the wind.

Phillip joined her, putting his hand on her arm. His skin was smooth and brown in contrast to hers. “I can tell you this. I learned that a man I once called Hap, a man I knew in Morocco a long time ago, was really Hugh Gerritsen.”

She stiffened and shook off Phillip’s hand. “Is that why we’re here? Because once upon a time we knew Aurore Gerritsen’s son?”

“I think that’s some part of it.”

He had succeeded in making her look at him. “And what are the other parts?” she said.

“I can’t speak for Aurore. Not yet. But maybe I can speak for you. I think you came for answers to questions you gave up asking yourself a long time ago. Questions you’re going to need to share with Jake very soon. Be cause I don’t think any of us was invited here so that we could hold tight to our secrets.”

Something went still inside her. “You’ve always been the one with questions. That’s why you do what you do for a living. You probe and you probe, like a tongue that can’t keep away from a sore tooth.”

“If you worry a tooth long enough, eventually it gives way.”

“You think that’s what will happen here?”

“I think we can be assured of it.”

She wondered how much Phillip really knew about her relationship with Hugh Gerritsen, exactly how much he had been told and how much he remembered. Phillip had been young during those days so long ago, but his memory had always been extraordinary.

As if he could read her mind, he nodded. “You know to be careful, don’t you?” he asked.

“Careful of what? The truth? The senator?”

“The senator, for starters.”

“So we’re switching roles? When you were a little boy, I warned you about crossing the street, and now that I’m an old woman, you warn me about ghosts and bigots?”

“Something like that. Except for the old-woman part.”

“I know to be careful. I’m so careful I almost didn’t come. You be careful, too.”

“I’ve got careful running through my veins. Only reason my veins are still running.”

Jake appeared in the doorway with a tray. “I only had hands enough for two plates, Phillip. But there’s plenty more in the kitchen, and you’re welcome to come back up and eat with us.”

“I think I’ll just go settle in.”

Nicky followed her son to the door without saying anything more. She was both glad and sorry that their conversation was finished. Too much had been said, or perhaps not enough. She was too upset to know. When he was gone, she took glasses of iced tea off Jake’s tray.

Jake moved closer. “Are you all right?”

“I’m just fine.” She waited until he set the tray on the bed before she went into his arms.

She stood in his embrace and listened to the sound of thunder in the distance. Finally she pulled away. “There’s still time to leave, Jake.”

He pulled her close again, and she resisted for only a moment. “Do you want them saying you’re afraid? That you didn’t think you were good enough to face down the Gerritsens and find out what this is all about?”

She was all too afraid she knew what it was about. “I don’t care what anybody thinks.”

“You’d leave your son here to face them alone?”

“At least the food smells good,” she said at last.

“And there are some people here who might be worth knowing.”

Nicky thought of Dawn and the things Phillip had said about her. She wondered if Dawn knew how much she looked like the young Hugh Gerritsen.

“Shall we eat?”

Jake moved toward the bed, but he seemed in no hurry to get the tray. He smoothed his hand over the lace spread, much as Nicky had done herself. “Then I think we should retire for the night.”

“Retire’s not exactly the word you have in mind, is it?”

He flashed her his slow, certain-of-himself smile. “I figure if we’ve got to be here, there ought to be compensations.”

She considered telling him that no matter how important staying here was, she wouldn’t be able to if he wasn’t beside her. But she decided not to. She just smiled slowly and held out her arms. And in her own way, she let him know.

CHAPTER THREE

Cappy Gerritsen needed only one glance around the downstairs bedroom that she and Ferris always shared to set her off. “I told you we shouldn’t have come.”

Ferris didn’t raise an eyebrow or point out that she had been silent for the entire two-and-a-half-hour trip from New Orleans. Cappy frequently alternated between stony silences and passionate oratory. After twenty-some years of marriage, neither upset him greatly.

He lit a cigarette and watched the smoke spiral to the ceiling, where it was sternly disciplined by a fan. One of the few similarities between Cappy and his mother had been their mutual distaste for air-conditioning. Each spring his New Orleans home was held hostage to the heat and humidity until mid-June. The cottage, thanks to his mother’s whims, was unbearable the entire summer.

“Don’t look at me like that. You obviously feel the same way.” Cappy sucked in her bottom lip—a manner ism that had been adorably provocative on a debutante and was nothing short of irritating on a forty-seven-year-old matron.

Ferris snuffed the cigarette in a potted fern and lit an other. “I came out of respect for my mother.”

“That’s what you call driving all this way to be con fronted by these people?”

When Ferris didn’t try to soothe her, Cappy began fidgeting with the shells lined up along the top of a chest of drawers. “Surely you can’t think this makes any sense. Isn’t it bad enough that your mother ordered an immediate cremation? Everyone expected the family to announce the date and time for a funeral mass. Now this. When the word gets out, our friends will think your mother is still leading us around by our noses.”

“I doubt they’ll be that perceptive.”

She looked down at her arrangement, dissatisfied. She tried lining the shells up by size. “Dawn didn’t even call. I sent cables everywhere I could think of to tell her about your mother’s death, and she didn’t even call. Until I saw her standing on the gallery, I didn’t even know if she’d gotten the message.”

From the beginning, Ferris had understood the roots of Cappy’s little tantrum. He paid lip service to it, even as he silently tried to make sense of what his mother had done. “Dawn made it clear some time ago that she does what she wants.”

“This is ridiculous. I don’t want to stay here even one night. This can’t have any bearing on your inheritance.”

“As old as he is, Spencer St. Amant’s still a worthy adversary. He’s often done what he damned well pleased and gotten away with it. I’m sure that’s why Mother chose him to oversee this little drama.”

She moved a large conch to the center and stepped back to view it. “Well, I know the law, and the law says your mother had no choice but to leave you a third of her estate.”

“Do we want a third, or do we want it all? There’s the controlling interest in Gulf Coast to consider.”

He watched as her hands went still. Gulf Coast Ship ping was the crown jewel of the Gerritsen family, a multimillion-dollar financial empire that was synonymous with the port of New Orleans and traffic on the Mississippi. Cappy’s own family was wealthy, but Gulf Coast, and Ferris’s connection to it, gave her the power in New Orleans society that she desired.

Ferris fully appreciated that desire. Cappy was an asset he had recognized long ago. When she chose, she could radiate breeding and charm, while simultaneously extolling her husband’s political virtues. Cappy, with her River Road plantation gentility, could work a room like a southern Jackie Kennedy.

He gave her a moment to consider before he continued. “I’ll talk to Spencer and insist he get this over with quickly. If he doesn’t agree, we could always take our chances and drive back to the city. But, of course, if we leave, we won’t know exactly what transpires here, will we?”

“You don’t miss a thing.”

He strolled to her side and leaned over to kiss her cheek. “You’ll stay, then?”

“As always, my choices seem limited.”

“Go ahead and unpack a few things. I’m going to explore and see what I can find out.”

When he reached the doorway, Ferris took one last look over his shoulder. Cappy was leaning over the chest once more, compulsively rearranging the shells. The room was simple, casual and quaint, as only rooms in a summer home can be. But there was nothing there, or in the sprawling twelve-room house, for that matter, that didn’t underscore the ambience of old money and tradition.

And there was nothing that didn’t reek of family now vanished forever.

Ferris had spent all the summers of his boyhood in this place. He hoped this was the last summer he would ever see it.

Dawn unpacked the few clothes she’d brought with her, then wandered the bedroom as memories stung her. Some things were much as they had been years before. The closet still held clothes she had worn as a teenager. A pink bathing suit with a pleated skirt lay in the bottom drawer of the pine dresser, faded rubber flip-flops tucked neatly under it. The view was one she remembered. She stopped at the window and gazed outside at a gray drizzle, leftovers from the earlier shower. The Gulf was just visible here, a wedge of turbulent water that mirrored her emotions.

She turned at the sound of rapping on her door. “Come in.”

Three men had helped shape her into the woman she had become. Ben was the third, her uncle Hugh the second. The man who appeared in her bedroom doorway was the first, and possibly the most important.

She nodded warily. “Daddy.”

Ferris smiled. “You must be my daughter. No one else calls me Daddy.”

She tapered her own smile into a warning. “If that keeps up, I’ll wish I hadn’t come home.”

“You should have called your mother, darling.”

“I know that.” She crossed the room and rose on tip toe to kiss his cheek. “I just needed some time alone to think about Grandmère’s death.”

“That’s one of your problems. You always think too much.”

She stepped away from him and shook her head. “This is the sixties. Women are allowed to think. You’d do well to remember that, if you want to be the next governor.”

“So you read, too. What do you think my chances are?”

Dawn thought his chances were good, but she thought telling him was a bad idea. The state of Louisiana would benefit from a humbler Ferris Gerritsen—but not as much as it would benefit from a more liberal man in the governor’s mansion. “What do you think?” she countered.

“I think you’d better face your mother and get it over with. She’s furious at you for not getting in touch.”

She put that aside for a moment, only too aware of the scene to come. “Daddy, do you know what this is about?”

“No, but I intend to find out. I don’t believe your grandmother really invited Nicky Reynolds and her family here.”

Dawn didn’t want to address that. Not yet. “Do you know why Ben Townsend was invited?”

His expression didn’t change, but then, his thoughts were rarely visible. “No. Are the two of you—”

She cut him off with a wave of her hand. “I haven’t seen him since…in a year.”

“Apparently your grandmother had a sense of humor I never appreciated.”

She stepped back to view him better. “Don’t dredge up old scores to settle with Ben.”

His expression was still pleasant. His voice was not. “Ben Townsend doesn’t belong in this house, and he doesn’t belong with you.”

That was undoubtedly true, but she didn’t want to give her father the satisfaction of knowing he was right. “That’s over now.”

“It should never have started.”

“If we could change history, there’d probably be more significant mistakes for both of us to worry about, wouldn’t there?”

His response was interrupted by a noise on the stairs. Dawn looked beyond her father to see her mother coming toward them. She added guilt to the carousel of feelings she had experienced in the past hour, and prepared herself. “Mother.”

Cappy Gerritsen stopped on the third step from the top, her posture regal. Dawn envisioned a younger Cappy, the prewar New Orleans debutante, gliding across the floor of her family’s River Road home with a volume of Emily Post on her head.

Cappy’s body was still gracefully curved and firm, and though she was a size larger than the six she claimed, neither age nor an extra fifteen pounds could destroy her basic beauty. No silver showed in her pale gold hair, and only twin frown lines between perfectly shaped eye brows signaled her basic dissatisfaction with life.

“Don’t badger Dawn, Cappy,” Ferris warned. “Just be glad she’s home.”

Dawn went to the head of the stairs, but her mother had made it impossible to embrace her. Cappy had al ways been three impossible steps away. “You look wonderful,” Dawn said. “Daddy’s plan to become the next Huey Long must agree with you.”

Cappy didn’t attempt to be polite. “You could have called.”

“I know.”

“Your grandmother dies, and you can’t even call your father or me to tell us you’re sorry?”

“Cappy.” Ferris joined his daughter. “Dawn and I have already discussed this.”

Dawn dredged up a smile. “I’ll go on record. I’m a failure as a daughter. Okay? Now can we go on to some thing else?”

“You disappeared off the face of the earth for a year. You didn’t call. You didn’t write. You didn’t visit. What are we to you, anyway?”

The smile died. “Right now you’re a living reminder of why I didn’t do any of those things.”

“Well, your grandmother’s not a reminder anymore, is she? Where were you when she needed you here?”

“You know where I was. I was in England, trying to find out if there was anywhere in this world where I could be something more than a member of this family.”

“You don’t have to be part of this family at all!”

Ferris stepped between them. “I’m not going to listen to any more of this.” He turned to Dawn. “There’s enough happening here without you and your mother going after each other.”

She shook her head in wonder. “My God, I’m a kid again.”

“Both of you are tired,” Ferris said. “This is a difficult time. Wait until you’ve rested before you talk.”

“I found Pelichere. She has drinks out for us.” Cappy started down the steps.

Dawn accepted Ferris’s brief hug, but she didn’t re turn it. “I’ll be down in a little while,” she said. “Let me comb my hair.”

She waited until he was gone before she took up her station at the window again. A year ago she had journeyed to another continent to banish her emotions, but now she knew she hadn’t succeeded. The child who had summered in this room was still inside her. The teenager who had longed for the love of her parents dwelt there, too. And the young woman who had given herself body and soul to Ben Townsend still cried out for understanding and forgiveness.

By the faint glimmer of a cloud-hazed moon, Pelichere swept the cottage gallery until not one grain of sand was lodged between the weathered boards. Dawn had offered to do it for her, but Pelichere had refused.

“I doubt anyone will even notice the fine job I’m doing,” Pelichere said, “but your mama would notice if the job wasn’t so fine. Mais yeah. She’d notice, just like she noticed the water stains on her bedroom ceiling, under the spot where the shingles blew off last week.”

Dawn leaned against a pillar, not at all anxious to go inside again. After an evening that had seemed endless, the house was quiet now, as if everyone had scurried to their rooms like ghost crabs hiding from shadows. She hoped they all stayed in their individual holes, particularly her parents. “Did she give you trouble?”

“How was I to know that storm would pry off shingles that haven’t budged in a century? At fifty-seven I’m supposed to climb up on the roof and inspect, shingle by shingle, every time it rains? I’d be up on the roof more than I’d be down on the ground. So maybe your parents should make their home on Grand Isle now that your grandmother, she’s dead. What shingles would blow off with Senator and Mrs. Ferris Lee Gerritsen living here?”

“Is it going to be their house after the will’s read? Seems to me Grandmère always said she was going to leave the house to you.”

“She said that, yeah. But there was more she didn’t say.”

A shrill whistle cut through the air. Pelichere turned and raised a hand in greeting as a pickup rattled along the oak-lined drive. “Joe and Izzy Means from down the road. Do you remember them, chère?”

“A little.”

Joe and Izzy got out, and Joe went around to the back of the truck, while Izzy trundled her substantial bulk up the path to the house. “I been cooking,” Izzy said, be fore she’d even reached the steps. “And cooking, cooking, cooking. It’s not right you should have to cook for the next four days, you with guests.”

Dawn was sure Izzy knew the so-called guests weren’t Pelichere’s. She supposed that was half the reason Izzy had arrived. In South Louisiana, keeping up with neighbors was still the favored evening recreation.

Pelichere introduced Dawn, and Dawn leaned over for Izzy’s enthusiastic kiss. Then she watched Joe, one ton to Izzy’s two, stagger up the path, well behind his wife, his arms loaded with grocery bags.

“What’d you go and do, Izzy?” Pelichere asked. “Drain the Gulf and cook everything left wriggling on the bottom?”

Pelichere scolded her friend while Joe made several trips from the truck. He left when he had finished, announcing that he was going down to the water to see what the dedicated fishermen still lining the beach were pulling in.

“Pelichere, you sit out here with Izzy,” Dawn said. “I’ll bring you both some coffee.”

Pelichere demurred, but Dawn ignored her. She re turned in a moment with cups and a pot of coffee Pelichere had left to drip in the kitchen. The coffee was thick and rich, black as goddamn, just the way Pelichere and Izzy liked it. Strong dark-roast coffee was as much a part of the local culture as seagulls and fishing luggers.

“So tell me, Peli,” Izzy said, stirring three spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee—for energy, “how’s it going?”

Dawn left them to chat.

The kitchen was one of the more modern rooms in the house. The original kitchen had been built behind the house as protection against fire and summer heat. The foundation was still visible fifty feet away, and a portion of one wall remained, blanketed by an orange-flowering trumpet vine that was often alive with the frantic darting of hummingbirds.

The new kitchen was large and airy. Tonight the blue gingham curtains billowed to the opposing rhythms of the wind and two ceiling fans. More wind blew through a screen door, carrying with it the scents of the distant Gulf and a closer tangle of honeysuckle.

Dawn sorted through the bags Joe had carried in. Nothing was labeled, but she recognized much of it. There were two gallons of gumbo, thick with small crabs and okra, Tupperware containers of jambalaya with chunks of dark sausage and green pepper, pounds of cold spiced shrimp and, although it was the end of the season, several pounds of boiled crawfish, as well. There was a freshly caught redfish, inviting Pelichere’s master touches, and close to a half gallon of freshly shucked oysters. “Good news, Grandmère,” she said as she stowed the last of it in the refrigerator. “It’s hot as hell and twice as much fun at your little house party, but at least we’ll eat like royalty.”

A voice sounded behind her. “Has anything been left out?”

She didn’t turn, but she knew the voice was Ben’s. “Still one big appetite looking to be satiated, aren’t you?” She dug back into the refrigerator and took out the boiled shrimp, holding it behind her. “Cocktail sauce?”

“Please.”

She opened a jar and sniffed it after Ben took the shrimp. “Peli’s own remoulade. You’re a lucky man.” She straightened and faced him. “This is supposed to be for tomorrow and after. Peli had food on the stove for over an hour tonight. Didn’t anybody tell you?”

“I ate.”

“I rest my case.”

“Join me?”

She determined to be casual and beat him at his own game.

“I don’t think so. I’m going to clean the kitchen before Peli gets back in here. There’s no reason for her to be waiting on us hand and foot. She’s as much Grandmère’s guest as the rest of us.”

He pulled out a chair beside the round oak table under a trio of windows. “It’s nice of you to be concerned.”

“But then, I’m a nice person, basically.”

“That wouldn’t be the first adjective that came to mind when someone looked at you nowadays.”

She cleared the sink of dirty dishes and ran a dish cloth around it. Then she filled it with hot soapy water, rolling up the sleeves of her shirt while she waited for him to elaborate.

“Once upon a time, a lead-in like that would have had you brimming with curiosity,” Ben said.

“Once upon a time? In a fairy tale, you mean?”

“It probably was a fairy tale.”

“Without the traditional ending.”

He elaborated, since she had refused to pick up on his cue. “The adjective that comes to mind now is determined.”

“Neat choice. Not positive, not negative. Ambiguous enough to please anybody who likes to free-associate.”

“I’ll give it a whirl. Determined to get through this ordeal. Determined to be polite. Determined not to show any feelings. Determined to point out how much you’ve changed.”

“Only parts of me have changed. None of the things you condemned have changed at all.” She slid plates into the sink and began to wash. “Condemned is a strong word.”

“You’re a journalist. You know it’s important to be accurate.”

She had finished the plates and glasses and started on the serving dishes before he spoke again. When he did, she realized he was standing beside her. He held out a perfectly shelled shrimp. “These are superb.”

“You’ve forgotten. We do some things well in Louisiana.”

He dangled it inches from her lips. “And a few of them aren’t illegal or immoral.”

She took the shrimp between her teeth, sucking it slowly until it was gone. “I’m surprised you could bear to bring yourself back here to the wellspring of all evil. You must have been unbearably curious about my grandmother’s invitation to risk your soul this way.”

“I was.” He didn’t move away. He leaned against the counter and crossed his arms. “Aren’t you?”

“More than a little.”

“Now that you’ve had a few hours to think, you must have a theory. Tell me about it.”

“Why?”

“Because I’d like to hear it.”

“And that should be reason enough?” She didn’t have to turn her head far to look at him. He was a foot away. Moonlight gleamed through the window and silvered the lock of wheat-colored hair falling over his forehead. “Shall I tell you one of the ways I’ve changed? I don’t turn to butter inside anymore when a man tells me he wants something from me. Now I expect reasons before I do anything. Good ones. Then I still think it over.”

“I didn’t mean to patronize you.”

“Didn’t you? Then you’ve changed, too.”

“I have. You’re absolutely right.”

“I’ll tell you my theory because I don’t mind sharing it.” She shook her hair back over her shoulders. One strand resisted and clung to her damp cheek. “I think my grandmother had a sense of the dramatic that none of us ever appreciated. I think she must have died with a smile on her lips, imagining the scene we’re playing here, all of us, not just you and me. She cast the most unlikely people she could bring together, then she pulled strings to be sure the play hit the big time. And somewhere, she’s watching us now and clapping her hands.”

He tucked the rebellious strand over her ear so deftly that he was finished before she could protest the intimacy. “In other words, you have no more idea than the rest of us why she invited us here.”

“None.”

“And your uncle?”

She finished the last bowl before she spoke. “Well, I doubt Uncle Hugh is clapping along.”

“I don’t know. Father Hugh had a sense of the dramatic to rival your grandmother’s. The larger his audience, the more effective he was.”

“His death was particularly effective, then. His audience was worldwide, thanks to the press.”

“If effective is a synonym for tragic.”

“And some of the people who mourned him mourned more than the death of a saint. They mourned a man they’d always loved.” She pulled the stopper and let the water drain away.

“I know.”

“Do you?” She rinsed her hands and dried them, rubbing Jergens lotion into them in a final ritual. “Did you love the man or the saint, Ben? Because they weren’t the same.”

“Maybe that’s part of the reason we’re here. To discover how much of each he was.”

“Why are you here?”

“To discover how much of each I am.”

She realized she had been avoiding his eyes. She gazed into them now, searching for answers. Nothing there explained his words. “Would you mind putting the shrimp in the refrigerator when you’re finished?”

“Of course not.”

“Then I’ll see you in the morning.”

Upstairs, her room was still hot. At sixteen she had been far too reserved to sleep without clothes, no matter what the temperature. Now she peeled off everything and stretched out against the relatively cool surface of the sheet. She didn’t expect to sleep at all, but sleep came quickly. And in her dreams she heard applause.

CHAPTER FOUR

Dawn knew she wasn’t the daughter her mother had hoped for. As an infant she had cried frequently. As a little girl she had been a timid shadow who suffered from nightmares and fears that almost paralyzed her. She had spent many of her early years with her grandmother, and only Aurore’s patience and praise had helped build her courage.

Aurore’s huge house on Prytania Street in New Or leans had been filled with wonder. The rooms had been pools of light, with walls painted in seascape pastels and ceilings so high they floated like clouds above her head. Satyrs’ faces had hidden in the decorative plaster arches that separated the rooms, and gnomes and elves had peeked from the gleaming legs of tables and chests.

Her own room had had cypress floors so slick with wax that she could skate across them in ankle socks. Aurore had agreed that violet would be a lovely color for the walls and daffodil yellow exactly the right choice for bedspread and curtains. Dawn could go to her room when the world seemed too large or small and come out to find it was just the right size again.

Her room, the house, the gardens of camellias and wisteria, none of it would have meant anything if Aurore hadn’t been there to share it. Her earliest memory was of sitting in her grandmother’s lap in the courtyard just off Aurore’s bedroom. The sun had been warm, and a breeze had tickled her cheek. Bees had buzzed around Lady Banksia roses as her grandmother whispered their secrets.

“Bees,” she’d said, “only make noise to warn you away. Flying from flower to flower is their work. They’re asking you to let them do it. See? They’re saying please.”

She’d listened in the haven of her grandmother’s arms, and the bees had no longer frightened her. Aurore had smelled like the flowers in her courtyard. Her hair had been laced with light, and her eyes had been the pale blue of Dawn’s own. Dawn had known that in her grand mother’s arms, she would always be protected.

There was no protection now. Grandmère was gone, and in her place were questions about a life that, on the surface, had never seemed extraordinary. But what an extraordinary thing her death had become.

Dawn lay in bed and watched morning light creep through the sheer curtains of the cottage bedroom. She heard a soft rapping at her door, guaranteed not to wake her if conflict and turmoil hadn’t done so already. She pictured Ben on the other side, the Ben who had talked with her in the kitchen last night.

She rose and put on a robe, but her father was at the door. She stepped aside to let him through, but he shook his head. “I’m going for a walk on the beach. Would you like to come?”

She was touched that, despite everything, Ferris would want her company. So rare had their private moments been that she had kept them in a mental scrap book throughout her childhood. “I’ll meet you downstairs in a minute.”

He kissed her cheek before he left. She fumbled as she dressed, all thumbs and anticipation until she realized exactly how she was behaving. She was twenty-three, and she was still thrilled by a few minutes of Ferris Gerritsen’s attention.

At the last moment, she grabbed her camera. Capturing some people’s souls on film took studios of equipment, elaborate backdrops and countless heart-to-heart talks. Others could be frozen for all time with the care less snap of a Polaroid. She didn’t have studios full of equipment to draw from here at the beach. But she wanted some photographs of her father at this critical juncture in his life. She could hope for a miracle.

They were on the beach before he uttered more than a few idle words. “Last night was a strain.”

“For everybody.” She walked on Ferris’s right, away from the waves. She was terrified of deep water, and had been as long as she could remember. Self-help books hadn’t lessened her fears. She took showers instead of baths, and conveniently got her period when she was forced to visit a beach. The phobia was an odd one for the heiress to a shipping company.

Ferris had never understood her fear, but he pandered to it now. “I imagine you don’t think well of me for the way I behaved with the Reynolds family.”

Dawn loved her father’s voice. Rich, slurred and art fully southern, his accent was more North Louisiana than New Orleans. It was bourbon and branch water on a summer night, a voice that could round the edges of the sharpest conflict. She thought of her hitchhiker and understood why she had initially found him appealing.

“No, I didn’t,” she agreed. “You were pompous and high-handed. Did you think well of yourself?”

“There’s more here than you know.”

“More than not liking the Reynoldses and Phillip be cause of the color of their skin?”

“I’ve always had colored friends. I’ve eaten with colored people, slept under the same roof, kissed their babies and their grandmothers.”

She lifted her camera and wished she could record his voice on film, the sincerity, the arrogance. He paused for her, but didn’t smile, as if having his photograph taken were natural.

“You won’t go down in history as a friend to the civil-rights movement,” she said when she had finished.

“That’s right. I won’t go down in history as a man who supported what he didn’t believe in.”

She gave him credit for honesty. His values had al ways been conservative. He believed in states’ rights. He represented thousands of people who believed just as he did, and he was a better, fairer representative than many of his colleagues.

But was he a racist? In his anger at being trapped by the wishes of a dead woman, he had acted like one last night. But Dawn believed her father lacked the passion for true racism. He was sloppy-sentimental about the Negro servants who had tended him as a child. Even now, he paid for a nursing home for one of them, al though the family debt to her had ended long ago. And he felt obligations to his Negro constituents. He wanted their schools to be good ones, their businesses to thrive. And now that integration was sweeping the state, despite his belief that separate but equal was fair enough, he was encouraging citizens to abide by the law.

The moment seemed too important to spoil. And for what purpose? How could Dawn change a mind made up by years of experiences and propaganda she would never understand?

“What do you mean, there’s more than I know?” she said.

He stooped to retrieve a piece of driftwood. She snapped another photograph of him with his arm extended, reaching for something outside the camera’s range. If the photograph turned out well, she would save it, not give it to him to use in his campaign.

He rubbed his thumbs along the driftwood’s surface as they continued walking. “I’ve never told you this, but I met Nicky Valentine years ago, during the war. Phillip was a little boy then, and she was singing at a club in Casablanca. She’d gone there to escape the occupation of Paris.”

“Casablanca? Did Sam play it again?”

“Don’t be cute, darling.” He tossed the driftwood into the waves.

Dawn refused to follow it with her eyes. “What were you doing there?”

“I was on the Augusta when the Allies took the coast of Morocco, and in the city later, after the French troops surrendered.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I’ve never been one to trade war stories. There wasn’t a lot about killing and waiting to be killed that was pleasant to remember.”

She was impressed with his candor. This reluctance to discuss particulars was something she hadn’t known about her father, something that didn’t fit with his political image of decorated war hero and patriot. “And you met Nicky?”

“I did. So did half the American men in the city.”

She stopped. “What are you trying to say?”

“Nicky was a woman alone with a child. She was light-skinned enough to come back to this country and try to be any race she chose. She was looking for a man with a soft heart and a savior complex….” He said no more.

Dawn shook her head. “Preposterous. Nicky had a son with dark skin. You’re saying she intended to abandon him?”

“There were schools in Europe where she could have left him. No one would have been the wiser.”

She continued walking. “I guess whether you were right or wrong about her intentions doesn’t matter now.”

“It mattered then. She went after someone close to me, someone weak enough to be tempted. I told her I saw through her scheme. And I told her I wouldn’t stand for it.”

She could imagine that scene. It left her feeling distinctly uneasy. “Who was it?”

“I can’t say. I suppose I’m still protecting his reputation. But he left the country after I confronted Nicky, and I’m the one she held responsible. I’m the one she vowed to get even with.”

“Don’t tell me you think this has something to do with Grandmère’s will?”

“Nicky Valentine’s a woman capable of extracting revenge. Maybe years later she got to your grandmother and told her lies or made demands. I don’t know. I haven’t put it together yet.”

They had turned back toward the cottage before she spoke again. “Why did you tell me this?”

“So you won’t be shocked if any of it comes out.”

She didn’t believe him. What had he really hoped for? That her respect for Nicky would diminish? She realized she’d better set him straight. “I’m surprised you knew Nicky during the war. But no matter what happened then, I don’t believe she’s after some kind of perverted revenge. And how could you believe it, what—twenty years later? Nicky must have had men falling in love with her every day. She’s still one of the most stunning women I’ve ever seen.”

“She’s a stunning colored woman.”

“And you’re blinded by your prejudices.”

“No more than you’re blinded by idealism.” He put his arm around her shoulders.

She had expected rejection. This attempt to draw her closer touched her. “Whatever the history, can’t you forget your feelings for a little while? Be the Ferris Gerritsen who gets himself elected to every office he runs for. Pump a few hands, smile a few smiles.”

“There’s no one here who would vote for me, darling. Not even my own little girl.”

“That all depends on who’s running against you.”

He squeezed her shoulder before he released her. “I don’t know what your grandmother thought she was doing, but I’m going to insist that Spencer read the en tire will this morning.”

“Have you talked to him?”

“He’s made himself unavailable to me.”

“I think there are going to be more surprises ahead.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. But why would Grandmère call us together in this remarkable way un less she had more plans for us? So far, nothing’s come out of our being together. There’s got to be more in store.”

“I’m leaving by noon.”

Dawn snapped one final photograph. Her father’s arms were folded, and his expression was supremely confident. Only rarely did anyone get the best of Ferris Lee. But in life, Aurore Gerritsen had been every bit as determined. And clearly, even in death, her determination had not faltered.

The only room in the cottage that was large enough to hold everyone was a screened porch, referred to as the morning room, which looked over a patch of yellow chamomile rimmed with magnolias and oaks. Storm clouds were gathering, but the occasional shaft of sun light beamed brightly in protest.

The bucolic setting was a touch of humor in a situation that merited more. As a journalist, Ben had grown used to insinuating himself into situations where he wasn’t wanted. He could not recall a time, however, when he had been so completely uncomfortable. He couldn’t dredge up enough sanctimony to suit the occasion. The Gerritsens didn’t want him here, and their objection was fair. They didn’t know that he was here to claim more than whatever small token Dawn’s grand mother had left him.

From his wicker vantage point in the corner, he watched the others straggle in. He remembered Dawn’s theory about Aurore’s sense of the dramatic. Whether it was true or not, the participants in this odd event were players in a pageant of Louisiana history, and he knew enough about all of them to appreciate it.

Dawn’s mother took her place in an overstuffed chair in the corner. She was sugarcane and old Creole blood lines that rivaled Aurore Gerritsen’s own. Cappy was a thriving symbol of a way of life that had passed on al most a century before.

He lifted his hand to Nicky and Jake, who settled across the room from Cappy. He knew a little of Nicky’s background from things that Phillip had told him. She had spent her childhood years watching the birth of jazz from a house on Basin Street, near today’s Club Valentine. She had gone on to Paris and later New York, but it had been the New Orleans in her voice that made her a star. Phillip’s only claims to Louisiana were his mother’s heritage and his recent marriage to a New Orleans woman, a fact Ben had discovered last night.

Jake’s roots were nowhere near as exotic as Nicky’s. Born into a family of sharecroppers, he had pulled him self from poverty by leaving Louisiana and venturing into a world where sometimes, at least, the color of a man’s skin was less important than what he was made of. But after his success was assured, he and Nicky had moved back to the state of their birth, with its deeply rooted culture and its enthusiasm for her talent.

Pelichere was a Cajun, descended from those brave souls, thrust from their homes in Acadia, who had found their way to the Louisiana bayous and a way of life rich in color and tradition. Ben liked her. She was as down-to-earth as the life she led. She, along with Spencer St. Amant, seemed perfectly willing to cut through the bull shit the rest of them wallowed in.

Finally there were Ferris Gerritsen and his daughter, the last to arrive. The senator was a mixture of his mother’s Creole blood and his father Henry’s perversion of it. From the distance of half a century, it was difficult to understand what Henry Gerritsen had offered a woman like Aurore Le Danois. He had been descended from a “Kaintuck” who floated a flatboat down the Mississippi, sold it for lumber in New Orleans, then started a business brokering boats for others. Somewhere on the trip, at some saloon or floating whorehouse, he had picked up Henry’s grandmother, and nine months later, Henry’s father had been born.

Ben had heard that story from Father Hugh. Apparently Henry had enjoyed telling it to his children, per haps because his lack of breeding humiliated his wife. The story had given Ben a certain understanding of Ferris. If anyone could understand Ferris.

And what of Ferris’s daughter? What was there to understand about Dawn? She smiled at Ben before seating herself ten feet from his chair, and the smile curdled his blood. She wore shorts that bared her legs and belly button and curved over hips shaped like an invitation. Everything about her seemed calculated to prove that she was nobody’s little girl.

He missed the vulnerability of the Dawn he had known, but this new woman intrigued him just as much. He imagined traces of the vulnerability were still there, layered under a new self-confidence and independence. But she had learned how to protect herself. He just hoped she had learned from whom.

The pageant ended with Spencer, another gracious remnant of New Orleans’s splendored past, who had come to the morning room with Pelichere. Now that everyone had arrived, he rose. Spencer stooped, as if he carried a heavy burden, but he seemed determined to see the morning through.

“I’m happy everybody stayed,” he said. “That was Mrs. Gerritsen’s wish. The rest of her wishes are just as specific. I’ll elaborate on them now. The reading of this will is going to be conducted exactly the way I promised Mrs. Gerritsen that it would be. I will not deviate in even one small detail.”

Ben admired Spencer as he spoke. A good gust of Betsy-generated wind would send the old man spinning, yet he possessed a composure that Ben could envy. He supposed it came with age and battles won. There was no way to fabricate it. Father Hugh had possessed it, too.

Ben listened as Spencer repeated the conditions he had communicated to them last night. It was all so mysterious, yet everything fit with what Ben knew of Aurore. Like Spencer’s, Aurore’s looks had been deceiving. He wished he could have known her as a young woman. What had Dawn taken from her grand mother, other than the English equivalent of her name?

“Before I continue,” Spencer said, “I’ll point out that Mrs. Gerritsen was very specific. You are to be in residence here, and there are to be no exceptions. If you need to leave for a brief period, please arrange it with me.”

Ferris got to his feet. “Everyone here has better things to do than play games with a dead woman. My mother won’t know if her wishes are carried out. You must be aware that these conditions can be challenged in court. What judge would believe my mother was competent when she made this will?”

“It’s possible you’re right, Senator. You could certainly attempt a challenge. You might win. Of course, there are a number of people who spent time with your mother during her final days who would swear to her competency.”

Ben watched Dawn touch her father’s arm. Reluctantly, Ferris sat down. “I’m sorry,” Dawn said to Spencer, “but you have to admit, this is unusual. You’ll have to give us all a little time to adjust.”

He smiled at her, only at her. “Shall we get on with the first bequests, then?”

Dawn looked around the room, as if counting votes. “Is anyone leaving?” Her gaze stopped at Ben.

He shook his head slowly. She lifted one brow be fore she turned away from him. “Shoot, Spencer.”

He looked down at the document in his hands. “As a matter of fact, my dear, the first bequests go to you, and to Ben.” He reached inside his coat pocket and pulled out two small boxes. He stepped forward and held out one to Dawn, then moved across the room to give the other to Ben.

“Any rules on how or when to open this?” Dawn asked.

Spencer slipped his papers inside his jacket. “None. And now we’re done for the rest of the day. We’ll meet here tomorrow morning at the same time.”

“Done?” This time Cappy stood. “Really, Ferris is right. I have a house to look after, and commitments I’ve made. What’s the purpose of cooping us up like rats in a cage?”

Spencer bent his head, but his words were clear. “It may take some time to discover the purpose.”

“I think my mother-in-law lost her mind, and you assisted.” Cappy swept out of the room, much as she had swept in. Ferris was slower to exit. He bent his head to Dawn’s for a moment, then shook it after she opened the box, as if to say he agreed with his wife. He took one last, assessing look around the room before he followed Cappy.

Ben kept his eyes on Dawn. She had opened her box, and the contents seemed to fascinate her. The box was the size a jeweler might use for a necklace or a brooch. Like his, it didn’t appear to have been wrapped or marked with any emblem.

“So what are you planning to do?”

Ben realized Phillip was at his side. “What should I do?”

“Open it, and see what’s going on.”

Ben flipped off the lid. A key, old and tarnished, lay inside. “How did Mrs. Gerritsen know what I’d always wanted?”

Nicky and Jake came over to examine the key. Ben glanced at Dawn and was surprised to find her looking at him. She held up another key, smaller than his.

Phillip stepped aside so that Ben and Dawn were looking straight at each other. “Do you suppose the two keys are related?” he asked her.

Dawn rose. “Maybe they’re related, and maybe they aren’t.” She strolled toward Ben. “Would you like to see mine? Or does the fact that it’s been in my hand make you squeamish?”

“You’d be surprised what I can tolerate.”

Dawn dropped her key in his hand. “Mean anything to you?”

He glanced down. “No more than mine. Was your grandmother some sort of a practical joker?”

“Never.”

“Does my key look familiar to you?” He held out his hand.

She took back her own and stared at his for a moment. “A key is a key.”

“It usually leads somewhere.”

“Not in Aurore’s Wonderland,” she said. “Mine’s too small to go to a door. And yours is too old to go to any of the doors in this house. All the locks were updated years ago.”

“All?”

“I think so. Peli?” She motioned for Pelichere to join them. “Would Ben’s key fit any of the locks in the cottage?”

Pelichere squinted, then shook her head. “No.”

“Maybe the keys are symbolic.” Ben cushioned his in the palm of his hand. “The old and the new?”

“Mine’s not new,” Dawn said. “It’s small, but it’s old.”

“The large and the small? Does this mean anything to you?” When she shook her head, he shrugged. “It appears we have two keys to nothing.” Ben dropped his in his shirt pocket.

“No. My grandmother had a reason for this. I know she did,” Dawn said.

Silently Ben congratulated her. As awkward as the situation had to be, she was trying to make sense of it. “We share some history. Maybe the keys are related to that.”

“There’s nothing between us,” Dawn said. “Except that once you called me a murderer.”

“Do you really want to talk about that now?” Ben asked.

Dawn glanced at Nicky, who had silently been taking in the conversation. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Reynolds,” she said. “This must seem crazy to you. Apparently this has nothing to do with you and your family.”

“I think you and Ben might need some time to cool off. Don’t you?”

Nicky might be a stranger to the Gerritsens, but she was already taking charge of the situation. As Ben watched, Dawn nodded. Then she turned to him. “You pride yourself on getting the facts straight. Tell Spencer I’m going for a walk, will you? God knows I wouldn’t want to be forced to give back my key.”

The garconnière was one of the few original out buildings still left on the Gerritsen property. Once the house and land had belonged to Pelichere’s great-uncle. Dawn wasn’t entirely certain now if a story her grand mother had told about riding out a childhood hurricane inside its walls was fact, or a fiction she had embroidered over the years. But she did know that her grandmother had purchased the property in the twenties.

As a child, Dawn had not been allowed to play in most of the outbuildings, some of which had been torn down to protect her. But the garconnière, like the house, was built of bousillage, an adobelike mixture of mud and Spanish moss packed between cypress boards. Traditionally, a garconnière was a place for bachelors in Cajun families to live until they were married, usually an attic reached by stairs from the end of the gallery.

Perhaps the architect of the cottage had been wealthier than the typical Grand Isle resident, or perhaps he had been blessed with so many rowdy sons that he was persuaded by a pleading wife to build the structure far away. Whatever the reason, the garconnière perched at the edge of the Gerritsen property. The building was narrow and two-story, with an outside stairway leading to sleeping quarters. The low-ceilinged bottom story had been used as work space, and the remnants of a primitive forge still took up half of it.

Each summer Dawn had escaped to the nineteenth-century bachelor pad to play. There had been armoires full of old-fashioned resort wear, and photographs and mementos to admire. Some of the photographs had been of her grandmother, a doe-eyed young woman with piles of hair and a waist to rival Scarlett O’Hara’s. The photographs had been so significant to the young Dawn. How important to be the one taking them, to steal tiny pieces of life and preserve them forever.

She hadn’t been inside in years. Vines obscured much of the building now, along with overgrown ligustrum and sasanqua, and she thought of it only when a long afternoon of childhood memories threatened to overwhelm her.

The hours after receiving the key had been quiet ones, as if everyone had agreed that peace could be achieved only by silence. After her walk, she had re treated to her room and stared out at her personal smidgen of Gulf. Bits of her childhood had claimed her. The day her uncle had tried to teach her to swim, and she had sobbed in his arms at her own cowardice. The day, the rare and glorious day, when her mother had awakened her for a breakfast picnic, and all the things that had always been wrong between them had disappeared for the morning.

Sometime after noon, she had thought of the garconnière. Sometime after that, she had thought of the lock that had probably never been changed because the building was so well hidden that vandalism was unlikely.

It was nearly four before she gathered her strength to find Ben and ask him to go with her to investigate. She didn’t lack courage, just the desire to be in his presence. Curiosity was stronger.

She didn’t find Ben, but she found Phillip on the front gallery, rocking away his tension. He was a hand some man, with an easy smile and dark eyes that seemed to be taking the world’s measure. She had always ad mired his writing. He didn’t know how to waste words, and he didn’t know how to tell a story that was sentimental or simplistic. Her uncle had been the one to introduce her to his work.

She folded her arms and lounged against a pillar. “I might know what Ben’s key fits. There’s a building on the property, the original garconnière. The top story had an old-fashioned lock.”

“What about yours?”

“Mine might fit something inside.”

“Maybe you need Ben after all.”

“Might be he needs me, too. Who knows what my key will unlock, or who’ll benefit?” She saw Ben standing at the door. “I was just telling Phillip I might know what your key unlocks.” She told him what she had told Phillip.

“I’m willing to give it a try.” Ben pushed open the screen door but was careful not to let it slam shut. Phillip stood and stretched. “Would you like to come?” Ben asked him.

Phillip looked from one to the other. “I don’t think so. Likely to get me shot,” Phillip said. “Old Ferris Lee sees me disappearing into the undergrowth with his only daughter, I’m a dead man, and no jury in Louisiana would give a damn.”

She had to smile at the drawl Phillip switched on and off at will, even though there was nothing funny about what was essentially the truth. “I’m planning to tell old Ferris Lee where I’m going and why,” she said.

She found her parents in the dining room. Her mother was polishing silver. Her father was reading the New Or leans States-Item and finishing what looked to be the most recent of a dozen cigarettes.

The picture was one of domestic bliss. She tried to remember how often she had seen her parents this way. At home they were seldom in the same room unless they were giving a party. Despite that apparent lack of intimacy, she had no reason to believe they were unhappy together. On the contrary, they seemed perfectly suited. Her father’s career had become her mother’s, too. Had she married a simple attorney or businessman, Cappy’s life would have revolved around bettering their position socially, perhaps striving toward the day when her husband would be declared king of carnival, an honor truly understood only in New Orleans.

But Cappy had married Ferris Lee, and had been given more to strive for. First the state senate, now the governor’s mansion. There was even talk of a run for the presidency somewhere down the road. Ferris lacked George Wallace’s sneer and vicious rhetoric, but he shared his political and social views. How many of the women who had worshiped President Kennedy’s smile, if not his politics, would come flocking to Ferris Lee Gerritsen for both?

When she realized her parents were waiting, Dawn explained where she was going.

“I don’t understand why you’re pursuing this,” her mother said.

Dawn picked up a platter and rubbed her thumb across the edge. “Just think of it as emotional silver-polishing.”

Ferris stubbed out his cigarette. “Your mother and I are going out for dinner.”

Dawn was surprised. “What does Spencer say?”

“There won’t be a problem, though I’ve got half a mind not to come back anyway.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“You don’t know what I mean, darling.” He lit an other cigarette.

She turned to Cappy. “Use your charm, Mother. Make sure he comes back.”

Cappy gave a real smile for the first time since their reunion. “You always ask me for the impossible.”

Dawn couldn’t remember ever asking Cappy for any thing except her love. But perhaps that was exactly what Cappy had meant.

Ben was alone on the gallery when she returned. “I’m ready if you are,” she said.

“Let’s get it over with.”

The path was as badly overgrown as she’d feared. Morning glory and creeper screened dead and dying trees, and the still air was heavy with the scent of decay.

They reached the garconnière without having exchanged one word. Dawn gestured toward the steps. “I’ll go first.” At the top, she stepped aside and gestured toward the door. “Voilà.”

With no ceremony, he took the key from his pocket and thrust it into the lock. He turned it, and the door swung open.

He faced her. “Surprised?”

“More than a little.” She entered first, since he was obviously waiting for her. Her eyes adjusted slowly. The room was the size of a French Quarter bar. There were six windows, old-fashioned double-hung panes grimy with dirt. Everything was just as she remembered it; in fact, it was hard to believe anyone had been inside in a decade.

Ben whistled softly. “Such wealth. How am I going to get this back to San Francisco?”

The idea was so ludicrous that she had to laugh. “Shipping the dust will eat up your life savings.”

“Got your key handy?”

“See anything I could unlock?”

He went to the nearest window and used a corner of a faded green curtain to dust it. The room grew subtly brighter, and she followed his lead, until all the windows had been wiped down. “I guess we’d better start some where and work our way around the room.”

“Did your grandmother ever throw anything away?”

“Apparently not.” Dawn approached an old chest with a cracked marble top. All the drawers opened easily. Something rustled in the corner of one, and she slammed it shut. “Mice.”

“If that’s the worst we find, we’ll be lucky.”

“Please.” She tried an armoire, packed full of filmy, fragile dresses spanning half a century in style. “There are museums that would love to have these.”

“I haven’t seen anything that needs a key.”

“We’re not done.”

She rummaged through boxes of dusty books and mementos, while Ben methodically examined furniture. They had almost progressed around the room before Dawn spotted the trunk. She remembered it well be cause it was the same one that had held all the family photographs. Some of the photographs were still there, but now half the space was taken up by a small leather suitcase.

Dawn sat cross-legged and lifted the case to her lap. She traced her grandmother’s initials, gold against dark blue. “Look.”

Ben squatted beside her. “Locked?”

She reached inside her pocket for the key. The lock opened as easily as the door. She lifted out a black leather journal. The pages were edged with gold, like a Bible. The first page was inscribed in fountain pen. The script was rounded and carefully formed. With childish whimsy, an ink blot had been turned into a tiny spider.

She was puzzled. She was halfway through the page before she realized who it belonged to. “Ben, this is Uncle Hugh’s journal. I didn’t even know he’d kept one.”

She looked up. Ben’s eyes were shadowed. “I’ve wondered what happened to it.”

“Then you knew?”

“I lived with him that last summer. I saw him writing in it sometimes. When I got out of the hospital and went back…to the rectory, I looked for it. But all his things were gone by then.”

She leafed through it. “It starts when he’s about ten, I think, and it’s pretty sporadic. But look, it’s nearly filled. Almost like…” She didn’t want to go on.

Ben finished for her. “Like his life and the pages ran out together.”

She didn’t want to think about that. “There’s more.”

She set the journal beside her and took out a lavender metal box decorated with pansies and violets. Inside, she found a thick stack of letters tied with a black rib bon.

The letters were more faded than the journal. In the dim light, she was forced to squint to make out words. “This one’s addressed to a Father Grimaud. Look, it’s in French.”

He squinted, too. “I studied Latin.”

“My French is acceptable.”

“Phillip’s is perfect, if you need a translator. Who are they from?”

She turned the first one over. “Lucien Le Danois.” She looked up at Ben. “He was my great-grandfather.”

“So what does this have to do with me?”

There hadn’t been time to ask herself that question. Now Dawn realized how important it was. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

He shrugged.

Dawn realized she was hugging the letters to her chest. “If Grandmère had only wanted me to have these, she would have given me both of the keys. Or she wouldn’t have bothered with keys at all. Spencer would have handed me the suitcase this morning on the porch. Do you see? Obviously she wanted us to work together.”

“What right do I have to delve into your family history?”

“I don’t know. Do you have any theories?”

“I haven’t had time to concoct any.” He stood. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to take the letters back to the house and read them.” She stood, too. She met his eyes, and for a moment she didn’t speak. Then she held out her uncle’s journal. “You take this.”

“Why?”

“Think about it. Grandmère wanted us both to find the case. Obviously she wanted you to be part of this. You don’t speak French, but you were with my uncle when he died.”

“Why do you want me to be part of this?”

“I don’t. But my grandmother did. Besides, don’t you need something to do besides sit around and judge me and my family?” Reluctantly she inched the journal closer to him.

He took it with something that seemed remarkably like gratitude.

“So, you want to share what we find at breakfast to morrow?” she asked.

“If we find anything.”

She put the empty suitcase back in the trunk and led the way out. The sky had darkened by the time they emerged. They had come in silence, but now that seemed intolerable. Her grandmother’s strange offering had tilted the balance between them. Dawn no longer knew exactly what to think.

“Betsy’s still threatening,” she said as they started back to the cottage. “Maybe nobody will be able to stay here the full four days. We might have to evacuate. I wonder what that would do to the will….”

“Nobody’s forecasting she’ll come ashore here.”

“Mistakes have been made before.”

They parted inside, their supply of small talk used up. Dawn watched Ben disappear into the kitchen, perhaps to find Phillip and report on this turn of events. She took the letters upstairs and set them beside her bed. A quick scan had shown that they covered a period of years. A good start on translating them would take her into the late hours of the night.

This new link with her grandmother was a surprise and a pleasure. There was really very little that she knew about her grandmother’s family or Aurore’s early life. Who was the woman who had married Henry Gerritsen and borne his two sons? Who was the woman who, contrary to the social mores of her time, had helped build Gulf Coast Shipping into a multimillion-dollar corporation?

Dawn washed and changed for supper; even the knowledge that she would have to face Ben over the table had taken a back seat to the letters and what she might find there.

By the time she went down to eat, rain pelted the roof and thunder shook the rafters. That, too, seemed unimportant.

Alone at last for the evening, she dressed for bed. Then she picked up her grandmother’s bequest.

“You were a crafty old lady.” She hugged the letters as she had earlier. “What was it that you couldn’t tell me yourself, Grandmère?”

She settled into bed and set to work.

CHAPTER FIVE

Bonne Chance lay just across Barataria Bay, not an easy or short journey from Grand Isle, since marsh, water and one ambivalent hurricane separated them. But getting there, even in bad weather, was possible, if you drove back toward New Orleans and cut east to the Mississippi River. Bonne Chance was a one-dictator town, home of Largo Haines, a crony of Ferris’s. It had also been the final home of Hugh Gerritsen.

“I don’t understand why dinner with Largo couldn’t wait until this fiasco at the beach is finished,” Cappy said, peering out the windshield as sheets of rain washed the blacktop in front of them. “We’ve been in the car for hours. We could have had him up to New Orleans next week. I could have made sure everything was perfect.”

“Largo doesn’t care about perfect. He knows exactly how far away we were. He cares whether I come when he whistles, like a well-trained Labrador.”

“Well, apparently he’s got nothing to worry about.”

“Nothing at all. I’ll play bird dog, and the minute I don’t need Largo Haines, I’ll chew him up like an old shankbone.”

“There it is.” Cappy pointed to a discreet sign illuminated by floodlights.

They turned into a driveway that in better weather would have been comfortably familiar. Now the landscape was a thousand shades of forbidding gray, and the Corinthian columns of the Bonne Chance Country Club offered no guarantees that the building would withstand a hurricane.

Inside the marble-tiled foyer, they checked their coats. Ferris swept Cappy from head to toe with critical eyes, but not a golden hair was out of place. Her hat was still perched at a jaunty angle, and the veil that matched the dark red of her suit brushed her forehead.

At moments like these he admired her most, and, as always, on the heels of admiration came desire. These days his sexual needs were few and easily taken care of, and he rarely bothered to spend the night in Cappy’s bedroom. Still, he had never ceased to want his wife when she was most untouchable. Now, as she straightened her skirt, he felt himself growing aroused.

“I’ll never understand why Largo doesn’t insist they redecorate this place,” she said.

“Maybe he likes it.”

She checked the circlet of diamonds above her left breast and brushed away an imaginary speck of lint. “Bamboo furniture and chartreuse walls? I half expect to see a native in a loincloth fanning the guests.”

“Not everyone has your patrician tastes, darling.” He took her arm. “And not a word of criticism.” He brushed his hip against hers as he led her into the dining room.

Largo was waiting at a table in the corner. There were no guests seated near him, but he wasn’t alone. The club manager stood at Largo’s right, his posture deferential. “I’m telling Charles here that we’ll have some crabs and a round of dry martinis before we order.” Largo waved Charles away and stood to embrace Cappy. Ferris watched the byplay and admired—as he simultaneously detested—the finesse with which Largo had already put everyone in the room in their respective places.

He shook hands and grinned when his own moment arrived, then held Cappy’s chair until she was settled. Seated across from Largo, he examined the man who could help install him in the governor’s mansion.

At fifty-nine, Largo had thinning hair that was the ivory of his suit, and his florid face was unremarkable. Raisin-dark eyes snapping with vitality were the first hint that he wasn’t someone to be taken for granted. His hands were even more revealing. Largo’s fingers were gnarled and knotted, yet he used them freely, as if he had an enormous tolerance for pain. More than once, Ferris had dreamed of Largo’s hands.

“The crabs are good,” Largo said. “Catch ‘em right here in Plaquemines.”

“How have you been, Largo?” Ferris asked. “Does Betsy have you worried?”

“Never yet seen a storm I couldn’t ride out. We might get a little damage. Some of the worst shacks’ll go.” He shrugged. “As good a way to clean up the place as any.”

He began to pepper Cappy with questions, which she answered with confident charm. Ferris knew she considered Largo a member of the overseer class, but she was political to the core and perfectly willing to abandon her snobbery on the surface if it suited Ferris’s purposes. And cultivating Largo suited them.

The crabs arrived, and Largo continued to chat as he twisted the shells into sections and dug out the meat with his fingers. The performance was a classic one, visceral and primitive, but most of all repugnant, because Largo obviously derived more pleasure from gutting the crabs than from the flavor of their meat.

Cappy politely worked on one with her knife and fork, and Ferris did, too. His mind drifted to a long ago night under the summer stars, when he and Hugh had sneaked away to the beach at Grand Isle with a dozen boiled hard-shells and half as many bottles of beer. Two young men with their lives ahead of them, they had for gotten their differences. By the time they staggered home at dawn, no secrets had been left between them.

The waiter returned, and at Largo’s recommendation they ordered turtle soup and broiled pompano. The meal progressed in lazy Louisiana fashion, with impeccable service and perfectly seasoned food. One round of martinis became another, with a manhattan thrown in for Cappy.

As they sat over coffee at the meal’s end, Cappy excused herself to go to the ladies’ room and left them to speak alone.

“So your little girl’s home,” Largo said. “Good to have family together.”

“She’s grown up, Largo. A real beauty.”

“You should have brought her.”

“Another time,” he said, although both men knew it would never happen.

“She favor you or her mother?”

Dawn favored Hugh, but Ferris wasn’t going to make that announcement. He wondered what trick of nature had doomed him to see his brother’s face when he looked at his only child. “She looks a little like my mother,” he said.

“I was sorry to hear about Mrs. Gerritsen. State lost a fine lady when she passed away.” Largo stood. “I need to stretch my legs. Let’s walk along the bayou. It looks like the weather’s clear enough now.”

Ferris didn’t know what “clear enough” meant. There was a steady drizzle, and the soft ground promised to suck at every footstep, but he followed Largo to the foyer and instructed the hostess to tell Cappy where they had gone.

If nothing else, the fresh air was more palatable than the mildewed atmosphere of the dining room. Largo started away from the parking lot, and Ferris followed.

“Since Rosie passed away, I don’t get over here as much,” Largo said. “I eat at home. Got a nigger cook that can bake circles ‘round the one at the club.”

“I’m glad you felt like coming tonight.”

“I didn’t. Not really. But business is just that.”

“What business are we talking about?”

“You running for governor.”

“What do you think about it?”

Without answering, Largo walked to the edge of the narrow bayou. It was hardly wider than the length of two cars, and despite the rain, the water was sluggish, as if it were in no hurry to empty itself into the marsh. He kicked a stick into the water, and they stood watching it sullenly ride the current until it disappeared into the darkness.

“I was a boy,” Largo said, “I used to swim in this bayou. Now I wouldn’t stick a toe in. Never know what you’ll find in the water these days.”

“Never do.”

“Those days, I’d swim with pickaninnies that lived down the road. Didn’t know any better till my daddy caught me. Nearly skinned me alive when he found out what I’d been doing. Told me then that I’d never amount to a thing if I didn’t pay attention to my character. And I’ve done that all my life. I got where I am by watching who I associated with. Do you follow me?”

“Perfectly.”

“You got a silver spoon in your mouth, Ferris. Not pure silver, good silver plate, on account of your father. Your mother, now, she was sterling. Me, on the other hand, I started out without a goddamned thing.”

“It’s where a man gets to, not where he starts, that matters.”

“Don’t bullshit me. You and that pretty little wife of yours think I’m poor white trash. And you’re just about right. When I started out, those nigger kids I swam with had more class than I did, but now I got more money and power than any man’s got a right to. And I intend to keep every last bit.”

“You don’t have to convince me, Largo. It’s power I’m asking you to use on my behalf—though I wouldn’t mind a generous campaign contribution, as well.”

“I understand a man who wants it all.” Largo began to walk along the bank, following the route of the vanished stick. “And I like you, when I can turn my head far enough to watch my back.”

“I’m not after you. You should know that.”

“I know for a fact you’re hungrier for power than me, and until I met you, I didn’t even know that was possible.”

“I just want to be governor. And maybe president later on. Could you use a friend in the White House?”

“I wonder what your brother would think of all this shinnying up the highest tree. Used to say, didn’t he, that a man’s real power was in his relationship with his Creator?”

“He probably did. Hugh was fond of saying things that had nothing to do with real life.”

“Miss him, don’t you?”

Ferris was silent.

“You know, Father Hugh could be the sticking point in your campaign.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Don’t you? I can think of more than a few reasons. Those who loved him will despise you for not being like him. And those who hated him will be afraid you’re too much like him.”

“That’s why I need people like you to make it clear exactly who I am and who I number among my friends.”

“Then, of course, there are things about your relationship with your brother that aren’t generally known…but could become so.”

Ferris didn’t miss a beat. “Right now I just want to find out what you’d like for this parish if I run for governor.”

“All I’d like is to be able to count on a governor to keep the welfare of the southern parishes in mind, and possibly to take a little advice from time to time.”

“I’m your man.”

“I think maybe you will be, but only if you remember that I’m not your man, or anybody else’s.”

They had reached a turn in the bayou. The water moved faster here, as if it had given in to the inevitable. Largo stopped and pointed. “Look over there. Stick didn’t make it ‘round the bend.”

Ferris saw something caught in the gnarled roots of a willow that clung tenaciously to the opposite bank. Whether it was the same stick or another was impossible to tell.

“Now, you can look at that stick two ways,” Largo said. “One, it didn’t want to go, so it’s hanging in those roots as a last stand. Two, it was bobbing happily down stream and got caught unawares.”

“Doesn’t say much for it either way,” Ferris said.

“No sir. It’s like a man who resists too hard or com plies too easily. Figure out how to straddle that line, Ferris, and I’ll help put you exactly where you want to be.”

Rain fell throughout the night, a dreary, steady drumming on the cypress-shingle roof that lacked drama. Drama was unnecessary. With the first light of morning, Dawn took her great-grandfather’s letters and hid them under the scatter rug beneath her dressing table. As a child, she had been full of secrets, hiding everything personal from the prying eyes of her parents and the house hold staff. Most of the time nothing she had hidden would have interested anyone, anyway. But the letters written by Lucien Le Danois were a different story.

She hadn’t known what to expect. In the garconnière, she had seen that the first few letters were addressed to a priest. But she had suspected that farther into the pile she would find advice from a father to his daughter—although the voyeur inside her had hoped for passionate love letters. Instead, she had gotten something very different.

She didn’t want to wait until breakfast and the reading of the next section of the will before she spoke to Ben. She had hardly slept, but she was past needing anything except answers.

She took time for a shower and a change of clothes; then she went downstairs, hoping she would find him there. Instead, she found Phillip, in a T-shirt and shorts, sitting on the hood of Ben’s car, tossing bread crumbs at a trio of sparrows. The birds ignored her approach, and so did he.

She stopped in front of him and crossed her arms. “Phillip, have you seen Ben?”

“No one else is up. Just you and me.”

“Oh.” She didn’t know what to do next or where to go. She needed answers, but nothing could persuade her to go into Ben’s room and wake him.

She thought about Pelichere and Spencer. One or both of them might be able to fill in the story that had been sketched out for her. But she just wasn’t sure.

“Not having the best kind of morning, are you?”

Dawn realized she had been staring right through Phillip. “No. I…” She turned her palms up and shrugged.

“Tell me something. Have you given much thought to why I might be here? Or my family?”

“Of course.” She knew this was bound to be an interesting conversation, but the letters were on her mind.

“Drawn any conclusions?”

“Not a one.”

“Not yet, huh?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nothing as overt as hostility had been in Phillip’s voice, but again she sensed distrust. “I don’t know anything except the obvious.”

“The obvious? Like our color?”

She shoved her hands in her shorts pockets. “The obvious. Like your writing and your mother’s music.”

“Really? You haven’t noticed that you and I aren’t exactly the same?”

“Look, I’m not in the mood for this, okay? I don’t care what color you are. It has nothing to do with me.”

“Now that’s where you’re wrong.”

She opened her mouth to defend herself, but didn’t. Suddenly she suspected that she and Phillip weren’t talking about the same thing at all. He moved over a little, almost as if he were inviting her to sit beside him.

She joined him on the hood. Now they were both staring at the house.

“You were waiting for me, weren’t you?” she said.

“I’m waiting for a whole lot of things.”

“Did Ben tell you about the letters?”

“Yeah.” Phillip tossed another volley of crumbs to the sparrows. As he did, a gold band on his left hand glinted in the sunlight.

“I didn’t realize you were married,” she said.

“And I’ll be a father any day now. Belinda’s waiting back in New Orleans. So I have my own reasons to get this over with. That’s why I’m sitting here right now.”

“What was your connection to my grandmother, Phillip?”

There was a pause before he spoke. “The same as yours.”

She tried to figure out what he meant. She had had many connections to her grandmother. Aurore had been her teacher, her friend, her champion. Dawn looked sideways to ask him to clarify. He was gazing at her, and waiting…. Then she understood. “She was—”

He nodded. “My grandmother, too.”

Seconds passed. “I don’t believe it,” she said at last.

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

“What are you trying to say, Phillip? That your mother…” She paused and tried again. “That Nicky—?”

“Nicky is Aurore’s daughter. But Nicky doesn’t know.” Phillip rubbed the back of his neck. “She will soon enough, though. And I’m going to have to be the one to tell her. Our grandmother was a great one for get ting other people to do the things she didn’t want to do herself.”

“How in the hell do you know all of this?”

“Aurore took her time dying. She had plenty of time to prepare. And telling me who I am was part of it. The truth came out a little at a time. She said she was hiring me to write her life story. I thought it was an old lady’s whimsy, and I humored her because I needed an excuse to stay in the city. Then I realized it was my story she was telling, too.”

Dawn thought about the letters she’d read. “But I don’t understand. She left me letters from my great-grandfather to a priest, but they don’t have anything to do with you.”

“Don’t they?”

“I don’t see what. They’re about a hurricane, way back at the turn of the century—”

“Did you understand what you read?”

“Some, but not why it’s so important.”

His gaze passed over her face, as if he were searching for something that until now he had found lacking. “Do you want to know more?”

Dawn was still trying to deal with what she’d just learned. Her grandmother had had a daughter. One she had never acknowledged. One of a different race. And that daughter was here now, waiting to be told the truth. Dawn chanted a long string of words she hadn’t learned from her mother.

“Well, we agree on that much,” Phillip said.

“Are you going to elaborate?”

“When Lucien Le Danois married your great-grand mother, he got more than a wife. He was from a good family with no money, and Claire Friloux was the heiress to Gulf Coast Steamship. When they married, Lucien moved up in the world considerably.”

Phillip certainly had her full attention now. And so far the story sounded familiar. “Go on.”

“The marriage wasn’t happy. Claire was pregnant for most of it, but your grandmother was the only child who survived infancy. And Aurore wasn’t expected to live into adulthood. The family came here in the summers, to get away from the heat and disease in the city. Lucien would leave Aurore and her mother on the island and come back and visit when he could. But they weren’t the only ones he visited. He found a lady friend in a nearby fishing village, someone without Claire’s delicate constitution. She was an Acadian woman named Marcelite Cantrelle, and when Lucien first met her, she already had a son. Raphael.”

“I don’t understand what this has to do with any thing.”

“You will.” Phillip leaned back so that he could see her better. “What else did you learn from the letters?”

“The storm hit Grand Isle in 1893. Lucien and his family were here at the time. He was out sailing when the storm blew up, and he went somewhere nearby—”

“Chénière Caminada.”

“That’s right. To wait. The storm worsened, and he waited in someone’s house for it to end. Then, during the eye, he took a boatload of strangers to the church, because he was afraid that the house wouldn’t withstand the rest of the storm.” Dawn told Phillip everything else she’d pieced together. The church had already been destroyed, but the presbytery had still been standing. Just yards from the door, Lucien’s boat had gotten snagged on wreckage, and he had jumped in the water to free it. Lucien had become caught up himself. In a panic, as the winds and waves began again, he had cut the rope tying him to the boat and sent it swirling into the Gulf. Some how he had made it into the presbytery and safety, but everyone on board the boat had perished.”

“The people in the boat weren’t strangers,” Phillip said, when she had finished. “There were three passengers. Marcelite Cantrelle, her son Raphael, and her daughter Angelle. Angelle was Lucien’s child.”

Dawn stared at him. “No…”

“And he didn’t cut the rope to free himself, not the way you meant, anyway. He cut the rope and sent them to their death because he had to get rid of them. His father-in-law had found out about his affair and was making threats.”

The last part barely registered. “He killed them?”

“Call it what you like.”

Dawn wanted to argue Phillip’s version of the story, but she couldn’t. She hadn’t understood why her great-grandfather had felt so deeply guilty. Over and over again he had defended his actions, even though the re plies from Father Grimaud absolved him. And she had noticed inconsistencies. She had wondered whether her French was at fault.

“Father Grimaud was the chénière priest. That’s why Lucien wrote him those letters,” Phillip said.

“What does this story have to do with you?”

“Raphael was my grandfather.”

“But you said that he died.”

“Everyone thought so, including Lucien. After the hurricane, Lucien buried Marcelite and Angelle and a child who looked like Raphael. But Raphael was found days later, clinging to wreckage from the boat. When he regained consciousness, he discovered that he had be come someone else. A man from the chénière had identified him as a boy named Étienne Lafont whose entire family had perished. A family from Bayou Lafourche took him in, and that’s where he grew up. But Raphael knew who he was and what Lucien had done, and he swore that someday he would find Lucien and make him pay.”

Dawn repressed a shudder. “Did he?”

“Once he was grown, Raphael found his way to New Orleans and took a job at Gulf Coast Steamship. He worked his way up into a position of confidence quickly. He was bright, motivated—” Phillip stopped. “He was also of mixed blood, but no one knew. Or at least no one could be sure.”

“How can that be?”

“Raphael’s father had been born into slavery, the son of a house slave and her master. But remember, after the hurricane, people on Bayou Lafourche were told that Raphael was a boy named Étienne, and the people of the chénière were dark-haired and swarthy, a true mixture of nationalities. Raphael suspected what his real heritage was, but the only thing that mattered to him was to get revenge against Lucien. And to do that, he would have lied about anything.”

“Go on.”

“He discovered a foolproof way to destroy Lucien financially and bring Gulf Coast Steamship to its knees. But he didn’t count on one thing. As part of his plan, he was determined to make Aurore fall in love with him. But despite himself, he fell in love with her, too. She be came pregnant, and they planned to run away together. For one instant, Raphael thought he had it all. Lucien’s downfall. Marriage to Aurore. But it all fell apart. She discovered what he’d done. Not why, but what. Lucien died, and Aurore disappeared to have the baby.”

“Disappeared?”

“By then, Aurore knew who Raphael really was. She knew that his father was a mulatto, and that her child would have mixed blood, too. She hid so she could have the baby and give it up. But Raphael found her and took their daughter to raise himself. That daughter was Nicky.”

“Grandmère let him take her?”

“She thought she had little choice.”

“But that’s impossible to believe. She was a devoted mother. She would have given up her life at a moment’s notice for her children.”

“She gave Nicky to Raphael, then she set about re storing the fortunes of Gulf Coast Steamship. Only there were no steamships by the time the creditors had finished with them. Raphael had done his work well. So the company became simply Gulf Coast Shipping. And when she couldn’t find any other way to get it back on firm financial footing, she married Henry Gerritsen, a man who could help her do it.”

Dawn was silent, trying to drink in the entire story. Part of her wanted to tell Phillip he was crazy. But a bigger part, a much bigger part, knew he was telling the truth. Everything added up. His presence here. Nicky’s presence here. And the bits and pieces of history that she’d always known. “Did Grandmère ever see Nicky again? Did she know anything about her when she was growing up?” she asked at last.

“There’s a lot more to this than I’ve told you. And that’s why your grandmother had me write it all down. Aurore initialed every page.” He smiled, with no humor. “She knew there would be some here who wouldn’t believe it.”

“You mean you have this manuscript here with you?”

“No. Spencer has copies to give everyone, but apparently not until this little beach party is completed.”

“Does Spencer—”

“Spencer can verify everything I’ve told you. He’s known the entire story for many years. And so has Pelichere.”

The sun had risen higher before she spoke again. “I’m going to have to tell my parents, Phillip. How are you going to tell Nicky?”

“Maybe I should have told her months ago. Aurore left it up to me to decide when.”

“Why didn’t you tell her before Grandmère died? They might have had a chance at a reunion.”

“That’s why I didn’t. I was afraid that nothing good could come of a meeting. I couldn’t bear to see either of them hurt more.” He slid off the car and stood. “There’s more than I’ve told you. Don’t judge my decision until you know it all.”

She joined him on the ground and took his arm when it seemed as if he was going to walk away. “Thanks. I guess.”

“For what? For telling family secrets you’d probably rather not have heard?”

She tried to think of a way to explain her own con fused feelings. “I’ve spent the last year of my life trying not to be a part of this family.”

He moved away. “Well, now there’s even more family that you can try not to be a part of. And not the kind you’re probably dying to have.”

She let that go. “Listen, have you ever stood on the Mississippi River bank when the fog was rolling in?”

He frowned.

“Try it sometime,” she said. “I did it a lot as a little girl, and I still remember. At first the fog is appealing, soft and cool and deliciously mysterious. Then you begin to realize there are people nearby, and boats on the river. You hear snatches of conversation, whistles and bells, and sometimes you even hear laughter. But nothing is clear, and you can’t find anyone or anything without falling into the river and drowning.”

“So?”

“Well, that’s what it’s been like growing up as a Gerritsen,” she said. “And even though I don’t like what I’ve heard about my grandmother, I guess I’m grateful you’re here to chase off the fog.”

His eyes searched hers, as if he expected to see some thing there to contradict her words. Then he shrugged. “There won’t be any fog at all by the time we’ve finished here, Dawn. Our grandmother’s going to see to that. I really hope you’re ready to see the whole picture. But I can tell you this. By the time these four days have ended, you may wish for fog again with all your heart.”

CHAPTER SIX

“Lies.” Ferris slashed his hand through empty air. “What kind of game are you playing, Dawn?”

Dawn had waited until her parents were awake and dressed; then she had invited them both for a walk down the driveway, where she quietly related what she’d learned from Phillip. No one else was in sight.

“No games,” she assured Ferris. “I’m just telling you what I know.”

“You’re telling me what Phillip Benedict told you.”

“That’s part of it. But I’ve read the letters, and Phillip’s story fits.”

“You believe it?” Ferris demanded. “You’re that gullible?”

“Grandmère dictated the story to him, and Phillip says that Spencer and Pelichere can verify everything he told me. You can ask them.” Dawn didn’t step back as her father moved in on her, but she felt as threatened as she had on the rare occasions in her childhood when Ferris had been angry at her.

“I told you Nicky Valentine was a liar. Apparently she’s passed it on to her son. Don’t you know she’ll jump at the chance to turn this into a scandal?”

Dawn was beginning to get angry right along with him. “Don’t kid yourself, Daddy. Nicky doesn’t want to be related to you any more than you want to be related to her. Her reputation will suffer.”

“I think the two of you have said enough for now.” Cappy stepped between them. “Dawn, Pelichere made French toast this morning. Why don’t you go inside and get some before Spencer calls us all together?”

“When does this family reach the point where any two of us can have a conversation without a referee?” Dawn watched something—acknowledgment, perhaps, or possibly even sadness—pass over her mother’s face. Then, before she could identify it for certain and be disappointed, she turned back up the driveway and left them behind her.

“It’s a lie,” Ferris said when Dawn was gone. “An insidious lie. I won’t have my mother’s name destroyed this way.”

“Your mother’s name?” Cappy gave a humorless laugh. “Nobody’s out here except you and me, Ferris, and both of us know whose name you’re worried about.”

“Don’t you start on me. You’ll be tarred with the same brush if these lies are spread around.”

Cappy made a show of looking at her watch. “We’ve got forty minutes before we’re all supposed to get together again. I’m going for a walk along the beach. I’d suggest you use the time left to figure out how you’re going to come to terms with the fact that Nicky Valentine is your sister.”

“I don’t know what these Gerritsens are trying to do, but I don’t see why I have to stay here and play along.” Nicky glimpsed Phillip and Jake exchanging looks as she stalked to the closet. She had been so quiet as Phillip related the story of her birth that she guessed neither man had expected this response.

As she began to pull clothes off hangers, Phillip stepped toward her, but Jake put his hand on his step son’s arm and nodded toward the door. Phillip stood poised between what he thought he should do and what he obviously preferred. Finally he settled for the latter. The door closed softly behind him.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Jake asked.

“I’m going home.”

“You gonna drive all the way back by yourself in this rain?”

She faced him. “You’re not planning to stay?”

“I’m not leaving. You don’t stay to find out what’s going on, I have to.” Jake sat down on the bed. “The way I see it, someone’s lying, or someone’s telling the truth. Either way, we got to ask ourselves why. We can’t pre tend it doesn’t matter.”

“Aurore Gerritsen was not my mother.” The bed was soft against Nicky’s legs. She felt Jake’s hand on her knee and realized she was sitting beside him.

“What do you remember about your daddy?” Jake asked.

“Little things. He was a good man.”

“And what did he tell you about your mother?”

“Nothing. He never said anything.”

“Could she have been a white woman?”

“How would I know what color she was?”

“Because you can put two and two together same as any reasonably well-educated person.”

“We’re talking shades? I’m supposed to guess my mother’s race by my father’s color? By mine? We’re not mixing a pitcher of chocolate milk here. Add a little more Hershey’s syrup, make it a little darker. People aren’t that simple, and you know it.”

“Your daddy didn’t tell you anything about your mama? Did anybody else?”

She was silent for a long time, wrestling with the things she couldn’t forget, wrestling with something too terrible to remember. “The place where I grew up was full of women as light or lighter than me, and all of them had colored blood. I always thought my mother had been one of them. Someone told me she’d died giving birth to me.”

“But it’s possible she could have been white?”

“No! Aurore Gerritsen was not my mother. There’s something wrong here.”

“Then stay and find out what it is.”

She stood and walked to the window. Dawn had been right. Nicky could see the Gulf. Now the waves were angry, and the water was a dark seaweed green. She thought of Phillip’s story, of a small boy and girl caught up in the water’s fury, of a woman screaming as her lover cut the thin tether that anchored her to the future.

She covered her ears. “I hate this place! How can you even think about staying? We weren’t welcome yester day, and we’ll be less so now. Once Ferris Gerritsen finds out what Phillip is saying, he’ll come after us with everything he’s got.”

“I’ll be looking forward to that.”

She faced him. “You think anybody in this state would take your side in a fight with the almighty senator?”

“I spent the first part of my life running from who I was, and the second part making peace with it. I plan to spend the last part standing up for what’s mine. You going to stand with me?”

“You’re not my conscience, Jake. If I stay, I stay be cause it’s right for me. For me!”

“I know. I’m just asking you to take a little time to let it all settle.”

“Give me some time alone before I have to face everybody again.”

He left quietly. He had been gone for a long time be fore Nicky was calm enough to think about her surroundings. The room was airy and feminine, decorated in a casual beach-house style with which she felt completely comfortable. Aurore Gerritsen no longer seemed a stranger. She had left her personal stamp everywhere. Nicky stood in the bedroom of the woman who had reached from the grave, claiming to be her mother, and she cursed Aurore for ever having been born.

Nicky didn’t look right or left. She held out her hand as Spencer stepped in front of her. Spencer’s wasn’t quite steady as he rested a jeweler’s box in her palm. “Aurore hoped that this might, in some small way, explain a great injustice.”

Nicky didn’t speak, and neither did anyone else.

Ben and Phillip exchanged glances. Phillip had told Ben the truth about Nicky and Aurore, and Ben knew that he had told Dawn, as well. Now, judging from the rigid set of her head, Nicky knew, too.

Nicky’s fingers closed around the box. She stood and left the morning room without a word. Jake followed.

“There’s nothing Aurore could have put in that box or anywhere else that’s going to make this any easier.” Phillip rose from his seat beside Ben and left the room, too.

“Just so you’ll know, we’re finished for the day,” Spencer told the rest of them. “We’ll meet tomorrow at the same time.”

Since he awakened that morning, Ben had wanted to talk to Dawn. He had wanted to talk to her even more after Phillip recounted what had passed between them that morning. But Dawn had eluded him. Now she stood between her parents and Spencer, a willowy guard dog of an old man.

As Ben watched, Cappy took Ferris by the arm and steered him toward the door. Ben was surprised that there hadn’t been another outburst from the senator, but he suspected Ferris was just biding his time. Cappy glanced back at Dawn, but Dawn, who was busy murmuring something to Spencer, didn’t notice. Dawn linked her arm through the old man’s and pointed outside. They walked to the window together, deep in conversation.

Ben knew better than to push her. They would talk when she was ready. She had already made that plain to him. Whatever happened between them now was on Dawn’s terms. He decided to settle for more reading. Perhaps, by the time they did talk, there would be even more to discuss.

Early in the afternoon, Nicky heard the door open and close. She didn’t turn away from the window. Strong arms enveloped her, and she leaned back, into her husband’s strength. “Where’d you go?”

“Pelichere told me about a bar down the road where I’d be welcome.”

She didn’t ask why he’d had to get a recommendation. She doubted it would ever be any different on the island.

He didn’t say anything else. He just tightened his arms and stood quietly looking out the window.

“I’m sorry I asked you to leave,” Nicky said.

“I had some thinking to do.”

“You’re not even curious what was in the box?” she asked.

“Never said I wasn’t curious.”

“You’re a good man, Jake Reynolds.” She bent for ward and lifted something from the nape of her neck and slipped it over her head. “Here.”

He kept her against him with one arm and dangled the necklace with his free hand. “This is it?”

The locket was old gold, mellowed by age and con tact with human skin. Diamond-studded roses were en twined on the front, etched skillfully by a long-dead craftsman. “There’s a picture inside.”

The catch was difficult to open; she could feel him struggling. She took it from him and pressed the edges until it spread into two identical golden hearts.

“Who is it?” Jake asked.

“You tell me.”

“Then it doesn’t mean anything to you?”

“I didn’t say that.” She stared at the picture. It was dearly familiar, although she hadn’t seen it in more than thirty years. “This was mine when I was a little girl,” she said.

“What?”

“Mine, Jake. The locket was given to me by a friend of my mother’s when I still lived in New Orleans, and she put her own picture inside.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I.”

“If it was yours, why did Aurore Gerritsen have it when she died?”

“That’s another story.”

He didn’t ask her to tell it. He fell silent, but both arms crept around her again.

Nicky felt tears welling up, although she hadn’t cried since opening the box. She snapped the locket shut and slipped it back around her neck. “I need some answers. Will you find Dawn and send her in here?”

“You think she’s going to tell you anything?”

“I’m going on instinct. What else can I do?”

He hugged her hard enough to force the air from her lungs. He always resorted to strength when he was most vulnerable.

She felt the absence of his arms once he’d gone, but she steeled herself for what was to come. She didn’t have to wait long. There was a knock, and Dawn opened the door. “Nicky?”

“Come on in.”

“Jake said—”

“I want you to look at a picture and tell me if you know who it is.”

“Of course.” Dawn approached slowly. “Are you all right?”

“No. Are you?”

“No.”

“Well, we’ve all got that much in common.” Nicky slid her fingers over the locket. She hesitated and looked back up at Dawn. “Have you ever seen this before?”

“I don’t think so.”

Nicky opened the locket. “And this woman?”

Dawn gazed at the photograph for a moment, then at Nicky. “My grandmother when she was young.”

Nicky snapped the locket shut. She turned away.

“Would you like me to leave?” Dawn asked softly.

“She never told me she was my mother. When I was a little girl, your grandmother held me on her lap and brought me presents. She told me she had known my mother, but she never told me who she really was.”

“Oh, God.” Dawn sat down on the bed beside her.

“I saw her twice, I think, although I’m not sure, be cause it was so long ago. I know I saw her right before my father and I left for Chicago, and she gave me this locket.”

“How old were you?”

“Twelve, I think. And that was the last time I ever saw her. Because I didn’t come back to New Orleans until a few years ago. My father was killed in Chicago. An old man named Clarence Valentine saw the whole thing. He was like a grandfather to me, and afterwards he was afraid for my life. He was a jazz pianist, and he was on his way to Paris, to play in a club in Montmartre. So he smuggled me out of the city and took me with him.”

“How was your father killed, or don’t you want to talk about it?”

“There was a riot, black against white. He was gunned down. I got a good look at the face of the man who did it. And Clarence was afraid that because I had, the man might come after me, too. So we left the country, and I started a new life.”

“Clarence Valentine. That’s where the Valentine comes from.”

“What did Phillip tell you about my father?”

Dawn was silent, as if she would rather not say what conclusions she’d drawn.

“Did he tell you that after everything, after my father had ruined Aurore’s family and taken me from her arms, and even after she had married Henry Gerritsen, they still couldn’t forget each other?”

“Raphael and my grandmother?”

“Not Raphael. He called himself Rafe by then. That’s how I remember him. Phillip says that years later Aurore discovered why my father had done the things he had. She found the letters that you read last night, and she figured out the truth. And when she confronted my father, he told her everything. For the first time, she understood it all. And she understood something even more frightening. Despite their years apart, despite everything they had done to hurt each other, he still loved her, and she still loved him.”

Nicky looked up. “Both of them knew how impossible it was. Everything in the world stood between them. But they loved each other anyway. Against all the odds. And that’s why my father took me and left the city. Be cause their love would have doomed them both.”

“I don’t even know what to say,” Dawn said at last.

“Phillip tells me that Aurore believed I died in the riot, along with my father. She was told that I had, and all her investigations seemed to prove that I hadn’t survived. By then I was in Paris, but she didn’t know.”

Nicky stopped. She wondered why she was telling this to Dawn. She turned, not knowing what she would see on Dawn’s face. Dawn lifted her hand and tentatively covered Nicky’s. “I can’t believe that she didn’t love you, Nicky. I knew her, as well as anyone in the world did. And I know that she wouldn’t ever have for gotten her own child or stopped loving you. Maybe she thought she didn’t have any choice, but she must have felt so guilty. The things she did must have stayed with her until the day she died. That’s why she couldn’t tell you herself.”

“No. I know why she couldn’t tell me.”

Dawn was silent. Nicky knew she expected her to go on, but she couldn’t. There were some words too terrible to be spoken out loud. “Thank you,” Nicky said at last. “I needed someone with answers.”

Dawn hesitated, as if she weren’t sure what to do. Then she leaned forward and kissed Nicky’s cheek.

Nicky went to the window again after Dawn left and rested her cheek against the window frame. She was a woman who looked toward the future and rarely considered her past. The future beckoned, but the past had always been a weight around her heart. And still, as hard as she had tried to forget where she had come from and who she had been, it was with her still.

Her hand went to the locket; it was warm against her skin. “I know why you didn’t tell me, Aurore,” she whispered. “How could you have told me, after everything that happened next?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Paris, 1927

Chez les Américains might as well have been plunked down in the center of the New World, considering how little of its ambience it owed to the Old. Shuttered windows erased all the distinctive qualities of the City of Light, most particularly light itself. Years ago someone had painted the brick interior of the rue Pigalle night club black and stained the soft wood floor. The newest owner, hoping to benefit from wealthy Americans spending cheaply purchased francs, had covered the walls with framed photographs of Valentino and Pick ford and pastoral scenes of western mountains and Indian braves. Illuminated by harsh spotlights, smoke-filled and noisy, Chez les Américains had little to offer the expatriates it so coveted.

But still, they came.

“Sure they come and keep comin’, Nickel girl,” Clarence said, chomping on the end of a huge cigar he wouldn’t light. “They comin’ to hear the best jazz in Paris. Hot jazz, not that pisspot stuff served up ‘round the corner.”

Nicky leaned on the top of the piano and watched as guests wandered from table to table. Clarence wasn’t boasting. Clarence Valentine and his band were the best in town.

Nicky adored Clarence, and had since the first time she heard him play, when she was still a young child. Since then, of course, her life had changed dramatically. She had gone from the child Nicolette Cantrelle to the woman Nicky Valentine, from Chicago to Paris, from a life with her beloved father to a very different one with Clarence. She had left everything behind when she and Clarence were forced to flee Chicago, everything except Clarence himself and her love of music.

And memories of her father’s death that still surfaced sometimes as nightmares.

“What’s you thinkin’ about, Nickel? Your face so long,” Clarence said.

She smiled fondly at him. “Is not!”

His face lit up in a grin. Clarence had made his living hauling bales of cotton on the New Orleans river front in the days before he could get jobs with his music, and he was a large man, although the years had begun to whittle away at him. He had little education, none of it in music, but he had taught himself to play the piano by listening to the music of others. His ear was so fine that he could play any song he heard, and usually a more thrilling version, at that.

Tonight he wore a shiny black suit with a scarlet vest and his signature diamond stickpin in his tie. In the harsh glare of the spotlight, his shirt was white enough to blind her.

“You gonna get to it?” she asked. “Or you gonna flex those old fingers all night?”

“We’ll get goin’ when we need to. Things’ll heat up soon enough.”

Nothing really got started at the Montmartre night clubs until well after midnight. The Americans and British had come to Paris to escape schedules and rules. In the process, they had established a new set.

Their days were predictable, and so were their nights. After dinner at cherished little restaurants, the serious drinkers among them went on to small, intimate bars like the Dingo or Parnasse, where they were on a first-name basis with the barman. But the others drifted to Montmartre for dancing and music. Those who came to Les Américains stayed until well after the sun was up, because as the clock ticked off the hours, the music got hotter and sweeter. The tips got more extravagant, too, and the praise more abandoned, which was why Nicky was preparing to ask Clarence if she could perform at the end of the night, instead of the beginning.

“Speaking of things heating up,” Nicky said, glad that he had given her an opening, “I can sing hot. You just don’t give me a chance, Clarence.”

“What you talkin’ about? You sing every single blessed night. You get everybody in the mood to stay here and listen. Weren’t for you, they wouldn’t come ‘tall.”

“They sure don’t come to hear me.” Nicky picked at a nail.

Clarence ran his fingers down the keyboard and started to play in earnest. She recognized the beginning of a bluesy medley, songs Clarence would consider too provocative for her.

She pouted—something she knew he hated. “They don’t come to hear me, because I never get to show them what I can do.”

“You better go show them now, else Mr. Yernaux’s gonna find himself somebody new for hostess.”

She made a face at him, crossing her eyes à la Josephine Baker, but he only shook his head. She straightened and shimmied to be sure her beaded dress fell into a perfect line; then she pasted a wide smile on her face and started for the door.

Some of the people who came to Les Américains were famous. From the moment Nicky and Clarence set foot on French shores, Clarence had been determined that she would have the kind of education and life her father had wanted for her. He had gone to work in a series of nightclubs, playing piano with one jazz band, then another, to fund school tuition and a comfortable apartment the two of them could call home. She had studied literature and art, language and deportment. Her French was perfect; her English was, too—just in case perfect English was ever called for. Best of all, the sisters had encouraged her love of reading, and Nicky knew, from all she had devoured, that people like Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, men who had danced and drunk at Les Américains, were men to reckon with.

Now she greeted a new group of guests. Two of the men were familiar, American journalists from some where in the Midwest who were in Europe on assignment for the next several months. They looked exactly alike to her, clean-cut, brown-haired youths wearing Sears and Roebuck worsted suits and friendly white smiles. The last time they’d appeared, they had talked endlessly about Lindbergh and given her stock-market tips she couldn’t use. She thought of them as Siamese twins, Bob One and Bob Two, but she called them “honey” and “sugar” to their faces. They ate it up.

“Honey, so glad to have you.” She kissed Bob One on the cheeks and turned to Bob Two. She had mastered the friendly kiss, the insubstantial but much appreciated greeting that made the guests at Les Américains feel welcomed. “Sugar.” She stepped back, extending her hand to those in the party she didn’t know.

She knew exactly who to touch and who to avoid. It was a sixth sense she had acquired, an intuition honed by subtle rejection and rib-crushing response. She had been the hostess for a year now, and she had learned which part of herself to share and which to hoard. Her livelihood was balanced somewhere in between—along with her self-esteem.

She seated the Bobs and their party, darting back and forth in her weighty green-and-rose dress like a ruby-throated hummingbird. By the time she left them, she knew they were comfortable and well on their way to finishing the first of many bottles of champagne.

Clarence’s piano grew louder, backed up now by the thumping of a bass and the mellow moaning of horns and a clarinet. Voices grew louder in response, and laughter rang through the room. She started toward a new group that had just arrived, a casual mélange of colored and white.

She had lived in Paris for eight years, and she had seen and shrugged off a world of experience. But she still wasn’t used to the coal black hand of a man on the chalk white arm of a woman. Black and white in public together still startled her, just as the lack of racism among the French did. She continued to be haunted by childhood experiences. When she shopped in Les Halles, she expected to be ordered to the end of every line. Once, not long ago, she had awakened screaming when car horns blared in the street below.

She greeted three of the men, jazz musicians who often played in a rival nightclub. She smiled at the women and watched them assess her. Their gowns were straight off the pages of L’Art et la Mode, carelessly worn and supremely designed. All the women slouched in the current fashion, their boyishly bound breasts nudging their bodices. Nicky’s dress wasn’t worth the hem of a Poiret or Patou, but she was satisfied that her longer legs made up for the difference.

One of the men, a drummer named Tadpole Harris, embraced her, and she remained in his arms. She recognized Julia St. Cloud, known to her friends as Cloudy. A short woman with shingled blond hair and a long, narrow face, she was an heiress who sometimes served as a patron for promising Negro talent.

“Nicky Valentine’s the only reason we’d come to this joint,” Tadpole told them. “She can dance. Can this little gal dance!”

“And sing,” she reminded him. “I sing, don’t forget. Besides, you come to hear Clarence. You know you do.”

“Clarence’s her granddaddy,” Tadpole explained. “Watches over her like an old papa lion. And he can stomp those ivories, New Orleans style. Oughta be here sometime for a real grand splaz with Clarence. Best there is.”

Nicky glowed, as she always did when Clarence was praised. Much of the jazz in Paris was stale, the hashed-over sounds of a more fertile time and place. Cut off from their roots, some musicians had lost touch with their heritage and its soaring potential. Not Clarence. He jammed with every horn player and drummer just off the boat from America and learned the innovations going on at home.

She broke free from Tadpole’s hug, ready to lead his party to a table near the piano, when another man came through the door to join them. She was tall, and he was only a little taller, a broad-shouldered, large-boned man in his early thirties, with smooth dark skin and eyes that seemed to bore right through her.

“You haven’t met Gerard,” Tadpole said. “Gerard Benedict. Cloudy’s friend.”

Nicky smiled and murmured her greeting. Then she realized why the name seemed familiar. “Gerard Ben edict, the poet?”

He raised a brow. “You know my work?” he asked, in a voice accented with southern nights and disbelief.

She stood a little straighter. “Can you imagine that, sugar?” she said, softly slurring her own response. “Once ‘pon a time a nigger boy from Alabam’ learned to write a word or two, and a nigger gal from Looziana learned to read ‘em. Whatever’s this ol’ world comin’ to?”

Tadpole roared his approval. She made a graceful dancer’s turn and started across the floor. At the table, she turned on the charm, fussing over everyone, but she kept her back to Gerard. She had endured the occasional slight from white Americans who, even in the tolerant atmosphere of Paris, hadn’t quite buried their prejudices. But she couldn’t remember being treated this way by one of her own.

She was everybody’s darling, the sassy, rambunctious granddaughter of the revered Clarence Valentine. She had sung and danced for the Prince of Wales and the Princese de Polignac. Artists, writers and poets were as common in her world as busboys and horn players. She couldn’t imagine what she had done to one Gerard Benedict to deserve his derision.

She felt a hand at her wrist and fingers encircling it to keep her in place. “Then you’ve read my work?” a deep voice rumbled in her ear.

“Sure have.” She turned her head a little, so that she could see his face. “Can’t say I liked it much. All those folks swinging from trees and getting buried alive.”

“Maybe you’re just out of touch with life in America the beautiful. You look more white than colored.”

“Oh, I’m the best of everything. A real snappy piece of work.”

“Maybe you are.”

She met his eyes and gave him a lazy smile. She decided to forgive him. “You better believe it.”

She left the table, heading straight for Clarence. He swung into a peppy introduction without missing a beat. The rest of the band took it up. Les Américains was too small for the jazz orchestras of nightspots like the Théâtre des Ambassadeurs in the avenue Gabriel, which had once imported a sixty-three-member troupe from Harlem’s Cotton Club. But what Clarence’s band lacked in size, it made up for in moxie and bare-knuckle talent.

She clapped her hands to the rhythm, which was growing progressively bouncier. Someone flashed the spotlight right on her, and the din softened.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” she said after Clarence played a splashy finale. “And welcome to Les Américains, which tonight is proud to feature Clarence Valentine and the Valentine Sweethearts.” She stepped forward and folded her hands demurely. At Clarence’s cue, she began to sing a poignant ballad about a man in love. Her voice was halting. The room grew quieter. She ended the intro with one finger to her lips in sad contemplation. Then a breath, a pause, and she was off.

“Yes sir, that’s my baby!” Clarence and the band cut loose, and so did she. She wiggled and swung, her arms akimbo as she shouted the lyrics and began to Charles ton. Her feet flew, her hands flew, her short, dark curls whipped against her cheeks.

The room broke into applause as she shimmied her hips and a thousand glass beads on her dress sparkled in the spotlight. She smiled her naughtiest smile as she hammered out the words. She touched her hips and turned for a backside view. Her feet flew in double time, her hands and knees crossed with rubbery grace; then she locked her fingers behind her head and started all over again. By the time she was finished, the dance floor, which she’d had to herself, was filled with hot-blooded sheiks and shebas.

She accepted compliments before she retreated to Clarence’s side. She would sing and dance again when there was a lull.

“You’re a hit, Nickel.”

She waited until her breathing slowed to nearly nor mal. “You sure make me earn my keep.”

He chuckled, and she kissed his grizzled cheek.

“I saw you making eyes at that man.”

“Making eyes my foot!”

His hands flew over the keyboard. “I’m not gonna be here forever to watch out for you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Don’t go doin’ nothin’ foolish.”

“I’m nearly twenty. I’ve outgrown foolishness.”

“You’re smack in the middle of it. Wish your father was here to make you behave.”

He almost never mentioned Rafe. “You’ve been like a father. Sometimes I forget you’re not.”

“You never forget.” He looked up. “Things would have been different if your daddy’d lived.”

“Miss Valentine?”

She swung around to find Gerard Benedict behind her. She moved away from the piano. The music slowed to fox-trot tempo. More dancers crowded the floor. A successful night at Les Américains was truly under way.

“Mr. Benedict?”

“Would you like to dance?”

“Sorry. I only dance alone.”

“Why not make an exception?”

She looked toward the table, where Cloudy was watching them. “What about your lady? She still going to fund your next book if you dance with me?”

“Nobody tells me what I can do.”

“I don’t dance with the guests, spade or ofay. That way nobody’s unhappy.”

“I’m unhappy.”

She felt something sparking inside her. She’d heard a thousand lines and had a thousand funny responses. She couldn’t think of one.

“I’ll pick you up after work.” He moved a little closer. “We’ll have breakfast.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“Suit yourself.”

His teeth gleamed white against his skin. His face seemed strangely exotic to her, broad and mysterious, a supremely African face, with all the lure of tribal warriors and mystic rituals. “I’m going to suit myself, Nicky Valentine.” As Cloudy watched from the table, he lifted her hand and kissed it.

He was a poet, with several critically acclaimed volumes and a contract for another. He was a part of the Negro Renaissance centered in Harlem, the peer of Langston Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois. She entertained in a bar, dancing the Charleston.

They had dark-roast coffee and croissants on the terrace of Le Dôme in Montparnasse, sandwiched between tall boxes of red geraniums and the table of a couple who never exchanged a word. Nicky had gone home first to bathe and change into a skirt and sweater. As light streamed through the geraniums, she removed her cloche hat.

“It’ll be hot by noon,” she said, helping herself to an other croissant. “In a month or so we’ll be closing down.”

“Closing?”

“Sure. No one stays in the city in August. You’ll find it hard to eat or shop if you stay here.”

“Where do you go?” He sat back. He hadn’t taken his eyes off her since they arrived. She wasn’t used to intense scrutiny. She found herself squirming under the heat of it.

“Here or there. Spain once. The South of France. Clarence has friends with a house in Antibes. Maybe we’ll go there.”

“You call your grandfather Clarence?”

“Odd, isn’t it?” She gave no explanation.

“I called mine Old Man.”

“Tell me about him.” She had already listed the basic facts of her own life. Her years in Paris, her education, a hazy, fabricated account of her life in New Orleans. But Gerard had said little about himself.

“You were wrong about Alabama. I was born in Georgia, but we moved to Harlem when I was ten. My father didn’t make his crops two years in a row, and the white man took our farm. We left with nothing but a mule and an old wagon. We worked our way up north, mile by mile. By the time we crossed the Mason-Dixon line, we didn’t have the mule. Old Man got sick and died in Maryland, and we didn’t have the money to lay him to rest.”

Nicky already knew that Gerard was not a man who would appreciate sympathy. She just nodded.

“Some church people took pity and saw Old Man got buried. Then they bought us train tickets to New York. By that time there wasn’t much left of my daddy. He drank up what pennies he managed to earn. We moved in with a cousin, and she raised us until we were old enough to go out on our own.”

“What about your mama?”

“Dead early. Real early.”

“Was Harlem better than Georgia?”

“No place’s better than any other.”

She toyed with her coffee cup. “Then you’ve been everywhere?”

“Just about.”

“You’re a real hard-boiled egg, aren’t you?”

He smiled, and the shadows lifted. “You haven’t seen enough of the world to understand.”

“If I haven’t, why are we having a conversation?”

“There’s something about you.”

His voice was resonant and deep. The words, as clichéd as they were, lingered in the air, settled provocatively against her skin, bored inside her to places that had never been touched. She tried to be flip. “Yeah. Yeah. Long, long legs. Sea green eyes. A smile that lights up the darkest corner of a room.”

“Sounds like you’ve heard it all.”

“And more.”

“But you’ve never heard it from me.”

She faltered for a moment, aware—although she fought it—that he was moving quickly to some place she had not yet inhabited. “Why should that matter?”

He reached for her hand. His was wide, with short, sturdy fingers. A farmer’s hand with no calluses. He en closed hers and held it tightly. “Because I’m going to matter,” he said. “Starting right now.”

She was terribly afraid he might be right.

Nicky spent August with Gerard, in the third-story apartment of a tiny building in the rue Campagne-Première. The apartment was tiny, too, one room just large enough for a bed and desk, another with a love seat, a chair and two arched windows looking out over Paris rooftops. The kitchen had a stone sink and one gas burner; the toilet and tub were down the hall.

As if to make up for its truncated size, the apartment was a short distance from the beautiful Luxembourg Garden, with its graceful statues and Médicis Fountain. She and Gerard strolled there sometimes in the late afternoon and stood under the shade of chestnut trees, watching children sail toy boats at the edges of the pond.

They explored Gerard’s neighborhood, too, moving slowly through the narrow, winding streets of Montparnasse, stopping for crusty baguettes at a corner bakery, a small wheel of Mont d’Or from the shop next door, tart purple grapes from the greengrocer at the end of the block. Paris was sleeping, its residents and guests dreaming away their summer in other, cooler places. But Nicky dreamed only of Gerard.

She awoke each morning wrapped in his arms, too warm in the windowless room, and yet never quite warm enough. She had been raised among musicians. She had come of age in an era when jazz trumpeted the battle cry of sexual freedom and in a country where Prohibition was only a word in another language. But through it all, she had retained a stunning naiveté. Until Gerard.

He was all the things she hadn’t known enough to wonder about. When he filled her, she understood the words to love songs she had learned years before and never really believed.

He was complex and often moody. In sleep his face was kind. She could see the man he might have been, a man untormented by the devils of racism and rejection. Awake she could see his struggle to transcend his pain. He was a strong man, a man who took pleasure in his body and in hers. A man gentle enough to take her virginity and passionate enough to take her innocence.

He was also a man who drank too much, who brooded for days at a time and sometimes raged uncontrollably. But in his best moments he was adept at driving away the doubts that beset her. When she was with him she believed in their future together; she believed that they could hold the world away and make a life here in her adopted country. Although he never made promises or talked about the days to come, she believed.

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