The Undoing of Saint Silvanus Page 13

  Jillian walked down the two flights of stairs behind the officers, balancing herself with her right hand on the wall. Officer La Bauve was so tall and broad that, when he stepped through the building’s doorway to the bright midmorning sun, Jillian stood in the shadow of a solar eclipse. When she stepped out onto the sidewalk she was relieved that at least there was no police car double-parked at the curb with lights flashing. She tried to gauge which way the pair of policemen were going to turn so she could dart in the opposite direction. Considering they had obviously asked about her all over the square, she had no intention of being seen with them. She didn’t care if she had to walk five blocks out of the way to catch the trolley.

  Officer La Bauve flashed a big smile and waved good-bye like they’d all just enjoyed a champagne brunch. Officer Sanchez hesitated for a moment. Then she dug into her back pocket and pulled out a card with a New Orleans law enforcement logo on it. “Miss Slater, here’s my card if you ever need anything.”

  “What would I need?” Jillian answered defensively.

  “I don’t know. Probably nothing. But you’re new in town. It doesn’t have to be business. Just if you need anything.”

  “I won’t.” Even with Jillian’s sharp tone, the officer maintained her stance and held out the card for several awkward seconds until Jillian took it and threw it in her purse. With that, the two officers turned to the left and headed toward Jackson Square. Jillian took that as a signal to go right as fast as her wobbling legs could take her. She had no memory of drinking enough to have the kind of hangover she was fighting. Then again, much of the night was a blur.

  As she turned the corner at the end of the block, she glanced over her shoulder and caught a glimpse of a woman facing her direction, sipping coffee out of a mug at a sidewalk café. There was no mistaking all that hair. It was Stella.

  CHAPTER 21

  “WELL, THAT WENT WELL.” Carla Sanchez retied her thick hair in a ponytail as they passed Café Beignet on the way to their car.

  As usual, sarcasm was wasted on Bully. “I don’t know. She seemed surprised to me.”

  “I’d say that’s an understatement, Bully. She’s got some kind of mouth on her, doesn’t she?”

  “You know how it is, Carla.” It was rare that anybody on the force called Sanchez by her first name, and if they even came close, it was usually Carlitos just to get on her nerves. “She’s just scared.”

  “Scared of what? I think she could use a little more fear than she seems to have. She’s gonna get herself in serious trouble.”

  “Oh, she’s scared alright. Give her some slack.”

  Bully’s words often had a gentle edge to them, but this time he sounded downright sappy. Sanchez stopped in her tracks, put both hands on her hips, and stared at him. “William Robert La Bauve, take those sunglasses off and look me in the eye or I’ll take them off for you.”

  “Why?” Bully grinned and held both sides of his glasses in place.

  “You think she’s cute!”

  “No, I don’t! I mean, it’s not that. She is cute. Anybody can see that. But that doesn’t have anything to do with me taking it easy on her. She seems lost. You know, like a lost puppy.”

  “You better listen to me well, partner. Puppies turn into dogs, and dogs bite.”

  “I’m starving.” That was the most convincing way to change the subject in a city that boasted the best food on the planet with waistlines to prove it. “How about I grab us two orders of these?” Bully motioned toward the café where Jillian worked. “That might hold me over till I can get my hands on a shrimp po’boy for lunch.”

  “I’ll pass on the beignets, but don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing. You’re gonna make sure they know she’s okay.”

  “I could just let them know at the to-go window that it was a false alarm. You don’t want them to go thinking something’s up with her.”

  A few minutes later, Bully joined her at the curb with a white paper bag in his hand. The grease spots on the bag suggested the beignets were fresh out of the fryer, hot and tasty. She resisted telling him she believed she’d have one after all. A breeze swept an empty paper cup down the sidewalk toward them. She closed her eyes for a moment and felt the gust against her face. “If I didn’t know better,” she remarked, “I’d think the first winds of fall might be blowing in.”

  “That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? Not unheard of this early either. But you know we don’t usually get a north wind down here that doesn’t come riding in on a storm.”

  Sanchez glanced off to the right and mumbled under her breath, “Yeah, and I feel a storm brewing. I feel it in my bones.”

  Bully called Adella as soon as he shut the patrol car door and turned the ignition. While he listened, he adjusted the air conditioner vents on his side of the car so they’d blow directly in his face. Adella’s tone was spirited enough that Sanchez heard most of what she said from the passenger seat but she couldn’t resist asking Bully to recount it. “So, how’d she take the news?”

  He quoted Adella in his best female pitch. “‘What do you mean she was asleep? Asleep! I’ll show that young lady some sleep! I’m gonna knock her to kingdom come! She won’t wake up for a month!’”

  They both laughed.

  “Did she bother to thank you?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, she did. Right before we got off the phone. ‘Officer La Bauve,’ she said. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’ I said, ‘You’re mighty welcome,’ but I think the phone was dead by then.”

  Sergeant DaCosta had a string of questions as long as a fishing line once they arrived, but most of them were left dangling. “The good news, boss, is that she is safe and sound and headed back to Saint Sans,” Bully said.

  “That’s good,” Sarge responded. “Yeah, that’s good. Now maybe we can get to work around here—if it’s alright with Mrs. Atwater.” His words sounded like he’d found the whole thing to be a nuisance, but his expression differed.

  “She wouldn’t let us take her home, Sarge. We tried.”

  The sergeant’s phone rang and he gave Bully and Sanchez a quick nod. “Gotta take this. Thanks, guys. Good work.”

  Half an hour later, Sanchez had her face glued to the screen of her laptop when Bully approached. “Did Sarge say we had to write a report?” he asked. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to do paperwork on a courtesy call.”

  “Nah, that’s not what I’m doing. Come over here and look at this.”

  Bully walked around the desk and looked over her shoulder. “What are you—? Are you playing cards?”

  “No, dork. You know better than that. This isn’t a computer game. It’s the tabletop at that apartment. While you were talking to Miss Slater, I took a few steps to look into the kitchen to see if anything seemed out of the ordinary. Everything in there looked fine, but this caught my attention. These cards were laid out on the table. Tarot cards, all faceup. See?” She tapped her finger on the screen.

  “You took a picture?”

  “Yep. I did. If she’d caught me, I was planning to tell her that I was texting Sarge.”

  “Tarot cards.” Bully pronounced the silent t on the end of the word. “You’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all. Not unusual around these parts.”

  “No, you’re right about that. But I wonder if our Miss Slater went over there to get herself a reading.”

  “Did you happen to get a good angle on a crystal ball?” He slapped his thigh. Nobody got a bigger kick out of Bully than Bully.

  “I’m serious. Look here.” Sanchez rolled the chair out beside her and patted it, motioning for him to sit down. As he did, the chair protested with a long squeak. “That’s what you call a five-card horseshoe spread.”

  “Is that kinda like a five-card flush?”

  “Bully, don’t even act like your mama has ever let you play any poker.”

  “Don’t be talking about my mama now.” Bully grinned. His mother had her own reputation on the force for sending copious b
atches of cookies to work with him like he was having a first-grade class party. She had cookie cutters for every season. Any day now, she’d be sending iced sugar cookies in the shape of ghosts and pumpkins, and in fifteen minutes flat, there would be nothing but crumbs.

  Sanchez stared pensively at the screen, unwilling to get sidetracked. “Bully, my great-aunt read cards. Growing up, I was completely infatuated with her. She was exotic and eccentric. She scared my big sister, but somehow I was enamored by her. My mom would tell me not to pay any attention to all that nonsense, but she didn’t stop me from going over there. It got me out of her hair for a little while. Anyway, I didn’t think it was nonsense. And I promise you that my great-aunt didn’t. Those cards were a bible to her. I can still picture exactly the way her hands looked when she held them. Two rings on each hand. She was thin, so her hands were really bony and she wore her nails long and painted dark red and they’d be chipped most of the time on the edges.”

  “You might have missed your calling, Sanchez. Maybe running a nail salon was in the cards for you.”

  Sanchez ignored his attempt to lighten things up. “Funny how you keep some images in your head all your life. And sounds, too. I can still hear the sound of her long nails clicking against those cards. As she got older, she increasingly lost touch with reality. And I lost touch with her. I felt so bad at her wake that I’d let go of that relationship. My uncles kept kidding that ‘she should have seen this coming.’ But I didn’t think they were funny.”

  “Weird. So you’re not about to tell me you’re a palm reader, are you, partner? Because I’d like to see you read this palm.” His pale, outstretched hand was the size of a dinner plate.

  She punched him in the shoulder. “No, I’m not a palm reader. But, Bully, I can read that draw. I’d sit right at my aunt’s side and she’d go through those cards one by one, telling me their stories, like she was reciting nursery rhymes. She’d try various hands on me and get me to tell her how I’d read them. She’d ask things like whether the cards in that draw were speaking to the future, the present, or the past. She really believed in the whole thing, said I had a knack with them and that only gifted people got the nuance. I started to get taken in by the whole thing until my mother finally told me she’d better not catch me over there again. To a large part, their use relies on the power of suggestion over a willing victim. They can be dangerous, but mostly they’re just creepy. This morning when I saw these things, it all came back to me. My stomach flipped like I was back in that musty room with the dark drapes. There’s no telling how that woman might have interpreted these cards for Jillian, but I can tell you how my great-aunt would have interpreted them.”

  “I’m listening.” Sanchez had Bully’s full attention at this point.

  She pointed to them one by one, slowly and in order. “That one involves money. That one—” she circled it on the screen with the mouse—“signals doom. The middle one is the fool. It can be a wild card, but in context with the rest of them, my aunt would say it lived up to its name.” She moved to the fourth one. “This one here? Betrayal.”

  “And that one?” Bully asked, pointing to the fifth card.

  “Death.”

  CHAPTER 22

  AS THE TROLLEY CAME TO A STOP, Jillian could see Adella standing at the front door of Saint Sans with her hands on her hips, steam coming out of her ears.

  Adella started in before Jillian’s foot hit the curb. “You’ve got thirty seconds to start explaining, young lady.”

  “Explaining what?” Jillian attempted to walk around her. “Why is it any of your business? My own mother never made me answer to her like that, even when I was in high school.”

  Adella blocked the doorway with her arm. “Well, has it occurred to you, Miss Thing, that she should have? Huh?”

  “I’m an adult, Adella. Treat me like one.”

  “Girl, I’ll treat you like an adult when you act like one. Take some responsibility. You had your grandmother worried sick. Just look what she’s done to the flower beds.” Wilted summer flowers and weeds had been pulled out by the roots and piled up in heaps under the oaks. “For that matter, you had us all worried sick. She called me in the middle of the night when you didn’t come home. I got here before dawn this morning and every light in the house was on. Mrs. Winsee was up half the night and was fit to be tied, saying Mr. Winsee couldn’t get a wink of sleep. For all we knew, your cold dead body had been thrown into the Mississippi mud.”

  “Oh, please. Don’t act like you guys all care like that. I can’t believe you’re mad at me.”

  “You better be glad you have some people in your life who care enough to get mad at you. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. I’m about to enroll you in a class with Miss Manners. You’d qualify for a scholarship.”

  “I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to get out of my personal life!”

  “That is precisely what I am not going to do. That much you can take to the bank. As long as you’re under this roof—”

  “It’s not even your roof!”

  Adella didn’t back down. “I’ll have you know that I may not own this roof, but I hire every single person who touches it, and I have a strong say in who lives under it.”

  “Well, then you will be relieved to know that I will not be under it much longer.” Jillian ducked under Adella’s arm into the great room. Adella marched right after her, heels clicking on the hardwood floor.

  “Young lady, you’re lucky I’m in the mood to overlook an offense since our day wasn’t ruined by a call to the morgue. Turn around here and pinch those smarty lips of yours and listen to me.”

  Jillian was headstrong but Adella had a way of barking orders that unearthed an involuntary compliance in a person. She faced Adella with as much annoyance as she could capture in one expression.

  “People in this house do care about you, Jillian. Some of them are just better at showing it than others. You could have called and eased some minds around here. It’s just common decency. Consideration. Do you get that?”

  Jillian almost let a yes slip from her tongue but thought better of it and sharpened her edge. She wasn’t going to let these people control her. “I went over to a friend’s apartment after work. That’s it. That’s all that happened. And then I fell asleep on her couch. Are you satisfied?”

  “Her couch.” Adella didn’t even try to mask her relief.

  “Yes, hers. I wasn’t with a guy. But if I had been, it still wouldn’t be any of your business. Are you people stuck in a time warp here or what?”

  “Need I remind you, Jillian Slater, that we have all the man problems we can handle right now?”

  “We don’t have anything.”

  “I’ll tell you what we have.” Adella whispered the loudest of anyone Jillian knew. “We have a pregnancy test in my purse and the one of us who still has a uterus is about to take it.”

  Jillian’s stomach rolled. She walked through the door of her room and set her purse on the bed. “I don’t want to take it yet.”

  Adella closed the door behind them. “That’s what you’ve been saying for the past two weeks. What I don’t understand is why not?”

  “I don’t want to take the test until I have some money to do something about it.”

  Adella started to speak. Then she stopped and seemed to change gears. “Now, let’s just simmer down and take one step at a time. Don’t go making those kinds of plans even in your head right now. Every baby is—”

  “Don’t say baby!”

  Adella took a deep breath. “Let’s just take the test and see what it says. Then we’ll go from there.” She pulled the box out of her purse, put her glasses on, and squinted to read the instructions.

  “Oh, just give it to me. I know how to do it.” Jillian took the test out of her hand and went into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Her hands were shaking as she took the stick out of the box. She set it in the dry sink and steadied both hands on its edge. “Pl
ease,” she whispered into the air, speaking, she supposed, to Fate.

  Staring into the mirror over the sink, she flashed back to the reflection she’d seen in the restroom of a clinic eight years earlier. The girl in that mirror was seventeen. Her hair was long back then, her natural black but with two strands of blonde highlights framing her face. The bridge of her nose had broken out from the stress and her round face was slenderer than usual. She’d lost nearly ten pounds. She’d known for about a month but hadn’t gotten the guts to tell her mother until a few days earlier.

  Jade had done almost exactly what Jillian expected. She’d handled it. She made the appointment for her, drove her to it, kissed her on the cheek, and said, “Call me when you’re ready for me to pick you up.” Jillian had gone through that door all by herself. Even though Jade had always claimed to love being a single mom, Jillian had to wonder if she had regrets about going through with her own pregnancy. Otherwise, why would she have been so quick to arrange the termination of Jillian’s?

  The memory of the expression on that face in the mirror had never left her. The girl in that reflection wore a mask of raw fear. She was scared of the pain and terrified of the sight of blood. And she was alone. Nobody was in that reflection with her. She hadn’t told the guy. She really liked him and she was afraid it would be the end of the relationship.

  Jillian remembered curling up that night under a crocheted blanket on their couch with the sound of popcorn popping in the microwave. Jade had rented a movie for them to watch together. “It’s a comedy,” she said cheerfully. “What we need to do is laugh.” Jillian couldn’t recall the movie title or who was in it. A few days later, she went back to school with a note from her mom saying she’d had the flu. The two of them never mentioned it again. She and the guy quit seeing each other soon after that.