The Undoing of Saint Silvanus Read online

Olivia continued. “He was about to board a plane but stepped out of line and hauled off after her like it was going to be one for the movies. He finally caught up to her outside of baggage claim. He grabbed her by the arm just before she got into the backseat of a cab. She jerked her arm away from him, called him something insulting, ducked into the car, and slammed the door. He stood there with his chin hanging. She looked nearly full-term, from what he described.”

  “He was sure the baby was his? Just like that?”

  “I asked him that, as you can well imagine. I certainly wasn’t. Not until later. He found her again about six months after that. She’d moved to Baton Rouge. He tried the gracious approach. Showed up at her apartment and asked if he could see the baby. She denied the baby was his.”

  “And he didn’t believe her.”

  “No. He’d have done better to have been poorer at math. I wish he had taken her word for it. But instead he saw a lawyer and got a paternity test ordered. DNA testing was just getting started, but Rafe had the money to have it done, and the results showed that the baby was his. He told Jaclyn he was going to court to request parental rights to see Jillian. Jaclyn caved because she was running out of money to fight him, so it never went that far.”

  “Whew. That’s a hornets’ nest.” Adella was trying to think what she would have done if her boys’ biological father had wanted to be a part of their lives. Emmett Atwater had been the best thing that ever happened to them. She’d get glimpses here and there of the boys’ wounds of abandonment—often when she least expected it. All in all, however, they’d managed to navigate the absence without excessive fallout. God had been good to them. For a split second she wondered where on earth his grace was hidden in this mixed-up Fontaine bunch.

  “You have no idea how big a hornets’ nest. Rafe’s father was livid at him for not letting it go. He said they’d go after every dime we had. I wasn’t happy with him either. It looked to us like he had the spine of an inchworm. He begged that woman for that child over and over again. Told her he’d do anything.”

  “So Jaclyn finally agreed to let him see her some?”

  “Yes, but she left no doubt how put out she was about it. She managed to convince Rafe not to sue for legal custody, saying it would be too disruptive for Jillian. I didn’t buy it. She had the maternal instincts of a bullfrog.”

  Adella tried not to let her face give away what she was thinking about the pot calling the kettle black. Anyway, she didn’t want to interrupt. Pieces of the Fontaine family puzzle were flying through the air in that conversation with the speed of light, and she meant to catch them while she could.

  “That’s not to say the baby adapted well.” Olivia paused long enough to close her eyes and shake her head with exasperation. Her expression betrayed how much she resented the right of those memories to surface from that deep vault. “She screamed her head off the first few times Jaclyn dropped her off, and I surely don’t have to tell you that Rafe didn’t know the first thing to do with that baby.” She sighed. “But he learned. And Jillian eventually seemed to adapt to him. He bought her everything under the sun. Clothes. Toys. The whole place looked like a nursery.”

  Olivia smoothed her palm over the surface of a folded bath towel, looking like she was trying to keep herself composed. “Once he asked me if I’d ever consider getting a swing set. I didn’t know why on earth we needed one, when there was a perfectly good park within walking distance. Mr. Fontaine never remotely warmed up to the idea of Rafe parenting a child. He refused to accept the ‘scientific hoodoo’ that said she was his.” Olivia stared out the window in the utility room for a moment. Then, right before Adella’s eyes, the woman seemed to shake off every ounce of emotion like a dog shaking off suds.

  “But you?” Adella asked.

  “I wasn’t blind. I caught a glimpse of the three of us in a full-length mirror walking out of a restaurant once. The resemblance was unmistakable.”

  A lump welled in Adella’s throat. “She looked just like him, did she?”

  “No, Adella. She looked just like me.”

  Both women went dead silent for several moments. It was Adella’s turn to stare out the window. Olivia blew out a breath and stiffened her lower back against the washing machine. Adella knew that if she didn’t say something quick to detain her, Olivia was going to make an exit and the subject would never come up again. “Well, I wish this was when you could tell me they lived happily ever after.”

  “It is clear enough that they did not. They had several years of this odd arrangement, but at least Rafe got to see the child. Jaclyn wouldn’t let her refer to him as Dad. Jaclyn had a number of men in her life in this period of time, according to Rafe. But everything changed when one of them moved in with her. I think the long and short of it was that Jaclyn wanted Jillian to attach to the new guy. She poisoned that child toward her father. Lied to her about him. By this time she was old enough to be brainwashed. Jaclyn told her Rafe wasn’t her father and that things would be better if he’d leave them alone.”

  “But she loved him by this time, right?”

  “She had, I think, before that, but she turned on a dime. I don’t know if you have ever seen a six-year-old with disdain on her face. She’d throw fits. She’d demand to go home. She’d say, ‘We hate you!’”

  “She was just a child, Olivia.”

  “Well, yes. A child with the power to break a grown man. One day he went to pick her up for a scheduled visit and stood knocking at the door for fifteen minutes. A man stuck his head out of the apartment next door, mad about all the racket. Rafe learned from him that they’d moved all their stuff out the day before. He went to the manager’s office in a tailspin, demanding to know if there was a forwarding address or contact number. Would you believe Jaclyn had the forethought to leave a letter in the manager’s hands with Rafe’s name on it? I saw it later in some of his things. She said they were moving to California for a fresh start, and if he cared about the child, he’d leave them alone. ‘She doesn’t want you to be her father,’ she’d said.”

  Adella’s stomach turned. “And he accepted that?”

  “If you want to call it that. That’s when a man who drank a bit too much on occasion picked up a glass and never set it down. He was just too sensitive for it all.”

  Olivia had only one thing left to say. “Jaclyn and Jillian killed Rafe long before he was dead. They might as well have put a gun to his head. He never got over it.”

  The morning sun was bleeding through every crevice in the plantation blinds when Jillian’s alarm went off. The sound persisted as she repeatedly slapped the top of the clock on the bedside table. Sitting up in bed, she remembered that it was the alarm on her new phone. She turned it off and fell back on the pillow.

  “Get up, girl,” she whispered to herself. “A world of dough awaits you.”

  Jillian climbed out of bed and turned the knob on the shower almost all the way to the left. As the temperature warmed and the bathroom mirror fogged, she splashed cold water from the sink on her face. She felt almost normal, a small miracle considering the last forty-eight hours. Maybe her stomach wasn’t quite ready for Olivia’s French press, but she could probably handle some coffee when she got to the café.

  Jillian realized that morning how much she missed music. She never got ready for work back home in San Francisco without it, and music played continually over the speakers at Sigmund’s. After her shower, she opened the app on the phone Olivia had given her and found nothing stored. For a moment she considered transferring the music stored in her old phone to the new one, but then again, to turn it on was to chance discovering a host of vicious voice mails.

  She put on a few coats of black noir mascara and some lip gloss, both of which she’d purchased at the grocery store. They weren’t her favorite but they weren’t so bad either. Slipping on a pair of hoop earrings, she glanced in the mirror over the antique vanity and tilted her head. What she needed was a haircut. If she was going to have to wear this white
getup to work five days a week, she at least owed it to her customers to keep her dragonfly in view. She made a mental note to ask Caryn for a recommendation or, on second thought, Stella, if she ran into her. Jillian had no idea if a stylist who worked with a black woman’s hair could also tame hers. Maybe she’d ask Adella.

  She grabbed her purse and stuck her new cell phone in its side pocket. As much as she hated to have to talk to Olivia this morning, she’d need to say something about the phone, especially since she planned to use it. Or maybe she’d leave her a note. Perfect idea. That’s what Olivia had done. Jillian headed into the kitchen and found a pad of paper by the phone and a pen in the drawer below it. The ballpoint appeared to be dry but she made circles on the pad until the ink began to flow.

  Mrs. Fontaine,

  Got the phone. Thanks. I will pay for it myself when I can. I will try not to be here much longer.

  Jillian paused a moment and considered how she could tell Olivia that she’d eaten the soup just to prove her wrong.

  Mrs. Winsee told me—

  Maybe that wasn’t a good idea. She scratched out those four words and jotted down two instead.

  Jillian Slater

  As she propped the note against a large bottle of olive oil on the kitchen counter, she heard voices down the hall. One voice was easy to identify. It was Adella’s. Thinking the other might be Caryn’s, she rounded the corner to inquire about a low-cost hair salon. It wasn’t Caryn after all. It was Olivia talking in a low voice to Adella in the utility room. She got within a few feet of the doorway just in time to hear Olivia say, “Jaclyn and Jillian killed Rafe long before he was dead. They might as well have put a gun to his head. He never got over it.”

  Jillian went cold. She swung around to get out of the hall before they caught her, stepping on the end of Clementine’s tail. The cat yowled loud enough to crack a glass. Jillian flew through the den toward the front entrance without glancing back to see if they were following her. She flung open the door, and as she stepped through it, she tripped, tumbling to her hands and knees.

  Clementine scurried past Jillian onto the front lawn as she caught her breath and scrambled to her feet. Both Olivia and Adella were standing in the doorway with their chins dropped but neither of them were looking at her. Jillian followed their gaze to the all-weather doormat where she’d tripped. All three women glared at a baby doll wrapped in a light-blue blanket.

  “Is this somebody’s idea of a joke?” Jillian was stunned. “Who did this?”

  Olivia was shaking her head. “We have no idea who, but somebody’s been—”

  “You people are sickos! I told you I wasn’t pregnant!”

  Olivia looked at Jillian with confusion. “What?”

  Adella stepped over the doll toward her. “Jillian, calm down a minute and let’s all get our bearings. Come back in here and let’s sort all this out.”

  Jillian glanced down St. Charles and saw the trolley in the distance heading their way. “I’m going to work. I wish I never had to come back to this place again.” She stormed across the lawn and then the street without looking back, even though both women were calling her name.

  Once she was on the trolley, Jillian turned up both of her stinging palms, scraped from catching her fall. She heard the muffled sound of a phone ringing and realized it was the one in her purse. Pulling out the phone, she saw the caller ID: Saint Sans Apartments. Jillian declined the call, silenced the ringer, and threw the phone back into her purse.

  CHAPTER 26

  ADELLA STARED AT THE UNCLOTHED DOLL lying on the dining table and the blue baby blanket crumpled beside it. Olivia was back in her suite, waiting to hear from Officer DaCosta. The morning’s events had not been the circumstances under which Adella wanted to tell Olivia about the arcane card on the flowers at the burial and the baby rattle on the back mat. But she’d promised Officer DaCosta she’d spill the beans, and she needed to do it before the man showed up himself.

  “Why atonement?” Olivia had asked with a look on her face that suggested she wasn’t sure she wanted an answer.

  “I was hoping you might know. Any idea at all?” Adella had begun to wonder if the two women had ever had a single conversation that wasn’t uncomfortable.

  Olivia had hesitated for a moment and then responded, “None.”

  Adella still wasn’t sure what atonement had to do with baby paraphernalia and things moving around on the back porch, but that picture of Rafe showing up out of nowhere made the whole thing so spooky that the hair stood up on her arms.

  Maybe the police could help make sense of all of it.

  Waiting for her to emerge with some news, Adella replayed in her memory the conversation earlier that morning between her and Olivia in the utility room. The one Jillian had caught the tail end of before running out the front door and tripping over the doll. No wonder the poor girl was always on the defensive. The whole house had gone crazy. There wasn’t a single rug she could stand on that didn’t get jerked out from under her. From the sound of things, that had been the story of her life.

  “I swear to goodness, it’s like the woman is amphibious,” Adella railed to Emmett that evening. “She pulls the girl in with her right hand and pushes her back with the left, all in one move.”

  “Ambidextrous, you mean,” Emmett replied.

  “And Jillian is no better. She’s just a younger version. We’re all getting the silent treatment from her now. The very idea that she thinks we’d plant that doll on the front porch.”

  “Dell, you better give me that knife before you amputate one of your fingers with it.”

  She pinched her lips together, hacked the blade through the raw onion, and sent slices flying off the cutting board.

  Seven hamburger patties were simmering in a giant skillet of brown gravy, two for each of the boys in the house and one for her. Emmett was apparently too hungry to sympathize properly with the latest from Saint Sans. Knowing him, he’d been thinking about that smothered steak all day. He gathered up the slices of onion and threw them into the skillet. He stuck a fork through a chunk of potato boiling on the stove to see if it was tendering up. It must not have been, because he turned up the flame.

  “Are you cooking this or am I?” Adella turned toward him with her hands on her hips.

  “You are, thank you, ma’am, but not fast enough for my appetite. You know what you need, woman? You need a hug.” He threw his arms around her, squeezed her, and kissed her forehead.

  “I do most certainly not need a hug.” Adella’s words were muffled as her face pressed into Emmett’s shirt. “What I need is some peace of mind!”

  “You know as well as I do, Adella Atwater, that peace of mind isn’t about peaceful circumstances. There’ll always be some conflict or calamity as long as we’re trudging along on this side of Jordan’s shore. Peace of mind is about trust. You take too much responsibility for all those people over there anyway. You can’t save them. Give them to Jesus.”

  “What was it Pastor said just last Sunday? From the book of James, I think. No, it was Jude. ‘Save others by snatching them out of the fire.’ You heard him yourself. I know I can’t save their souls, but if somebody doesn’t do something, resentment and distrust are going to rub together like two dry sticks and the sparks are going to burn that whole house down.”

  Emmett pulled back from Adella so he could look right into her eyes. Holding her face in both his hands, he said, “You can’t snatch somebody out of a fire who’s refusing to budge. And you’re getting yourself burned trying.”

  Water sizzled on the hot stove and Adella looked up to see the potatoes boiling over. She turned down the burner and stirred them briskly. “Oh, now look what you’ve gone and made me do!”

  Adella lay awake for a long time after Emmett started snoring. She couldn’t get her mind to stop replaying all the events of the last few days. She was fitful about having been so preoccupied with the reality show over at Saint Sans that she’d come in two weeks late on Trevor Do
n’s love life—the topic of conversation at dinner, thanks to a less-than-accidental slip of the tongue by AJ. Apparently he’d been keeping company with Tonya Thompson, a girl from church. Much to her boys’ dismay, she had insisted on reading every word of every text on Trevor Don’s phone. “I intend to steal it regularly from now on,” she had assured Emmett before he dropped off to sleep.

  “I don’t find that hard to believe,” he responded.

  “And the same goes for AJ’s, too.”

  At that, Emmett had reached over on the bedside table, picked up his phone, and handed it to her. “You might as well read mine, too.”

  She pushed his hand back, laughing. “You happen to be the one man in the house I trust farther than I can throw him. Anyway, your texts bore me to tears. Give me back that phone. Let me read you a perfect example. This was just yesterday. Me: ‘I am in enough traffic to give a civil woman a murderous case of road rage. Those idiots have got all the lanes closed down but one. I’m going to try to exit Poydras and take the feeder road. Can you stop by the store on your way home from work and get some hamburger buns? If I stop, I may never get back on. I’ve got fresh meat in the fridge but I forgot the buns because a woman with a behind the size of a barn hogged up half the aisle at baked goods while she squeezed every bun on the shelf. By the time she finally moseyed on to the fruits and nuts where she belonged, I forgot what I was there for. You know how the boys hate it when I use regular bread on a burger. And all I’ve got is that wheat bread that I bought on Tuesday in a vain attempt to save all our arteries and you would’ve thought I’d committed a domestic crime the way they acted about it. You got off earlier than I did today and Jillian has nearly sent me into a nervous fit so can you get some?’ And here’s you.” Adella put the phone right under his nose but he was too tickled to read it. It didn’t matter because she was certain he remembered exactly what he’d texted back: K.

  In all the excitement of the evening, she realized now, she hadn’t looked at her phone a single time, and she wondered whether anyone from Saint Sans might have called with an update on Jillian. The way the girl hightailed it out of there this morning, Adella worried she might decide to stay out all night again.