The Undoing of Saint Silvanus Read online

  Jillian had—and of course she hadn’t liked it—but didn’t all men do that? Allie’s final words in the wet sand of anger hardened into concrete in Jillian’s head. “He came on to your best friend, Jillian! I can’t believe you would take his word over mine.”

  That was the end of it. Jillian didn’t believe her. She couldn’t afford to.

  At least Jillian’s mom had been supportive in the wake of that fight. “A true friend would have understood, Jillian. Who on earth wouldn’t choose a man over a girlfriend?”

  Vince had been so good to her in the beginning, telling her what a natural beauty she had and how different she was from everybody else he’d been with. Everybody else. Even his compliments had a way of making her feel insecure.

  Jillian was a hundred and eighty degrees removed from a stereotypical Southern California blonde. She had raven-dark hair, cut short and left naturally curly at the nape of her neck. With enough humidity, it looped around a tiny tattoo she had just behind her right ear as if the whole presentation was planned that way. The black-and-white dragonfly with a wash of pale pink inside its wings was ink at its most feminine. She had big, round Christmas-green eyes that caught the light like a prism when she laughed and broke the banks of a river when she cried. Or, at least that’s what someone had told her when she was a little girl.

  Jillian had never been bone-thin, but she’d been okay with how she looked until Vince started dropping a string of remarks about her weight. Long-waisted, her stomach was as flat as a kitchen counter, so what she ate slid right over it and landed squarely where she sat. These days she mostly ate behind his back so he wouldn’t glare at her like she was an old sow.

  Jillian missed Allie terribly, especially on a day off. She was the best friend she’d ever had.

  The ring of the phone in her back pocket was a welcome red light to Jillian’s racing thoughts. It was Garrett, a fellow waiter at Sigmund’s, in a fast-talking, high-pitched panic. He was hands-down her favorite person at work, but he could manage to make a nap dramatic. They needed her at work ASAP to help with a party of sixteen, he said. Casey was on the schedule, but according to Garrett she was indisposed, so they were shorthanded and overwhelmed. He said Vince indicated that Jillian had better get down there posthaste if she knew what was good for her.

  In fifteen minutes flat, Jillian flew through the door of Sigmund’s, grabbed her green apron, tied it around her waist, and spun around, looking for a table set for sixteen. Garrett and Sam, another waiter, were standing at the end of the bar, making peculiar faces.

  Jillian was flabbergasted. “Why don’t you guys have the table ready? Are you crazy? What time is their reservation?”

  Garrett and Sam stared at her wide-eyed without saying a word.

  “What is wrong with you two? Let’s start moving tables!” Jillian wasn’t often the one barking orders but she was in no mood to hide how annoyed she was. “I can’t believe you guys didn’t get started. What have you been doing for fifteen minutes?”

  Garrett shifted his eyes toward Vince’s office and tilted his head, clearly trying to signal Jillian’s attention that direction.

  “What?” She had no idea what was the matter with him, but if he didn’t shake out of it, the party of sixteen was going to be a disaster.

  He shifted his eyes a second time with unmistakable insistence.

  “Is he mad at me or something?” This time Jillian didn’t wait for a response. When she took the shortcut behind the bar to get to Vince’s office, she caught a glimpse of Casey’s purse. “Are you guys kidding me? She came in after all and you didn’t bother to save me a trip?” Jillian felt like punching Garrett when she walked past him.

  The second she saw Vince’s office door closed, Jillian knew. In that very moment she could have scripted the next scene with stunning precision. She grabbed the doorknob and tried to turn it. It was locked.

  Of course it is, she said to herself, her head feeling like it would explode. She beat on the door with her fist, and when her knuckles throbbed, she banged with her palm. After what seemed to Jillian like minutes, Vince opened the door, severely annoyed. “What?” he demanded, almost shouting. From the expression on his face, Jillian was obviously the last person he expected to see. His annoyance escalated into anger.

  “What, Jillian? I’m in a meeting. What are you even doing in today?” He spit the words out, offering no pause for an answer. “You’re making a spectacle out of yourself. Give me a minute, will you?” Before he shut the door in Jillian’s face, he looked her up and down like she disgusted him.

  Jillian staggered into the kitchen, her mind whirling. Everyone but the chef scattered like mice, and he studied his saucepan as if he’d never seen onions simmer. When she heard the door of Vince’s office open several minutes later, she steadied herself and stepped back into the hall, trying to muster the courage to be unavoidable. Casey emerged first and headed for the dining room. Then came Vince, as cool as a California cucumber. Jillian thought he was going to walk right past her as if she were invisible, but he didn’t. He paused next to her and, without so much as a glance her direction, said, “Go home, Jillian.”

  Home?

  He’d spoken to her like she was a child. No, worse than that. He’d spoken to her like she was a repulsive child, and loudly enough for anyone paying the mildest attention to hear. The instant he hit the dining area, he turned on the charm, stopping by tables to say hello and to ask the customers if they were being well taken care of. Jillian had never in her life met a man so smooth. If he’d offered them his palm, she was pretty sure they’d eat right out of it.

  He slapped one of the regulars on the back, a big spender at Sigmund’s, and called Garrett over to the table. “Make sure this man’s dessert is always on the house, will you?” The customer beamed and the waiter awkwardly nodded. It was the only time Garrett’s gaze met Jillian’s. Maybe what she saw on his face was regret. Maybe it was pity. Maybe it was too late to make a difference to Jillian.

  After Vince garnered sufficient praise, he pulled out his keys, put on his sunglasses, and walked out the door of Sigmund’s like a man exiting a Broadway stage after a standing ovation. Almost instinctively, Jillian shifted her attention to Casey. The young woman watched every step Vince took toward the curb, where his car was parked, and then she carefully watched him climb inside, shut the car door, and drive off. Jillian didn’t bother wondering what Casey was looking for. She’d been there too many times. She was looking to see if he’d glance back at her.

  He didn’t. He never looked back at either one of them.

  CHAPTER 8

  ADELLA CAUGHT HERSELF walking on tiptoes again through the great room at Saint Sans. She felt like she hadn’t walked with her heel to that hardwood floor since the day Rafe was buried. It was as if the world within those walls was so delicately balanced that the least tremor would bring the whole thing down. They were a shattered window waiting for one faint tap to send it falling to the floor in a thousand pieces.

  September had finally dragged its lazy girth through the door but with no relief from the summer swelter. That was normal this far south. A cool spell by now would have made the morning news, and if the digits dropped a lick lower than sixty even by October 1, that city full of Chicken Littles could celebrate because the sky would be falling.

  Everyone at Saint Sans was in mourning, but rather than calling it what it was, they had all cloaked themselves in the sackcloth of quiet cordiality. All of them were pallbearers, bearing the weight of Rafe’s lifeless body, finding no fitting place to lay him to rest.

  Adella had been around the block enough times to know such things happened, but she still wondered how a man could live and die on a sidewalk within one day’s walking distance of this big, fancy house. Some people were just too sick to come home. Or others weren’t well enough to let them.

  David told her they rarely heard music wafting from Mrs. Winsee’s room in the late evening, as they’d all grown accustomed to.
She’d said Mr. Winsee’s back was out and there had been little dancing. Caryn had made herself scarce, restricting her studies almost entirely to the Tulane Medical Library. Adella actually missed coming in on occasion in the early morning and catching Caryn cleaning up the mess of textbooks strewn over the kitchen island after an all-nighter.

  The dense weight upon Adella’s soul wasn’t only from the death of their proprietor’s son or even from his unsolved murder. It was also from the secrets. She’d never told Olivia about the cryptic card on the flowers at the grave site. Nor had she told her about the blue baby rattle she’d found on the doormat outside the back door of Saint Sans a few weeks ago. She chose to believe Clementine had dropped it there like a dead mouse. She hadn’t mentioned it even to David.

  Between the unsolved murder, that stupid card, and the baby rattle, Adella was herself as nervous as a cat. She looked over her shoulder every time she got in or out of the car in the dark. A woman of God knew better than to fear superstitions and omens, but this town had a way of turning anything unexplainable into something paranormal. Anyway, Adella didn’t feel much like a woman of God right now. Emmett had commented on Sunday how she’d clammed up at church. All that conniving and secret-keeping had made her feel what her mama would’ve called sin-sick.

  The only bright spot during the past weeks had been an unexpected, out-of-season cardinals’ nest in the formal garden outside the great room and Olivia’s suite. It had proved to be just the distraction everyone in the house needed.

  When David came in after school on the day two eggs had been spied in the nest, Olivia was hovering in the den and Mrs. Winsee was fussing around the kitchen, looking for her tea bags. The afternoon sun was at just the right spot to spill every color in the large stained-glass window over the floor like water. The deep blue of the tossing waves under the disciples’ boat fell in a lighter shade across Olivia’s legs.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Fontaine.” David’s words were directed starboard but his eyes shot toward Adella, who raised her eyebrows to show equal bafflement.

  “Afternoon, David. Have you heard we have new boarders?”

  “Caryn’s leaving? Where is she going? And right in the middle of a semester?”

  “Caryn’s not going anywhere, at least as far as I know.” Adella took it upon herself to explain. “Mrs. Fontaine is talking about a nest of cardinal eggs right there in the formal garden.”

  David made an odd face. “In autumn?”

  “Well, now, aren’t we all quite the bird experts in this house?” Olivia looked unusually pleased with herself and had become so conversational that Adella wondered if she was nipping on a little something in her room.

  A voice from the kitchen: “Surely it would come as no surprise to any of you that a pair of doves was released into a perfect blue sky from a gilded cage at the garden wedding reception of Mr. and Mrs. Waylon Randall Winsee III.”

  “No surprise at all, Mrs. Winsee. I can only imagine the romance of it all,” David replied, walking over to the window to see the nest for himself.

  “And you know they mate for life, don’t you, dear David?” Still Mrs. Winsee and, with that, she giggled and for just a moment her deep-rose lip pencil appeared to align with her lips. She joined him at the window, tea sloshing into the saucer.

  Olivia had stood next to them, clicking the nail of her index finger on the glass. “Right there. Do you see it?”

  “I hate to spoil the party, you three, but if you want that mother to come back to those eggs, you better move away from that window. The last thing you want is for her to abandon that nest.”

  And just like that, it happened. Like she’d jinxed it by speaking it. Adella was supposed to be off today but she couldn’t keep from going to Saint Sans to save her life. It had been twenty-four hours, and if the mother bird had not returned, she was sure the two speckled eggs were lifeless by now.

  “Adella, what are you doing here?”

  She caught Olivia off guard and in her housecoat in the kitchen. She rarely ever emerged from her quarters without being neatly manicured from head to toe. She wasn’t fancy per se, but she well surpassed presentable. Her makeup was understated but always in place and her earrings were small but never missing. And almost never cheap, at least as far as Adella could tell. Adella had only ever seen Olivia barefoot that one time, drunker than Cooter Brown in Rafe’s bed. Of course, she wasn’t barefoot now but her slippers said it all.

  “Well, I just wanted to see what supplies we were running low on. I’m headed to the supermarket for my own family and I might as well pick up the things we need here.”

  “Suit yourself.” Olivia turned and walked down the hall without a passing glance to the left for a roll call in the camellia bush. That should have been all Adella needed to know but she headed to the window the second Olivia’s door closed. Two speckled eggs. Nothing more.

  To make less a liar of herself, Adella checked the cabinets in the laundry room for cleaning supplies. “It’s just nature’s way anyhow. Isn’t there enough to worry about with humans? That oldest boy of yours, for instance. Does he or does he not have a midterm biology exam today and has he or has he not made every excuse for why he can’t concentrate? ADHD, he says. I’m going to give him a dose of ADHD, alright, with a knot on his head.”

  “Adella, are you talking to yourself again? Tsk, tsk, tsk. Do you answer yourself, too?” It was Mrs. Winsee sweeping past her in the hall. Well, if that wasn’t the pot calling the kettle black. Things were obviously worse for Adella than she feared. It was the change of life, and day after tomorrow she guessed she’d no longer remember where she worked. That might be a relief.

  “Your hair looks nice, Mrs. Winsee. That’s a good shade for your skin tone.” Adella had barely seen it out of the corner of her eye, but she had the manners to be kind to the elderly and nothing made Mrs. Winsee happier than a compliment. Maybe it was a tender mercy of God that the old woman saw someone wholly different in her vanity mirror. Not a different person really. Just another era.

  “Well, Mr. Winsee would have me blonde again if he could. You know how men are. But I think Hint of Chestnut goes best with my naturally dark eyebrows.”

  Adella knew those hadn’t been naturally dark eyebrows in three round decades, but the way things were going, she might bleach her own hair blonde next week. Then it would all break off the next. She added Pine-Sol to her list as Mrs. Winsee chattered away in the great room. Adella had overheard her talking to her dead husband no few times but this was the first time she’d heard her talk to her dearly departed mother. “Poor, lost thing,” she murmured, shaking her head. “Lord, let me keep my mind.”

  Adella pitched down her pen. “Wait a minute.” She spun around the corner, where she could see Mrs. Winsee and concentrate on what she was saying.

  “Where have you been, Mommy? We’ve been watching for you!”

  Adella nearly tripped over her own feet making her way to Mrs. Winsee, a yard shy of the window. “Well, I’ll be a striated pardalote,” Adella whispered. “Would you look at that?” There she was, feathers bristled as big as she could get them, two speckled eggs hidden from sight, snuggled safe and sound underneath.

  Before Adella walked out the back door to finally have a decent day off, she picked up the pen, tore the blank part of the page off her grocery list, scratched two words on it, and slipped it under Olivia’s door:

  She’s back.

  Adella was right there in the aisle between the kidney beans and the sweet relish when it happened. Without a hint of notice, tears squirted from her eyes like she was shooting a water gun. She couldn’t stop herself. Her whole head drained like a tub. She felt a howl coming from her inner regions, like she was about to bay like a hound—and all this over a pair of eggs no bigger than thimbles. She tried to fend it off with a snort just as a woman turned the corner sharply with her grocery cart and stared at her.

  Adella snatched the wax paper from Emmett’s apple fritter, blew her nos
e into it, and cried, “Will these prices ever break? A dollar seventeen for a can of shoepeg corn? Criminals, all of them!”

  The woman hugged the pickle shelf as tight as she could as she moved past Adella and on down to dairy. The condition she was in, Adella felt it the better part of wisdom to wait on those two dozen eggs even if they were on special. Maybe the chicken livers weren’t a good idea either.

  As she unloaded groceries from the plastic bags onto her kitchen counter, Adella was at a complete loss about what a woman could conjure up for supper from this ugly conglomeration. She glanced into the refrigerator to make sure she had some fresh mayo. At the welcome sight of it she said, “BLTs. They’ll love ’em. Thank you, Jesus.”

  “Is it safe to come into the house this afternoon?” Emmett was peeking around the door with a grin so sheepish and handsome, Adella couldn’t even play mad.

  She’d flown all over him that morning for poking fun at her for activating the church prayer chain over eggs. “Here’s you a pair of eggs to pray about!” she’d said and commenced scorching his over easies in the iron skillet until the kitchen smelled to high heaven.

  She and Emmett had tied the knot five years ago in a real, live church with a bona fide minister. All day long she’d said, “If I’m dreamin’, nobody better wake me up.” And no one had. Adella had known her share of heartache, but over the last several years—even swimming in the hormones of two teenage boys—she’d been about as happy as anyone she knew. And she’d tell you she was blessed if you’d listen.

  Now the man grabbed her up in a bear hug so tight, she’d have stayed there all night had the boys not come in right behind him. “I found a couple of scallywags on a corner and brought ’em home with me. They threatened to starve before I could get them home, so I was held at gunpoint until I pulled into the Circle K.” The oldest boy was plenty old enough to drive, but Adella was of the mind-set that a kid would make it to destruction slower if he had to walk there. She’d have to give in soon, but it wouldn’t be this week.