Midnight Confessions

by Candice Proctor

  She didn’t answer him right away. A small crease appeared between her brows as she thought, but in the end, she only shook her head again, her gaze coming back to his face. “No. I’m sorry. I can’t think of anything. Have you spoken to her parents?”

  “Last night.” He bounced the Chinaball berries up and down in his palm, then closed his fist over them. “Did you know her mother blames you for Claire’s death?”

  “Me?”

  “She thinks that if it hadn’t been for you, Claire never would have volunteered at the hospital.”

  She brought up one hand to rub her forehead in a telling gesture of exhaustion. She was driving herself too hard, and it was starting to show. “Madame La Touche didn’t know her daughter well.”

  “Did you?”

  “I understood how she thought. I understood her anger and frustration.”

  “Anger and frustration? With what?”

  “With society’s expectations and prejudices.” She paused. “Do you even know what I’m talking about?”

  “I have read Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill.” He smiled at the startled widening of her eyes. “That surprises you, doesn’t it?” he said, leaning into her. “And did you ever think that perhaps you have a few prejudices of your own, Madame de Beauvais?”

  “Against men who wear uniforms, you mean? Especially blue uniforms?”

  “Against men, period.”

  She stared at him without blinking, the black lace at her throat shuddering as she drew a quick, high breath. He thought she meant to deny it, but all she did was say, her voice crisp, “Has your army doctor finished the postmortem?”

  Zach shook his head. The baby inside was crying again. “Not yet. But I promised the La Touche family I’d try to have the body released in time for them to be able to hold a wake tomorrow night.” It would need to be a closed coffin, of course. They hadn’t liked that, the La Touche family.

  “Will you tell me the results, when you receive them?” She paused. “Or does my status as a suspect preclude that?”

  “I’ll tell you.” He realized he still held the Chinaball berries in his hand, and looked down at them before tossing them away. “You know, Claire La Touche and Henri Santerre did have one other connection besides this hospital that you didn’t mention.”

  She shook her head. “What’s that?”

  “Philippe. Philippe de Beauvais. And you.”

  That evening, after an endless, numbing day spent treating malnourished children and scurvy-wracked, hollow-eyed women, Emmanuelle took Dominic and one of his friends uptown on the Carrollton steam train. There, while the two boys raced across the grassy flat below, their young voices raised in excited laughter, Dominic’s bright red kite climbing higher and higher into the pale blue sky, Emmanuelle walked to the top of the levee, where she could look out across the driftwood houses lining the batture, to the surging gray-brown expanse of the river.

  A cool wind buffeted her face, blowing away the driving anger that had kept her going all day. Trouble was, beneath the anger lurked a grief and fear so profound, she knew herself to be hollowed out by it and left dangerously fragile. A gust of wind tugged at the brim of her hat and she brought up one hand to hold it down, her eyes narrowing against the dazzle of sunlight reflecting off the swift-moving waters of the river. She sucked in a deep breath, drawing it all in, the sound of the children’s laughter and the warmth of the sun on her shoulders and the majestic beauty of the river, and then felt a warning sting of tears in her eyes when she thought of how fleeting it all was, how quickly it could all be lost, how quickly it had been lost, first to Philippe, then to Henri, and now to Claire. She tightened her grip on her hat, her other hand fisting in her skirts as she fought the urge to run down the levee and sweep her son up into her arms and hold him safe and alive against her. Hold herself safe for him.

  She became aware of a man riding toward her, a tall man in a blue officer’s uniform, his seat on his horse as graceful and effortless as that of any Louisiana planter. She turned her back to the river breeze and watched as he kneed his big cavalry mount at an angle up the slope of the levee, toward her. He was her enemy, the enemy of her people, a part of the terrible things that were being done to them every day. And yet, just the sight of him was enough to set her heart to beating hard and fast.

  “How did you know where to find me?” she asked when he drew nearer, her head tipping back, her hand shifting to grasp the ribbons of her bonnet as the wind caught at it again.

  “I stopped by the rue Dumaine,” he said, and swung out of the saddle beside her.

  They turned and walked together along the shell-strewn path at the crest of the levee, his big bay ambling along behind them. She could see Dominic, below, sprawled on the grass as he worked at untangling a snarl in his kite string. “You have the results of the autopsy,” she said quietly, when the man beside her didn’t speak.

  “Yes.”

  She threw a quick look sideways at him. “And what did your Yankee doctor find?”

  He had his gaze fixed straight ahead, his profile hard and handsome and utterly unreadable. “You were right. It was tansy.” He drew the length of his reins through his other hand, dark leather against pale gauntlets. “I asked the army doctor what sort of ‘women’s problems’ it’s used to treat. He said women take it to bring on their monthly flow.” He looked at her. “Which is a fuzzy way of saying it’s used to get rid of an unwanted child.”

  Emmanuelle felt an aching sensation in her chest, as if a hole had suddenly opened up in her heart. “And was she with child?”

  “No. Although she was no innocent maiden, either.” He searched her face, his eyes narrowed, fierce. “But then, you knew that, didn’t you?”

  She made no attempt to deny it, only swung away from him to look out over the shantytown on the batture below. This stretch of willow and weeds between the levee and the riverbank was public land, a part of the river, really. Those who squatted here lived a precarious existence, their houses perched on stilts high above the level of the yearly floodwaters, their chickens and pigs running free and vulnerable beneath the feathery branches of the willows. But she’d always thought the view of the ever-rolling river from those rickety porches must be magnificent.

  “Do you know the name of the man she was seeing?” he asked.

  “We didn’t discuss such things.” It wasn’t exactly a lie, although it hid a shameful truth she had no intention of revealing. She turned to walk on, the shells crunching beneath her feet, her face lifted toward the golden light of the lowering sun. The wind was almost cold, this close to the river. It always surprised her, how cold the wind on the levee could be.

  “So of course you don’t know who might have wanted Miss La Touche dead?” he said, keeping pace beside her.

  “No.”

  “When I talked to her family last night, they described their daughter as innocent. Untouched. Which means either they didn’t know the truth, or they were too ashamed to admit it. Or too afraid.”

  “Afraid?” She swung to face him, her head tilting to one side as she studied his set features. “What are you suggesting? That they killed Claire because she was no longer a virgin?”

  “It’s been known to happen, when a young woman threatens to bring disgrace to her family—to her old, proud, oh-so-respectable family. It seems Miss La Touche was rather daring in her sexual activities. According to the doctor who did the autopsy, some of the things she did were . . . well, let’s put it this way, a man would need to pay extra for that kind of fun, in the bordellos along the waterfront.”

  She felt her cheeks flame with understanding. “I’m not an innocent, Major. I can guess what you’re talking about.”

  Something glittered in the depths of his dangerously dark eyes, something he hid with a downward sweep of his lashes. “For some people—say, for instance, a proud father, or an outraged brother—it might be reason enough to kill.”

  “No. Not for Antoine,” she said hasti
ly, too hastily, she thought, when she saw the flicker of interest that crossed his features.

  “How close was she to Henri Santerre?”

  “You can’t think Henri.” She shook her head in vehement denial. “No. Henri would never.”

  “What makes you so certain?”

  “Mon Dieu. He was an old man!”

  He glanced sideways at her, a hard smile curling his lips. “It’s been known to happen before.”

  “No. Henri was an honorable man. He would never have seduced a woman young enough to be his grand-daughter.”

  “Perhaps he was the one seduced. Claire La Touche was a very beautiful young woman. Beautiful and bold and knowing.”

  “No,” she said again. “You don’t understand. There was only one woman in Henri’s life. His wife might have been dead thirteen years, but he was still devoted to her. Besides . . .” The snapping of a line made her look up, her gaze narrowing as she saw Dominic’s red kite climb, leaping and dipping, into the cornflower blue sky again. “Henri didn’t even like Claire. I mean, he appreciated what she did for the men in the hospital, but he”—she hesitated, looking for the right word—“disapproved of her.”

  “Did he know she took laudanum?”

  She threw him a quick glance of surprise.

  “According to the army doctor, she was a regular user. And don’t try to tell me you had no idea, because you’d have known. Someone like you would have noticed the signs.”

  “I wouldn’t say she took it regularly, but she took it more than was prudent, yes. Most people don’t understand how addictive it can be. I tried to warn her, but she only laughed at me.”

  “Do you know where she got it?”

  Emmanuelle shook her head. “Before the war made opium scarce, you could get it anywhere. But that’s not true anymore.” In the shade of one of the driftwood porches below, a mulatto man was weaving a wicker chair from the batture’s willows. Emmanuelle stood very still, watching his hands flash in and out as he worked. “It’s still possible Claire’s death was an accident, isn’t it?” she said slowly. “I mean, she could have thought she was with child, and taken the tansy to get rid of it.” Yet even as she said it, Emmanuelle knew it could never have happened that way. No matter how desperate she might have imagined herself to be, Claire would never have taken such a harsh purgative in the afternoon, when she was going out. She would have waited for the long, secret hours of the night.

  “It was no accident,” he said. “The tansy was in her laudanum. Fletcher found the bottle in a search of her room—a search your friend Antoine did his best to prevent, by the way.”

  “In the laudanum? But . . . is that possible? It’s sweet, laudanum, but surely not sweet enough to completely mask the bitterness of the tansy.”

  He shook his head. “It was a new bottle. Even if she did notice a different taste, she probably just thought it was a bad mix. After all, she wouldn’t be likely to think someone was trying to poison her, would she?”

  A strange sound escaped Emmanuelle’s lips before she could stop it. He took a step toward her, his hand closing on her upper arm to bring her around to face him when she would have turned away. “Listen to me,” he said, holding both her arms now in a fierce grip that pulled her to him. “Something ugly is going on here, something ugly and dangerous, and you know a hell of a lot more about it than you’ve admitted so far. Can’t you see that you’re in danger? Don’t you even care?”

  She stared up into his fierce, hard face, and found herself caught by the turbulent darkness of his eyes. “Do you think I’m not afraid? I have a son who lost his father less than three months ago. Do you think I don’t worry about what will become of him if something were to happen to me?”

  “Then why the hell won’t you tell me the truth?”

  They were too close, and the emotions raging through her were all too linked, too entwined, fear and excitement, passion and hate. She felt her heart thundering hard and fast within her. Saw his features sharpen with an intense, almost predatory sexuality as his head dipped, his gaze fixed on her mouth. “Monsieur . . . ,” she whispered. “My son . . . his friend . . .”

  He flung up his head, a quick breath shuddering his chest, his hands lifting from her shoulders. She spun away from him, but he made no move to touch her again.

  “How many more people are going to have to die?” he said, standing suddenly, frighteningly still. “How many people are going to die before you overcome your prejudices against my uniform and my sword enough to tell me what is going on?”

  She shook her head slowly from side to side, her fingers twisting in the heavy folds of her black mourning gown. “That has nothing to do with it.”

  She could hear Dominic’s voice calling in the distance. “Maman, Maman.” Turning her head, she watched him race up the levee toward her, his kite soaring. “Maman, look how high!”

  “It has everything to do with it,” the man beside her said and, gathering his horse’s reins, he swung into his saddle and rode away, a solitary figure in blue silhouetted against a fading Southern sky.

  That night, sometime in the still hours around midnight, Emmanuelle jerked awake, her heart pounding. She sat up in bed, her ears straining to catch an echo of whatever had awakened her. But the silence in the house was a ringing, tangible thing, as heavy and impenetrable as the darkness.

  Shivering with fear, she got up and crept to the doorway of Dominic’s room, but he slept peacefully, his breathing a gentle sound on the quiet night. And so she forced herself to venture farther, across the room and out into the hall, the night air warm against her goosefleshed skin, her bare feet moving noiselessly over the bare floorboards. She felt terrified and vaguely foolish. Before going to bed she’d checked all the long windows facing the street herself, and had slid home the bolt on the front door. No one could be in the house. Yet her fear remained, and when a stair tread creaked beneath her foot, her stomach seemed to leap up into her throat, so that her breath was coming in gasping pants.

  She checked the French windows of the parlor, but both were closed and securely locked. And so she continued down, to the entryway. She wondered, one hand clutching tightly to the banister, what she would do if she were to find someone there. But the hall was empty, the door safely closed against the dangers of the night. Closed, but no longer barred.

  And she knew, then, that someone had been in the house, that what she had heard in her sleep had been the sound of that someone pulling back the bar to let himself out, and then carefully closing the door behind him.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Early the next morning, Emmanuelle borrowed a neat little gray mare from one of her neighbors and rode out of the city, toward the swamps to the east and the peculiar, mushroomed-shaped hut of the black man who lived there and was said to be able to foresee the future.

  She hadn’t been raised with horses, like Philippe. But in that heady first year of their marriage he had taken her down to Beau Lac and taught her to ride, the way he had taught her so many things. And so she supposed it was natural that she should find her thoughts drifting to him as fields of sugarcane replaced the tight rows of houses, and city gave way to country.

  Last night, after discovering the front door closed but unbolted, she’d gone to check on Rose and found the colored woman safely asleep in her bed. “But how?” Rose had asked, her eyes widening with fear when Emmanuelle told her. She sat up, her arms hugging her bent knees to her chest. “How could anyone have got in?” Her eyes grew even wider. “And what was he doing here?”

  They’d checked the house then, the two of them together, searching for some sign of the intruder. But they hadn’t found anything.

  “There’s only one explanation that makes sense,” Emmanuelle said later, as they sat beside the kitchen hearth and drank hot chicory coffee from thick mugs. “Whoever it was must have come in and hidden someplace during the day, when the door wasn’t locked, and then waited until we were all asleep to do whatever it was he came t
o do.”

  “I tell you what,” Rose said, her gaze dropping with sudden suspicion to the coffee in her hands. “From now on, I’m keeping that door locked all day long. And come morning, I’m throwing out every lick of food in this house. One thing you can be sure of, whoever he was, he was up to no good, sneaking around in the dead of the night like that.”

  Emmanuelle kept her peace, but she didn’t believe their intruder had come to poison them. Anyone wanting them dead could simply have murdered them all in their beds. “Have you heard any talk in the market, Rose? Any ideas about who’s been doing these killings, or why?” They were a well-known and valuable source of information, the servants of this city, both slave and free. People said that was where the voodoo practitioners learned so many of the secrets they used to dazzle their credulous customers.

  “Oh, there’s lots of talk,” Rose said airily. Too airily. “But nobody really knows anything.”

  “What kind of talk?”

  Rose’s gaze slid away. “Foolish talk.”

  Emmanuelle leaned forward, her mug clutched in both hands. “Tell me, Rose.”

  Rose brought her gaze back to Emmanuelle’s face, and let out her breath in a long sigh. “All right. Some are saying it’s Michie Philippe. That he didn’t die down on the bayous like the Yankees think. That he got away, only he’s not quite right in the head anymore and so he’s killing everybody he knows.”

  Emmanuelle’s hands tightened so hard around her mug, she wondered it didn’t crack. “What else?”

  Rose shrugged. “That’s about it. Oh, some are saying no, it’s that English doctor, or the German boy who lost his foot, but that’s just prejudice against people who talk funny and got different ways.”

  Emmanuelle nodded, but already an idea was forming in her head, an idea that wouldn’t go away. She wasn’t sure at what point during the long, sleepless night that followed that she gave in to it and decided to come here, to the edges of the Bayou Sauvage. She still felt foolish to be doing it, for while she had the utmost respect for Papa John’s knowledge of healing herbs and potions, she’d never really believed in his famous readings, in his guiding deity and his supposed ability to tap into the so-called collective unconscious. But Henri had believed. As she neared the small clearing, she told herself she had come because people did tell the old black man things, so many things, secrets and suspicions and fears. Yet she also knew it wasn’t the only reason she was here, and she found herself thinking about what Philippe would say, if he were to see her, now. Philippe hadn’t believed in Papa John, either.