“You—” She took another step back, her hand tightening on her medical bag, the urge to swing it at his head almost overwhelming. “You’ve had men watching me? Following me? Spying on me?”
Something of her thoughts must have shown on her face, because he took a step back himself, his gaze shifting warily between the bag and her umbrella. “It was for your own protection. Mainly.”
“Mainly.” The shuddering had stopped. “And if I said thank you but I don’t need anyone to protect me, Major?”
She watched, bemused and reluctantly beguiled, as his face relaxed into a slow smile. “I’d say I know of at least one Irishman who would agree with you.” His gaze went beyond her, to the narrow, rutted street filling rapidly with men and women and children, all talking at once and mingling in noisy confusion with a motley collection of barking dogs, mewing cats, squawking hens, and one squealing pig. “Actually, make that an entire neighborhood of Irishmen.”
“How long?” Emmanuelle de Beauvais demanded, facing Zach across the darkened length of her front parlor. The sun was up now, the streets below coming to life with the rattle of carts bouncing over paving stones and the banging of shutters being thrown open to a new day. But no one had opened the shutters on the windows in here yet, and the clouds were too thick to let through much light, anyway. She was only a dim shadow, rigid with fear and anger. “How long have you had your men following me?”
They had barely spoken as he escorted her here through the awakening streets, to the house on the rue Dumaine. Now he stood just inside the door to the room, his plumed officer’s hat dangling from one hand as he stared back at her through the gloom, and it occurred to him that the closeness that had been theirs that day on the sunlit shores of Lake Pontchartrain had vanished as if it had never been. In its place was the old, familiar wariness and mistrust. Her mistrust.
“Since Friday night,” he said, and saw her head snap back as if he’d hit her when she realized that it was Friday they’d gone crabbing at the lake, Friday when he’d held her in his arms and told her he believed her. Then he’d come back into town and ordered his men to watch her.
She swung abruptly away to walk over and open the French doors and throw apart the shutters, letting the feeble gray light into the room. “And here I thought you were actually starting to believe me.”
“I do believe you,” he said, then added, “about most things.”
She actually laughed, a low, mirthless laugh that cut him more than he’d have expected it to. “Then why didn’t you tell me you’d set your men to watching me?” She turned her head to look at him over her shoulder. “If they were for my protection?”
In the street below, a vendor with a cart rumbled past, shouting, Calas! Tout chaud! “I suspected you wouldn’t like it.”
She suddenly seemed to realize she still wore her low-crowned mourning hat and gloves, and tore them off with reckless impatience. “You were right.” She tossed hat and gloves together onto a nearby chair, then stared at them as if they were some black indictment of all that she had done, and all that she had almost done with him. “I don’t like it.”
“Exactly why not?” He walked up to her, close enough that he could have touched her, although he didn’t. “Because the soldiers wear blue uniforms, like me?”
“I don’t like the idea of anyone watching me.”
“That man today was watching you,” he said, deliberately making his voice hard. “Watching you, and waiting for you.”
“I know.” Sighing, she brought up one hand to rub her forehead in a gesture that was becoming a habit with her.
“Emmanuelle . . .” He paused, searching for some way to reach her, to reach through the defenses she’d been throwing up against him ever since that first night, in the cemetery. “If you have any idea what’s happening here, you must tell me. You do see that, don’t you? I can’t help you if you don’t trust me.” The problem was, he thought, that she had no reason to trust him, and they both knew it. As much as he might try to deny it, in a very real sense he was still her enemy.
She let her fingers slide down the side of her face to press against her mouth, then curled them into a fist that dropped to her side. “You asked me once if I thought Henri might have been killed by mistake, if I might have been the real target that night.” She let out a long, tired sigh. “I did think that, at first. But now, since Claire’s death . . . I’m not so sure. Perhaps someone simply wants us all dead. Perhaps you were right all along. Perhaps it’s some soldier who lost an arm or a leg at the hospital, and holds us all responsible.”
“Perhaps,” he said, although he didn’t think so. Not anymore. “Who do you know that might want to see you dead?”
She shook her head. “I’ve thought and thought, but none of it makes any sense.”
“Not even if it’s Philippe?”
“Philippe is dead,” she said, keeping her voice even with obvious effect.
“And if by some chance he isn’t?”
The pulse at the base of her throat was beating so hard and fast, it fluttered the narrow white band of lace edging the black collar of her mourning gown. “Philippe was a healer,” she said, “not a killer.”
“But it has occurred to you that he might be doing this, hasn’t it?”
She swung away to go stare out the window again. “I thought at first . . . if he believed I’d betrayed him . . .” She shook her head. “But he wouldn’t do this. Not Philippe. Whoever is doing this must be mad.” She paused, her gaze still fixed on the awakening street below. “After I knocked him down, that Irishman said I was barmy. Crazy. He said it was no wonder they wanted me dead.”
“They,” Zach repeated sharply. “Is that exactly what he said?”
“Yes. I don’t think he knew exactly who hired him.”
“He’ll know something.” She looked so small and vulnerable and yet fiercely, determinedly brave, standing there in the pale light of another sultry, overcast day, that it was all he could do not to go to her and fold her in his arms. Instead, he tightened his grip on his hat and turned to leave.
“I haven’t thanked you,” she said, stopping him.
He paused to look back at her from across the room. “For what?”
“For trying to protect me.”
Just when he thought he was coming to understand her better, she always seemed to surprise him. “You’re a damned hardheaded woman, you know that, don’t you?”
She gave him a wry half-smile. “I know that.”
“How in the name of all that’s holy,” demanded Hamish, the finger and thumb of one hand smoothing his mustaches over and over again as he stared out at the muddy expanse of the river. “No, better yet, make that how in the name of everything that’s holy and unholy do you think we’re going to find one lousy Irish opium addict in a city of close on two hundred thousand people who hate our guts and wouldn’t cooperate with us even if the Pope anointed us all?”
He’d come here, to the wharf opposite the cathedral, to inspect the papers of a ship bound for Boston and to approve its sailing. But it was a cursory inspection only, for the ship’s cargo was one of cotton and sugar collected by Andrew Butler, the general’s rapacious—and increasingly wealthy—brother. It would take more than a query from the provost marshal’s office to keep this ship from sailing.
Zach leaned a shoulder against one of the wharf’s weathered wooden pilings and squinted up at the ship’s tall masts, several of which weren’t as straight as they should be. “You tell me. You’re the policeman.”
“Huh,” grunted Hamish. “Besides, how do you know this fellow wasn’t just some opium addict after her morphine and a few dollars, and whatever else he could lay his hands on?”
Zach brought his attention back to his friend’s heatflushed face. “She said he told her someone wanted her dead.”
Hamish gave Zach a steady, unblinking stare. “She said? She said? And since when did we start believing anything Madame de Beauvais says?”
&n
bsp; “I think she’s telling the truth in this.”
“Oh you do, do you? Up until now, our killer has been doing his own dirty work, remember?”
Zach turned his gaze back to the ship. It was a clumsily built vessel, too wide at the bow and deep at the stern. If he were Andrew Butler, he’d think twice about entrusting his cargo to this tub. “Maybe,” he said slowly. “Maybe not. We don’t really know for certain, now do we?”
Hamish leaned forward, his brows drawing together. “What are you trying to tell me? That your hookah-smoking Paddy from this morning somehow managed to send that wee crossbow bolt straight through Henri Santerre’s heart?”
Zach shook his head. “No. But if our murderer hired a thug to do his killing for him this time, he could have hired someone else, before.”
“He, you’re saying. And what if it’s a she? What if that Frenchie widow hired Paddy herself, just to make us think someone was trying to kill her?”
“She didn’t know we were having her watched.”
“She says she didn’t know.”
“She’s not that good of an actress.”
“Huh. You know what I say? I say she’s looking more like our killer all the time. Think about it. She had the crossbow before Santerre’s murder, she had it after, and she knows how to use it.” Hamish waggled a stumpy, sunburned finger in front of Zach’s face. “And if you believe that shit about someone sneaking into her house to steal that brass-bound box and then sneaking in again to put it back, I’m going to start thinking maybe you’re the one who’s taken up hookah-smoking.”
“Jesus Christ, Hamish.” Zach pushed away from the piling to stand easily on the dock’s gently rocking planks. “Why would Emmanuelle de Beauvais want to kill Henri Santerre? So she could inherit a hospital building so heavily mortgaged to support the Confederate war effort that she’s working herself to exhaustion simply trying to keep it open?”
“Greed isn’t the only reason people kill.”
“Oh, right. What’s she supposed to have wanted revenge for? The fact that he’d been like a father to her ever since her own father died nine years ago?”
“I’m not talking about revenge. I’m talking about self-protection. Maybe Santerre found out she’d betrayed her husband to the Yankees.”
Across the square, the cathedral bells had begun to peal, ringing out slow and solemn over the old part of the city. Zach shook his head. “We don’t know she’s the one who betrayed Philippe. Besides, even if she was, what do you think? That the old man would be likely to rush right out and betray her?”
“She might have thought he would.”
“No. She wouldn’t kill for something like that.”
“Ah.” Hamish’s broad face split into a smile so smug, it practically sent him rocking back on his heels. “So you do still think she could kill.”
The cathedral bells tolled on and on, calling the faithful to mass and stirring up the pigeons in the square. “I think most people are capable of killing, given enough provocation,” Zach said slowly. “Those who say they couldn’t probably aren’t being honest with themselves—or they haven’t been given a strong enough reason.”
“So maybe she had a reason we don’t know about.” They turned together to walk back toward the levee, Zach’s step practiced and sure despite his limp, Hamish wobbling with each lurch of the dock. “You’re the one who always said she was hiding something, remember? Even back when I thought she was just a fragile widow.”
“I still think she’s hiding something. But I don’t think she’s our killer.”
“Well, I do,” said Hamish, jumping awkwardly from the edge of the wharf. “And I think I can prove it.”
Seagulls wheeled screeching against the heavy gray clouds hovering over the city, mingled with the pigeons from the square. Zach tipped back his head, his eyes narrowing as he stared up at the threatening sky. “You can try. But for now, just find the Irishman, will you?”
Two days later, the clouds still hung gray and low over the city, and it still hadn’t rained.
Zach was in the courthouse, dealing with a backlog of petty cases, when he spotted one of Hamish’s men, the corporal with the breaking voice and unshaven cheeks. The boy was looking anxious and unsure of himself, but was obviously bursting with news.
“Major, sir,” he said, saluting sharply when Zach made his way over to him. It was only about five o’clock, but the heavy cloud cover cast a gloom over the day, making it feel much later. “Captain Fletcher says to tell you he found your Irishman, sir.”
Zach knew a satisfying surge of anticipation. Now maybe they would start getting somewhere. “Where is he?”
“The captain? He’s at the army hospital on Magazine Street, sir.”
“Is he hurt?”
“He’s dead—I mean the Irishman, sir,” he added quickly when he saw the expression on Zach’s face. “Captain Fletcher’s had the body taken there for an autopsy.”
For a long, tense moment, Zach simply stared at the private, while the boy’s face turned white and he started to shake. “Jesus Christ,” Zach said at last, his voice low and carefully controlled. “He killed him.”
“No, sir.” The boy’s head shook back and forth like a door swinging in the wind. “The man was dead when we found him. Captain Fletcher wants an autopsy to be sure, but there isn’t much doubt about what killed him.”
Somehow, Zach had a feeling his hookah-smoking Paddy hadn’t been stabbed or shot. “What killed him?”
“Poison, sir.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Once, the St. James Army Hospital on Magazine Street had been a hotel, an elegant brick and stucco building with fine high windows and cast-iron railings and plaster detailing. But General Butler had requisitioned the hotel the same way he had so much else in this conquered city. Now it was the scene of shouting and confusion as carts rumbled in and out the cobbled courtyard, although few of the men overflowing the hospital’s wards or being trundled off to the city’s cemeteries were actual battle casualties. Most suffered from such things as scurvy and dysentery and measles, and the swamp poison that was killing the men sent to garrison the outer regions at the rate of two or three a day. The stench rising from the hospital—and the fouled gutters outside it—was enough to make a man gag. As he passed through the former hotel’s lobby with its crystal chandeliers and blood-splattered faux marble–painted pillars and once polished floor now encrusted with drying mud and debris, Zach thought of the scrupulously scrubbed floors and whitewashed walls of the Hospital Santerre, and felt a renewed surge of respect for the woman who was fighting so hard to keep it open.
The small building the army doctors used for autopsies, dissections, and embalmings was a brick-walled chamber with a packed-dirt floor located in what had always struck Zach as unhealthy proximity to the kitchen. “So where’d you find him?” Zach asked Hamish, when they met in the courtyard just outside the brick building’s open doorway.
“In a corner of what’s left of one of those burned-out storehouses down by the wharves,” said Hamish. “According to the doctor who did the autopsy, he probably died soon after his attack on our widow.”
“Is he around? The doctor, I mean?”
“Dr. Austin Sinclair,” said Hamish, adopting a foppish stance and pretentious Bostonian accent. “He’s in there,” he added, dropping the pose and the accent and jerking his head toward the building’s open doorway, where a shallow flight of steps led downward. “Embalming some dead soldier whose folks want him sent home to Colorado. I told him you’d be wanting to see the Irishman’s body, just to be sure we’ve got the right hookah-smoking Paddy.”
“Come on, then,” said Zach, pausing just inside the doorway to grin over his shoulder at Hamish when the big New Yorker hung back.
Inside, the air was thick with the smell of chemicals and rank flesh and a dank, overwhelming odor reminiscent of an old crypt, although that came less from the room’s use than from the way it had been built, with the low
er three feet or so of the walls actually lying below ground. Most buildings in New Orleans weren’t built with basements. Every time it rained, Zach thought, this room must run with water. He hoped the rain held off until he was out of here.
“Yes?” said a young man of probably no more than twenty-five who looked up from the body of the soldier laid out before him. Dr. Sinclair was built short and plump, with prematurely thinning brown hair and pudgy, forgettable features and pale, pale skin. The cloth he wore stretched over his drab brown suit might once have been white, but it was now as stained with blood as the apron of any French Market butcher. There was dirt under his fingernails, and he seemed to have a cold or something, because he kept sniffing as he stared at Zach over the rims of the glasses he wore pushed down on the end of his nose.
“This is Major Cooper,” mumbled Hamish, his nose and mouth disappearing behind a big white handkerchief he held in front of his face. “He’s here to see the poisoning case we brought in.”
“Ah, yes.” Laying aside his scalpel, the doctor turned to whip a sheet off a body on one of the room’s other elevated slabs. “Here he is.”
“Jesus,” said Zach, involuntarily taking a step back.
The doctor sniffed. “Strychnine poisonings are never pretty. The victim’s body essentially becomes overstimulated by the action of the drug, resulting in the sort of convulsions you see frozen here. Rigor mortis sets in almost immediately after death, and the body remains as if in its final agony, eyes wide open, the face twisted into a rather hideous grimace. An important point to remember,” he added, “since it affects one’s estimate of the time of death.”
Zach leaned forward, his eyes narrowing as he stared at the man’s contorted face, with its wildly staring pale gray eyes and tangled reddish beard. “What did you do to the top of his head?”
“You don’t want to know,” said Hamish. What little was visible of his face had taken on a decidedly greenish tinge. “Just decide if it’s him.”
“It’s him.”
“Good. Let’s get out of here,” Hamish said, and bolted for the steps and the rectangle of gray sky above.
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