Midnight Confessions

by Candice Proctor

  “Oh, Lord.” Hamish’s heat-flushed face suddenly turned an even darker red, his eyes widening as if a thought had only just occurred to him. “Don’t tell me that German lad, Spears, is one of those, too?”

  One of those. Zach found the expression both disturbing and distasteful, and linked in some way he couldn’t quite define with the memory of a blue-eyed, blond-haired, half-caste little girl whose father could never marry her mother because the woman was colored. He remembered the expression on Ben Butler’s face as he sent a Jewish mother of nine off to prison for laughing at a child’s birthday party, and the condescension in Charles Yardley’s voice when he’d said of Emmanuelle, “She would have made a fine doctor, if she’d been a man.”

  The more Zach thought about it, the more he understood why she had been so adamant about keeping this truth a secret. The effect on a young boy like Dominic, should such damning information about his father become widespread knowledge, could be both painful and catastrophic. “Maybe. Maybe not,” Zach said slowly. “I think we should put a couple of men onto watching him.”

  “You reckon he’s our killer?” Hamish said, nodding.

  “I don’t know. But if he’s not, he could very well be our next victim.” Zach leaned his spine against the window frame. “It’s strange, isn’t it, that this didn’t come up before, when we were checking into de Beauvais’s background and friends?”

  Hamish smoothed his mustache with a slow, thoughtful motion of one thumb and forefinger. “It’s the kinda thing he’d be likely to try to keep quiet, now isn’t it? Him being a Catholic and a doctor and from such an important family and all.”

  “Secrets can be dangerous things.” Zach pushed away from the window. “Sometimes, people will kill to keep them.”

  Hamish’s forehead puckered in a heavy frown. “What are you saying now?”

  Zach shook his head. “I’m not sure. Send someone out to the Bayou Crevé, would you?” He reached for his hat. “I want the lieutenant who led that patrol brought into town so I can talk to him.”

  “What do you think he’s gonna tell you we haven’t already heard?”

  “Maybe we’ve been hearing it.” Zach settled his plumed black officer’s hat low on his forehead, and reached for the door handle. “Maybe we just haven’t been listening.”

  “Jesus. Don’t you start doing it,” said Hamish, shaking one thick finger at him.

  Zach paused in the doorway to look back. “Doing what?”

  “Talking in riddles, like some Bayou Sauvage voodoo king.”

  By Thursday afternoon, the shutters on the town house on the rue Dumaine had all been closed and latched, the bell taken off the front door, the trunks and cases loaded on a wagon. They would be setting out for Beau Lac early in the morning, and so it had been decided that they would all spend this last night in the big house on Esplanade.

  Emmanuelle stood alone in the center of the darkened parlor, her hat and gloves in one hand. She could think of no reason to put off their departure any longer, and yet the uneven tread on the stairs she’d been waiting for, hoping for, had never come.

  “Did you really think he would come, that Yankee?” Rose said from the door.

  Emmanuelle looked up. She wanted to deny it, but couldn’t.

  Rose pursed her lips and let out a long, tired sigh. “He told you he loved you, and you told him you didn’t believe in love and that you didn’t have the courage to try again. What did you think he was going to do? Come here and try to change your mind?”

  A faint smile touched Emmanuelle’s lips. “I thought he might try.”

  “Huh.” Rose went to give one of the lace panels at the front windows a twitch, as if to straighten it. “For a smart woman, you sure can be dumb sometimes.”

  Emmanuelle tried to laugh. She really tried to laugh, only it came out sounding something like a sob.

  Rose turned to fix her with a hard, steady gaze. “And were you ready to change your mind, then?”

  Emmanuelle put on her black straw hat and recklessly tied the ribbons. “I honestly don’t know.”

  Rose nodded. “Then I reckon that’s why he didn’t come.”

  Friday morning, the lamplighters were still making their rounds with their stepladders, putting out the gas streetlights when Zach left the Garden District and turned his horse’s head downriver. By the time he reached Esplanade Avenue, with its grassy median planted with sycamores and elms and graceful crepe myrtles blooming now in drifts of white and pink and red, the sun had crested the horizon, spilling golden light across the city. Zach nudged his big bay gelding into a trot. It was already hot. Anyone with a long journey ahead would make an early start.

  Not far from the de Beauvaises’ white, doublegalleried house, he reined in beneath the moss-draped shadows of a spreading old live oak. Two carts piled high with trunks were pulled up in front of the house and, as Zach watched, a well-sprung, shiny black and yellow carriage swung out of the drive.

  He couldn’t say exactly why he had paused here. It certainly hadn’t been to speak with her, or even in hopes of catching a last glimpse of her. But he stayed until the dust raised by the carriage’s passing had disappeared into the hot morning air. Then he turned his horse’s head toward the Bayou Sauvage, and rode on.

  He found Papa John in that small patch of herbs that grew to one side of the round African hut. He was bent over, pinching back some low-growing plant, but as Zach reined in, the black man straightened and slowly turned.

  “So you’ve learned a few things, have you?” he said, the edges of his eyes crinkling in amusement.

  “You could have told me,” Zach said, and swung out of the saddle.

  “I could have.”

  Zach looked up from tying the big bay to a nearby cypress limb. “Some men tried to kill me a few days ago. Some black men.”

  Papa John snorted. “I did warn you, didn’t I?”

  Zach came to stand before him, the sun pouring down hot and golden on his back. “Who hired them?”

  The old Haitian shook his head slowly. “Can’t tell you that.”

  “At least you’re not going to try to claim you don’t know.”

  Papa John showed his teeth in a wide smile. “That wouldn’t be very good for business, now would it? I’m supposed to know everything.”

  “I could haul you in. You know that.”

  “I know it. But I still wouldn’t tell you anything.”

  Zach let out short laugh, and started to turn away. “No. I don’t suppose you would.”

  Papa John stayed where he was, his feet planted wide, the sun gleaming on the frilled front of his white dress shirt. “Then why’d you come out here, Major?”

  Zach untied the bay and reached for his stirrup. “You said Emmanuelle’s a friend of yours.”

  “That’s right.”

  Zach swung into his saddle. “I wonder if you know she’s gone to Beau Lac?”

  The big black man didn’t say anything, but Zach rather thought from the sudden slackening in the old man’s face that here was something Papa John hadn’t known.

  Zach kneed the bay forward, then reined in hard when Papa John started after him suddenly, calling, “Major!” Sweat glistened on the old man’s ebony face, and his eyes were round, almost afraid as he tilted back his head to stare up at Zach. “You find the name of the woman who betrayed Michie Philippe to that Yankee patrol, and you’ll know who sent those men to kill you last Sunday.”

  Zach’s fist tightened involuntarily on the reins, causing the big bay to sidle nervously. “A woman? I’m looking for a woman?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Papa John stepped back, his gaze still hard on Zach’s face. “Miss Emmanuelle, she claims you’re different from most folks. She says you see things more as they are, and not as you want them to be. I hope for her sake, she’s right.”

  It was early on Monday morning by the time the lieutenant from the Bayou Crevé made it into the city. He was a gangly, punctiliously dressed young man wit
h a thick shock of blond hair and a weak, receding chin he had a habit of drawing back even further into his neck when he grew thoughtful or felt challenged in any way.

  “What do you mean, how do I know the man we buried in the swamps was Philippe de Beauvais?” said the young lieutenant, his gray eyes bulging out as he pulled his chin down and back. “He had his papers on him, sir.”

  Zach had been down near the wharves, looking over a burned-out warehouse Butler wanted rebuilt to store Brother Andrew’s growing accumulation of cotton, when the lieutenant had tracked him down and saluted with a flourish and a sharp, “Lieutenant Presley reporting, sir.”

  “Can you remember what this man you buried looked like?” Zach asked now, turning to walk with the lieutenant along the levee.

  Lieutenant Presley had to stop and think about it a moment, his chin puckering as it flattened against his chest. “He was tall, I think. Tall and thin, with blond, curly hair and blue eyes. Unusually vivid blue eyes.” The chin lifted. “I remember that because one of the soldiers closed them after we already had the Rebel in the hole we’d dug for him. Said it wasn’t right, putting the dirt on top of those open eyes.”

  Dominic had eyes like that, Zach thought. Startlingly blue eyes, and thickly curling pale hair. “Are you sure he was dead?” Zach asked. He’d heard of men, left for dead and buried hastily in shallow graves, who later revived and somehow managed to claw their way to the surface.

  The lieutenant laughed. “Of course he was dead. Half his head was blown away.”

  The man was starting to grate on Zach’s nerves. A steamboat appeared around the wide bend in the river, sun glistening on fancifully intricate, white-painted gingerbread, smoke belching from high smokestack, giant paddle wheel churning up foamy brown waves as it chugged its way upstream. He watched it for a moment, and somehow managed to rein in his mounting irritation. “Who else was with this man you buried?”

  “That we killed?” The lieutenant shrugged. “Some nigger. I don’t know who he was. There was a third man, but he got away.”

  Hans Spears, thought Zach. With one foot mangled beyond repair, the German couldn’t have gone very far very fast, but looking at the young lieutenant before him, Zach wasn’t too surprised the patrol let the third member of that small smuggling party slip away. “I understand it was a woman who told you to expect the smugglers,” Zach said, turning to walk along the river again.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Zach brought his gaze back to Lieutenant Presley’s face. “Do you remember what she looked like?”

  The other man shook his head. “She was veiled, sir. I never saw her face.”

  “Could she have been colored?”

  “A nigger?” The lieutenant laughed. “I don’t think so, sir.”

  Zach felt it swell within him again, the irritation, mingling this time with anger. “How can you be so sure,” he said, keeping his voice even with effort, “if she was veiled, and wearing gloves?”

  “She was a lady, sir.”

  Zach nodded toward the narrow streets below. “Stand on any corner in the old quarter, and you’ll see them: colored women, dressed like ladies, raised as ladies, well educated, speaking French, wearing silks and satins, and owning black slaves of their own.”

  The lieutenant’s chin was starting to disappear into his neck again. “Well, I suppose she could have been colored, sir,” he said slowly. “They do come tall like that, don’t they?”

  Zach swung abruptly to face him. “She was tall?” Rose was tall.

  “Yes, sir. Unusually so. Especially for a woman that age.”

  Zach held himself very still. The sun was beating down fierce and hot on his shoulders, but he suddenly felt cold inside, as if all the blood were draining from him. Blinders, Papa John had said. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Just that she was old, sir. At least, she sounded it. You can hear it, can’t you, in a woman’s voice?”

  It was all Zach could do to keep from grabbing the front of the lieutenant’s unusually well-tailored uniform, and shaking him. “How old?”

  Lieutenant Presley shrugged. “I don’t know. Fifty. Maybe sixty.”

  “You’re sure?” said Zach, his voice like a whiplash. Two images played themselves across his mind. Marie Thérèse de Beauvais sitting tall and straight in the parlor of her Esplanade Avenue house, her lips pressing into a thin, angry line as she said, “Men with good wives do not seek consolation elsewhere.” And a newer, sharper memory of windblown dust raised by the well-sprung chaise carrying the woman Zach loved away from him, to Beau Lac, and death.

  “She wasn’t young,” said Lieutenant Presley, “I know that, sir. Sir?”

  But Zach was already running.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Almost as old as the city of New Orleans itself, the vast and wealthy sugar plantation known as Beau Lac lay on the banks of the Bayou Crevé. Here was no Grecian temple with tall white columns stretching to a pedimented roof, such as the American planters had built up and down the banks of the Mississippi. The house at Beau Lac was French colonial in style, with its main floor on the second story, high above a stuccoed briquette-entre-poteaux first floor given over to storage. The de Beauvaises could have replaced it long ago with something far larger and more splendid, but they hadn’t, preferring the simplicity of the steep-roofed white house with its dormered attic windows, its elegant allée of moss-draped live oaks, its broad sweeps of wooden-railed galleries entwined with creepers. Yet as he urged his tired horse down that long, shady allée, Zach was only dimly aware of the quiet beauty of the big white house that rose before him. It was a good day’s hard ride from the city, and he had practically killed his big cavalry bay, getting here.

  A child’s laughter drew Zach’s attention to a side garden of orange trees and roses, where Dominic was trying to haul the liver-colored, joyfully barking hound out of an octagonal-shaped fishpond with high sides and a weathered statue of a naked woman holding an urn that poured water in a gentle trickle.

  “Napoléon,” shrieked the boy as the dog leaped from his grasp to land back in the pond with a soggy splash that sent silver fans of water spraying up into the air and a swell of waves decorated with shredded green lilies and golden flickers of hapless fish washing over the sides of the pond. “Napoléon,” Dominic screamed again, abandoning the dog in favor of scrambling about the brick paving to scoop up the wriggling goldfish and fling them back into the pond.

  The sight of the boy brought a measure of relief to the constriction of terror that had held Zach in its grip ever since he’d left the city. She must be all right, he thought, his eyes squeezing shut in a quiet moment of thankfulness. No child who had just lost his mother could laugh and play so heedlessly.

  “May I take your horse, Michie?”

  Zach opened his eyes to find a slim young black man in a blue workshirt and a straw hat smiling up at him. “Yes, thank you.” Swinging out of the saddle, Zach ran one hand down the bay’s sweat-darkened neck. “Take good care of him, will you? I rode him hard.”

  “I’ll cool him down good, Michie, never you fear.”

  “Major,” called Dominic, the glistening white shells of the drive crunching beneath his feet as he came running up, one hand fisted around the collar of the dripping, panting hound at his side. “Qu’est-ce vous faites ici?”

  Zach swung to face him. An early evening breeze had come up, stirring the broad leaves of the oak trees and carrying to him the sweet scents of lemons and roses and jasmine, and the light trickle of water from the dog-ravaged fountain. The sun shone warm and golden on the house’s stuccoed walls and the wide, slightly worn flight of steps that led from the shell drive up to the front gallery with its ladder-backed rockers and open double doors. For one, intense moment, Zach felt the quiet beauty and idyllic serenity of this place envelop him, so that he found himself wondering if he might not be mistaken after all. How could someone who lived amid such peace commit such a violent string of murders?

&nb
sp; “Is your mother inside?” he asked Dominic.

  “Non.” The boy shook his head. He was breathing heavily, and had to pause to suck in a quick gulp of air. “She and Papère took the pirogue out on the lake.”

  “The lake?”

  “Oui. She’s a very good fisherman, ma mère, ” said Dominic, dropping to one knee to throw an arm around the dripping, panting dog. “I would have gone with them, but Napoléon was missing.”

  “I see you found him.”

  “Il est très méchant.” Napoleon happily endured another fierce hug. “He’d got himself locked in a stall in the old stables.”

  Something stirred on the broad gallery above, a shimmer of black satin that detached itself from the shadows and came forward. Marie Thérèse de Beauvais, tall, thin, meticulously groomed, lethal.

  Zach kept his gaze on the woman above. “Make sure that stable hand is taking good care of my horse, would you, Dominic?”

  “Mais oui, monsieur,” said the boy, one hand coming up to grab his wide-brimmed hat as he took off around the side of the house, the dog at his heels.

  “Major Cooper,” said Marie Thérèse de Beauvais, coming to stand beside one of the slender round wooden colonnettes of the second level. “Is something wrong?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.” Zach mounted the wooden steps slowly, his gaze hard on her face. The sound of Napoleon’s enthusiastic barking faded into the distance as boy and dog followed the big cavalry mount toward the stables. “I don’t take kindly to people’s attempts to kill me.”

  Gray brows lifted in a parody of consternation. “Did someone try to kill you, monsieur?”

  “You did.” Zach paused at the top of the stairs. “Last Sunday, at Congo Square.”

  “I’m sorry, Major, but I have never been near the place.”