by Byers, Beth
“We were attacked and betrayed, and you’ve shown up the day after I threw down a challenge on the perpetrator. I won’t risk it. Take the income or not. I cannot put my family at risk.”
“Your family? You’re an orphan.”
“I meant Edmée,” Severine said, nodding her head to Lisette’s grandmother, “and those others I love.”
The man scowled. “Where will we get this money?”
Severine reached past Edmée to a small cabinet and pulled a card from the cupboard. “See Mr. Brand. He’ll take care of you.”
Severine shut the door on them and turned to Edmée. “We really do need help.”
“I have a granddaughter who could use work.”
“She’s not going to let someone in for money?”
“Not if she wants to live,” Edmée said flatly.
Severine nodded. “We need at least a girl or two to keep the house up, someone strong who can open the door and turn away those who aren’t welcome but still put on a pretty face, and someone to work as housekeeper and cook until Chantae is back up to the task.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Edmée replied.
“The same for the big house in the country,” Severine replied. “More trustworthy.”
“More?”
“We want them to search every inch of that house for my parents’ secrets while we’re here.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Edmée repeated.
“Why are you throwing in your lot with me?”
“Because you saw my granddaughter for a person and you gave her hope.”
Severine didn’t understand, and her expression must have conveyed that.
“Your father did right by you, sending you to those nuns. They raised you to see people.”
Severine shook her head.
“They found your pure heart and they cultivated it, Severine DuNoir.”
“I—”
“Lisette gave up after falling in love with Landon Gentry,” the old woman told her. “She lost her zest for life, and only a few days after speaking with you that first time, she found it again. My daughter came to me, happy again herself. That’s all a mother wants, you know. For their children to be happy.”
“A good mother,” Severine countered. “I’m glad that the mystery of my family gave Lisette the road she needed out of whatever was holding her back, but she would have found her way out eventually.”
“She would have,” Edmée agreed. “You aren’t her savior, you were just the spark.”
“She saved herself,” Severine said.
“We’re agreed,” Edmée answered and grinned wickedly. “But we’ll keep you alive until you can save yourself as well.”
Severine laughed and then asked, “Who is here?”
“Lisette left mysteriously before dawn.” Edmée’s tone was displeased at the thought and Severine lifted a brow.
“She’s been doing that rather a lot lately,” Severine said. “Chantae?”
“She’s up and around and attempting to recover the kitchens to the previous state.”
There was blame in that statement and Severine held out apologetic hands. “I—”
“I would have thought your nuns would have taught you to clean better than I witnessed.”
“They did,” Severine said with a wicked grin. She turned and faced Edmée and said, “I could be persuaded to dust.”
“This is your house. All the chores are yours.”
Severine tried, “But I don’t want to.”
Edmée snorted without sympathy and then added with a little more care, “Don’t worry, love. You’ll be paying those I find for you a generous wage to do the cleaning.”
“Hurry up then,” Severine replied with a wink and made her way to the kitchens to help Chantae clean and to find something to eat. They spent the morning quietly and when Severine left the house, she left alone. It wasn’t surprising, however, to find Mr. Brand hurrying down the steps of his house as she started the engine of her Rolls-Royce Phantom.
Chapter 4
Severine had chosen a dress randomly, but it was, of course, black and slinky. It formed around her body loosely, drawing attention to her long dark hair, her nearly black eyes, and her too-white skin. She’d rolled her hair in rags for the loose curls that hung below her shoulders, ignoring the style of the day.
Severine applied sooty darkness around her eyes with powder on her cheeks and deep red lipstick on her lips. She bypassed all jewelry for a black ribbon around her neck, tied in the back and black jet stone beads at her ears.
She’d placed a cloche on her head and added a black coat that flowed longer than her dress, which only reached her knees. With black stockings and black shoes, she looked as though she could be in mourning, but it was her signature look. The slash of red lips and the dark dress and her pale white skin.
She’d have looked ridiculous in the pale pinks and blues of women her age, so a style was suggested for her and Severine embraced it. She might be officially out of mourning, but she hadn’t stopped struggling with her feelings around her parents’ death.
Before Severine had backed her car into the drive and secured the doors of the one-time carriage house, Mr. Brand had taken the passenger seat and persuaded Anubis into the back.
“Where to then?”
Her answer was a shrug and a grin and then she left the street where she’d been raised and wound the car through the streets of New Orleans until she reached a small brick building in a rundown part of the city.
“Where are we?”
“A private investigator.”
“They can be bought for information, Sev,” he told her with doubt in his voice.
“I know,” Severine agreed. “I thought I would tell him I know he might be approached for information about what he finds for us, and he can tell them whatever he tells us.”
“What?” Mr. Brand demanded. “Severine, I—”
“We aren’t going to find anything that any other private investigator wouldn’t find,” Severine told him. “The name of a person who asks might be other than Andre. That could lead us to the next step.”
“So you pay the private investigator to find information, and then let him get paid for sharing that information with whoever asks for it, and then pay him again to learn who asked him?”
Severine nodded with a grin.
Mr. Brand shook his head. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming here?”
Severine glanced at him. “I was testing Chantae.”
“To make sure she was on your side?”
“To see what she’d do. I was just idly curious.”
“To know if she would call me if she thought you were doing something foolish?” Mr. Brand eyed Severine sideways.
“I suppose you could say that.”
“What other thing were you curious about?”
“What a mother would do if she thought I were doing something foolish.” She didn’t mean the words to come out so plaintively.
Mr. Brand blinked and then his face evened out into nothingness.
Severine laughed and reached back to Anubis who was watching her carefully. She scratched the big dog as she told Mr. Brand, “I adjusted to the mother I had before she died. You don’t have to feel sorry for me even though I sounded entirely pathetic.”
“I remember you as a little girl, Sev,” he told her. “I—”
“Don’t,” she told him and exited the car before he could apologize. As a little girl, she’d been a wraith and generally unnoticed. He was only putting context to the creature she had been.
She hurried up the steps of the office building and made her way to the back. She’d learned where to go and led the way as if she’d gone there before. Severine found the door that read Marty Shaw and knocked with Mr. Brand and Anubis just behind her. A man grunted, “Come in.”
Severine opened the door and found the private investigator on the other side. She had imagined a big lurking fellow or perhaps someone with da
rk hair and a crooked nose and the look of a spy. What she found was a man in his mid-forties who had lost most of his hair and carried quite a paunch. She blinked and then took the seat he jerked his head toward.
The man didn’t take a second glance at Anubis or Mr. Brand. Instead he leaned back and eyed her with his hands folded over his stomach. She noticed the sweat stains on his shirt and the fact that his eyes were bloodshot, and she eyed him just as carefully.
“What do you want?” he barked.
Severine lifted a brow. “Do you get work this way?”
“I get work because my work is solid,” he told her flatly. “If you want information, I’ll get it to you. I won’t pad my hours or my expenses, but I won’t pad your ego either.”
Severine laughed and told Mr. Brand, “Well I guess I know where we stand.”
“You don’t have an ego,” Mr. Brand told her and then studied the private eye. “We expect you to be contacted for information about what we’re looking into.”
The man grew thoughtful. “Aggressively?”
“Possibly. Possibly with a bribe. Possibly with someone looking through your offices or trying to read your notes.”
“For the average person, a bribe would be the easiest way to go,” Marty Shaw said, like a man who had been bribed more than once. “What do you want me to do?”
He cut right through the nonsense to the flat of it.
“Can we count on you to keep our secrets?” Mr. Brand asked.
“Barring torture,” Mr. Shaw said, with a shrug. “I’m not going to lose an eye or fingernails for a daily rate and expenses.”
Severine eyed the man carefully and then asked him clearly, “Would you lose it for your reputation?”
“My reputation is worth a lot, but most of my jobs are cheating husbands looking to catch their cheating wives and businessmen trying to find who is stealing money from them. Why should I take your job?”
Severine slid names across the table to the man. “I want to know whatever you can find out about these men and their relationship to my father. And I want the name of whoever tries to find this information from you. Give it away before you get hurt and learn who really wanted to know.”
Mr. Shaw laughed. “Now that I can get behind. Is this whole thing a trap?”
Severine shook her head. “I really do want to know who these men are and how they’re connected to my father.”
Mr. Shaw named a hefty sum and Severine eyed Mr. Brand. “For that much, you’ll need to get as many names as you can.”
Marty Shaw nodded and then waved towards the door. He opened the door of his desk and was pouring himself far more than two fingers of whiskey before they’d shut the door behind themselves.
“What names did you give him?”
Severine handed Mr. Brand another list of names. This one included everything that her father had written in his small notebook and there were stars next the names she’d given to Marty Shaw. Severine watched Mr. Brand carefully as he read the name. “This Jarrod Van Ausdell was a friend of your father’s. I don’t know much more. I just saw him at the funeral and spoke to him for a few minutes. He was angry that you were being sent away. He said Austrian nuns were no place for a DuNoir.”
“And the other name?”
Mr. Brand shrugged. “I have no idea. I’ve never heard of Nathaniel Sidney. Van Ausdell is familiar, although I’ll have to think about why.”
Severine nodded and headed the auto towards the park. She wanted beignets, chicory coffee she didn’t have to make herself, and a walk under the oaks. She knew Mr. Brand didn’t want her wandering New Orleans on her own, but she was used to ever-so-long walks in the woods. She needed to walk under the trees and stretch her legs or she’d go mad. The best that New Orleans could offer was the over-sized park in the center of the city.
She stopped the auto and Mr. Brand went in for the beignets and coffee while she waited in the car with the dog. While she was leaning back and watching passersby, there was a knock on her window. Severine gasped and found a young boy with dark skin, hair, and eyes. He impatiently waved a note at her and she rolled the window down and took the note from him.
A sharp clearing of his throat had her handing him a coin, and then he grinned and disappeared. She opened the note and shook her head as she read it:
Go back to your nunnery.
She reached back to Anubis as she tossed the note onto Mr. Brand’s seat.
When he returned, he set the bag of beignets on the floorboard to take the note, sit, and shut the door all while holding the coffees. Wordlessly, Severine drove to the city park. She took her coffee cup and got out of the car with Anubis at her heels. He ranged ahead, hunting through the grass until he found a stick and brought it back to her. Severine threw it for him and then turned towards Mr. Brand.
He crumpled the note and threw it behind them, and Severine lifted a brow, crossing to pick it up and put it in the trash.
“I have an idea of where to proceed as well,” Charles Brand said at last. He handed her the bag of beignets and joined her facing away from the wind. Their powdered sugar fried dough was eaten leaning out to keep the powdered sugar from snowing all over their clothes. When they finished, they walked while Mr. Brand explained his idea.
“There are a lot of addresses?” Severine reminded him.
“Yes.” Mr. Brand seemed unconcerned. “Some are houses, some are in the industrial areas. There is a warehouse on the dock and even ships.”
“And you want to visit every single one?”
He nodded.
“You’ve never visited them before?”
Mr. Brand shook his head. “Your father told me to leave things as they were. I could have, of course, but—”
“They can’t see us coming,” she warned.
“No,” he agreed. “I think we should consider using people who fade into the background. Which—you—do not.”
Severine laughed. “The odd girl in all black with a massive dog doesn’t blend in?” She gasped, placing a hand over her heart.
He groaned and elbowed her just like a big brother should have. Mr. Brand’s care of her, the way he looked after her, the way he protected her—he was the perfect brother, and the knowledge left her woebegone that she’d had Andre instead.
Severine threw the stick as hard as she could for Anubis, and he went racing off into the trees to chase it. There was something about watching him run that took away the lingering stress of what they’d been through. The darkness of the previous weeks faded and she said, “I didn’t think I would feel normal again.”
“Is this normal?” Mr. Brand questioned.
She elbowed him lightly and then threw the stick for Anubis again. “Well, normal for me is prayers at dawn, baking bread, working in the gardens, and studying with the nuns. So perhaps, normal for here.”
Mr. Brand’s warm, kind eyes focused on her. “Sev—” He shook his head. “We’re going to get through this and make a normal that is boring. With traveling.”
“Traveling?”
“Where would you go?”
Severine paused almost stupidly. She hadn’t considered that such a decision would be hers. “Anywhere?”
“Darling Sev, you’re quite wealthy. You can go anywhere.”
Severine didn’t even know how to answer.
His smile was gentle as she struggled and then she burst out, “Brazil!”
“Why there?”
“It seems like the most exotic place possible. Rio de Janeiro. I—I—I cannot imagine getting on a boat to Brazil or picture myself spending any amount of time there. It seems like going to visit Atlantis or the Emerald City.”
“We could do that right now, Sev. You could bring your friends, we could stay as long as you’d like. There’s no requirement we press forward with your goal.”
“But I want to be able to sleep.”
She had never received a more heartbreaking look than the one that followed.
Chapter 5
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Severine was trying, once again, to make sense of her father’s coded books when the front doorbell rang. She started to rise to answer it only to remember that Edmée’s great-nephew Fabien was now manning the door. She returned her focus to her work.
The books were a maze, and it was clear that it was purposeful. What she needed was the key, but she was no codebreaker. What if, however, she could find one? She tapped her pen against the paper as she considered how one would go about finding a code breaker.
She started to make a list only for Fabien to clear his throat for her attention from the doorway. She couldn’t help but bite her bottom lip to hide a reaction every time she saw him. Edmée had certainly found the right man to secure the door of the mansion. He had to be at least six and a half feet tall. His shoulders were broad, his nose had been broken time and time again, and in the black suit of his uniform, he grinned and brushed a non-existent piece of dust off of his cuff.
“There’s a girl here who says she’s your cousin,” Fabien announced. His dark eyes were sarcastic, and Severine had to smile. Nothing about their new butler was the storied, impassive, mannered butler of the ages. “Blonde, lots of rouge, spoiled-looking. I put her in the parlor.”
“That’s her.” Severine held back a laugh. “Thank you, Fabien. Would you have some chicory coffee brought in along with little nibbles?”
He nodded and Severine rose and left the items on her desk. The little notebook that was so desired was both hidden and locked away. She also locked the office using the only key, which she placed on a ribbon around her neck.
As much as she wanted to, Severine wasn’t sure she trusted her cousin, Florette, and they hadn’t made plans to get together. Why then was Florette here? Had she been sent by Grandmére to distract Severine? Sev glanced at her dogs, who were looking after her, and she set Kali to guard the office.
Anubis shadowed Severine as she made her way down the hall. Her cousin had moved in with Grandmére after Severine and Florette had an agreement that it would be all right, but the more time passed, the more Severine felt that she was attacked on every side.