Marisa Carroll - Hotel Marchand 09

by Her Summer Lover

“Did you say something, Alain?” his mother asked from the kitchen as he passed by.

  “Nope,” he lied. God, he was talking out loud to himself. That was a bad sign.

  “Is Dana asleep?”

  “Out like a light.”

  “Good. I was afraid she’d be too wound up to sleep after talking to her mother.” Cecily hadn’t taken the time to change from the set of maroon scrubs she’d worn to work that morning and she looked tired as she rested her elbows on the scarred top of the pine table that had sat in the middle of the kitchen floor for as long as Alain could remember. Familiar guilt jabbed at his gut. He was taking advantage of her, living here like this. It was time they moved out on their own.

  He stood there holding the basket of dirty laundry, seeing his childhood home, his present sanctuary, in a different light. He knew the rent he paid for living here went a long way toward the upkeep on the old house. It was a monster to heat and cool. But his mother, and her mother before her, had grown up here. If he and the kids moved out, could she keep it? Did she even want to? The question surprised him a little. He hadn’t thought of that before, his mom maybe wanting to move into a nice apartment in New Iberia or even Lafayette. Her life, her roots were planted so deep in the bayou soil he’d never pictured her any place else. But maybe it was time he did.

  “Mom—”

  She interrupted his attempt to broach the subject. “Are you planning to let Casey Jo take Dana to Florida?”

  “Not if I can help it.” He set the basket on the floor and turned one of the high-backed pine chairs around backward to straddle the seat. “Even if she can afford the trip, I don’t want her getting the idea she can take Dana out of school anytime the notion strikes her.” He wasn’t comfortable about letting his ex have the kids un-supervised. He never knew when one of her infrequent bouts of maternal feelings would kick in and she’d decide to try and keep them with her. Not that it would last long, just long enough to disrupt all their lives and cost him six months’ salary for lawyer fees to get them back, but he wasn’t going to take the chance if he could help it.

  Cecily tucked a strand of graying hair into the braided knot on top of her head. “Good. Sometimes you’re too soft-hearted.” She got up and went to the coffeepot on the counter and poured a cup. His mom had a cast-iron stomach from drinking hospital coffee for thirty years. He’d be up all night if he drank coffee this late in the day. “If she’s got the money to take the kids to Disney World, then she can damn well hand it over for their college funds, and I would have told her just that if I’d gotten to the phone before Dana did. Between you and me, I don’t like it when she takes them out of the state. No telling what kind of idea that girl’ll go and get in her head.”

  “Yeah, Mom. I thought of that, too.” He stood up and heaved the laundry basket onto one hip. “Better get this load washed or it won’t dry before bedtime.”

  “I’ll get that,” Cecily said, leaning back against the counter as she cradled her coffee mug in both hands. “You must have better things to do than laundry.”

  “You do, too,” he said, heading for the washer and dryer on the back porch off the kitchen.

  She snorted. “I don’t know what it would be.”

  “Same here,” he laughed. “We’re both just homebodies.”

  “You’re too young to be thinking that way.”

  “Hey, I’m just glad I’ve got a full duty roster for the weekend. I might even get the magnolia in the backyard trimmed for you. It’s your weekend off. Why don’t you do something special for yourself? Go out to dinner. See a movie. Shop.”

  She gave him a quick, almost guilty glance over the top of her mug. “Uh…no. I…I think I’ll just work around the house. Unless…” She turned away and poured the rest of her coffee into the sink, her voice strained. “Unless your grandmother has something planned for me to do.”

  SHE WAS GONE when Alain returned from loading the washer. Guy had his head inside the refrigerator. He and Dana could stand that way for hours if he let them. Alain wondered if it was too late to bring Mamère Yvonne over for a couple of days, establish her at the kitchen table, and let her browbeat them into a healthy state of reluctance about wasting electricity, as she’d done for him and his sisters. He still couldn’t stand in front of an open fridge for more than thirty seconds without feeling guilty about it. “Nothing in there’s going to mutate into anything else while you’re watching,” he said, coming to stand beside his son.

  “I’m starving,” the teen muttered.

  “We ate less than two hours ago.”

  “I’m a growing boy. I don’t suppose I could take the truck and run out to the Gator Hole for a pizza?” The Gator Hole was an old roadhouse, just outside the town limits, that had been converted into a pizza place and carryout a dozen or so years ago. It was a hangout for the local kids. The owner, Eddie Larouche, had been a classmate of Alain’s in high school. He kept the kids under control and in return Alain and his small force kept an eye on the place even though it was technically outside his jurisdiction.

  “You suppose right.”

  “There’s nothing to eat in here.”

  “There’s got to be something. I bought a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of groceries two days ago.”

  “Toilet paper and dishwashing soap. I can’t eat those.”

  Alain wasn’t going to be suckered into an argument he couldn’t win. He grabbed a can of soda and a package of cheddar cheese and shoved them in his son’s hands. “Make do. There’s a box of those onion crackers you like in the pantry.”

  “No more onion crackers. Gives me bad breath.” Guy made a face at the offering, but headed for the tall narrow pantry beside the stove. Bad breath? Was it a girl that had brought on this sudden consideration for others? “Did you know Mom called tonight?” the boy asked as he pulled a paring knife out of the drawer beside the stove. “She still wants to take us to Disney World.”

  “I know, Dana told me.” Alain grabbed a bottle of water off the shelf and shut the refrigerator door.

  “I told her forget it.” Guy dropped into a chair and propped both feet on another one, slouching down on his spine. His voice had changed over the winter. He didn’t sound like a boy now, but an angry young man. “I told her she could wire the money she’s planning to spend on me into my college account. Like that’s ever gonna happen,” he finished with a sneer.

  “You’d better not have used that tone of voice,” Alain said automatically.

  “What does it matter?” The tone was still defiant but he didn’t quite meet Alain’s eye. “I hardly ever talk to her anyway.”

  “She’s your mother. You should show that much respect.”

  Guy snorted and shoved the point of the paring knife into the block of cheese. “Respect, that’s a hoot.”

  “All right.” Alain held up his hand in a gesture of surrender. It was an old argument between them, one that wasn’t going to be solved tonight. Guy had been five the first time his mother took off to “find herself,” ten when she’d left for good. In between those years she’d confused and disappointed him often enough that he’d given up waiting for her to come back. They barely spoke. Casey Jo kept trying, and crying on Alain’s shoulder when she got the chance, but it was her own fault, and until she grew up and faced that fact, Alain didn’t hold out much hope for her relationship with their son. “Then I expect you to at least be polite.”

  Guy snorted again. There was hurt and confusion beneath his anger, though he tried hard to hide it. “I was polite. But I’m not going to Disney World with her and you better not let Dana go, either,” he finished darkly.

  “I don’t intend to.”

  “No matter how much Grandma Marie cries about it, right?”

  Alain met his son’s eyes, so like his own at that age, and saw the worries of a man reflected in their navy-blue depths. “I’ll stand my ground.”

  “Good. ’Cause once Dana thinks about it and Mom starts sending her all those little broc
hures and stuff you get from the travel agent, she’ll make our lives miserable trying to get you to change your mind. Then something will happen and she won’t get to go. I don’t want Dana getting her heart broken.”

  “Is that the only thing you’re worried about?”

  Guy hacked off a piece of cheese. “She’s always trying to get Dana to come live with her. Paints a real good picture of what it would be like. She used to try the same line of bull with me.”

  “Yeah, I know that, too.” No use saying Casey Jo loved him and Dana…in her way. It was a lame explanation and they both knew it. Alain looked down at his half-empty bottle of water and wished it was a beer. He’d known tonight was only the opening skirmish of the Tinker Bell Wars. There would be more battles to come. And, as usual, even if he won, he would lose, too. He would come off looking like the heavy and Casey Jo would play the injured party and Dana and Guy would be caught in the middle.

  Guy stomped out of the kitchen to finish his homework and Alain headed for the back porch. The washing machine had just entered the spin cycle, and rather than go back to the kitchen to wait it out, he propped his shoulder against the screen door and stared up into the night sky. The breeze off the bayou carried a chill but with the underlying promise of spring. Winters were cold and damp in this part of Louisiana but they were short, and in a few weeks people would be starting to work in their gardens, and by the end of March, warm weather would be back.

  Would Sophie Clarkson still be in Indigo come spring? He doubted it. Maude’s estate wasn’t large. Once she got the paperwork out of the way and found someone to run Past Perfect, or an auction house to appraise the inventory and sell it off for her, she’d head back to Houston. Never to return.

  Was he going to let that happen? He hadn’t been in love with her for a long time, but there was still something there, a longing, a yearning deep inside him that had never gone away, even when he’d denied its existence all the years of his marriage to Casey Jo.

  Except for that one short week the summer before Dana was born, when it had almost chipped its way out of the locked vault of his heart and come to life again.

  He stared at the stars visible through the bare branches of the magnolia tree his grandfather had planted beside the back step sixty years ago. The moon had risen over the bayou and shadows danced along the ground as the big tree’s branches swayed in the night breeze. He shivered as the cold air penetrated his shirt.

  He’d never made love to Sophie in the wintertime. Never slept with her beneath a warm blanket while cold winter rains pounded the window beside the bed. He wanted that, he realized with a sudden fierce longing. He wanted to make slow love to her in the dark of a long winter’s night. Their teenage lovemaking had been as heated as the Louisiana sun on their skin, as incendiary as lightning bolts in a summer storm. He’d figured they had their whole lives ahead of them to make love. But their love hadn’t lasted forever. It hadn’t lasted through a single change of seasons.

  Her parents had come for her in early September, looking much the same as they had at Maude’s funeral, tanned, toned and successful. To their credit, Donner and Jessica Clarkson hadn’t forbidden her to see him again. They’d only asked her to wait until Christmas, when he’d returned from basic training, to accept his ring. And then they’d whisked her back to Houston, to the life she’d always known.

  Outside of rare phone calls, their only connection had been her perfumed little notes on monogrammed stationery chronicling the parties she’d attended, the lunches with friends, shopping trips with her mother, sorority rushes and college mixers that were as alien to his world as life as an army grunt’s wife would be to hers. It hadn’t taken him long to come to his senses. The invasion of Kuwait had just taken place. Already there were rumors of war. He knew he might get sent overseas. He knew he might even get killed. So he had broken off their almost-engagement. Noble, self-sacrificing. Stupid as hell.

  She’d called and she’d cried and declared she would love him forever, but he’d stood firm and eventually she gave up trying. Her last little perfumed note to him had been polite and reserved. She had wished him the best of luck in his life, and hoped he did the same for her.

  Looking back from where he stood now, Alain figured letting her go had been the biggest mistake he’d ever made.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IT WAS RAINING again. Sophie pulled her car into the space beside the opera house where Maude had always parked, and made a dash for the porch. In the ten days since her godmother’s funeral it had rained more often than the sun had shone. But at least today the rain was coming straight down, not being blown around by a chill breeze.

  Still, she was thankful for the heavy black cardigan she wore over her cowl-necked, raspberry shell and black jeans. It was February now and not as cold as it had been in late January, but it was still a long way from warm. A long way from the steamy, almost tropical heat of a bayou summer.

  Sophie made a face at her wavy reflection in the glass of the opera-house doors. There she went again, letting her mind slip too close to the past. She had thought her overnight trip to Houston to gather more suitable clothes and fill her parents in on her plans to stay in Indigo for a few weeks longer would have helped clear her mind of thoughts of Alain Boudreaux and what might have been, but just the opposite had occurred. She thought of him all the time—memories of him as a boy that enchanted summer, and even more disturbingly, fantasies of him as the man he now was.

  She shook the raindrops from the slouchy black hat she’d shoved on her head in a vain attempt to keep the mass of curls under control, and inserted the heavy key into the old-fashioned deadbolt that secured the opera-house door. She didn’t even glance at the keypad of the security system that had been affixed to the wide door frame. It wasn’t turned on and she hadn’t been able to find the instructions on how to reset it or even a contact number for the company that had installed it. She supposed Alain might have the combination on record at the jailhouse, but she hadn’t asked him for it and hoped she didn’t have to.

  It didn’t surprise her that she couldn’t find the code. Maude’s filing system, both personal and business, was as eccentric as she had been. It would take weeks to sort everything out. But Sophie was going to start working at it in earnest today, and if she didn’t find what she was looking for, she’d give up and call Alain. Maude may have felt the contents of Past Perfect were safe without the electronic warning system, but she wasn’t so sure.

  She’d talked to her grandmother when she was in Houston, a breathtakingly expensive overseas call to New Zealand, where she and Sophie’s grandfather were making a pilgrimage to the Lord of the Rings movie sites as part of her birthday tour. Darlene had promised to come to Indigo after her return to the States and help Sophie go through Maude’s personal effects.

  “Go back to La Petite Maison,” Darlene had said in her eminently practical way. “Be comfortable. The house can wait.” But the business really needed to be up and running again, or turned over to a reputable appraiser and auctioneer so that the inventory could be liquidated before the enervating heat of a southern Louisiana summer set in and made the buyers too hot and cranky to pay top dollar for the merchandise.

  Sophie smiled again as she recalled her grandmother’s words. The advice to ignore the house was blunt, but exactly what Maude’s lawyer had told her. If she was going to put the inventory of Past Perfect on the block by spring, she had to start now.

  As soon as she walked through the door, the familiar smell of old roses and lavender, dust and times-gone-by rose to greet her. She felt strangely as if she’d come home, and was a little bit reluctant to part with all of this. She wasn’t going to go there, either. She was a fund-raiser and a good one, not an antique dealer in a small bayou town.

  She shut the door behind her, sailed the slouchy hat onto the counter as she passed and opened the big double doors that led to the auditorium of the opera house one at a time, hooking them against the walls with claw-shape
d iron hooks that had probably been forged by one of the slaves on the Valois plantation a hundred and fifty years ago.

  She turned around and just stared. The daylight coming from the high four-over-four windows was gray and diffused, but there was more than enough to see what confronted her. The space before her was filled with boxes of books, camelback horsehair sofas and turn-of-the-last-century dining suites, the tables stacked high with sets of Depression-era china and boldly colored Fiesta ware. An eighteenth-century fainting couch was covered with hats and handbags that ranged from Jackie Kennedy pillboxes to Victorian garden hats bedecked with faded silk flowers and frayed ribbons. More boxes still unopened, and smaller tables, their surfaces hidden by dozens and dozens of china vases and figurines, filled the wide aisle that bisected the rows of dusty velvet-seated chairs that fronted the stage.

  She turned her head, finding bed frames stacked against the wall and a dozen glass and china hurricane lamps marching up one of the narrow stairways to the private boxes that had been her magical childhood hideaway. On her right was a pair of five-drawer metal filing cabinets, their tops piled with baby boomer-era board games in worn cardboard boxes, and a set of green Depression-glass cups and saucers.

  Sophie sat down with a thump on a cane-bottomed chair that protested her weight with an ominous squeak. She could never remember Maude carrying so much inventory. “This will take forever,” she said out loud.

  The bell above the front door jingled and a female voice called out a greeting in French. She recognized the voice; it belonged to Alain’s mother, Cecily. For a moment Sophie was tempted to stay where she was, mostly hidden from the sales floor by the big open doors, but then another voice spoke and she was on her feet.

  “Hello, Mrs. Boudreaux. Hello, Dana.” Alain’s daughter was wearing a red Winnie the Pooh raincoat and matching hat over jeans and a lightweight turtleneck sweater. Her smile showed a gap where she’d lost a tooth since Sophie had last seen her.