Scandal in Copper Lake

by Marilyn Pappano

  She thought he would ignore it. Robbie Calloway admitting to his conservative family, friends and clients that he’d fathered a child with a mixed-race fortune-telling fraud? Ignoring their part-black babies was an age-old tradition for wealthy Southern men. If the Calloways had been typical slaveholders, his distant grandfathers, uncles and cousins had done it a time or two. It would be no stretch for him to.

  Though it would break another piece of her heart.

  He grew serious again. “How sick is Mama Odette?”

  A lump formed in Anamaria’s throat, and her vision blurred before she blinked it clear again. “The doctors say she’s dying. She says God doesn’t share his plans for her with such meddling men. When it’s her time, she’ll go, but until then she’s got a life to live.”

  “Good attitude.”

  “Yeah. I’m going to be just like her when I reach her age—gray and round, speaking my mind, surrounded by sisters and daughters and granddaughters and nieces. They’ll be sorry to see me go, but they’ll be grateful, too, for the life I lived while I was here.”

  He brushed a strand of hair back, tucking it behind her ear. “Don’t those daughters need a father?”

  She raised her gaze to find him closer than she’d realized, watching her with such intensity that shivers rippled across her skin. “Duquesne women don’t marry,” she reminded him softly. “We just fall madly in love, then use our babies to mend our broken hearts.”

  His fingertip feathered across the curve of her ear. “Is that a law?” he teased. “Can I find it in the Georgia Code?”

  Her head tilted, and he continued stroking, along her jaw, the pad of his fingertip bearing a small callus. He had good hands—strong, gentle, unpampered. A woman or an infant could find extraordinary comfort there. “It’s worse than a law. It’s a curse. The price we pay for being extraordinary women with extraordinary gifts.”

  He stopped stroking her, and she missed the touch. He didn’t move away but shifted so he could better see her, one arm resting on the mattress, his head resting on that hand. “What happens if you get married anyway?”

  “What happens?” she echoed.

  “Does your groom burst into flames at the altar? Does he get zapped into some parallel universe? Do all those who have passed before descend on him to keep him from getting to the church on time?” He shrugged. “Curses have to have consequences. What are the consequences of this one?”

  She stared at him. It was such a simple question, but she’d never asked it before. Oh, she’d asked Mama Odette why often enough to drive a lesser woman crazy. Why aren’t you married? Why isn’t Auntie Lueena married? Why isn’t Auntie Charise married? Why do we all have different daddies? Why are there no men in our family?

  Because that’s the way it is, chile, Mama Odette had answered when Anamaria was younger, but as she got older, the answer had changed. It’s the curse of the Duquesne women.

  “It’s not a curse,” Robbie said. “It’s tradition. Just like it’s tradition in my family for all the men to go to law school.”

  “But your brothers aren’t lawyers,” she murmured, still caught up in the import of his simple question. What happens? In two hundred years no one had bothered to find out. Had it just been circumstance that made her relatives stop marrying? Slavery had been a hard life, and then the war had begun, disrupting their worlds. A lot of women who would have married, raised families and lived normal lives had found themselves following different paths after the war. When had it gone from happenstance to destiny, from coincidence to curse?

  “Actually, Russ is. He just chooses not to practice. Rick was the first one to break with tradition, and lightning didn’t strike him dead. My grandparents didn’t disinherit him. Society didn’t shun him. And Mitch wasn’t raised as a Calloway, so the family had no expectations for him.”

  But Robbie had been raised a Calloway, and there were a lot of expectations for him. Marrying within his race and class was one of them.

  “It’s just not done,” she said at last.

  “But what happens if it is?”

  “Nothing happens, because that’s just the way it is. There hasn’t been a marriage in our family in two hundred years.”

  “What happened to that one?”

  Her laughter was tinged with discomfort. “Two hundred years ago? I don’t know.” But she did. It was part of the history passed down from one daughter to the next. Etienne and Alfreda Duquesne had raised four daughters—Harriett, Florence, Ophelia and Gussie. At the age of sixty-one, Etienne had died defending the plantation he’d called home all his life. Two days later Alfreda had passed, too.

  And a tradition had begun.

  She stared at Robbie a long time before slowly reaching into the chest again.

  A cracked wallet, holding a driver’s license and Social Security card and stuffed to the breaking point with photographs of daughters and nieces. A tattered storybook that brought tears to Anamaria’s eyes. A well-worn deck of tarot cards. A soft velvet bag of crystals and charms. A Bible, its red cover stamped with gold letters in the lower right-hand corner: Glory Duquesne.

  A few of my favorite things, Robbie thought, the tune dancing through his head. The important things in a person’s life reduced to what would fit inside a wooden chest.

  A handful of baby clothes. Some photographs Anamaria identified as being of Odette, Charise and Lueena, along with Odette’s mother, Chessie. A mother-of-pearl cross on a sterling chain. Cards marking birthdays, Mother’s Day, Christmas. A few dried rose corsages, fragile as dust, the stickpins dull and rusty. Church programs, bits of ribbon, what might have been at one time a lucky penny. And underneath it all, a small stack of memorial pamphlets from funerals, with newspaper obituaries tucked inside.

  He read each name as Anamaria sifted through them. None of the services were local; no one sounded familiar.

  “This was Mama’s father,” she said, handing him the last one. “When Mama Odette told him she was pregnant, he said he’d send her to prison on trumped-up charges if she ever contacted him again, so she never did. The first time Mama saw him, he was lying in a casket.”

  The picture showed a stern white man; the obituary identified him as a retired judge in Savannah, survived by a wife, three children and six grandchildren. Of course, there was no mention of his black daughter and granddaughters.

  “Hard to imagine Mama Odette with him.”

  “Isn’t it,” Anamaria agreed. Leaning forward, the fabric of her gown pulling tight over her spine and the curve of her butt, she made sure the chest was empty, then sat back. “Well.” Her sigh said more than the word. She’d hoped to find something significant inside the box, something that pointed to Glory’s lovers, to Charlotte’s father.

  “We have her client list,” he reminded her as he picked up the Copper Lake notebook, flipping through the pages.

  A loose piece of paper slipped out, fluttering to the floor between them. It was buff in color, heavyweight, a jagged corner torn from a piece of stationery. The printing on one side showed a lowercase cursive s in bold brown ink. By hand on the other side someone had scrawled a note: Tuesday, 6:30, Lodge.

  Glory had had two appointments the night she died, one at five with Lydia, the other after, and she’d intended to be home by eight-thirty. A six-thirty meeting certainly fit into the time frame.

  “I don’t know anyone named Lodge,” he said before Anamaria could ask.

  “Maybe we’ll find him in the notebook.” She eased to her feet, stretching, then lifted the chest to the bed, laying its contents beside it before she sat down.

  Robbie stretched, too, then glanced out the window. It was still dark, the humidity so heavy that it hung in thin clouds just above the ground. They had probably an hour and a half before the sky lightened and the town started stirring. It was an ungodly hour of the morning to be up; he could count on one hand the number of things that could get him out of bed before the sun: fishing, a vacation, sex.

  He
thought about it a moment, then amended the last: sex with Anamaria.

  He eased to his feet and went into the bathroom, where his clothes hung over the shower rod, still damp. The boxers were clammy but went on without a problem; the jeans were clammier and required a lot of effort.

  “I need a shower,” he remarked when he returned to the bedroom, still tugging at denim that wanted to cling where it shouldn’t.

  “And a shave,” Anamaria said helpfully.

  He did have a pretty good bristle-thing going on, which he didn’t mind, but it was her delicate skin that suffered for it. “I’ll bring breakfast when I come back. What would you like?”

  “I can cook.” A half-dozen pillows were propped behind her back, and her gown was tugged over her knees, where the baby bonnet rested. She gazed at it, her fingers stroking the material as gently as if it were the baby itself.

  “I can shop. Tell me or I’ll be forced to bring back my idea of breakfast.” Which was, most days, lunch.

  “Sweets, fruit, coffee.” She shrugged. “Anything.”

  He stood at the door a long time, watching her, telling himself to go. When he finally moved, it wasn’t to leave, though. He went to the bed, cradled her face in both hands and kissed her fiercely, as if he owned her.

  More truthfully, as if she owned him.

  Then he left.

  His first stop was the condo, where he showered, shaved and dressed. The housekeeper had been in the day before, and the place smelled clean and new. There was no cookie scent lingering in the air, no Anamaria scent in the bathroom or the bedroom, no candle scent or wooden-chest scent. No sex scent.

  The fact that he even noticed made him frown as he left again through the garage.

  Not much was open yet in town—the convenience stores, the truck stop on the edge of town, the twenty-four-hour doughnut shop. He settled for the bakery, a shabby little place on a side street where Sara had always bought fresh bread after Sunday-morning services. Every birthday cake that had ever graced his family’s table had come from there, and his mother was insisting that when Mitch’s little girl turned one in June, they had to make the trip from Mississippi for the cake.

  That was a tradition worth keeping. Never marrying just because none of your relatives had done it didn’t even begin to make the list.

  Not that he was thinking about marriage, and certainly not with Anamaria.

  He was standing at the counter, selecting enough pastries for the whole Duquesne family, when Tommy came in. He wore shorts and a T-shirt, both as soaked with sweat as his hair, and he was breathing hard.

  “You’re out early,” Robbie commented. Tommy ran five miles most mornings, but he didn’t usually hit the bakery for another hour—a detail Robbie knew secondhand since he was never out this early, either.

  “Screw you,” Tommy muttered, then jerked his chin toward the man behind the counter. It could have been a greeting but instead was shorthand for the usual: two jelly doughnuts and a cup of black coffee.

  “Man, if giving up cigarettes makes you this much fun in the morning…”

  Tommy scowled more fiercely. “I’m about as much fun as you were when you gave up booze. Where’ve you been?”

  “Home.”

  “And you woke up six hours early with a craving for yeast and sugar?”

  “Yeah, well, I couldn’t find a good pulled pork sandwich this early.”

  “How’s Anamaria?”

  “How’s Ellie?” Robbie shot back. When Tommy’s gaze narrowed, he immediately regretted the question. He knew things were rough between Tommy and Ellie because he was their friend, and that made him a bastard for asking like that. “Look, I didn’t mean…I wanted to ask you something.”

  Tommy picked up his breakfast and moved to a table. After paying for a box of doughnuts and two large coffees, Robbie followed him. He sat there a moment, listening to an old man in overalls order a dozen cake doughnuts, before finally blurting out his question. “How bizarre would it be if Glory Duquesne’s baby had lived?”

  Tommy chewed a bite of doughnut, then washed it down with coffee while he considered it. “About the only way that’d be possible is if she wasn’t alone out there. And if she wasn’t, if someone took her baby and left her there…” He shook his head grimly. “Damn. Why do you ask?”

  Robbie told him about their visit to the river the night before, about Anamaria’s inability to sense any hint of the baby, about Glory’s missing shawl and the note for a six-thirty appointment with the unknown Lodge.

  “Jeez, let me go to the lieutenant and tell him I want to take a look at a decades-old accidental death because the victim’s psychic daughter can’t feel the life force from her newborn sister at the scene. And, oh yeah, the victim’s shawl is missing.”

  It sounded as ridiculous as Robbie had expected. Still, he argued the point. “To hear Anamaria tell it, the shawl is like that medal you wear. It’s a family thing—and these people are big on family. They’ve got this intense matriarchal-society thing going on that makes our families look like slackers at staying in touch.”

  Tommy’s jaw tightened at the mention of the medal, but he didn’t reach for it or tuck it inside his shirt. His mother had put it around his neck when he was seven, then she’d left to go to the store and had never been seen again. And Robbie had never seen him without the medal since.

  “A shawl,” he repeated. “That’s something you wrap around you, right? No buttons, no zippers? It could have fallen off. It could be out there in those woods under a pile of dead leaves. Or it could have dropped into the river.”

  “Or, if somebody was there with Glory, he could have wrapped it around the baby.”

  “And what did he do with the kid?”

  Robbie shrugged. “Raised her as his own. Gave her to someone else. Sold her to someone else.”

  Tommy swiped jelly from his fingers before picking up the second doughnut. “It’s a better scenario for the kid than drowning or being eaten by wild animals. But it’s still pretty far-fetched.”

  “But it’s possible.”

  This time it was Tommy who shrugged. “Anything’s possible. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth…’” After a moment, he grinned. “I was watching PBS last night.”

  The coincidence made the hairs on Robbie’s neck bristle. Shakespeare again, first from an elderly fortune-teller, and now a cop who’d squeaked through high school English lit by the skin of his teeth—just for the sake of the football team.

  “The way I see it, there are only two ways to prove it. Find the person who was there and get him to admit that he left Glory to die, that he maybe even helped her along before disappearing with her baby. Or find the baby and compare her DNA to Anamaria’s.” Tommy polished off his doughnut, opened Robbie’s box and chose a cream cheese-glazed cinnamon roll. “He couldn’t have stayed here in town with the baby. That would have been too obvious, especially with teams searching the river for days.”

  “Wouldn’t she have needed medical care right away?”

  “I don’t know, man. Do I look like I know anything about babies? If she did, he couldn’t have taken her to a hospital within two hundred miles of here. Too big a risk. But a private doctor…”

  Some doctors would do anything for the right amount of money.

  Or the right patient.

  Several of the names Marguerite had given them the day before came from enough money and influence to qualify on both counts. Robbie and Anamaria needed to start making lists and ruling out whoever they could. It still might be impossible to figure out who fathered Charlotte, or if he’d had anything to do with Glory’s death, but it was all they had at the moment.

  “I’ll talk to you later,” he said, rising abruptly, picking up his box and coffees. “Tell El—” Annoyed, he shook his head. It was just habit: Tell Ellie hello; tell Ellie to come with you next time. He wished they’d stay together or apart, because the on-again, off-again crap was too much hassle.

  With a scowl
, Tommy dismissed the blunder. “Later.”

  After a stop at his office, Robbie returned to Easy Street more than an hour and a half after he’d left. Anamaria was dressed in denim jeans that ended just below her knees and a worn T-shirt advertising some herb festival in Savannah. She sat at the kitchen table, Glory’s notebooks piled in front of her, one open. The baby bonnet was carefully laid out beside them, and her fingers idly stroked the fine fabric.

  A glance through the door into the next room showed that the bed was made, its covers straightened, its pillows piled high. He’d rather rumple it again than talk about the matter at hand, but he joined her at the table.

  “The coffee’s cold.”

  She smiled faintly. “I made a pot. You take longer to shower and dress than Auntie Charise’s twin girls. Believe me, that’s saying a lot.”

  “I ran into Tommy, and I stopped by the office.” He set down the bakery box, along with a file folder, then went to the counter and poured himself a cup of coffee. “Did you find anything in the appointment book?”

  Her expression was blank for a moment; then her gaze darted guiltily toward the bonnet. “Uh, no, sorry. I was just thinking…”

  About her mother. Glory Duquesne may have been dead most of Anamaria’s life, but she wasn’t gone. She lived on in her daughter’s heart. She’d handled the things in that chest, filled the notebooks with the details of her work and tied that bonnet underneath Anamaria’s baby chin, maybe Jass’s and Lillie’s, too, and had planned to do the same with Charlotte. She’d lived and loved and had had a huge impact on the people who’d lived with her and loved her back.

  He topped off her coffee, sat down, took a maple bar from the bakery box and checked the front of the notebook she’d chosen. Atlanta, where Glory had lived when she had gotten pregnant with Anamaria. Had the father been one of her clients? Did Anamaria hope to find his name in one of those pages?

  He chose the Copper Lake notebook and opened it to the first pages. Appointments were sparse in Glory’s first few months in town; like any profession, he supposed, it took time to build a following. He’d been lucky; he’d come out of law school about the time his uncle Cyrus had retired and had been given all of the old man’s clients, including Calloway Industries, the county’s largest employer.