Jewell (A Second Chance Novel Book 2)

by Tina DeSalvo

  “I don’t know who initiated it, but it was Ralph who contacted me,” she said. “All I really know is that I took the papers, Beau, and I didn’t take the jewelry and other items I’m charged with stealing. I also know, and now you do too, that I didn’t tell the DA about the papers, either. I would’ve if he had asked me about them, but he didn’t. I wouldn’t lie about it.” She looked at him a moment, and he knew she was trying to read in his eyes if he believed her. He wasn’t sure she got her answer when she continued. “The way I figure it, if I go to the DA now and admit to taking Genevieve’s personal papers from the same safe where the jewelry they say I stole was kept, it would incriminate me even more.” She blew out a heavy breath. “I hate this. I’m an honest person. My ethics have always been stellar. My behavior with this has been incredibly difficult for me to justify. I want to go to Claude and his attorney and say, look, this is what happened. I’m innocent, but…” she shrugged.

  “But they will say, sure, you just took the papers but you didn’t take the valuable jewelry that’s missing.” Beau folded his arms over his chest. “And they’ll probably go one step further and say that you may have even forged the papers to cause harm or to blackmail the Monroe family.”

  “Exactly.” She said something in French and then shook her head. “Like I said before, this is incredibly difficult.”

  “Where are the papers now?”

  “In my safe-deposit box.” She gathered her hair and tossed it over her shoulder. “You know, I’ve gone over it in my head a thousand times, trying to figure out how I could’ve handled it differently. I couldn’t. I don’t have the emotional fortitude.” She cleared her throat. “I was photographing the old coins in her office safe. There was a security guard in the room. I had hired him as I always do when I’m handling very expensive pieces. Anyway, at the bottom of the safe under a box holding her pearls was a large manila envelope hand-addressed to Genevieve. It was my mother’s very distinctive, extra curvy handwriting.”

  “Go on.”

  “I opened it. I was still within my work guidelines to do so.” She folded her hands in her lap. “In the envelope was a contract. My mother had signed papers stating she would never reveal the name of the father of her baby girl, Jewell Orleans Monroe. If she did, she would have to pay the sum of one million dollars for breach of contract. She was paid five hundred thousand dollars to enter into this agreement.” Beau saw the pain in her eyes. “She was paid off to never reveal who my father was. She used that money to purchase the strip club she still owns today. The awful place that I’ve hated my entire life.”

  She tried to continue once, twice and even a third time, but her emotions were too wrenching and too close to the surface for her to speak. There were no physical tears flowing. These were the worst kind of tears that made a person weep from their soul. Beau could feel that kind of anguish charged in the air around Jewell. He wanted to gather her in his arms to soothe her and to soothe himself. He felt so damn helpless seeing her like this.

  “I just kind of freaked when I found the papers,” she finally said. “I felt the room start to tilt and blur. I tried to read the words on the contract again, but I couldn’t see it. The sound of the fan overhead started to fade into a distant beat. It sounded hollow, like I was underwater. Yes. I felt like I was underwater. I suddenly couldn’t breathe. I had to get out of there. Out of that room where my mother probably had signed this awful document that started the lies and embarrassment that shrouded my childhood.” She pulled at a loose thread on the quilt. “It wasn’t as horrific a childhood as yours, Beau, but it wasn’t one that ever included a loving mother or father.” She bit her bottom lip. “I took the papers. I wanted to take them home, lock the door to my bedroom, and read them when I was calmer. Also, in the chaos of my mind, I knew I wanted to take them to confront my mother to ask her why she’d done this. Like I didn’t already know.”

  “Because you wanted to hear her side. You’re a fair-minded woman. You wanted to know the truth.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe I was being a little pathetic too. Maybe I wanted to hear her say something redeeming, so I could discover my mother wasn’t the narcissist I knew she was.” She pulled a short beige thread from the quilt, wound it around her pinky. “She told me she signed the contract. She said she was seventeen and daring and naive enough to trap Thomas in the impossible situation. She was a minor. He was twenty-three. She called herself jailbait. She even admitted that when she trapped him with the pregnancy she hadn’t considered that her being a minor would stop them from being able to marry. Genevieve told her that she wouldn’t shame her family with her son marrying a pregnant minor…especially a pregnant mulatto teenager.” She looked at Beau, swallowed. “My mom is half white and half black. Mimi got pregnant from a grand love affair she’d had when she turned forty. She had my mother when she was forty-one. Old enough to know better, she always told me. That was all I had known until the day we arrived at Sugar Mill. Mimi told y’all about her affair with a former pro football player. When I later questioned her, she told me he’d come to town while working for the NFL to get the New Orleans franchise started. It explains her obsession with the Saints.”

  “Jewell, your mother has always billed herself as being Creole,” Beau said. “Her being interracial is no surprise and no big deal.”

  She smiled, and his heart felt like it was squeezed in a vice. “Thank you for saying that. But, it did matter to a lot of people when I was a child that she was interracial and that I was her illegitimate daughter. Especially to the mothers of the little girls I wanted to be friends with. I never got invited to sleepovers, after-school swimming parties or birthday parties. There was a fear that I’d expose those sweet innocent children to the decadent life of a Bourbon Street stripper because I must’ve had knowledge of that world since my mother was the queen of it.”

  She shrugged her shoulders as if it didn’t really matter, but he saw in the tightness of her neck, the way her hands balled into fists, that it mattered to her. It mattered to her a lot.

  “The truth is, I had been exposed way beyond what other kids had been, but not in the way they thought. I was an innocent. I saw no lewd and lascivious acts. Mimi wouldn’t allow that. She protected me from that. God, Beau, I’m so grateful to her for that. Otherwise, I might’ve been that girl the PTA moms feared.” She swallowed hard. Beau knew her emotions were barely contained. “I did have a promiscuous, narcissistic mother,” she sighed. “She saw nothing wrong with introducing her daughter to the oversexed men she slept with, even going so far as being extremely affectionate with them in front of me. And she certainly had a lot of different men coming around. She’d claim to be in love with a guy one day, only to bring a new lover around the next day.”

  “I sort of understand why you developed your philosophy on sexual behavior being based on science.”

  “Oh, that didn’t come from my mother,” she said, defensively, but Beau wasn’t buying it. “That was from years of study.”

  “Sounds like denial to me.”

  “No…I…it’s not…it’s physical anthropology…the study…”

  “Whatever, Jewell,” he interrupted her. “Off subject. Let’s get back on subject.” He began to pace. “The Monroes felt the same about your mother as your schoolmates’ parents.”

  “Yes, but in a different way. It wasn’t out of a sense of protecting her children that Genevieve was motivated. My mother simply wasn’t good enough for her ilk, and her illegitimate grandchild wasn’t either.” She looked away. “You know, my mother said that she didn’t regret getting pregnant for a second. She even said that…she got the most important thing in her life out of it.”

  Beau stopped pacing. “You.”

  “The Crescent City Lantern Club.”

  He moved to sit next to her. Gathered her in his arms. God, he needed her warmth against his chest. It was more than his understanding the chilling pain of the child just wanting their parent to love them. It was that he
just couldn’t stand seeing her suffer. He wanted to take that away from her. “That’s a crap thing to say.”

  “Yeah, but it was the truth. She’d purposely gotten pregnant at sixteen to use Thomas Monroe’s wealth and position. She didn’t know his mother would be the one to give her what she wanted when she set out on her scheme. She thought she’d marry a good-looking, rich New Orleans man who’d shower her in diamonds, fancy cars, inappropriate clothes.” She leaned her head back. “People use each other all the time. Thomas used her for a good time. She used him back.”

  She looked at him and Beau felt that she was telling him that was what was going on with them. It ticked him off. That wasn’t what the hell was going on with them at all. But he wasn’t taking the conversation there. Her legal problems were too serious for them to move to another topic that would no doubt end in an argument.

  “Jewell, I don’t like what I’m hearing about your case. How does your attorney plan to defend you? You have valid concerns about bringing in the fact that you took the papers, but does he agree with you?”

  “It’s not up for discussion. I don’t want to bring my mother into this.”

  “You damn well should do whatever you need to do to win.” He felt his ears begin to burn with his anger. “This is your damn life you’re playing with here.”

  “I’m not playing, Beau. I need a not guilty verdict if I am ever going to do the work that I love and was trained to do.” She got up from the bed with the quilt still wrapped around her. “How in the world will I be able to take care of Mimi if no one will hire me? I can’t work for the Bienvenus forever.”

  “You can’t support Mimi from jail, either,” he snapped. “Damn it, Jewell. I sure as hell hope you have the best lawyer in New Orleans.”

  Jewell turned her back to him. “I thought you were my lawyer,” she joked. “Oh, wait.” She turned to face him. “Your thirty seconds are up. You’re fired.”

  She walked out of the bedroom into the bathroom and closed the door. Beau heard the shower go on a few seconds later.

  “Damn you, Boots,” he said to the closed door. “I don’t want to lose you now that I’ve just found you.”

  ***

  Jewell had been avoiding Beau for two days as she went back and forth to New Orleans with the moving crew to bring Elli and Ben’s unwanted furniture to her warehouse. It broke her heart to see him with Nancy the few times he came by to check on her progress at Sugar Mill, but when she didn’t make any extra effort to talk to him, he’d take the puppy and leave.

  Jewell knew she wasn’t being fair to him. He’d done nothing wrong. It was her. She was the one who was embarrassed about stealing the papers, about her mother entering into that awful contract with Genevieve Monroe and about any number of a dozen things. He was just being a friend. She didn’t have time to fret over this, she kept telling herself. Their fling would’ve ended eventually anyway. Besides, relationships with men as good-looking and desirable as Beau never ended well. Hell, most relationships just didn’t work out. Even good women like Mimi ended up alone.

  “Mimi, you ready to go back to New Orleans?” she asked, deciding she could return to Cane to finish the work she promised to do for Tante Izzy if she wasn’t convicted and locked away in jail.

  Her grand-mère looked at her and smiled. She was doing a lot of that lately. It was as if she didn’t understand the words Jewell was speaking. Jewell kissed her on the forehead and waved to Ruby and Tante Izzy, who had driven up.

  “We heard you were heading back to New Orleans,” Ruby said, walking up to her. “We wanted to say good-bye.”

  “Did you get dat truckload of stuff Pearl and some of da family sent over for you to sell for dem?” Tante Izzy asked.

  “I got it.” Jewell thought of the old beds, baby cribs, dressers and other used furniture that weren’t antiques but would help poor families trying to furnish their homes. Those items would be perfect for the consignment store if Elli and her friend Abby were able to open it. “I’ll do my best to sell the pieces for them.”

  Ruby looked at Mimi sitting on a lawn chair in the shade of a crepe myrtle near the barn. “I’m sorry she’s gotten so distant” she said. “She looks happy, though. Wherever her mind has taken her, it seems to be a good place. You can thank God for that gift.”

  Jewell kissed Ruby on the cheek for those kind thoughts.

  Tante Izzy looked at her, then lifted her cheek to Jewell for a kiss. She happily obliged. “I really love you, Tante Izzy.”

  She nodded. “What’s not to love?” She shook her head. “My momma always said dat chil’ren are a blessing unless dey belong to a different woman.” She laughed. “Not true for you. You’re like my own.”

  Jewell hugged her. “Thank you.” She looked at Ruby, who had tears in her eyes and was fanning her face. “Ruby? Are you okay?”

  “Oh, it’s just the menopause. I cry so easily and get hot flashes at the same time.” She sniffed. “It has absolutely nothing to do with how much I’m going to miss you or how much my heart is breaking.”

  Jewell looked at Mimi, who was smiling up at a bird on a branch. She looked at Tante Izzy, who could recall stories of family from years gone by as easily as she recalled what happened yesterday. Why did some suffer with dementia while others kept clear minds to the end?

  As she went to get Mimi, Jewell waved to the ladies who’d always have a place in her heart. She stopped. Turned. Tante Izzy’s comment about her mother suddenly echoed in her head. “Tante Izzy,” Jewell called to her as she rushed back to her. “You said your momma said that children are a blessing unless they are another woman’s.”

  “Dat’s right.” She pursed her lips.

  “Did she say anything else about other children or maybe the child from your father’s first wife?”

  “Hmmm, let me see, now.” She scratched her head. “No, I don’t think so.” She narrowed her eyes, clearly thinking hard. “She didn’t talk ’bout other chil’ren or Martine. She did feel sorry fer herself from time-to-time, though. She sure could do needlepoint, but she couldn’t sew a real pretty dress. She’d complain dat she’d have to go to New Orleans if she’d want a good party dress because her favorite seamstress had done gone dere wit’ her child to work fer da nuns.”

  Jewell smiled. “Her seamstress? Her French seamstress?”

  “Mais oui. She sure was French. I remember her sayin’ dat.” She cocked her head.

  “This seamstress had one child, you said?”

  “I only remember momma talkin’ about da one child and how her seamstress’s talents were wasted on da nuns, not needing pretty dresses and all.”

  Jewell gave Tante Izzy a kiss.

  She pulled out her phone and called Beau. She wanted to share the news with him. As she waited for him to answer, she watched Ruby and Tante Izzy walk over to Mimi to say good-bye. Tante Izzy leaned over and hugged Mimi so tightly she thought they might both tumble to the ground. Then Tante Izzy let her go and handed her the crystal salt and pepper shakers. Mimi laughed, recognition and joy shining from her face. “I need to put these back on the kitchen table when momma is finished sewing there.” Mimi said, speaking for the first time that day. “Twinnie helps me. We get madeleines after.” She smiled. “I like madeleines.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Tante Izzy said, winking. “It’s your lucky day. I just bought some Girl Scout cookies from my niece, Molly. I’ll get dem from my truck.”

  “Hello, Jewell,” Beau said, answering the call.

  Jewell had to clear her throat to speak; emotion made it difficult. “Hi, Beau.”

  “Are you okay? Mignon?” Hearing the concern in his voice made it impossible for her to speak. She nodded, then realized that he couldn’t see her. “Good,” she managed. “I’m calling with news.” She told him about the conversation she’d had with Tante Izzy and what Mimi had said afterwards. “So, it looks like it was the seamstress who took Martine to New Orleans to live at the monastery with her and her daughter.”
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br />   “I’m glad we got that question answered, Jewell.” His voice deepened. His accent seemed heavier. “We still don’t know which child died, do we?”

  “No. It doesn’t matter.” She sighed. “We know that Mimi’s Twinnie is no longer here for her to see or visit before…” Her voice caught. She cleared her throat again. “I know it would’ve been nice for your family to have closure, but for Mimi, we have that closure. I just wish I could’ve given her more of that memory before she lost all of her memories.”

  “Are you okay not knowing about your family history?”

  “Yes. Mimi is my family no matter what her name really is.”

  Beau’s voice softened. “Jewell, you’re the best granddaughter she could ever have.”

  “Thank you. It means a lot to hear you say that.” She shifted the phone to the other ear.

  “I know you’re going back to New Orleans, Jewell,” he began, his voice stronger now, more confident. “How about I come by tomorrow after you and Mimi have had a chance to settle back into your home? I’ll pick up dinner.” He lowered his voice as if he didn’t want someone in the room with him to hear what he was saying. “I’m already missing you.”

  She sucked in a breath, stiffened her spine. She’d miss him every minute of every day for the rest of her life, just as she already mourned losing Mimi’s essence while she still lived on this earth. How would she get through this? God, would life in prison, where she would probably spend the next decade, teach her to accept what she couldn’t have?

  “No, Beau, this is good-bye,” she said, not knowing where her strength came from, to keep her voice steady. Prolonging the good-bye meant she’d be tortured thinking of the day when it would come…and it would come. She inhaled deeply. “I’ll always treasure what we had together. It’s time for both of us to move on.”