Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

  He cruised for a while, getting the feel of the plane, and then he warmed up with a few barrel rolls and a couple of loop-the-loops. At the end of the last loop, he fell out into a slight dive, then climbed to full power until he was flying completely upside down. At the top of the circle, instead of cutting his engine and diving down to complete yet another loop, he held full power and rolled a half turn to the left and back again into an upright position, and then he twisted the plane around into a long, straight spin, going down and down and down, and he held it, held it, held it, as the ground came rushing up to meet them.

  He waited until the last possible second to pull out of the spin, waited until he was a heartbeat away from being too late, reaching for that belly-clenching, breathless place between greased lightning and the sweet spot where it hits.

  Any other woman in the world would have screamed. Death was screeching at them on the press of the wind, but Remy Lelourie was laughing.

  She hadn't changed.

  On the drive from the airfield back to the city, they stopped along the side of the road where a man was selling slices of watermelon off the tailgate of a battered pickup truck. They ate the fruit sitting side by side on the Bearcat's running board, spitting seeds into the dirt and getting their hands and faces all sticky.

  Pinpricks of sunlight pierced the black straw of her hat, freckling her ear and jaw. Her lips were wet with watermelon juice. He thought of the way it had been between them once, how they'd been no more than kids, really, and yet there had been something pure and distilled in the fury of their love, like the blue flame of a match before it burns out on its own. Afterward, he had gone off to war, he'd married another woman, had a child by her and then buried her—he had lived and thought himself over Remy Lelourie.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked aloud. “You had the whole world to play in, so what have you come back for?”

  Her mouth pulled into something that was not quite a smile. “You might find this hard to believe, but there's a limit to how much one can bear of a thing—even champagne baths and tango dancing and petting parties in the purple dawn.”

  He spat a seed at a fence post. “Yeah, I've had that same feeling myself lately—too much of a good thing. Like too many scotch-and-ryes and bourré games that last past two in the morning. Too many dead bodies.”

  She turned her head and met his gaze, but her face kept her secrets well. He had read once that when you are acting whatever you are thinking, the camera will catch it. But if your thoughts are lies—what then does your audience see?

  “I wanted to come home, Day,” she said. “Oh, maybe not for forever, but for a little while. Sometimes the past can seem as if it has a powerful hold on you, way more than any future can ever hope to claim. I just wanted to come home for a spell. Is that so hard to understand?”

  “No,” he said, but that was a lie as well. He didn't understand all of it, not when he remembered how their future had been destroyed by what she had done that hot summer's evening eleven years ago. He had always known why she had left. What he still didn't know was how—brave as she was, reckless as she was—she had ever dared to come back.

  “It was double-dare time for Remy Lelourie,” she said softly, as if she were reading his mind, and that was impossible, surely, for she couldn't have known what he had seen.

  He took her watermelon rind and tossed it, along with his, into the weed-choked ditch. He gave her his handkerchief to wipe her hands, and the juice off her mouth. “We'd better be getting you home,” he said.

  They spoke only once more on the way back to New Orleans. He asked her where she'd been going with her suitcase all packed up last night, the same night her husband just happened to have got himself carved up with a cane knife, and she said, “It's been so hot lately, I decided to go out to the lake for a spell.” But he knew that that too was a lie.

  He let her out at the top of the oyster-shell drive and watched her walk away from him through the moss-strung oaks, watched her passing through sunlight and shadow, toward the house with its slender white colonnettes and wide, gracious galleries. Although she was a thoroughly modern girl with her bobbed hair and painted nails, her rolled stockings and rouged knees, she looked as if she belonged only to that house and to the South, to the past.

  Once, years ago, when they were lovers, his greatest fear had been that she would give up everything, even him, to possess Sans Souci. She had left him anyway, only she'd left the house, as well.

  In the end, though, it was Sans Souci she had chosen to come back to, and not him.

  Her mama had been the one to plant that particular obsession in Remy's head. Generations ago, as far back as the 1850s, the plantation had belonged to the Lelouries. It had been lost, in a game of cards or through a duel, or maybe those old stories lied and it had simply been sold to pay off bad debts—the how of it had never been important, anyway. What had always mattered to the Lelouries was getting it back. You had to be from New Orleans to understand that a house like Sans Souci was more than cypress wood and bricks. It was a testimony to past glories and old sins, a bequest wrapped up in pride, honor, and immortality. A legacy of ambition, greed, and deceit. It was la famille.

  It was a thing Rourke did understand, this obsession with the past and la famille. His past and Remy's—it was like a shared sin, not forgotten, but never confessed. For once, years ago, his mother had left him and his father and brother, and had gone to live with her lover in the house on Conti Street.

  Her lover, whose name had been Reynard Lelourie.

  Chapter Seven

  WHEN DAMAN ROURKE WAS A KID HE WOULD HANG around for hours outside a certain house on Esplanade Avenue. A raised cottage mostly hidden behind a tall black-iron picket fence afroth with honeysuckle vines.

  What he hoped for during all those hours of all those days was to get a good long look at the two little girls who belonged to his mother's lover. He thought that if he watched them often enough, watched how they behaved, watched to see if they sassed the nuns, or hid their butter beans under their plates, or stole licorice whips from Mr. Pagliani's corner grocery—if he watched them often and carefully, then he would come to understand why those little girls' father had left them.

  Then maybe, like the detective he was today, he would have been able to piece all his clues together, one by one, and figure out what terrible crime he had committed that had caused his mother to leave him.

  They had kept themselves to themselves, though, had Reynard Lelourie's two daughters, but their mother was what folk called a serious recluse. When Heloise Lelourie's husband had left her to go live openly with his mistress—Daman's mama—in the house on Conti Street, she had put on mourning black, as if he had died, and only set foot outside the iron gate to go to Mass on Sundays. Except for when Reynard Lelourie had died for real, from eating a bowl of spoiled shrimp gumbo the day of his fiftieth birthday—then Heloise Lelourie had caused a bit of a stir herself, by going first to her husband's wake and then to the cemetery to see him good and buried.

  It was less than half a mile as the crow flies between Sans Souci and the Lelourie cottage on Esplanade Avenue. Rourke drove there now, parking beneath the shade of a giant palm, whose thick green fronds clicked in a breeze that came up from the river, damp and heavy. Sunshine glazed the few puddles left over from last night's rain.

  In the early years of the city's history, Esplanade Avenue with its root-cracked sidewalks had been only a muddy road, which wound through French colonial plantations from the river to the Bayou St. John. Eventually the plantations were parceled up, and the muddy road was paved with Belgian blocks and lined with elegant Creole mansions and raised cottages. Then, as more years passed, some of the families died out or moved uptown, and many of the mansions were turned into rooming houses. Others had been allowed to go to seed. But in New Orleans only the appearances of life changed, Rourke thought. The rhythms remained the same.

  The metal of the cottage's gate was hot to the touch w
hen he pushed it open. All those hours he had spent hanging around the outside of this gate, and this was the first time he had ever passed through it.

  The garden was lush and beautiful, profuse with oleander, azaleas, camellias, and roses. Some animal on a tear had been at the flower beds along the river side of the house, though. Mangled blossoms and shredded leaves lay tossed and scattered in deep furrows of wet, turned-up earth.

  The house was in a sad way as well, paint flaking and cardboard patches in the windows where the stained-glass panes had gone missing. The Lelouries had never been rich like the St. Claires and they had fallen on even worse times lately, but their blood was just as blue. Their name was as old as Louisiana itself.

  Rourke climbed the steps to the saggy gallery and pulled the bell. A long crack, he saw, ran across the fanlight above the door.

  He knew they were home. Still, he waited awhile for the door to be answered. Long enough for a clothes-pole man and a fruit seller's wagon to pass by on the avenue, the two men together making a melodious song out of their shuck and hustle.

  “Clothes poles. I got the clothes poles, lady, sellin' clothes poles a nickel and a dime.”

  “I got watermelon red to the rind.”

  When the door finally opened Rourke touched the brim of his straw boater and smiled. “Mornin', Miss Belle.”

  She tried to slam the door in his face, but he put his hand out, stopping it.

  “You have your nerve—coming to this house, Daman Rourke,” she said. Her voice was dry and brittle.

  From within the house a woman called a question, and she half turned to answer. “It's that woman's boy, Mama…. No, not the priest. The policeman.” She swung back around to him, color staining her cheeks, her eyes bright. She'd always had bright eyes, he remembered—golden brown, the color of a candle flame seen through a glass of whiskey. “I'm tellin' him just where he can take himself off to.”

  “No. Let him come in.”

  Mrs. Heloise Lelourie materialized out of the darkness of the hallway, standing small and slender and straight-backed behind her younger daughter.

  Rourke had never spoken to her before, this abandoned wife of his mother's lover. But he was well acquainted with the sight of her—as a boy, he had often gone to Mass in her church just to observe her, her and her girls. Hers was a French face, petite and sharply boned, timeless. But her coloring was fair, gray eyes and blond hair now faded to the color of old wax.

  For a moment longer Belle still kept the door half-shut against him, and her hand that held it trembled. Her short nails were grimed with black dirt, and a band of sunburn circled her wrist between where her gardening glove must have ended and her sleeve began. She saw him looking at her hand, at her nails, and she let go of the door and stepped back into the gloom of the hall.

  Mrs. Lelourie led the way into a front parlor that was furnished in black walnut and red velvet that had faded to puce. The large gilded mirror over the mantel was spotted with mildew. The carpeting was so threadbare the floor showed through the nap in places. A dry, musty smell hung around the place, like that of a grave so old that even the bones had long ago fallen into dust.

  Mrs. Lelourie waved her hand at a black horsehair settee that was worn bald in places. “Please, will you take a seat,” she said, her words blurred by a soft accent, but then she had grown up speaking real French. In her day, her people had seldom married outsiders, and the paterfamilias didn't even like their children learning English in school.

  “Belle,” she said, as she settled with old-fashioned grace onto a lyre-backed chair, “if you would prepare and pour, please, the café for our guest.”

  Belle stared at her mother and some feeling burned quick and hot across her face, gone before Rourke could read it. She turned on her heel and left the room, and the cheap cotton skirt of her dark blue dress, too long to be fashionable anymore, made a sighing sound as it brushed her legs.

  Mrs. Lelourie folded her white, veined hands on her lap and lifted her head up proud. She didn't speak, and neither did he. Long ago, Daman Rourke had learned that the human heart couldn't bear emptiness, and a silent room was emptiness of the worst sort. The heart would ache to fill the silence. All he had to do was wait and listen.

  The house was so quiet he could hear Belle way back in the kitchen, making the coffee. He doubted any guest had stepped into this parlor in years. “My mama lives in a grave, and I hate her for it,” Remy had said to him once, but even then he knew it wasn't really hate she felt. He understood the tangled layers of shame and pride that had made a crypt out of this house for Heloise Lelourie, but he wondered now why Belle had chosen to stay and be buried alive along with her mother.

  There were many women like Belle in New Orleans, though, Rourke thought—women who awaken one day to find themselves left behind, caring for aging parents and living out their lives in fading rooms behind drawn curtains, where antique clocks measure out the time in years, not minutes, and too much is left unsaid.

  The strong chicory smell of the coffee made it out to the parlor first, followed by Belle carrying a tarnished silver tray weighted down by a large gray agate cafetière with steam rising from its spout.

  The coffee was thick and black as tar. He watched Belle pour it, together with the hot milk, into china cups. He remembered her as a pretty child, with long curls the color of late-summer apricots that would slide back and forth over her shoulders when she walked. She hadn't bobbed her hair, the way all the other girls of her generation had done, and she wore it swept up now in a thick, soft bun. Its bright color had faded some, though, the way a ribbon will do when left too long in the sun.

  As she leaned over to hand him his café au lait, a medal on a heavy silver chain swung out from around her neck. It was a St. Joseph's medal, the patron saint of spinsters, and so it seemed that she still had her hopes of escaping, after all.

  Belle sat down on the sofa, and Mrs. Lelourie took a delicate sip from her cup. The older woman's gaze met Rourke's, then she looked away. She smoothed the napkin on her lap. “Everyone knows how those Hollywood movie people do all sorts of wicked, unnatural things that no one else does.”

  “Oh, Mama, you really mustn't say such things,” Belle said, although the words sounded forced, as if they'd gotten caught in her throat on the way up and she'd had to cough them out. “Mr. Rourke is going to think you're sayin' that Remy killed her husband.”

  Mrs. Lelourie took another sip of café au lait. “Stuff and nonsense. He knows I speak of this thing of shame that my daughter Remy has done after her husband's death. Allowing him to be cut up, butchered in that foul place. There can be no proper wake because of it, no open casket.”

  The older woman's hand betrayed her for just a moment by trembling and spilling coffee into her saucer, and Rourke had to look away. He ached for her. All she had to fill her days, her years, were the rituals of life and the memories they made—the wakes and weddings, the births and burials. Yet for Reynard Lelourie's wife, it must have seemed as though even the rituals kept betraying her over and over.

  “I wish you could have been spared the pain of a postmortem,” he said. “But the procedure is always required nowadays, when there's a murder.”

  “Murder.” The sound she made was between a genteel little snort and a sigh. “Charles St. Claire brought his death on himself. It runs in that family, that sort of insanity.”

  “Oh, Mama, you mustn't say…Now Mr. Rourke is going to think you're the one who's gone a little crazy.”

  Mrs. Lelourie lifted her shoulders in a small shrug, as if murder and insanity hardly mattered anyway. “The important thing, bien sàr, is that Sans Souci will be back with the Lelouries now, where it belongs.”

  “Under Louisiana law,” Rourke said, “the husband's property doesn't always pass on to the wife. Especially if she killed him for it.”

  The smallest of smiles pulled at the corners of Mrs. Lelourie's mouth, and her gaze went to an oil painting of the house that hung in an ornate
gilded frame above the mantel. “God will not disappoint us.”

  Belle pushed herself to her feet in a sudden, jerky movement. She went to the window to stare out at her beautiful garden through lace panels yellow with age.

  She crossed her arms over her middle, hugging herself. “As you can see, our mama was just as pleased as can be when Remy married—not that Mama would ever tell Remy so, and she wouldn't go to the wedding either. But later on that evenin' Remy came on over with her new husband, flashing that weddin' ring on her finger, Mrs. St. Claire at last and after all these years, and Mama still wouldn't speak to her. Poor Remy. You should have been here that evenin', Mr. Rourke. You would have felt so bad for her. She thought she'd found the one thing that would make Mama love her again, but Mama doesn't forgive so easily. Do you, Mama?”

  “To disgrace oneself is to disgrace the family. My daughter has shamed the name of Lelourie.”

  Belle swung her head around to her mother. “She has shamed our name, Mama? She has?”

  Rourke got up and went for a closer look at the painting hanging above the fireplace. The artist had signed his work: Henri Lelourie. It must have been done many years ago. Sans Souci was lovely today, but she had been lovelier then, in her prime.

  Mrs. Lelourie's gaze was riveted on the painting as well, and her voice floated through the room's musty silence as if she spoke from a dream. “Sans Souci. Remy understands, and so does Belle. Mon trisaïeul, my great-greatgrandfather, built her. Once she was the most beautiful plantation in all of Louisiana. Once she was ours, and now she will be ours again.”

  Her gaze lingered lovingly on the painting, and then it shifted to Rourke's face, and even from where he stood now across the room from her, he could see a hard glitter in her eyes, as if they had been glazed and fired in a kiln.