That Winter in Venice

by Ciji Ware

  Between sobs, Serena said, “Tell him... tell him the feeling’s mutual.”

  “Look, Serena, four heads are way better than that bitchy, scheming brain belonging to Lauren! C’mon over to our house and let’s figure this out together.”

  “I-I can’t,” Serena hiccupped, a sound that practically ended in a wail. “I’m dealing with my own family’s reaction to merely learning about the deficiencies in those walls, let alone keeping it secret that my boyfriend—my former boyfriend,” she corrected herself, “is related to the people whose behavior guaranteed my brother and sister-in-law would one day drown. I’ve had enough drama and trauma in my life, not to put myself in the path of anything else involving Jack Durand!”

  “Men!” Corlis exclaimed. “They do stupid men tricks—like Jack going into some swamp where there’s no cell coverage. But have you ever considered how digging up all this stuff about the storm has affected his psyche? Who could have predicted that whack-job Lauren Hilbert would somehow have access to all this and then do something so cruel and malicious to a man she supposedly loved?”

  “My thoughts, exactly,” Serena managed to reply between gulps for air.

  Corlis gave her shoulders another squeeze.

  “Listen, Serena... guys like Jack and King don’t come along very often, sweetheart. You’ve gotta know by now that Jack Durand is profoundly in love with you beyond anything I ever imagined was possible for that guy. You’ve got to believe me that he has your deepest interests at heart.”

  Serena didn’t answer, her shoulders heaving. Corlis leaned closer, her voice urgent.

  “Not only has he had to deal with big-time legal issues on a story like this, he’s been holding his poor, repentant elderly uncle’s broken life in his hands.” She reached out to lift Serena’s chin between her fingers and gazed somberly into her eyes. “Talk about your PTSD! Our boy Jack had a lot to contend with on this one, just as you have. A lot.”

  But Serena could only shake her head from side-to-side, tears once again beginning to slide down cheeks already sheened with moisture.

  Finally she replied barely above a whisper, “Tell him I’m sorry. Tell him my heart is breaking, but I can’t see how any of this can come right. Explain to him that I just can’t live through the pain of trying... when the odds against us are so huge.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Dirty dishes sat on the kitchen table where King, Corlis, and Jack had consumed the muffalettas that King had brought home from Napoleon House a few blocks from the Duvallon’s place in the French Quarter. Jack had left his hero-like sandwich half eaten on his plate while listening with a grim expression to Corlis relate how Serena found out about his uncle being the unnamed source in his story.

  “So Lauren had a friend come with her to Antonelli’s?” he pressed. “Did Serena know her or recognize her name?”

  “She’d never seen the other woman before. All she said was that it was Judy somebody.”

  “Do you know any Judys?” King asked Jack. He looked at his wife. “Who do we know named Judy?”

  All three of them were silent for a few moments. Then Jack slapped the top of the table.

  “Judy, the court reporter!”

  “Who?” they chorused.

  “Judy Mansfield! Our lawyer, Chambordeau, and the outside firm that the T-P brought in, hired a freelance court reporter to take verbatim notes when they were quizzing me about all my sources and fact-checking details. They had her there to transcribe every word said in the room during our conference, in case we ever got sued. By the end, she knew every single facet of all three stories in the series! Did Serena describe her to you? Kinda short? Brown, frizzy hair?”

  “No, but Serena did say she was a Theta sorority sister of Lauren’s. Would that about jibe with this Judy Mansfield’s age bracket?”

  “Absolutely,” Jack replied. “Judy even mentioned that day we worked together that she’d been invited to the children’s charity fashion show, but the price of the tickets was too high for her budget.” The scene in the lawyers’ office came back to him, clear as day. “She also hinted she’d like me to take her out afterward, but I said I had to meet y’all at the Monteleone.”

  “Oh, crikey!” exclaimed Corlis. “Judy probably knew about the fashion show because Lauren must have tried to get her sorority sister to buy a seat to the dinner! And this Judy character was nosing around you, Jack, because she’d probably heard you’d broken it off with Lauren and thought you were an available man.”

  “That’s gotta be it!” King said, glancing at his wife admiringly.

  “Yeah,” Jack agreed. “That has to be the connection. For some reason, Judy Mansfield told Lauren about Jacques—although I was present when the lawyers cautioned her, as well as the rest of us, that everything we’d heard and talked about that day was not to leave the room.”

  “It was a juicy tidbit she couldn’t resist imparting to someone. Too bad it had to be Lauren,” King said sourly.

  Corlis asked, “I wonder who else Judy or Lauren have blabbed to? Serena said that once the cat was out of the bag, Judy looked miserable. Maybe she’d just traded casual gossip with Lauren? She apparently said in front of Serena that Lauren had promised never to repeat what Judy had told her and yelled, as she was leaving, that she’d never speak to Lauren again.”

  “I hate to say it,” King said to Jack, “but Lauren may have seen an opportunity to make trouble and grabbed it, since we already know how she’s had you in her crosshairs since the day you broke up.”

  Jack abruptly rose from the table to make a phone call to his editor. He was under an obligation to tell him that the secret was out and the repercussions could be far worse than any misery he and Serena had endured to date.

  Editor John Reynolds, three lawyers for the newspaper, and reporter Jack Durand sat at a long, mahogany conference table with a sniveling Judith Mansfield positioned at the far end, the male group serving as judge, jury, and executioners.

  “You realize, don’t you, Ms. Mansfield,” said one of the lawyers, “that we are making some very serious accusations against you? What do you have to say? Are we right? Did you tell Dr. Lauren Hilbert and anyone else about Jacques Durand being one of the anonymous sources in Jack’s Katrina story—which is in a clear violation of your well-known professional obligations?”

  “Lauren just wrangled it out of me,” she said tearfully. “I happened to mention I’d done a free-lance job for the T-P and she asked me if I’d seen Jack, here. She wanted to know every single thing about him! It was weird.”

  “And you said?” John Reynolds asked sternly.

  “I said he’d been working on a hush-hush story and she asked ‘what about’ and we got to talking, and I-I might have mentioned that... well... that New Orleans is such a small town, even his own family was one of his sources.”

  “Right,” Jack broke in. “And then what happened?”

  “Quiet, Durand!” snapped another of the lawyers. “Let us ask the questions.”

  But Judy responded to Jack directly.

  “Well, you know how mad she was you broke up with her! She said you’d humiliated her over Christmas when you didn’t give her an engagement ring and took up with some slutty girl in Venice when you were over there.”

  “Oh, Jeez...”

  “You know what she’s like!” Judy whined. “She just kept pushing and pushing me to tell every single detail about what you were doing since you’d ended it with her.”

  “And that’s when you told her about the details of Jack’s story?” Reynolds confirmed. “That his uncle, Jacques Durand, was an unnamed source?”

  Judy nodded, gulping. “I didn’t mean to, honest!” She turned to Jack.

  “And you have to believe me that I had no idea when she said she wanted us to go over to Antonelli’s Costumes to see about getting outfitted for next year’s St Anne Parade that she was going to drop a bomb on your new girlfriend. I didn’t even know that that costume lady was the girl you’d
met in Venice until later, when Lauren and I had a huge fight in Lafayette Park, down the street from the shop.”

  Jack’s editor shook his head in disgust.

  “Well, Judy,” Reynolds said evenly, “here’s why we asked you not to repeat anything you heard in your duties transcribing what went on between the paper’s lawyers and our reporter, Jack, here. Yesterday, the newsroom received an anonymous tip that Jacques Durand was the one who signed the documents that approved the final plans for the Seventeenth Street Canal back in 1982. Of course, we, here at the paper, already knew that, and knew the names of some of the other engineers who’d been part of all that, but we’d decided not to publish the senior Mr. Durand’s name to protect him from further harm as a whistleblower. But now that people outside those in this room are aware that it was Jacques Durand, our newspaper must publish that fact ourselves—or be rightly accused of protecting one of our own reporters who happens to be Jacques Durand’s nephew!”

  “So you see how serious this breach of confidentiality is for everyone involved here, Ms. Mansfield?” asked the lawyer who’d spoken previously.

  “Yes, sir,” Judy replied meekly. “Believe me, I’m sorry I ever spoke to Lauren Hilbert in my entire life! She was never very nice when we were Thetas together at Tulane.”

  “Ever heard of the phrase ‘Loose Lips Sink Ships?’” Reynolds asked sharply.

  Judy Mansfield gazed at him, bewildered.

  Reynolds told her grimly, “It’s a World War Two expression. Idle chatter can cost lives, or in this case, cause others to commit suicide, even. We’re dealing with raw emotions here.”

  At the sound of the word “suicide,” Judy blanched.

  “Oh, God!” she moaned.

  Reynolds nodded. “You, in such a position of trust, should have known better!”

  Avery Chambordeau, the newspaper’s in-house lawyer intervened.

  “Divulging what you heard to Lauren Hilbert is not only going to cost you future work here at this newspaper and with our outside law firm,” Chambordeau said, his lips pressed in a straight line, “but I have contacted both the agency that got you this assignment and have spoken with the head clerk of the family court about this matter. I suggest you train for another line of work. You may go, now, Ms. Mansfield.”

  Judy Mansfield remained where she was, stunned by this announcement. Meanwhile, Jack’s editor turned to speak directly to him.

  “And Jack, I’m afraid you’d better warn your uncle immediately that he’s about to be officially ‘out-ed’ to the entire state of Louisiana and beyond by your own newspaper. I’ll meet you downstairs and we can work together on the wording of our very brief follow-up story.”

  When Jack arrived at his uncle’s house half an hour later, he was relieved to learn his aunt was out shopping. To his amazement, Jacques took the news of the leak and the coming public announcement in a surprisingly stoic manner.

  “No one can keep a secret in this town,” he said. “I’ve been waiting thirty-three years for this to finally come out.”

  “I’m sorry, Uncle J. The transcriber the lawyers used was Lauren Hilbert’s sorority sister and she let it slip after Lauren pressured her to tell her what I had been doing since we split up. Lauren told—”

  “Never liked that old girlfriend of yours,” Jacques interrupted.

  “Why are you acting so resigned about all of this?” Jack demanded as he followed his uncle through the living room and out to the screened-in back porch.

  “Relieved, I’d call it,” Jacques said, sinking heavily into a wooden chair. “It’s real strange, but ever since that day when I told you everything while we were standing by the Seventeenth Canal wall, I feel... well, more at peace with myself, I guess you could say. It was a mighty big burden, keeping that secret all these years.” Then he paused and his expression grew grave. “Does Serena Antonelli and her family know, yet, that I was the person you were writing about in your story?”

  “I didn’t tell her, but she found out from Lauren, who stormed into where she works and took great delight in informing her. Serena hasn’t told her family, but they’ll all know soon enough when the paper comes out with this update. Even before this, she stopped speaking to me.”

  “Who isn’t speaking to you? Serena or Lauren?”

  “Both, actually.”

  Jacques shook his head slowly from side to side, his stricken expression registering the dire estrangement that now existed between his nephew and the woman he loved.

  “I want to meet with this Serena and her family,” he announced quietly.

  “What?” Jack asked with amazement. “Why would you want to do that?”

  The older man inhaled a long breath and then answered, “To make it right between you two... and to ask for everyone’s forgiveness.”

  Jack had a sudden vision of Serena’s large clan arrayed in a circle in their family home, glaring with hatred at two generations of Jack Durands.

  “Do you think that’s such a great idea? They probably won’t want anything to do with either one of us for the rest of eternity.”

  But Jacques spoke as if he hadn’t heard his nephew.

  “If what I did has ended your relationship with Serena Antonelli and she and her family won’t give me their forgiveness, I’m done with all this.”

  “What do you mean... ‘done’?” Jack asked slowly.

  “You know what I mean, son. Please arrange a meeting if you can.”

  Jack felt a sense of gloom descend upon the two of them more smothering than the hot, September winds that were blowing through the palmetto trees outside his uncle’s screened porch.

  “I can’t promise anything,” Jack murmured, “but I’ll see if I can gather everyone in some neutral place.”

  Serena didn’t notice Corlis until she was walking beside her a half a block from the costume shop.

  “Just because you’re still furious with Jack doesn’t mean you can dump me as a friend,” Corlis declared, keeping pace with Serena who continued to walk toward the front door of her family’s business.

  “I’m not dumping you. I’m... taking a break from you.”

  “Same as,” Corlis shot back. “Look, just so you know. Jack is in terrible shape. So is his uncle. Lauren has told everyone she meets that the anonymous source was Jacques Durand and now the paper has had to print this disclosure before anyone else does to avoid being charged with protecting their reporter instead of the source.”

  “Well, that’s nothing to do with me. At least now I don’t have to keep the secret from my own family! Soon, everybody will know that my former boyfriend’s uncle murdered my brother, his wife, and their unborn child!”

  Corlis whirled on her heels.

  “Now you stop that right now, Serena Antonelli! Nobody committed murder. Get your facts straight and stop punishing people who don’t deserve it anymore than your family deserves to suffer from all these past sins. Jack’s uncle begs to meet with you and your entire family.”

  “What?” Serena was both startled by this news and stunned by Corlis’ vehement chastisement, which she knew she completely deserved. Even so, she felt defensive. “For God’s sakes, why would Jacques Durant want to do that?”

  “To ask for your forgiveness.”

  Serena stared at Corlis, shocked into silence.

  “That’s right,” the reporter reiterated. “He and Jack want to speak to all of you.”

  “And why would we grant our forgiveness to Jacques Durand—or his nephew—for that matter?” she asked, feeling as if a raw wound was being poked with a sharp stick.

  “Because if you do,” Corlis replied with quiet intensity, “maybe everyone can escape from this terrible cycle of hurt and suffering and endless recrimination since the storm.”

  Serena yanked open the door to the shop and prepared to disappear inside.

  Corlis asked from the threshold, “Can I come in?”

  Serena heaved a defeated sigh and led the way to the glass-enclosed confere
nce room where she had met with Lauren and Judy Mansfield that terrible afternoon. Corlis followed in her wake and shut the door.

  “Look, Serena, none of this is going to be easy. Maybe you just can’t find a shred of forgiveness for any of the Durands. But one thing you should know is, from what Jack tells me, Jacques Durand is borderline suicidal since the paper decided they’d have to print his name. Making it even worse, Jack also told his uncle that you still won’t respond to any calls or texts and that it’s caused this breach between the two of you.”

  “We’ve already been over all this,” she retorted. “Jack caused the breach by taking off for Covington after the story ran.”

  “He knows that now,” Corlis replied patiently, “but the misery will never end for you—for any of you—if you don’t allow Jack and his uncle to come see you. How about this?” she proposed. “What if y’all come to our house on Dauphine Street. Nice, neutral territory for both sides.”

  “Not so neutral. You and King are Jack’s best friends.”

  “Well, then,” Corlis retorted, “why don’t you all meet on the grassy bank next to the new Seventeenth Street Canal wall? Is that neutral enough for you?”

  Serena allowed Corlis’ angry words to sink in and took a deep breath.

  “I’m sorry. I am being such a bitch.” She reached for Corlis’s hand. “You have been a wonderful friend to me through all of this. It’s just I’ve been so... so unable to—”

  Tears, as they did most days lately, sprang to Serena’s eyes and she choked on her words.

  “I know, sweetie,” Corlis said, instantly sympathetic. “You and Jack are the walking wounded right now.”

  Serena gazed at her through the tears blurring her vision.

  “Okay...” she said barely above a whisper. “I’ll see if I can get my family to agree to hear out Jacques Durand, but I don’t want Jack to come. I just couldn’t handle it if he were there too.”