He followed her inside where the mess of glass he’d scraped out of the window casings was piled on the floor, and when she returned with the broom and dustpan, there he was, waiting. She swept the glass into the dustpan, and dumped the glass bits into a trash bag.
“So you’re engaged to Drake Cavanaugh.”
She swung around, dustpan still in hand. His statement lingered heavily in the air like the rumbling echo of thunder from outside.
“We’ve discussed it. But, no, we’re not and we’re not going to be, if you have to know. He’s a friend, a good friend, but that’s all. What’s it to you?” God, that sounded childish. What did she want him to say? That it was everything to him, that he cared who she was involved with, that it should have been him she was planning to wed?
“I told you I’m not your enemy, Bryn.” He moved closer, his raw sexuality further invading her space.
Her chest tightened and a suffocated feeling intensified.
“You’re not my friend either.” She made the statement flat. Cole could never be her friend. Her sweetest nightmare, maybe. Her most unattainable taboo. But not her friend.
Two weeks suddenly seemed like a very long time. How she would stand it, she didn’t know. Just looking at Cole aroused old tender, hungry feelings that had no place in the here and now.
“I’m sorry that you feel that way, Bryn,” he said slowly, watching her.
Did he really think they could be friends? Or was he playing her, as Drake said?
It had probably been insane to promise to help him in any way. All he had was a piece of paper that might or might not be genuine, and on that basis alone she’d agreed to let him drag her back into the worst period of her life. He was using her guilt and grief for Aimee to get his way. And for that reason alone, she couldn’t trust him.
“It doesn’t matter how I feel,” she said tensely.
He gave her a long look. “All right. Then let’s get to work.”
“I hope you aren’t expecting me to jump to your command for the next two weeks,” Bryn said, still standing there stiffly. “Because that’s not going to happen.”
Cole had no doubt that Bryn’s agreement to work with him was made reluctantly.
“You want to know the truth about Aimee’s death,” he reminded her. “And so do I.” He watched her as she rested the dustpan on the floor in the corner. She looked every bit as brittle as the glass she’d swept away. “You set the time limit, not me. I’m not planning to waste a single hour in the next two weeks.”
“Let’s get one thing straight.” Bryn placed the broom beside the pan and eyed him squarely. “I’m not convinced we don’t already know the truth about Aimee’s death.”
She wasn’t giving in easily to his theories or his new evidence, and he didn’t expect anything else. To accept that her sister’s murderer had been walking free in Azalea Bend all these years had to be the worst kind of anguish. She was clinging to her shreds of denial for all she was worth.
But he was equally determined to keep things moving forward.
“I need that list I mentioned. People who were at Bellefleur the day Aimee died. Her friends. What she did, where she went that summer,” he said. “We’ll take it from there.”
He was leveled with a hard look. “I’m running a business here, in case you’ve forgotten. I do have other things to do today.”
“And I appear to be your only guest at the moment, so I don’t think you’re that busy. Unless you’re trying to back out of our deal before we even get started.”
He watched the ice flash in her eyes. She was good and stressed-out by this whole situation, and ready to take it out on him. Now he knew what water hyacinths looked like at zero degrees.
Did those beautiful eyes of hers ever melt for Drake Cavanaugh? They might not be engaged now—or ever would be, according to Bryn—but he’d bet that wasn’t the way Cavanaugh wanted it. Jealousy was not an emotion with which he felt comfortable. In truth, he’d never thought of himself as a jealous man. But Bryn brought out emotions he didn’t expect.
“I’m sure the fact that I’m struggling is satisfying for you. How low the Louvels have sunk—literally bringing in boarders to pay the light bill. And I’m still barely making it from one day to the next.”
She didn’t look angry suddenly. She looked sad, and a little bit scared. Not that she would want him to know that. He could see the struggle within her to contain her feelings, hide them, control them.
“There’s no shame in honest work,” he said.
“I’m not ashamed.”
But, oh, she was. He could see it in the way she didn’t quite meet his gaze now. She was a Louvel, born and bred to a brand of luxury and aristocracy that most people—-especially Cole—couldn’t begin to imagine. An antebellum birthright that was as out of step with modern times as hoop skirts.
And she was dealing with it. He couldn’t help but be proud of her, knowing the way she’d been raised and seeing how she was managing the hand dealt her now.
He wasn’t the only one who’d discovered strength in the murky disaster of their shared past.
“Hey.” He should have resisted, knew it was a mistake, but his resistance was so unsteady when it came to Bryn. And there was something brimming inside him that he had to say, whether it was wise or not.
He closed the breath between them and touched the silken line of her jaw, capturing the silvery violet of her complicated gaze. He experienced the inexplicably persistent pop of awareness that such nearness to her yielded. “Not much surprises me anymore, but you do. You’re a lot tougher than I ever knew.”
Her shrug rippled the light cotton of her cherry T-shirt. “You never really knew me, Cole.”
The words were stark and unbearably true. What had he known about the girl he’d fallen for so hard and fast? They’d been all fumbling kisses and breathless handholds back then. And one star-lanced night he’d never forget. Adolescent dreams and magic, more fantasy than reality.
She was an adult now, and so was he. And he saw her in the harsh light lent by maturity. She was no fairy princess anymore. She was a woman stamped by some of life’s most bitter trials.
And this was just the beginning of yet another trial. For both of them.
“My loss,” he murmured, and he meant it.
Her eyes reflected a confusion he understood—he was confused, too. Every time he looked at Bryn, the bitterness that had been his lifeboat all these years sank a little deeper.
She broke the staticky moment by stepping away from his touch.
“Let’s just get this done.” She turned away, moved toward the anteroom she used as an office. “Believe it or not, I do have work to do today. The St. Salome Garden Club is holding a tea here this afternoon. And as you are aware, I need the income.”
His fingers felt chilled as he dropped his hand to his side and followed her stiff, proud back into the office. She sat behind the desk and slid open a drawer to pull out a legal-sized pad. She took a pen from a silver cup on the desk and began jotting down names.
He sat down across from her and waited.
“The regular household staff consisted of Nellie Brewer, the cook, and Mathilde Brouchard, the maid. My mother brought in extra help for dinner parties or special occasions, but nothing out of the ordinary was going on the week Aimee died. Emile Brouchard managed the grounds.”
She looked up from the list she was creating. “He hired boys from town every summer to work the gardens. My father kept meticulous records of the plantation accounts, but you’ll have to give me time to dig those up. There should be a record of the checks written to yard boys that summer. And of course, there were all the people who worked in the sugarcane fields. They came up to the house sometimes.”
Bryn seemed perfectly focused, speaking as she continued to write. “Emile and Mathilde Brouchard still work for me, and as far as I know, Nellie Brewer still lives in town. The sugarcane records are in storage, so I’ll have to get that information
for you later. Some of those workers were migrants, of course. Look,” she glanced up at him again, her pen stilled, “I don’t know what you expect people to remember after fifteen years.”
“What do you remember, Bryn?”
The look that entered her eyes tore out his heart. He saw the way she fought for control, the way she squeezed her lids for just a beat as if holding in tears.
“It was a normal day,” she said quietly. “Just like any other day that summer. Aimee and I slept late. We had pancakes in the kitchen that Mrs. Brewer had kept wrapped in the oven for us. She always kept breakfast in the warmer for us in the summers. We went into town for dance lessons. We’d just gotten our licenses. Aimee drove. We went to the drugstore afterward and shopped for makeup. I bought a new lipstick, then we came home.”
“Was there anything different about your parents that day? Any strange people who came to the house?”
“No. Of course, we weren’t there all day, but everything seemed normal to me, nobody was there who wasn’t always there. When we came back, Mrs. Brewer had set out the afternoon tea and the mail. She would leave the tray on the table in the front hall and Mathilde would carry it up. It was a totally ordinary day.”
“What about Aimee? What was she doing that summer? Who was she seeing?”
“We had the same friends, and a lot of their parents were friends of our parents. Like Drake. Our best friends were Dana Kellman and Lizzie Cornelius. Dana’s married and lives in New Orleans. Her name is Dana Bleeker now. Lizzie teaches here in town. They were taking dance that summer with us.”
“Do you remember who else was in your dance class?”
Bryn frowned in thought then jotted down several names. “I’m not sure who else. It was a small class. I don’t know what they’re all doing. I know Erica Saville runs a little boutique downtown—the Fleur de Lis.”
“How did Aimee spend the afternoon?”
He knew how Bryn had spent the rest of that day. She’d come down to the sugarcane fields and they’d slipped away together to hold hands and share kisses by the river. The memory rushed him, poignant and bitter.
“I don’t know what Aimee did that afternoon. I know she took the tea tray up to our mother’s room after we got back from dance. Aimee liked to have tea with her sometimes—I hated it—and Mathilde wasn’t around, so she took it up. She promised me she was going to tell our parents that I’d twisted my ankle at dance and wouldn’t be coming down to dinner so they wouldn’t notice I was gone. Then—” She took a ragged breath, and he could see her battling to control her emotions. Was she thinking of that last afternoon by the river, too? She continued, glossing over that part of her day. “Then you walked me back to the house and we heard my parents fighting.”
She didn’t have to tell him what had happened then. Maurice Louvel had been convinced his wife was having an affair with Wade Dempsey. Cole’s father had been called up to the plantation and fired. And being fired meant that he was being thrown out of the little house on Bellefleur land that they’d made into a home. They would have to leave Azalea Bend.
Bryn had been in tears. Aimee had come outside and found them, and she’d been crying, too.
“Aimee said she was going to fix everything,” he reminded her quietly. He knew this was the last time she’d spoken to Aimee and it had to be painful, but he had to ask. “What did she mean?”
“You know how she was with us. She thought she was like our fairy godmother, always helping us sneak away. She was going to talk to our mother. I’m sure she thought there was some way she could fix it so your family didn’t have to leave Azalea Bend. So you and I wouldn’t be separated.” She took another shaky breath. “But my mother had driven off, and my father drove after her. Then we went down to the river again.”
And when they came back, Aimee was dead.
She’d been outside, probably waiting for Bryn. Cole and Bryn had heard her scream across the plantation, as had her parents from the front of the house where they’d just driven up. But by the time they’d reached the reflecting pool, it had been too late.
The attack had been swift and brutal. Aimee had lived long enough to scream, long enough to fight, but she hadn’t had a chance. She’d been shoved down against the edge of the pool, her head striking the decorative rocks that surrounded it. Blood had been everywhere.
Wade Dempsey had been found holding her lifeless body. Maurice Louvel had torn inside and come back with a gun.
All hell had broken loose.
A long, achy silence weighted the room.
“What else was Aimee doing that summer? Who else did she hang out with?” Cole probed gently.
Bryn let out a frustrated sigh. “We went to dance. We hung out with our friends, went to the movies. There were a few other girls from school, that’s it. We spent most of our time at Bellefleur. Aimee was a real homebody.”
Aimee had been shy, quiet. It had been bright, outgoing Bryn with her engaging smiles and innocent charm who had caught Cole’s attention. He’d never gotten to know Aimee, but oh how he’d wanted to know Bryn. There’d been something irresistible about her then. And now.
She scratched down several more names. “That’s all I can think of. And I don’t know what you think you’re going to find. There was nothing deep, dark and secretive about Aimee. She certainly never did anything that would make someone want to kill her.”
“But someone did kill her.”
“I knew Aimee,” she said in a low, heart-rending voice. “We were twins, Cole. We weren’t just close in the way normal siblings are close. We knew everything about each other.”
“You were distracted that summer.”
A slash of guilt darkened her shining eyes. Bryn had spent a lot of time with him that summer. A lot of time away from Aimee. Had she known her sister as well as she thought?
“I knew my sister,” she bit out.
“I’d like to talk to your mother, too.”
Something unreadable passed through the eyes she shifted away from him. She pushed the list across the desk to him, then raised her controlled, pain-hardened eyes. “I do have work to do here, Cole. Even if it doesn’t look as if I do. And I’ll talk to my mother alone. I don’t want you upsetting her.”
He knew when he’d pushed enough. For now. He took the list she’d made. “Thank you for your help, Bryn.” He watched her for a long beat and stood. “My father didn’t kill Aimee. And I’m going to prove it.”
Rain pounded down outside, obscuring the tall window behind her with a funereal pall. The long-threatening storm had arrived.
Chapter 8
The umbrella popped open beneath the sheltering portico, the sound drowned by the lashing drops of the cold deluge all around. It was a hell of a day for a garden club tea, and she could only pray they didn’t cancel. Bryn rushed down the front steps of the house, then slowed in spite of the driving downpour. The brick-lined path to her mother’s cottage loomed before her.
Behind her, she’d left Cole, but the tumbling mix of feelings and questions came with her. You’re a lot tougher than I ever knew. Well, she had him fooled. She was weak. A puff of smoke in the wind, swayed into an emotional morass by his every glance. I’m not your enemy. A traitorous part of her wanted to believe that was true. But everything about his presence at Bellefleur confused her. She couldn’t trust him, but he had her backed into a corner about Aimee. The one thing she couldn’t ignore was the haunting doubt he’d planted about her sister’s death.
The cottage was a warm beacon in the darkling afternoon, set amongst the tumbling ruins of other outbuildings—the long-ago separate kitchen, the cotton press from the earliest days of Bellefleur, and the long barracks that had once housed slaves. Her mother’s home was one of two restored buildings still in use on the grounds. Double-bloom pink camellias drooped beneath the weight of the pouring rain, surrounding Patsy’s cottage like a sweet, sad embrace. Mr. Brouchard planted more every year, and cutting their blooms was the one thing that would
bring Patsy Louvel into the sunshine and fresh air. All through the spring of every year, she kept a fresh camellia in a small vase in the midst of her bone china angels.
Formerly the residence of the plantation cook, the two-bedroom turn-of-the century gingerbread-trimmed house was just the right size for Patsy and her companion, Emmie Layton, who was everything from friend to maid to nurse rolled into one. Through the window, Bryn could see her mother sitting by the small hearth, a magazine tumbled back on her lap as she watched the flickering television screen in the corner.
Bryn closed her umbrella in the shelter of the porch overhang and knocked, then pushed the door open a crack. “Mom?”
Patsy Louvel turned in her seat. Her look was gently vague, and Bryn’s heart fisted.
“It’s me, Mom. Bryn.”
“Hello, Bryn. Would you like to come in?”
It was always a question as to whether or not Patsy knew her. Bryn wasn’t sure now. Sometimes she was Bryn, her daughter. Other times she was a neighbor dropping by for afternoon tea. Sometimes she was a complete stranger and her mother would become angry and order her away.
Today, Patsy lowered the volume on her soap opera then got up to give Bryn a hug. Maybe today she knew Bryn was her daughter. “I’m just having some tea and watching my stories. Sit down, darling, and I’ll get you a cup.”
Bryn gave her mother a kiss on her still-smooth cheek, then propped her umbrella by the door. With Patsy’s movie-star platinum hair, ruby lipstick and stick-thin figure, she was in most outward ways the woman she’d always been. Her mother rose every morning, dressed as if she were still running a great house, then sat down for hours of game shows and daytime dramas.
That was a good day for Patsy Louvel. On bad days, she didn’t get out of bed. Depression had been Patsy’s constant foe for years, and the only good thing about the vascular dementia that had made its slow claim on Patsy’s mind following a series of small strokes was that most of the time now Patsy Louvel didn’t remember Aimee at all.
Cole Dempsey’s Back in Town Page 7