A Little Bit Guilty

by Jenna Mills

  “You the gal from Rosemunde’s?”

  She stilled. “Yes.”

  Silence. For a long, thick heartbeat. “She said…” The girl—she had to be a girl—lowered her voice. “She said you were a friend of Darci’s.”

  “Yes.”

  “So was I.”

  Live oaks lined the dirt road, their tattered canopies creating a tunnel leading to the faded white house at the end of the drive. Whispering Oaks sat there, big and grand and weathered, out of place and time but still beautiful.

  “I’ve heard about this place,” Evangeline said as Gabe swerved the pickup toward a wooded area beyond the oak-shrouded drive. There was no sign of the girl they’d arranged to meet. “Didn’t they make a movie here?”

  “A couple of them,” he said. “But it’s been a while.”

  Once the plantation had been the heart of the parish. Even decades after she’d fallen into disrepair, tourists had found their way here. If Evangeline remembered right, there’d been an attempt to turn the house into a bed-and-breakfast, but purists had balked at having even one shutter tampered with.

  Tampered.

  The word scraped, even as part of her wished this time the tampering had been allowed. Now in disrepair, Whispering Oaks, with her stunning rows of columns and wraparound porches, sat secluded by the trees, all but forgotten.

  Much like Jimmy.

  Except she hadn’t forgotten, and even if her brother refused her visits, he wasn’t alone. Four months had passed since she’d last driven away from the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, but the vow she’d made that fall day remained like steel inside of her. She was getting close. No matter what went down with the girl who’d arranged to meet them here, Evangeline had other leads, starting with juror number eight. She’d tracked him down, and he was willing to talk.

  In four days they would meet.

  The quick slice of dread was automatic, the memory of juror number three, a young single mother from Chalmette who’d arranged to meet with Evangeline at a bowling alley. She’d been nervous, but ready to talk.

  That had been almost a year before. Evangeline had sat there listening to the echo of bowling balls for six hours, but the woman had never shown. The next morning she’d read about the single-car accident. Cherry had been drinking and lost control…

  In her small frame house, the police had found a shoe box containing newspaper clippings from the trial…and several other cases Gabe had prosecuted. No one had thought much about it. Cherry was, after all, a single woman. And Gabe, a Robichaud, was probably as close to a rock star as she’d ever met.

  But Evangeline knew there was a darker side….

  Swallowing against the sickness, she glanced at him, at the hard lines of his face and the determination in his eyes, and waited for the surge of venom. But her throat tightened instead, and she found herself looking at hands she’d once imagined covered in Cherry’s blood. Now she saw only the grease from changing the tire, the blunt-tipped fingers and the calluses. She remembered the way those hands had felt the night before against her face, when he’d inspected the gash at her forehead.

  Dangerous, she reminded herself, in more ways than one. That’s why she looked away from his hands, to the forsaken old house. It was easier that way. She could think more clearly, focus her thoughts where they needed to be, not on some ridiculous fantasy of a man who didn’t exist.

  Like juror number three, the girl on the phone had been scared. Her voice had grown lower, until Evangeline had barely been able to hear her over the wind.

  It had taken some coaxing to convince her to meet them, but she’d let the girl choose the time and the place. Out of view, Gabe parked the truck and turned off the engine.

  “I don’t see her,” he said. “You sure we can trust her?”

  There were only a few things Evangeline was sure of—the girl who claimed to be a friend of Darci’s was not one of them. Too much desperation had leaked through her voice. “Depends upon how badly she wants to know what she thinks we can tell her.”

  Trees stretched and sprawled around the car, their roots running above ground like a tangle of thick snakes while cypress knees jutted up everywhere, making it nearly impossible for grass to grow. But not the moss. It dripped and dangled around them, swaying to an unheard rhythm.

  It could have been the twenty-first century, or the nineteenth century. Other than the truck, there was no giveaway—no other vehicles, no radios or MP3 players or cell phones. Just the grand old house a hundred yards away.

  And secrets waiting to be found.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. The winter had been mild and the Deep South rarely obeyed Mother Nature’s rules. Against the porch out-of-control rosebushes tangled with wild bougainvillea, both in near-violent bloom—much like the bright pink-and-white flowers her mother had once tended to. “Like stepping back in time.”

  “That’s what my sister always said.”

  His voice, quiet and oddly thick, rushed through Evangeline, because, for a fractured minute, she’d actually forgotten: forgotten why she’d come to New Orleans, forgotten that years had passed since her mother had tended to anything, forgotten she was there to pump an informant for information. Forgotten that Jimmy was in prison and juror number three was dead.

  That Gabe was at the old house with her.

  But even as she remembered, his voice buffered the broken edges she’d lived with for too long.

  “I didn’t know you had a sister,” she said, and the image came by itself, that of a brother and a sister. Gabe would have been protective but annoying, just as Jimmy had been. He’d gone out of his way to drive her crazy, had put toads in her bed and given her favorite Barbie dolls crew cuts. But if anyone had laid a hand on her, or so much as looked at her the wrong way…

  Jimmy had put a quick end to that.

  And then someone had tampered with everything…and put an end to life as he’d known it.

  “Camille,” Gabe said, staring at the tired old house as if he expected someone to come running out any minute.

  “Older or younger?” she asked. “Does she still live in Louisiana? I bet—” The memory clicked even though he said nothing, the black-and-white photo on the corner of his desk, the girl with the impish smile and blond hair. The picture had to be twenty years old. If that was his sister…

  If he had a more recent picture…

  Gabe loved his sister enough to keep a picture of her where he could see it often, but he’d never mentioned one word about Camille, not even before, during those first few weeks, when no walls had existed between them.

  “Gabe.” This time Evangeline’s voice was quiet. And this time she did what she knew better than doing: she lifted her hand to his shoulder. “Did something happen to her?”

  Beneath her hand, his muscles bunched, but he didn’t turn to look at her. “I don’t know.”

  It was not the answer she’d expected. “I don’t understand.”

  “No one does.” The words were quiet, clipped, not at all like those of the exalted assistant district attorney or the good ole boy Russell Rae, but a man who didn’t know how to let go. “Sometimes I still think I’m going to see her on the porch with a book or a magazine….”

  “But you’re not going to, are you?” The question was quiet, gentle.

  “No.”

  She absorbed the word, felt the sense of loss down to her bone. “What happened?” she asked, but knew he didn’t hear. Because he smiled. It was a slow smile, an easy curving of his lips.

  “She used to say she’d lived here before,” he said in that same restrained voice, while Evangeline wondered how it was possible that a smile could take years off his face—and his heart. “Back when the house was new—and that, someday, she’d live in it again.”

  There was so much to grab on to, so many questions to ask. In the end, she chose the most obvious. “You lived around here?”

  Her research had focused on Gabriel Fontenot, the Robichaud
and the attorney, the man. But not the boy.

  “Other side of the parish,” he said, and the surprise was immediate, not because of his answer, but because he did answer. Gabe did. He answered her question. Hers. Evangeline’s. The woman who’d offered him friendship and compassion, while she’d been setting him up, praying he would fall.

  “And you came here today, anyway?” The gamble surprised her. “What if someone recognized you?”

  He shot her a look so dry, so classic Gabriel Fontenot, it was all she could do not to laugh. “Do you recognize me?”

  This time she did laugh, even as something inside her wanted to cry. “I’m not sure I ever knew you to begin with,” she answered with an honesty that made her chest tighten. There was Gabe, the son of privilege, and Gabe, the cut-throat attorney; Gabe, the card shark, and Gabe, the coffee addict, Gabe, the man who’d been betrayed first by a colleague, then by the woman he was going to marry.

  Gabe, who slipped easily into the role of Russell Rae.

  Gabe, the brother, who had a picture of his sister on his desk.

  Gabe, the vigilante.

  “I stopped looking in the mirror,” he said, not looking at her, either. “Until a few days ago.”

  Because even he didn’t recognize the man he’d become. The words were unspoken, but they sliced through Evangeline, anyway.

  “I’ve been gone a long time,” he was saying, and suddenly she knew they’d traveled further back, to when he’d been a boy and his sister a girl, when he’d known where she was and what he would see in the mirror. “A lot’s changed since then. No one in Wild Berry would ever guess.”

  Guess what? she wanted to ask. How far he’d risen, or how far he’d fallen?

  “What happened?” Maybe she shouldn’t have asked the question. She’d told herself not to let things get personal again. Not to ask questions, not to look beyond the facts as they pertained to her brother’s case. But nothing happened in isolation. The fragmented man Gabe had become and the boy he’d been…they were both part of the puzzle. “To your sister?”

  To him.

  He looked beyond the old house, toward the bayou snaking along a couple hundred yards from the structure. “She was just a kid,” he said. “Cute, sweet, with a big heart and an even bigger taste for adventure. She and Saura…No matter how many times I told them all those stories about religious relics smuggled out of France were just that, stories, they kept looking. They were so determined to be the ones to find it…just like my dad.”

  The smile just sort of happened. “I was a buried-treasure girl, myself,” she said, and with the words came the memory. Of her and Jimmy and a silly Civil War treasure map purchased at a country grocery. “I was convinced if we looked hard enough, we’d find a stash of jewelry buried by some poor antebellum woman before her home was invaded.” She’d heard the stories and rumors, of the women who’d buried their valuables in the swamp to prevent the Yankees from stealing them. According to her grandmother, her great-aunt had actually dug up a sterling-silver tea service for twelve. “Maybe even the lost Confederate gold.”

  That had been Jimmy’s goal.

  She stilled, realized she’d just handed Gabe a piece of herself, of Jimmy, she’d never meant to share.

  But he didn’t even act as if he’d heard. His hands were tight on the steering wheel now, his knuckles white. “She never knew when to stop. Never knew when to listen. Christ,” he swore, and with the words, slammed one fist against the wheel. “If she’d just listened—”

  Evangeline looked to the hard lines of his face. “If she’d just listened, what?”

  Chapter 5

  F our years separated them. By all rights, Gabe should have found Camille annoying. She’d left her dolls in his bed and taped lace curtains up in the fort he and Jack had constructed in the backyard. But every night before bed she’d told him she loved him, and every morning she’d offered to comb his hair.

  That’s what he wanted to remember, what he tried to remember.

  Instead, when he thought of his sister, he saw eyes dark and damp and horrified, a pale mouth and tangled hair, clothes that were torn. He saw Jack running and her limp in his arms, alive, but…gone.

  “It was late.” Up ahead, darkness bled from the grimy windows, making it impossible to see what lay inside. “She should have been in bed, but she wanted to listen to records with me and Jack, kept offering to fix milk shakes or popcorn…” She’d been wearing one of their father’s LSU football T-shirts. It had been huge on her, hanging like a dress.

  “Gabe?”

  Beside him he saw Evangeline move, was aware of her hand settling against his wrist. But he felt nothing. He turned anyway, looked at her angled toward him, compassion in her eyes.

  It was a hell of an illusion.

  He should have learned, damn it. That night, and in the days that followed. He should have learned that just because he wanted something to be one way, didn’t mean that it was. “She told me she was going to bed.”

  Lilah—He destroyed the name before it could finish forming. Lilah didn’t exist. It was Evangeline whose ponytail was loosening, Evangeline who looked at him with an understanding he knew better than to trust.

  “But she didn’t,” she whispered.

  “No, she didn’t.” He could still hear the song that had been playing when his mother’s scream ripped through the last seconds of his childhood. It had been a debut album, a new rock band from Ireland. “She—” The memory hacked through all the debris he’d shoved against it. “She went somewhere she shouldn’t have gone, saw something she shouldn’t have seen.”

  “What?” Evangeline’s hand tightened against his wrist. “What did she see?”

  He tried to focus on her, but saw only a wood-paneled study lit by a single lamp. “The gun.” His voice was so devoid of emotion he barely recognized it. “The blood.” Everywhere. “The body.”

  Evangeline winced. “Your sister saw someone killed?” It was barely more than a whisper.

  The door had been open, the cool breeze swirling through the room, giving the illusion of life to death. “She ran.” He and Jack had found her footprints in the mud beyond their old fort. Hers, and another set. Larger.

  “My God…Did the killer see her? Did he know what she’d seen?”

  A hard sound broke from Gabe’s throat. “Depends upon whose story you believe.”

  “Did you…” Wide and dark and drenched with something that made Gabe’s chest tighten, Evangeline’s eyes met his. “How long was she missing?”

  Because he wanted so goddamn bad to touch, he ripped back and stared at the dials on the dashboard. “She didn’t want to be found.” Just like now. “We all looked, Uncle Eddy and Uncle Eti, Cain, Saura, me…”

  But not his father.

  “Jack found her two days later.”

  “Jack?” Recognition hovered on the name. “The sheriff you told me about? Savoie?”

  They’d split up, Gabe going left, Jack going right. By then over fifty people had methodically combed the swamp. There’d been dogs. And so much unsaid. With each hour that passed, the quiet had thickened, the grim awareness hardening his uncles’ eyes.

  Shortly after sunrise Jack’s shouts had brought them running. He’d emerged from a tangle of wild bougainvillea, his clothes wet and dirty and torn, Cami in his arms.

  “He’s like a brother to me,” he said. “And to her.”

  Evangeline closed her eyes, opened them a long moment later. But the horror remained. “I’m so sorry, I know what it’s like to—”

  The words broke off, dangling there between them. “To what?” Gabe asked.

  He saw her throat work. “It never goes away, does it?” With a sad smile, she shoved the flyaway hairs back from her face. “You remember the way things used to be, the plans and dreams for the future. But you’re in that future now, and nothing is the way it’s supposed to be. There’s this big empty place that never goes away….”

  Outside the truck, the
wind kept blowing. And in the trees, the birds were squawking. Blackbirds, he thought. The herons that nested nearby were quiet. But Gabe didn’t allow himself to move. Because if he did, it would be toward her. He would lift his hand and touch her cheek, see if she could possibly feel as good as he remembered.

  If she needed his touch anywhere near as badly as he needed—

  “Come on. Let’s go.” He reached for the door and pushed it open, stepped into the warm breeze. He hadn’t brought Evangeline here to trade secrets or play true confessions, damn it. “She should be here by now,” he practically growled the words, striding toward the house.

  From behind him he heard the other truck door close, Evangeline hurry after him. “Gabe!” she called, catching up with him on the sweeping wraparound porch. “What are you so afraid of?”

  He spun toward her, found her too damn close. He couldn’t move without touching her, couldn’t breathe without inhaling the scent of powder and vanilla. “Law 101,” he said silkily. They were attorneys. They both knew how to sidestep. “Never ask a question unless you really want the answer.”

  Her smile was slow, languorous. “Law 201,” she countered. “When you don’t want to answer a question, fire another one in return.”

  Slowly, he lifted his hands. And slowly they came down on her arms. That’s when she should have winced. That’s when she should have recoiled, twisted from his arms and backed away. Because she knew, damn it. She knew she’d betrayed him. She knew she’d peppered him with lies to see if he would bite. She knew, and she knew that he knew.

  But she made no move to get away from him, just angled her chin and looked up at him in much the way she looked at a witness she was on the verge of cracking.

  The urge to move his hands higher slayed him. To slide a finger along her jawbone and free the hair from her mouth, to put the pads of his fingers there, to trace and touch and—

  Taste.

  Because he knew, too. He remembered. Her taste and her feel, the confidence and uncertainty. But he also knew how easily she could morph like a chameleon into whatever she needed to get what she wanted.