Lagniappes Collection II

by Cradit, Sarah M.

  Once I was within her, sitting back wouldn’t be an option. I was itching for home, the way one does after being away on holiday for an extended period. Except this feeling was sharper and ran far deeper. If this worked, Janie would cease to be her, and would be me. Me.

  I also understood, from my brief and extended stays within Duke and his staff, that a transient visit left them befuddled. This was the second rule of my new life: As soon as you jumped in the driver’s seat, their own mind shut off. They could not remember the periods of time when I was within them, and, eventually, this would pose problems for me as they sought answers. Thus far, Duke had chalked his blackouts up to the nights he spent deeply intimate with bourbon, but the gardener’s wife was part of a voudou society in Bayou St. John. He’d find himself close to the truth in no time if I wasn’t very careful.

  So Janie wouldn’t be a dorm room I entered when I needed, and left when I did not. She would be a forever home, or she would be nothing to me. And I’d already chosen her before she even returned from Yale.

  Did I feel any guilt, knowing what I took from someone who deserved only good things?

  To that, my answer is the only feasible one: What good is guilt when, if given the chance to make a different choice, you’d choose the same path, again and again?

  We are, in the end, animals, driven most deeply by our innate desire to self-preserve.

  If I had any doubts Janie was the one, they fled the moment I stretched within her frame, settling myself into the corners and edges with an ease that made the prior occupations feel like a chore. Like a glove, as the saying goes. As if Janie had been waiting for me all along.

  I don’t place much stock in destiny. To do that would mean I subscribed to the idea providence had decided to steal my life, and my family’s lives. That same fate then bringing me to Janie was less a gift and more a consolation prize.

  Meant to be, though? Yeah. I could concede to that.

  I’ve said I didn’t sit back, and I didn’t, once I settled into her. But the longer I’d been doing this nesting in others, the more I’d learned to listen. I could drive Janie and still learn enough about her habits and patterns, her likes and dislikes, to be her without raising too many suspicions.

  She enjoyed rowing, as I mentioned, but was also part of a sailing club that met weekly on Lake Pontchartrain. I wasn’t thrilled about being on the water, but at least she didn’t like building houses. She devoured books at the rate of one a day, mostly of the bodice-ripping variety, or bathroom literature, as my snobby sophomore year English Lit teacher called anything not written by Dostoevsky. Reading was never a pleasure activity for me, not like it was for Adrienne, but I would need to learn. The life I planned to lead as Janie would include some of what made her her, but it would begin to also be my own. If I did it right, her family would observe this as a natural evolution as she grew up. People change. Interests change.

  More to the point I cared about, her taste in men was eclectic. As far as I could see, she didn’t have a type. She’d been with men of all races, all body types, all levels of intelligence. Funny, dumb. Arrogant, shy. Fundamentalist, atheist. I had to dig deep to find the last actual boyfriend she’d had. Most of these men she took to bed once or twice, no more than three times, before moving on.

  My kind of gal!

  I’d never understood why people endured the stress and heartache of love when all any of us really wanted was pleasure. The nightmare Cordelia put my father through for more than two decades. The ups and downs of my own failed dalliances with older men as I floated through my senior high school years, wishing for a life without a curfew.

  Only one man on my personal list of conquests made me question this belief. But Oz Sullivan had fallen for Adrienne, and now she was gone. Presumed dead to the world, though I knew better.

  I wondered if the new life she was living satisfied her. Would Oz find her? Would she return to him?

  Come to think of it, why the hell hadn’t she come back for him? What could have possibly kept her away from the man… the reason for defying all of Father’s rules?

  I stopped myself.

  If it weren’t for me and my quick ingenuity, Adrienne wouldn’t have a life to consider at all. She was still in possession of her own body. Lucienne and Nathalie spirited away with nothing. My beloved father. My not-so-beloved stepmother.

  Her leaving Oz alone was perhaps for the best. Oz would move on now, as he should.

  I decided to keep an eye on him.

  While falling into an easy rhythm as Janie Masters, I still showed up for the occasional sailing club, usually after a bit of hassling from my/her peers. I read her ridiculous romance novels, but less frequently now. Even took the job at the NOPD on her behalf, New York forgotten. My life was here, so hers would need to be too.

  And then men… ahh, so many beautiful men! Janie was lovely enough to have her pick, and I was fortunate enough to choose for her. The Iranian banker. An Irish cop. My frat boy phase, all the same, and yet so different. By then I’d forgotten the feeling of my own curves and learned to enjoy Janie’s. How to move fluidly, gracefully, bringing about the pique of pleasure in any partner. I’ll bet the poor thing never knew her full potential.

  Sailing. Reading. Investigating. Fucking. Rinse, repeat.

  We went on like this, in a forward momentum of bliss and learning, for two years. Two delightful years.

  What produced the pause?

  Why, Adrienne, of course.

  She couldn’t stay hidden forever.

  VI

  Someone recognized her, is what happened. How that took two years… when search crews, paid for with a blank check from the Deschanel estate, scoured the entire southern United States… is a mystery of incompetence, especially when the hero turned out to be a random fellow with no connection whatsoever.

  I saw her and thought I’d seen her before, yeah. In those newspapers, yeah.

  Millions of dollars couldn’t find her, but a local cooyon had it covered.

  Sullivan and Associates, the Sullivan family law firm of which Oz was a new member, had always represented the Deschanels. I was keeping an eye on him, remember? I want to say this relationship started after the Civil War, but I’m terrible with history and minutiae. They were ingrained in every nook and cranny of our estate. Counting cobwebs on the lace, my father once joked. They had always been there, a mainstay of our lives. Colin Deschanel, Oz’s father, had spent many evenings at our supper table, and often his wife and Oz joined him. Oz also had his own spot in the family as my brother Nicolas’ best friend.

  With most of the family kaput, there wasn’t much work to be done on the estate other than ongoing maintenance. I hadn’t checked in on my brother, Nicolas, but knowing his laissez-faire approach to anything except his own whims, he wouldn’t be bothered with it.

  One day during lunch with a cousin, I heard Oz say, I just check in on the properties and investments from time to time. Not very interesting, but I felt a sharp thrill knowing he was still connected to our family, even if I was no longer an outwardly active member.

  I wasn’t there when Oz received the news about Adrienne. Can’t say I would have wanted to be, either. I knew his love for Adrienne had taken a chokehold on him, for he’d grown withdrawn during the past couple years, an effect visible to anyone who knew him before and after. He hardly ventured out, if it wasn’t related to his work. And if he went on a single date, I missed it.

  If Adrienne had loved him as much, she would have taken the first bus out of Abbeville once she was rested from her injuries.

  Two years. She let him dangle two years. Maybe she’d wanted a way out all along, and fate provided one. Cruelty, I had to assume, kept her from finally cutting the cord.

  I loved my sister, even now when I was someone else entirely, but she’d always had an artless way of going through life in a delicate dance, leaving a wake of destruction. She would say she never meant any harm, and I believed her, but she also never did mu
ch to prevent it.

  Oz was worthy of so much better.

  He deserved a nice wholesome girl, who could offer him maturity and stability.

  Someone like Janie Masters.

  The next few weeks played out like a terrible movie. Adrienne came to New Orleans in search of what she claimed was a lost memory (I did say a terrible movie, didn’t I?). A convenient excuse exonerating her from any responsibility for the harm done to Oz. And Oz, being the wonderful man he is, of course, took her in and tried to help her recover what she’d lost. The poor wretch.

  I watched this carefully; as closely as I could without drawing suspicion.

  Can you guess how it ended?

  If not, you haven’t been paying attention.

  Adrienne broke his heart. Again. This time, she couldn’t use the excuse of an accident, or amnesia. She made the choice to walk away, leaving him even more lost and confused than he had been two years before. Retreated back to Abbeville, to the man she’d been seeing there during her so-called convalescence. She left behind only a ridiculous note.

  If I’d had any qualms about going after the man she loved, they ended with her final, cruel action toward him.

  When I asked the sergeant for the Deschanel case, he handed it to me without issue.

  VII

  Maybe you’re wondering why, faced with a blank slate and endless potential, I would be fixated on a man from my old life whom I’d never done more than kiss the summer I turned sixteen.

  I don’t have a satisfying answer. If I was one of the women in Janie’s novels, I might wax on about love’s sweeping embrace. The alignment of the stars.

  All I know is, he’s the only person from my past I could not completely let go. I would arise in the middle of the night and see his image, clear as a picture. Waking up in the bed of a conquest, there was always a moment where, in the seconds before I’d blink away the illusion, they looked up at me with his green eyes and shocking black hair.

  And not a thousand sweaty embraces could erase the feeling of Oz pressing me against the old oak behind Ophélie, summers ago.

  Love. I suppose I did love him. Maybe love is what made me approach him while Adrienne was still in town before she fled him a second time. I did not want to be the second helping. If there were any chance of Oz returning my feelings, I would need the plant those seeds while he was in the middle of confusing emotions for my sister. Not after when he would look for someone to nurse his broken heart.

  In an alternate version of history, it was me Oz gave his heart to, not my baby sister.

  Oz, years later, might look back on the moment in his mother’s dining room and consider it coincidence. What were the odds he would run into the woman he would later marry?

  Hold up. Marry?

  If you’ve read Oz’s account of matters, in St. Charles at Dusk, you already knew this. Those of you who tuned in with my version of the story are probably wondering how on earth I managed to turn a chance meeting into forever vows.

  Well. I may be a witch, but I’m not capable of brainwashing a man, even when he’s feeling especially vulnerable, such as was the case with Oz Sullivan, on the eve of a fresh new heartbreak.

  I had to see him. I had to see how Adrienne’s re-emergence had affected him, and my from-a-distance stalking methods weren’t going to be sufficient. I had to see how far he was under her spell.

  Oz’s mother, Catherine, was on the case without any prodding or conspiring on my part. Oh, I can’t wait for you to meet my son. Did you know he was top of his class at Tulane? He’s been doing so well at the firm, too. Really making a name for himself. How is your father, then, dear?

  “Oz!” I heard Catherine exclaim as she answered the door. “I’m so glad you’re all right! I was worried about you, what with Adrienne and—”

  “I’m here now and I’m fine, Mama. What’s for dinner?”

  This was my cue to make an entrance.

  I had caught a good look at him before he turned to notice me. His raven-dark hair filled my vision first, messy from a day in the office. His blazer was slung over one shoulder, hooked into his index finger in an offhand way. When he pivoted, following his mother’s gaze, his emerald eyes caught the dining room lights.

  I beheld the only man who had ever made my heart skip.

  “Oz, this is Janie Masters,” his mother introduced us. Oz took my hand in his and shook it, his touch lingering. He smiled, and I smiled back, another moment drawn out beyond the expected period for pleasantries. Did he know it was me, smiling from behind Janie’s eyes? No, that was wishful thinking.

  “I’ve heard so much about you,” I said. The force of his penetrating stare caused me to drop my eyes. “I’m sorry if I’ve intruded on a family visit.”

  Catherine ignored me. “Janie is with the forensic unit at NOPD,” she said, with a slight upturn of her eyes at Oz. I knew what that meant. I had an ally.

  “That sounds very interesting,” Oz acknowledged, shuffling the way men often had around my subtle confidence.

  “It is,” I agreed.

  Catherine excused herself in a rather contrived manner to go check on the pie and left us standing together.

  “So, you’re a lawyer, then?” I asked as if I didn’t know everything about him already.

  “Yep.”

  “You’re also working on the Deschanel case, no?”

  Oz’s eyes widened in mild panic. Probably wondering how much I knew about him and Adrienne. Everything, darling.

  Letting him off the hook, I clarified, “I’ve been assigned to reopen the investigation. What, with the reappearance of Deschanel’s daughter and all. Unfortunately, she lost her memory so we can’t ask her what happened. However, we know she did survive the accident, which helps us understand what might have happened that night.”

  “What more do you expect to find? They were killed in a car accident. That’s never been disputed.”

  “Some believe it wasn’t an accident.”

  This was not a new theory though no one truly connected to us would have ever believed it a possibility. Some thought my stepmother, Cordelia, had taken a lover, who helped her plan the entire thing; others thought she promised someone a portion of the estate to assist with the plot. But she was far too selfish to share any of what she believed to be her son, Nicolas’, inheritance. Not to mention she was too terrified of my father’s threats of divorce to closely involve anyone in the family.

  Still, any investigator in the area worth their salt would have raised that theory. I wouldn’t say I was very good at my job, seeing as the interest was Janie’s and not mine, but I didn’t want Oz to know that.

  “I hope you are able to successfully resolve the matter,” he encouraged.

  I glanced toward the kitchen to see if Catherine was still there, then closed in on Oz. I slipped my business card into his hand. His eyes fell on the paper and stayed there. Lips curved into a small smile.

  “Call me, Mr. Sullivan, if anything comes up.” I flashed him a knowing look, one that was more than a solicitation for assistance from one professional to another.

  I could have stayed for dinner, but this was the way to leave things. With some mystery.

  “You can count on it, Ms. Masters,” he affirmed. I felt his eyes follow me as I walked out the door.

  VIII

  He didn’t call. Not that day or the next. I knew the reason before it was confirmed, almost two weeks later: Adrienne. As I already mentioned, she left him high and dry, no hope of reconciliation. I never knew she had it in her to be so utterly cold-blooded, but this new life of mine was providing all kinds of insights about a world I’d been admittedly sheltered from before.

  In other words, no reason for me to feel even a lick of guilt about what was to happen thereafter.

  A man named Calvin Cartwright is to blame, if anyone is.

  Cartwright was a Sullivan & Associates client. One of their most prestigious and highest paying… in the same league as the Deschanels. When he
was accused of first-degree murder, enough evidence existed against the baron to put him away for life.

  I was the lead investigator on the case. As far as I could tell, Calvin was as guilty as sin, and with the murder rate in New Orleans soaring daily, we didn’t have the resources to chase after the dozen or so other leads that had come in.

  Then Oz called me. He wanted everything I had on the case, and though I hadn’t cared about Calvin’s fate or future before then, I sure did after. Those resources we didn’t have? Found ’em.

  Turns out, the man wasn’t guilty at all (not of murder, anyway; he was otherwise a letch), and my work on the case proved that. Oz called me daily for updates, and I dangled them, always hinting at what might come next if we pushed hard enough.

  When my investigation won his client’s freedom, Oz finally thanked me with dinner.

  “No business tonight. I didn’t even bring my phone,” I assured him, grinning from across the table at Galatoire’s. No one took a fling to Galatoire’s. He and I both knew that.

  “And tonight, my mother isn’t somehow behind this, so that’s two points in our favor,” he added.

  “Besides, we are celebrating something which could change both of our careers forever.” I wrapped Janie’s slender fingers around the base of my wine glass and lifted it. “I’d say this night couldn’t get any better.”

  His eyes twinkled mischievously as he looked at me over the glass. “Well…” he teased.