Sarah Booth Delaney

by Sarah Booth Delaney 01-06 (lit)

  "Why don't you wait in my office?" she suggested. "I'll be right back."

  We took a seat and Penny went to the front office and stayed there for over fifteen minutes. When she returned, she carried several file folders. She tossed one on the desk in front of me.

  "You never came back for your diphtheria booster," she said, drilling me with her gaze. "Roll up your sleeve. My record on school vaccinations is perfect, except for you."

  "Forget it," I said.

  "I'd like your cooperation," Penny said with a smile. She was going to play hardball. To get what I wanted, I was going to have to give her what she wanted—a piece of my hide.

  "Sarah Booth had the rest of her vaccinations at Bible camp in Jackson," Tinkie said with complete authority. "We can have them fax you the transcript."

  I could have kissed Tinkie.

  Penny pushed my folder aside and picked up another. "Tinkie Richmond," she mused. "You married well." She gave me another malevolent glare. My matrimonial failure was undoubtedly inked into my health department chart. I just wondered under what illness it would fall. Female disorders. Charm deficit. High levels of expectation. Absorbed in my own thoughts, I didn't hear what the nurse said, but I saw the reaction on Tinkie's face. She drew back in her chair. "What?" she asked. "What did you say?"

  "Were you ever checked for worms?" Penny smiled.

  "I've never had worms in my life. What would make you ask such a thing?"

  "There's no test in your chart." Penny took on a concerned look. "Worms can be quite serious. It's a simple test. We could arrange—"

  "I don't have worms and I'm not being tested for anything." Tinkie was completely taken aback. Normally Tinkie loved medical attention—from the proper physician, who would be male, handsome, solicitous, and comforting.

  Penny was not to be deterred. "I've seen cases you wouldn't believe. Left untreated, worms can thread the digestive track and intestines, weakening the entire system until there's a blowout of the intestinal wall. This could happen at a formal dinner at The Club, or while you're shopping, or lunching with your friends."

  "Tinkie doesn't have worms," I said, realizing that my earlier fear of the clinic was totally justified. Nurse McAdams was a sadist. "Do you have birth records for Lillith Lucas or not?" I asked in a no-nonsense voice. "Doc Sawyer sent us over here."

  Doc was retired from private practice, but he was the emergency room physician and tended a few old-time patients. Some old gossip I'd retained in the back of my brain came into play. Penny McAdams had once had a crush on Doc. It was a trump card that produced amazing results.

  "I can call Doc and check to make sure he sent you," she said, her eyes narrowing.

  "Be my guest. He said to ask you 'pretty please' to help us."

  She cleared her throat and reached for the stack of files. "Yes, well, there were three births registered to Lillith Lucas, though we had to send someone to the home and demand that she give us the information. All three babies were delivered by the mother, at home, without even the assistance of a midwife. It's remarkable that under those conditions only one of them died."

  "Three?" Tinkie and I echoed each other.

  Nurse McAdams assessed us. "Measles can sometimes cause deafness. I need to check your mothers' vaccination records and see about this."

  "We can hear," I assured her, "we just didn't expect three births. We knew of only one."

  "Even though you make it a point to poke into everyone's business, Ms. Delaney, you don't know everything." She muttered something under her breath that sounded like "Should have been immunized for nosiness."

  "May we have the children's birth dates?" I asked, deciding that I'd rather be stuck in the butt with a needle than have to talk to this woman much longer.

  She handed us the birth certificates with some reluctance. "If Doc hadn't sent you, I wouldn't show you these. I'm under no legal obligation to show you anything, you know."

  I scanned the documents. The first was a baby boy born two years before I was. There was no name, no birth weight or height, no attending physician, no time of birth. No father's name. It was only listed as Baby Lucas, with just the gender and date of birth.

  The second certificate was for a female. The age approximately matched Doreen's. Again, no father or other details. Another Baby Lucas.

  The third was a boy born the next year. The certificate contained his birth day and the note that he'd died only hours after birth. He didn't live long enough to even be called Baby Lucas.

  "Is there any way to tell why this baby died?" I asked the nurse.

  "Sure, hire a psychic."

  Tinkie, recovered from a momentary imaginary journey into the hellish possibility of worms, rose up to her full five-two height. "There's no need for such rudeness," she said. "We're not trying to hurt anyone and we're not asking you to do anything except your job. You can't jab us with a needle, so you're doing your best to make us suffer some other way. Well, it's not working. I'm marking the health department off the list of worthy projects from my civic clubs." Her eyes gleamed. "And I belong to every single one of them. You won't get another dime for renovation."

  I zipped my lip. Tinkie had gotten Penny's attention.

  "I remember the death of the baby clearly," Penny said. She wasn't friendlier, but she was more forthcoming. "It was a perfect baby in appearance, but it simply stopped breathing. That's according to Lillith."

  "There wasn't an autopsy?" I asked.

  "Hardly. Folks never considered that a mother could kill her own child back then. SIDS was a reality, of course, though we didn't call it that. Some babies just stopped breathing. It was a risk everyone knew about."

  "The infant girl was left at a Catholic convent," I continued. "What happened to the first boy?"

  Penny shrugged. "That, I couldn't tell you. Public health has no jurisdiction. Back then, not even the welfare department really jumped on that kind of case. I do remember that someone asked Lillith about the children, and she said they'd been given to good homes."

  " 'She said'?" Tinkie didn't hide her incredulity. "Like, my dog had a litter of puppies and I found good homes for them."

  Penny actually smiled. "Exactly like that. I don't know if you recall Lillith, but she was crazy. Today she'd be locked up. She wandered around town like an escapee from Bedlam, her hair in rattails, yelling and shaking a Bible at anyone who passed by her. Any home away from her had to be an improvement for a child. Folks like her should be sterilized by the state."

  I stood up. We'd gotten everything she was going to give us. "Thanks for your time, Nurse McAdams."

  "Tell Doc next time he needs my help, he should call me himself," she said.

  "I'll be sure to deliver the message," I promised. With quick steps, Tinkie and I walked out into the October sunshine.

  "That's incredible," Tinkie said with mounting indignation. "Those children could have been sold. Any kind of predator could have gotten hold of them."

  "The past is over and done. There's nothing we can do. If the boy is still alive, he's older than either of us."

  She leaned down to pick up a handful of pecans. Cracking them in her hand, she fished out the succulent meat and offered me a half. "Do you ever wonder why we ended up with the parents we got?" she asked.

  I hadn't. Not until that moment. But it was a question that wasn't easily dismissed. Why had I gotten loving parents and Doreen was born to Lillith Lucas?

  On the drive to Dahlia House, I slipped into a pensive mood. After Tinkie drove away with Chablis riding with her little paws on the steering wheel like she was driving, I walked across the sweep of front lawn.

  When I was fifty yards away, I turned and looked at the old plantation house with fresh eyes. She was a beauty. Time had been kind to her—there was nothing wrong that a little paint wouldn't fix right up. My forefathers had built a house that endured. What role did I play in the Delaney line? It was a question I'd expect more from Jitty than myself.

  I couldn't
help but contrast Doreen with my memory of her mother. There was a sense of peace and serenity about Doreen that even I had to acknowledge. Lillith had been frightening. Integral to my case for Doreen would be the father of infant Rebekah. But I couldn't help but wonder who Doreen's father was and how he happened to get involved with Lillith, a woman whose sole religious ministry seemed to focus on the sins of sexual pleasure. What combination of genes had created a woman as physically lovely as Doreen from the raw material of Lillith?

  Doreen Mallory had opened the door on a lot of questions that, in all likelihood, I would never know the answers to. But they were questions that also impacted me. How did it happen that I'd been born into the Delaney family? Was it just a random combination of chromosomes and molecular chemistry or was there something else at work?

  Where Tinkie had found Doreen believable, I found her troubling. She'd accepted her baby's death with the serenity of the insane. And if she was crazy, she may have killed her own child and not even be aware of it.

  Sweetie Pie, my wonderful red tic hound, greeted me from the porch, her tail beating a fast rhythm against the balustrade. We entered the house together, both of us thinking about food.

  "Is she a baby killer?" Jitty asked from a corner of the parlor. She stood up, her hair tucked under a cloche hat and her body seemingly robbed of all its curves by a dress banded at her hips.

  "I don't know." I couldn't help staring at Jitty. She frequently jumped decades, and she'd obviously found the stash of old Harper's Bazaar, Vanity Fair, and Vogue dress patterns from the

  1920'*.

  "What do you mean you don't know? If you're gonna save her, you have to know that she didn't kill her own baby. Sarah Booth, you can't be runnin' around the county defending baby killers."

  "Tinkie doesn't think she did it."

  "Tinkie wants to build hair sculptures. Can you trust her judgment?"

  "Can I trust my own?" I countered, passing through the parlor and dining room and into the kitchen. I went straight to the refrigerator and found some cold fried chicken in a deli take-out box from the Piggly Wiggly. I peeled the meat off the bone and gave it to Sweetie. She smacked it down and eyed the bone, which I carefully threw away.

  "You'd better be able to trust your own judgment. Tinkie's got her a rich husband to fall back on if she screws up. You got a fat hound dog and a mortgage."

  "Thanks for the reminder," I said sarcastically. In the back of the refrigerator I found some boiled eggs. An egg salad sandwich would be perfect.

  "Is she a healer?" Jitty pressed.

  "I don't know," I said, my voice echoing a little in the refrigerator as I searched for bread-and-butter pickles.

  "I don't believe in magic. Sounds to me like it's some kind of New Or-leans hocus-pocus."

  I looked over the door at Jitty. "Very interesting. A skeptical ghost. Most folks wouldn't believe in you, either."

  "Most folks never get a chance to meet someone like me," Jitty sniffed. "I know things that would curl your toes."

  "I get the impression that Doreen Mallory does, too. She says her baby wasn't murdered. And she's so calm and certain about it." I stared into Jitty's eyes, hoping for some insight. "Which means that if she really didn't do it, someone else did. I need to make her talk about the father of her child."

  "The daddy would be the next logical choice," Jitty agreed, "especially if he didn't want to be no daddy." She frowned at the mess I was making on the table. I'd peeled the eggs, chopped them up with the pickles, and now I was adding mayo, salt, and pepper.

  I paused in my culinary preparation. "Don't you think it's a little odd that no one has mentioned the father yet, and that he isn't here, trying to help Doreen?"

  Jitty rolled her eyes at me. "Like sperm donation requires any future commitment from a man."

  I was shocked. Jitty had become as cynical as I. It was a disturbing thought. Especially when it came to fatherhood, which was her one constant theme of harping at me. "Wait, so just any man won't make a good father?" I pressed, amazed that she'd given me such an advantage.

  "The duties of fatherhood aren't for the faint of heart, missy. Not all daddies are like your daddy was. Some are no account. They got nothin' for the children that spring from their loins." She paced the kitchen, the short skirt of her dress swinging against her well-formed thighs.

  "What's eating you?" I asked.

  "Sometimes a baby is just a trap."

  My heart squeezed painfully. Jitty hit where it hurt—and where it hurt was Coleman. "When a man dances the tune, shouldn't he pay the fiddler?" I asked.

  "As long as he knows what tune he's dancing to," Jitty pointed out. "Sometimes a man is told he's dancing a waltz and it's really a bop."

  It was at least fifty-fifty that Connie had lied to Coleman about pregnancy prevention, but that still didn't undo what had been done. "I don't want to think about this," I said. "But I do have a question for you, Jitty. Why do you think I was born to my parents?"

  Her eyebrows lifted higher and higher. She reached out as if to touch my forehead, and I felt a feathery whisper of cool breeze. "You got a fever? You talkin' out of your head. You were born to them because they wanted you."

  "They wanted me, specifically, or a baby?"

  She nodded in understanding. "Girl, you're questioning the work of the Divine. All I know is that your mama often said that you were a special gift from heaven. I'm surprised you don't remember that. She said it just before she left, the night she was killed."

  But I did remember. To my mother and father, it didn't matter what strange blend of biology or heavenly intervention had created me, I was the child they loved.

  "Do you believe in some sort of divinely ordained plan for each person?" I asked Jitty.

  Her eyes were liquid chocolate. "I may have an answer to that, but it won't do any good for me to tell you. That's something you have to figure out on your own, Sarah Booth."

  5

  Sweetie and I moved our lunch to the side porch where the crisp October breeze blew even more memories over me. Long ago, I'd sat in this swing with my father while he sang old classics to me. Where my mother had a great love of the blues, my father had been more of a Cole Porter man.

  Although it was a happy memory, I was left with a piercing sadness. Bittersweet was a word I was developing an intimate knowledge of.

  "Let's go for a ride," I suggested to Sweetie Pie. Maybe a brisk canter around the cotton fields would clear the past from my brain. Living in Dahlia House I was always steeped in the history of my family, but it didn't often have the power to quick me as it had been doing lately.

  I went inside and slipped into jeans and my riding boots. I was ready to go when the phone rang. Tinkie was on her way to her hair appointment. I thought there might be an edge to her voice, but the cell phone static made it impossible to determine.

  "Sarah Booth, I was thinking what to do next. Do you suppose Coleman has any of the NOPD reports? We need to see them."

  It was a good point. If Coleman had any reports, I felt certain he'd share with us. If he didn't, then I'd have to deal with the New Orleans Police Department, and that might take a lot longer. It was something that needed to be addressed before I escaped for my horseback ride.

  "Good thinking, Tinkie. I'll take care of it right away."

  "Sarah Booth, are you okay?" I heard Chablis' little bark in the background as if she echoed Tinkie's concern.

  "Sure. I'm fine. Why do you ask?"

  "You just seem... quiet. I don't know. Not really quiet, but sort of removed or unfocused. I mean, you're always the one who thinks of things like autopsy reports."

  She had a point, but I wasn't going to give it to her. "Could it be, Tinkie, that you're just getting better and better as a PI?"

  Her laughter sounded tinny and empty on the phone. "Well, I'll see you later, when I'm a glamorous Malibu blonde."

  "You'd be glamorous if you were bald," I told her before I hung up.

  I didn't
want to think about the question Tinkie had asked me, so I called the sheriff's office. I needed official info and Coleman was the man who could give it to me. When Rinda answered the phone, I was determined not to let her get under my skin. I asked for Coleman.

  "He's taken the afternoon off to be with his wife," she said. "Don't you get it, Sarah Booth? He's a married man, and he's with his wife. Why don't you give it a rest and call back Monday?"

  "Tell him I need to talk with him about Doreen Mallory," I said, ignoring her insults.

  "Doreen Mallory is the perfect client for you. If Dr. Frankenstein could blend the two of you together, he'd have the perfect Madonna-slash-whore complex. You, of course, being the whore." She laughed.

  To be honest, I was more shocked than insulted. I'd never thought Rinda was smart enough to come up with a slam that combined horror, religion, and psychology.

  "Rinda, remember when you used to do those handstands and cartwheels during halftime and everyone at the football game looked at you?"

  There was a cautious pause. "Yes. I was the best cartwheeler on the cheerleading squad."

  "Every time that little skirt went over your head, we could see the cellulite on the back of your thighs."

  There was a gasp from her end. Smiling, I hung up.

  I'd barely gotten the phone in the cradle before it rang. Millie, proprietress of Millie's Cafe on Main Street

  , was on the line.

  "Arlin McLain is in the cafe," Millie said in a whisper. "You'd better get over here quick."

  Arlin was a local lawyer and a man known for his calm and reason. He was a serious man who'd been the town's most eligible bachelor in his younger days. He'd never married, but he'd built a reputation as a fine lawyer and a man of ethics—a difficult balance. He wasn't the type to invoke a riot or require someone to whisper about his presence. "What's going on?" I asked Millie.

  "He says he's been talking with your client. It would seem Doreen Mallory has come into some money." Millie rang up a sale on the cash register. I could hear her making change. "The best I can tell, Lillith Lucas left money in the bank when she died. Doreen's the heir."