Sarah Booth Delaney

by Sarah Booth Delaney 01-06 (lit)

  "Sure. I'll check with Doreen and see how she wants to handle it. What are you going to do?"

  "Unless LeMont tells me differently, I'm driving to Lafayette." I checked my watch. "And soon. We've waited long enough for Pearline to come home."

  Tinkie nodded. "I just have this nagging suspicion that she knows something."

  "Maybe we're just desperate." I hadn't been able to shake my depression on the long drive back to New Orleans.

  She shrugged. "Desperation is the mother of invention."

  "Yes, when all else fails, quote Benjamin Franklin."

  "Did he really say that?"

  I laughed. "I don't know. Let's just say that neither one of us should ever try to get on a TV quiz show."

  "Be careful, Sarah Booth. If Pearline's hiding, it's because she has a reason. Desperate people take desperate measures."

  There was that word "desperate" again. Doreen would say the universe was giving me a psychic tap. Though I might be skeptical, I wasn't totally stupid. "I'll look out for 'desperate,' " I promised Tinkie. "If I see it, I'll duck."

  She gave me such a dazzling smile that I felt blessed. "I love you, Sarah Booth," she said.

  "I love you, too, Tinkie." Funny how easy it was to say to her.

  "Girl power!" She held up her knuckles for me in the salute we'd created in second grade when none of the boys wanted to play with us. We bumped knuckles and went our separate ways.

  At my car, I used my cell phone to call LeMont. To my surprise he didn't even sound surly.

  "Pearline Brewer's giving a statement," he said conversationally.

  "She's here, in New Orleans?"

  "Yeah, I got a call about five o'clock this morning from another law enforcement... agency. It was a good tip. I sent a car to Lafayette with a warrant for Pearline as a material witness."

  God bless Coleman. He'd followed through. "Can I talk to Pearline?"

  "Sure. As soon as I've finished."

  I didn't like the sound of that. Pearline was employed by the Clays. In all probability, so was LeMont. As fond as Tinkie was of old sayings, I had a favorite of my own: A man couldn't serve two masters. I didn't trust LeMont not to coach the witness to protect Ellisea or the senator.

  I drove to the Eighth District, figuring I'd have at least a two-hour wait. To my happy surprise, LeMont motioned me back to his office. A petite woman with cafe-au-lait skin and espresso eyes looked up at me. In that strange, exotic swirling of cultures, Pearline Brewer was an exceptionally lovely woman. I guess I'd expected a maid to be plain or dowdy. Pearline could have been on the cover of any magazine. Her smile was shy.

  "I've been waiting to talk to you," I said.

  "My mother has been ill, yes," she replied in that strange cadence that was English, but not. I'd heard it along the bayous of Louisiana and sometimes the streets of New Orleans. It was lilting and beautiful and sometimes difficult to decipher.

  "You were with Rebekah all evening before she died?" I asked.

  I could tell LeMont had been over this ground, but he didn't interfere. Pearline gave a basic rundown of her evening. She'd bathed and fed Rebekah around six, as usual. This was normally the time Doreen came home from either the Center or the Square. But Doreen had called saying she needed to stay later, until eight. Pearline had willingly agreed to stay with the baby.

  "She was a pleasure, yes," Pearline said. "Her smile was like being touched by God."

  "Pearline, why were Reverend Oren Weaver's fingerprints on Rebekah's baby bottle?" I'd hoped to get her off balance with a sudden shift in direction.

  From his desk drawer LeMont removed a plastic evidence bag that contained a baby bottle. It was the kind where fresh sacks of formula could be inserted. He set it on his desk.

  Pearline looked down at the floor. "The detective has asked the same question, cherie."

  I glanced at LeMont. He shrugged. "I thought you might as well hear the answer with me."

  Suddenly he was willing to let me play with his toys. I couldn't help but wonder why.

  "So tell us."

  "It will break Doreen's heart, yes." She bit her lip and lifted her dark eyes to mine. "Doreen could not help her baby. She prayed for Rebekah. She asked her god to help. But nothing happened, yes. I thought perhaps the true God could help Rebekah. Doreen was working a little late, so I took Rebekah to a revival meeting so that Reverend Weaver could heal her. I took that sweet baby to be healed, and that night she died."

  Of all the answers I'd expected, it wasn't this one. So Oren Weaver had held Rebekah, possibly unaware of who she was and that she might be his own daughter. It was a bitter irony.

  Pearline's soft sobs filled the office. "It was wrong. Doreen will be so hurt that I didn't trust her to heal her own child, that I took her to Reverend Weaver. But he's healed others on television. I've seen him. I thought it was worth a chance, yes, and I knew my little baby was dying."

  "Did Reverend Weaver know this baby was Doreen's?"

  Pearline's eyes were horrified at the idea. "Oh, no. I betrayed Doreen by taking her baby to another healer, but I would never have told anyone. I wouldn't tell now except the detective said if I didn't tell the truth I'd go to jail."

  I put a hand on Pearline's shoulder and that's all it took. She began to sob in earnest. In a moment I was sitting beside her and she was wetting my chest with her tears.

  "Everyone looked at that baby and saw only her deformities, yes. But I looked into her eyes and I saw an angel. She was sent straight from God."

  As I patted Pearline's back and did my awkward best to comfort her, I felt a pure and righteous rage building in my own heart. Oren Weaver, the lying bastard, was next on my list for a personal visit.

  Storm clouds were building to the west as I drove toward Oren Weaver's compound. Doreen had been right about one thing; Pearline hadn't harmed Rebekah. Of all the people walking the planet, Pearline had never even seen Rebekah's medical problems. She'd seen only her spirit and had fallen in love with the infant.

  The top on the roadster was down and I liked the cold, rain-promising wind that whipped into my face. The year when I was nine years old, I'd come to New Orleans with my parents. August was never a good month to visit a Southern city below sea level. While it's hot in the Delta, it's suffocating in New Orleans. And it's hurricane season.

  A tropical storm that had stalled off the Yucatan Peninsula for a week had suddenly picked up a twenty-mile-an-hour forward speed and roared into the coast of Louisiana as a class three hurricane. It had happened so suddenly that my parents and I hadn't had time to evacuate.

  We'd stayed at the Royal Sonasta in the Quarter, and we listened to the howling wind and watched the sheets of rain from the safety of our second-floor room. What I remember most was the flooding. Because portions of New Orleans are below sea level, the storm had drowned the city. Streets were turned into Venetian canals. Things that had long been buried beneath the silty river bottom floated through main intersections. I'd decided never to find myself in New Orleans during another flood.

  The rain clouds blowing up from the west were a long shot from hurricane clouds, but I was itchy to leave New Orleans. My skin felt as if it had been peeled back and salted, burning and rubbing in strange places.

  The guards at Oren's compound were about as glad to see me as I was to see them. They dicked around with me for ten minutes before they let me through the gate—after a good pat down, of course. It was okay. Just another little score to settle when I finally faced Oren.

  True to form, he met me at the front door with no intention of asking me in. I pushed past him and went to the cold den where several young men in suits were sitting in what was obviously a meeting.

  "Get lost," I said.

  They looked at Weaver, who'd walked in behind me.

  "We'll continue this later. Take a fifteen-minute break," he told them. They got up like obedient robots and left the room.

  "Ms. Delaney, I'm about ten seconds away from calling the po
lice and having you charged with trespassing."

  I handed him my cell phone. "Be my guest. Detective LeMont's probably on his way here now to question you."

  He hesitated, reading something dangerous in my face. "What do you want?"

  "How did you know that Rebekah Mallory might be your child?"

  "Are you completely insane? We've been over this. She isn't my child."

  "Reverend, this isn't going to end pretty for you no matter how it goes. I've seen you pay folks to pretend to be healed. The police have your fingerprints on a baby bottle belonging to Rebekah Mallory—the bottle that contained the sedative given to kill her. We have enough circumstantial evidence to tie you to the baby's murder. If the DNA comes back that you're the father, you're going down."

  It was a long speech and one I was rather proud of. I detested the man who stood before me. He held out the worst kind of false hope to people who were, in a word, desperate. He stole from them using the cruelest of weapons—their own fear and desperation.

  "I'm not Rebekah's father," he said simply. "I'm not. I have no clue how my prints got on any baby bottle, if they're really there. This sounds like a setup."

  "Keep hoping," I said, "because it's going to give me intense pleasure to nail you."

  He didn't actually take a step back, but I think the hatred in my eyes and voice made him lean away from me. "I offer people hope," he said. "You don't see it, but I do. In a world where most folks know only suffering and pain, I offer the hope of a miracle. That's not a bad thing to do."

  "Sure," I said. "You offer as much miracle as they can afford. But the sick thing is, you only offer the illusion of a miracle. If just once you had the real thing, it would be different."

  "I did once."

  He spoke so softly that I thought I heard him wrong. "What?"

  "I've healed people. Truly. Not hundreds of them, but some."

  "I don't believe you."

  "Ask Doreen."

  I remembered what she said about Oren Weaver, that he had the true power to help others if he could just tap into it.

  "Who did you heal?"

  The strangest look came over his face. "My wife. Myra. She was the first."

  "Myra who lives in Baton Rouge and who you have to buy off with hush money for cars?"

  He was startled when he realized how much I knew about his life, but instead of getting angry, he smiled. "Myra had something wrong with her leg. She had a lot of pain. Even so, she was a beautiful young woman. I think I fell in love with her the first time I saw her. I never even noticed that she limped."

  I fought against the tidal pull of his words. Oren Weaver was a terrific orator. He had the power to lasso me with his words and pull me into his world.

  "Myra lived in St. Francisville. She was an only child and over-protected to the point of abuse. She wasn't allowed to go places with her friends. Her parents used her bad leg as an excuse to cripple her even further. I met her by accident. My car broke down and I stopped at her house to use the phone. It was the first time I'd ever been inside one of the planter's homes."

  I could see the moss-draped trees of the small town north of New Orleans. Tinkie and I had stopped there for breakfast on our way to New Orleans. It was part of the Episcopalian Louisiana—a rich planter class with treasured Anglo ties. Not for St. Francisville, the evils of Catholicism, and the mixed culture of southern Louisiana. These were purebreds, and as such, their daughters would be guarded against any untoward influences of life.

  "They looked on a Baptist revival preacher as akin to Satan himself," Oren said. "I might as well have said the Pope sent me."

  "I'll bet Myra now wishes she'd listened to her parents."

  "I doubt it," he said. "I should have left her alone, but I couldn't. One day I met her down at the creek behind her house. I told her I wanted to baptize her. What I wanted to do was get her in the water with me. I wanted to see how her dress would cling to her when it was wet. She was so beautiful, and my thoughts weren't on saving her soul."

  "You talked her into it?" My estimation of Myra's intelligence dropped.

  "I told her I could heal her leg."

  "Had you ever healed before?"

  "It had never even crossed my mind. But as soon as I said it, I had a clear picture of her leg and what was wrong inside it. There was something growing, something that would move from her leg up to her stomach and kill her. I knew it as surely as I know my name, and I knew that I could stop it. With God's help, my hands could touch her leg and destroy that cancer. And I did." He held my gaze. "Because I loved her so much. God empowered that love."

  Goose bumps danced over my skin. Doreen. How much of this had she known?

  "Who else have you healed?"

  "There was a time when Myra and I first married that I helped people. God gave me visions to see inside their bodies. I knew exactly what to heal and what to destroy." His voice grew tired. "But that was a long time ago. Now I have to pay people to pretend to be healed. But I'm still giving people what they want, what they really need, the hope that miracles still exist."

  "You're bilking them out of their money. You're offering false hope."

  "False hope is better than no hope at all, Sarah Booth, and if you don't understand that, you've got some hard lessons ahead of you. I'm not cheating these people. They don't really expect me to heal them, but they do expect to leave my revival with the hope that God has the power to somehow touch them. And who am I to say he won't?"

  Oren Weaver was a dangerous man, and perhaps a wicked one. I'd lost the ability to tell if he was conning me, conning himself, or if he believed the words he spoke.

  "Do you remember the baby with the birth defects?"

  "Yes, I do." He locked his hands behind his back. "I didn't want to hold her, but the woman thrust her at me. I had to grab the baby bottle because it slipped from the infant's mouth. She couldn't even try to hold it. Her arms..."

  "You didn't know that was Doreen's child?"

  "How would I? The woman who brought the baby was Cajun or Creole. I assumed it was her infant."

  I didn't believe him. The problem was, I didn't disbelieve him. It was the perfect explanation for the fingerprints on the bottle. And Pearline had confirmed his story.

  "You haven't asked the most obvious question," Weaver said, his face tightening, "the one I keep asking myself each day."

  "What would that be?"

  "How a love like the one I shared with Myra could turn so twisted and ugly. We despise each other now, you know. She can't abide my touch."

  "Let me guess. She caught you sleeping around." His mouth turned up slightly at the corners. "True, as far as it goes. I've never claimed to be more than a mortal man in the face of temptation. You have no idea how many women throw themselves at me. Not actually me, but who they think I am. I should have resisted, but sometimes the Devil led me to their beds." "You know what I hate about religion?" I asked. "I probably couldn't begin to assemble the list." His words stung me for a moment, but I rallied. "It's how convenient it is to blame everything on the Devil. Oh, just point at Satan and claim a momentary weakness and then ask for forgiveness." My jaw had clenched. "Well, some things can't be forgiven, and I'm willing to bet my family home on the fact that a jury of your peers won't be looking to send Satan to jail. They'll be very happy to see you behind bars if you killed that baby."

  Since I was on a tear of terrorizing potential suspects, I drove to the senator's house. Though I knocked and hammered on the front door, no one answered. I had the sense that someone watched me from inside the house, and that triggered my already hot temper.

  Instead of leaving, I cut across the immaculate yard, pushed through some camellia bushes that had to be two hundred years old, and found myself facing a huge gravel car park. A young man in a chauffeur's uniform was scrubbing on a pale blue Jaguar. With the rush of the water hose and the volume of the radio, he didn't hear me. I eased up and stopped. The letters C-H-A-N-D-A-L-A had been spray painted on
the car in Day-Glo orange. The chauffeur was doing everything in his power to remove the paint, but it wasn't budging.

  I heard someone behind me and turned to find the senator frowning down at me.

  "Vandals," he said. "Public figures are always a good target."

  "What does it mean?"

  He shrugged. "The kids who did it probably have a second-grade education. Who knows what they were trying to write." He motioned the chauffeur forward. "Call the dealer. Tell them to get another car ready, then drive this one over for a trade-in. They can repaint it themselves."

  "Sure thing, Senator," the young man said. He hustled to do his employer's bidding.

  Senator Clay looked down into my eyes. "I've asked you not to come here," he said. "Ellisea is upset."

  "Ellisea seems to stay in a constant state of upset."

  "She has medical problems."

  I'd be willing to bet they were mental, but I didn't say so. "Senator, has anyone ever mentioned that your wife has become a political liability? That fit she threw Saturday night was a doozy. I'm only wondering how you kept it out of the newspapers."

  "Ellisea has problems, but so does every other politician's spouse in D.C., or don't you watch the news?"

  He had me there. Politicians were human, and under the microscope of the national press, their flaws were revealed on a daily basis. It was just that I hadn't been to a high-society ball with other political wives and seen them engage in a catfight.

  "Why does Ellisea hate Cece so much?" I asked.

  "I have no idea."

  I saw something in his eyes that quickly vanished. Was it prejudice? I didn't always agree with Clay's politics, but he'd always seemed to uphold the rights of people to practice whatever gender or religion they chose. Like Doreen had pointed out, Clay was in a position to make sweeping changes on issues from the environment to the right to abortion. Was he, at heart, a man who devalued personal freedom?

  "You might ask yourself why your friend has it in for my wife," he countered. "There's some jealousy there, I believe. Ellisea was a runway model. Cece may have aspired to that but didn't make it."