by Tami Hoag
“I think maybe you're more ready than you know, darlin',” Caroline said gently. “More time isn't going to change what happened. You'll never be able to get justice for those children. I think the best thing you can do is go and get justice for somebody else, then.”
Laurel heaved a sigh and nibbled her lower lip, chewing off the soft coral lipstick she had just applied. She couldn't think of a thing to say. The feelings were too jumbled. She wanted to stand there forever with Caroline's arm around her, with her aunt's love supporting her. This was what she had come home for, not to jump into trouble with a religious charlatan, not to fend off Vivian's machinations, not to be tempted by Jack Boudreaux. For love, for someone who would judge her far less harshly than she judged herself. For the first time in a long while she felt an acute stab of longing for her father, who had solved all her childish problems with a hug and a kiss and a stick of Juicy Fruit gum. But all she had left of him were a few old snapshots, his crawfish tie pin, and his sister—Caroline.
She drew in a slow, deep breath, tamping down the emotions, drawing up some strength, focusing on the few items scattered on the Chippendale hall table, and cataloging them to give her mind something to do besides wallow in sad memories—an ivory French-style telephone, a blue willow vase holding a spray of fresh-cut flowers, a pewter dish holding an assortment of car keys and a lone earring.
“I'll be all right,” she said, her gaze fastening on the earring. It was heart-shaped, large, tarnished silver studded with rhinestones and bits of colored glass. She fished it out of the dish as an excuse to change the topic. “Is this yours?”
Caroline frowned at the gaudy bauble. “Lord, no. It must be Savannah's.” She took a step back and gave her niece one last, long look in the eye, not in the least bit fooled by the diversion. “You come down to the store and see me later if you need to talk, you hear?”
Laurel nodded. Caroline reached up and stroked her niece's cheek gently, her thumb just grazing one of the dark shadows of fatigue that arched beneath her eyes. “I know how strong you really are, sweetheart,” she said softly, “and I know you'll be all right. You're a Chandler, after all, and we're made of stern stuff. But don't expect to climb back all in one day, and don't forget that I'm here if you need me.”
“Thanks, Aunt Caroline,” Laurel murmured.
Caroline straightened her dainty shoulders, a gleam in her dark eyes and a wry smile curling her mouth. “Thanks, nothing. You go kick the figurative shit out of that television preacher.”
A chuckle bubbled up inside Laurel, and she smiled. “I'll do my best.”
As Caroline went out, Savannah came down the stairs, wearing a plum silk kimono trimmed with a band of ivory satin and wide ivory satin cuffs that fell past her wrists. Laurel watched her descent by way of the mirror as she repaired her lipstick, trying to assess her sister's mood. It had been near dawn before Savannah had come in, and she was obviously trying to fight off the aftereffects of her late night. She wore a blue gel eye mask to combat puffiness and took the stairs one careful step at a time. Her lips were swollen and red, and her hair was as wild as a witch's mane around her shoulders.
Their eyes met in the mirror, and Laurel bit down on the questions that sprang instantly to mind and the re-criminations that came hard on their heels.
“Is this your earring?” She held up the heart-shaped bob as she turned away from the mirror.
Savannah said nothing as she padded barefoot down the hall. She stared blankly at the earring for a moment, flicked at it with a finger to set it swinging. “It was in your car,” she said flatly. “Where are you going?”
“Down to the courthouse to see about stopping Baldwin from harassing the Delahoussayes.”
“Christ, Baby, you barely know them.”
“I know all I need to know.”
“You're not supposed to be upsetting yourself with other people's problems.” You're supposed to be letting me take care of you.
Laurel opened her pocketbook and dropped in her lipstick and car keys. “So,” she said with a shrug, “I'll solve this one and go back to laying low. How's that sound?”
“Like a load of bullshit,” Savannah snapped. “Let the Delahoussayes take care of themselves. They can damn well fight their own fights.” Her mouth bent into something like a smile. “You saw that for yourself yesterday. That bitch Annie damn near gave me a bald spot.”
She lifted a hand to rub at her scalp, the sleeve of her kimono falling to her elbow. Laurel's eyes went round at the sight of her wrist. The delicate, porcelain skin was bruised and raw in spots.
“My God, Sister! What happened to you?” she demanded, snatching at Savannah's arm so she could get a better look.
Savannah bared her teeth, an expression made eerier by the blue mask she wore across her eyes like something left over from Mardi Gras. “You don't want to know.”
“Yes, I do! What the hell—”
“No,” she said coolly. “I distinctly remember you telling me you didn't want to hear about my sex life. You didn't want to hear that Ronnie Peltier has a cock like a jackhammer or that the Revver likes to play whip-me, whip-me games or that I like to do it with—”
“Stop it!” Laurel yelled. Flinging her sister's arm away, she stepped back, as if Savannah's admission was so repulsive, she couldn't stand the idea of touching her or breathing the same air. “Dammit, Savannah, why do you have to do that? Why do you have to degrade yourself that way?”
“Because I'm a slut.” Savannah threw the word like a dagger, her temper tearing through what little self-control she had left. She stalked toward Laurel, eyes narrowed behind her mask, lips pulled back. “I'm not a shining little bright-eyed heroine. I'm what Ross Leighton turned me into.”
“You're what you want to be,” Laurel fired back. “Ross hasn't laid a hand on you in fifteen years—”
“How do you know?” Savannah sneered, backing her into the hall table. “Maybe I still fuck him twice a week for old time's sake.”
“Shut up!”
“What's the matter, Baby? Don't you want to hear about how I spread my legs for our dear old stepdaddy so you wouldn't have to?”
The words stung like nettles in Laurel's heart. “I didn't have any control over what Ross did to you,” she said, her voice choked with emotion. “You can't blame me, and you can't blame yourself. It's stupid to spend the rest of your life punishing yourself for something that was beyond your control.”
Savannah stepped back, her expression beneath her mask a combination of cynicism and incredulity. “My God, aren't you the little hypocrite?” she said softly. “What the hell have you been doing with your whole damn life?”
Laurel stared at her, stunned, weak. Her knees felt like water, and her stomach tightened like a fist.
Mama Pearl rumbled into the hall, wringing her plump hands in a red checked dish towel, a scowl folding her forehead into burls of flesh. “What the world goin' on out here?” she demanded. “All I hear is yellin' an' cursin' like to burn the Almighty's ears! What goin' on?”
Savannah pulled her temper in and wrapped it tight around her as she adjusted the sash on her kimono. “Nothing, Mama Pearl,” she said calmly. She picked a piece of dead leaf out of her hair and crumbled it between her fingers. “I just came down to get a pot of tea.”
Mama Pearl looked to Laurel for corroboration. Laurel straightened her glasses and picked up her purse, her hand trembling visibly. “I have to go,” she mumbled, refusing to meet anyone's eyes, focusing on maintaining some semblance of control.
She walked out of the house and into the sauna heat of midmorning on wobbly legs, thinking that after what she had just been through, a trip to the courthouse was going to be a piece of cake.
The air-conditioning in the sheriff's office was fighting a losing battle against the afternoon sun that came glaring in through the window. Sheriff Duwayne Kenner stood behind his desk with his hands on his slim hips, overseeing the futile attempts of two maintenance men who were
trying to install a new venetian blind.
“Get the goddamn bracket straight,” he growled. “And the left one's half an inch higher than the right. What the hell you boys thinkin'—that y'all can tip the whole goddamn courthouse so the shade'll hang straight?”
The maintenance man on the right shot a glance over his meaty shoulder, blinking at the sweat that dribbled down his shining dark forehead and into his eyes. His blue shirt was soaked down the back and sides, the tails crawling up out of the low-riding waistband of his pants, giving glimpses of a generous tube of fat around his middle. He gulped a breath and mumbled the expected, “No, sir.”
The other man—younger, thinner, harder, darker—set his jaw at the word “boy” and dropped his end of the blind so that the blazing sun struck Kenner full in the face.
“Jesus Christ!” The sheriff took a quick step back, snapping his head to the side and squeezing his eyes shut. The badge pinned to the chest of his sweat-stained khaki uniform shirt glinted like gold.
The younger man's mouth flicked up on the corners. “I's sorry, Sheriff Kenner,” he said in an exaggerated drawl.
“Your sorry black ass,” Kenner grumbled under his breath. He jerked around, muttering about the squandering of tax dollars on equal opportunity programs, and faced the young woman who had come into his office a full five minutes ago to speak with him.
Laurel Chandler. Ross Leighton's stepdaughter. While Kenner curried favor with Leighton, he was in no particular hurry to listen to the girl. Everyone in town had heard about her—making wild accusations up in Georgia, blowing the case, losing her marbles over it. She was trouble. He could smell trouble a mile off—even when it was wearing perfume.
Laurel sat in the visitor's chair, sweat trickling down her sides and between her shoulder blades. Her linen jacket was wilted, her temper frayed down to the nub. While her morning's efforts had gone smoothly, she had a feeling Kenner was going to be a whole different story. He had the unmistakable aura of a redneck about him. He looked fifty, tough and sinewy, with the lean build of a cowboy. His steel gray hair was thinning fast on top, but she doubted anyone ribbed him about it. If Kenner had a sense of humor, the Klan backed the NAACP.
He regarded her with hard, dark eyes, his impatience charging the air around him, his mouth set in a grim line that would have done Clint Eastwood proud. “What can I do for you, Miz Chandler?” he asked in a flat tone that indicated both his level of interest and his lack of willingness to do anything at all for her.
Laurel took a deep breath of stifling, sweat-tinged air and shifted on her seat. “I wanted to make you aware of the situation between the Delahoussayes of Frenchie's Landing and Reverend Jimmy Lee Baldwin. He's been harassing them and disrupting their business. I've spoken with Judge Monahan on their behalf.”
Kenner perched a skinny buttock on one corner of his desk, picked up a pack of unfiltered Camels, and shook one out just long enough to hook his lip over. “Seems a might drastic,” he said, cigarette bobbing as he tore a match from a book and struck it.
“Baldwin is not only making a nuisance of himself, he's defaming the Delahoussayes and inhibiting their right to free trade.”
He took a deep pull on the cigarette, pretending to consider the facts as she had presented them. “He hadn't hurt anybody, has he?”
“Is that your criterion for action?” Laurel asked coolly. “You wait until someone has resorted to physical violence?”
Eyes narrowing to slits, Kenner blew twin streams of smoke out his slim nose and pointed a finger at her, shaking ash down on the cheap linoleum floor. “I do a damn good job in this parish, Missy. Everywhere around us they got dead girls stacked up like cordwood and drug dealers crawling around thick as copperheads in canebreaks. You don't see that here, and I'll tell you why—'cause I know damn well whose ass to kick.”
“I'm sure you do.”
“You're goddamn right I do.” He took a quick drag on his smoke and shot a glare over his shoulder at the maintenance men, who were making an unholy racket with the blind. “And I'll tell you this—I got better things to do with my time than chase around after that television preacher, tellin' him where he can piss and where he can't.”
Laurel rose gracefully, smoothing the wrinkles from her trousers, schooling her temper. Kenner was hardly the first jerk she'd ever come up against. “I don't care where he pisses, Sheriff,” she said smoothly. “I don't care where he does anything, as long as he doesn't do it at Frenchie's Landing. Judge Monahan has granted a temporary injunction until the formalities can be taken care of. Diligent as you are, I expect you'll do everything in your power to see that Reverend Baldwin respects it.”
Kenner gave her a flat look, the muscles in his lean jaw working. His cigarette smoldered between his fingers, ribbons of blue smoke curling up into the stagnant air. “I know who you are, Miz Chandler,” he said softly. “I don't need some female with an overactive imagination running around my parish crying wolf every time she turns around and dud'n like the look of somebody.”
The jibe hit and stuck. Laurel tensed against it, steeled herself and her pride, and dug down for some of the grit she had been known for back in Scott County. Lifting her chin, she met Kenner's stare, unflinching. “I don't make empty accusations, Sheriff. If I cry wolf, there'll be one coming to chew your skinny ass.”
He gave a snort of derision and stubbed out his cigarette, shooting another glare at the maintenance men, who had stopped working altogether to watch the confrontation.
“Get your lazy asses in gear and get that goddamn blind up before I get a heat stroke!”
Laurel turned and walked out, gritting her teeth as her stomach knotted and her nerves gave a belated tremor. The hall was cooler and darker. The courthouse had been built before the Civil War, and for a town the size of Bayou Breaux, it was an impressive structure, three stories of brick with Doric columns and a broad set of steps out front. Inside, the hallways were wide with soaring ceilings where old fans turned lazily to stir the humid air. The dark green plaster walls were decorated with a framed gallery of prominent citizens from the past.
For a moment Laurel leaned back against the cool, nubby plaster and rested her eyes, willing herself to relax. It didn't matter what Kenner thought of her. His opinion was no great surprise. She imagined a great many people held it. The Prosecutor Who Cried Wolf. The headline still made her angry, still made her want to lash out, to rail at those who had doubted her.
I wasn't wrong. They were guilty.
She wasn't wrong, she was a failure. That was the worst of it. Knowing that those children had been committed to terrible fates because she hadn't been able to prove it.
“No one will believe you, Laurel. . . . Don't tell Mama.”
For an instant she was twelve again, standing in the door to the parlor, watching Vivian fuss with an arrangement of calla lilies and delphinium. The secret was there inside her, a big gooey ball of words that clogged her throat. Savannah's warning rang in her ears—“No one will believe you, Laurel. Don't tell Mama. She'll only get cross with you. . . .” Helplessness and fear gripped her like icy hands, grappling with her sense of justice. She wanted to tell, thought she ought to, but she just stood there, watching Vivian frown and fuss, her temper slipping visibly as the flowers failed to please her. . . .
Sucking in air like a diver just breaking the surface, Laurel shoved herself away from the wall and turned into a shallow alcove, where a water fountain gurgled. She bent over and swallowed a mouthful of cool, over-chlorinated water, dampened her fingers, and patted her cheeks. Dismissing the memories, she dug through her pocketbook for a roll of Maalox tablets.
She would have to go to Frenchie's and explain things to T-Grace and Ovide. Maybe she would stop by the antiques shop and tell Aunt Caroline everything had gone well enough.
“Back in harness, so to speak, Laurel?”
She jumped at the sound of Stephen Danjermond's voice. She hadn't heard his approach, had been too focused on herself, she
supposed. Closing her purse, she casually took a step back. “Just doing a favor for some friends.”
“The Delahoussayes?” he asked, his smile telling her he already knew the answer. He stood half in shadow, his face half light and half dark, like a figure in a dream. Laurel found the effect unsettling. “News travels fast in a town this size,” he said, sliding his hands in the pockets of his tailored charcoal trousers. “I had a chat with Judge Monahan over lunch. He was very taken with you.”
“He was taken with the idea of making Reverend Baldwin's life unpleasant,” Laurel said. “Some years ago his mother gave a sizable fortune to a man of Baldwin's ilk, and it was later discovered he spent the contributions of his flock on such things as air-conditioned dog houses and spiritual retreats to nude beaches on the French Riviera.”
“You sell yourself short, Laurel. I was discussing with him the possibility of your coming to work for me. The idea pleased him.”
She frowned a little. “I wish you wouldn't have said anything. I told you, Mr. Danjermond, I'm not thinking about going back to work at this point.”
“But you're thinking about seeing justice done, aren't you, Laurel? A job title has little to do with it. You are who you are.”
The way he said it had a ring of inevitability, as if mankind's little play of the busy, bustling world was all superfluous to the core of life. The trappings could all be stripped away and everyone reduced to their very essence. She was the champion for justice.
“It's what matters most to you, isn't it?”
Laurel kept her answer to herself, feeling it would somehow give him an advantage in their chess game. She resettled her purse strap on her shoulder and shifted her weight toward the door. “I ought to be on my way. I have to go tell T-Grace and Ovide what's going on and make sure Baldwin gets the message. I don't have a lot of faith that Kenner will do the job.”
Amusement lit the district attorney's eyes and widened his smile. He turned and started toward the door with her, checking his long, fluid strides to stay beside her. “I assume it wasn't love at first sight between you and Duwayne.”