Blood Memory (30 page)

Dawn has only just broken, but the ground floor of Malmaison is lit up as though for a royal court party. I saw the yellow dome of light as I jogged through the trees from Michael’s house in Brookwood, following the old trail I beat with my own feet so long ago. Pearlie’s lights are on, too.

My Audi is parked beside Pearlie’s Cadillac. Not far away stands a tall, white pickup truck like the ones used on the island—the kind that tried to run me over. Someone on the island must have found my car and brought it back. But if that’s the case, why doesn’t Grandpapa have the police scouring the countryside for me or my corpse? And why didn’t someone call my cell phone?

After circling around to the yellow-flooded front lawn, I stop and check the phone. The call log shows three calls from my grandfather’s number. With the phone set to vibrate only, I slept through them, and in my shock over the calls after I awakened, I failed to notice the misses. The last call probably came around the time I was having my nightmare. I press
1
and listen to the messages.

“Catherine, this is Grandpapa.”
His voice is resonant, even in the tinny cell-phone speaker.
“Henry found your car across the channel from the island. There was no sign of you. Louise Butler says you set out on a bike for the bridge, but no one knows whether you made it or not. Please call me if you get this. If you’re hurt or in trouble, don’t worry. I’ve got the sheriff’s departments on both sides of the river combing the banks and roads for you, and Jesse’s got a dozen men searching the island. If you’ve had an accident, help is coming quick. Call me, please.”

Hearing the concern in my grandfather’s voice almost brings tears to my eyes. His next message says,
“It’s me again. If you’re in any other kind of trouble—that is, if there are other people involved—then let them hear this message. This is Dr. William Kirkland speaking. If you’re from anywhere around the part of the country where you found my granddaughter, then you know my name. And you know you’ve made a mistake. If you release her immediately, I’ll look no further into the matter. But if you hurt that girl…by God, you won’t live one day past the day I find you. And I
will
find you. You ask around. You’d rather have the hounds of hell on your trail than me, and that’s a fact.”

My skin is crawling. The voice that spoke to my unknown abductors was that of an avenging angel, deathly cold and crackling with violence, so certain of itself that nothing could stand against it. It’s the voice of the man who hunted down the escaped convicts on the island all those years ago.

On his third call, my grandfather left no message at all.

Looking up at the floodlit face of Malmaison, I’m more sure than ever that I don’t want to see anyone inside. Not Grandpapa. Not even Pearlie. That’s why I came on foot. If I pulled up in Michael’s Expedition, I’d be seen and questioned by everyone at home. My chances of discreetly getting a gun from my grandfather’s safe would be greatly reduced. But this way…

I trot to the far end of the mansion’s east wing, where there’s hardly any light. Most of these rooms are closed except during Spring Pilgrimage. I’ve known since the eighth grade that the lock on one window here can be slipped with a credit card. I used to sneak in this way to raid my grandfather’s liquor cabinet. Today I have no credit card—I left my purse in my car on the island—but Michael lent me an expired driver’s license to do the job. Judging by the picture on it, he was about seventy pounds heavier when the license was issued. I press the license steadily between the panels of the tall French windows. They part slightly, and the laminated license easily flips the lock.

As I climb through the heavy draperies, I smell the scent of mothballs. Most of the furniture in this wing is covered with white slip-covers. I feel as though I’m walking through a deserted museum. In the hallway, I smell bacon frying. I move quickly to my grandfather’s study, the room patterned after Napoléon’s library. The door is standing open, and the desk lamp is on, but the room is empty.

The gun safe is quite large, big enough to hold the architectural model he showed me the other day, plus his collection of rifles, shotguns, and pistols. The combination lock is easy to open—it’s my birthday. Four clicks left, eight clicks right, seventy-three left, then turn the handle. I freeze once as I turn the dial, sure that I heard footsteps in the hall, but no one appears.

When I turn the handle, the heavy steel door opens.

The casino model is gone, but the guns are there. Five rifles, three shotguns, and several handguns lying in holsters on the floor of the safe. The scent of gun oil is strong, but there’s something else, too.

Burnt gunpowder.

One by one, I pull the rifles from their slots and sniff the barrels. The first two gleam in the light, their barrels clean. But the third has recently been fired. Holding the weapon in my hands, I turn it in the light. It’s a bolt-action Remington 700, scarred from use but well maintained. As I stare, my pulse begins to race. I killed a deer with this rifle when I was a girl. But that’s not why my heart is pounding.

I’m holding the rifle that killed my father.

As a child, I asked my grandfather several times to get rid of this gun, but he never did. He saw no reason to get rid of a “good gun” for “sentimental reasons.” Knowing what I know now about what he did with this rifle—or at least the story he told me—it surprises me that he would keep it. Was it a trophy, like the Weatherby he used to bring down his bull elk in Alaska? But more important, who fired it in the last couple of days?

I don’t have time to speculate.

Replacing the rifle, I grab an automatic pistol from the bottom of the safe. Nothing big or fancy, just a Walther PPK we used for target practice on the island. The black handgun looks wet and dangerous under the light. Ejecting the clip, I see that it’s fully loaded. I’d like some extra ammunition, but I don’t see any, and I don’t have time to look. Besides, if six rounds isn’t enough to get me out of whatever scrape I get into with Malik, another six probably wouldn’t save me either.

Closing the door to the safe, it strikes me as odd that a man would leave so many guns accessible to a teenage girl who he knew suffered from depression. Grandpapa even used my birthday for the combination, for God’s sake. What was he thinking? But then…Grandpapa never saw depression as an illness, only a weakness. Maybe he figured that if I wasn’t strong enough to resist the temptation to kill myself, I didn’t deserve to live.

Back in the hall, something stops me. Faint voices floating on the air. Grandpapa first. Then Pearlie. Maybe Billy Neal, though I’m not sure. Then a richer, warmer voice chimes in. It has a submissive tone, like the voice of a laborer in his employer’s house. The warm voice belongs to Henry, the black man who drove me across the bridge to the island yesterday. He’s talking about finding my Audi this morning, and how it threw him into a panic. He’s worried that I fell into the river and drowned like my grandmother. Grandpapa says I might die a lot of ways, but drowning won’t be one of them. Then he thanks Henry for bringing back the car and bids him good-bye. Heavy footsteps sound on the hardwood.

A screen door slams.

Someone speaks, and I recognize the careless voice of Billy Neal for sure. “Maybe she hitched a ride with somebody,” he says.

“Why the hell would she do that?” Grandpapa snaps. “Her goddamn car was sitting right there with a spare set of keys in a magnetic case under the bumper. Who do you think put those keys there?”

“The Audi dealer, maybe?”

“Boy, have you got an ounce of brains in your head? Catherine put those keys there. That’s the kind of girl she is.”

“Maybe the car wouldn’t start.”

“It started right up for Henry this morning.”

“Maybe she’s still on the island, then. Maybe the bridge got covered over before she left.”

“Get the hell out of here!” bellows my grandfather. “Don’t come back till you start making some sense. That girl knows how to take care of herself. I want to know what happened down there. I’ve got enough to worry about with the casino project. Government questioning every goddamn thing on the applications, DNA tests on three-hundred-year-old teeth. Jesus. Get out of here!”

More footsteps, and the door slams again.

“What do you think, Pearlie?” asks Grandpapa.

I move closer to the door, close enough to hear Pearlie sigh.

“Am I paid to think?” she asks.

“I asked your opinion. Where is she? Where’s my grandbaby?”

“I’m afraid somebody done hurt that girl, Dr. Kirkland. Like you said, she knows how to take care of herself. And she wouldn’t leave that car behind without a good reason.”

“She might if she went into one of her manic states. What you call her spells.”

“Last time I saw her,” says Pearlie, “she looked more down than up to me. No, if Louise put her on a bicycle, then somebody followed her. She never made it to that bridge.”

“Who would do that?” asks Grandpapa.

“I’d ask that trash you got working for you where he was yesterday evening.”

The silence stretches for some time. “You think Billy followed her down there?”

“Do you know where he was yesterday?”

“Doing some business for me in Baton Rouge. Picking up some things for me.”

“Way I remember it, that island ain’t far off the highway to Baton Rouge.”

More silence. “What would Billy want with Catherine?”

“You’d know more about that than I would.” Pearlie’s voice carries a sharp rebuke. “What does any man want with any woman?”

Grandpapa makes a rumbling noise. “I’ll talk to him.”

The screen door bangs again.

I step into the kitchen.

Pearlie is standing at the sink, her back to me. She lifts an iron skillet and turns on the tap, then freezes. Slowly she turns, and her eyes go wide.

“Don’t say anything,” I whisper. “Not a word.”

She nods silently.

“I’m leaving town, Pearlie. Are my extra keys in here?”

She glances at the counter. The spring-loaded Audi key is lying on top of some mail. I grab it and return to the doorway.

“Where you going, girl?” Pearlie asks.

“I have to meet someone. I want you to tell me something first, though.”

“What?”

“Somebody did some bad things to me when I was a little girl. A man. It was either Daddy or Grandpapa. And I don’t see how you could have taken care of me for so long—you did my mother’s job, really—without knowing about that. I just don’t.”

Pearlie glances at the outside door, but her expression doesn’t change.

“You won’t tell me?” I ask.

Her face tightens in what looks like anger. “Listen to me, child. What you doing running down to the island stirring things up? What good you think you gonna do? Is any good gonna come from all this? For you? For your mama? For anybody?”

“I don’t have any choice. I have to know how and why Daddy died. And I have to know why I’m the way I am. You don’t understand that?”

She looks at the floor. “The Lord works in mysterious ways. That’s what I understand. There’s a lot of pain in this world—especially if you born a girl—but it ain’t for us to question all that. We just got to deal with it as best we can.”

“Do you really believe that, Pearlie?”

Her gaze returns to me, her eyes more intense than ever. “I got to believe it. That’s the only thing got me this far.”

“What do you mean ‘this far’? To this house? This job? Working for my grandfather?”

Indignation comes into Pearlie’s face. She speaks in a quavering voice. “I work for this family, not Dr. Kirkland. I came to work for old Mr. DeSalle in 1948, when I was seventeen years old. Your grandmama, your mama, you—you’re all DeSalles. I worked for all of you. Dr. Kirkland just the man who signs my check.”

“Is that all he is, Pearlie? Isn’t he the man who says what goes? Hasn’t he always been?”

She nods somberly. “There’s always a man who says what goes. That’s what people mean when they talk about the Man. And round here, Dr. Kirkland be the Man. Everybody knows that. Now, you gonna tell him you all right or not?”

“You can tell him after I’m gone.” I’m about to turn and go when something Michael said comes back to me, accompanied by a fragmentary image from my dreams—the black figure fighting over my bed with my father.

“Did you pull the trigger that night, Pearlie?”

The whites of the old woman’s eyes grow large. “Have you lost your mind, child? What you think you’re saying?”

“Did you kill my father? That’s what I’m asking you. Did you kill him to protect me from him?”

She shakes her head slowly. “Where you going in that car?”

“To find out the truth about this family.”

“Where you gonna find that?”

“Don’t worry about it. But when I find it, I’ll let you know. And then you can pretend you didn’t know all along.”

Pearlie opens her mouth as if to speak, but no sound emerges.

I shake my head, then turn and run back up the hallway.

I expected to find Billy Neal and my grandfather talking behind the house, but there’s no sign of them. Glancing around the parking lot, I move quickly to the Audi, flicking the electric unlock button as I go.

As I grab the door handle, Billy Neal rises from behind Pearlie’s Cadillac. He’s wearing black jeans, a green silk shirt, and snakeskin cowboy boots. His eyes are as dead as the snakes that adorn his boots, but they lock onto mine with mechanical precision.

“I’ll be damned,” he says. “A lot of people think you’re dead.”

“Is that what you thought?”

A faint smile plays across his lips. “I gave it even money.”

“Why do you hate me, Billy? You don’t even know me.”

He walks up to the Audi and stares at me over the roof. “Oh, I know you. I’ve fucked girls just like you. Pampered princesses, trust fund waiting, never had to worry a day in their damn lives. And still you blow half your money going to shrinks.”

“Why do you care?”

He lays his forearms on the roof and leans toward me. “’Cause you think your shit don’t stink. You look in my direction and you don’t even see me. In the daytime, anyway. But at night it’s a different story, isn’t it? At night, I’m just the guy you’re looking for. I’ve heard about you, Miss Cat in the Hat. You like to party, don’t you? People still remember you from high school. The rich girl who loved to have fun. They still remember your aunt, too. Same story, only worse.”