Marisa Carroll - Hotel Marchand 09 (10 page)

H
ER HANDS
were still shaking as she folded the corset and petticoat and laid them on the horsehair fainting couch that she’d had Guy and his buddies move out of the main aisle to a spot under the balcony staircase. She’d spent two hours on the Internet trying to track down its origins when she couldn’t find one like it in any of the reference books Maude had kept stashed under the counter. She smiled a little as she sat down to tie her shoes. She’d finally come across the description of one similar in many respects on an obscure Web site devoted to handmade reproductions. She wasn’t one-hundred-percent certain—she’d have to rely on the appraiser’s opinion—but if the markings on the under-side were authentic, Maude had picked up a gem of an antebellum piece, hand-carved by slave labor on a Mississippi plantation known for its furniture-making.

She would have to contact one of the big dealers in New Orleans or Houston to see if they would take it on commission or maybe put it up for auction. She’d probably get enough for it to pay the appraiser’s fee if the bidding went high enough.

She gave the corset a final pat and started up the aisle toward the stage. She couldn’t believe she’d given in to the temptation to try the darned thing on when she’d known Alain would be dropping by to check on the roof sometime that afternoon. Or had she hoped he might find her in it?

Of course not,
she told herself sternly. It had merely been the natural curiosity of a twenty-first-century woman to experience what her great-great-grandmother had endured in the name of fashion. As for Alain showing up, she’d simply lost track of time, that was all. And now that she thought about it, oddly enough, she hadn’t felt oppressed by the constrictions of the garment. She’d felt, well, feminine, sexy and alluring.

“That’s because you didn’t lace up tightly enough to feel oppressed,” she scolded herself.

“Did you say something?” Alain stretched out a hand to help her up the set of steep narrow steps to the stage.

“Just talking to myself.” When she was safely on the apron, he dropped down on his haunches and began looking through the stack of tapes and the few CDs she’d found, along with the decade-old boom box in one of Maude’s filing cabinets.

Alain held up a CD. “Beausoleil. Good stuff. Classic zydeco.” Sophie liked the foot-tapping music but it wasn’t something she sought out unless she was in Indigo.

“Ever listen to these guys?” He popped the lid on the boom box, to place the CD inside. “Indigo Boneshakers.”

“Local?” she asked, looking down on him. He’d taken off the Stetson and laid it at the edge of the stage. His dark-brown hair glinted with chestnut highlights, and as far as she could tell, it was as thick as it had been when he was younger. Her fingers itched to reach out and feel for herself if it was still as soft as she remembered.

“Yeah, a couple of the guys are. My dispatcher Billy Paul Exeter’s the drummer. The rest are from Lafayette and around.” Alain pushed the Play button and the music started again. “This album’s pure Cajun, but these guys play everything from zydeco to Elvis. I sit in with them now and then when they need a fiddle player.”

“Why didn’t you follow your dream and try and make it in the music business?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Life happened. I grew up fast after we broke up.”

“It took me a lot longer,” she said, thinking of her carefree college days, the whirlwind of parties that followed her engagement to Randall, the fairy-tale wedding. And the divorce that had sent her running back to Indigo and into Alain’s arms.

He was following his own train of thought. His voice was low and quiet, whiskey-rough, as it rasped across her nerve endings. “It was the right thing to do, Sophie. Letting you go.”

She sighed. She’d been hurt and disappointed but she hadn’t been ready for marriage and they both knew it. “I had my way to find, too.” She thought of her failed marriage and her own unfulfilled dreams of a home and children. “I just wish I hadn’t taken a wrong turn along the way.”

“You and me both.”

“You have Guy and Dana. Doesn’t that make up for a lot of hurt?”

“They’re my life. I’d like to believe becoming a husband and a father made me a man, but it was the army that did that. Working at the husband and father jobs came later. You might say I’m still a work in progress in that department.”

He smiled the crooked grin that started at one corner of his mouth and worked its way across his face just as it had when he was young. But today it didn’t quite reach his eyes.

“You gave up your dream for them,” she said.

“That’s all it was, Sophie, a boy’s dream. I had a family to support on a cop’s pay. There wasn’t time for music. There still isn’t, except now and then.”

“No regrets?”

“Just one.” Their eyes locked. Her heart began to beat a little faster. She knew he was talking about her and what they’d had and been too young to keep hold of. He stood up and the moment was broken. “We’d better head upstairs or we’ll lose the light.”

He held out his hand to help her up. Too much time had gone by to resurrect the past. Neither of them were kids anymore. It was impossible to rekindle what they’d felt for each other so long ago. Wasn’t it?

“Here’s the stairs,” he said, leading her behind the stage. When she was little and had sneaked back here, it had always surprised her how light and airy the space was. The beadboard paneling was painted white and sunlight streamed in through three tall narrow windows along the back of the building. There were no dressing rooms, but long iron rods that had once held curtains, giving the actors some privacy for costume changes, still protruded from the walls, as well as rows of wrought-iron hooks for hanging street clothes and props. To her disappointment, then and now, none of those props or pieces of scenery remained. But if Marjolaine and Hugh were right, some of those relics might be right above her head.

Alain walked to the far end of the building to a door that Sophie didn’t remember from her childhood. He pulled a key out of his pocket and fitted it into the deadbolt lock.

“Has this door always been here?” she asked. “I can’t recall seeing it when I was little and searching for a way into the cupola.”

“The stairway’s always been here, but Maude kept the doorway boarded up and painted over. She figured it would keep teenagers from trying to climb up here. It was a pretty big deal, kind of a rite of passage in my granddad’s day. She put a new door on after Katrina blew through and the workmen needed to be in and out of the attic to fix the roof.”

“Why didn’t she have it boarded up again when the roof was fixed? I’d think it would be just as much of a challenge to kids today as it was to your granddad.”

“Hugh Prejean and some of the others asked her not to. Besides, I’d taken over the chief’s job by then and she figured her tax money was paying for me to keep vandals off the property.” An equal mixture of exasperation and amusement underscored his words.

Sophie smiled, too. “That sounds like something she would say.”

Alain unhooked a flashlight from his belt. “Ready? It’s darker than Hades up here. No electricity.”

Once more he offered his hand, and this time Sophie was ready for the tiny frisson of awareness his touch produced. The stairs were narrow and steep, but when they stood at the top she gasped in surprise. Most of the big room was in shadow, but directly under the cupola was a pool of muted sunlight. The floor was covered in wide-planked cypress and seemed sturdy enough. Alain must have thought so, because he strode off without any hesitation, shining the flashlight up into the rafters.

As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, Sophie lost interest in the condition of the roof. All around her were piles and piles of…treasure, just as Marjolaine had said. Old sign boards announcing the appearance of Vaudeville acts and minstrel shows, oil lanterns that looked as if they must be the original stage lighting, a huge roll of canvas that would have taken half a dozen men to carry up those narrow stairs. A thought struck her. “Alain, is that what I think it is?”

He turned around, the flashlight beam sliding across the floor in front of him, illuminating a stack of painted scenery portraying a scene that could only be Venice and must have been the backdrop of a century-old production of Shakespeare or perhaps an Italian opera. “I know exactly what it is,” he said, shining his light on the canvas, and she heard amusement in his voice. “It’s the original stage curtain from downstairs.”

“What’s it doing up here? I mean, it’s valuable. Maybe irreplaceable.”

He came over and dropped onto his haunches beside her. “It’s only irreplaceable to those of us who live here in Indigo.” He reached out and poked the big, heavy roll with his flashlight. “It’s up here because it’s too far gone to restore. Maude and the others were just trying to keep it from deteriorating any further. They were hoping to be able to recreate it…if they ever got the money.”

“It still should be stored somewhere with better climate control and where mice and bugs can’t get at it.”

“You’re beginning to sound like an antique dealer.”

“It’s a piece of history,” she said indignantly, but she did feel as if she’d made a rare discovery. It was a feeling she never had wining and dining prospective university donors for Clarkson and Hillman, and never would, she thought with a pang.

“Probably,” he said. “But you’re forgetting—technically it belongs to the owner of the building. Some Canadian guy who isn’t interested in the place beyond the revenue it brings in.”

She looked around. “How sad. Those boxes are probably more of the opera-house records. They need to be stored correctly, too. There’s a lot of history here.”

“There is.” He held out his hand and Sophie’s heart skipped a beat or two as she took it. So much for telling herself they could be comfortable together, just old friends. It wasn’t working. At least not for her. “We’d better get back downstairs.”

She willed her stuttering heart back into rhythm and stood up, but the octagonal pool of sunlight beckoned. Within its radius a narrow, ladderlike stairway led to an equally narrow catwalk beneath the cupola windows. “I may never get back up here. I’d like to see the view from the skylight. It must be marvelous. Can you spare a minute or two before we go back downstairs?”

“Sure. I haven’t been in the attic since after Katrina and Rita, and then it was to wrestle half a dozen sheets of plywood up here to board up the broken windows. The view wasn’t all that great then.” His face darkened as he thought back to those dark days. “But I’ll bet it is today.”

“Who paid to replace the broken glass?” she asked as she mounted the rusty metal treads. She was very conscious of Alain behind her as she stepped onto the catwalk, his heat, his scent, his bulk.

“Insurance. The landlord may be absentee but he’s conscientious. He keeps plenty of insurance on the building.”

She leaned her hands on the sill of one of the narrow windows that ringed the copper-roofed cupola and looked out over the Bayou Teche, brown-green and sluggish as it flowed behind the building. She knew that the old Valois plantation had once sat on the high ground on the far shore, but it had burned to the ground sometime in the early nineteen hundreds and nothing remained of the house or outbuildings. The land had been sold off in pieces even before that time, if she remembered Maude’s rambling history lessons. “Do you suppose it looked like Shadows-on-the-Teche?” she asked, referring to the famous restored plantation house not many miles away in New Iberia where Maude had taken her as a child.

“What?” Alain asked, turning toward her. He had moved to the front of the skylight and was looking down over the town square.

Sophie hid her smile. A cop first, last and always, he was observing his domain, not dreaming of hoop-skirted belles and dashing cavalry officers with swords at their sides.

“The old Valois plantation. Do you think it was as beautiful as Shadows-on-the-Teche?”

“I doubt it,” he said. “It was a big house for these parts but nothing to compare to Shadows. I don’t know if there are any pictures of the place still in existence. I’ll ask my grandmother. She was a Valois, you know. A poor relation of the original family. The land-owning Valois immigrated to Canada after Reconstruction. The only one ever to come back was Amelie, Alexandre Valois’s widow. She’s buried beside him in St. Timothy’s cemetery.”

“I know that part of the story. Growing up, I thought it was the most romantic thing in the world that she came back here and died at his graveside.”

“Funny, I always thought it was a foolish trip for a sick old woman to make in the dead of winter.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Just like a man.” She picked out the angel that crowned the white marble Valois vault standing above all the others in the church cemetery. “No romance in your soul. You can quote all the facts you want, but I’ll always believe she clung to life until she could be reunited with her lost love. Indigo’s own Evangeline and Gabriel.”

“You’ll have to write up the story for the tourists. Too bad no one’s ever claimed to see or hear their ghosts in here. That would be a real draw.”

“If Amelie was going to haunt somewhere, this would be the perfect place. Maude said she had a beautiful voice.”

“So I’ve always heard.”

She turned her head and found him watching her. She took a step away from him because he was standing too close and she liked it.

“Be careful or you’ll fall over the railing,” he cautioned.

Since the railing was only knee-high she did as he told her. “Is that your mother’s house?” she asked, pointing toward Lafayette Street.

“Yep,” he said. “And there’s my grandmother’s place two streets over.”

“This is a marvelous view,” she said, her gaze resting first on the Blue Moon Diner and then the Savoy Funeral Home. She let her eyes follow the river’s meandering path out the Bayou Road toward La Petite Maison. Thinking of Luc’s establishment brought her back to a sense of time and place. “Oh dear,” she said aloud. “What time is it? I promised Luc I’d be back for tea this afternoon. He’s serving some new pastries that Loretta Castille baked this morning. He’s booked for the weekend and I gather he wants to make a good impression on the new guests.”