Rising Tides (4 page)

Inside, she paused in the center hallway, compelled by the oddity of the circumstances to make small talk. “It’s a large house, though it doesn’t look like it from the outside. It was built by an Acadian family more than a hundred years ago.
When I was a little girl, I used to lie awake at night and listen for their voices.”

“Did you ever hear them?”

“What would you think if I said yes?”

“That you have imagination.”

“I’m a photographer. Some people don’t think that takes imagination.”

“Some people don’t think singing other people’s songs takes imagination, either.”

Dawn felt the flush of camaraderie. She pointed out the layout of the rooms downstairs, then started up to the second floor. Her mother had disappeared, and Dawn hoped she wouldn’t meet her now. Since she had openly defied her father, she anticipated his appearance with even less enthusiasm.

She led Nicky to the bedroom at the end of the hall way in the addition. It was large and airy, furnished with pine and cypress antiques of straight, simple lines. The bed, a nineteenth-century tester, was draped in hand-crocheted lace.

“This was my grandmother’s room.” Dawn stepped inside. Immediately she was embraced by the entwined fragrances of roses and vetiver, fragrances she would al ways associate with Aurore. “I think you’ll be comfort able here. There’s a private bath.”

“Your grandmother’s room?”

“It’s one of the larger ones in the house, and it was her favorite, because there really is a view of sorts, if you step out here.” She walked to the French doors leading out to a small balcony and threw them open. Immediately fresh air swept into the room, licking at the scents.

“Why are you giving this room to me?”

Dawn faced her. “Why not?”

“You know the answer to that.”

Dawn was afraid she did. She was the daughter of Ferris Lee Gerritsen, noted for his opposition to civil rights, and blood was supposed to tell. “I hope you won’t hold my father’s prejudices against me. We’re not at all the same.”

“You’re not at all what I would have expected.”

“Well, you’re even more.” As a photojournalist, Dawn had learned to quickly assess faces. Nicky was one of those rare women who would be equally beautiful on film or in person. Her dark hair hugged her head in short, soft curls. Her eyes were an impenetrable green, the still surface of a tree-shaded bayou. Her features were broad and strong, sensual, earthy and somehow—and this fascinated Dawn most of all—wise. Nicky was at least as old as Dawn’s own parents, but age seemed only to have intensified her assets.

She realized she was staring. “You were a great favorite of
Grandmère
’s. I grew up listening to your voice. Seventy-eights at first. Then 45s. Then albums, with your photograph smiling at me from the record rack.”

“Your grandmother was a complete stranger to me.”

“I think you would have liked her.”

Nicky ran her hand over the lace coverlet, but she didn’t answer. Dawn heard footsteps on the stairs and realized that their private moment was about to end. “This situation is extraordinary, Mrs. Reynolds. Please tell me if there’s anything I can do to make it more comfortable for you.”

“It’s not going to be comfortable, no matter what any of us do.”

“You haven’t met Pelichere Landry yet. She was a friend of
Grandmère
’s, and she takes care of the cottage when no one’s here. I know she’s set out food in the kitchen. When you’ve settled in, please introduce your self, and she’ll show you where everything is.”

Dawn stepped aside as Jake and Phillip entered. Ben was carrying a suitcase, but he stopped in the doorway. Without a word, she moved past him.

“So you decided to come.” Phillip kissed his mother’s forehead, and didn’t have to bend far to do it. She was only half a head shorter than his six-foot-two.

“I don’t know why I did.” Nicky pushed him away before he could answer. She and Phillip had gone round and round about this invitation to Grand Isle since the moment it arrived. She had flatly refused to come, but somehow she had ended up here anyway. “And don’t bother telling me you don’t know why I was invited. You never could lie worth anything. You know a whole lot more about this situation than you’ve let on so far.”

“Have you had supper?” Jake asked Phillip.

“There weren’t a lot of places on the way down where I could have been sure to leave with a full stomach
and
a full set of teeth.”

Jake laughed, but both men knew the truth behind Phillip’s joke. Black humor, some called it. Both men had theories about that.

“Dawn told me that someone’s set out food for us in the kitchen,” Nicky said.

Jake set down the suitcase he had carried. “Suppose she meant we’ll be eating in the kitchen while the white folks eat in the dining room?”

“No, I don’t suppose that’s what she meant. She was trying to make us welcome.”

“If Dawn’s anything like her father,” Phillip said, “she can charm you right straight to the center of a lie, and you’ll never even know you’ve been there.”

“Would you like me to go down to the kitchen and see if I can get something to bring up?” Jake asked Nicky.

“I’d like that. Phillip?”

Phillip shrugged. “You don’t have to leave us alone, Jake.”

“Think I do.”

Nicky watched her husband leave. His footsteps were no longer audible when she spoke. “I think it’s time you did some explaining.”

Phillip wandered the room, stopping at a bedside table. Wildflowers bloomed in a cut-glass vase, and a handful of novels fanned out along the edges in invitation. “You’re one of the few people who know that Aurore Gerritsen hired me to write her life story. That she dictated it to me chapter and verse.”

“Knowing’s not the same as understanding.”

“Have you wondered just how far she went? How much she told me about her life?”

Nicky didn’t reply.

Phillip faced her. “She left out nothing.”

“How can you know what she left out?” She wandered to the French doors and gazed out over wizened water oaks bending in the wind.

Phillip joined her, putting his hand on her arm. His skin was smooth and brown in contrast to hers. “I can tell you this. I learned that a man I once called Hap, a man I knew in Morocco a long time ago, was really Hugh Gerritsen.”

She stiffened and shook off Phillip’s hand. “Is that why we’re here? Because once upon a time we knew Aurore Gerritsen’s son?”

“I think that’s some part of it.”

He had succeeded in making her look at him. “And what are the other parts?” she said.

“I can’t speak for Aurore. Not yet. But maybe I can speak for you. I think you came for answers to questions you gave up asking yourself a long time ago. Questions you’re going to need to share with Jake very soon. Be cause I don’t think any of us was invited here so that we could hold tight to our secrets.”

Something went still inside her. “You’ve always been the one with questions. That’s why you do what you do for a living. You probe and you probe, like a tongue that can’t keep away from a sore tooth.”

“If you worry a tooth long enough, eventually it gives way.”

“You think that’s what will happen here?”

“I think we can be assured of it.”

She wondered how much Phillip really knew about her relationship with Hugh Gerritsen, exactly how much he had been told and how much he remembered. Phillip had been young during those days so long ago, but his memory had always been extraordinary.

As if he could read her mind, he nodded. “You know to be careful, don’t you?” he asked.

“Careful of what? The truth? The senator?”

“The senator, for starters.”

“So we’re switching roles? When you were a little boy, I warned you about crossing the street, and now that I’m an old woman, you warn me about ghosts and bigots?”

“Something like that. Except for the old-woman part.”

“I know to be careful. I’m so careful I almost didn’t come. You be careful, too.”

“I’ve got careful running through my veins. Only reason my veins are still running.”

Jake appeared in the doorway with a tray. “I only had hands enough for two plates, Phillip. But there’s plenty more
in the kitchen, and you’re welcome to come back up and eat with us.”

“I think I’ll just go settle in.”

Nicky followed her son to the door without saying anything more. She was both glad and sorry that their conversation was finished. Too much had been said, or perhaps not enough. She was too upset to know. When he was gone, she took glasses of iced tea off Jake’s tray.

Jake moved closer. “Are you all right?”

“I’m just fine.” She waited until he set the tray on the bed before she went into his arms.

She stood in his embrace and listened to the sound of thunder in the distance. Finally she pulled away. “There’s still time to leave, Jake.”

He pulled her close again, and she resisted for only a moment. “Do you want them saying you’re afraid? That you didn’t think you were good enough to face down the Gerritsens and find out what this is all about?”

She was all too afraid she knew what it was about. “I don’t care what anybody thinks.”

“You’d leave your son here to face them alone?”

“At least the food smells good,” she said at last.

“And there are some people here who might be worth knowing.”

Nicky thought of Dawn and the things Phillip had said about her. She wondered if Dawn knew how much she looked like the young Hugh Gerritsen.

“Shall we eat?”

Jake moved toward the bed, but he seemed in no hurry to get the tray. He smoothed his hand over the lace spread, much as Nicky had done herself. “Then I think we should retire for the night.”

“
Retire
’s not exactly the word you have in mind, is it?”

He flashed her his slow, certain-of-himself smile. “I figure if we’ve got to be here, there ought to be compensations.”

She considered telling him that no matter how important staying here was, she wouldn’t be able to if he wasn’t beside her. But she decided not to. She just smiled slowly and held out her arms. And in her own way, she let him know.

C
appy Gerritsen needed only one glance around the downstairs bedroom that she and Ferris always shared to set her off. “I told you we shouldn’t have come.”

Ferris didn’t raise an eyebrow or point out that she had been silent for the entire two-and-a-half-hour trip from New Orleans. Cappy frequently alternated between stony silences and passionate oratory. After twenty-some years of marriage, neither upset him greatly.

He lit a cigarette and watched the smoke spiral to the ceiling, where it was sternly disciplined by a fan. One of the few similarities between Cappy and his mother had been their mutual distaste for air-conditioning. Each spring his New Orleans home was held hostage to the heat and humidity until mid-June. The cottage, thanks to his mother’s whims, was unbearable the entire summer.

“Don’t look at me like that. You obviously feel the same way.” Cappy sucked in her bottom lip—a manner ism that had been adorably provocative on a debutante and was nothing short of irritating on a forty-seven-year-old matron.

Ferris snuffed the cigarette in a potted fern and lit an other. “I came out of respect for my mother.”

“That’s what you call driving all this way to be con fronted by these people?”

When Ferris didn’t try to soothe her, Cappy began fidgeting with the shells lined up along the top of a chest of drawers. “Surely you can’t think this makes any sense. Isn’t it bad enough that your mother ordered an immediate cremation? Everyone expected the family to announce the date and time for a funeral mass. Now this. When the word gets out, our friends will think your mother is still leading us around by our noses.”

“I doubt they’ll be that perceptive.”

She looked down at her arrangement, dissatisfied. She tried lining the shells up by size. “Dawn didn’t even call. I sent cables everywhere I could think of to tell her about your mother’s death, and she didn’t even call. Until I saw her standing on the gallery, I didn’t even know if she’d gotten the message.”

From the beginning, Ferris had understood the roots of Cappy’s little tantrum. He paid lip service to it, even as he silently tried to make sense of what his mother had done. “Dawn made it clear some time ago that she does what she wants.”

“This is ridiculous. I don’t want to stay here even one night. This can’t have any bearing on your inheritance.”

“As old as he is, Spencer St. Amant’s still a worthy adversary. He’s often done what he damned well pleased and gotten away with it. I’m sure that’s why Mother chose him to oversee this little drama.”

She moved a large conch to the center and stepped back to view it. “Well, I know the law, and the law says your mother had no choice but to leave you a third of her estate.”

“Do we want a third, or do we want it all? There’s the controlling interest in Gulf Coast to consider.”

He watched as her hands went still. Gulf Coast Ship ping was the crown jewel of the Gerritsen family, a multimillion-dollar financial empire that was synonymous with the port of New Orleans and traffic on the Mississippi. Cappy’s own family was wealthy, but Gulf Coast, and Ferris’s connection to it, gave her the power in New Orleans society that she desired.

Ferris fully appreciated that desire. Cappy was an asset he had recognized long ago. When she chose, she could radiate breeding and charm, while simultaneously extolling her husband’s political virtues. Cappy, with her River Road plantation gentility, could work a room like a southern Jackie Kennedy.

He gave her a moment to consider before he continued. “I’ll talk to Spencer and insist he get this over with quickly. If he doesn’t agree, we could always take our chances and drive back to the city. But, of course, if we leave, we won’t know exactly what transpires here, will we?”

“You don’t miss a thing.”

He strolled to her side and leaned over to kiss her cheek. “You’ll stay, then?”

“As always, my choices seem limited.”

“Go ahead and unpack a few things. I’m going to explore and see what I can find out.”

When he reached the doorway, Ferris took one last look over his shoulder. Cappy was leaning over the chest once more, compulsively rearranging the shells. The room was simple, casual and quaint, as only rooms in a summer home can be. But there was nothing there, or in the sprawling twelve-room house, for that matter, that didn’t underscore the ambience of old money and tradition.

And there was nothing that didn’t reek of family now vanished forever.

Ferris had spent all the summers of his boyhood in this place. He hoped this was the last summer he would ever see it.

Dawn unpacked the few clothes she’d brought with her, then wandered the bedroom as memories stung her. Some things were much as they had been years before. The closet still held clothes she had worn as a teenager. A pink bathing suit with a pleated skirt lay in the bottom drawer of the pine dresser, faded rubber flip-flops tucked neatly under it. The view was one she remembered. She stopped at the window and gazed outside at a gray drizzle, leftovers from the earlier shower. The Gulf was just visible here, a wedge of turbulent water that mirrored her emotions.

She turned at the sound of rapping on her door. “Come in.”

Three men had helped shape her into the woman she had become. Ben was the third, her uncle Hugh the second. The man who appeared in her bedroom doorway was the first, and possibly the most important.

She nodded warily. “Daddy.”

Ferris smiled. “You must be my daughter. No one else calls me Daddy.”

She tapered her own smile into a warning. “If that keeps up, I’ll wish I hadn’t come home.”

“You should have called your mother, darling.”

“I know that.” She crossed the room and rose on tip toe to kiss his cheek. “I just needed some time alone to think about
Grandmère
’s death.”

“That’s one of your problems. You always think too much.”

She stepped away from him and shook her head. “This is
the sixties. Women are allowed to think. You’d do well to remember that, if you want to be the next governor.”

“So you read, too. What do you think my chances are?”

Dawn thought his chances were good, but she thought telling him was a bad idea. The state of Louisiana would benefit from a humbler Ferris Gerritsen—but not as much as it would benefit from a more liberal man in the governor’s mansion. “What do you think?” she countered.

“I think you’d better face your mother and get it over with. She’s furious at you for not getting in touch.”

She put that aside for a moment, only too aware of the scene to come. “Daddy, do you know what this is about?”

“No, but I intend to find out. I don’t believe your grandmother really invited Nicky Reynolds and her family here.”

Dawn didn’t want to address that. Not yet. “Do you know why Ben Townsend was invited?”

His expression didn’t change, but then, his thoughts were rarely visible. “No. Are the two of you—”

She cut him off with a wave of her hand. “I haven’t seen him since…in a year.”

“Apparently your grandmother had a sense of humor I never appreciated.”

She stepped back to view him better. “Don’t dredge up old scores to settle with Ben.”

His expression was still pleasant. His voice was not. “Ben Townsend doesn’t belong in this house, and he doesn’t belong with you.”

That was undoubtedly true, but she didn’t want to give her father the satisfaction of knowing he was right. “That’s over now.”

“It should never have started.”

“If we could change history, there’d probably be more
significant mistakes for both of us to worry about, wouldn’t there?”

His response was interrupted by a noise on the stairs. Dawn looked beyond her father to see her mother coming toward them. She added guilt to the carousel of feelings she had experienced in the past hour, and prepared herself. “Mother.”

Cappy Gerritsen stopped on the third step from the top, her posture regal. Dawn envisioned a younger Cappy, the prewar New Orleans debutante, gliding across the floor of her family’s River Road home with a volume of Emily Post on her head.

Cappy’s body was still gracefully curved and firm, and though she was a size larger than the six she claimed, neither age nor an extra fifteen pounds could destroy her basic beauty. No silver showed in her pale gold hair, and only twin frown lines between perfectly shaped eye brows signaled her basic dissatisfaction with life.

“Don’t badger Dawn, Cappy,” Ferris warned. “Just be glad she’s home.”

Dawn went to the head of the stairs, but her mother had made it impossible to embrace her. Cappy had al ways been three impossible steps away. “You look wonderful,” Dawn said. “Daddy’s plan to become the next Huey Long must agree with you.”

Cappy didn’t attempt to be polite. “You could have called.”

“I know.”

“Your grandmother dies, and you can’t even call your father or me to tell us you’re sorry?”

“Cappy.” Ferris joined his daughter. “Dawn and I have already discussed this.”

Dawn dredged up a smile. “I’ll go on record. I’m a failure as a daughter. Okay? Now can we go on to some thing else?”

“You disappeared off the face of the earth for a year. You didn’t call. You didn’t write. You didn’t visit. What are we to you, anyway?”

The smile died. “Right now you’re a living reminder of why I didn’t do any of those things.”

“Well, your grandmother’s not a reminder anymore, is she? Where were you when she needed you here?”

“You know where I was. I was in England, trying to find out if there was anywhere in this world where I could be something more than a member of this family.”

“You don’t have to be part of this family at all!”

Ferris stepped between them. “I’m not going to listen to any more of this.” He turned to Dawn. “There’s enough happening here without you and your mother going after each other.”

She shook her head in wonder. “My God, I’m a kid again.”

“Both of you are tired,” Ferris said. “This is a difficult time. Wait until you’ve rested before you talk.”

“I found Pelichere. She has drinks out for us.” Cappy started down the steps.

Dawn accepted Ferris’s brief hug, but she didn’t re turn it. “I’ll be down in a little while,” she said. “Let me comb my hair.”

She waited until he was gone before she took up her station at the window again. A year ago she had journeyed to another continent to banish her emotions, but now she knew she hadn’t succeeded. The child who had summered in this room was still inside her. The teenager who had longed for the love of her parents dwelt there, too. And the young woman who had given herself body and soul to Ben Townsend still cried out for understanding and forgiveness.

By the faint glimmer of a cloud-hazed moon, Pelichere swept the cottage gallery until not one grain of sand was lodged between the weathered boards. Dawn had offered to do it for her, but Pelichere had refused.

“I doubt anyone will even notice the fine job I’m doing,” Pelichere said, “but your mama would notice if the job wasn’t so fine.
Mais
yeah. She’d notice, just like she noticed the water stains on her bedroom ceiling, under the spot where the shingles blew off last week.”

Dawn leaned against a pillar, not at all anxious to go inside again. After an evening that had seemed endless, the house was quiet now, as if everyone had scurried to their rooms like ghost crabs hiding from shadows. She hoped they all stayed in their individual holes, particularly her parents. “Did she give you trouble?”

“How was I to know that storm would pry off shingles that haven’t budged in a century? At fifty-seven I’m supposed to climb up on the roof and inspect, shingle by shingle, every time it rains? I’d be up on the roof more than I’d be down on the ground. So maybe your parents should make their home on Grand Isle now that your grandmother, she’s dead. What shingles would blow off with Senator and Mrs. Ferris Lee Gerritsen living here?”

“Is it going to be their house after the will’s read? Seems to me
Grandmère
always said she was going to leave the house to you.”

“She said that, yeah. But there was more she didn’t say.”

A shrill whistle cut through the air. Pelichere turned and raised a hand in greeting as a pickup rattled along the oak-lined drive. “Joe and Izzy Means from down the road. Do you remember them,
chère?
”

“A little.”

Joe and Izzy got out, and Joe went around to the back of the truck, while Izzy trundled her substantial bulk up the path to the house. “I been cooking,” Izzy said, be fore she’d even reached the steps. “And cooking, cooking, cooking. It’s not right you should have to cook for the next four days, you with guests.”

Dawn was sure Izzy knew the so-called guests weren’t Pelichere’s. She supposed that was half the reason Izzy had arrived. In South Louisiana, keeping up with neighbors was still the favored evening recreation.

Pelichere introduced Dawn, and Dawn leaned over for Izzy’s enthusiastic kiss. Then she watched Joe, one ton to Izzy’s two, stagger up the path, well behind his wife, his arms loaded with grocery bags.

“What’d you go and do, Izzy?” Pelichere asked. “Drain the Gulf and cook everything left wriggling on the bottom?”

Pelichere scolded her friend while Joe made several trips from the truck. He left when he had finished, announcing that he was going down to the water to see what the dedicated fishermen still lining the beach were pulling in.

“Pelichere, you sit out here with Izzy,” Dawn said. “I’ll bring you both some coffee.”

Pelichere demurred, but Dawn ignored her. She re turned in a moment with cups and a pot of coffee Pelichere had left to drip in the kitchen. The coffee was thick and rich, black as goddamn, just the way Pelichere and Izzy liked it. Strong dark-roast coffee was as much a part of the local culture as seagulls and fishing luggers.

“So tell me, Peli,” Izzy said, stirring three spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee—for energy, “how’s it going?”

Dawn left them to chat.

The kitchen was one of the more modern rooms in the house. The original kitchen had been built behind the house as protection against fire and summer heat. The foundation was still visible fifty feet away, and a portion of one wall remained, blanketed by an orange-flowering trumpet vine that was often alive with the frantic darting of hummingbirds.