Shattered Dreams: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (23 page)

“At what?” I asked, because seriously, I was starting to think my grandmother had spent her whole life keeping secrets from me. “Lying?”

“Protecting.”

There it was again. One man’s lies … another man’s virtue. “From
what
?”

Fourcade pushed back to his feet, the way he crossed the patio reminding me, for some crazy reason, of an ancient wolf, once powerful but now worn out from all that he’d seen.
Done.

“From the truth,” he said, and all I could think was here we go again. More circles. “About your mama,” he added before I could call him out on the doublespeak. “And yourself.”

It wasn’t until I felt the sting that I realized I’d curled my hands into fists. Wincing, I glanced down at the ooze of blood once again staining the gauze.

“Sweet Mary.”
Fourcade was by my side before I could manage even a breath, going down on his knee and taking my hands in his with the same unexpected gentleness he’d bestowed upon the plants. “What happened?”

“Just an accident,” I said, stunned by the way his big bony fingers could move so tenderly, slowly unwrapping the bandage.

“Hey, what are you doing—” Chase started, but this man, this former cop who’d known my parents, silenced him with a quick, lethal glance.

“Get me Mama Faye’s salve!” he shouted, and I looked from him to Chase, wondering who in the world he was talking to.

Within seconds, I had my answer.

The dog-silencer emerged from the darkness of the house, moving with the same sleek, predatorlike grace as when he’d stood in the shadows of the patio. He was taller up close, a hint of a goatee at his jaw, his hawklike eyes as silver as the man kneeling before me.

The two exchanged a quick look I didn’t understand. Then Fourcade was turning my hands palm up and the younger version of him was joining him on his knees, bringing the shiny silver tube over my palms.

“What the—” Chase started—but Fourcade blasted him with another of those slicing looks.

This time Chase refused to be silenced. He lunged closer, reaching for me. “Ever heard of asking?”

Fourcade stood and stopped him. Vaguely I was aware of the way the cop took Chase by his arms and backed him away, of the terse exchange of voices. But only vaguely. I couldn’t have looked at them if I’d tried, not with the way the younger version of Fourcade kneeled in front of me, squeezing the tube over my palms. With a single finger he spread the amber salve along each of the cuts, leaving a tingle of warmth everywhere he touched.

“This will help,” he said, and it was all I could do to swallow. Because I saw him then, saw that he was no man, but much younger, probably not much older than me. Unlike all the silver of his father, he was dark, with closely cropped hair the color of night, his complexion that of olives, his jaw clean-shaven. His cheekbones were razor sharp, his eyes deep-set.

Wolf and hawk,
I thought a little maniacally, but with a whole new sympathy for Alice and the rabbit hole.

“You need to be more careful,” he said, those silver eyes lingering on mine for a heartbeat longer than was comfortable. And then, he was gone.

“What the hell,” Chase was saying, shoving against Fourcade. But there was no longer a need. The cop released him, stepped back while Chase dropped down in front of me, taking my palm-up hands in his. “Are you okay?”

I nodded, staring at the angry red wounds. But that was a lie. I was not okay, not even close, not when I could still feel a slow burn seeping through flesh and muscle, deeper, closer, clear to the bone.

“What is this stuff?” Chase asked, glancing toward Fourcade.

I couldn’t help but wonder what Chase was the most upset about—the mystery salve, or the way the Silent One had touched me.

Fourcade joined us, offering Chase a roll of gauze. “It will help,” was all he said.

Chase muttered his doubt under his breath as he started to wrap my left hand. Then he looked up at me. “You can wash it off, later.”

Peripherally I saw Fourcade stiffen, and realized I’d arrived at a crossroads, whether I wanted to be there, or not. I could wash the reddish, sulfur-smelling stuff off. That was true. And maybe I should. That would have been the smart, rational, logical thing to do. I didn’t know Jim Fourcade from an axe murderer. I only knew that he’d known my parents—and that he recognized me.

That did not mean he didn’t want to hurt me.

But some inner awareness stopped the tug-of-war before it really got started.

“No,” I whispered, and really, only a few days before the flicker of dismay in Chase’s eyes would have changed my mind.

But standing beneath the twirling dream catcher on Jim Fourcade’s back porch, I realized if I wanted answers, this was a path I had to take.

“Why did you call my mother Marguerite?” I asked, lifting my chin to stare Fourcade straight in the eyes.

His smile was oddly satisfied. “To see what you knew.”

“A test,” I realized as Chase carefully rebandaged my right hand.

“Only if you choose to think of it that way,” Fourcade said. “You have to realize…” He hesitated, glancing beyond me before again meeting my eyes. “I always knew this day would come,” he said. “I…” He swore under his breath. “I just knew. But I didn’t know it would be today. You caught me flat-footed, Trinity Rose—it took me a minute to catch up with where we are.”

I wasn’t totally sure I got all that, but was willing to go with it. “And where are we?”

“You said you wanted the truth,” he said, spinning around one of four rickety-looking wrought-iron chairs. He sat backward in the chair, his legs straddled. “And if that’s my role in all this, so be it.”

His role?

Chase secured the last bandage, holding my hands gently as he looked down at me. “Let’s go.”

“No.” The weirdness of it all wasn’t lost on me, the fact that I was in the middle of nowhere with a potentially mentally unbalanced stranger—and Chase.

And that I felt safe. Totally, absolutely, without a shred of doubt safe.

Lifting my eyes to his, I smiled. “I’m good,” I said. Because I was. I was so, so good.

Because of Chase.

He’d done this for me.

I’d done everything I could to push him away, but like a rock in hurricane-force winds, he’d held firm, and found Jim Fourcade.

I reached for his hand and squeezed without thinking, realizing only after, that nothing happened. There was no quick sting, no burn. No pain in my palms whatsoever.

“Let’s see what he knows,” I said quietly, then made myself look away and focus on Jim Fourcade. “Why Marguerite?”

Much to my shock, he didn’t pretend to misunderstand me. “That was her professional name.”

“Professional name?” Chase asked.

“The name she used in the Quarter,” Fourcade said.

“Her psychic name,” I realized.

Fourcade nodded.

No wonder. No wonder my research on Rachelle Monsour kept turning up absolutely nothing. “Which was her real name?”

“They both were.”

I frowned.

“Her mama named her Rachelle. Her mama’s mama chose Marguerite.”

“Like a middle name?”

“It’s complicated,” Fourcade said. “Most people are content to go by one name for everyone. But some people … need a buffer.”

Chase drew me back against him, using one arm to anchor me against his body. “A buffer?”

Fourcade rocked forward, bringing the chair onto two legs. “To protect.”

That little tidbit went through me like a jackhammer. “To protect? From what?”

His mouth tightened, but he said nothing, and I knew, I knew he was testing me again, gauging how much I knew before deciding what to tell me next.

“You mean from her visions?” I asked, and pretty much automatically, I lifted my hand to my chest, where the tarnished dragonfly dangled from the old bronze chain.

Fourcade smiled. “Her visions,” he said. “And her work.”

We were getting closer. “You mean as a psychic?”

“No,” he said, and his eyes were doing it again, getting all glowy-glowy. “With me.”

“With you?” Chase and I spoke in unison.

Fourcade sat only a foot or two away, but between us, the miles and years lengthened. “There was a little girl,” he said. “Six years old. She got on her bike one afternoon to go see her grandma. One block away, only one turn. Her grandma was outside waiting. But Meggie never showed up.”

Around us the wind teased an odd collection of spoons-turned-chimes dangling from a nearby tree, providing relief to the stifling humidity. But I could find no sign of relief for Fourcade, not from the heat, or the past.

“We looked. We looked and looked and looked. Everywhere. Five minutes. That’s all it should have taken—what the hell can go wrong in five minutes?”

A lot, I knew. A whole lot.

Everything.

“There was no trace,” Fourcade went on as Chase rubbed his hands up and down along my arms. It was only then that I realized I’d started to shiver.

Yes, the temperature was somewhere in the nineties.

“There was a canal running behind her house. That’s where we found her bike.”

The image formed, as vivid as it was sickening.

“But not the girl,” I whispered, not sure how I knew, just knowing that I did.

“No. Not Meggie.” The breeze rustled a long strand of silver hair that had worked free of his ponytail, but he made no move to brush it back. No move to indicate that he’d even noticed. “And then one day I’m in my office, and in walks—”

“My mother.”

Fourcade’s eyes met mine. “I can still see her,” he said, and from the way he looked at me, I had to wonder who he was seeing at that very moment. Me? Or a ghost?

My money was on the ghost.

“Her eyes,” he said. “It was like someone had punched me in the gut.”

My breath caught. Behind me, I felt Chase’s do the same.

“Told me she’d had a dream,” he said, still looking at me—but clearly seeing her. “I thought she was nuts.”

Instinctively my fingers again found my mother’s dragonfly, and rubbed.

“Then she led me straight to Meggie.”

I closed my eyes, but immediately wished I hadn’t, because I saw her there, not my mother or the missing child, but Jessica, alone in the darkness of the house on Prytania.

Or
was
it the house?

I no longer knew—it made no sense that she would return to that place two nights after we’d all been there. Had she lost something? Seen something she wanted to see again? Had she arranged for someone to meet her there?

I’m afraid your dream was nothing more than a fantasy …

“Gone. That beautiful little child had been tossed in a marsh south of town, like nothing more than a piece of trash.”

And my mother had known. My mother had … seen.

Swallowing hard, I opened my eyes to see Fourcade press a leathery hand to his face. “My partner thought she did it.”

“Holy shit.” That was Chase.

“Omigod.” That was me.

“But I knew better,” Fourcade was saying. “I knew how bad it looked. And I knew how crazy it sounded, that she’d had a
dream …
But I also knew Rachelle,” he said. “She and your daddy lived next door to my mother-in-law. That’s why she chose me. That’s why she felt comfortable coming to me. She’d tried to hold quiet, to live with what she knew…”

But she hadn’t been able to.

“I stood up for her,” he said. “There was an investigation. It got real bad. But in the end there was no evidence … not even when the second child went missing.”

Chase held me tighter. “Did she help find that one, too?”

Fourcade nodded. “People started calling her a witch.”

Like his mother-in-law, Emma Watson.

“After the fifth child—”

I gasped. “Five?” And she’d kept on. My mother had kept trying to help, even when doing so amounted to burning herself at the stake.

“Five,” Fourcade repeated. “But that little girl we got to in time. We found her before that monster could do anything to her, because by then, your mama was seeing as clearly as he was.”

I wanted to cry. For those little girls, for my mother, even for Jim Fourcade. Because even after all this time, and really, it had to be over fifteen years, I could see the weight of all that had gone down in the burnished glow of his eyes.

“That’s when the game started,” he said, and I felt myself go ice still.

“What game?”

“It was in the papers,” he said, still in that faraway, faded voice, the one that hurt to hear, because in it the past still lived. “Some idiot found out about your mama’s role in the investigation, and printed it. They freakin’ printed it in the paper for every crack-job in the world to see.”

I looked away, toward the back of the yard, where I finally found the dogs from before, two sleeping, one alert, watching.

And a whole new picture started to form, of this former cop who lived so far out of the mainstream. At first I’d equated the trees and the birds, the isolation, with serenity. Maybe even escape. Now I had to wonder.

Had Jim Fourcade turned his back on society, or had society turned its back on him?

Did he live in the middle of nowhere for peace … or protection?

It chilled me to realize the same could be asked of my grandmother.

“What happened?” Chase asked, and I glanced up at him, realizing for the first time that I’d forgotten. Only a few days before, I’d done a major league tap dance to keep Emma Watson from revealing anything about my mother in front of Chase. But that was all gone now. Somewhere along the line, I’d let my defenses drop, and started to ask questions. In front of Chase.

And he wasn’t running in disgust.

He was standing with his arms around me, holding on.

And despite the shock of all I’d learned, my heart did a long slow free fall through my chest.

“Someone started to play with us,” Fourcade said.
“With her.”

I didn’t like the way that sounded. “What do you mean, play?”

“Games,” he said. “New Orleans is a world unto itself, and your mama was by no stretch the only one with abilities. There are others—there always have been. Some people turn away from the unexpected, the unexplained. But others embrace it. The more bizarre, the better. They seek it, hone it.
Crave it.
”