What She Doesn't Know (15 page)

 
“What does that mean?
Cherie?
Some guy called me that at the airport.”

“Who did?”

She was surprised by the sharpness of his voice. “Just a guy. He gave me these beads.”

“Be careful about talking to anyone around here.”

“Like I struck up a friendly conversation and invited him to dinner.”

He shot her a look to make sure she wasn’t serious. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was being protective. She probably didn’t know better.

“So, what does it mean?” she asked. “You called me that, too.”

“Something like dawlin’. It’s a casual endearment, doesn’t mean anything.” He focused on the traffic again. “I thought I’d gotten rid of all that New Orleans slang. Soon as I came back, so did it.”

He looked annoyed at that, and she found herself wanting to tell him that she liked the southern honey in his voice. Luckily, she got hold of herself.

“New Orleans seems like another world with all its customs, the parades and costumes.”

“It is another world. After growing up here, Atlanta seemed like a foreign place. People in suits and sneakers all hurrying, all the high tech companies looking toward the future. Here in New Orleans, some folks like to stay in the past. Some of the old-line krewes have been around for over a hundred years.”

“Sounds nice, all that tradition, history.”

“Only if you’re one of the few, the proud, the secretive.”

“Secretive?”

“The most prestigious old-line krewes, like Proteus and Comus, keep their members secret. It can be a big secret society, and if you’re not born into the right family, you can’t join. In fact, you can’t join unless they decide to invite you in. It’s their way of keeping aristocracy alive and kicking. Or at least that’s the way they used to be. We knew families who were in a Mardi Gras state of mind all year long; it’s what they lived for.”

It did sound like another world. Although he kept his words neutral, she detected an underlying current.

“And you think it’s all so much hogwash,” she said.

“Yep.”

She waited a moment before saying, “Ah, I see. You’re only willing to talk if it’s not about you personally.”

“Why do you want to know about me?”

He had her there. “I want to know your opinion, that’s all.”

“My opinion,” he said after he’d reached the highway, “is that it’s all a bunch of hogwash.”

“What a surprise. But your family was involved in a krewe. Your dad was president, or captain, if I recall correctly. You grew up in all that hogwash.”

“Not by choice.”

“So it shouldn’t bother you to tell me why you think it’s hogwash.”

He shot her an antagonized look. “I just didn’t get into all the pomp and circumstance. My mother was old-line New Orleans. She was born into one of the right families, and she went from being the flower girl to the maid and finally the queen of Rex, the highest honor a woman can achieve.”

“Oh yeah, I saw the medallions. And the shoes. She obviously thought a lot of her mementos.”

“That was the most important event in her life. When you’re king or queen of Rex, you’re the royalty of Carnival itself. She talked about it ‘til the day she died. My father, he was
nouveau riche
, which didn’t count among the old-line krewes. He hated that he couldn’t join Rex or Comus, even married to a former queen. He was gauche enough to ask to join Rex. They’ll blackball you for that alone. And they, along with my mother’s family, did. They didn’t want anything to do with their embarrassing relatives.

“So Dad formed his own krewe—the Krewe of Xanadu. He could decide who could play and who couldn’t.” He glanced over at her. “Is it starting to sound a little like kindergarten yet?”

“Obviously Brian was into the whole thing,” she said. “Tammy made it seem like it was some tragedy that he couldn’t be king.”

He shook his head. “Armageddon.”

“And they were mad at you,” she said, trying to steer it back to him.

“It wasn’t the worst thing I’d done.” He pulled up to Brian’s house.

She inhaled softly. “And what was that?”

“Why are we talking about me again? I thought you were here to help Brian.”

“What did you do that was worse?” After all, stabbing a man, even accidentally, wasn’t on the list of kindergarten assaults. “Tell me.”

“I was born.” He got out of the car and walked to the house, leaving her to ponder that.

The house was quiet when she walked in a few minutes later. There was no sign of him. She felt like apologizing, but how would she word it?
Sorry for making you bare some part of your soul?

He’d opened his family home to her, even picked her up at the airport, and she’d poked at old wounds. For all his bluster, though, he was a man who needed some understanding. She wished she could give it to him, but his walls were too high. She found herself absently rubbing her nose. As if she, of all people, should even be
thinking
about it.
 

She walked up to her room and called Joyce. Still no hotel room to be found. She looked at the battery symbol on the phone. The last bar was fading. Outside her room, she heard Christopher’s voice coming from the room down the hall from hers. He was discussing bandwidth with someone.

She stopped at the top of the stairs and looked over at what must be Brian’s bedroom doors. Surely he wouldn’t mind if she checked it out. Maybe she’d find some clue, something concrete to convince Christopher his brother was in danger.
 

The room was long, with French doors leading out to the same balcony outside her room. When she flipped on the light, she was surprised to find it a mess. Sheets and blankets were piled on the bed. Books and papers cluttered the desk, spilling onto the black carpet.
Black carpet?
Between the carpet, dim lighting, and curtains over the French doors, the room reminded her of a lounge.

She shook her head as she inched farther in. The walls were salmon-colored with dark yellow trim. The border around the ceiling looked hand-painted, a cityscape perhaps. Dragons and other mysterious creatures peered from paperbacks crammed on the bookshelf. She fingered the boxed set of the
Chronicles of Narnia
, remembering the tales from childhood. She vaguely recalled Thomas More’s
Utopia
from her college reading days. She straightened the books and put order to the chaos of paper.
 

On the wall hung a sword, gleaming in the dull light, with an intricate gold hilt. Surrounding that in box frames were several knives that looked straight out of
Star Trek,
most made by Gil Hibben. The one that wasn’t a Hibben was just as strange, a primitive, wavy-bladed knife labeled
West African Exorcism dagger
. She spotted the Silent Shadow in a place of honor, at the top of the arrangement. The knife had two rings for fingers and what looked like a rope pattern on the handle. A brass plaque proclaimed its name and maker. Strange that a knife had brought them together and then brought her here.
 

He had his own shrine to Mardi Gras, including pictures from a masquerade ball—
Brian LaPorte, King of Xanadu
, a section from the society page read beneath a photo. King of Xanadu…

She’d seen the swordfight. Maybe there were other scenes that would help. Maybe she could see the final scene better. She sat on the edge of the bed and called up the slideshow again. The sword, the blood, the funeral. She braced herself for the final scene, the sense of overwhelming fear. This time she heard something else, a sound, a word. She held onto it.
Sira.
It swamped her with the force of a flash fire. Who or what was Sira?
 

She searched the pictures and invitations on the wall around his desk. A conspicuous blank area caught her attention. Two pieces of tape were affixed to the paint, and she could see where something made of paper had once been attached. She searched everywhere, even the garbage can, but found nothing to match the shards of sketch paper still attached to the tape.

Her search gained momentum. Sira was her first clue. There had to be something here to tell her what it meant. She found a pocket calendar in the top drawer and flipped through the pages, hoping for a notation of a meeting with someone named Sira. That happened on detective shows, that vital clue that led to another and then another.
 

No such clue here, though. Every month he had an appointment at Hair and Now, even for the Saturday after he’d fallen. He’d made note of an upcoming auction the following week, a deceased New Orleans collector. And he’d made note of all the parades, or at least that’s what she guessed “Pegasus,” “Tucks,” “Thoth,” “Zulu” and “Rex” were.
 

One thing was undeniable: this was not the appointment book of a man who planned to take his life.

She found three science fiction magazines in the bottom drawer with a colorful illustration on the cover and short stories inside. In each one a story by Brian Caspian was flagged. She set those aside and pulled out a scrapbook, another testimony to Brian’s dedication to Mardi Gras and Xanadu. She looked for something about Sira, but found all kinds of mythical and Egyptian names instead. Was Sira a krewe? If so, it wasn’t a well-known one.

She lowered herself to the chair as she read about the tableaux Xanadu put on. Each year it kept the theme of the parade, going all the way back to when the brothers were boys. Brian and Christopher always had the leading roles, dressing up in costumes and brandishing swords or other kinds of weapons. And each year, Christopher was the bad prince.

What had he done to deserve that repeated role?
I was born.
She shivered at the memory of those words. She put the book away and continued her search but came up empty. With a sigh, she took the appointment book down the hall to the last bedroom on the right.

The door was partially open, and she could hear Christopher’s fingers moving over the keys of his laptop computer. She meant to knock, really she did. But like that moment in the hospital where she could not make herself heed the rules of protocol, she pushed open the door and stepped inside. His room was a vivid blue, like the sky on a bright summer day. The bed…wow. Even unmade, it was spectacular. A four-poster with a spindle on top of each post, the footboards at the head and foot looking like the ornate iron gate out front. Except it wasn’t uninviting.

His back was to her. She felt an overwhelming urge to come up behind him, put her arms around those broad shoulders and tell him she understood, that she had been the outcast child, too.
 

Her goal was to show him the appointment book, make him believe that Brian had no intention of killing himself. Instead, she found herself standing right behind him, breathing in the faint scent of after-shave and grape gum, wanting to touch the place where his dark hair tapered to his neck. She forced herself to look to the computer screen where he wrote an e-mail to someone. The subject read: “I’ll Be Watching You….” Christopher’s ID was
THE HIGHWAYMAN
.

He heard the breath she sucked in and turned to find her standing there with uncertainty in her eyes. She backed away, holding out the appointment book like a shield.

“What are you doing, sneaking around?” He sent the email, disconnected, and closed the laptop. “Don’t they teach you manners in Bah-ston?”

She moved closer to the door. Maybe she didn’t understand him all that well. Maybe his role
had
turned him into the bad prince. “I…I wanted to show you this. It’s his date book. Proof that Brian had no intention of taking his life. Look.” She opened it to the appointments and the parade schedules. “Why would he make a hair appointment if he’d planned to kill himself? Why would he care about parade schedules? And I told you, we were talking about meeting. He was looking into the future, planning his life—not his death.”

He didn’t look at the entries. “Maybe he didn’t plan on doing himself. Some people just up and decide, or maybe something upset him and he couldn’t take it anymore.”

“Brian was a planner. He would have planned out the details, taken care of loose ends. And men use methods that ensure their deaths, like a gun. Jumping from a roof isn’t a man’s way to commit suicide, particularly one that close to the ground. It doesn’t make sense. What if someone did push him off that deck? You’re not willing to accept that because then you’d have to re-examine your roles. You’d have to accept that maybe Brian wasn’t the good prince after all, which might mean you’re not the bad prince, either. Isn’t that right?”

His expression hardened. “How did you know about that?”

“He has a scrapbook in his office with articles about the tableaux.”

He took a step closer. “You don’t know me. You don’t know Brian. If you want to investigate this presumed attempted murder based on something my brother told you while you were in a coma together, then go ahead. Don’t expect me to buy your story. And butt your little therapist nose out of my business.”

He walked past her and downstairs. She couldn’t move for a moment. She glanced at the laptop, now closed. He was right. She didn’t know him. Maybe she had been fooling herself. Maybe she didn’t want to understand him, and at the moment, she definitely did not want to touch him.

And maybe she should be a little afraid of him. Just in case.

CHAPTER 10

Rita sat on the bed in her room studying Brian’s appointment book and photo albums. She heard Christopher go into the bathroom they both shared and start the shower. Her gaze kept wandering to the white door that separated her from a roomful of steam and male, and “Fever” drifted through her mind.

Dammit, why couldn’t the guy have been ugly? And short. Twig-thin, pot bellied, whatever. She rested her chin on the top edge of the photo album, closed her eyes, and lost herself in the image of the steam curling under the door and floating across the floor like long, sensuous fingers. Those fingers climbed over the edge of the bed and across the tufted bedspread. She could almost feel the weight of the steam as it formed into a sleek, muscular body poised above her, pressing her down into the soft mattress. She let herself sink deeper into the fantasy, feeling his mouth on hers, his hands on her…