“Not that I know about.” She gives a little shrug. “I’m probably wrong about that. But now he’s got that driver, that Billy Neal. I don’t like that boy at all.”
I’ve met my grandfather’s driver only once, and then briefly. Thin-faced and muscular, Billy Neal reminds me of the men who relentlessly hit on me in bars. Quiet men who assume too much. Their silence is not solicitous but threatening, almost belligerent. “Do you think Billy Neal is a kind of bodyguard?”
Pearlie snorts. “I know he is. He too mean to keep around for anything else. Specially just driving.”
The idea that my grandfather should need a bodyguard seems ridiculous, yet that was the impression I got when I saw him in New Orleans with his new driver. But it’s Pearlie’s first theory that has my heart thumping. “Why do you say the prowler might have been a friend of Daddy’s?”
“I think it would have had to be,” she says firmly. “To get close enough to your daddy to shoot him with his own gun like that?”
“Why?”
“I never saw a man so alert, child. Mr. Luke slept with both eyes open. Always looking for danger. I guess the war made him that way. Dr. Kirkland think he’s a big hunter, but your daddy … he could walk through the woods without bending a blade of grass. First couple of years he was back from the war, he walked this property all hours of the night. The island, too, I heard. ’Bout scared me to death sometimes. He’d just appear in front of you, like a ghost. Couldn’t nobody slip up on Mr. Luke without him knowing. No way, no how. That’s one thing I know.”
“A friend,” I murmur, trying to get my mind around the idea. “I don’t remember Daddy having friends.”
Pearlie smiles with regret. “They wasn’t friends, really. Just boys like he was. Boys who’d been in the war. Not with him, but like him. They was good boys, but a lot of good boys come back from Vietnam hooked on that dope. Black and white the same. My nephew was one. Anyway, them friends would’ve known your daddy had pills around. Plus, they probably figured Dr. Kirkland kept drugs here. Not hard to figure the rest, is it?”
I gaze around the forlorn bedroom. A child’s room without a child in it. I’m not claustrophobic, but sometimes certain places get to me, and in those times I have to move. Move or freak out. “Let’s go outside.”
Pearlie takes my hand. “What’s the matter, baby?”
“I need some air.”
“Well, let’s get you some then.”
I let Pearlie exit first, then close the door behind us.“Don’t go back in there anymore,” I tell her. “I still have work to do inside.”
“What kind of work?”
“The same work I do in New Orleans. There may be more blood in there.”
Anxiety tightens her shoulders.
“What’s the matter?” I ask.
She stops in the kitchen and lays a hand on my forearm “Baby girl, it don’t do no good to dig up the past. Even simple folk know that. And you ain’t simple.”
“I wish I were sometimes.”
Pearlie clucks softly. “There’s one thing we can’t change in this world. Our natures. We come into the world with them, and they stay with us all the way through.”
“Do you really believe that?”
A terrible wisdom seeps from her eyes. “I believe it, all right. I’ve watched too many children from the cradle to the grave not to.”
I don’t agree, but neither do I argue. Pearlie Washington has lived a lot longer than I have. We walk out into the sunlight of the rose garden.
“I have one more question,” I tell her. “And I want you to tell me the truth.”
The maid’s eyes deepen again, like a stilling pool. “I’ll try, baby.”
“Do you think Daddy might have killed himself?”
She draws back. “What you talking ’bout, girl?”
“I’m asking you if there was really a prowler here that night, or whether everybody’s been lying to me all these years to protect my feelings. Whether what Daddy went through in the war was just too much for him. So bad that … that even Mom and me weren’t enough to keep him wanting to live.”
Pearlie lifts her long brown fingers to my cheek and wipes away tears. “Oh, baby, don’t you ever think that. Mr. Luke thought the sun rose and set in your eyes. That’s a fact.”
I try to blink away the wetness in my eyes. “Did he? I don’t remember.”
She smiles. “I know you don’t. He got took from you too early. But Mr. Luke didn’t go through all he did in that war just to shoot hisself when he got back home. He loved you more than you’ll ever know. So you get that foolishness right out of your mind. All right?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I’m surprised by the childlike sound of my own voice.
“I better find Natriece,” Pearlie says, squaring her shoulders and looking toward Malmaison. “You holler if you need me.”
As Pearlie walks toward the rear of Malmaison, I take my cell phone from my pocket and check the screen. Eight more missed calls, all from Sean. He won’t give up.
I open my digital phone book and dial my mother’s cell phone. She answers through a crackle of static.
“Cat? What’s wrong?”
“Why do you think something’s wrong?”
“Why else would you call me?”
Good God. “Where are you, Mom?”
“About thirty miles south of Natchez, coming back the Liberty Road way. I’ve been to see your aunt Ann.”
“How is she?”
“Not good. It’s too long a story to tell on a cell phone. Where are you?”
“Home.”
“Are you working on those murders down there? I saw the news.”
“Yes and no. I’m actually in Natchez right now.”
Static never sounded so empty. “What are you doing in Natchez?”
“I’ll tell you when you get here.”
“Don’t you dare do that to me. Tell me now.”
“When you get here. Good-bye, Mom.”
I
