maybe, or a hunting boot. The NOMURS killings have a claim on me, but I cannot leave Malmaison without knowing more about those footprints.
I take a deep breath and force myself to sit.
My grandfather sits in a leather club chair and regards me with interest. He’s an imposing figure, and he knows it. William Kirkland looks the way people want their surgeons to look: confident, commanding, untroubled by doubt. Like he could operate ankle-deep in blood and only get calmer as the situation deteriorated. God endowed my grandfather with that magical combination of brains, brawn, and luck that no amount of poverty could hold in check, and his personal history is the stuff of legend.
Born into the hard-shell Baptist farmland of east Texas, he survived a car crash that killed his parents while they were traveling to his baptism. Taken in by his widowed grandfather, he grew into a boy who worked from “can see to can’t see” in the summers and in the winters managed to score so highly in school that he attracted the attention of his principal. After receiving a full athletic scholarship to Texas A&M, he lied about his age and enlisted in the marines at seventeen. Twelve weeks later, Private Kirkland was on his way to the Pacific islands, where he won a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts as he fought his bloody way toward Japan. He recovered from his wounds, then used the GI Bill to graduate from A&M, where he won a scholarship to Tulane Medical School in New Orleans. There, he met my grandmother, the demure princess of Tulane’s sister college, H. Sophie Newcomb.
A Presbyterian and a pauper, my grandfather was initially regarded with suspicion by the Catholic patriarch of the DeSalle family. But by sheer force of personality, he won over his future father-in-law and married Catherine Poitiers DeSalle without changing his religion. They had two daughters before he finished his medical training, yet still he managed to win top honors during his surgical residency. In 1956 he moved his young family to his wife’s hometown—Natchez—and joined the practice of a prominent local surgeon. The future seemed set in stone, which, as a believer in the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, suited my grandfather just fine.
Then his wife’s father died. With no male heir to take over the DeSalle family’s extensive farming and business interests, my grandfather began to oversee those operations. He showed the same aptitude for business that he had for everything else, and before long he’d enlarged the family holdings by 30 percent. Surgery soon became almost a hobby, and he began to move in more rarefied business circles. Yet he never left his rural past behind. He can still split a fifth of cheap bourbon with a group of field hands without their guessing he’s the man who pays their wages. He runs the DeSalle empire—his family included—like a feudal lord, but without sons or grandsons to carry on his legacy, the weight of his frustrated dynastic ambitions has devolved onto me.
“Where have you been?” I ask, having endured all the silent scrutiny I can stand.
“Washington,” he replies. “Department of the Interior.”
The candid answer surprises me. “I thought that was a big secret.”
He sips judiciously from his Scotch. “To some people it is. But unlike your mother and her sister, you know how to keep a secret.”
I feel my cheeks flush. My status as my grandfather’s favorite has always been more of a burden than a blessing, and it frequently causes jealousy in my mother and aunt.
“I want to show you something, Catherine. Something no one else has seen outside Atlanta.”
He stands and goes to a large gun safe built into the wall, which he unlocks with precise twirls of the combination lock. I feel a great urgency to get to New Orleans, but if I want to find out anything about the night my father died, I’ll have to humor my grandfather for a few minutes. Grandpapa Kirkland doesn’t hand out anything for free, especially information. He’s a quid pro quo man. This for that, I recite, mentally translating the Latin he insisted I study in school.
As he works at something in the safe, I recall what Michael Wells said about how strong Grandpapa seems. Most men age first in their shoulders and chests, their muscle mass waning as their middles thicken, the bones slowly becoming brittle like those of their wives. But my grandfather has somehow retained the shape of men twenty-five years his junior. He’s a member of that rare brotherhood that seems to age at half the rate of mortal men—epic figures like Charlton Heston and Burt Lancaster.
Instead of the priceless antique or musket I expect him to bring out of the gun safe, he produces a large architectural model. It looks like a hotel, with two grand wings framing a central section done in the Greek Revival style so common to the antebellum homes of Natchez.
“What’s that?” I ask, as he carries the model to a poker table in the corner.
“Maison DeSalle,” he says with pride.
“Maison DeSalle?” That’s the name of my mother’s interior design business. I walk over to the table. “That looks way too big to be a new building for Mom’s store.”
He chuckles with rich amusement. “You’re right. I just liked the name. This Maison DeSalle is a hotel and casino complex. A resort.”
“Why are we looking at it?”
Grandpapa sweeps his arm over the model like a railroad baron taking in a map of the continent. “Sixteen months from now, this will be standing in downtown Natchez, overlooking the Mississippi River.”
I blink in disbelief. By law, every Mississippi casino—even the Vegas-style palaces on the Gulf Coast—has to be built on some kind of floating platform. Natchez has its own riverboat casino permanently docked at the bottom of Silver Street. “How can that be? Doesn’t state law restrict gambling to casinos on water?”
He smiles slyly. Michael Wells was right: my grandfather knows something no one else does. “There’s a loophole in the law.”
“Which is …?”
“Indian gaming licenses.”
“You mean reservation gaming, like in Louisiana?”
“Louisiana and about twenty other states. We have one in Mississippi already, up at Philadelphia. Silver Star, it’s called.”
“But there’s no reservation in Natchez.”
Grandpapa’s smile becomes triumphant. “There soon will be.”
“But we don’t have any Native Americans here.”
“Who do you think gave this town its name, Catherine?”
“The Natchez Indians,” I snap. “But they were massacred by the French in 1730. Slaughtered down to the last infant.”
“Not true, my dear. Some escaped.” He runs his long fingers along the roof of one of the model’s wings, then caresses the casino’s central section. “I’ve spent the last four years tracking down their descendants and paying for DNA tests to prove their lineage. I think it would interest you. We’re using three-hundred-year-old teeth to get the baseline DNA.”
I’m too stunned to speak.
“Impressed?” he asks.
I
