they stopped along the side of the road where a man was selling slices of watermelon off the tailgate of a battered pickup truck. They ate the fruit sitting side by side on the Bearcat’s running board, spitting seeds into the dirt and getting their hands and faces all sticky.
Pinpricks of sunlight pierced the black straw of her hat, freckling her ear and jaw. Her lips were wet with watermelon juice. He thought of the way it had been between them once, how they’d been no more than kids, really, and yet there had been something pure and distilled in the fury of their love, like the blue flame of a match before it burns out on its own. Afterward, he had gone off to war, he’d married another woman, had a child by her and then buried her—he had lived and thought himself over Remy Lelourie.
“What are you doing here?” he asked aloud. “You had the whole world to play in, so what have you come back for?”
Her mouth pulled into something that was not quite a smile. “You might find this hard to believe, but there’s a limit to how much one can bear of a thing—even champagne baths and tango dancing and petting parties in the purple dawn.”
He spat a seed at a fence post. “Yeah, I’ve had that same feeling myself lately—too much of a good thing. Like too many scotch-and-ryes and bourré games that last past two in the morning. Too many dead bodies.”
She turned her head and met his gaze, but her face kept her secrets well. He had read once that when you are acting whatever you are thinking, the camera will catch it. But if your thoughts are lies—what then does your audience see?
“I wanted to come home, Day,” she said. “Oh, maybe not for forever, but for a little while. Sometimes the past can seem as if it has a powerful hold on you, way more than any future can ever hope to claim. I just wanted to come home for a spell. Is that so hard to understand?”
“No,” he said, but that was a lie as well. He didn’t understand all of it, not when he remembered how their future had been destroyed by what she had done that hot summer’s evening eleven years ago. He had always known why she had left. What he still didn’t know was how—brave as she was, reckless as she was—she had ever dared to come back.
“It was double-dare time for Remy Lelourie,” she said softly, as if she were reading his mind, and that was impossible, surely, for she couldn’t have known what he had seen.
He took her watermelon rind and tossed it, along with his, into the weed-choked ditch. He gave her his handkerchief to wipe her hands, and the juice off her mouth. “We’d better be getting you home,” he said.
They spoke only once more on the way back to New Orleans. He asked her where she’d been going with her suitcase all packed up last night, the same night her husband just happened to have got himself carved up with a cane knife, and she said, “It’s been so hot lately, I decided to go out to the lake for a spell.” But he knew that that too was a lie.
He let her out at the top of the oyster-shell drive and watched her walk away from him through the moss-strung oaks, watched her passing through sunlight and shadow, toward the house with its slender white colonnettes and wide, gracious galleries. Although she was a thoroughly modern girl with her bobbed hair and painted nails, her rolled stockings and rouged knees, she looked as if she belonged only to that house and to the South, to the past.
Once, years ago, when they were lovers, his greatest fear had been that she would give up everything, even him, to possess Sans Souci. She had left him anyway, only she’d left the house, as well.
In the end, though, it was Sans Souci she had chosen to come back to, and not him.
Her mama had been the one to plant that particular obsession in Remy’s head. Generations ago, as far back as the 1850s, the plantation had belonged to the Lelouries. It had been lost, in a game of cards or through a duel, or maybe those old stories lied and it had simply been sold to pay off bad debts—the how of it had never been important, anyway. What had always mattered to the Lelouries was getting it back. You had to be from New Orleans to understand that a house like Sans Souci was more than cypress wood and bricks. It was a testimony to past glories and old sins, a bequest wrapped up in pride, honor, and immortality. A legacy of ambition, greed, and deceit. It was la famille.
It was a thing Rourke did understand, this obsession with the past and la famille. His past and Remy’s—it was like a shared sin, not forgotten, but never confessed. For once, years ago, his mother had left him and his father and brother, and had gone to live with her lover in the house on Conti Street.
Her lover, whose name had been Reynard Lelourie.
When Daman Rourke was a kid he would hang around for hours outside a certain house on Esplanade Avenue. A raised cottage mostly hidden behind a tall black-iron picket fence afroth with honeysuckle vines.
What he hoped for during all those hours of all those days was to get a good long look at the two little girls who belonged to his mother’s lover. He thought that if he watched them often enough, watched how they behaved, watched to see if they sassed the nuns, or hid their butter beans under their plates, or stole licorice whips from Mr. Pagliani’s corner grocery—if he watched them often and carefully, then he would come to understand why those little girls’ father had left them.
Then maybe, like the detective he was today, he would have been able to piece all his clues together, one by one, and figure out what terrible crime he had committed that had caused his mother to leave him.
They had kept themselves to themselves, though, had Reynard Lelourie’s two daughters, but their mother was what folk called a serious recluse. When Heloise Lelourie’s husband had left her to go live openly with his mistress—Daman’s mama—in the house on Conti Street, she had put on mourning black, as if he had died, and only set foot outside the iron gate to go to Mass on Sundays. Except for when Reynard Lelourie had died for real, from eating a bowl of spoiled shrimp gumbo the day of his fiftieth birthday—then Heloise Lelourie had caused a bit of a stir herself, by going first to her husband’s wake and then to the cemetery to see him good and buried.
It was less than half a mile as the crow flies between Sans Souci and the Lelourie cottage on Esplanade Avenue. Rourke drove there now, parking beneath the shade of a giant palm, whose thick green fronds clicked in a breeze that came up from the river, damp and heavy. Sunshine glazed the few puddles left over from last night’s rain.
In the early years of the city’s history, Esplanade Avenue with its root-cracked sidewalks had been only a muddy road, which wound through French colonial plantations from the river to the Bayou St. John. Eventually the plantations were parceled up, and the muddy road was paved with Belgian blocks and lined with elegant Creole mansions and raised cottages. Then, as more years passed, some of the families died out or moved uptown, and many of the mansions were turned into rooming houses. Others had been allowed to go to seed. But in New Orleans only the appearances of life changed, Rourke thought. The rhythms remained the same.
The metal of the cottage’s gate was hot to the touch when he pushed it open. All those hours he had spent hanging around the outside of this gate, and this was the first time he had ever passed through it.
The garden was lush and beautiful, profuse with oleander, azaleas, camellias, and roses. Some animal on a tear had been at the flower beds along the river side of the house, though. Mangled blossoms and shredded leaves lay tossed and scattered in deep furrows of wet, turned-up earth.
The house was in a sad way as well, paint flaking and cardboard
