but their blood was just as blue. Their name was as old as Louisiana itself.
Rourke climbed the steps to the saggy gallery and pulled the bell. A long crack, he saw, ran across the fanlight above the door.
He knew they were home. Still, he waited awhile for the door to be answered. Long enough for a clothes-pole man and a fruit seller’s wagon to pass by on the avenue, the two men together making a melodious song out of their shuck and hustle.
“Clothes poles. I got the clothes poles, lady, sellin’ clothes poles a nickel and a dime.”
“I got watermelon red to the rind.”
When the door finally opened Rourke touched the brim of his straw boater and smiled. “Mornin’, Miss Belle.”
She tried to slam the door in his face, but he put his hand out, stopping it.
“You have your nerve—coming to this house, Daman Rourke,” she said. Her voice was dry and brittle.
From within the house a woman called a question, and she half turned to answer. “It’s that woman’s boy, Mama…. No, not the priest. The policeman.” She swung back around to him, color staining her cheeks, her eyes bright. She’d always had bright eyes, he remembered—golden brown, the color of a candle flame seen through a glass of whiskey. “I’m tellin’ him just where he can take himself off to.”
“No. Let him come in.”
Mrs. Heloise Lelourie materialized out of the darkness of the hallway, standing small and slender and straight-backed behind her younger daughter.
Rourke had never spoken to her before, this abandoned wife of his mother’s lover. But he was well acquainted with the sight of her—as a boy, he had often gone to Mass in her church just to observe her, her and her girls. Hers was a French face, petite and sharply boned, timeless. But her coloring was fair, gray eyes and blond hair now faded to the color of old wax.
For a moment longer Belle still kept the door half-shut against him, and her hand that held it trembled. Her short nails were grimed with black dirt, and a band of sunburn circled her wrist between where her gardening glove must have ended and her sleeve began. She saw him looking at her hand, at her nails, and she let go of the door and stepped back into the gloom of the hall.
Mrs. Lelourie led the way into a front parlor that was furnished in black walnut and red velvet that had faded to puce. The large gilded mirror over the mantel was spotted with mildew. The carpeting was so threadbare the floor showed through the nap in places. A dry, musty smell hung around the place, like that of a grave so old that even the bones had long ago fallen into dust.
Mrs. Lelourie waved her hand at a black horsehair settee that was worn bald in places. “Please, will you take a seat,” she said, her words blurred by a soft accent, but then she had grown up speaking real French. In her day, her people had seldom married outsiders, and the paterfamilias didn’t even like their children learning English in school.
“Belle,” she said, as she settled with old-fashioned grace onto a lyre-backed chair, “if you would prepare and pour, please, the café for our guest.”
Belle stared at her mother and some feeling burned quick and hot across her face, gone before Rourke could read it. She turned on her heel and left the room, and the cheap cotton skirt of her dark blue dress, too long to be fashionable anymore, made a sighing sound as it brushed her legs.
Mrs. Lelourie folded her white, veined hands on her lap and lifted her head up proud. She didn’t speak, and neither did he. Long ago, Daman Rourke had learned that the human heart couldn’t bear emptiness, and a silent room was emptiness of the worst sort. The heart would ache to fill the silence. All he had to do was wait and listen.
The house was so quiet he could hear Belle way back in the kitchen, making the coffee. He doubted any guest had stepped into this parlor in years. “My mama lives in a grave, and I hate her for it,” Remy had said to him once, but even then he knew it wasn’t really hate she felt. He understood the tangled layers of shame and pride that had made a crypt out of this house for Heloise Lelourie, but he wondered now why Belle had chosen to stay and be buried alive along with her mother.
There were many women like Belle in New Orleans, though, Rourke thought—women who awaken one day to find themselves left behind, caring for aging parents and living out their lives in fading rooms behind drawn curtains, where antique clocks measure out the time in years, not minutes, and too much is left unsaid.
The strong chicory smell of the coffee made it out to the parlor first, followed by Belle carrying a tarnished silver tray weighted down by a large gray agate cafetière with steam rising from its spout.
The coffee was thick and black as tar. He watched Belle pour it, together with the hot milk, into china cups. He remembered her as a pretty child, with long curls the color of late-summer apricots that would slide back and forth over her shoulders when she walked. She hadn’t bobbed her hair, the way all the other girls of her generation had done, and she wore it swept up now in a thick, soft bun. Its bright color had faded some, though, the way a ribbon will do when left too long in the sun.
As she leaned over to hand him his café au lait, a medal on a heavy silver chain swung out from around her neck. It was a St. Joseph’s medal, the patron saint of spinsters, and so it seemed that she still had her hopes of escaping, after all.
Belle sat down on the sofa, and Mrs. Lelourie took a delicate sip from her cup. The older woman’s gaze met Rourke’s, then she looked away. She smoothed the napkin on her lap. “Everyone knows how those Hollywood movie people do all sorts of wicked, unnatural things that no one else does.”
“Oh, Mama, you really mustn’t say such things,” Belle said, although the words sounded forced, as if they’d gotten caught in her throat on the way up and she’d had to cough them out. “Mr. Rourke is going to think you’re sayin’ that Remy killed her husband.”
Mrs. Lelourie took another sip of café au lait. “Stuff and nonsense. He knows I speak of this thing of shame that my daughter Remy has done after her husband’s death. Allowing him to be cut up, butchered in that foul place. There can be no proper wake because of it, no open casket.”
The older woman’s hand betrayed her for just a moment by trembling and spilling coffee into her saucer, and Rourke had to look away. He ached for her. All she had to fill her days, her years, were the rituals of life and the memories they made—the wakes and weddings, the births and burials. Yet for Reynard Lelourie’s wife, it must have seemed as though even the rituals kept betraying her over and over.
“I wish you could have been spared the pain of a postmortem,” he said. “But the procedure is always required nowadays, when there’s a murder.”
“Murder.” The sound she made was between a genteel little snort and a sigh. “Charles St. Claire brought his death on himself. It runs in that family, that sort of insanity.”
“Oh, Mama, you mustn’t say … Now Mr. Rourke is going to think you’re the one who’s gone a little crazy.”
Mrs. Lelourie lifted her shoulders in a small shrug, as if murder and insanity hardly mattered anyway. “The important thing, bien sûr, is that Sans Souci will be back with the Lelouries now, where it belongs.”
“Under Louisiana law,” Rourke said, “the husband’s property doesn’t always pass on to the wife. Especially if she killed him for it.”
