open the French doors, too.”
Aurore listened as the rustle circled her bed. She heard the slide of windows, and then, from outside, the chirping hum of the year’s first cicadas. The air that drifted in was damp against her skin, primeval in its rain-forest scent and sensation. For a moment she was seventeen, standing on the bank of the Mississippi River, and river mist was rising to envelop her. She was leaning forward, watching barge and steamer make their way against the current. She was leaning forward, waiting for life to begin.
“Aurore…”
Aurore turned her head and gazed at the man who had been her attorney for nearly fifty years.
“How are you, dear?” Spencer asked.
“Old. Sorry I am.”
Spencer slowly lowered himself to the chair the nurse had placed at the bedside. “Are you really sorry? I re member when you were young, you know.”
“You remember too much.”
“Sometimes I think so.” He took her hand. His was dry and trembling, yet still strong enough to enfold hers.
Her mind drifted again, as it sometimes did now. She remembered a day so many years before, at Spencer’s office on Canal Street. The office was still there, despite Spencer’s being well past the age of retirement. She didn’t know why he hadn’t passed on his practice to one of his younger partners, but she was glad, so glad, he hadn’t.
“You were elegant,” she said. “Compassionate. I still thought…you would turn me away.”
“The first day you came to see me?” He laughed a little. “You were so pale, and you wore a hat that cast a shadow across your forehead. I thought you were lovely.”
“But…you couldn’t have liked what you heard.”
“It wasn’t my place to like or not like what you told me. I promised you I would never betray a word of what passed between us. You played with a long strand of amber and jet beads while we talked.”
“Amber and jet.” She smiled. “I don’t remember.”
“The beads passed between your fingers, one by one, like a rosary. There was time for a hundred pleas for intercession before you left my office.”
She lifted her gaze to his. “I’ve learned since that no one…will intercede for me.”
His hand tightened around hers. “Then you’ve learned more than most people ever do, my dear.”
“I want you to file the new will. Just as we wrote it. I want…the old will destroyed.”
Seconds passed by. “You’ve thought this over care fully?”
“It is all…I’ve thought about.”
“Things may not turn out as you wish. More harm than good could result. At the very least, people you love could be hurt.”
“My whole life…I’ve been afraid to tell the truth.”
“And you’re not afraid now?”
“I’m more afraid.” He sat forward, cradling her hand in his lap, but she continued before he could speak. “But even more afraid…the truth will never be told. Others must have the chance to be courageous now…as I never was.”
“This is an act of courage.”
Her mind drifted to two men she had loved. Rafe. And her son, Hugh. Two men who had known what courage was. “No. Not an act of courage,” she said. “The last, desperate act of a coward.”
Twilight deepened into night as they sat together. Finally he spoke again. “Shall I come back tomorrow to see if you’ve changed your mind?”
“No. Will you do this for me, Spencer? Just as we talked about? You’ll go down…to Grand Isle?”
“I’ll do whatever you wish.” He paused. “I always have.”
“No one ever had a better friend.”
“Yes. We’ve been friends.” He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. Then, gently, he placed it at her side. “I have an address for Dawn. She’s in England, taking photographs for a magazine in New York. I could ask her to come home.”
For a moment, Aurore was tempted to say yes. Just to see Dawn, to have her beside her bed, to touch her one last time. Then to be forced to reveal everything to her granddaughter, much as Dawn had once revealed childhood secrets to her.
Everything.
Aurore couldn’t bear the thought. She really was the coward she had claimed to be. “No. It’s best she not come home until…”
“I understand.”
“There’s only so much I have the strength to do.”
Spencer rose. “Then I’ll send her your letter and send the others theirs…when I must.”
“Yes. The letters.” She thought of the letters, which she had dictated herself. And all the lives that they would change.
“You’re tired. And you still have another visitor.”
Aurore didn’t ask who the visitor was. She was certain from the sound of Spencer’s voice that it was some one she would be glad to see.
Aurore knew when Spencer left the room, although her eyes were closed by then. The cicadas’ song grew louder, and she could picture the insects’ hard-shelled, alien bodies sailing from limb to limb of the moss-covered live oaks bordering her Garden District yard. With the windows open, the evening air was redolent of the last of the sweet olives and the first of the magnolias, and it masked the fragrances of an old woman’s life and impending death.
She heard footsteps, but she didn’t have the strength to open her eyes once more. A hand took hers, a firm, strong hand. She felt lips, warm against her cheek.
“Phillip,” she whispered.
“You don’t have to talk, Aurore. I’ll stay for a while anyway. Just rest now.”
The voice was Phillip’s, but for a moment it was Rafe by Aurore’s side. In that instant, she was no longer old, but young once more. Her life was ahead of her, her decisions were not yet made. As she drifted toward dreams, the cicadas’ song became one dearer and more familiar. Phillip was humming one of the songs his mother had made famous when Aurore fell asleep.
CHAPTER ONE
September 1965
The young man Dawn Gerritsen picked up just outside New Orleans looked like a bum, but so did a lot of students hitchhiking the world that summer. His hair wasn’t clean; his clothes were a marriage of beat poet and circus performer. To his credit, he had neither the pasty complexion of a Beatles-mad Liverpudlian nor the California tan of a Beach Boy surfer. In the past year she had seen more than enough of both types making the grand tour of
