against London’s soft, cool rain. Now it trapped the Louisiana summer heat and melted against Dawn’s thighs, but she didn’t care. Her gaze had moved beyond the car, beyond the oleander and jasmine, to the wide front gallery. A man she had never expected to see again leaned against a square pillar and watched her.
She was aware of rain splashing against the brim of her hat and running in streams across her boots, but she didn’t move. She stood silently and wondered if she had ever really known her grandmother.
Ben Townsend stepped off the porch. He had no protection, Carnaby-mod or otherwise. The rain dampened his oxford-cloth shirt and dark slacks and turned his sun-streaked hair the color of antique brass. His clothes clung to a body that hadn’t changed in the past year. Her eyes measured the span of his shoulders, the width of his waist and hips, the long stretch of his legs. Her expression didn’t change as he approached. Repressing emotion was a skill she had cultivated since she saw him last.
“I guess you didn’t expect me.” He stopped a short distance from her, as if he had calculated to the inch exactly how close she would allow him to come.
“A masterpiece of understatement.”
“I got a letter asking me to come for the reading of your grandmother’s will.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. Dawn had seen him stand that way so many times, shoulders hunched, palms turned out, heels set firmly in the ground. The stance made him real, not a shadow from her memories.
“I’m surprised you bothered.” She rocked back on her heels, too, as if she were comfortable enough to stand under the dripping oak forever. “Expecting to find a story here?”
“Nope. I’m an editor now. I buy what other people write.”
For the past year, Ben had worked for Mother Lode, a celebrated new magazine carving out its niche among California’s liberal elite. Dawn had read just one issue. Mother Lode obviously prized creativity, intellect and West Coast self-righteousness. She wasn’t surprised Ben had moved quickly up its career ladder.
“You always were good at pronouncing judgment,” she said.
He hunched his shoulders another inch. “And you seem to have gotten better at it.”
“I’ve gotten better at lots of things, but apparently not at understanding Grandmère. I can’t figure if inviting you was an attempt to force a lovers’ reunion, or if she just had a twisted sense of humor.”
“Do you really think your grandmother asked me here to hurt you?”
“You have another explanation?”
“Maybe it has something to do with Father Hugh.”
She tossed back her hair. “I don’t know why it should. Uncle Hugh’s been dead a year.”
“I know when he died, Dawn. I was there.”
“That’s right. And I wasn’t. I think that was the subject of our last conversation.”
That conversation had taken place a year before, but now Dawn remembered it as if Ben’s words were still carving catacombs under her feet. She had been standing beside Ben’s hospital bed on the afternoon after her uncle’s death. A nurse had come at the sound of raised voices, then scurried away without saying a word. Dawn could still remember the smell of lilies from an arrangement on another patient’s bedside table and the tasteless Martian green of gladiola sprays. Ben had shouted questions and waited for answers that never came.
“Did you know, Dawn? Did you know that your uncle was going to be gunned down like a common criminal? Did you know that a mob was on its way to that church to turn a good man into a saint and a martyr?”
“Look, I’m staying,” Ben said. “I don’t know why I was invited here, but I’m going to stay long enough to get some answers. Can we be civil to each other?”
“You’re a Louisiana boy. You know hospitality’s a tradition in this part of the world. I’ll do my part to live up to it.”
Dawn studied him for another moment. His hair was longer than it had been a year ago, as if he had made the psychological transition from Boston, where he had worked on the Globe, to San Francisco. He wore glasses now, wire-framed and self-important. He no longer looked too young to have answers to all the world’s problems. He looked his full twenty-seven years, like a man who had found his place in the world and never in tended to relinquish it.
Her father was a man who also radiated confidence and purpose. Dawn wondered what would happen when Ferris Lee Gerritsen discovered that Ben Townsend had received an invitation to Grand Isle.
Ben waited until her gaze drifted back to his. “I’m not going to push myself on you.”
“Oh, don’t worry about me. Nobody pushes anything on me these days. And nobody puts anything over on me, either. Stay if you want. But don’t stay because you want to finish old conversations.”
“Maybe there’ll be some new conversations worth finishing.”
She shrugged, then turned back to her car for her lug gage, making a point of dismissing him. She had left al most everything she owned in Europe. She reached for her camera case and her overnight bag, but left her suit case inside.
In the distance, thunder exploded with renewed vigor, and the ground at Dawn’s feet seemed to ripple in response. The sultry island air was charged with the familiar smells of ozone and decay. By the time she straightened, Ben was no longer beside her. She watched as he walked down the oyster-shell drive, glad she didn’t have to pretend to be casual even a moment longer.
She might not have understood Grand Isle’s draw for her grandmother, but each year Dawn had been drawn to it herself. The summers had been a time to bask in her grandmother’s love. Nothing else had been expected of her. The sun had been too hot, the occasional breeze too enticing. She had done nothing of consequence on the island except grow up. But Aurore’s pride in her had been the solid ground that Dawn built the best part of herself upon.
How proud had Aurore been before she died, and what had she known? Had she known that Dawn still loved her? That despite her exodus after her uncle’s death, she had still yearned for her family? That falling in love with Ben Townsend so long ago had not been the same as declaring sides in a war Dawn had never understood anyway?
Most important of all, had her grandmother understood that even though Dawn had crossed an ocean, she had never really been able to break free of any of the people she loved?
Louisiana was a statewide Turkish bath, which might explain the inability of its residents to move forward into the twentieth century. Their brains were as steamed as Christmas pudding, their collective vision as fogged by heat and humidity as the air on an average afternoon. On a day like this one, when raindrops sizzled in the summer air, it was possible to see why nothing ever changed, and nothing was ever challenged.
Ben stood on the beach and watched the foam-tipped breakers rearrange a mile of seaweed. Grand Isle was an obscure sandpile, projecting like an obscene middle finger into water the temperature of piss. In the hour since his encounter with Dawn, he had walked nearly the entire length of it.
Louisiana wasn’t Ben’s favorite place. He had been born not far from Grand Isle, but a year ago he had al most died there, too. A year ago he had watched as a martyr was gunned down by bigots and left to bleed
