at all. Their lives and their careers had taken them in different directions.
“I’m not exactly sure why I’m here,” Ben said. “But I was invited to the reading of a will. You?”
“Seems I’ve been invited, too. Aurore Gerritsen was one interesting old lady.”
Ben shifted so that his back was against the car door. He had known from the conversation in the store that Phillip’s presence on Grand Isle had something to do with the Gerritsen family, but he hadn’t really expected this. He had guessed that Phillip was looking for a story.
Or feeling suicidal.
Raindrops glistened in Phillip’s hair and on the dark hollows of his cheeks. He didn’t look any the worse for his confrontation with the storekeeper. In fact, he looked like a man waiting for new challenges. “This is getting stranger by the moment,” Ben said. “Why you?”
Phillip smiled. “You told the man. I’m a friend of the family.”
“I was just trying to keep your ass in one piece. What’s the real reason?”
Phillip shifted, too, trying to make room for his long legs. “Are you entertaining theories?”
“Yeah, and you could entertain a whole lot more than that by coming to a place like Grand Isle and manhandling the locals.”
Phillip took his time looking Ben over before he spoke again. “Do you know why you were invited?”
“How much do you know about the Gerritsens?” Ben reached into his shirt pocket for the Butterfingers he’d bought at the store. He ripped it open and broke it in two, offering half to Phillip.
Phillip declined with a shake of his head. “I just know what I’ve been told.”
“How much do you know about Father Hugh Gerritsen?” Ben asked.
“I know he was killed last year. Over there in Bonne Chance.” Phillip hiked his thumb over his shoulder.
“Yeah. A short sail, or a hell of a trip by car. I was born there, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m there again. I can feel the heat and the damp settling all over me, and I’m back in Bonne Chance.”
“You were there when he died, weren’t you?”
Ben wasn’t surprised that Phillip knew. They had never talked about it, but the story had been covered in the national media. “I was there. But there’s more to it than that. His niece and I…” He shrugged. “Dawn and I were close.”
“That right?”
“All I really know is I’m here, and I’m planning to stay.”
“So am I.”
“You’ve avoided telling me why you were invited.”
“I don’t know for sure.”
“But you could guess if you had to?”
“I got to know Mrs. Gerritsen at the end of her life. My being here has something to do with that.”
“Do you know anybody else who’s coming?”
Phillip gave a half smile that Ben could have interpreted a hundred different ways. “My mother and step father.”
Ben gave a low whistle. He had never met Phillip’s family, but he had heard Phillip’s mother sing a thou sand times. She was Nicky Valentine, a world-famous jazz and blues singer who owned a nightclub in New Or leans.
“Got their invitations the same day I got mine,” Phillip said.
Ben had a hundred questions, but Phillip had a journalist’s natural reticence. Ben would get his answers when they all gathered back at the cottage. “This is going to be even more interesting than I thought.”
Phillip’s smile hardened into something else. “Especially when the senator and his wife find out who’s been invited to their house.”
“I wouldn’t turn my back on him, if I were you.”
Phillip swiveled in his seat and reached for the ignition. “We’ve got questions, both of us, and they need answering. Maybe it’s time we found out what’s planned. But whatever it is, it’s not going to be boring. There’s a story here. Dark and light folks, tapping together to an old lady’s song.”
Ben was silent as Phillip started the car. The rain had slacked off again, but the sky was almost dark. He imagined that everyone who had been invited to hear the will was at the cottage by now. Maybe Phillip was right. Maybe a story would unfold in the next hours. But one thing was for certain. During her lifetime, Aurore Le Danois Gerritsen had been a woman to reckon with. Even now, even in death, she was still determined to have her way.
CHAPTER TWO
At seventy-four, Spencer St. Amant should have had nothing to worry about except whether an afternoon thundershower was going to keep him from taking a stroll down Esplanade Avenue. But while his cronies gathered at the Pickwick Club and talked incessantly about their days in the sun, Spencer sat in his Canal Street law office and directed the parade of fresh-faced Tulane graduates who did his legwork.
He had considered retirement once, a decade before. In a private dining room at Arnaud’s he had thought it over between courses of shrimp remoulade and trout meunière. And when the last bite of trout was vanquished, he had walked back to his office and announced to his staff that the jockeying for position could cease immediately. Someday they would find him at his desk, facedown amid volumes of the Louisiana legal code. Until then, he was still in charge.
Spencer doubted that anyone had ever suspected the reason for his decision. He wasn’t married to the law, and most parts of mediating society’s quarrels didn’t appeal to him. As a youth, he had wanted to fly. He had dreamed of soaring above the clouds like the Wright brothers, exploring every corner of the world stretched before him. Instead, he had stayed on the ground to fulfill his duty to his family.
His duty to the long-dead St. Amants who had taken such pride in the family firm had been discharged long ago. But his duty to the woman he had loved had not. Aurore Gerritsen had never known that he continued his law practice to stay close to her side. She had died his friend and client, more than he could ever have hoped for if he told her the truth.
His duty to her was not yet ended. There were still her last wishes to fulfill. One final act of love.
Despite the rain, Spencer moved slowly up the path to the Gerritsen cottage. As he drew closer, he was re minded of the first time he had gone up in an airplane. The airfield had once been acres of corn, and as the flimsy two-seater began its take-off, he had been thrown from side to side. Decades had passed, many more than he cared to think about, but he still remembered that moment of terror when he had realized that his life was about to be transformed, that something more than a plane had been set in motion and couldn’t be halted.
On the front gallery, he knocked and waited. At the sound of footsteps he waved to his driver, who had al ready deposited his suitcase by the front door. The young man promptly backed down the drive and disappeared with a squeal of Spencer’s own tires. Spencer
