Blood Memory (52 page)

I look up at the curious brown eyes. “Yes.”

“And he still wants to see you?”

“Yes.”

She shakes her head as though at some rare and wonderful sight. “That’s a man you need to stick with, right there.”

I feel my mouth smile. “I think you’re right.”

Pearlie takes my hand in hers and squeezes tight. “Lord, it’s about time you settled down. We been needing some babies around that old place.”

I take a deep breath and look toward Grandpapa’s grave. “I think I was waiting for him to go first.”

Pearlie nods. “Lord knows that’s right.”

Daddy’s casket lies beside the open grave now, the rain pattering against its burnished lid. Strangely, the sound doesn’t bother me at all.

“Could you open it for me now, please?” I ask.

One of the men from the funeral home takes a hex key from his pocket and begins unsealing the casket.

“What?” Pearlie gasps, her eyes filled with horror. “What you doing, girl? That’s bad luck, doing something like that!”

I shake my head. “No, it’s not.”

As the man from the funeral home lifts the coffin lid, I reach beneath my wheelchair to the luggage pocket beneath. I feel soft fur in my palm. Using all my strength, I stand and walk slowly to the coffin. My father looks just as he did the other day, like a young man sleeping on the couch after a Sunday dinner. Gritting my teeth against pain, I bend at the waist and lay Lena the Leopardess in the crook of Daddy’s elbow. Then I straighten up again.

“So you won’t be lonely,” I say softly.

Before I turn away, I take a folded piece of paper from my pocket and drop it in the casket near my father’s knee. It’s one of the drawings from the sketchbook he kept in the green bag in the barn. A charcoal rendering of Louise Butler, smiling at him with unbounded love in her eyes. Perhaps I should feel guilty for this, but I don’t. Louise probably relieved Luke Ferry of more pain than any of us in those last years. She accepted him for what he was…a profoundly wounded man.

“Good-bye, Daddy,” I murmur. “Thank you for trying.”

I turn from the casket and walk back to the wheelchair, signaling Michael as I go. He comes quickly.

“I want to see the river,” I tell him. “Will you wheel me up to Jewish Hill?”

Towering three hundred feet above the Mississippi, Jewish Hill offers the most commanding view of the river I’ve ever seen.

Michael can’t hide his dismay. “It’s raining, Cat.”

“I know. I like it. Will you come with me, Pearlie?”

“All right, baby.”

“Can you make it?” Michael asks her.

Pearlie snorts indignantly. “I may be over seventy years old, but I can still walk from Red Lick to Rodney and have strength left over for a day’s work.”

Michael laughs, apparently recognizing the names of two tiny Mississippi towns over twenty miles apart. He pushes me up the hill at a steady pace, and before long, we are staring over the mile-wide tide of river at the vast plains of the Louisiana delta.

“That’s too big to look at,” Pearlie says.

“I love it,” I say softly. “I used to come here whenever I felt trapped in this town.”

“I think you always been trapped here, until your granddaddy died.”

“You know he killed himself,” I murmur.

There’s a long silence. Then Pearlie says, “I don’t know any such thing.”

I look up at her. “Come on. You don’t really think he went off that bridge by accident?”

She looks at Michael, then back at me. “No, I don’t.”

A low humming has started in my head. “What is it, Pearlie? What do you know?”

She looks as serious as I’ve ever seen her. “I know everything. How much do you want to know?”

“Same as you.”

She looks doubtfully at Michael. “Some things it’s best not to know, Doctor. Why don’t you go get the car?”

Michael looks down at me, and I nod.

As he walks away, Pearlie steps in front of the wheelchair and fixes me in her gaze with an old woman’s severity. “After you left me on the island, I stayed with Louise Butler awhile. But I was nervous as a cat. I couldn’t rest. So I took me a walk. I wound up on the other side of the lake. At the big house.”

She’s talking about my grandfather’s lodge, the showplace designed by A. Hays Town.

“Before I knew what I was doing, I was tearing that place apart. I was still looking for the pictures, see? I knew they had to be somewhere.” She sighs and looks at the ground. “Well, I found ’em. They was inside a hollow book, just one out of hundreds in that library down there. And they were bad, baby. Lots worse than the two of you and Ann in the swimming pool.”

“What did they show?”

Pearlie wrinkles her nose as though smelling rotten meat. “Everything. It made me sick to look at them. I went to use the bathroom, and I was crying so bad I couldn’t stop. And then I heard something.”

“Grandpapa?”

“No. Jesse.”

“Jesse Billups? He saw the pictures?”

Pearlie nods, her face filled with anxiety. “And they wasn’t just pictures of any old children. Some of them were from the island. Jesse recognized them. Some of them belonged to people still living down there.”

“My God. What did he do?”

“He cursed me. Then he took the pictures and left with them.”

“What happened, Pearlie? What did he do with them?”

“He showed them to some other men down there. Some of the daddies of them children. See, the women had known about Dr. Kirkland, just like I guessed. Some of them, anyway. But they never let their menfolk know. But now the men
knew.
And they was killin’ mad, just like the women worried they would be. Well…Jesse called Dr. Kirkland and told him somebody had busted into the big house and tore everything up. Said Dr. Kirkland ought to come right away.”

I close my eyes, almost afraid to hear the end of the story.

“You sure you want to hear this, baby?”

“Yes.”

“When Dr. Kirkland got there, Jesse and the other men put him in a truck and carried him round to Big Leon’s house.”

“Who’s Big Leon?”

“One of the men on the island. He spent twenty years on Angola Farm. Jesse showed Leon the pictures and told him what Dr. Kirkland had done. Then he told Leon, ‘You can have him for two hours. Just don’t mark him up none.’”

“Oh, my God.”

As Pearlie nods, her eyes glow with fierce knowledge. “Two hours later, they went back and got him. Then they did what that Billy Neal was gonna do to you and me.”

“What?”

“Tied him to the steering wheel of his car and ran it off the bridge.”

“Jesus.”

“After a while, one of them swum down and took the rope off Dr. Kirkland’s hands.” Pearlie is watching me closely, waiting to see my reaction. “You said you wanted to know.”

“Did you see Grandpapa at all during any of this?”

“No. All I know is what Jesse told me.”

My mind is filled with one question. “Did he beg for his life at the end?”

“No, baby. He cursed them till his head went under the water. Wasn’t nothing gentle left in that old man. He’ll curse the devil hisself when he gets to hell.”

I suddenly feel exhausted.

“What you gonna do now?” Pearlie asks.

“I don’t know. Wait for my wound to heal, I guess. The bullet wound, I mean. The other could take my whole life.”

“I meant about the house. Malmaison.”

“What do you mean?”

Pearlie shrugs. “Well, it’s gonna be yours now.”

“What?”

“I thought you knew. Dr. Kirkland always said Miss Gwen couldn’t take care of her own self, much less the wealth she was born into. That’s why Billy Neal hated you so bad. You gonna get just about everything.”

Her words take some time to register. I have no idea what might be included in my grandfather’s estate, but it’s bound to be enormous.

“So, what you gonna do?”

“Sell it all,” I say.

Pearlie makes an uncertain sound. “The island, too?”

“Why not? I don’t ever want to see it again.”

“If you sell that island, the people down there won’t have nowhere to go. You own it all, the houses and everything. They just rent.”

For a few moments, images of the island rush through my head. But the pain that comes with them is too much to bear. “They can have it, Pearlie. The whole damn thing. It’s theirs anyway.”

“Do you mean that? That island’s worth a piece of money.”

“I couldn’t care less. I’ll have the lawyers draw up papers first thing. You and Jesse work out fair shares for everybody. Except for Louise Butler.”

Pearlie’s back stiffens. “What about her?”

“Louise gets the lodge.”

Pearlie gasps. “The big house? You’re not serious. Those women down there hate Louise.”

“It’s her house, Pearlie. As of today.”

The old woman makes several noises I cannot interpret. Then she says, “I guess you know what you’re doing.”

“For the first time, I think I do. Do you see Michael? I’m ready to go.”

“We don’t need no Michael. I can push this chair good as any man.”

She steps behind the wheelchair and takes the handles in her firm grip. As she turns me around, I catch a last glimpse of the river, vast and majestic under the shadows of the rain. The water down there will soon flow past DeSalle Island, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and finally into the Gulf of Mexico. Where I’ll be then, I don’t know. But the chain of misery forged through the generations of my family has finally been broken.

By me.

That’s about as good a start as I can imagine.

Pearlie pushes me back toward the lane, where Michael’s Expedition waits. As we approach, Michael gets out and waves. I lay one hand on my stomach and close my eyes. I’m not touching the wounded place, but a spot lower down. I don’t need a drink now. I don’t need anything. But for the first time in my life, I feel truly free to choose what I want.

“It’s going to be different for you,” I whisper, rubbing my tummy in a slow circle. “Your mama knows what love is.”

First and foremost, I thank the women and men who spoke frankly to me about private matters. For obvious reasons I will not name them here. Accounts of childhood sexual abuse are difficult to deal with, even on the written page. To recount personal experiences is nothing short of heroic. Few crime victims face the battles that those who as adults begin to recall childhood sexual abuse must fight. Far too often, family members and the general public refuse to believe their claims, even in the face of corroborative evidence. None of us wants to think about the harrowing crimes that innocent children suffer in their own homes. But we owe everyone who has such memories a fair hearing. Please don’t ignore any child or adult who claims that she—or he—has been sexually abused. Listen, and contact a professional. Do not wait. Do not ignore your instincts. If you need more information about child abuse, visit http://www.gregiles.com.

As with all of my novels, I relied upon the knowledge of experts to add verisimilitude to this story. I warmly thank all of these people for their contributions:

Police expertise: O’Neil DeNoux, former homicide detective and a great writer in his own right.

Dental expertise: Dr. Carrie Iles.

Medical expertise: Dr. Jerry W. Iles, Dr. Michael Bourland, Dr. Tom Carey, Dr. Geoff Flattman, Dr. Andrew Martin.

Natchez City Cemetery: Don Estes, Maypop, Martin Anderson.

Mortuary science: Charles Laird, Dickey Laird.

Miscellaneous: Nancy Hungerford, Jane Hargrove, George Ward, Clint Pomeroy, Tammye Hoover, Lisa Bunch.

Early readers: Ed Stackler, Mike Henry, Betty Iles, Carrie Iles, Ann Paradise.

Special thanks to Geoff Iles, without whose invaluable help these books would be much less than they are.

Special thanks to Selah Saterstrom, for permission to quote from her hypnotic work,
The Pink Institution.

Special thanks to Kim Barker, who first saw the blood on the wall. She’s a wonderful writer with a great imagination. I’m glad she likes laughter better than fear. Woo-hoo!

All mistakes are mine.