What She Doesn't Know (20 page)

“No, no, no,” Rita said, rummaging in her purse to look up her number.

“But she said she’s not supposed to do that, so she’s been driving around in circles for an hour.” He lifted his eyebrow, but Rita was already dialing the number and walking around the corner.

She talked Anna out of the panic attack she’d worked herself into and eventually helped her drive to her destination without stopping. Twenty minutes later, she hung up and returned to the kitchen where he still indulged in his coffee.
 

“I take it she didn’t really run someone over,” he said.

She shook her head. “She has an obsessive-compulsive disorder that makes her think every time she hits a pothole or a speed bump in the road, she’s run over someone. So she circles back looking for them, and then she’ll hit another bump and it literally becomes a vicious circle. Plus it puts her into panic mode. We’ve been working on exposure therapy, where I ride in the car with her and we purpose run over potholes and bumps. She’d been doing well until her marriage also hit a pothole and that’s thrown her back in her therapy.”

“Do you deal with a lot of that kind of thing?”

“That and phobias and other oddities.” Out of respect for her clients, she didn’t want to get into too much detail, so she shifted the subject. “You match this house, you know.”

“What?”

“The colors you wear.” He looked down, then around. She said, “You never really left New Orleans. Think about it: the coffee you order, the accent.”

He contemplated as he took a sip of his coffee. “New Orleans is the woman you left behind and never forgot.”

Perhaps New Orleans hadn’t let him go. He probably felt at home in the city, but had he at his own home?

“Stop looking at me like that,” he said

She blinked. “Like what?”

“Like you’re analyzing me. Didn’t we get that straight last night?”

Her face flushed, and she lifted her hair off her heated neck. “It’s a habit. Analyzing, that is.” Not asking men to kiss her, not putting herself on the line only to get tromped on. “We have a lot in common.” He gave her a skeptical look. “With our fathers, I mean. We both had fathers we couldn’t reach. And now they’re gone.”

“But my father’s indifference stopped hurting me a long time ago.”

She winced at the unspoken side of that statement. “At least I found out why he was…the way he was.” She tried to force a casual smile of bravery. Okay, maybe the indifference did still hurt, but only a little. “When I finally mustered the courage to tell him, I found out he’d died of cancer two days earlier. I never got to make peace with him. Did you?”

“I let him go long before he ever died,” he said, and left it at that.

“Did you?” Before he could get defensive, she quickly said, “I worked through a lot of my anger and other hang-ups during my college studies, but I still needed to make peace with him. And I’d figured out what his problem was. I used to think that simply knowing the source of a person’s behavior was the key to fixing the problem. I thought that if I explained it to him, he’d see the light. It doesn’t always work that way.”

He finished off his mug and then poured more for himself. As he started to put the pot back, he stopped and held it up in question. He was getting better at this host thing. His eyes were on her as he poured the coffee, though he knew when to stop pouring. He smelled of deodorant and shaving cream, intrinsically male scents that sent heat pooling inside her.
 

“What was his problem?” he asked.

“You really want to know?”

His eyes warmed for a moment. “Sure.”

Did she want to tell him? Well, she’d started it, hadn’t she? “In layman’s terms, Charlie was the victim of a sensual mother. From what I knew, Maura’s husband had ignored her, so she lavished all of her affection on her only son. She dressed in sexy clothes, moved like liquid. Once I started studying psychology, I figured out what had happened.

“When a man becomes an adolescent and starts having sexual feelings, if his mother is draping herself all over him, some of those feelings are transferred to her. He gets disgusted at himself for these wrong feelings and shuts them off. Because of that shame, he doesn’t date women or get into relationships with them; he feels like a freak. And when Charlie suddenly got custody of his young daughter…well, he didn’t know how to relate to a woman, even a girl, in a nonsexual way. It was probably the same kind of shame all over again, just the thought of having sexual feelings toward his own daughter. So he kept me at a distance.” She decided to turn the tables. “What about you?”

He put the coffee pot back on the burner. “I was a mistake, that’s all.” He met her eyes. “Did you say you were meeting Tammy today?”

“Yes,” she said, feeling cheated. Why did women always give so much more? They talked more, that’s why.

He was already walking out of the kitchen. “I’ll take you in to the Quarter. So you don’t get lost,” he added over his shoulder before heading around the corner.

“I wasn’t going to get lost,” she stated. No point in arguing. He was right—she’d get lost.

Rita headed to the car fifteen minutes later but stopped when she saw Christopher strolling down the sidewalk. “Aren’t we driving in?”

“Nope. Too many people, too many beads dropping from the sky.”

She caught up to him. “Beads are going to drop from the sky?” She squinted up at the sun.

He chuckled. “Not literally. People throw them from galleries. Those are balconies to you and me.”

“This place is like another country.”

“For sure. Balconies are galleries, sidewalks are banquettes.” He held out a pack of bubble gum in a gesture of offer, but she shook her head. She didn’t want to be reminded of kissing him. He popped a purple chunk in his mouth and stuffed the pack in his pocket. Would she ever smell grape again and not think of him?
 

Along the parade route naked trees were treated to a new look: beads of all colors draped from their branches. Groups of people wandered around, wearing Mardi Gras colors and looking at the houses.

“Come on, let’s try to catch the next streetcar.” He grabbed for her hand as he broke into a sprint but let go as soon as they made contact.

Once they were settled on the old wooden seat of the streetcar, a bell clanged twice and they headed toward the Quarter. Sunshine slanted down into her window. She closed her eyes and soaked up its warmth. When she opened them, he was watching her with something that looked like hunger. Instead of looking away, he gave her a soft smile.

Several stops later, they disembarked at Canal Street. They crossed a large expanse of road flanked by hotels and shops and continued straight on Royal Street. The buildings were old, but what character they had. Some of them had character of an X-rated kind. Naturally, he had to catch her as she peered into one of the open doorways.

“Just holler if you want to stop,” he said with that sly grin.

“I was just…there was…oh, never mind!” She really had no decent excuse, other than curiosity.

He chuckled. “I’ll start calling you my peeping Annie.”

That smile of his arrested her as surely as the words he’d just said.
His
peeping Annie, huh? He probably hadn’t even noticed it, but those words settled into her belly like a dose of peppermint schnapps.

“One block over is Bourbon Street,” he said, pointing to the left as they crossed the street.

People flowed from Bourbon down the side street, draped with beads and wearing silly hats. She absently placed her hand on her collarbone; she hadn’t put on her beads. Almost everyone was wearing at least one necklace and as many as thirty. Without those gaudy beads, she was the one who stood out.

“Mawtha a’Gawd, a condom shop!” She stopped, gawking at the sign over the doorway proudly exclaiming their specialty. “A shop that sells nothing but condoms. Who would have figured?”

“Oh, they probably sell a few other things.”

She started to ask what but caught herself. She didn’t want to know. Okay, maybe she did a little, but she wasn’t about to ask.

He shook his head. “What was that first part you said. Mouther something?”

She thought back over what she’d said. “Mother of God? It’s just an expression Kevin White—one of our former mayors—used to say. It kinda stuck.”

The crowds got even thicker as they ventured farther into the Quarter. Several party animals were already nearing the bottoms of their large, plastic cups of beer. “Huge ass beers,” according to a sign one guy was carrying around. She looked over at Christopher, who was oblivious to his surroundings.

“Did you spend a lot of time at the hotel?” She wondered if the place would evoke painful memories.

“I helped out during Mardi Gras and over the summers.”

Rita thought about what Emmagee had said. “New Orleans must have changed a lot since you left.”

“For sure.”

Well, that was deep. But she already knew he wasn’t into sharing, and for a moment she envied Emmagee for having known him when he wasn’t living in the dark. When he danced. When he was Chris. Maybe she could have…

She stopped herself right there. She had lived with too many maybes and what-ifs. First with her father, and now she seemed to be repeating the pattern with Christopher. He already told her he didn’t need her help, that he had monsters in his moat. That should be more than enough to steer her clear. But every once in a while she glimpsed something besides all that anger and indifference. She saw a man who deserved a woman who would not give up on him.

“Where you headed?” he asked.

“A dangerous place,” she said, then realized she’d walked on without him.

He steered them toward the dark green covered entry for the LaPorte. The tall doorman nodded without a smile as he opened the door, but he obviously had no idea Christopher was a LaPorte. Then again, Christopher probably hadn’t identified himself as such.

“Have you been here much since you came back?” she asked as they passed beneath an ostentatious chandelier hanging in the lobby.

“A few times.”

She wondered if his father had left him any portion of the hotel. Charlie had left her a few thousand dollars, but everything else had gone to his mother. Rita would have traded every dollar for an hour with him before he’d died.

Even though Christopher did not have any ties here, he walked through the office door as though he had authority. Behind the white carved door, a hallway split right and left, and a series of offices lined both sides. Along the walls were framed pictures of nature with inspirational sayings beneath them like
TEAM: Together Everyone Accomplishes More
, and
Persistence prevails when all else fails.
It was strange that she’d never seen this side of Brian. It made her feel as though she hadn’t known him at all.

“I’ll meet you over at Pat O’Brien’s when you’re done chatting Tammy up,” he said, slowing down in front of the last office. “Go up to St. Peter and turn toward Bourbon. Once you walk in, I’ll be in the piano bar on the right.”

“You’re leaving me here?” When at first she’d intended to go into the Quarter by herself, now she was disappointed he wasn’t staying.

“I’m going to check out Brian’s office again, look for anything I might have missed the first time, and then I’m outta here. Unless you need me to wait.”

And inconvenience him? No way. “I’ll be fine.”

He smiled. “Don’t look so worried,
cherie
. This part of the Quarter’s not so bad during the day. Just don’t go wandering or making friends on the way.”
 

“Like I would.”

Tammy came around the corner of the hallway. Her blond, curly hair was a bit disheveled.

“Hi, Rita. Christopher,” she acknowledged more carefully. “Slumming?”

Rita answered for him. “He walked me in to make sure I got here in one piece.”

Tammy’s eyebrows rose. “Really now? Better watch it, Christopher. Your chivalry is showing.”

He merely gave her a lift of his eyebrow and turned away.

Tammy looked annoyed that she hadn’t riled him. She turned to Rita.
 
“I’ve got about fifteen minutes to squeeze in lunch, so let’s go.”

Tammy secured a table in the crowded courtyard. Most of the patrons here were dressed in fine clothes and jewelry, though a few were decked out in Mardi Gras colors.

“Make it fast, Dave,” Tammy said to the waiter, who eyed Rita curiously. “I’ve got fourteen minutes.” Once they’d ordered, she said in the same no-nonsense voice, “You’re obviously still snooping around Brian’s life. Have you found anything to prove Christopher pushed him off the roof?”

“He had nothing to do with it.”

“But you still think someone did.”

“I think it’s more likely than him falling by accident. After all, he spent his whole life in that house. He knew his way around that deck. You obviously cared a great deal about him,” Rita ventured. “Don’t you want to know what happened?”

“I didn’t only care about him. Any fool could see I loved the man. But not Brian. As far as romance goes, I might as well have been the palm in the lobby. All those women he dated, and not one measured up to him.”

Or to you,
Rita didn’t say. “Christopher said Brian hadn’t dated anyone in some time. What about business ventures? Had he shown any interest in video games lately?”

Her brows furrowed. “Video games? I can’t imagine that. But you know, he could have been into anything for all I know. And the more I think about it, the more I’m sure he
was
into something. He zoned out a lot. Like he was daydreaming. He had this light in his eyes, too, and sometimes a faint smile.” She crumpled her linen napkin. “Doesn’t sound like a business venture, does it?”

Rita shook her head. Another dead end. “Did he ever mention the name Sira? Or anything about Xanadu?”
 

“Nothing about Sira. Xanadu was the name of his father’s krewe, but he never talked about that anymore.”

When Tammy looked behind Rita, Rita turned to find the waiter approaching with their sandwiches and hot teas. How long had he been standing there listening to them? He placed their food on the table and left.