Darkest Fear (10 page)

Suzanne made a face and whisked the eggs harder, which ensured that they would be tough and rubbery when she cooked them. Coco looked over at me, and I mouthed,
I know.
We shared mutual good-cook shrugs of pain. One morning a few weeks ago, I'd actually felt like baking and had made orange-cranberry scones, with homemade lemon curd to go with. Coco had loved them, and the next thing I knew, I was teaching her some of my baking specialties and she was showing me how to make a remoulade sauce.

The only couple who lived here besides Matéo and Aly was Suzanne and James, who slept in the room next to mine. Thank heavens we had closets in between us and thick, old-fashioned walls. Suzanne Edmunds was tall with black hair, very pale skin, and light blue eyes. She'd come here from Connecticut to go to law
school at Tulane University, and she had what I secretly felt was a Northern chilliness, a sort of stuck-upedness. Her boyfriend, James Fortunato, was black, very tall and very slender. As a third-year med student, he was hardly ever here. His clean-cut good looks and preppy clothes made him look like someone in a J.Crew ad. He was sweet and laid-back, and often visited his parents uptown. Suzanne and James had lived here for almost a year.

With so much going on, I had minutes at a time when I forgot to be crushed by life and devastated by grief. One afternoon I noticed that I had smiled twice already that day. Another morning I realized that my clothes weren't swimming on me as much. July melded into August, and life in general took on an easy, hushed quality, as if the heat and humidity muffled sounds, muffled thoughts, muffled fear.

• • •

“Why are you still there?” Jennifer cried. “I'm coming home tomorrow!”

“I . . .” My voice trailed off. I really wanted to see her. Jennifer coming home from Israel was always the highlight of any summer. Usually I would be waiting in her driveway with a helium balloon or flowers from the grocery store. She would be exhausted from the trip but so happy to see me, and we would go lie on her bed, telling each other everything that we had already Skyped about the whole time she was gone. Then she would crash because of the time difference and I would sneak out.

“I've just . . . sort of settled here. I keep thinking about going home, and the thought of walking into my house—”

“You could stay with me,” said Jennifer.

“You're leaving for college in two weeks.”

“Yes,” she said pointedly. “I'm leaving for New York in two weeks, and then I won't see you till winter break. Therefore you should come home tomorrow so we can see each other.”

I hesitated.

“You don't have to drive. You could fly. It would take an hour and a half,” she pointed out.

“I know.” I paused, finding the thought of going home frightening and oppressive. “I just . . . don't want to be there,” I said lamely. “I didn't tell you this before because I didn't want you to worry, but someone tried to break into my house the night before I left. I was terrified, wondering if it was the same person who'd killed my parents.”

“You're kidding!” Jennifer's face was worried and too close to the screen camera. “Why didn't you tell me? What happened?”

“I was sleeping and woke up when someone broke the glass in the kitchen door. I called 911 and then waited with my baseball bat.”

“Oh my god, sweetie. That must have been so scary!”

“It was awful,” I said honestly. “I totally freaked out. I was so glad to leave the next day, and every time I think of going back, I get scared all over again.”

“Of course you do,” Jennifer said. “That's why you should stay with me.”

“It isn't just that,” I said, sighing. “It's like, when I'm here I can—”

“Pretend?” she said, but not meanly.

“I guess. I do want to see you . . . would love to see you. If we could meet in a bubble somewhere, where I wouldn't have to see anything else.”

Her brow furrowed. “I wonder . . . maybe Mom would let me come to New Orleans to see you?”

“That would be awesome. You could stay here. I would love that.” Of course, as soon as the words left my mouth, I wanted to smack myself: I was living in a house of . . . aberrations. “Freaks” seemed too mean a word for the people I was enjoying living with, even Suzanne. But we were not normal.

As it turned out, I didn't have to worry. Mrs. Hirsch was sympathetic, but she didn't want Jennifer to come to New Orleans and stay with people she didn't know. I was hugely, hugely relieved.

It was obvious that Jennifer was really hurt I wasn't coming back to see her, but every time I tried to psych myself up for it, I felt panicky. I did not want to go home. She tried to be understanding, but she couldn't believe she had to get ready for college without me. We'd always planned to do it together, had talked about it a million times. Even two years ago she'd been planning her college wardrobe, pulling things out of her closet and examining them with an eye toward being a college freshman. I would lie on her bed, reading a magazine while she held up one outfit after another and asked my opinion.

“Yeah, that seems okay,” I would say, or “No, that doesn't seem New York-y, you know?” But more often than not I just
had no idea, and she'd finally gotten exasperated.

“Vivi, it's not a good sign that your dyke best friend has more fashion sense than you do,” she'd pointed out, and I'd laughed.

“I promise to let you go through my clothes,” I'd said. “Make sure they're college-worthy.”

Back when I was planning to go to college.

I still planned to go. Someday. I wasn't up for it now. Probably next year. Tia Juliana had tried to talk me into sticking with my plan, but in the end I'd convinced her that there was no way, and she'd notified Seattle University.

Conversations between me and Jennifer became more strained the closer she got to leaving for school. I knew part of it was me and part of it was her going to a school that she didn't want to go to.

“So, they're putting me on a plane in a couple hours,” she told me toward the end of August.

“You and Helen?” I asked.

“Yeah. We took all my boxes to UPS yesterday. They should get there soon.” She tried to look positive.

“It might surprise you,” I said. “You might like it more than you think.” Our eyes met, and we both knew I was saying lame stuff a parent might say, because it was better to say that than something like,
I know it's going to suck. Wish I could help.

• • •

In Sugar Beach, my days had been all melty and surreal as I wandered through our house. I hadn't begun to process what had happened—Mrs. Peachtree next door had offered to help me clean
out my parents' clothes, to take them to her church's yard sale, but I'd just looked at her blankly.

Now that I'd been here almost two months, my days had acquired a somewhat amorphous form: I woke up, had a cup of coffee with Matéo if he was around, and puttered around the house. Sometimes I'd clean the kitchen or vacuum or something, since no one else really seemed to. Twice a week Matéo made pickups and deliveries of the instruments he repaired, and I often went with him.

One day we were eating fast food in the car, in between a delivery uptown and a pickup from a school in the Lakeview area, when he asked a question out of the blue:

“Will we ever know?”

I knew what he meant. “I don't know,” I said. “It's not like we can go back to the Everglades and look for clues.”

“Let's go over what we know,” he said, and I stifled my impatience. We'd done that so many times already.

“Your parents were killed a year and a half ago,” I said. “There was nothing special about the date: It wasn't a holiday. It wasn't your birthday.”

“Right.” Matéo bit into his hamburger fiercely.

“It looked like an accident. But because they weren't positive, the police did an autopsy.” Keeping my voice gentle didn't make these harsh facts any more bearable.

“Right.”

“They found that both of your parents' hearts were missing. When they reexamined the car, they found that there was nothing
wrong with it—no reason for it to catch on fire or explode.”

“So the cops thought maybe my folks were killed somewhere else, then put in their car, and then the car was burned to hide the evidence.” Matéo stuffed his burger wrapper back into the bag and started the engine. “But they never found any other clues.” He let out a heavy sigh and headed down Carollton Avenue toward the lake. “Okay, now your parents.”

“We've been over this a bunch.” And it still wasn't easier to talk about.

“I know, but what gets me is, you were gone for a while, maybe an hour, maybe more,” Matéo said.

“Probably a couple of hours. The sun went down,” I remembered.

“Then you came back and waited to see if there was any danger.”

There had been a large azalea bush, I remembered. Despite the smell of blood and death and fear, I'd remained there silently for minutes, my animal instinct taking over.

“Yeah.”

“But your mom was still alive,” Matéo went on. “She still had her heart. So the guy must have stopped long before you came back. It wasn't you coming back that made him run away, right? Because by the time you got there, he was gone. You didn't see anything while you waited.”

“Right,” I said slowly, thinking.

“So what stopped him? Or her, or them,” Matéo amended.

“Maybe my mom fought back too hard? Maybe my dad had really injured him, before . . .”

We sat there silently for a minute; then Matéo said, “I think you should ask Tia Juliana. See if there are any other instances in our family or in a haguari community where someone's heart got stolen.”

The idea was reasonable but not appealing. I still hadn't told her I was in New Orleans. Basically, I was lying to her every time we talked.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “And what about all the people you know? You said there were a million haguari here. Can't you ask around?”

“I've thought of that,” said Matéo. “But is it safe for me to do that? What if the murderer is connected to us somehow, or is here in New Orleans? If I start asking around, will it be dangerous?”

“I don't know. But yeah, it might be.”

“We gotta think of something,” he said. “We just need to . . . think of something.”

BUT WE DIDN'T GET VERY
far. I tried to call Tia Juliana, but her housekeeper told me the family was at the beach and wouldn't be home for a few days. Sometimes I was sure that if I thought hard enough, the answer would come to me, and sometimes I just wanted to never think about it again. We didn't want to give up, but right now we seemed to see nothing but blank walls in front of us.

About a week after Jennifer left for Columbia, Aly came home from work and tossed a flyer onto the kitchen table.

“TGIF! And ooh, it smells good in here,” she said, giving Matéo a kiss. He was making pork chops for dinner, and I was about to faint from the delicious aroma. Dana was peeling sweet potatoes, and I was shelling fresh lima beans, which I'd never known existed. My mom had always made the frozen kind.

“What's this?” I asked, wiping my hands on my shorts.

“It was on the bulletin board at the dry cleaner,” Aly said. “I don't know, I thought you might be interested. Okay, let me get out
of my work clothes and I'll set the table.” She breezed out of the kitchen, her heels clicking on the wooden floor.

I looked at the flyer. It was a
HELP WANTED
sign for a coffee shop. Tink leaned back in his chair and read it over my shoulder. Tink Owens was the last live-in member of the household, and was a total sweetheart. He worked for the Department of  Wildlife and Fisheries, patrolling the millions of Louisiana's bayous and lakes for people hunting or fishing illegally, or polluting, etc. He was an enormous blond offensive-lineman kind of guy, really nice but really big and loud. When he was home, the energy in the house totally changed. Matéo had told me Tink had lived here last year for several months, then with his boyfriend for a couple months; then the boyfriend had kicked Tink out, and now he'd been back for about six months.

“I've gone past that coffee shop,” Tink said. “It's uptown, in the Garden District.”

“Okay,” I said. “But why did Aly give this to me?” I already paid rent, and I didn't actually need more money. The insurance company had tried to suggest my parents had done a murder-suicide situation, but in the end, faced with a lawsuit by a lawyer Ms. Carsons had hired, had been forced to pay up. It still amazed me how people could put a dollar amount on a life. I would give all the money back, and a million times as much, to have one more day with my parents.

“It was just an idea,” Aly said, coming into the kitchen. Her ponytail, tank top, and cutoff shorts made her look more like herself.
The first time I'd seen her work persona, all polished and in grown-up clothes, I'd barely recognized her. “I thought you might be tired of watching Téo sand things. You could get out into the world, meet some people.”

Now I was mortified. Of course I was here too much. I was here all the time. Everyone else came and went because they had actual lives, but I was just . . . always here. I opened my mouth, starting to stammer, and Aly smiled and put her fingers against my mouth.

“Don't even go there. We love having you here. I hope you stay here as long as you want, for years and years.” She brightened, hit by a sudden thought. “You could be our live-in nanny.”

Matéo nodded in approval and leaned over to kiss Aly's dark hair. “Thinking ahead. Smart woman.”

“But working in a coffee shop would be a relatively low-pressure way of dipping your toes back into society.” Aly pulled open a drawer and grabbed some silverware. “Anyone know who's home right now and wants dinner?”