Ciji Ware (6 page)

Chapter 3

December 21, 1837

A cloying fragrance of lilies filled the room, producing an unsettling counterpoint to the subtle aroma of decay emanating from the corpse. The deceased, in his midfifties, was dressed as if for a fancy ball in a formal black suit, a stiff white-wing collar that grazed his frozen jawline, and white kid gloves.

On a cherry wood sideboard a small ivory card with a thick black border had been placed upon a miniature brass easel. In the flickering candlelight Corlis Bell McCullough—of the Pittsburgh Bells, as her mother, Elizabeth, proudly declared—could just make out the freshly printed words.

Henri Girard

Died December 20, 1837

Funeral Services at Saint Louis Cathedral

New Orleans on Saturday at Noon

Monsieur Girard lay in the luxurious mahogany coffin on a long table in the dining room. Below, on the Rue Royale, Corlis could hear the clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages wheeling beneath windows draped in the solemn black crepe of a house in mourning.

“A fine job,” pronounced a voice from a corner of the makeshift death chamber. “Why, a person viewing this body would think that Girard hadn’t died of anything more serious than too much rich food and too many glasses of port!”

Corlis felt a congratulatory pat on her taffeta sleeve.

“You’ve done well, my dear, applying your feminine arts in this emergency.” She turned her head and gazed at Ian Jeffries, the man who had extended her the bizarre compliment. His face appeared flushed, even in the dim light shed by the funereal candles. “Thanks to your rouge pots and your excellent choice of attire from Henri’s closet, the man looks as if he’s merely in a gentle slumber. Even the priest raised no questions when he came to call.”

A cold shudder slithered down Corlis’s spine, despite the warmth in the parlor where the windows had been shut tight against miasmic drafts off the river.

“ ’Twill be a relief, Ian,” declared the third member of their little group, “to see this unfortunate man in his tomb… and the sooner the better, I say, eh what?” Corlis detected a pulse-pounding strain in Randall McCullough’s subdued tone of voice.

She turned away from her husband to stare once again at the body lying still and silent in the casket. She attempted to control the tremors that seized her. The expensive coffin had been hurriedly secured from an undertaker by the name of Ebèrt. The thin, perpetually smiling little man with tiny eyes and extraordinarily small rodent-like ears had also been the source of the extravagant bouquets of lilies that seemed to scream of the collective guilt shared by all those present.

Corlis felt a sort of dread creeping over her that she couldn’t precisely identify. Furthermore, she felt too shaken by the day’s events to ask probing questions of her husband lest her inquiries yield answers she didn’t want to learn. A loud pounding on the front door abruptly interrupted her train of thought. The hammering rent the air, throwing the three of them into a state of near panic.

“Let me in!” a voice thundered on the other side of the entrance to Henri Girard’s magnificently furnished abode. “I demand that you open this door at once!”

“It’s André Duvallon!” Randall McCullough declared in a low, rasping whisper, visibly frightened at the prospect of such an unexpected arrival. “In the name of Christ, man! What do we do
now
?”

The pounding increased several decibels.

“All right, all right!” admonished Ian Jeffries, her husband’s barrel-chested business partner. He exited the dining room and crossed into the foyer, cracking the door open an inch.

A tall, handsome figure with dark hair and a thunderous expression shouldered Jeffries aside and stalked into the shadowed chamber where Henri Girard lay motionless in his coffin. André Duvallon, Girard’s banker, suddenly halted in his tracks and stared aghast at the sight of his boyhood friend silenced by death. A look of pure anguish spread across Duvallon’s patrician features, and he advanced a step closer toward the ornate casket. Then he whirled to confront the two men standing nearby, his heavy black cape fanning out in a circle.

“Oh… my… God! It was
you
who took the body away!” The sound of his accusatory cry reverberated throughout the silent rooms, assaulting Corlis with its palpable suffering. “So, it has come to this!
You
two! Playacting. Making yourself important, when you are the reason this man lies dead in his coffin! You are
scoundrels
,” Duvallon said between clenched teeth. “And I should shoot you both—but of course, you know I shan’t,” he added in a voice laden with self-loathing. His eyes narrowed as he glanced briefly at Corlis, as if to say,
Have you also somehow played a role in this?

Corlis was stricken by André’s look of disgust mixed with fury and grief.

“M-Monsieur Duvallon…” she began in a faltering whisper. “I am so sorry about your friend. So sorry that—”

The stifling air laced with the sweet smell of the flowers had begun to physically sicken her. In front of her the room’s walls appeared to throb, and the world began to go gray around the edges, transforming the figure of André Duvallon into a ghost in the mist. The next thing Corlis Bell McCullough knew, her knees buckled, and she fell into a dead faint upon the polished cypress floor.

***

The acrid aroma of burning food had the stimulating effect of smelling salts, rousing Corlis with a start. Across Julia Street, a TV blared through an open window. A block away she heard the electric streetcar loudly clang its bell as it glided down St. Charles Avenue.

What in the world was that?

Abruptly she sat up on her couch. A shudder seized her at the memory of the dead man’s waxen face staring sightlessly at the ceiling in a candlelit chamber that overlooked Royal Street in the French Quarter. Everything had seemed so real! That woman had appeared so alive…

What
woman?

Corlis Bell McCullough…

Now, why would she dream about her namesake like that? The ancestress that Aunt Marge claimed had once floated down the Mississippi on a steamboat while pregnant and suffering from the dreaded yellow fever? Corlis’s own temples were throbbing, and she felt as if she were still swimming to the surface of total consciousness.

Suddenly she sniffed the air. Something
was
burning!

“Oh, m’God!” she exclaimed, turning to look over the back of her couch toward the kitchen. “My oatmeal!”

She sprang from the sofa, nearly toppling over the tall vase of sickly sweet stargazer lilies on the coffee table, and groped her way into her tiny kitchen. The room was filled with sooty smoke tunneling from a small saucepan irreparably blackened on the top of the electric stove. Corlis grabbed a pot holder, eased the pan into the sink, and turned on the faucet.

A loud hissing sound accompanied an increasing amount of dark smoke that poured from the vessel, its sides encrusted with the remains of John McCall’s Irish Oatmeal. Corlis gazed with dismay at her breakfast while a lingering vision of a coffin, surrounded by vases full of lilies, filled her thoughts. The smoke alarm went off.

“Double, triple
merde
!”
she cursed aloud.

She was further startled by a series of agitated chirping sounds and a soft puff of fur rubbing against her calf. She whirled in place and saw Cagney Cat staring reproachfully at the billowing clouds clinging to her twelve-foot-high ceilings.

“Well, where have
you
been?” she demanded distractedly.

Next the smoke alarm in the hallway began to beep in piercing syncopation.

Corlis made a dash for the tall window nearest her fireplace and pushed up the sash to let the smoke out. In a flash Cagney flew through the open window onto the gallery’s wrought-iron hand railing, defying gravity and common sense by padding to the opposite end of the balcony that hung high over Julia Street.

“Come in here, you beast!” Corlis cried over the staccato sounds of smoke detectors. She stuck her head out the window for a welcome whiff of fresh, moist air. Despite this improvement in atmosphere, she felt something akin to hysteria pulling at her throat.

Was she completely losing her mind? she wondered as she observed her tabby sitting precariously on the railing and insouciantly licking one paw. The dream, or vision, or whatever she’d just experienced, had seemed so authentic… as real as the brief glimpse she’d had of the nineteenth-century wedding couple in Saint Louis Cathedral the previous night.

Corlis pulled her head back inside the room and stared at the vase of white trumpet blooms. Their strong, distinctive fragrance now competed with the acrid odor of burned oatmeal.

“California crazy” is what King Duvallon would call her.

What she’d just experienced seemed very different from ordinary dreaming. The scene that had unfolded before her eyes this morning had been more like watching a movie. However, she reminded herself, the events she’d “seen” supposedly had taken place 150 years ago, if they’d happened at all!

Furthermore, who the hell was Henri Girard
—
the stiff in the coffin?

In her mind’s eye she recalled the black-bordered card sitting on the cherry wood sideboard announcing the date—1837—and the location of Henri Girard’s funeral, Saint Louis Cathedral. She suddenly remembered the name of her boss at WWEZ-TV who’d employed and then fired her: Victor Girard.

Girard!
The same last name as the dead man!

“Oh, Jesus…” she murmured, grabbing her kitchen counter for support. She must really harbor more resentment toward the guy than she realized. But it had all seemed so genuine, as if she really were right there, watching events taking place “live” and in living color in 1837!

Her reporter’s training kicked in. She could always look in the city’s official birth and death records to see if a Henri Girard had died on that date in New Orleans.

And what if Henri Girard actually existed? What then?

It was a
dream
!

She headed for the gallery to check on Cagney just as the smoke alarms mercifully fell silent. As she crossed her living room once again, she gazed with a jaundiced eye at the red Persian rug that her great-aunt had described as a precious family heirloom. It had been handed down from the woman whom Marge had insisted she be named for: Corlis Bell McCullough. She and her husband were the only members of the Scottish-American McCullough clan to ever live in New Orleans.

How nice,
she thought grimly.
My very own magic carpet.

She leaned against the window jamb and stared absently down at Julia Street’s dew-slicked pavement. Perhaps this strange apparition had been a kind of self-inflicted morality play. Maybe she’d merely dreamed that the man who’d fired her so unceremoniously last night would come to a bad end.

But in a winged collar?

And besides, the dead guy’s first name was Henri. Her boss was Victor. Worse yet, in the dream she’d had a good look at the corpse’s face. Except for his arched Gallic nose, Henri Girard did not look at all like the man who had just given her her walking papers at WWEZ-TV.

Meanwhile, Corlis began to worry that Cagney Cat might come to an equally bad end if she didn’t get him to come back inside. Disconcerted by everything that had happened in such quick succession, Corlis again stuck first her head, then her torso out of her living room window. She gazed with increasing frustration at the willful feline who remained perched on the gallery’s wrought-iron railing.

“Oh, stay out there, for all I care, you big brat!” she declared finally. “I’m going round the corner to the Hummingbird for breakfast!”

At this point, Corlis thought grimly, a hearty meal in her stomach seemed her only hope for putting a stop to all this nonsense! Filled with resolve, she marched down the hallway, grabbed her purse and keys off the bed, and swiftly ran down the stairs and out her front door.

***

A loud series of short buzzes from the apartment intercom penetrated the fitful, caffeine-laced doze that Corlis had fallen into following her breakfast of pancakes and cane syrup. Whoever was downstairs on Julia Street changed tactics and held a heavy finger on the button.

“All right! All right!” she protested as she padded down the hallway in her sweat socks and pushed the “speak” button on the intercom.

“Hello!” she barked.

“Corlis McCullough?” A deep masculine voice sounded as irascible as she felt.

“Bin-go!” she said.

“It’s King Duvallon. May I come up?”

Corlis sagged against the wall, utterly dumbfounded and dismayed.

“Hello? You still there?”

“What
are you
doing here? What
time
is it? And how do you know where I live?”