LeOmi's Solitude (2 page)

LeOmi asked Ruby, “Why doesn’t she live in
the whole house?”

Hannah had startled LeOmi when she answered,
“Because she cares not to Little Missy, and that’s that.”

Hannah was an old woman even then. Almost as
old as Grand-Mère, but she was still as agile as a woman half her
age. She had no problem escorting Ruby and LeOmi back to her
mother.

Mother had warned LeOmi to avoid Hannah, “She
is very faithful to your Grand-Mère; they both can be very evil
when they want to be.”

Hannah had just stood there with that same
look that she would give Grand-Mère, like you might think that you
can tell me to do something—but I won’t do it unless I want to.
Standing there like she was, LeOmi thought she must have been very
beautiful when she was young. Her hair was always swept back from
her face and tightly knotted in the back of her head. She always
wore those dangly ruby earrings, there was a broach to match—but
she only wore that on special occasions. Now at the bus station,
Hannah had that same look on her face and when the car stopped at
the garage Hannah said, “I won’t be stuck with taking care of you,
Little Missy. I have my duties and you will have yours. I am not
your momma and I will not be responsible for you.” LeOmi noticed
that Hannah wore the broach today. LeOmi turned to Hannah with
fierce determination in her eyes but said nothing.

As they entered the house, Grand-Mère was in
her sitting area in her chair.

Grand-Mère’s gray-black hair was fastidiously
wound and pinned together on her head. Her hands neatly folded in
her lap showed her lovely rings on her fine long and elegant
fingers manicured to perfection. Her dress was of the old style but
immaculately clean and well maintained.

There was an elegant desk to her right and
the beautiful tall, straight-backed chair that she sat in was
reminiscent of a throne, French aristocracy incarnate.

“So, you are now here.” There was the heavily
annoyed tone to her voice.

LeOmi stood in front of the most powerful
personality she had ever encountered in her short life. From the
previous visits, LeOmi had learned to not get in Grand-Mère’s way.
She remembered her mother saying
, “Stay out of her way and she
will stay out of yours.”

LeOmi’s response was to stand silently.

“Very well, we will endure each other. Do not
cause any unnecessary complications and you may remain. If I find
you intolerable, I will send you back to that man who is your
father.”

LeOmi only inclined her head, lips pressed
firmly together.

“Hannah will show you where you may sleep. Is
that thing on your back all of the luggage that you have come
with?”

LeOmi nodded.

“So it is to be expected from your father.”
Grand-Mère simply pursed her lips together, showing a remarkable
family resemblance between the two.

LeOmi waited for a comment about her hair,
but there was none. Apparently she was to be ignored as much as
possible.

Hannah led LeOmi to a small room just off the
kitchen. It had been cleaned and fresh linens were on the bed.
There was no window.

* * *

About a week later, her father sent a trunk
with her clothes and some papers showing that she was enrolled in
the local school. He didn’t even bother to ask her, he didn’t even
personally have her checked in. It was all done by correspondence
through the US Postal service. It felt like he was distancing
himself as far away from her as he could.

I guess I remind everyone of her, so I’ll be
ignored by all of them.

* * *

The next two years seemed to fly by. LeOmi
attended the local school and stayed out of Grand-Mère’s way. One
of the duties required of LeOmi was to attend dinner every night,
eight p.m. dinner was a solemn occasion with Grand-Mère, dressing
in southern fashion but LeOmi did not perform as lady-like as she
should have and her hair remained defiantly short. She had even
rebelliously white tipped her black hair and jelled it into
spikes.

There were no conversations. No discussion of
classes. Pomp and circumstance was not something that was expected
of her. After all, this was an inconvenience for Grand-Mère. At
least that is what it felt like all the time.

In her spare time, LeOmi could be found at
the local gym studying Kendo and Kickboxing. She went from a skinny
ten year old to a tall liquid young woman who could “take down”
anyone who challenged her. LeOmi’s instructor, Henry, said that he
had never seen anyone move with such grace and speed.

Henry Ben Franklin, a retired West Point
teacher/instructor took her under his wing. Part Cherokee Indian,
he taught her things like archery and horseback riding, but his
passion was sharp edged weapons of any kind. In the year that LeOmi
studied under him, she learned more than she ever thought
possible.

His favorite saying was “Discipline is the
human character through applications of principles.” Then he would
say, “But you’re a girl, how would you understand that? …Did I get
you riled up yet? You seem to focus better when you’re angry.”

Henry got to know all his students, but
during the summer months, when few people were in the gym and they
had more one-on-one time, he asked her, “LeOmi, what do you want to
be when you grow up?” A common enough question.

Her answer was, “The best.”

“The best? The best at what?”

She said, “At everything I do.”

Henry had a ranch just over the causeway. He
bred and stabled horses and taught horseback riding. He gave her a
job there as sort of a go-fer in the summer. That is where LeOmi
found out how much she loved horses. Her favorite was called Fury,
for all the right reasons but throughout the summer, they both
mellowed. They calmed each other. Henry just called him “her horse”
and she spent as much time with Fury as she could.

“That horse has changed because of you.”
Henry said as he approached LeOmi and Fury after a busy day at the
ranch.

“Why is it that you can care for that horse
so much, yet you are so distant with the people who are right
beside you?

LeOmi continued brushing down Fury, then she
said, “Fury doesn’t expect anything from me, yet he can be a true
friend. It isn’t like that with people.”

“Some people aren’t as bad as you make them
out to be. We all run away from things—”

“I’m not running away.”

“Hah. You’re just like that horse was,
irritated by people.”

“I am just working, not running
anywhere.”

“I don’t mean your job, you are doing a fine
job, and you’re a hard worker. No, I mean how you deal with
people.”

LeOmi kept brushing the horse, and brushing.
Henry had been a good instructor and friend.

He waited for her to answer, and waited.

“I need to reach my goal, a goal that may be
unattainable, through no fault of my own.”

She threw the horse brush down into the
bucket, startling Fury. She grabbed his mane and hugged him.
“Sometimes it seems like life is so meaningless. So...empty.”

“Yes.”

Henry inspected the horse. “This is a fine
animal, strong. He just needed someone to care for him, to believe
in him, someone who could identify with him. That was you. Someday,
you may find people that you can identify with.”

“Not likely.”

“When a mockingbird sings, it is imitating
others, it can sound like a robin or it can sound like a hawk. What
is its true voice?”

LeOmi shrugged her shoulders, “I don’t
know.”

“Sometimes, even the ones closest to it don’t
know. Heck, it has sung those different songs for so long; maybe it
doesn’t even know any more. But if we listen…”

“We can learn?”

“And understand. You…and I…still have a lot
to learn.”

Henry was an uncommonly honest guy. She tried
not to get too close to him. Everyone she had ever felt any
friendship for had simply gone away.

As things worked out, time ran out for Henry.
He died from bone cancer exactly three months before her twelfth
birthday. She was there for him as much as she could be. His
family, long ago estranged, slowly having a change of heart and
coming back to him in the end.

“I am alone again.”

All she had learned, she kept close to her
heart, the good and the bad.

* * *

When she wasn’t at the gym or jogging five
miles a day, she was studying books in the local parish
library.

Things were quite a bit different in New
Orleans from the chapel home at the Naval Base. Life seemed lazy
and laid back. As long as she kept her mind busy she was okay.
Thinking of home and the life that she had in Virginia was the
worst thing she could do.

Everything was close in New Orleans. Not only
in walking distance—but also, everyone seemed to know what everyone
else was doing. Grand-Mère seemed to have her spies everywhere.
There was no need to talk about her day at the dinner table.
Grand-Mère already knew. Everybody knew everything about everybody
else, and every day seemed like the next. Mother must have had a
horrible childhood here.

No wonder she was so prepared to run off
with my father—and then she just seemed to make a habit of it.

LeOmi wasn’t surprised when her father
called. She knew that the phone was going to ring, she could sense
it.

Chapter 2

To Make War is Life or
Death

As LeOmi entered the house she heard, “There
are only so many ways to look at things but the thing I keep coming
up with is that nothing is ever easy.”

Detective Sergeant Dominick Polaris was a
large man. The slogan “bear of a man” must have been invented for
him. He looked like he came by it naturally, mostly height and
muscle, but you could see just the beginnings of the middle age
roll forming on his hips.

He had come to escort LeOmi’s father and
Grand-Mère to the morgue to identify her mother’s body, and to see
if any of them were suspects. It didn’t take Sergeant Polaris long
to find out that her father could not have had anything to do with
her mother’s murder. He came and left quickly barely even looking
at her. He was back in Virginia before the next morning.

Hannah tried to console LeOmi but she cringed
away from Hannah’s attempt.

“How could this happen Hannah, it wasn’t bad
enough that she had been taken away...but killed.”

Grand-Mère just seemed to have expected it to
happen, as if it was inevitable. No one was saying or doing
anything about her mother’s death—it was almost as if they felt
that she had it coming to her.

LeOmi heard Henry in her mind,
“Did I get
you riled up yet? You seem to focus better when you’re
angry.”

“I’ll find my own answers.” Her door slamming
was the only sound in the huge old house.

LeOmi went through everything in the room.
Her mother’s scarf and old tattered book were all she had left of
her. That and LeOmi’s memories.

* * *

LeOmi had the freedom to do as she liked—just
as long as she was back every night for dinner—probably so
Grand-Mère could report to her father that she was still alive, if
necessary.

Transportation to the other side of New
Orleans was the hardest part to manage. If she took a taxi or the
bus or even the trolley Grand-Mère’s spies would know. She would
probably find out no matter what.

The address was an old crumbling brick
building, strangely out of place for the part of town that it was
in. It was down in a bog area. Nothing but dead trees and other old
boarded up warehouses, only a stone’s throw from modern townhouses
and new condominiums. The sign that hung from a pole out front read
The Celtic Wheel. A big ram’s head was painted on a plank in the
old saloon style on the threshold above the front door.

LeOmi stepped under the crime scene tape that
wrapped around the building just as the sun was approaching three
knuckles above the horizon and a nipping wind was howling from the
north. The front door was a heavy solid structure, thicker than any
door she had ever seen. LeOmi entered, trying to look natural and
like she had been asked to come there.

The building must have been a hundred years
old and whoever built it must have used un-tempered mortar on the
huge stone fireplace and chimney. The smell of old smoke struck her
as she entered the large open room. It must have leaked terribly.
There was an old coat of whitewash on the brick walls to try to
cover up the stains—but nothing would be able to remove the smell
and greasy smoke stains unless they pulled it all down and put new
in its place.

There was a section of the carpet missing, a
rectangle that had been cut out. Within the hole there was her
mother’s bloodstain that had seeped through the carpet to the
cement slab. LeOmi could almost envision her mother lying there
with the life pouring out of her.

A man’s voice came from another room.

“There is no truth in this place.”

LeOmi moved closer to the sounds, but made
sure to stay close to the wall. She could hear at least two people
moving around in the back of the building. They appeared to be just
walking and talking. At least one of the two was talking.

“You would think that this place was a tavern
at one time by the look of it—but it has never been licensed for
that, although you can certainly tell that drinking is something
that goes on here, license or no.”

Sergeant Polaris
.

LeOmi recognized the voice of the detective
who came to the house to talk with her father and Grand-Mère. Of
course there hadn’t been much to be said. No one knew where her
mother had gone. New Orleans was the last place that LeOmi had
thought she would be.

What was she doing in a place like this?

LeOmi listened for a clue to tell her who the
other person was. She only heard shuffling movements. She moved
closer to the doorway, keeping concealed and out of their field of
view.