Lies Agreed Upon (31 page)

Jon shrugged
. “Maybe they wanted them to sell. Maybe they were angry at a world where some people build pretty but useless follies like this while other people can’t pay the rent. Some may have done it just for the joy of stealing beauty
—
or destroying beauty. When it comes to motives, it’s never simple.”

“I’m becoming more convinced of that daily,” agreed Tess as they entered the shady ground floor of the belvedere together. Its honey sandstone floor was bare of furnishings, al
though light rectangles showed the former locations of the stone benches that Sam had moved to the garden at her grandmother’s request.

Tess strolled to the arcade opening opposite to the garden. The hedge ran close to the building on this side, allowing space only for a narrow paved patio with two dwarf orange trees in stone pots, survivors of the vanished orangery walk apparently. In the center was a large two-tiered granite fountain filled with damp and rotting leaves. A top o
rnamentation represented leaping fish. “Oh, it’s the ‘spitting fish’ fountain from the old Myrtle Court!” Tess laughed. “Gloria Donovan described it to me. It must have been salvaged after the fire and put here.”

“They decorated one ruin with another ruin. The fish are sort of grotesque,” remarked Jon.

“Gloria Donovan also told me about a secret room here. If you press on one of the tiles on the right-hand end wall, a secret panel will open to a storage space. I wonder if we can find it,” she commented. Moving to the tiled-covered wall, they began pressing haphazardly on various tiles. Tess thought she saw the outline of a panel, but she couldn’t find the opening trigger.

“Well, this is frustrating.
As a child, Gloria got locked in the space by accident once, so maybe they sealed it up,” Tess finally concluded. “Forget it. Let’s go take a look at the view from upstairs. This place is giving me the creeps.”

She felt an almost urgent need to escape the belvedere’s ground floor. The deterioration
and echoing shadows combined with a faint but disturbingly foul scent of decay to create a suffocating, oppressive atmosphere.

Jon must have felt some of the same negative aura because he agreed quickly, “Me, too. Let’s get back to a sunnier view of things.”

They quickly mounted one of the paired end staircases to the second floor arcade. Together they went to lean against the stucco balustrade overlooking the tapestry of flowers and paths. Tess could see old Sam sitting on the rose-arbor bench. His hatless head nodded over hands resting atop his cane, and he seemed to be dozing.

They crossed wordlessly to the opposite balustrade and looked out toward the Mississippi. Past the hedge wall, a sea of waving sugar cane stretched to a distant line of trees
and glimpses of the great river. To their right, another serpentine line of trees apparently followed a bayou. Beyond these trees, Tess could see a rusted horse-head oil pump, its rocking long stilled. It was the old oil well that had propelled the early Donovan fortune, she concluded. Still farther away, the refinery’s industrial buildings, round tanks, and flame-tipped chimneys were clearly visible.

“Your ardent suitor, Gulf Coast Refining,” said Jon, pointing toward the refinery. “I think the area around the bayou must be where there is a pollution problem, mostly the refinery’s own fault, so it’s noble of them to offer to clean it up,” he added cynically. “Environmental controls have never been strongly enforced in the state. Petroleum-related revenue and employment are powerful forces.”

“What’s that do you think?” asked Tess, pointing toward a small cupola-topped structure near the bayou trees. The little dome was supported by classical columns and attended by a small grove of multi-trunked trees with chalky white bark. It looked abandoned, embedded in dense brush.

“It looks like some kind of folly or maybe a memorial,” said Jon. “We’ll have to ask Grampaw. You’ve inherited some view
, I’ve got to admit.”

As she idly scanned the vista to her left, Tess noticed a small island of derelict land in the middle of the cane field. She squinted and thought she could dist
inguish the stump of a large, circular brick column near a pile of bricks shaded by a tupelo gum.

Suddenly, Tess knew what she was looking at. “Jon, look over there. I’m sure that’s what’s left of Josephine Chastant’s old sugar mill. See the brick chimney base? My own piece of antebellum history!”

Jon obediently eyed the distant ruin and then remarked, “To you, I guess that pile of bricks is former glory. To me, it’s a reminder of oppression. When that mill chimney was smoking, my great-great-grandmother Solange was at the big house dressing Miss Josephine’s hair.”

Tess bit her lip and decided that there was no reply that would not further emphasize the racial schism. After a few quiet heartbeats, she said, “It’s certainly pleasant up here with the breeze, just like Gloria Donovan said. By the way,
this weekend I was planning to visit the African American History Museum in Tremé, the one you mentioned. Would you care to join me?” she asked, too shy to look at him directly in case her invitation was rejected.

Jon looked surprised and then smiled broadly. “I don’t trust you to really explore Tremé without me,” he declared. “We can have lunch and see the sights. OK?”

“Great,” Tess smiled back.

“It’s a deal. I’ll come by your hotel around 11 a.m. on Saturday. Now let’s go wake up Grampaw. I think it’s time to get him to a more comfortable napping place,” said Jon and strode purposefully toward the stairs. Tess watched his lithe, retreating form with a warm feeling that was worlds away from the insecure distaste of their earliest encounters.

Back among the roses, Jon gently roused Sam. “Y’all enjoy the view?” Sam asked.

“The belvedere has wonderful views,” smiled Tess. “By the way, what is that round white building over by the refinery land? We thought it might be a gazebo or memorial.”

“Oh, that. Well, it’s sorta both,” nodded Sam. “You saw the white-bark chalk maples there? Well, they was there ’fore the buildin’, and it was called The Ghost Grove then. After Charles Donovan built that little place, it got named Donovan’s Grove.”

“Charles Donovan put a folly there?” asked Tess in confusion. “Isn’t it on Cabrera land?”

“Yeah, Thérèse Cabrera did purely hate it, but she gotta let Charles Donovan build it for the ghosts.” The old man had the pleased air of a man setting up to tell a good story.

“Don’t tease us,” said Jon with an exasperated look. “What did Charles Donovan build and why?”

Sam smiled impishly but obliged the two younger people. The story began with a visit to Alhambra by Elaine and Charles. They had come to see the new belvedere, and Charles was strolling along the upper level when he noticed the distant grove of white-bark trees. He idly asked Elaine about the distinctive trees, and she said they were called The Ghost Grove, but she claimed she did not know why. Charles was intrigued and asked Thérèse, but she became so irritated and flustered that he grew even more curious. So Charles hiked down the road to the grove and began poking around.

Suddenly,
his eye was caught by something shining on the ground. He bent down, picked up the object and realized that it was a button from a Yankee uniform. He began to inspect the area more closely and eventually found another button and a half-buried Union belt buckle. Now he began to guess the reason for the name Ghost Grove, and he marched back to the Alhambra main house to face off with Thérèse.

He forced her to admit what he suspected: The soldiers from his
squad, the ones who vanished when he was shot at the old Arnoult place, were lying under the earth, surrounded by chalk maples like ghost sentinels. Thérèse acknowledged that the Union soldiers had been ambushed by a larger unit of Confederates, who left the bodies in the road. Paul Arnoult and Antonio Cabrera were frightened that they would be blamed, so they enlisted trusted slaves to bury the bodies far from the attack site.

“You know there’s exac’ly five of those ghost-bark trees there, one for each soldier, and that do make you think,” intoned Sam
with a solemn nod.

The last thing Thérèse wanted, now that her family fortunes were heavily dependent on Northern investors, was a public reminder of the family’s
personal role in the Confederate ambush of Northerners. But Charles only agreed to keep the graves a secret if Thérèse let him build a “Greek temple” on the spot to honor his dead friends, continued Sam. Charles took the statue of the dying odalisque from a shed, where she had been languishing since ouster from the maze, and placed her in his folly. The meaning to him was obscure, but the statue’s resurrection to a place of honor certainly annoyed Thérèse.

“I brung that naked lady up here. I bet Thérèse is turnin’ in her grave,” Sam chuckled. “Anyway
s, Charles useta sit out there all the time, and it drove Thérèse crazy. Yeah, those dead soldiers kep’ gettin’ revenge on her.

“When
Charles passed on, Elaine said she wanna put a chalk maple out there to make it six, like Charles is joinin’ the other soldiers. F’sure, Thérèse won’t allow it. Then Elaine planted an oil rig instead. In Thérèse’s last days, she can see a useless ‘temple’ on her own land to remind her of her guilt and that well risin’ up to pump money from her daughter’s land!”

Sam grinned, planted his cane and slowly leveraged his bent form from the bench. Jon quickly placed a supportive hand under the old man’s arm.

“So Charles Donovan built a gazebo and a memorial,” Jon concluded as Sam began a slow shuffle toward the garden’s exit.

“
If Thérèse was determined to keep the dead soldiers a secret, and Charles never told, how did you learn about them, Grampaw Sam?” asked Tess.

Sam chuckled. “
Oh, Thérèse never could keep a secret from Grammaw Solange, and Solange always shared with my papa. But there didn’ seem to be a reason to disturb dead Yankees, so we kep’ quiet on it.”

“
I wonder if it was kindness or an attempt to deflect Union suspicion and anger that made Thérèse save Charles Donovan. Perhaps it was a guilty conscience that made Thérèse nasty to Charles Donovan later on,” Tess speculated.

“Yeah, Thérèse was tryin’ to avoid a reckonin’ for her deeds. She shoulda knowed the Lord
’s gonna balance the scale sooner or later,” nodded Sam. “Ain’t you learnin’ that yourself?”

“What do you mean?” asked Tess, clearing her throat nervously.

“Well, don’t you think you got some unpaid debts come with this place? Yeah, you got lotta ghosts wanderin’ in this garden, young lady. The first Cabrera to the last Cabrera owed the Beauvoirs. It was Solange Beauvoir planted your family tree. Beauvoirs kep’ Cabrera secrets and tended Cabrera riches. It ain’t boastin’ to say I saved Cabrera lives from fire and this very garden from ruin. You gotta figure out how to balance the scale now.”

Tess glanced nervously around the garden as Jon and old Sam moved slowly through the hedge arcade toward the open exit gate. The cloistered beauty seemed disturbingly shadowed suddenly. It’s only my imagination thanks to Sam’s words, only a cloud pass
ing over the sun, Tess reasoned. She glanced upward to verify the source of the dimmed light.

Reassured, she was turning her head to pass out of the central rose garden when
something shifted at the corner of her eye. For an instant, she was sure she saw a watching figure in the belvedere gloom. Her heart froze, and she blinked in panic for a breath. No, the garden was still and empty after all. She hurried to join the two men as they passed through the gateway to the outside world. Jon locked the garden away behind the heavy wooden door.

13 MOTIVES

Tess, Jon and old Sam Beauvoir made slow progress from the hidden garden back to their cars. Sam was tired
, so his pace was painfully sluggish. Jon was anxious to make his appointment and had to obviously restrain himself from hustling the old man along. As they all inched along in the buggy humidity, Tess yearned for her air-conditioned car.

W
ith each sweaty, plodding step, she felt as if she dragged the accumulated weight of the garden’s fate, her mother’s childhood horror, and the old man’s “debt” for generations of injustice.

Jon had heard his grandfather’s remarks before they closed and locked the gate to the perfumed oasis, but he was purposely expressionless and silent. Tess assumed Jon wanted the Beauvoirs’ long and secretive history of servitude to the Cabreras to end with transfer of the ga
rden responsibility from Grampaw Sam to Tess. But did he, like his grandfather, expect some overdue atonement, too? She did not want to ask; they had just found a friendly rapport.

Jon was clearly eager to be on his way as he helped his grandfather into Tess’s car for the return trip.
As Jon started to say his hurried goodbyes, his words were drowned out by the rumbling roar of a passing convoy of three large semitrailer trucks. “DiPaolo Machine Works” was emblazoned on the side of the trucks. Jon waited until the semis were past and stood a moment watching the departing vehicles with a frown.

“There’s an example of how hard it is to get agreement
on things in Louisiana,” he said, with a nod toward the disappearing trucks. “DiPaolo is an equipment supplier to one of my clients, a sugar cane grower near here, and I tried to get the machine works owner to testify in the grower’s dispute with Gulf Coast Refining. But it turned out DiPaolo was negotiating a deal to supply the refinery. They had money on both sides of the balance and weren’t interested in tipping either way.” Jon sighed. “It’s hard to find a cause where conflicting interests don’t stymie resolution,” he said with a grimace.

Tess nodded sourly
and watched dumbly as Jon slipped into his silver Mercedes. He moved carefully from the turnout to the asphalt road and then accelerated, a puff of gritty air washing back over her.

The responsibility of taking care of the 90-plus Sam had concerned Tess. She was r
elieved when, only minutes into their ride, the old man announced that he was going to take a brief nap “after all that walkin’ and talkin’.” He then removed his sunglasses and placed them in his coat pocket, removed his hat and placed it in his lap, and closed his eyes. In a few minutes, a soft snoring reassured Tess that he had safely entered slumber and not his final rest.

As they entered the outskirts of the city, Sam roused and asked Tess if she needed any help finding his house. She reassured him on the accuracy of the GPS, and Sam listened in amusement
to the automated voice’s unintelligible pronunciation of the street names.

“You know I gotta tell you somethin’ about Josephine I forgot till a bit ago,” Sam sudde
nly said.

“Oh, what
did you forget to mention?” asked Tess, actually uninterested in more stale melodrama.

“Josephine di
dn’ leave her son without a word like you maybe thought,” Sam asserted. “Josephine wrote a letter to her son. See, right after she give birth to baby Benjamin, Josephine’s weak and low. She’s scairt she might not live to see her son grow up. So she writes out a letter and tells Solange that, after she’s dead, pass it to Benjamin when he turns 18
—
and make sure to never let Antonio see it. After she drowned herself, Solange kep’ that secret letter. When Benjamin lef’ for mil’tary school, Solange passed it on to him.”

“What did it say?”
questioned Tess, her interest mildly piqued.

“Solange never opened it. Even if she did, Solange don’
t know how to read,” answered Sam.

“Oh, well, I hope it was a loving message. Poor Ben certainly deserved more from his parents than he got,”
said Tess, dismissing the story. “I think we’re almost to your house, Grampaw Sam.”

“Yeah, you got me home safe,” nodded Sam. “Now don’
t feel you gotta sit with me. Once I get to my stoop, I can do fine.”

“Are you sure?” asked Tess. “Jon told me that his aunt, your daughter Luanne
—
at least I think that’s her name
—
should be waiting at your house. If she’s not there yet, maybe I should wait till she arrives.”

“Hmph. If Luanne promised to be there, she prob’ly gonna be sittin’ on the
stoop waitin’ to dial 911 if I show up a minute late.” Sam heaved a long-suffering sigh.

As they pulled into Sam’s driveway, Aunt Luanne was in fact watching from a front wi
ndow and was down the steps and opening the car door almost before Tess switched off the ignition. “See what I mean,” came Sam’s disgruntled mutter as the woman reached in and unlatched his seatbelt, brushing Sam’s hands away with clucking mother-hen officiousness. She proceeded to pull the old man from the rental car with the same forceful determination of a dentist yanking a tooth.

Tess had come around to help if necessary, but Aunt Luanne was not about to cede any authority. She thanked Tess pleasantly but dismissively and began to urge her father toward his front door with cooing words and a strong grip.

Sam dug in his heels mulishly, shooting his daughter a quelling glare. “Now Tess, you let Jon know if you wanna see me. Lemme know what you decide to do with the garden. Oh, hush, Luanne, I don’t answer to you,” he grumbled as Luanne began to pepper him with “What garden?”

Upon reaching her hotel, Tess found that she had a voicemail from Tony. The meeting with Dreux was set for noon Tuesday at his townhome, and, while Tony thought the whole setup was strange, he pronounced himself willing to humor the old lawyer.

Tess also had another insistent message from her apartment manager in California, and she resigned herself to putting an end to the suspense for the poor woman. She would tell her that she was moving out and book a flight for Los Angeles after her meeting with Dreux. If necessary, she could return to New Orleans to sign papers. In the meantime, she would move most of her things into temporary storage in L.A. and arrange to temporarily stay with a friend. She had decided that Christina’s apartment was the best bet as a crash site. Katie was too busy with her wedding, and Jen’s fancy environment did not seem very hospitable to nonpaying tenants.

But first, she forced herself to call her mother’s former housekeeper and confidante, Gina Gomez. Now that she knew that Dreux had been present when her mother witnessed De
smond’s suicide and then present again on the day her mother committed suicide, she wanted to rule out a connection, no matter how improbable Dreux made it sound. The only person who might shed some light on her mother’s last day was Gina, because, as Tess admitted bitterly, the housekeeper had been more involved in her mother’s life than Tess had been.

Tess called Gina’s home phone, the only number she had, and struggled to use her school-girl Spanish in a conve
rsation with Gina’s mother. In the end, she was fairly confident that at least her phone number, if not her reason for calling, would get through.

At that point, Tess felt a deep need to reach out to her friends.

“Oh, have you had too much vicarious trauma? Try watching a man’s head explode from a few inches away.”

Tess almost desperately punched Katie’s number into her cell phone.

“Hey, Tess,” Katie answered with a smile in her voice. “I bet you’re calling to see what I think about your family drama e-mail.”

“You are still a mind reader,” Tess said with a forced laugh. “But before you start to dispense pearls of wisdom, let me tell you what I learned today.” Tess described to Katie the discovery of the preserved garden and her mother’s traumatic experience with Desmond’s suicide.

“Gosh, I’m seeing your mo
m in a different light. I guess she needed to develop a hard shell to protect against a world where people blow their brains out in front of 6-year-olds,” commented Katie. “I just don’t see what connection this visit by Dreux could have with your mother’s death. It doesn’t make sense. As for the rest of the story, your family characters run from good to bad to ugly, and some are all three. Let’s talk about something more important. When are you coming back? I miss you,” Katie concluded

“Funny you should ask. I’ve
decided to book a flight back to L.A. on next Thursday. Until my inheritance pays out, I need to cut expenses and move out of my apartment,” Tess told her.

“Where will you go? You know you’re always welcome to stay with me, married or not. I just ca
n’t invite you on the honeymoon. I’d be OK with it, but Trevor might object,” Katie laughed.

“You’re a sweetheart for offering, but I’m going to put most of my stuff in storage and see if Christina will take me in.”

“Well, you better throw out those crossword puzzles. In fact, you might as well store all your books. There’ll be no quiet time with Christina. But it will motivate you to move on quickly,” Katie teased and then turned serious again. “So I guess you’re pretty close to a resolution on that property.”

“Not really. It’s a tougher decision than I thought. I really feel bad about the garden. It’s so lovely, Katie. But it’s so impractical, too. I’m probably going to finalize a sale to the refinery when I meet with Dreux on Tuesday.” Tess felt oddly defeated as she said this. She had come out to New Orleans for a quick infusion of cash, and now it seemed like a betrayal of something or someone.

“You don’t sound too happy about it. Look, I usually advise you to follow your heart, but this time I really think you should follow the money,” Katie advised. “That garden was your grandmother’s thing, some kind of memorial to her husband even though, or maybe because, she erased his name from her past. Your mom doesn’t sound like she was going to keep it going. Why should you? And I don’t think you owe Sam Beauvoir a darn thing. He
wanted
to tend the garden, and he was paid.”

“It just seems wrong to throw away something beautiful,” sighed Tess.

“Use the money to make something beautiful that’s also useful to you, Tess,” Katie suggested. “L.A. is a great place for gardens, too. Come on home.”

Tess tried and failed to reach Christina. (It was a Friday after all.) Surprisingly, she caught Jen at her office. Tess was a bit
taken aback by Jen’s opinion, however.

“Well, your mother’s past explains but does not excuse some of her behavior,”
proclaimed Jen’s tart voice. “Actually, it lowers my opinion of the woman. Why would she inflict on her own daughter the trauma she tried to forget her whole life?”

“Maybe we don’t have all the facts yet,” Tess mumbled, surprised into defending her mother. She changed the subject. “What are your thoughts on my grandfather’s murder? I’m thinking Noah Cabirac is
a prime suspect.”

“That’s as good a guess as any if you look at only the people you know about,” Jen acknowledged but with little conviction. “There is still a lot we don’t know about your grandf
ather’s life. He’s supposedly this paragon, but there are hints of pride and intolerance in the cases of Noah and Lillian. I would dig deeper. What about angry patients or patients’ families? Even good doctors have unhappy results. What about crazy hospital co-workers? And there could have been a love affair gone wrong. His liaison with Lillian proves he was no saint. I think you need to find one of his friends from the hospital days.”

“That’s a good suggestion,” Tess agreed. “There was ‘a friend’ quoted in that news cli
pping about the murder. He and my grandfather were both doctors at Charity Hospital. I can try to find him although he’s probably retired by now, and Charity Hospital is closed. Still, I’ll try.”

Tess mentally scolded herself for missing the hospital angle earlier. She had become too obsessed with the family history to look beyond its small cast of characters to the wider world in which her grandparents had lived, she realized ruefully.

On the subject of the garden, Jen was dis
missive. “Forget about it. Make the most profit you can from your inheritance.”

A text message came from Christina: “U
rang? Tlkng 2 BFF K or J?” Katie smiled but went to find the old news clipping about the murder instead. As she had remembered, the clipping mentioned that Dr. Donald Lepore was a friend and colleague.

Historic
Charity Hospital was badly flooded during Hurricane Katrina and had never re-opened, so the best Tess could do was call the only Dr. Donald Lepore she found listed in the phone book, apparently owner of The Lepore Imaging Center. She placed the call with little hope of success
—
her grandfather’s friend must be 77 years old and likely retired. But the medical center operator promptly put her through to a nurse who, to Tess’s amazement, assured her that she had indeed reached the office of the Dr. Donald Lepore who had been at Charity Hospital in the late 1950s.

Dr. Lepore was not in
his office, however, so the nurse took Tess’s name and number and promised to pass it on to him. “Tell him it’s regarding an old friend of his, Guy Cabrera,” Tess explained, spelling the name as the staffer cheerfully jotted down the message. The elderly doctor apparently had limited hours.