The House on Prytania (Royal Street #2)(103)
Author: Karen White
“You’re a terrible listener,” he said quietly.
“So are you,” I whispered back.
He shook his head, then returned his gaze to the room below, and I did the same, scooting over to find my own vantage point. The acoustics were perfect, but the visuals less so, with only snapshots of various people moving or stopping directly below me, depending on the opaqueness of various paint colors in the mural. I shifted my body to the right so that I was now directly above the middle of the room, able to get at least a partial glimpse of people standing on the periphery.
I spotted Sam first, standing alone and holding off a roomful of bystanders. In front of her stood a sobbing Angelina Sabatier, her arm around a petite blond-haired young woman. For a moment, I thought it was Sunny—or the Sunny I knew—but Sunny was glaringly absent from the crowd below. Christopher stood beside Mimi, his arms loose at his side as if he was prepared to catch her. Michael pulled out a dining chair and sat with his head in his hands while Robert stood behind him, clenching his hands on the back of the chair and wearing the white-lipped expression of a man facing a firing squad.
“Felicity,” I whispered. “Sam brought Felicity.” I looked from Felicity to Angelina. I could almost hear the pieces clicking into place. “The F initial on the tombstone—it stands for Felicity, doesn’t it?”
Beau turned steady eyes on me. “Yeah. And the last name should be Hebert, not Broussard. Not that having the right name on the tomb would have helped us, since we never bothered to look.”
“And Mimi? Does she know?”
“Christopher gave her a note from me fifteen minutes ago.”
I looked down again, watching as Robert tried to lay a comforting hand on his wife’s shoulder and she angrily brushed it off, stepping back with Felicity cradled against her. “So if Michael’s real sister died, then . . .” I looked at Beau.
“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—remember? If Antoine blamed my grandfather for making him kill his own daughter—as crazy as that sounds to sane people—it makes sense that he would exact revenge by taking away my sister.”
“And when the real Felicity died, it was the perfect opportunity to take one child and replace her with another. But what about Felicity and Michael’s parents? They would have to be complicit, right?”
“Oh, yeah. Didn’t you wonder why they became missionaries and moved to another continent? Their guilt forced them to leave their children in the care of their father’s sister and her husband, two bereft and grieving parents who’d suffered too many losses and would find it almost impossible to say no, or to ask too many questions about a little girl with the same name as the niece they knew had died.”
The reek of moist soil and decay wafted past my nostrils, making me gag. Beau coughed, but kept his attention focused below. Robert had moved to the middle of the group, his hand raised, the crowd behind him now silenced except for the occasional sobs from Felicity and Angelina. Mimi was strangely silent, her attention fixated on Felicity as if she were seeing a ghost.
Robert started to speak, his voice too thick and heavy for him to be understood. I strained forward, noticing the bald circle at the crown of his head. He coughed, and a man dressed as Saint Joseph with a baby carrier on his back emerged from the group to hand him a glass of water. “I am sorry,” Robert announced. “I know any apologies are grossly inadequate, but to those I have wronged, I am heartily sorry.” He looked at his wife, who turned her face as she continued to cradle a sobbing Felicity against her chest. His own face turned toward Mimi. “And I will not feed the rumor mill by going through all the painful details of a crime you will undoubtedly be reading about for years.”
His voice had been rising as he spoke, the bare emotion distracting me from the attic air that had become icy and the cloying stench that made me think of death and decay, of a stale old mausoleum.
“My wife, Michael, and Felicity are blameless. My wife’s brother and his wife I also hold blameless, their actions born of grief and desperation over the loss of a child. They are still doing penance with lives of servitude and forced separation from their family and the children they adored. I alone will answer for all the sins and ills of this family.”
He clenched his hands into fists and pounded one on the dining table, causing the china and crystal to tremble alarmingly. “But I will share the blame with Antoine Broussard, whose evil nature still exists, along with his sins, sins that are well-known but carefully buried beneath layers of threats and fear. But the time has finally come for his true nature to be revealed to the very people whose acceptance and reverence he craved.”
The cover of Jeanne’s clientele book slammed open on the walkway between Beau and me, the sound drowned out by Robert, whose words were now being shouted as he walked in a small circle, like a man uncertain of where he should turn.
“He and he alone planted the seeds for this unconscionable crime. He told me how I could make my despondent wife the mother she desperately wanted to be. When he told me it would involve abducting an innocent child from her loving family, I refused. He countered by threatening the life of my beloved Angelina.”
The frigid air surrounding us pulsed in and out like a rancid breath as my own throat tightened in fear. Pages from the book began tearing loose and flying through the air.
“He’s not going to leave peacefully, is he?” My voice shook with cold and dread.
“Leave now. While you still can.” Beau was looking at me, the tips of his eyelashes frosted with ice.
I spoke through chattering teeth. “Only if you come with me.”
A strong wind rushed through the attic as Robert’s raised voice echoed from the room below. “And I curse Antoine Broussard. May he rot in hell for all eternity!”
The walkway beneath us began to tremble, and the people in the dining room turned their gazes upward in unison. It took me a moment to realize that they weren’t looking at us but at the giant chandelier that was now swaying drunkenly above the table, the plaster ceiling groaning and crackling like an old man after a long sleep.
“Don’t you just love old houses?” Jolene exclaimed from her spot near the foot of the table as she stretched out her arms and began funneling guests toward the doorway. “You’d think all the settling would be over by now, and then—the chandelier starts shifting. The one thing that’s as sure as your grandma forgetting her teeth on the bathroom sink is their unpredictability.”
Christopher stepped forward to take Mimi’s arm, then spoke to the crowd with a friendly yet commanding voice. “Let’s all go outside to the back garden, where we will enjoy this beautiful evening and announce the winners of the raffles.”