The House on Prytania (Royal Street #2)(19)
Author: Karen White
“Well, that’s one thing we can agree upon. So, why are you here? You said you’d stopped running in the park.”
“I did.” He looked down at his hands, now clasped between his knees. “But I wanted to see you. I’ve missed you. Even if you wouldn’t talk to me, I wanted to at least see you. To try to explain my actions. To make you understand my family.”
“So you know that Antoine killed his own daughter.”
He looked at me with surprise. “I only suspected. But you knew?”
“Let’s just say that Beau and I learned a lot about your family while trying to figure out who kept on breaking into my house.”
Michael had the decency to look chagrined. “I was told that my job was only to gain access, not to ask questions. I know how lame this sounds, but I only did what I was told.”
My phone buzzed in my hand, and I looked down at it to see another text from Beau. Well?
“Do you think we could . . .” Michael shrugged. “I don’t know—have dinner?”
When I didn’t respond, he said, “Well, that’s a relief. I was afraid you’d scream and run away.”
“I still might. Why do you think we should have dinner?”
“To talk. Maybe start over?”
At my look of incredulity, he rushed to explain. “I mean as friends. I don’t think that even you can deny that we have a connection. We were drawn to each other because we were both abandoned by our parents. The circumstances were different, but we wear similar bruises. And I really like you, Nola. A lot. And I thought you liked me, too. Despite everything, I was hoping there was still that.”
He looked at me expectantly. I held my breath so I wouldn’t say every vile thing I’d been calling him in my head ever since I’d discovered his duplicity. Because even now, I couldn’t completely erase the feelings I’d had for him. And that was why contemplating going out with him should have been an easy no but wasn’t. But, as I’d discovered the hard way over the last eight years, nothing was ever easy. Even revenge.
Michael tentatively took my hand, and when I didn’t pull back, he squeezed it. “I thought we could talk about what happened. Not to excuse what I did, but maybe so I could explain it in a way you could understand.”
I stared down at our clasped hands so he couldn’t look behind my eyes and see my head and heart playing keep-away with my conscience.
“I know it’s a lot to ask, and that I don’t deserve five minutes in your company, but I had to try. The worst you can say is no, right?”
I lifted my eyes, and he gave me the devastating grin that had once loosened my bones. “Actually, there are a lot of worse things I could say to you right now, but all of them would make me want to wash my mouth out with soap.” My phone buzzed in my hand again, but I didn’t look, knowing it was Beau, repeating his question.
Michael looked at me hopefully. “Then how about dinner this weekend? Do you like Commander’s?”
It was a rhetorical question. Everyone liked the iconic restaurant, but very few could get last-minute reservations. I pulled my hand away and stood. “I’ve got to go.”
Michael stood, too. “Friday night, then? Pick you up at seven?”
I thought of the repercussions Beau would face if I walked away from Michael now. If I shut the door on this opportunity to get inside Michael’s family and make them face justice for the abduction of Sunny Ryan. Beau would stop at nothing to get those answers himself, despite the danger. My phone buzzed again, and I realized that I really didn’t have a choice at all.
“Thursday,” I said. “My family arrives on Friday. I’ll see you then.” I hurriedly exited the park, turning left to jog down St. Charles toward Broadway. When I’d reached the next intersection, I slowed my pace to a walk so I could reply to Beau’s texts. With my head bent over my phone, I typed, I’m in.
Before I could change my mind, I sprinted across St. Charles Avenue and ran at full speed all the way back to my apartment, my breathing not loud enough to erase the one thought that kept racing across my brain. Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.
CHAPTER 7
Two days later, I leaned my bike against the front of my house, not bothering with the lock. My cottage continued to be a thief repellent—along with a delivery service, contractor, and visitor deterrent. The only intruders I experienced were the extremely large cockroaches that, according to Thibaut, would survive a nuclear blast and that all the roach bait and poison just made bigger and stronger.
Despite the air’s being still, the wind chime of blue glass by the front door swayed, the tinkling breaking the silence that enveloped my house like heavy fog. Even in the middle of summer, the nightly chorus of insects from neighboring yards ended at the perimeter of my property.
The faint smell of pipe smoke teased the air, and I turned my head toward the end of the porch, where I’d once seen the specter of Charles Ryan smoking his pipe. But that was before Beau and I had sent him into the light. It wasn’t unheard of for a freed spirit to return occasionally to check on the living. I turned the doorknob and pushed open the front door, pausing as I caught another whiff of smoke. A shudder went through me as I considered the possibility that he had unfinished business. Something that still tied him to my house.
The rousing beat of salsa music thumped upstairs. I closed the door loudly to let Thibaut and Jorge know I was there before climbing up the steps, stopping at the top of the stairs to peer inside the closet that had been nailed shut when I purchased the cottage. The door sat ajar, the vintage clothes, shoes, hatboxes, and Mr. Bingle doll found inside since removed to my apartment.
Jolene had sold most of the clothing items to a vintage clothing store in the Quarter, but the Mr. Bingle doll and one of the hatboxes, with its mysterious contents—a pipe, a yellow hair ribbon, a tie clasp, and an old camera negative—remained in the back room of the apartment along with a clientele book from the now-defunct Maison Blanche department store. Jolene and I had agreed to keep it all hidden, buried under a pile of monogrammed throw pillows, just in case. Not that we expected another attempted robbery, but we’d decided that there had to have been a reason for it all to have been locked in the closet since the murder of Jeanne Broussard in 1964.
Michael’s uncle had hired someone to break in and steal the Maison Blanche door we’d stored in my apartment. Fortunately, the thief had been thwarted by Jolene and her well-aimed blow from a large Barbie head. I tried not to think too much about that night, not only in deference to Barbie and the lessons I’d learned from her in terms of makeup application, but also because that was when I’d become aware of Michael’s betrayal.