"Oh, God," she whimpered as the despair cracked through her armor and the tears squeezed past the tightly closed barriers of her eyelids. "Oh, God, please, please…"
"Help us, Laurel! Please, please, please…"
Her fingertips, then her knuckles scraped the brick as her fingers folded into fists. She sobbed silently for a moment, releasing a small measure of the inner tension, then swallowed it back, gagging on the need to cry even as she ruthlessly denied herself the privilege. She pushed herself away from the building and turned toward the balcony, swiping the tears from her face with the heels of her hands.
Dammit, she wouldn't do this. She was stronger than this. She had come here to take control of her life again, not to fall apart twice in one night.
Using anger to burn away the other emotions, she turned and slammed her fist against one of the many smooth white columns that supported the roof of the balcony, welcoming the stinging pain that sang up her arm.
"Weak-stupid-coward-"
She spat out the insults, her fury turning inward. She kicked herself mentally for her failures as she kicked the column with her bare foot. The pain burst through her like a jolt of electricity, shorting out everything else, breaking the thread of tension that had been thickening and tightening inside her.
Gulping air, she bent over the balustrade, her fingers wrapping tightly around the black wrought-iron rail. In the wake of the pain flowed calm. Her muscles trembled, relaxing as the calm shimmered through her. Her heartbeat slowed to a steady bass-drum thump, thump, thump.
"Sweet heaven, I have to do something," she muttered. "I can't go on like this."
That truth had precipitated her leaving the Ashland Heights Clinic. Her stay there had been peaceful, but not productive. Dr. Pritchard had been more interested in digging up the past than in helping her fix her miserable present. She didn't see the point. What was done was done. She couldn't go back and fix it no matter how badly she wanted to. What she needed to do was push it behind her, rise above it. Move forward. Do something. Do what?
Her job was gone. The fallout from The Case had fallen directly on her. She had been stripped of power, profession, credibility. She had no idea what would become of her, what she would ultimately do or be. Her job had been her identity. Without it she was lost.
"I've got to do something," she said again, looking around, as if an answer might appear to her somewhere down the dark corridor of the balcony or in the trees or the garden below.
Belle Rivière had been built in the 1830s by a local merchant to placate his homesick young wife who had grown up in the Vieux Carré in New Orleans. The house was designed to emulate the elegant splendor of the French Quarter, right down to the beautiful courtyard garden with its fountain, and brick walls trimmed with lacy black wrought-iron filigree. The garden Laurel had spent two days trying to put to rights only to have Jack Boudreaux's dog-allegedly his dog-uproot her efforts. Damn hound.
Damn man.
The garden had been maintained sporadically over the years. Laurel remembered it as a place of marvelous beauty during her childhood when old Antoine Thibodeaux had tended it for Aunt Caroline. As lush and green as Eden, spray billowing from the fountain, elegant statues of Greek women carrying urns of exotic plants. Antoine had long since gone to his eternal rest, and Caroline's latest gardener had long since gone to New Orleans to be a female impersonator on Bourbon Street. Caroline, absorbed in her latest business venture, an antiques shop, hadn't bothered to hire anyone new.
Laurel had seen it as the perfect project for her, physically, psychologically, metaphorically. Clear away the old debris, prune off the dead branches, rejuvenate the soil, plant new with a hopeful eye to the future. Resurrection, rebirth, a fresh start.
She stared down at the mess Huey the Hound had left and heaved a sigh. Young plants torn up by the roots. She knew the feeling…
"Where are you taking Daddy's things, Mama?"
"To the Goodwill in Lafayette," Vivian Chandler said, not sparing a glance at her ten-year-old daughter.
She stood beside the bed that had been her husband's, smartly dressed in a spring green shift with a strand of pearls at her throat. She looked cool and sophisticated, as always, like a model from out of a fashion magazine, her ash blond hair combed just so, pale pink lipstick on. She propped her perfectly manicured hands on her hips and tapped the toe of one white pump against the rug imaptiently as she supervised the proceedings. Tansy Jonas, the latest in a string of flighty young maids, hauled load after load of suits and shirts and slacks out of the closet to be sorted into piles.
"Of course, we'll have to take some of it to the church," Vivian said absently as she considered the armload of dress shirts weighing down poor Tansy. Tansy wasn't more than fifteen, Laurel reckoned, and thin as a willow sapling. The girl seemed to weave beneath the burden of silk and fine cotton cloth, her black eyes going wider and wider in her round dark face.
"It's expected," Vivian went on, inspecting the state of collars and cuffs, oblivious to Tansy's discomfort. "The Chandlers having always been the leading family hereabouts, it's our duty to contribute to the less fortunate in the community. Why, just the other day, Ridilia Montrose was asking me if I hadn't donated Jefferson 's things," she said, frowning prettily. "As if she thought I wasn't going to. She's got a lot of nerve, and I would have told her so if I weren't a lady. Imagine her looking down on me when everybody in town knows they nearly went bankrupt! And what a shame that would have been, because that daughter of hers has teeth like a mule, and it's going to cost a fortune to fix them."
She selected a pair of striped shirts, impervious to the pleading look on the maid's face, and tossed them into one of several piles on the bed. "I told her I just hadn't been up to sorting through Jefferson 's things. Why, the mere thought of it had me on the verge of one of my spells. I can see, though, that I can't put it off a second longer, or there'll be tongues wagging all over town. I swear, that Ridilia isn't any better than she has to be."
Continuing in the same breath, she said, "Tansy, put the rest of those on the chair."
"Yas'm," Tansy murmured with relief, staggering away under the weight of the load.
"I'll sort through your father's things," Vivian said to Laurel. "Never mind that it could send me into a tailspin. I'll donate to the church, but I'll die before I see no-account trash walking around Bayou Breaux in Jefferson 's silk suits. They're going to Lafayette, and Ridilia Montrose can go to blazes."
Laurel scooted off the seat of the blue velvet armchair before the maid could bury her alive. She didn't like this at all. Seeing all of Daddy's things pulled out of his neat closet and strewn around his room caused a hollow, churning feeling in her tummy. She had played in his closet more times than she could count, sneaking in there with her Barbie dolls, pretending his big shoes were cars or boats or space ships. It had been her secret place for when she wanted to be all alone. It smelled of leather and cedar and Daddy. She had sat cross-legged on the floor and felt the legs of his neatly hung pants brush across the top of her head, and pretended they were vines and that she was inside a secret cave in the jungle and that his belts were snakes. Now it was all being torn apart to be given to strangers in another town.
Chewing on a thumbnail, she sidled along the big mahogany bureau, her eyes on her mother. Vivian didn't look bothered at all by what she was doing, unless being cross counted. Laurel didn't think it did. It only meant that her mother would rather have been doing something else, not that this job made her sad. She said it might give her a spell, though, and that was a million times worse than just plain sad. It scared Laurel something terrible when her mother went into one of her blue spells-crying all the time, hardly ever getting out of her nightclothes, shutting herself up in her rooms-the way she had done when Daddy died.
Laurel secretly feared she was going to have the same kind of spells. She had felt that bad when Daddy died. She hadn't wanted to see anybody. And she had cried and cried. She had cried so hard, she thought she might just turn herself inside out the way Daddy had always teased her she would. She and Savannah had cried together. She had slipped into her sister's room through the door in the closet because Mama had told her more than once that she was a big girl now and had to sleep alone. She and Savannah had hid under the covers and cried in their pillows until they almost choked.