“And Caitlin took his word over yours?”
“No. No, she… she didn’t even bother to get his word first. She just dismissed me right on the spot and made all sorts of accusations.”
“What kind of accusations?”
“The desperate kind.” And she used John’s murder against me. And that was a rule between us—never use John’s murder against me. And yet she broke it because she couldn’t face the truth; she used it to hurt me to keep herself from being hurt.
There was another reason the attack had caught him so off guard; he’d been braced for an attack of a different kind, a full-throttle version of the same half-assed accusation she’d always make whenever he became too protective or accused her of losing her head over some guy—that he didn’t want anyone coming in between him and his access to what she often referred to her as her incredible wealth, which became even more incredible after the plane crash that killed her parents.
While the accusation was familiar, it was also absurd, and Blake would have been willing and able to defuse it in an instant, especially if he thought Caitlin’s marriage was at stake. After all, he was the one who had repeatedly turned down her father’s offer to give him long-term financial support if he took his daughter’s hand in marriage.
Still, there was a small seed of truth to it. Over the years, Blake had taken great comfort in being a kind of adopted Chaisson, if not exactly a beneficiary. Without the Chaissons, he would have spent his teenage years alone, raised by vague memories of a mother who died when he was only four years old, a father who never managed to crawl out of the scotch bottle after losing his wife, and a passel of high-strung aunts from Dallas who popped in on a regular basis to make sure their brother hadn’t made a complete mess of things. Meanwhile, Blake spent most of the major holidays with Caitlin and her family, and that had been just fine. More than fine, actually.
But he’d put himself through nursing school and paid his own rent while he did it. So he didn’t owe Caitlin money or the kind of soft-glove treatment she was accustomed to receiving from her cousins and her late father’s employees. He owed her the truth.
They allow Blake a moment to sip his coffee, then Baldy says, “Must not have been easy.”
“Which part?”
“Making that kind of allegation against the cop who found your friend’s killers.”
For a while, nobody speaks. Blake watches the hummingbirds dancing in the branches on the other side of the plate-glass window. A few tables away an older woman cries into a man’s shoulder, one hand still absently wrapped around her cup of tea in much the same way Blake is holding his cup of coffee. Blake recognizes them; their son was the overdose he treated sometime around 3:00 a.m. No telling how long that coma’s going to last.
“John Fuller wasn’t my friend, Detective.”
Both detectives look startled for the first time since they all sat down together. Not by the information itself, but by the bristling anger with which Blake delivers it.
10
Willie Thomas lives in a tiny clapboard house hemmed in by a small forest of banana trees sitting just on the other side of Spring House’s back property line. It is accessible by its own long private road, which means Blake can drop in on Nova without risking a run-in with Caitlin.
He’s not quite ready for that.
After five hours of fitful sleep, every nerve in his body is still demanding that he reach out to his old friend. But he’s known the woman for almost his entire life. Six months haven’t changed her, he’s sure. Any contact from him will be seen as an attempt to rub her nose in the sad truth about her husband, and that’s the last thing Blake wants, especially if something terrible has happened to Troy.
So he vows to give her time. And space. Whatever that means. He doubts she’s still at Spring House anyway. Unless the police have some strange reason to keep her there, and nothing about the detectives’ questions that morning suggest they suspect Caitlin of anything other than having bad taste in men, he’s pretty sure she’s gone back to New Orleans.
While not quite confirmation, there’s no sign of her on the drive out, no glimpse of her tiny gold BMW X5 whizzing past him along the levee’s gentle bends, and when he turns onto the mud-laced road that leads to Willie’s house, the only person he sees is Nova, hurriedly stomping out a cigarette and tossing it over the side of the front porch.
“Really?” Blake asks her as soon as he steps from his Ford Escape.
“It’s a clove cigarette,” she says with the condescension of someone who has just enough college under her belt to think she knows everything.
“So what? Those are worse. And they don’t even have nicotine, so you won’t get a buzz.”
She ignores this. “Caitlin went back to New Orleans.”
“I figured. How’s your dad?”
“Stitched up right. You want to check?”
“Did he go to a hospital… or did you do it?”
“You got me,” she says, hands up in mock surrender. “I fixed him up with some alcohol and a little blowtorch.”
“That’s a really good school you’re going to up in Baton Rouge.”
Her smile is weak. Instead of inviting him inside, she holds the screen door open behind her just long enough for him to keep it from snapping shut in his face.
The tiny house is immaculate inside. He figures this is Nova’s doing. Blake is not a regular here, but the few times he’d stolen a peek through the front door, it was clear Willie kept the house much the same way he kept his shed—every practical item within plain sight and easy reach, no thought at all to aesthetics.
Nova must also be responsible for the neat but prominent pile of textbooks placed on the kitchen counter. The featured title is Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century by Gwendolyn Hall, and it’s even angled slightly so as to be visible from her father’s easy chair. It doesn’t take Blake long to put together that the older and more educated Nova gets, the less comfortable she is with her father’s marginally paid, codependent position at Spring House. These textbooks on the history of their people have the feel of AA literature left in the house of a hard-drinking relative.
“Iced tea?” Nova asks.
“I’m good. Thanks. Your dad?”
“Up at the shed. Cleaning up.”
“Is that a good idea? It’s a crime scene, isn’t it?”
Nova turns to face him, one arm resting atop the refrigerator door she’s just opened. “Crime scene techs went over it all night. Couldn’t find a drop of blood inside.”
“What? How’d it get all over that woman then?”
“Question of the day. And the next day. And the next…” She’s staring at him expectantly, but he can’t tell if she’s letting this information sink in, or if there’s something she wants him to do about it. It’s not a hot day out and the open refrigerator is blasting cold air all over her, but Nova doesn’t seem to give a damn.
“Who was she?” Blake asks instead.
“Some woman who worked with the caterer. Never saw her before.”
“What’d she tell the police?”
“Nothing. She was just rocking back and forth when they took her away. Shock, I guess.”
“Did they arrest her?” It’s a trick question, sort of. The detective let slip that morning that the woman was still being held for questioning, which Blake took to mean detained. But Nova is being so evasive about what transpired here the night before, Blake hopes to draw her out a little by withholding some information of his own.