Eden's Shadow

Mary stared after the disappearing Buick. “They’re photographs, not pictures, and no, I didn’t. God, I hope I don’t end up like them one day.” Turning her head, she ran her gaze up and down her sister’s body. “Or you, either, for that matter.”

Eden made a quick check of her face and hair in the waiting room mirror. “What’s wrong with how I look?” Other than maybe a little washed out under the bright lights.

Mary shrugged. “Nothing. You’re gorgeous. Every man I date says so. But…” Her expression grew mysterious, and Eden sighed. She recognized the sign.

“‘For deeds long past, chère child will reap, my vengeance curse, of death—or worse.’”

Eden, who’d taken a moment to release her dark hair from its ponytail, gave her head a shake and her shoulders a roll. “Why do you love that old rhyme so much? You don’t believe in family curses any more than I do.”

“I know. But then it doesn’t apply to me, does it? I’m the youngest in our patchwork family.” Mary’s leather pants and jacket creaked as she headed for the door. “Let’s blow this spooky tooth palace. Something’s happened, and you’re the only one who can make it right.”

“I have to clean…” Eden started for the examination room, but Mary grabbed her arm. “I’m not being dramatic, Eden. This is big, or at least it could be, and it doesn’t involve you lending me money. It’s about Lisa.”

Something tightened in Eden’s stomach. Mary wouldn’t hesitate to plead her own cause, but she seldom championed anyone else’s. And she never looked rattled.

“What about Lisa?” she asked. “Is she sick? Hurt? In trouble?”

“The last thing.” Loosening her grip, Mary made a disgruntled sound.

“Okay, look, our middle sister, who pored over the records of every adoption agency in the city, found you, found me and brought us all together ten years ago, was questioned by two cops. They came to the house tonight. They were asking her questions about a man named Maxwell Burgoyne.”

“Someone she’s dating?” No, that couldn’t be right, Eden realized. Lisa didn’t date. She waved the question aside before Mary could respond. “Never mind. Just tell me who he is.”

“You want it straight?”

“Please.”

“Maxwell Burgoyne is our biological father—as in the unknown X chromosome that forms half the link between us.”

Stunned, Eden stared at her. “Lisa found our natural father? I thought he was dead.”

Mary’s red lips curved into a sardonic smile. “He is dead, Eden, deader than Dickens’s ghostly doornail. The thing is, he only got that way two nights ago. Maxwell Burgoyne was murdered in a plantation cemetery seventeen miles outside of New Orleans. And according to the city’s finest, Lisa was quite likely the last person to see him alive.”

THEY WENT TO EDEN’S French Quarter walk-up. It was ten minutes from her office on foot, less than three in Mary’s zippy black sports car.

Lisa had given her the car as a gift two years ago—or so Mary claimed. Eden had a feeling this gift, like so many others, had been bestowed out of guilt rather than generosity.

Not that Lisa wasn’t generous. She loved to give. She donated to several charities that Eden knew of and spent hours every week trying to entice Eden to move in with her and Mary. She would buy them a three-story house in the Garden District, large enough that they could all have private suites.

“I can afford it,” she’d told Eden only last month. “You know I hit the adoption jackpot, and now that my mother and father are both gone, their money’s just sitting there, waiting to be spent.”

“But not on us,” Eden had countered. “Take a Mediterranean cruise, Lisa. Meet men. Flirt, dance, do something that doesn’t involve soil, fertilizer and root rot.”

“I love my garden, and I don’t know how to flirt.” She’d started to take Eden’s hand, but stopped herself as she invariably did. “I inherited a lot of money, Eden, more than Mary knows about or could ever finagle out of me.”

“Invest it then—and I don’t mean in a bigger house.”

“You don’t want to move, do you?”

“Not really. I like my place.”

“It’s very nice, but it’s so small. You can’t spread out or grow bushes or even many herbs. I know you’re used to tiny spaces because of where you lived in San Francisco…”

Which had nothing to do with anything as far as Eden was concerned. Amused, she’d replied, “I grew up in suburbia, Lisa, not the backwoods. My parents left their hippie groove before I finished grade school. My mother actually went back to college and got her degree in philosophy.”

“And now she’s a professor at LSU,” Lisa supplied.

“Was.” Eden had propped her chin in her hands and tried to figure out how many different kinds of flowers were in the vase on Lisa’s kitchen table. “She accepted a position at Florida State last fall, remember?”

“She moved away?”

For a moment, Lisa had appeared confused. That quality of losing her bearings had puzzled Eden ever since they’d met ten years ago. Mary called them day trips. Eden wondered if there might not be more to it than that.

She was thinking about Lisa as she unlocked the wrought-iron gate at street level and climbed the outer stairs to her apartment. Her sister had actually located their biological father. The why of it aside, Eden gave her credit for persistence. By all accounts, including that of their natural mother, the man had died years ago.

“It feels like a thousand degrees,” Mary complained. She’d removed her jacket and now wore only a faux-leather halter top with her tight pants and spiky heels. “Lisa could be in trouble up to her big green eyeballs, and—” Her own eyes widened. “Why on earth are your windows closed?”

“Because Amorin would jump out onto the porch. Then she’d dig up the courtyard garden or get hit by a car, and I don’t want either of those things happening to my cat, that’s why my windows are closed. The ceiling fans are on. But talk to me about Lisa, Mary. What did the police want from her?”

The question had a surly edge, Eden realized. Her experience with the New Orleans force as a whole hadn’t been good. With one member in particular, it had proved disastrous.

But that was a memory for another time—maybe twenty years from now.

It took three shoves, a kick and two thumps with her fist to open her apartment door. Thunder rumbled on the river, and for a moment after she touched the light switch, Eden thought the power was going to fail.

“Just what we need in Hemingway Central,” Mary muttered at her elbow. “A candlelight vigil.” At a look from Eden, she kicked off her shoes. “Yeah, I know, cut the chit-chat. What can I say? There’s background stuff, I suppose, but we both know whatever went down in that plantation graveyard, Lisa didn’t hit Burgoyne on the head and take off.”

Eden tried a second light. It flickered but stayed on. “Is she a suspect?”

Mary fussed with her hair. “She’s a person of interest at this point because, like I said, she’s the last person the cops know of who saw the guy alive. But that’s today, Eden. What happens if they can’t find anyone to pin his death on? It’ll come back to Lisa—or it could. Okay, we’d be talking circumstantial evidence, but Lisa says she didn’t think much of the guy the first time she met him, and I don’t get the impression she was any more enamored after the second meeting. She doesn’t have an alibi for the time of the murder, either, and I can’t give her one because I was out with friends.”

Eden struggled to digest everything as she turned on her temperamental air conditioner. “She met this man twice?”

“That’s what she says. I didn’t hear about either meeting until the cops showed up tonight. Anyway, my point is this. You know a few cops, right?”

“Don’t start,” Eden warned.

Mary tapped impatient fingernails on the tabletop. “Forget the past, will you? You do know some cops. You could get information.”

Eden could be stubborn, too. “Mary, the only cops I knew have either quit or been reassigned.”

“What about that prosecution lawyer you dated last year?”

“You want me to ask him to spy for us?”

“If necessary, yes. Look, I don’t think you’re clueing in here. This little scenario has the potential to go very bad, very fast.”

Circumstantial evidence…