Mortal Sins

He had gone to war after she had left him that summer, the summer of 1916. The Great War, they called it, and great it had been from the way it consumed blood and flesh and bones by the trenchload. America hadn’t joined in the carnage yet, but there had been a French flying squadron of American volunteers, the Lafayette Escadrille. Daman Rourke had gone to France hoping to die, and instead he had renewed his love affair with danger in the form of tracer bullets blazing out of the blinding sun. He had discovered inside himself new and terrible talents, for fighting and killing and jousting in the sky.

He’d had to stop the killing after the war was over, but he hadn’t been able to give up the flying. It was so easy, he had discovered, and so very sweet, to take an airplane out on the screaming edge and dance.

Usually for stunt flying he flew one of the Spads, but he rolled the Jenny out of the barn now and began a preflight check, running his hands over the struts, testing the tension of the flying wires, tightening nuts and bolts. Remy walked around the plane the way she’d walked around the Bearcat, touching it, taking in the fragile contraption of wood and wire and fabric.

“Is it your intention to take me flying in this thing?” she finally said.

“Well, you did allow as how you wanted to go fast. Guaranteed thrills, and your money back if you get killed.” He put a whole lot of challenge and just a touch of meanness into his smile. “It’s double-dare time, Remy Lelourie.”

She only laughed.

He helped her to put on goggles, helmet, and one of his old leather jackets, and then he lifted her up into the front cockpit’s worn wicker seat. Even though she wouldn’t be doing the piloting, because of her much lighter weight she would have to ride up there to prevent the aircraft from being nose-heavy.

She sat in the cockpit, watching him, and he thought he could feel the excitement in her, the life, like a vibration along the plane’s flying wires. She watched his every move as he checked to be sure the ignition switch was off and that both the air- and gasintake valves were open before he hand-pumped air pressure into the gas tank. He went to the front of the plane and flipped the propeller four times clockwise, then came back to the cockpit and slowly shut down the air valves and turned on the magneto switch. He went around up front again, put his palms on the propeller blade, and heaved.

The engine coughed and roared to life even as he was jumping clear of the flying propeller blades. He swung up onto the wing as the plane began to roll.

He climbed into the cockpit and took the Jenny up. The horizon was strung with wisps of gray clouds, like dirty feathers, but the sky above them glowed with a soft, saffron light. They went up and up, flying, until the palmettos, the water oaks and willows, were all reduced to green splashes on brown earth, and the oyster and shrimp boats looked small as doodlebugs on the water. They flew, soaring high toward the sun, and he widened his eyes so that he saw the whole world below, above and around him.

He cruised for a while, getting the feel of the plane, and then he warmed up with a few barrel rolls and a couple of loop-the-loops. At the end of the last loop, he fell out into a slight dive, then climbed to full power until he was flying completely upside down. At the top of the circle, instead of cutting his engine and diving down to complete yet another loop, he held full power and rolled a half turn to the left and back again into an upright position, and then he twisted the plane around into a long, straight spin, going down and down and down, and he held it, held it, held it, as the ground came rushing up to meet them.

He waited until the last possible second to pull out of the spin, waited until he was a heartbeat away from being too late, reaching for that belly-clenching, breathless place between greased lightning and the sweet spot where it hits.

Any other woman in the world would have screamed. Death was screeching at them on the press of the wind, but Remy Lelourie was laughing.

She hadn’t changed.

On the drive from the airfield back to the city, they stopped along the side of the road where a man was selling slices of watermelon off the tailgate of a battered pickup truck. They ate the fruit sitting side by side on the Bearcat’s running board, spitting seeds into the dirt and getting their hands and faces all sticky.

Pinpricks of sunlight pierced the black straw of her hat, freckling her ear and jaw. Her lips were wet with watermelon juice. He thought of the way it had been between them once, how they’d been no more than kids, really, and yet there had been something pure and distilled in the fury of their love, like the blue flame of a match before it burns out on its own. Afterward, he had gone off to war, he’d married another woman, had a child by her and then buried her—he had lived and thought himself over Remy Lelourie.

“What are you doing here?” he asked aloud. “You had the whole world to play in, so what have you come back for?”

Her mouth pulled into something that was not quite a smile. “You might find this hard to believe, but there’s a limit to how much one can bear of a thing—even champagne baths and tango dancing and petting parties in the purple dawn.”

He spat a seed at a fence post. “Yeah, I’ve had that same feeling myself lately—too much of a good thing. Like too many scotch-and-ryes and bourré games that last past two in the morning. Too many dead bodies.”

She turned her head and met his gaze, but her face kept her secrets well. He had read once that when you are acting whatever you are thinking, the camera will catch it. But if your thoughts are lies—what then does your audience see?

“I wanted to come home, Day,” she said. “Oh, maybe not for forever, but for a little while. Sometimes the past can seem as if it has a powerful hold on you, way more than any future can ever hope to claim. I just wanted to come home for a spell. Is that so hard to understand?”

“No,” he said, but that was a lie as well. He didn’t understand all of it, not when he remembered how their future had been destroyed by what she had done that hot summer’s evening eleven years ago. He had always known why she had left. What he still didn’t know was how—brave as she was, reckless as she was—she had ever dared to come back.

“It was double-dare time for Remy Lelourie,” she said softly, as if she were reading his mind, and that was impossible, surely, for she couldn’t have known what he had seen.

He took her watermelon rind and tossed it, along with his, into the weed-choked ditch. He gave her his handkerchief to wipe her hands, and the juice off her mouth. “We’d better be getting you home,” he said.

They spoke only once more on the way back to New Orleans. He asked her where she’d been going with her suitcase all packed up last night, the same night her husband just happened to have got himself carved up with a cane knife, and she said, “It’s been so hot lately, I decided to go out to the lake for a spell.” But he knew that that too was a lie.

He let her out at the top of the oyster-shell drive and watched her walk away from him through the moss-strung oaks, watched her passing through sunlight and shadow, toward the house with its slender white colonnettes and wide, gracious galleries. Although she was a thoroughly modern girl with her bobbed hair and painted nails, her rolled stockings and rouged knees, she looked as if she belonged only to that house and to the South, to the past.

Once, years ago, when they were lovers, his greatest fear had been that she would give up everything, even him, to possess Sans Souci. She had left him anyway, only she’d left the house, as well.

In the end, though, it was Sans Souci she had chosen to come back to, and not him.

Her mama had been the one to plant that particular obsession in Remy’s head. Generations ago, as far back as the 1850s, the plantation had belonged to the Lelouries. It had been lost, in a game of cards or through a duel, or maybe those old stories lied and it had simply been sold to pay off bad debts—the how of it had never been important, anyway. What had always mattered to the Lelouries was getting it back. You had to be from New Orleans to understand that a house like Sans Souci was more than cypress wood and bricks. It was a testimony to past glories and old sins, a bequest wrapped up in pride, honor, and immortality. A legacy of ambition, greed, and deceit. It was la famille.

It was a thing Rourke did understand, this obsession with the past and la famille. His past and Remy’s—it was like a shared sin, not forgotten, but never confessed. For once, years ago, his mother had left him and his father and brother, and had gone to live with her lover in the house on Conti Street.

Her lover, whose name had been Reynard Lelourie.

Chapter Seven (#ulink_61e43117-50f3-5cb6-a330-ed3711adbd59)

When Daman Rourke was a kid he would hang around for hours outside a certain house on Esplanade Avenue. A raised cottage mostly hidden behind a tall black-iron picket fence afroth with honeysuckle vines.

What he hoped for during all those hours of all those days was to get a good long look at the two little girls who belonged to his mother’s lover. He thought that if he watched them often enough, watched how they behaved, watched to see if they sassed the nuns, or hid their butter beans under their plates, or stole licorice whips from Mr. Pagliani’s corner grocery—if he watched them often and carefully, then he would come to understand why those little girls’ father had left them.

Then maybe, like the detective he was today, he would have been able to piece all his clues together, one by one, and figure out what terrible crime he had committed that had caused his mother to leave him.

They had kept themselves to themselves, though, had Reynard Lelourie’s two daughters, but their mother was what folk called a serious recluse. When Heloise Lelourie’s husband had left her to go live openly with his mistress—Daman’s mama—in the house on Conti Street, she had put on mourning black, as if he had died, and only set foot outside the iron gate to go to Mass on Sundays. Except for when Reynard Lelourie had died for real, from eating a bowl of spoiled shrimp gumbo the day of his fiftieth birthday—then Heloise Lelourie had caused a bit of a stir herself, by going first to her husband’s wake and then to the cemetery to see him good and buried.

It was less than half a mile as the crow flies between Sans Souci and the Lelourie cottage on Esplanade Avenue. Rourke drove there now, parking beneath the shade of a giant palm, whose thick green fronds clicked in a breeze that came up from the river, damp and heavy. Sunshine glazed the few puddles left over from last night’s rain.

In the early years of the city’s history, Esplanade Avenue with its root-cracked sidewalks had been only a muddy road, which wound through French colonial plantations from the river to the Bayou St. John. Eventually the plantations were parceled up, and the muddy road was paved with Belgian blocks and lined with elegant Creole mansions and raised cottages. Then, as more years passed, some of the families died out or moved uptown, and many of the mansions were turned into rooming houses. Others had been allowed to go to seed. But in New Orleans only the appearances of life changed, Rourke thought. The rhythms remained the same.

The metal of the cottage’s gate was hot to the touch when he pushed it open. All those hours he had spent hanging around the outside of this gate, and this was the first time he had ever passed through it.

The garden was lush and beautiful, profuse with oleander, azaleas, camellias, and roses. Some animal on a tear had been at the flower beds along the river side of the house, though. Mangled blossoms and shredded leaves lay tossed and scattered in deep furrows of wet, turned-up earth.

The house was in a sad way as well, paint flaking and cardboard patches in the windows where the stained-glass panes had gone missing. The Lelouries had never been rich like the St. Claires and they had fallen on even worse times lately, but their blood was just as blue. Their name was as old as Louisiana itself.

Rourke climbed the steps to the saggy gallery and pulled the bell. A long crack, he saw, ran across the fanlight above the door.

He knew they were home. Still, he waited awhile for the door to be answered. Long enough for a clothes-pole man and a fruit seller’s wagon to pass by on the avenue, the two men together making a melodious song out of their shuck and hustle.

“Clothes poles. I got the clothes poles, lady, sellin’ clothes poles a nickel and a dime.”

“I got watermelon red to the rind.”

When the door finally opened Rourke touched the brim of his straw boater and smiled. “Mornin’, Miss Belle.”

She tried to slam the door in his face, but he put his hand out, stopping it.

“You have your nerve—coming to this house, Daman Rourke,” she said. Her voice was dry and brittle.

From within the house a woman called a question, and she half turned to answer. “It’s that woman’s boy, Mama…. No, not the priest. The policeman.” She swung back around to him, color staining her cheeks, her eyes bright. She’d always had bright eyes, he remembered—golden brown, the color of a candle flame seen through a glass of whiskey. “I’m tellin’ him just where he can take himself off to.”

“No. Let him come in.”