Mortal Sins

Mrs. Heloise Lelourie materialized out of the darkness of the hallway, standing small and slender and straight-backed behind her younger daughter.

Rourke had never spoken to her before, this abandoned wife of his mother’s lover. But he was well acquainted with the sight of her—as a boy, he had often gone to Mass in her church just to observe her, her and her girls. Hers was a French face, petite and sharply boned, timeless. But her coloring was fair, gray eyes and blond hair now faded to the color of old wax.

For a moment longer Belle still kept the door half-shut against him, and her hand that held it trembled. Her short nails were grimed with black dirt, and a band of sunburn circled her wrist between where her gardening glove must have ended and her sleeve began. She saw him looking at her hand, at her nails, and she let go of the door and stepped back into the gloom of the hall.

Mrs. Lelourie led the way into a front parlor that was furnished in black walnut and red velvet that had faded to puce. The large gilded mirror over the mantel was spotted with mildew. The carpeting was so threadbare the floor showed through the nap in places. A dry, musty smell hung around the place, like that of a grave so old that even the bones had long ago fallen into dust.

Mrs. Lelourie waved her hand at a black horsehair settee that was worn bald in places. “Please, will you take a seat,” she said, her words blurred by a soft accent, but then she had grown up speaking real French. In her day, her people had seldom married outsiders, and the paterfamilias didn’t even like their children learning English in school.

“Belle,” she said, as she settled with old-fashioned grace onto a lyre-backed chair, “if you would prepare and pour, please, the café for our guest.”

Belle stared at her mother and some feeling burned quick and hot across her face, gone before Rourke could read it. She turned on her heel and left the room, and the cheap cotton skirt of her dark blue dress, too long to be fashionable anymore, made a sighing sound as it brushed her legs.

Mrs. Lelourie folded her white, veined hands on her lap and lifted her head up proud. She didn’t speak, and neither did he. Long ago, Daman Rourke had learned that the human heart couldn’t bear emptiness, and a silent room was emptiness of the worst sort. The heart would ache to fill the silence. All he had to do was wait and listen.

The house was so quiet he could hear Belle way back in the kitchen, making the coffee. He doubted any guest had stepped into this parlor in years. “My mama lives in a grave, and I hate her for it,” Remy had said to him once, but even then he knew it wasn’t really hate she felt. He understood the tangled layers of shame and pride that had made a crypt out of this house for Heloise Lelourie, but he wondered now why Belle had chosen to stay and be buried alive along with her mother.

There were many women like Belle in New Orleans, though, Rourke thought—women who awaken one day to find themselves left behind, caring for aging parents and living out their lives in fading rooms behind drawn curtains, where antique clocks measure out the time in years, not minutes, and too much is left unsaid.

The strong chicory smell of the coffee made it out to the parlor first, followed by Belle carrying a tarnished silver tray weighted down by a large gray agate cafetière with steam rising from its spout.

The coffee was thick and black as tar. He watched Belle pour it, together with the hot milk, into china cups. He remembered her as a pretty child, with long curls the color of late-summer apricots that would slide back and forth over her shoulders when she walked. She hadn’t bobbed her hair, the way all the other girls of her generation had done, and she wore it swept up now in a thick, soft bun. Its bright color had faded some, though, the way a ribbon will do when left too long in the sun.

As she leaned over to hand him his café au lait, a medal on a heavy silver chain swung out from around her neck. It was a St. Joseph’s medal, the patron saint of spinsters, and so it seemed that she still had her hopes of escaping, after all.

Belle sat down on the sofa, and Mrs. Lelourie took a delicate sip from her cup. The older woman’s gaze met Rourke’s, then she looked away. She smoothed the napkin on her lap. “Everyone knows how those Hollywood movie people do all sorts of wicked, unnatural things that no one else does.”

“Oh, Mama, you really mustn’t say such things,” Belle said, although the words sounded forced, as if they’d gotten caught in her throat on the way up and she’d had to cough them out. “Mr. Rourke is going to think you’re sayin’ that Remy killed her husband.”

Mrs. Lelourie took another sip of café au lait. “Stuff and nonsense. He knows I speak of this thing of shame that my daughter Remy has done after her husband’s death. Allowing him to be cut up, butchered in that foul place. There can be no proper wake because of it, no open casket.”

The older woman’s hand betrayed her for just a moment by trembling and spilling coffee into her saucer, and Rourke had to look away. He ached for her. All she had to fill her days, her years, were the rituals of life and the memories they made—the wakes and weddings, the births and burials. Yet for Reynard Lelourie’s wife, it must have seemed as though even the rituals kept betraying her over and over.

“I wish you could have been spared the pain of a postmortem,” he said. “But the procedure is always required nowadays, when there’s a murder.”

“Murder.” The sound she made was between a genteel little snort and a sigh. “Charles St. Claire brought his death on himself. It runs in that family, that sort of insanity.”

“Oh, Mama, you mustn’t say … Now Mr. Rourke is going to think you’re the one who’s gone a little crazy.”

Mrs. Lelourie lifted her shoulders in a small shrug, as if murder and insanity hardly mattered anyway. “The important thing, bien sûr, is that Sans Souci will be back with the Lelouries now, where it belongs.”

“Under Louisiana law,” Rourke said, “the husband’s property doesn’t always pass on to the wife. Especially if she killed him for it.”

The smallest of smiles pulled at the corners of Mrs. Lelourie’s mouth, and her gaze went to an oil painting of the house that hung in an ornate gilded frame above the mantel. “God will not disappoint us.”

Belle pushed herself to her feet in a sudden, jerky movement. She went to the window to stare out at her beautiful garden through lace panels yellow with age.

She crossed her arms over her middle, hugging herself. “As you can see, our mama was just as pleased as can be when Remy married—not that Mama would ever tell Remy so, and she wouldn’t go to the wedding either. But later on that evenin’ Remy came on over with her new husband, flashing that weddin’ ring on her finger, Mrs. St. Claire at last and after all these years, and Mama still wouldn’t speak to her. Poor Remy. You should have been here that evenin’, Mr. Rourke. You would have felt so bad for her. She thought she’d found the one thing that would make Mama love her again, but Mama doesn’t forgive so easily. Do you, Mama?”

“To disgrace oneself is to disgrace the family. My daughter has shamed the name of Lelourie.”

Belle swung her head around to her mother. “She has shamed our name, Mama? She has?”

Rourke got up and went for a closer look at the painting hanging above the fireplace. The artist had signed his work: Henri Lelourie. It must have been done many years ago. Sans Souci was lovely today, but she had been lovelier then, in her prime.

Mrs. Lelourie’s gaze was riveted on the painting as well, and her voice floated through the room’s musty silence as if she spoke from a dream. “Sans Souci. Remy understands, and so does Belle. Mon trisaïeul, my great-great-grandfather, built her. Once she was the most beautiful plantation in all of Louisiana. Once she was ours, and now she will be ours again.”

Her gaze lingered lovingly on the painting, and then it shifted to Rourke’s face, and even from where he stood now across the room from her, he could see a hard glitter in her eyes, as if they had been glazed and fired in a kiln.

“Have you heard it told, then,” she said, “how we Lelouries came to lose Sans Souci?”

“Something about a duel between a Lelourie and a St. Claire, and cheating going on during a game of cards.”

She stared at him a moment longer, and then she looked away, and he got the feeling that what she said next wasn’t what she’d been about to say.

“Yes, that is how the story goes. There was cheating at cards and so Sans Souci was lost, and then there was a duel, in which the Lelourie boy died and the St. Claire boy lived. Because of the wicked greed of a St. Claire, our beautiful plantation house has been out of our care for all these years and my husband never knew his granddaddy. So what does it matter who killed him, or if he brought it on himself? Charles St. Claire’s dying was justice long past due.”

“If you believe the sins of the father should be visited upon their sons. That’s a long time to bear a grudge, though, and your husband has been dead for years himself, and long past caring.”

Her face was composed, but he could see her pride, and her pain, in the way she drew herself up tall. “I was born a Lelourie, I married a Lelourie, our children are Lelouries. We are family, and none of that changed no matter what came after—not my husband’s desertion of me and our girls so that he might go off and live in sin with your mother the Irish whore, and certainly not his dying. Nothing has changed. But then I would never expect a boy like you, come up from the gutter, a son of that woman, to have an understanding of these things.”

She stood up then, as if that should be the last word on the subject. She inclined her head to him. “Good day to you, sir.”

He waited until she got as far as the doorway before he said, “I couldn’t help noticing how the umbrellas in the hall tree were still a bit wet. I hope y’all didn’t get caught out in that terrible downpour last night.”

She paused for a moment, her hand on the jamb. She half turned back to him, although he thought her gaze might have flashed for just an instant to her daughter. Belle had gone perfectly still.

Then that smallest of smiles brushed across the older woman’s mouth again. “Doubtless all our neighbors will be pleased to tell you how I have hidden my head in shame and not left this house come an evening in twenty-seven years. But the truth is my daughter and I have been known to take comfort from Mother Church and her sacraments on other days besides Sunday. Belle, will you see this gentleman out?”

Heloise Lelourie turned and walked from the room with her head held high and her back straight, her long black skirt from another era brushing in a whisper over the floor. Rourke watched her go, understanding her more than she thought. He understood how she had fought to keep the past alive by feeding it with the hopes and dreams and desires of her children. He understood, because he himself had never been able to separate his obsession with Remy from the shame they shared over a past they suffered from but hadn’t made.

“Poor Mama,” Belle said. “But then you know why she is the way she is. And how is your own dear mama?”

The smile Rourke gave to her held more than a touch of meanness in it. “The same. Beautiful, dark, and mysterious. Still wearing black, just like your mama.”

He turned back to the painting and stared at it until Belle was moved to leave the window and come to stand beside him. “Is this going to be enough satisfaction for your mama?” he said. “A pretty painting hanging above the mantel? Even if Remy does end up with the deed to Sans Souci, I don’t expect she’ll be inviting y’all to move on in with her.”

“What about my sister?” Belle said after a moment. “Are you going to arrest her?”

Rourke didn’t answer. He saw that they had turned a nearby sideboard into an altar. They’d covered it with a crocheted lambrequin and on that sat a plaster statue of St. Michael, patron of les familles. Pray to him and he would keep your family safe.

The statue was surrounded by dozens of votive candles, some still burning, and some long since melted down to globs of wax. Dangling from St. Michael’s prayerful, outstretched arms was a string of rosary beads. Made out of small red peas, they looked like tears of blood.

They had been praying a lot for something lately, the two women in this house.

Beside one of the puce velvet chairs was a walnut table laden with framed photographs. Many were of Belle when she was a child, but he didn’t see any of Remy. Then he noticed that one wasn’t a photograph, after all, but a lock of black hair mounted on rose velvet and enclosed in a gold-leaf frame.

He stared at the lock of hair a moment, but what he picked up was a photograph of Belle framed in ornate silver. She had been such a pretty child that everyone called her Belle so often it had become her name. Those thick apricot curls, round dimpled cheeks, a rosebud mouth. Remy had been a dark child, in looks and temperament. Remy had been edgy and fierce, and with the individual parts of her face—her eyes and mouth and chin and cheekbones—all seeming too much for making up the whole of it.