“She’s staying with me now, over at Randall Denton’s place. The Bishop’s Palace.”
“I heard you’d fixed up a sick house there for poor folks that needed it.” Ace deliberately forked up a mouthful of refried beans and swallowed it down. “How has it been to have a kid around?”
“Awful. I worry about her all the time.” Ace nodded and reached for a bottle of hot sauce, sprinkling it over his refried beans. “She’s loud,” Sloane said, “she’s sulky, she complains all the time, she never does what I tell her without arguing. I was never like that. My mother never had to worry about me falling out a window or running away.”
Ace took a sip of water. “You don’t get to pick your kids.”
“She’s not my daughter.”
“Okay.”
“She’s not my daughter,” Sloane said. She closed her eyes. Opened them. “She’s who I wanted to be when I was eleven. Damn it. She’s that bold, noisy, dramatic girl Odessa wanted me to be. I used to…I used to design these dresses, glorious scarlet dresses with flounced sleeves and trains, or royal blue brocade.”
Ace smiled. “I think I got an idea about the dresses.”
Sloane winced. “That was the thing about Mardi Gras I always loved, making the costumes. And when I was there myself, with you…but I could never wear those dresses now. That was Sly, that wasn’t me.”
“What’s Sly but you and three fingers of whiskey? Speaking of which…” Ace reached into his black preacher’s coat and pulled a crumpled ball of leather from the breast pocket. It was the mask. “I believe this belongs to you,” he said, handing it over.
The leather was a tingle in her hand. A shiver of possibilities rippled through Sloane, and she realized how much she had missed being Sly. God help her, but it was fun to be that willful, playful, fox-faced woman.
“Anyt’ing for you, señorita?” asked Maria the waitress.
“No. I should be going.” Sloane closed the menu. “I guess it’s stupid to be jealous of a little girl.”
“Yep.”
“Good seeing you,” Sloane said. The tiredness was back in Ace’s eye, and though it wasn’t hot in the diner, there were tiny beads of sweat along his brow. His breakfast still sat all but uneaten in front of him. “You’re running a fever.”
“Oh, it’s nothing. Everybody’s sick. Lots of flu going around.”
“If you get sick, if you need a place to stay, you can always find me at the Bishop’s Palace,” Sloane said. “You or anybody.”
“Thank ’ee kindly, Miz Gardner,” he said with a drawl and a smile. He sipped his coffee. “Sorry about your mom.”
“Me, too,” Sloane said.
THREE hours later, Sloane and Scarlet were grabbing a quick breakfast of rice porridge and molasses on Randall Denton’s patio. Sloane had started to cross herself before eating; Scarlet would have nothing to do with such pathetic charms, of course. It was ridiculous, Scarlet said, for Momus’s granddaughter to be afraid of magic. She poked at the porridge with her spoon; she rolled her eyes; she kicked her feet against her iron deck chair and made disgusted faces.
Sloane tried to ignore her, drowsy with the hum of bees in the Denton gardens. The Dentons sure knew how to take their pleasures, Sloane had to give them that. Randall’s patio was edged with honeysuckle and tumbles of forsythia, and the wrought-iron table at which they sat was shaded by a magnificent magnolia tree. The vegetation was gorgeous, lush and green. Sloane frowned at Randall, who was sitting in a patio chair with an accounts ledger open on his lap. “You haven’t been conserving water, have you?”
“No,” he replied equably, “but I have been encouraging it by buying up the excess from more conservation-minded souls. You didn’t think your mother’s edicts are what spurred the rash of civic-minded water-saving, did you? It was every man for himself until my money began leading the yokels along the path of virtue.”
To Sloane’s surprise, she had found herself very glad of Randall Denton’s company. He was the only thing left over from her old life; in a way, even his greed was reassuring.
Lianna bounded through the French doors from the parlor. “They shot another Prawn Man, Sly. I just heard,” she said, whiskers trembling. She prowled around the wrought-iron breakfast table. “That’s seven of us in the last three days.”
“What a shame,” Randall murmured. “All right, that’s another three sets of sheets ripped up for bandages since yesterday, two sets of servants’ uniforms given away, as well as a pair of my pants—damn good pants, too—one Chinese vase, knocked over by the fellow with the stilts, and of course another day’s food, as recorded by my cook.” He slid a piece of paper across to Sloane. “No, wait.” He scribbled 2x rice pudding & molasses @ $3 and changed the total line at the bottom. “Sign here.”
“We need to get to Grandfather,” Scarlet said from the other side of the table. “This is disgusting,” she added, pushing her rice pudding away.
“What do we do next?” Lianna snarled. “Wait until the sheriff breaks in here and shoots us all?”
“Eat your breakfast,” Sloane said. She pulled a handful of poker chips out of her pocket and handed them to Randall, writing “paid” down the items on Mrs. Sherbourne’s food bill until she ran out of chips. They lasted almost through yesterday’s breakfast. Well, it was something. Then Sloane took the pen from Randall and crossed out the dollar amount for the Chinese vase. “I’ll find someone to get you another pot.”
Randall was wearing the tightly tailored pants he had helped establish as a style, back when his calves were better, along with a collarless cotton shirt that made a point of being impossibly white. “That’s an antique—”
“So is this molasses.”
“Then why do I have to eat it?” Scarlet sulked.
“Just be quiet and eat your breakfast,” Sloane snapped. She didn’t want any more of her porridge either, but forced herself to set a good example for Scarlet. Left to her own devices the girl would eat nothing but sweet yogurt and sugarcane.
Lord, it was going to be another scorching day. September…fourteenth? Only another couple of weeks until the summer broke for good.
Sloane forced her mind back to the problems of the present. “Randall? Is your uncle going to storm this house?”
“If he does, I expect my guns to be returned to me undamaged, with payment in full for every bullet you fire in your glorious defense.” Randall sipped from a cup of mint tea he had brought with him. He’ll probably bill me for that, too, Sloane thought. Consultant’s fee. Business breakfast. “I don’t know, Sloane. I wouldn’t have thought so, but your reappearance has put Jeremiah under considerable strain, you know. It makes it look as if the evidence against the two men convicted of, ah, getting rid of you, was not entirely legitimate. And of course the last week has been hard on everyone. But even so, Uncle Jeremiah has been behaving oddly. He never liked the revellers much, but since the hurricane it’s become something of a mania with him. And he has a terrible cough,” Randall said. Sloane wondered if the old man was still spitting up seawater. “Worse than that, he seems to be hearing things. We were chatting in the Gold Room at your old place and three different times he shushed me and held up his hands. Claimed to hear crabs scuttling around inside the piano. Once he actually lifted the top off to look down inside. Didn’t hear a thing myself.”
Wait a minute. “You’ve seen him?” Sloane asked.
“Yesterday. At your house. He’s moved the sheriff’s offices there until they get the building downtown fully repaired.”
Sloane looked at Lianna. “Nobody told me Randall had left.”
“I can’t watch him every minute,” Lianna bristled. Sloane closed her eyes. There were twenty-five or thirty refugees from the Mardi Gras now squatting in the Bishop’s Palace. Sloane had begun to discover that, while many of them were great fun, “devotion to duty,” “dependability,” and other such stolid daily virtues were not the revellers’ strong suit.
Bees bumbled among the vines. R
andall watched them, considering. “Am I a prisoner then, in my own house, Sloane? Are you making me a hostage?”
Well, yes. “I guess not,” Sloane said. “It wouldn’t look good, I suppose.”
Randall grinned and sipped his tea. “Thanks for caring.”
“We should get Grandfather,” Scarlet said. She was using one of Randall’s sterling silver spoons to draw patterns in her uneaten porridge.
“He would look after his own,” Lianna said. “He would take care of us if he knew.”
“What makes you think he doesn’t know?” Randall said, amused. “You think none of these murders happened in the moonlight?” He put his cup down, stretched, and breathed in the scent of honeysuckle with great satisfaction, before glancing back at the cat-faced reveller. “The Dentons have been members of the Krewe of Momus since 1873, my feline friend, and at the risk of sounding sacrilegious, an excessive care for his worshipers has never been part of the jesting god’s character. Named after the Greek god of derision, you know. Thrown out of Olympus for ridiculing the other gods. None of your Jesus cult loving-kindness. For that matter, I never heard that Jesus did much for the blacks when they were slaves around these parts either, however fiercely they believed.”
“So what do you believe in, Randall?” Sloane said, exasperated.
“Keeping your head down and a ten percent return. Call me a traditionalist.” He slid the accounts over to her again and held out his pen. “Sign the invoice, Sloane.—Ah. Thank you.”
Sloane didn’t like to think how much money she already owed him. Even if she ever managed to get Ashton Villa back, she might have to sell her mother’s house to pay her debts. “You’re such a Denton.”
“And you have turned into a Gardner, much to my surprise.” Randall gathered his papers. “I never thought you had your mother’s stomach for it. Rather be off in your room sewing or writing poetry. But here you are, a do-gooder and a busybody after all. In my house, inconveniently.” He stood. “I shall leave you to it. I am going to stay with Mother tonight, and for the duration of Uncle Jeremiah’s siege, I think. Unless you’ve decided to hold me hostage after all?”
“Don’t go,” Sloane said. Scarlet gave her a dirty look. “I mean, why?”
“Much as I enjoy seeing my house full of mutants and homeless people,” Randall remarked, glancing pointedly at the cat-faced Lianna and Scarlet, “not to mention rude children, I don’t believe this place is safe. It was one thing for you and Alice Mather to play at good Samaritans here for the first few days after the storm. That was mostly bumps and cuts and a few broken bones. But the people coming here now are sick, Sloane. They have fevers. They are probably contagious with typhoid or dysentery or cholera or yellow fever. As lovely as it has been to unite our strengths for the good of the adoring if smelly masses, I don’t intend to stay here and catch the plague with you, dear.”
“How will you know how much of your stuff we’ve used?” Sloane argued weakly.
“Mrs. Sherbourne will keep track of it.”
“Oh, so you don’t mind leaving her here to catch the plague.”
“I’m paying her extra,” Randall said briefly. “Or rather, you are.” He took a handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his shirt and dabbed at the sweat beginning to bead on his brow. “Besides which, now that the dead are slow-roasting in their pyres, Uncle Jeremiah is turning his attention more seriously to the problem of the revellers hiding out in my house. He’s quite rabid about having monsters on the Island. He warned me he might have to cut off the water here, or the gas. I like a shower in the morning, and I like it hot.” Randall tipped his head. “Good day, Sloane. And goodbye.”
“Don’t let him go, Sly!” Lianna said. “We need a hostage.” But Sloane shook her head.
“Grandfather will fix you,” Scarlet said.
Randall seemed unperturbed. “Momus will fix all of us, sooner or later,” he said. “Until Carnival comes, I advise you to look somewhere else for rescue.”
SLOANE went upstairs to Randall’s study. She had told everyone she was going where she could concentrate, and she had tried, making lists of small jobs that needed doing, while all the time unable to figure out how to stop Sheriff Denton from executing the revellers.
What would Mom do? she asked herself. Easy, she’d be running the city. She was the Law, not the Outlaw. As for Odessa, she had her magic. Momus—well, gods did as they wished. Sloane couldn’t do what any of them would have done. They were greater people than she. She quirked a small smile. So what was the small, sneaky, quiet, polite way to get out of this mess?
Pray?
Actually, that was good advice, she decided. With the magic running high over Galveston, the Mexicans clutching their votive candles and chanting Mass probably had the right idea. A small offering or two wouldn’t hurt at all. And who had better ancestors to invoke than Sloane Gardner? Oh, it would make Mother spin in her grave to have me burning incense for her, Sloane thought. She grinned. For that matter, just finding she could spin in her grave would make her spin in her grave.
Her smile died. Even after having spent quite a while as Sly, she had let her mother down too badly to make light of it. Maybe she could pray to Bettie Brown; they had shared the same house together for years, after all. Even played a hand or two of cards in the Mardi Gras. Or Odessa, better still. She hadn’t managed to save her godmother, but at least she had tried to avenge her. She supposed she should feel sorry for having thrown Jeremiah Denton’s doll into the sea, but she didn’t. It had been a mean, furious, impulsive act, and she was so much prouder of it than all her polite, reasonable, carefully considered decisions.
I wonder if the sheriff would be willing to play stud to decide the issue. Or Texas hold ’em. Or jackpots, Sloane thought, as she closed her eyes. Hell, I’d let him deal and play with wild cards if he wanted…
THE next thing she knew, a maid was touching her gingerly on the shoulder. “Ma’am?”
Sloane started up. It was hot and airless in the little study. Her eyes felt puffy and her face numb where it had been lying on the mahogany desk. “What? What?”
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Lindsey said. “Mrs. Mather brung her son, and a gentleman. A doctor.” There was something odd about Lindsey’s voice. Sloane blinked. The maid had a rag tied to cover her nose and mouth. Soaked in vinegar, to judge by the smell. Worried about catching a fever.
Sloane nodded. “A doctor. Good. That’s good.”
“It’s, it’s the doctor, ma’am. The one we all thought…”
Oh. “The apothecary. Mr. Cane.” The maid nodded. “And Mrs. Mather’s son Ham, is he there, too?”
“Yes, ma’am. Burned to a crisp with a big mark on his head. Branded like a cow, they say, by cannibals!”
“Thank God!” Sloane took one moment to be heartily glad that Josh and Ham hadn’t died because of her, and another to be relieved on Alice Mather’s part. How nice.
Now here comes the guilt. It was so predictable Sloane felt mad at herself as the shame rose in her. But she had earned this self-disgust. If she hadn’t been out playing in the Mardi Gras, Josh and Ham would never have been arrested and exiled. Sloane looked at the small clock on Randall’s desk. Just past noon. She had been asleep for more than an hour. “Thank you. I’ll be right down.” The clock was very old; each tick felt labored and a little late. Brittle, elderly ticks. Sloane lifted her wrist to check her Rolex for the right time, then remembered that the watch was gone. She had thrown it away, her mother’s most powerful charm. Thrown it away and been glad to get rid of it.
The maid curtseyed and turned to go. “Lindsey,” Sloane said.
“Ma’am?”
“Do you have any makeup?”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“In the house?”
“Yes.”
“A little, ma’am.”
Sloane looked down at the desk, where her hands were lying. Flecks of faded red polish speckled her nails like peeling paint
nobody had cared enough to sand away. “Could I borrow it?”
“It’s just eyeliner and a pencil,” Lindsey said doubtfully. “And cheap. Not from before the Flood or anything.” The clock ticked slowly in the stuffy room. “All right,” the maid said.
“Thank you,” Sloane said. “Just bring the makeup, and then tell Mr. Cane I will be down directly.”
In five minutes the maid was back. As well as eyebrow pencil and eyeliner, she brought a small bowl of water and a round tin with dull red lipstick inside, the sort you had to pick up on your fingertip and spread like liniment. “From Mrs. Sherbourne in the kitchen,” Lindsey said. “And I brought one of Mr. Denton’s handkerchiefs to blot with.” Sloane was pretty sure that if she tried to speak she would cry. She settled for smiling. Lindsey smiled back through her vinegar-soaked rag. “Do you have a thing for the doctor?” the maid asked.
“No.” Dipping her fingers in the bowl, Sloane traced cool water on her face. Without exactly meaning to, she found she was drawing the lines of the Sly mask on her cheeks—invisible tracks of coolness.
There are some things, Odessa had told her once, you need a new face to face.
Chapter Twenty
TREATMENT
ONCE Mrs. Mather had led Josh and Ham over to the Bishop’s Palace she tactfully withdrew, saying she had to help Randall’s cook put lunch on the table. She left the boys standing in the foyer while the housemaid ran upstairs to announce their arrival. The maid was wearing a rag face mask dipped in vinegar. Josh had long ago decided not to argue with these contraptions, which a lot of Islanders were wearing to fend off disease. He figured he had no right to be condescending, not when a good placebo was more effective than many of his remedies.
Ham tugged absently on the brim of an old nylon baseball cap as he looked Randall Denton’s place over. George’s brand still marred his forehead, although Josh’s was gone. Sometime during Joe Tucker’s amputation he must have wiped his forehead with his bloody hands; his brand had been erased by a streak of salt-white skin. Josh found himself flexing his bleached fingers. The white skin was soft as a baby’s bottom, and unnervingly sensitive; he had already burned himself once this morning, grabbing a cup of chicory that normally wouldn’t have hurt him to hold.