Blood Memory

  “Mom knows?”

  “Of course.”

  “And Pearlie?”

  “It was Pearlie who helped me clean Luke’s blood off the bedroom floor and walls before the police arrived. Not that it mattered. They never even checked the slave quarters.”

  “Why not?”

  He looks at me as though the answer should be self-evident. “They believed what I told them. Luke was lying dead under the dogwood tree in the rose garden. I told them how it happened, and that was that.”

  Such a passive police response would be unimaginable in New Orleans, even back in 1981. But in the Natchez of twenty years ago? What local cop was going to question the word of Dr. William Kirkland, especially when his son-in-law had just been murdered?

  “Did they do any forensic investigation at all? Did they search the grounds for blood or other evidence?”

  “Yes, but as you pointed out, it was raining hard. They didn’t put too much effort into it. It was a sad night, and everybody wanted it over.”

  I gaze across the rose garden to the slave quarters that was my home for sixteen years. Then I pan my eyes right, to the dogwood tree where for most of my life I’ve believed my father died. Luke was dead…It made no difference where the police found his body. But of course it does make a difference to me. It makes all the difference in the world.

  “But Grandpapa…what if something did happen to me? Did you ever think about that?”

  Before he can answer, his Town Car pulls alongside my Audi on the passenger side. Billy Neal gives my grandfather a pointed look.

  “What’s his fucking problem?” I snap.

  Grandpapa frowns at the expletive, but he motions for Billy to pull away. After about ten seconds, the driver obeys.

  “Of course I considered the possibility, dear. I examined you myself, after the police had gone.”

  “And?”

  “I saw no evidence of assault.”

  “You checked me for sexual assault?”

  He sighs again, obviously put out by the specifics of my question. “I did a thorough examination. Nothing happened to you. Nothing physical, I mean. The psychological shock was clearly devastating, though. You stopped speaking for a year.”

  “What do you think I saw?”

  “I don’t know. On the milder side, the prowler might have exposed himself to you. I suppose he might have fondled you or forced you to fondle him. But at the other end of the spectrum…you might have seen your father murdered before your eyes.”

  I want to hide my quivering hands—my grandfather despises weakness—but there’s nowhere to put them. Then he closes one of his strong, age-spotted hands around both of mine, stilling my tremors with the force of his grip. “Do you have any memory of that night?”

  “Not before I saw his body. I have nightmares, though. I’ve seen Daddy fighting with a faceless man…other things. But nothing that makes any sense.”

  He squeezes my hands harder. “Those aren’t nightmares, dear. Those are memories. I’ve said some bad things about Luke, I know. And God help me, I’ve lied to you as well. Hopefully for a good reason. But one thing I told you, you can take as holy writ. Your father died fighting to save your life. He probably did save your life. No man could have done more.”

  I close my eyes, but the tears come anyway. I’ve always felt a certain amount of shame about my father’s war-related problems. To hear now that he died a hero…it’s almost too much. “Who did it, Grandpapa? Who killed him?”

  “No one knows.”

  “Did the police really look?”

  “You’d better believe it. I rode them hard. But they couldn’t come up with anything.”

  “I can,” I say quietly. “I can take apart that crime scene with tools that didn’t even exist about back then.”

  Grandpapa is watching me with grief in his face. “I’m sure you can, Catherine. But to what end? What if you were to find DNA from an unknown person? There were never even any suspects. Are you going to take blood samples from every black man in the city of Natchez? That could be five thousand people. And the killer could easily be dead now. He could have left town years ago.”

  “Are you saying I shouldn’t try to find out who murdered my father?”

  Grandpapa closes his eyes. Just as I decide he has fallen asleep, he opens them again and turns them on me with startling intensity. “Catherine, you’ve spent your adult life focused on death. Now you’re about to cross the line into full-blown obsession. I want my granddaughter to live. I want you to have a family, children…”

  I’m shaking my head violently, not because I don’t want those things, but because I simply can’t think about them now. And because I already have a child on the way—

  “That’s what Luke would want,” Grandpapa finishes. “Not some belated quest for justice with no chance for success.”

  “It’s not just justice I want.”

  “What, then?”

  “The man who killed my father is the only person in the world who knows what happened to me in that room.”

  At last my grandfather is silent.

  “Something happened to me that night. Something bad. And I have to know what it was.”

  Grandpapa is saying something else, but I can’t make out specific words. His voice seems to come from across a windy field. Pulling one hand loose, I yank open the door and try to climb out. He tries to hold me by my other hand, but I relax my fingers and the hand slips free. My feet hit the ground, and I start running toward the slave quarters.

  Sensing something amiss, Billy Neal jumps out of the Lincoln and blocks my path.

  “Get away from me, you shit!” I scream.

  He grabs for my arms, but I pivot and reverse away from the buildings. Without looking back, I sprint down the hill toward the bayou, where the barn that served as my father’s studio and sleeping quarters stands in the shadow of a wall of trees. I’ll be safe there. Voices cry out behind me, one of them Pearlie’s, but I run on, wind-milling my arms like a panicked little girl.

  Chapter

  22

  I can’t get into the barn. For the first time in my life, my father’s sanctuary is closed to me. The main entrances are padlocked, and the secret ones I used for years have been nailed shut. If I could find a ladder, I’d try the loft door, but as I begin looking for one, I hear Pearlie shouting from the direction of the house.

  She’s running down the hill in her white uniform. That she’s over seventy seems not to affect her speed at all. Her bony legs move in a herky-jerky motion, giving her the appearance of a marionette being controlled by invisible strings, but she moves fast. I wait by the barn, watching Pearlie come, wondering what she has to say that’s so important. The air here smells of the bayou beyond the barn: decaying vegetation, dead fish, frogs, snakes, skunks. The mosquitoes have always been bad down here, too, but Daddy never seemed to mind them.

  “What you doing here?” Pearlie calls.

  “I want to look in the barn.”

  She slows to a stop, panting. “Why?”

  Because I want to be close to my father. Because his grave does nothing for me. Because here, where his final sculptures are stored—unsold at my request—I feel a connection with him that has never died, or even faded…

  “I just do,” I snap. “Why is it locked?”

  “All Mr. Luke’s metalwork be in there.”

  “All? I thought there were only a couple of unsold pieces left.”

  “Used to be. But your granddaddy been buying up all the others. Whenever something comes on sale, he buys it. He got at least ten of them things in there. Big ones, too.”

  This seems impossible to me. “Why is he doing that? He never liked Daddy’s work.”

  Pearlie shrugs. “Got to be money in it, some way. Them statues worth money, ain’t they? Some of ’em he brought all the way from Atlanta.”

  “A few collectors think they’re important. But they’re not worth the kind of money that matters to Grandpapa.”


  Pearlie steps closer and looks me in the eye. “What happened in that car up there? Why’d you run away like that?”

  I turn back to the barn door. “Grandpapa told me where Daddy really died.”

  She circles me so that she can maintain eye contact. I see fear in her eyes.

  “What are you afraid of, Pearlie? What did you think he told me?”

  “I ain’t afraid of nothing! You tell me what he said.”

  “He told me Daddy didn’t die under the tree. He was shot in my bedroom, saving me from the intruder.”

  Pearlie seems frozen in place. “What else did he say?”

  “He told me that you cleaned Daddy’s blood off the walls and the floor.”

  The old woman lowers her head.

  “How could you do that? How could you lie to me all these years?”

  Pearlie shakes her head, her eyes still downcast. “I got no regrets about cleaning that blood. Wasn’t no good going to come from you knowing any different than what we told you.”

  “You don’t know that! Isn’t it always better to know the truth, no matter what?”

  She looks up, her eyes brimming with emotion. “Maybe you ain’t lived long enough to learn it yet, but some things it’s better not to know. Specially if you’re a woman.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “If everybody knew what everybody else was really thinking and doing all the time, there’d be a lot more people in the jailhouse. And there wouldn’t hardly be one family left together. Hardly any left together now, come to that. Especially black ones.”

  “I want the truth, Pearlie. I don’t want to be protected. I don’t want to be lied to. I want the truth, however bad it is.”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying, girl. You think you do, but you don’t.”

  I take hold of her arm. “You know everything that ever happened to this family. What else have you been keeping from me?”

  “Nothing! What Dr. Kirkland done that night was right. Wasn’t no use having everybody talking ’bout you being raped. All them old white ladies would have been whispering poison every time you walked into a room. You didn’t need to carry that around with you. Not in this little town.”

  “I don’t care what those people think! Not now, not then. You know that.”

  Pearlie nods. “You a strong girl, all right. Always was. But you didn’t need that scandal hanging on you. Now, come back up to the house. Dr. Kirkland got the only key to this old barn. You gonna have to wait on him to get inside, and he gone to his meeting now.”

  I jump as my cell phone beeps out U2. It’s Sean. My first instinct is to ignore the call, but something makes me answer.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Hold on to your socks,” Sean says, his voice raspy from an obvious hangover. “At eight o’clock this morning, Nathan Malik gave up the names of his patients.”

  I can’t believe it. There’s no way a man who spent time as a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge was broken by one night in the parish prison. “Is he out of jail now?”

  “Yep. And we were suspicious for the same reason you are. Why would Malik go to jail on principle, then suddenly crack? It’s almost like he did it for the publicity, and once he got that, he caved. Well, Kaiser suddenly realized that without Malik’s medical records, we had no way to know whether the patient list was complete. So he got a court order authorizing us to compare the list to Malik’s computer records. Well, guess what? There weren’t any. The hard drives at his office were wiped clean.”

  This I can believe. “The data can still be retrieved. You just—”

  “You’re not listening, Cat. The data’s gone. All of it. The FBI technicians said it would take somebody who really knew computers to pull that off.”

  “Malik could do it.”

  “Hang on…. I gotta run, Cat. Things are popping down here. I miss you.”

  He clicks off, leaving me feeling utterly dislocated from my old life.

  “Bad news?” Pearlie asks.

  “Not good,” I reply, wondering whether the list Malik gave the police has a single current patient’s name on it.

  I turn reluctantly from the barn and follow Pearlie up the hill.

  As we reach the parking lot, my mother and Aunt Ann walk out of the rose garden. Each is rolling one-half of a matched pair of Louis Vuitton suitcases. From a distance they could be twins, but as we near them, Ann’s age shows itself in her face. Only four years older than my mother, she’s paid the price for years of alcoholism and hard living. A friend of mine from Natchez wrote a book about her troubled family. In it, she wrote, “Beautiful women are haunted houses.” I always think of that line when I see Aunt Ann. Ann was the one that the boys always followed home. Her face had the classic proportions that transcended small-town prettiness, but beauty seemed to bring her more trouble than happiness, and by fifty it was mostly gone. Now her cheeks hang on the long-envied bone structure like ragged sails on the woodwork of a once-proud ship. Looking at the spider-work of veins in her face, I touch my own, knowing that one day my secret drinking will exact the same price from me.

  “What have you two been doing down by the bayou?” my mother calls. “The mosquitoes will eat you alive down there.”

  “Looking at the barn,” I answer. “I wanted to see some of Daddy’s pieces.”

  The smile fades from Mom’s face. “Well, they’re all locked up now.”

  Ann props up her suitcase, walks over to me, and gives me a tight, sisterly hug, not one of the side hugs my mother favors. Then she draws back and looks into my eyes. Hers are as blue as my grandfather’s, and almost as penetrating. “If I didn’t know better, Cat, I’d think you’ve been crying.”

  I shake my head, wondering if Ann knows where Daddy really died.

  “Good. That’s my department. How are you holding up down in New Orleans?”

  “Fine. I’m good.”

  She nods, though she obviously doesn’t believe me. “You seeing anybody of the male persuasion down there?”

  “I have a guy, yeah.”

  “Handsome?”

  I force a laugh I don’t feel. “Yes.”

  “Good for you. Every man’s going to wear you down eventually, so you might as well pick one who’s pretty to look at.”

  Ann gives me a conspiratorial wink, but I can’t summon another laugh. There’s a glitter in her eyes that makes me wonder if she’s in a manic phase.

  “Ann’s headed back to the coast soon,” says my mother. “But we’re going to have brunch at the Castle first. Why don’t you put on some decent clothes and join us?”

  That’s the last thing I want to do now. But looking for some of my father’s sculptures won’t qualify as a sufficient excuse in my mother’s book. “I’d really like to. But I have some things to do.”

  Mom looks put out. “For example?”

  I search for an excuse—any excuse—to skip lunch. “Dr. Wells asked me to come swimming over at his house.”

  Ann gives me another wink. “Sounds a lot better than lunch with us. You go on, Cat. We’ll catch up with each other soon.”

  In the most casual voice I can muster, I say, “Mom, who in town has some of Dad’s work on display?”

  “Well, they still have that piece at the library. And there’s the one at the Vietnam Veterans Building over at Duncan Park—the helicopter. Other than those and what’s in the barn, everything’s in private homes. Most of them are far from Natchez.”

  I give Ann another hug, then glance at Pearlie—who has watched this exchange like a silent sentinel—and set off through the trees toward Michael Wells’s house.

  My plan is to turn around as soon as Ann and my mother drive away, but they stand by the Acura talking to Pearlie as if they have all day. With little choice but to play out my charade, I walk deeper into the trees.

  Something moves among the trunks to my right, and it startles me. Then I recognize Mose, the yardman. He’s setting mole traps in the scraggly
grass beneath the trees about thirty yards away. Looking at him bent over the ground, I recall Grandpapa’s description of the prowler who ran away from the slave quarters on the night Daddy died. He was black. Could that have been Mose? He’s lived on the property for decades. He always drank quite a bit, and it strikes me now that he might have had some dealings with my father over drugs.

  I veer toward the old man and walk for several yards, but something makes me stop short of him. Mose had an open window into my life from infancy to age sixteen. Is it possible that he lusted after me? To the point that he came into my room and tried to molest me? Could he have done something before that night, even? On the grounds of Malmaison, maybe? Under the tin roof of the barn? Could that something have been so traumatic that I blocked it out? Before talking to Nathan Malik, I wouldn’t have considered this. But now, thinking of the nightmares that have troubled me for years—faceless black figures breaking into my house—I wonder. The idea that a random prowler would walk all the way from the highway to Malmaison during a rainstorm has always bothered me. But if that “prowler” were Mose, he wouldn’t have had to walk more than a hundred yards. Could he be the faceless black man in my dreams? The demon fighting my father in the dark?

  I’ll have to ask Pearlie that.

  Mose hasn’t seen me yet. Behind Malmaison, Ann and my mother are still talking by the car. I might be able to reach Michael’s house without Mose seeing me, but Michael is bound to be at work. I could still use his pool, though. I think of the flat rock in his flower bed. Five or six minutes on the bottom of that pool might be just the thing to calm me down. I’m thinking of sprinting the rest of the way when the sound of a motor carries through the trees. Ann’s Acura is backing up. I hear her shift gears, and then the car rolls slowly down the curving driveway toward the gate.

  “Miss Catherine?” croaks a voice parched by thousands of hand-rolled cigarettes.

  I whip my head around. Mose is standing erect, staring at me from behind his pile of mole traps.

  “That you, Miss Catherine? My eyes ain’t so good no more.”