herself.
In that moment, Josephine learned that she herself was capable of the worst sin, that she could kill a man.
Lila couldn't face Charmian, so Josephine went to her. She was sitting in the study next to her bedroom, hungover, nursing her coffee and going through some Polaroids from the night before. Charmian confirmed that Richard – dressed as a pirate, dressed as Brad – had never left the Hardings' last night, and that he and Brad had revealed the costume switch near the end of the evening, as planned. And the proof was right there: the partyers grinning at the camera, Richard smiling ear-to-ear after lifting off his pirate face mask and wig. And Bradford, the boar mask under his arm, hair wet with sweat, mouth smiling but eyes to one side as if the enormity of what he'd done was catching up to him.
Charmian's rage had been terrifying to behold, and Josephine recognized the blood look in her eyes because she'd felt it in her own only moments before: Charmian, too, could kill. And yet Josephine knew she was also wounded, in agony over her daughter's distress and staggered by the fact that her younger brother was capable of this.
Telling it, Josephine had to sit down again. There was a stump among the maze of paths, and Cree helped her fold her length onto it.
'Before I lef that room, she tol' me one thing. She say, 'You don't tell anyone.' I knowed that woman, know she hurtin' for Lila, see, but she thinkin' of Ron, too, she thinkin' of the Lambert name an' the Beauforte name. Me, I can't get past thinkin' 'bout that sweet baby girl and 'bout somebody could do that to her. But Charmian, she thinkin' ahead. She playin' it out in her mind. I says, 'No, ma'am,' but she know I don't ean it and she stop me at the door. She tell me to look at her. And what I see, I never forget. Never forget that woman's eye. She say again, 'You don't tell anyone. You don't talk to Lila. You don't talk to Richard. This is my family, and this is my respons'bility.' She say, 'Don't underestimate me, Jos'phine. What I will do to keep this from doin' more damage than it already done.' And I know she mean she kill me or anybody, not just the man raped her daughter. I b'lieve it down to my shoes.'
Cree could easily imagine Charmian saying it, the cold steel in her eyes, the saber of her voice.
Later, passing by the door to Lila's bedroom, she several times overheard Charmian talking to her daughter in hushed, urgent, hard tones. But Josephine couldn't be quiet about it. The anger and concern were too great. She tried to talk to Lila, but Lila wouldn't open up again, and Josephine thought maybe that was a good thing, she was hardening herself as she had to. It took another week or more to find a time to tell Richard. She was shocked to learn that Charmian hadn't told him. But he admitted he had seen the difference in his beloved daughter, and now he was outraged to learn its reason. He stormed off to talk to Charmian.
Another two weeks went by and the household started to fragment into secrets, quiet hatreds, hushed conversations, and tense silences. Poor Ron, knowing nothing, was especially confused. Lila grew increasingly distant, her light dimming, the lid coming over her.
Bradford had not returned to the house, but Richard and Brad's regular three-day fishing expedition was coming up. The night before the trip, Richard came to Josephine, told her to help ready his gear for their early morning departure. The way it always worked was Bradford got up early, came to the house at three-thirty or four A.M., they'd drive down to the private dock where Richard kept his boat, then continue by water the last ten miles or so. The place was an old trapper's cabin Brad had won in a card game years before, deep in the brackish swamps of Terrebonne Parish, back where water and land merged in a labyrinthine lacework.
Three in the morning, and Richard woke Josephine up. The rest of the household was fast asleep as she joined him in the library. When Brad came in, Richard locked the library door and confronted him. Brad looked sick with nervousness, but at first he pretended he thought Richard was joking. Richard threatened him and then had Josephine confront him as well. Brad shifted strategies, claimed it hadn't really been rape, it didn't get that far, it was just horsing around. When that didn't stick, he shifted again, saying it was Lila's fault. She was a ripe one, a hot one, a little slut who knew perfectly well what she was doing; he wasn't the first, she was lying if she said he was.
At that, Richard's rage built in him until he became a human bomb. At first he just demanded that Brad admit what he did, apologize on his hands and knees to Lila, and then leave New Orleans forever. But Brad resisted and anyway it wasn't enough. Richard bulled him, pushed him, took up the poker and threatened him with it. And Brad, afraid now, admitted, wept, swore he was sorry. But it was too late. The admission only inflamed Richard, the bomb had been triggered. Richard's face was a knot of red bulging veins, the enonnity of it was catching up with him; he hit Brad, he kept beating Brad, he couldn't stop himself. At first Josephine was shocked, but when Richard finally came to his senses and looked at the poker, appalled, she took it from his hands. Bradford was lying on the floor, maybe already critically injured. And Josephine struck him, too – once, and then again, with all the strength her capable arms could muster. And then he stopped moving. Josephine's heart rose up, joyous in vengeance.
There was almost no blood, and what there was they worked quickly to clean up. Then they had another task.
Josephine had never been clear if Richard had envisioned everything from the start – the murder and then the concealment of the murder – or whether he had just been overtaken by his own rage and had improvised a solution afterward.
Whichever, in New Orleans, as nowhere else, there was a convenient way to dispose of dead bodies.
They packed Brad out through the former carriage house and into Richard's car. They drove to Lafayette Cemetery, only five blocks away, and carried the corpse quickly inside. Josephine moved the car away from the gate as Richard carried the body to the Lambert family tomb, deep in the center of the mazelike necropolis. When she rejoined him, they unbolted the crypt's marble front cover and used a small sledgehammer to batter away the bricks behind it. When they'd opened a hole big enough to squeeze the body through, they stuffed Brad onto the top of his mother's coffin, then bolted the cover back on.
So within half an hour of Brad's death, he had disappeared for good. Josephine and Richard knew no one would ever open the Lambert crypt to find the gap in the bricks or the remains atop the coffin. Because there would never be cause to open the grave: Brad was the last of the Lambert name. When her time came, Charmian would be buried in the Beauforte tomb. Anyway, in only a year and a day Bradford would be baked to dust and flakes of bone.
It wasn't yet sunrise when Richard dropped Josephine off at the house and went on down to the shack just as he and Brad had done so many times over the years. He came back two days later with a terrible story. The lie he'd told the police was that they'd separated in the cypress labyrinth, Brad taking a little pirogue he favored and Richard using the larger boat as they fished for black bass and flatheads. Later, when Richard arrived at their planned rendezvous, he'd been shocked to find the pirogue floating untethered and untended. Some accident must have happened. Police rescue teams combed the area, but no one could say for certain how far the pirogue might have drifted before Richard found it, and in the endless maze of cypress lanes, the tangle of roots groping down into coffee-dark water, it was no wonder they couldn't find his body. With all the alligators around, there probably wasn't much to find.
It made the newspapers as a tragedy for one of New Orleans's oldest and most respected families. At the church ceremony they eventually held, Brad's survivors – Charmian, Ron, Lila, Richard – appeared much distraught.
A family grieved.
41
The man who picked up Charmian wasn't from Crescent City Confidential Services. His two gold teeth, the checked shirt, those too-small oval sunglasses, and the posture of deliberate negligence showed him for what he was. As variously described by Ronald and the people he'd referred her to find him, he was a 'fixer,' a 'hitter,' a 'handyman' – someone willing to do dirty work for pay. Just how dirty, Charmian wasn't sure, but the way he looked, slouched behind the wheel of his beat-up Cadillac, driving with one wrist, she wouldn't put much past him. He was a scrawny, chain-smoking, hatchet-faced Cajun swamp rat who leered when he told her his name was Pierre Lapin Peter Rabbit. When he'd first taken the driver's seat and tugged his jeans up, Charmian saw the end of
