medication or alcohol withdrawal. It’s fear. The same sickening panic I felt at the LeGendre crime scene, and at the Nolan scene before that. If it weren’t for the child’s footprint, I’d assume the boot print was made with deer blood. Whitetail often wander onto the grounds of Malmaison, and my grandfather has been known to shoot a buck now and again, sometimes from the window of his study. But the child’s footprint
When my watch hits the sixty-second mark, I close the shutter. Then, to be sure I capture the prints, I open the lens aperture by one f-stop and repeat the procedure. By then Pearlie is squawking through the door.
The familiar ritual of crime scene photography is calming my nerves. Habits have great comforting power- even bad habits, as I discovered long ago.
“Answer me, girl! I can’t read your mind like I used to. You’ve grown up too much and been gone too long.”
I smile in spite of my fear. The year after my father died-the year I stopped speaking-only Pearlie was able to communicate with me. The stoic maid could read my emotions in a glance, from the curl of a lip to the angle of my downcast eyes.
“I’m coming!” I call, going to the door.
As soon as I turn the knob, Pearlie pushes open the door and stands with her hands on her hips. Over seventy years old, she is tall, thin, and tough as gristle, with chocolate brown skin and clear traces of Caucasian ancestry in her facial features. Her eyes still flash with intelligence and wit, and her bark-though intimidating to strangers-is considerably worse than her bite. Around my grandfather and my mother, Pearlie displays the quiet dignity of a nineteenth-century servant. She can vanish as silently as a ghost when certain whites enter a room, but around me she is much more animated, treating me as she might a daughter. She still wears a starched white uniform, which you don’t see much anymore, and a shiny, reddish brown wig to cover her grizzled white hair.
I’ve missed her more than I realized. For her part, I see a mixture of pique and excitement in her eyes, as though she doesn’t know whether to hug me or spank me. Were it not for Natriece’s fear and the odd scene in the bedroom, Pearlie would undoubtedly crush me to her chest.
“Answer me this minute!” she demands. “You ain’t been home since your grandmother’s funeral, and that’s been a year now.”
“Fifteen months,” I correct, fighting a new wave of emotion that I can’t afford to face right now. Last June, my grandmother drowned on DeSalle Island. Part of the sandbar she was standing on simply slid into the Mississippi River. There was no warning. Four people saw it happen, yet no one could save her. No one even saw her surface after the bar collapsed. Catherine Poitiers Kirkland was an excellent swimmer in her youth-she taught me to swim- but at seventy-five, she’d been no match for the mighty current of the Mississippi.
“Lord, Lord.” Pearlie sighs. “Well…why didn’t you call to say you was coming? I would have cooked for you.”
“It was an impulse.”
“Ain’t it always with you?” She gives me a knowing look, then pushes past me into the bedroom. “What’s going on in here? Natriece told me they’s a ghost in here.”
I see the little girl standing just outside the door. “There is, in a way. Go look at the carpet by the foot of the bed.”
Pearlie walks over to the tripod, bends at the waist, and examines the floor with the eagle eye of a woman who has spent decades eradicating the slightest specks of dirt from “her” house.
“What’s making that rug look like that?”
“Blood. Old bloodstains hidden in the carpet fibers. It’s reacting with a chemical that Natriece sprayed on it by accident.”
“Blood?” Pearlie says skeptically. “I don’t see no blood. That looks like them Halloween teeth you used to wear when you was a child. Vampire teeth, like Count Dracula.”
“It’s the same principle. But there’s blood there, you can count on that.”
“Blood the only thing make that stuff glow?”
“No,” I concede. “Some metals will do it. Household bleach can do it. Have you spilled Clorox in here? Or in the laundry room and then tracked it in here?”
Pearlie purses her lips. “Can’t say I have. Can’t say I ain’t either. Could have done, I guess.”
“I’ve seen lots of stains like this. Blood has a particular kind of glow with luminol. And I’m ninety-five percent sure I’m looking at blood.”
“Well, I don’t hardly see nothing now.”
“It fades pretty quickly. That’s why I took pictures of it.”
Pearlie always minimized the negative aspects of any situation. Part of what she was paid for, I suppose. I even used to hear her sing an old Johnny Mercer song to that effect while she worked:
“Could be deer blood,” Pearlie suggests. “Or armadillo maybe. Dr. Kirkland shoots armadillos round here all the time. They always digging up the yard, nasty things.”
“There are tests that will tell me whether the blood’s human. You know, it would take a lot of blood to make prints this well defined. There’s a boot print, and also the print of a child’s bare foot.”
Pearlie stares down with mute skepticism.
“Have there been any children around here since I left?” I’m an only child, and my aunt Ann, despite three marriages, has no children. “Has Natriece been around here much?”
Pearlie shakes her head. “My kids live in Chicago and Los Angeles, you know that. And Natriece only been to this house two times before this. She never been out here that I know about.” She turns and glares at Natriece. “You ever been in this room before, child?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Answer me straight, now! I ain’t one of them soft teachers you got at school.”
“I’m telling you true!”
As Natriece pooches out her lower lip, I kneel and study the fading image of the bare foot. Pearlie’s right; it’s nearly vanished. “Natriece, will you take off your flip-flop and put your foot over here?”
“In
“Not in it. Just hold your foot above the rug.”
The little girl slips off her yellow flip-flop and places a callused foot in my waiting hands. I hold it just above the dying glow of the footprint. It’s almost a perfect match.
“How old are you, Natriece?”
“Six. But I be big for my age.”
“I think you’re right.” I had guessed her age as eight, so her foot is probably about the size of a normal eight-year-old’s.
Pearlie is watching me with a worried look.
“Where’s Mom, Pearlie?”
“Where you think? Gone to Biloxi again.”
“To see Aunt Ann?”
“What else? That Ann draws trouble like my Sheba draws tom-cats.”
“What about Grandpapa?”
“Dr. Kirkland gone off on another trip. He supposed to get back later today, though.”
“Where has he been? The island?”
“Lord, no. He ain’t been down there in a good while.”
“Where, then?”
Pearlie’s face closes. “I ain’t supposed to say.”
“Not even to me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Pearlie…”
The maid sighs and cocks her head at me. She and I have kept each other’s secrets for years. Pearlie kept quiet about my sneaking in and out of the house as a teenager, which she usually witnessed while smoking on her porch in the wee hours. I kept quiet about occasional male guests staying over at Pearlie’s house. Pearlie was never
