Blood Memory

“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.”

“It’s me, Mose,” I call, already walking back toward Malmaison. “Don’t work too hard in this heat.”

“Heat don’t bother me none.” He laughs. “I’ll take it over the cold any day.”

I give him a broad wave, then turn and race back toward the house.