Assassin

Chapter Three

River Road, Louisiana

AFTER THE FUNERAL, ALEX SAID GOOD-BYE TO VICKY’S father, got into his hired car, and drove down the River Road, following the Mississippi south towards New Orleans. The sun was a big blood-red orange hanging out the open window on his right, except for the times when the road dropped down behind the levee.

His mother had grown up on this river; her early life had been shaped by it, and Alex had heard stories about the river from her until she was murdered the day after his seventh birthday. One day he’d found her tattered copy of Huckleberry Finn where it had slipped behind his bookcase. She always said it was the truest book about the river ever written, and maybe the truest, best book ever written about anything. She was reading it to him every night in those last days they had together. Huck and Tom and Nigger Jim were every bit as real for Alex as any of the boys at his school, and certainly a lot more interesting way for a boy to learn about life.

Listen to me. Alex Hawke, she’d said one day when he’d come home all scratched and bloody, having brought home a foundling cat, a boy carrying a cat home by the tail is learning something he can learn no other way.

He was ten or eleven years old when he finally read the book for himself. The story of Huck Finn filled in a lot of the holes created when his mother’s own life story ended so abruptly. His father was English and so was he, but he’d had an American mother and the book had helped the boy feel a connection to his mother, to see her America, feel it the way she did, even though it was a story from a time long ago. He was thinking about his mother now, Hawke realized, because thinking about anyone else was unbearable. His idea was to try and find the house where she’d grown up, find her childhood room on the top floor, and look out her window at the river.

See what she’d seen with his own eyes.

The real estate agent in Baton Rouge had told him the house was still standing. The Louisiana Historical Society protected it, although some developer was trying very hard to change that. According to the agent, the house, called Twelvetrees, was Italianate style, completed in 1859 by a Mr. John Randolph of Virginia. It was now owned by a family named Longstreet, but had stood unused and unoccupied for decades.

Alex had been driving for some time before he saw the flashing blue lights coming up fast in his rearview mirror and realized he was going well over a hundred and ten miles an hour. Fast, but well below escape velocity. You can’t outrun this one anyway, Alex, not this time, he told himself. Not ever. He slowed down and pulled off the side of the road, waiting for the police to pull up behind him, run his plate through the computer, approach him with their hands on their hip holsters, ask him what the hell the big hurry was, Mister.

The blue lights went screaming by him, siren wailing. The vehicle with the flashers wasn’t a police car, it was an EMS van and it raced past him and disappeared around a bend in the road. Five minutes later he saw the ambulances and the fire engine and the fiery accident itself up on the side of the levee. He knew instantly it was bad and averted his eyes, kept them on the road ahead, sped up again. He punched some buttons on the radio, looking for Louis Armstrong.

He finally caught Satchmo singing “Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?” It helped a little bit. Laissez les bon temps rouler. That’s what his mother had always said, her favorite expression. Let the good times roll. Bloody hell. You couldn’t cry anymore so you had to laugh. After half an hour or so, he saw a Louisiana Historical Site sign. ‘Twelvetrees Plantation.’ He turned into the drive. Satchmo was singing “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.”

He could see the house standing at the end of the long allee of oak trees. The oaks formed a solid canopy above him, turning the entire drive into a green tunnel. The sun was low enough in the west now, hovering just above the levee, to flood the entire length of the drive with rusty light. As he got closer, he began to sense the enormity of the old house.

He parked the car under a big oak and got out. His shirt was drenched with sweat and clung to his back. The heat and humidity were part of the place. The mosquitoes and the music, the bugs and the blues. And the moss, he thought, taking a fistful from a low branch and turning the matted greyish-green filaments in his hand. Tentacles of moss dripped from all the branches of all the oaks around him. It was pretty, but there was something decadent about it as well, something that sent a graveyard chill up his spine.

Spanish moss, Hawke said to himself, suddenly remembering the name. He walked out from under the low-hanging branches and looked up at what was left of the house where his mother had been born. He was glad he’d come. It occurred to him that he’d needed to do this for a long, long time.

Make a connection.

It was a stunningly handsome work of architecture. Four graceful stories rising up above the trees, each one with a veranda, massive Corinthian columns now shrouded in the heavy green vines which had almost overtaken the entire house. He climbed the steps leading to the front entrance and paused when he reached the top. He saw the doors were missing, and twisting vines had worked their way through the open portal and into the interior of the house.

There were some faded beer cans and old newspapers littering the steps and the sagging floorboards of the front portico. It was irrational, he knew—he wasn’t the proprietor after all—but all this refuse made him not just sad, but angry. The trash and debris were just a natural accumulation, the commonplace detritus of years of human neglect. Still, it felt to Alex Hawke like a sacrilege, a desecration. He brushed away veils of drooping cobwebs and ducked into the musty coolness of the reception hall.

The staircase. That was the thing which helped him get beyond all the ugliness at his feet. It soared upwards to the very top of the house in two gently curving sets of stairs which intersected to form landings at every floor, then bowed out once again and ascended higher only to join once more. It was perhaps the most beautiful thing Hawke had ever seen. At once delicate and strong, it was the work of an artist commissioned by someone, this John Randolph apparently, who clearly wanted to make the most functional fixture in the house also the most beautiful.

The stairway reminded him of something, Alex thought, mounting the stairs and climbing upwards. Something in nature. What was it? Damn it, he couldn’t remember anything lately.

Alex reached the top floor, paused on the top step, and pulled the old postcard out of his jacket pocket. On the faded front was a Mississippi steamboat, white billows of steam floating from her big black stacks, coming round a wide bend in the river. On the other side was a little note from his mother. He’d read the thing a thousand times, but now, standing in her house, he found himself reading it aloud. Not whispering either. He pronounced each word in a loud, clear tone, as if he were addressing an invisible audience gathered below.

“My darling Alexander,” he began. “Mummy and Daddy have finally reached New Orleans and what fun we are having! Last night, Daddy took me to hear a famous trumpet player down in the French Quarter named Satchmo. Isn’t that a funny name? He toots like an angel, though, and I adored him! This morning we drove up the River Road looking for Mummy’s old house. I was amazed to see it still standing! It looks dreadful to be sure, falling down, but I took your father up to the very top floor and showed him my room when I was your age. It’s a very silly little room, but you would love it. It has a big round window that opens and you can sit and watch the river go by all day if you want to! Rivers go on forever just like my love for you. I miss you, my darling, and Daddy and I send you all our love and oodles of kisses, Mummy.”

The sound of his voice was still reverberating throughout the empty house as Alex returned the postcard to his pocket. He walked to the banister, which seemed solid enough, gripped it and leaned over, looking down through the intertwining stairs to the ground floor hall far below.

“Hello,” he cried, listening for the echo. “Anybody here? I’m home!”

He turned and walked along the hall until he came to the center door. It was slightly ajar and he pushed it open, surprised by the flood of sunlight still streaming in. It was coming through a large round opening in the opposite wall. The opening was in an alcove formed by the pitch of a gable. Going to it, he saw the window itself was long gone and all that remained was the empty hole. Shielding his eyes from the glare of the setting sun, he went to it and rested both hands in the curvature of the sill.

Her room was filled with light every evening. This is where she would have had her bed. She would have read her books here, listening to the sonata of a songbird, the sweet scent of magnolia floating up from the gardens. During the day, she could watch the boats out on the river, looking up from her book whenever she heard one hooting, coming around the wide bend. At night, pulling her covers up, she would lay her head down on the pillow and see the broad avenue of trees which led all the way out to the stars over the river and sometimes to the moon.

There was a rickety old straight-backed chair tilted against one wall, and Alex pulled it over to the window. He sat there, seeing the world through her eyes, until the sun had finally set behind the levee and all the stars he could see from his mother’s window had been born.

Finally, he stood up and turned to go. He was walking across the dusty floorboards when it came to him. What the lovely spiral staircases of Twelvetrees had reminded him of. That thing in nature they had so closely resembled.

“It’s DNA,” Alex said softly to himself and then he pulled his mother’s door shut behind him.