Blood Memory

Chapter 66

I spent much of the week after I was shot going to funerals. Two were expected, one was not. Two were postponed until I was discharged from Tulane University Hospital, and thanks to Stacey Lorio, I had to ride in a wheelchair to all of them. The bullet she fired from Sean’s gun tore through my stomach and lodged in a muscle in my back. I lost a lot of blood and also my spleen.

But I didn’t lose my baby.

Sean nearly drowned in his own blood. His head had been turned sideways beneath the couch cushion when Lorio fired, so instead of drilling through his forehead-as she had intended for it to do-the bullet punched through his right cheek a couple of inches anterior to his ear. It smashed five teeth, shattered his hard palate, and pulped part of his maxillary sinuses. Sean owes his life to Angie Pitre, who, instead of fleeing the scene, called 911 and stayed with us until para-medics and police arrived.

Stacey Lorio died instantly from my second bullet. I feel a deep sadness at the childhood trauma that created the hate-filled adult she had become, but I feel no guilt over killing her. She meant to murder both Sean and me in cold blood. Sean blamed himself for not cracking Lorio’s “rock solid” alibis for the murders, but no one else had either. It turned out that her ex-husband was a drug addict. Because Stacey kept him supplied with pills from the clinic where she worked, he would have given her alibis for a dozen more murders and sworn to them all under oath. Lorio’s other alibis had been provided by two women later identified as members of Group X. With hindsight all seems obvious.

Special Agent Kaiser spent a lot of time in my hospital room. The doctors tried to keep him out, but Kaiser can be pretty pushy when he wants to be. He demanded to know every detail of what had happened to me during the case, and of how I had solved the riddle of who was doing the killing. He was obsessed with determining once and for all whether the six murders in New Orleans had any connection to the events in Natchez and on DeSalle Island. Given the link between Ann and Dr. Malik-and in a way, Malik and me-it seemed inconceivable that they were not causally related. But they weren’t. Not really.

Dr. Hannah Goldman put it best when she dropped by to see me and found Kaiser at my bedside. She patiently laid out the connections by drawing a line diagram on the back of a hospital cafeteria menu. The primary link between Natchez and New Orleans was sexual abuse. Nathan Malik first noticed me in Jackson, Mississippi, because I was sleeping with a man twenty-five years my senior. That relationship-a symptom of my childhood abuse-also resulted in my being expelled from medical school, which led me into dentistry and, ultimately, into forensic odontology. Malik’s childhood abuse led him slowly but surely into work with sexual abuse victims. He became the natural end point of my aunt Ann’s quest to find a therapist who could control the terrible fallout of her childhood sexual abuse. Given Ann’s history-and Nathan Malik’s sexual predilections-sexual involvement between the two of them was almost inevitable. Malik’s childhood abuse also made him ripe for the countertransference that caused him to encourage vigilante justice among the patients in Group X. The murders committed by Stacey Lorio and Angie Pitre-and the decision by those women to use bite marks to mask the true nature of the crimes-resulted in my being called into the case. (The FBI’s search of Stacey Lorio’s apartment turned up a huge collection of true-crime paperbacks, filled with underlined sections about forensics and the psychology of sexual homicide.) As soon as Dr. Malik became aware of my involvement in the investigation, he became obsessed with communicating with me. Given his knowledge of my family’s secret history-and what Ann had probably told him about me-he felt that my appearance represented some sort of meaningful synchronicity, and he could not ignore it.

“The simple answer,” Dr. Goldman concluded, “is that sick people attract other sick people. Psychologically speaking, of course.”

According to Hannah, though, my recent wave of nightmares about my grandfather and the truck had nothing to do with the murders in New Orleans. Those, she insisted, were the result of my pregnancy. The moment my brain knew that I was going to have a child, my subconscious realized that to protect my baby I needed to remember my childhood abuse. “Evolution at work,” Hannah said. “Carrying on the species is the highest priority of any organism. Your brain decided that protecting your child was more important than protecting you from the trauma of your own past. Thus, the flood of nightmares and flashbacks. You were going to remember what your grandfather did to you whether anyone got killed here in New Orleans or not. Take my word for that.”

But not even Hannah could explain what it was about the murder scenes that had clued me in on the true nature of the crimes. Like the FBI, I had been presented with classic evidence of a male sexual predator at work, and I had looked at similar scenes many times before. So what caused my panic attacks? What told me that I was looking at violence that was somehow related to sexual abuse similar to my own? Hannah thought it might have been the sight of naked old men. But in the end, I decided it was the smallest of clues. My first attack happened at the murder scene of the third victim. Eleven days before, at the home of the second victim-Andrus Riviere-I had seen a little girl who stuck in my mind. Her grandfather had just died violently, yet she seemed almost wild with joyous energy. She was racing around the house as if her birthday party were about to start. And knowing what I know now, I believe that it was. Andrus Riviere’s murder had released that little girl from a living hell. And something about her face-something in her too-wise eyes, I think now-sent me a message without my knowing it. As Pearlie had known subconsciously about Ann’s abuse when she was a child, I knew subconsciously that something was wrong in the Riviere house. Something that death had remedied.

Kaiser stunned me by telling me that Dr. Malik had willed all the videotapes and other raw materials for his documentary film project to me. These included his patient records, which were found in Biloxi, Mississippi, cached in the home of my aunt’s third husband. As soon as these materials are released from the NOPD evidence room, they will be delivered to me. At some point I intend to review them all and begin working to finish Malik’s film. I will include no footage of the murders, but I will do all I can to explain their motivation.

The day I was to be discharged from the Tulane hospital, I learned that Margaret Lavigne was also a patient there. I had an orderly wheel me down to her floor and leave me alone in her room. Margaret lay comatose beneath a white sheet, connected to an assortment of monitors and tubes. The insulin she’d injected into her veins had turned her brain into a useless gray lump. John Kaiser had told me that Lavigne’s mother was likely to authorize the withdrawal of life support later in the week. I held Margaret’s hand for a while, thinking quietly about the suicide note she’d left behind, and of the horror she must have felt when she realized she’d condemned an innocent man to death. Like me, she had been unable to believe that her father had raped her. She erroneously blamed her stepfather instead. I’m thankful that in my own case I was right, but I could so easily have been wrong.

The first funeral I attended was Nathan Malik’s.

The psychiatrist had elected to be cremated, so it was a memorial service, held in a New Orleans park. About fifty people attended, most of them women. There were a few men, too, some of them obviously Vietnam veterans. A Buddhist monk chanted and said some prayers, and everyone laid flowers by the urn.

The second funeral was Ann’s, and it was held in Natchez.

Michael Wells drove me to McDonough’s Funeral Home, helped me into my wheelchair, and even drove me out to the cemetery afterward for the burial. While the minister gave a generic eulogy, I sat in the pews reserved for family and thought of the tape Ann had made for Nathan Malik. The mini-DV cassette I stole from the box at Angie Pitre’s house had made it all the way to the hospital in my purse. I borrowed a camcorder to watch it, but I could only endure about ten minutes before I was overwhelmed. Ann had suffered far more than the rest of us. For whatever reason, she had not dissociated during her abuse. She had felt and processed and remembered every agonizing detail. Her primary concern had been protecting her younger sister-my mother. And though she failed in that goal, she tried her best. She did this by luring my grandfather to her room whenever she sensed his attention wandering to her sister. But Ann wasn’t trying to protect only Gwen. The reason for her silence over the years was simple: Grandpapa had threatened that if she ever revealed what he was doing to her, he would kill both her sister and her mother. Ann had no doubt that he would carry out his threat. She knew better than any of us that he was capable of murder.

The third funeral-the unexpected one-was held one day after Ann’s.

Today.

I didn’t go to the funeral home. I had Michael drive me out to the cemetery to sit beside Ann’s freshly covered grave. I stared at the mound of wet brown earth on the grass and wondered if I could somehow have prevented her suicide. Michael assured me that I could not, and I’m trying my best to believe him. A few minutes before the mourners were to arrive, Michael wheeled me up the lane to a vantage point from which I could watch the burial service without being bothered.

And here I sit.

The line of luxury cars behind the black hearse seems to go on forever, like the cortege of a slain president. I shouldn’t be surprised. Dr. William Kirkland was a wealthy, powerful, and respected man, a pillar of the community.

My mother tried to keep the funeral simple, but in the end she gave in to the well-intentioned friends who insisted on a large production, including eulogies delivered by the mayor, the attorney general, and the governor of Mississippi.

Everyone seems content to pretend that my grandfather’s death was an accident. That he drove off the edge of the bridge to DeSalle Island in bright sunlight at midday seems to escape everyone’s attention. A few people have mentioned his “recent” stroke-which happened a year ago-and recalled his doctor forbidding him to drive. In fact, they say, it was the untimely death of his driver-Billy Neal-that caused my grandfather to drive down to the island alone to deal with some urgent business matters.

The truth is much simpler.

My grandfather killed himself. He knew that his life’s foul secret was about to be exposed. That all of his power and money would be insufficient to stop one of his victims-me-from finally revealing his depravity to the world. And his pride could not abide that. He probably saw himself as choosing a manly death, even a noble one. But I know him for what he was. He was what he once called my father in front of me when I was a little girl. Yellow. When all was said and done, William Kirkland, MD, was a stinking coward.

I’m here today because I want to see him lowered into the ground. I need that closure. When you’ve lived with a demon all your life, and you somehow escape him, it’s important to see him buried. If old Mr. McDonough would have let me, I’d have walked into the prep room and driven a stake through my grandfather’s heart.

And yethe didn’t begin life as a monster. He began it as an innocent little boy who lost his parents in a car wreck on the way to his baptism. It was only later-I’ll never know when-that the poison with which he infected me was passed into him. Decades ago, on some dark and silent country night, his innocence was stolen, and a transformation began that would transform the lives of countless others, including mine.

One mystery that will probably remain unsolved is why Grandpapa was buying up my father’s sculptures. Was he driven by guilt over the life he had stolen so long ago? Or was he on some half-mad quest to understand the creative spark that he had snuffed out, creativity being the one talent he had never really possessed? Perhaps time or some as-yet-undiscovered document will give me an answer someday.

The burial service is mercifully brief, as the sky is threatening rain. The mourners quickly return to their cars, and the long line begins to leave the cemetery.

When all of them have gone, a solitary figure remains beside the grave.

Pearlie Washington.

She’s wearing a black dress and a huge black hat, but I know her bony figure as well as I know my mother’s. Probably better. Has she stayed behind to mourn my grandfather alone? Or Ann? Or has she stayed because she knows what’s about to happen in the DeSalle family plot?

As Michael wheels me down the hill, Pearlie stands motionless, looking down at Grandpapa’s grave. As we near her, a white Dodge Caravan with ornate silver trim appears in the lane and rolls slowly to a stop near the low wall. Two men in dark suits get out, walk to the back of the van, and unload a bronze casket. They settle it onto a collapsible gurney, then work the gurney across the grass to the corner of the plot, where a green tarp is staked out over a long hole in the ground.

The headstone above the tarp reads LUKE FERRY, 1951-1981.

As Michael rolls me through the gate, Pearlie walks over to me and touches my hand. “They doing what I think they’re doing?”

“Yes.”

I see pain in her eyes. “Why you didn’t tell me about it? I loved that boy, too.”

“I wanted to be alone with him. I’m sorry, Pearlie.”

“You want me to go?”

“No.”

The old woman watches the men strip the tarp from the ground. As they fold it up, soft rain begins to fall.

“Where’s your mama?” Pearlie asks.

“She said she couldn’t stand to bury her husband a second time.”

Pearlie sighs heavily. “She’s probably right.”

Michael touches my elbow and leans down to my ear. “I’m going to give you a few minutes.”

I take his hand and squeeze it. “Thanks. I won’t be long.”

“Take your time.”

As he walks away, Pearlie turns and watches him leave the family plot. “He seems like a good man.”

“He is.”

“Does he know you carrying another man’s child?”

I look up at the curious brown eyes. “Yes.”

“And he still wants to see you?”

“Yes.”

She shakes her head as though at some rare and wonderful sight. “That’s a man you need to stick with, right there.”

I feel my mouth smile. “I think you’re right.”

Pearlie takes my hand in hers and squeezes tight. “Lord, it’s about time you settled down. We been needing some babies around that old place.”

I take a deep breath and look toward Grandpapa’s grave. “I think I was waiting for him to go first.”

Pearlie nods. “Lord knows that’s right.”

Daddy’s casket lies beside the open grave now, the rain pattering against its burnished lid. Strangely, the sound doesn’t bother me at all.

“Could you open it for me now, please?” I ask.

One of the men from the funeral home takes a hex key from his pocket and begins unsealing the casket.

“What?” Pearlie gasps, her eyes filled with horror. “What you doing, girl? That’s bad luck, doing something like that!”

I shake my head. “No, it’s not.”

As the man from the funeral home lifts the coffin lid, I reach beneath my wheelchair to the luggage pocket beneath. I feel soft fur in my palm. Using all my strength, I stand and walk slowly to the coffin. My father looks just as he did the other day, like a young man sleeping on the couch after a Sunday dinner. Gritting my teeth against pain, I bend at the waist and lay Lena the Leopardess in the crook of Daddy’s elbow. Then I straighten up again.

“So you won’t be lonely,” I say softly.

Before I turn away, I take a folded piece of paper from my pocket and drop it in the casket near my father’s knee. It’s one of the drawings from the sketchbook he kept in the green bag in the barn. A charcoal rendering of Louise Butler, smiling at him with unbounded love in her eyes. Perhaps I should feel guilty for this, but I don’t. Louise probably relieved Luke Ferry of more pain than any of us in those last years. She accepted him for what he wasa profoundly wounded man.

“Good-bye, Daddy,” I murmur. “Thank you for trying.”

I turn from the casket and walk back to the wheelchair, signaling Michael as I go. He comes quickly.

“I want to see the river,” I tell him. “Will you wheel me up to Jewish Hill?”

Towering three hundred feet above the Mississippi, Jewish Hill offers the most commanding view of the river I’ve ever seen.

Michael can’t hide his dismay. “It’s raining, Cat.”

“I know. I like it. Will you come with me, Pearlie?”

“All right, baby.”

“Can you make it?” Michael asks her.

Pearlie snorts indignantly. “I may be over seventy years old, but I can still walk from Red Lick to Rodney and have strength left over for a day’s work.”

Michael laughs, apparently recognizing the names of two tiny Mississippi towns over twenty miles apart. He pushes me up the hill at a steady pace, and before long, we are staring over the mile-wide tide of river at the vast plains of the Louisiana delta.

“That’s too big to look at,” Pearlie says.

“I love it,” I say softly. “I used to come here whenever I felt trapped in this town.”

“I think you always been trapped here, until your granddaddy died.”

“You know he killed himself,” I murmur.

There’s a long silence. Then Pearlie says, “I don’t know any such thing.”

I look up at her. “Come on. You don’t really think he went off that bridge by accident?”

She looks at Michael, then back at me. “No, I don’t.”

A low humming has started in my head. “What is it, Pearlie? What do you know?”

She looks as serious as I’ve ever seen her. “I know everything. How much do you want to know?”

“Same as you.”

She looks doubtfully at Michael. “Some things it’s best not to know, Doctor. Why don’t you go get the car?”

Michael looks down at me, and I nod.

As he walks away, Pearlie steps in front of the wheelchair and fixes me in her gaze with an old woman’s severity. “After you left me on the island, I stayed with Louise Butler awhile. But I was nervous as a cat. I couldn’t rest. So I took me a walk. I wound up on the other side of the lake. At the big house.”

She’s talking about my grandfather’s lodge, the showplace designed by A. Hays Town.

“Before I knew what I was doing, I was tearing that place apart. I was still looking for the pictures, see? I knew they had to be somewhere.” She sighs and looks at the ground. “Well, I found ’em. They was inside a hollow book, just one out of hundreds in that library down there. And they were bad, baby. Lots worse than the two of you and Ann in the swimming pool.”

“What did they show?”

Pearlie wrinkles her nose as though smelling rotten meat. “Everything. It made me sick to look at them. I went to use the bathroom, and I was crying so bad I couldn’t stop. And then I heard something.”

“Grandpapa?”

“No. Jesse.”

“Jesse Billups? He saw the pictures?”

Pearlie nods, her face filled with anxiety. “And they wasn’t just pictures of any old children. Some of them were from the island. Jesse recognized them. Some of them belonged to people still living down there.”

“My God. What did he do?”

“He cursed me. Then he took the pictures and left with them.”

“What happened, Pearlie? What did he do with them?”

“He showed them to some other men down there. Some of the daddies of them children. See, the women had known about Dr. Kirkland, just like I guessed. Some of them, anyway. But they never let their menfolk know. But now the men knew. And they was killing mad, just like the women worried they would be. Well, Jesse called Dr. Kirkland and told him somebody had busted into the big house and tore everything up. Said Dr. Kirkland ought to come right away.”

I close my eyes, almost afraid to hear the end of the story.

“You sure you want to hear this, baby?”

“Yes.”

“When Dr. Kirkland got there, Jesse and the other men put him in a truck and carried him round to Big Leon’s house.”

“Who’s Big Leon?”

“One of the men on the island. He spent twenty years on Angola Farm. Jesse showed Leon the pictures and told him what Dr. Kirkland had done. Then he told Leon, ”˜You can have him for two hours. Just don’t mark him up none.‘“

“Oh, my God.”

As Pearlie nods, her eyes glow with fierce knowledge. “Two hours later, they went back and got him. Then they did what that Billy Neal was gonna do to you and me.”

“What?”

“Tied him to the steering wheel of his car and ran it off the bridge.”

“Jesus.”

“After a while, one of them swum down and took the rope off Dr. Kirkland’s hands.” Pearlie is watching me closely, waiting to see my reaction. “You said you wanted to know.”

“Did you see Grandpapa at all during any of this?”

“No. All I know is what Jesse told me.”

My mind is filled with one question. “Did he beg for his life at the end?”

“No, baby. He cursed them till his head went under the water. Wasn’t nothing gentle left in that old man. He’ll curse the devil hisself when he gets to hell.”

I suddenly feel exhausted.

“What you gonna do now?” Pearlie asks.

“I don’t know. Wait for my wound to heal, I guess. The bullet wound, I mean. The other could take my whole life.”

“I meant about the house. Malmaison.”

“What do you mean?”

Pearlie shrugs. “Well, it’s gonna be yours now.”

“What?”

“I thought you knew. Dr. Kirkland always said Miss Gwen couldn’t take care of her own self, much less the wealth she was born into. That’s why Billy Neal hated you so bad. You gonna get just about everything.”

Her words take some time to register. I have no idea what might be included in my grandfather’s estate, but it’s bound to be enormous.

“So, what you gonna do?”

“Sell it all,” I say.

Pearlie makes an uncertain sound. “The island, too?”

“Why not? I don’t ever want to see it again.”

“If you sell that island, the people down there won’t have nowhere to go. You own it all, the houses and everything. They just rent.”

For a few moments, images of the island rush through my head. But the pain that comes with them is too much to bear. “They can have it, Pearlie. The whole damn thing. It’s theirs anyway.”

“Do you mean that? That island’s worth a piece of money.”

“I couldn’t care less. I’ll have the lawyers draw up papers first thing. You and Jesse work out fair shares for everybody. Except for Louise Butler.”

Pearlie’s back stiffens. “What about her?”

“Louise gets the lodge.”

Pearlie gasps. “The big house? You’re not serious. Those women down there hate Louise.”

“It’s her house, Pearlie. As of today.”

The old woman makes several noises I cannot interpret. Then she says, “I guess you know what you’re doing.”

“For the first time, I think I do. Do you see Michael? I’m ready to go.”

“We don’t need no Michael. I can push this chair good as any man.”

She steps behind the wheelchair and takes the handles in her firm grip. As she turns me around, I catch a last glimpse of the river, vast and majestic under the shadows of the rain. The water down there will soon flow past DeSalle Island, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and finally into the Gulf of Mexico. Where I’ll be then, I don’t know. But the chain of misery forged through the generations of my family has finally been broken.

By me.

That’s about as good a start as I can imagine.

Pearlie pushes me back toward the lane, where Michael’s Expedition waits. As we approach, Michael gets out and waves. I lay one hand on my stomach and close my eyes. I’m not touching the wounded place, but a spot lower down. I don’t need a drink now. I don’t need anything. But for the first time in my life, I feel truly free to choose what I want.

“It’s going to be different for you,” I whisper, rubbing my tummy in a slow circle. “Your mama knows what love is.”