Cat Deck The Halls

36

L EAVING THE GALLERY after James Kuda was arrested, Detectives Davis and Sand headed for Juana’s condo with the distraught and frightened little girl. In the apartment, Juana turned on the lights and lit a fire while Eleanor gave the child a quick warm bath and put her into pajamas. She sat on the couch holding her, a warm quilt tucked around them. Juana made cocoa, put Christmas cookies on a plate, and carried the tray in by the fire; though she was concerned about their small charge, she was so encouraged that the child could speak and that her spirit had rallied. As horrifying as the sight of the killer had been, this little girl had stood up to him. Healthy anger, Juana thought, had wonderful curative powers as the child fought her way out of a grim darkness. This little girl didn’t shrink for long, when she faced the man who’d shot her daddy, she was mad as hell, and that, in Juana’s book, was healthy progress.

The child, now warm and cozy under the quilt, snuggled up to Eleanor, and gulped down her cocoa and cookies as if she were starving; when Juana took the empty mug from her, to refill it, she reached up suddenly to her.

“What?” Juana said. “You want the mug back?”

A shake of the head. No.

“You want to get up again?”

Another shake. “No,” she whispered. Her white little face was still blotched from crying, and her expression was so needy. “Corlie,” she said. “My name is Corlie.”

“Thank you,” Juana said, sitting down beside them. “That’s very special, to know your name. And do you have a last name?”

“My name is Corlie Lee French,” she said in such a soft whisper that the detective could barely hear.

“Corlie Lee French,” Juana said. “I like that.”

“That man…” she whispered, looking bleakly at the officers.

“Did you know him?” Juana said softly.

“He was my daddy’s friend!” she said in a fast, shivering breath, and hid her face against Eleanor. Eleanor was quiet, holding her-until suddenly a car light blazed across the top of the drawn draperies, and remained there, unmoving.

Tucking the child down on the couch beneath the quilt, the officers rose and moved to the drawn draperies, standing at either side to look out through the crack where draperies met wall. Though Donnie/James Kuda was headed for jail, they didn’t know whether someone else might be involved. They didn’t know yet whether the Wickens were part of this, or whether the two cases were unconnected.

Earlier in the evening, when the snitch had called her, Juana had turned out the lights and then called the department, quickly putting officers in place. Looking down at the street from the darkened window, she had seen the man standing in the shadows just as the snitch had described, a dark presence beneath a tangle of vine against the black windows of a closed shop. She had seen no one else on the street, until a shadow came slipping along an alley.

But the shadow was one of their own, an officer she’d just put in place. She saw, one street over, another darkly clad officer move into position. Satisfied but wary, she had watched until, half an hour later, the dark figure against the building gave up his vigil, maybe deciding Juana was in for the night. She had watched him step out from beneath the vine and slip away up the street, and had listened on the police radio as the two officers followed on foot to where he got into a tan pickup a block away. She had watched the officers’ unmarked car move out a block behind him. And then, on a secure line, she had set the rest of the plan in place.

Soon the officers tailing the pickup had a make on the truck’s plates, giving a recent transfer of title to one Donnie French. Cora Lee’s cousin Donnie, just as the snitch had said. Thinking, then, that this man was the real Donnie French, she had felt a wave of bitter dismay for Cora Lee, who had been so very happy to rejoin her family.

Hoping that Donnie thought she and the child were tucked in for the night, and hoping that he was headed for Charlie’s opening, she had helped little Corlie dress, telling her it was a game. “We’ll get dressed in the dark. Can you do that?”

The child had known something was up, but she’d dressed quickly and obediently. She had seemed, then, as if she wanted to speak, Juana thought. But she hadn’t, she’d been still and silent as they slipped down the back stairs, where McFarland had a car waiting.

Sitting in the passenger seat holding the child, Juana had asked her, “Do you remember Officer McFarland?”

No sound, no answer; but a small little hand had reached over to the steering wheel, to touch McFarland’s big, warm hand.

C HARLIE, TOO, LIT a fire on the hearth, a comforting fire in the seniors’ house, while Lori made cocoa-both friends employing the homely gestures of caring and nurturing, to try to ease Cora Lee. Cora Lee, seated near the fire, tremulously picked up the phone to call Donnie’s sister-in-law. Before dialing, she looked up at Charlie.

“Would you mind if I turn on the speaker? I’m so befuddled. I’d like you to hear, too, to help me keep things straight. Oh, Charlie, I dread so to speak to her. Louise and Donnie were close after Barbara died.” Cora Lee had found Louise’s number in their downstairs apartment where James Kuda had been staying.

Now, calling Louise in Texas, reluctantly waking her, she told Louise that Donnie was dead, that he had been murdered, and that his little girl was safe. “I had thought that all three children had drowned…One child survived, then?”

When Louise was at last able to talk, and to make some sense, she assured Cora Lee that Donnie’s smallest daughter, Corlie, had indeed survived the storm and that she had been with him on their flight to California.

“Corlie was the only one of Donnie’s girls to survive the collapse and flooding of the school, the only one of the three who could be reached in time.”

It took a long time for Louise to tell what she could piece together of James’s Kuda’s deception. Donnie had known Kuda for years. “James Kuda was in and out of prison,” Louise said. “I didn’t like having him here, I thought him a bad influence on Donnie. He was staying with Donnie, here, until he got on his feet, as he put it. But he…Well, he is charming. He did a lot of repairs to our house, and he…he looked so much like Donnie looked before he lost his hair that…Well, I guess I softened to him. Softened too much,” Louise said bitterly.

She was quiet for a few moments while Cora Lee tried to comfort her. “You didn’t know, you couldn’t have known…”

“They named Corlie for you,” Louise said. “Corlie Lee, because when you were kids…”

“He called me Corlie,” Cora Lee said, wiping a tear. Then, “His was such a late marriage. I was so glad for him-it did seem strange to have young nieces when I should, at my age, be talking about great-nieces. And now…Now we have only little Corlie.”

It took some time for Louise to find Donnie’s original letters hidden in the room where James Kuda had stayed. She called Cora Lee back, and then faxed them to her: the letters to Cora Lee that James had always taken to mail for Donnie when he went out early to bike or to run, the letters that were never mailed-that had been replaced by Kuda’s versions: letters giving a new flight time, many weeks ahead of when Donnie had been scheduled to arrive in San Jose, rent a car, and drive down to Molena Point.

“Kuda left here six weeks before Donnie was to fly to California,” Louise said. “He told us he was going back to New Orleans for a while, to help with the flood cleanup.” Then, “Why?” she said. “Why did he kill him?”

Charlie looked up when Max arrived, and beckoned him in, and in a minute Cora Lee handed him the phone.

“I’ll be talking with the Texas Bureau of Investigation in the morning,” he told Louise. “If you would close Kuda’s room, don’t search further or touch or change anything. They’ll have a man out there to go through everything and take evidence. We’ll run his record, but please tell them whatever you can about his background.”

Louise said, “They may find quite a lot. I heard them talking one night, Donnie and James. They stopped when I came in the room. I never…Well, I didn’t ask Donnie about it, later. I was afraid of what I might find out about Donnie, too. Donnie wanted Kuda there, and he’d been through so much…I didn’t want to fight with him. Any kind of stress was hard on him, but squabbling was terrible for Corlie. Corlie…She was in the hospital room, in her mother’s arms, when Barbara died. Her mother holding her, when she died. That took the life right out of the child.

“She didn’t cry for her mother,” Louise said. “And she did not speak again.”