She couldn’t help it. She eyed his broad shoulders, his pumped biceps, his big hands. Just thinking about trying to fight him off gave her the shakes.
But not in the same way fighting off gang members had. Not even necessarily in a bad way.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” she said, hiding her gaze by looking down at her paperwork.
“Looks like you did a job on your knuckles. So where’d you learn to fight like that, anyway?”
“Tulane.”
And maybe from my Dad.
She’d been thinking about it a lot, since the previous night. Could a person inherit her father’s fighting skills, without ever having met him?
If
her father could fight, why hadn’t her mom mentioned it before?
Luckily, Greg arrived. “Hey, Roy. What’s up? I didn’t know you were on this early.”
“I’m here to ask you about the note.” Roy stood. “And I heard Faith here was heading to the station on her lunch hour to ID the mug shots of a few of her victims. I thought I might walk with her.”
“And what,” challenged Faith, amused that he was telling this to Greg before he mentioned it to her. “Carry my books?”
“Yeah, and if my newspaper route pays off, maybe I’ll even buy you a soda. Grow up. It’s damage control because you’re a magnet for bad guys, is what it is.” He talked big, but she sensed his concern was real. That had to concern her, too.
“Do you mean just the gangbangers?” she asked. “Or do you know something else about the serial killer?”
Roy planted both hands on her desk and bent over them, his face uncomfortably close to hers. Coffee. Soap. “There’s no proof he’s a serial killer. If he were, we’d have to bring in the feebies, and I’m not going there without more than one body.”
Feebies
were the FBI, whose jurisdiction included serial killers. Cops and the FBI weren’t exactly a model for interagency cooperation.
“He may have been at the psychic fair to scout victims,” Faith insisted. “He says he’ll kill again.”
“Which makes him a
potential
—” Instead of finishing, he rolled his eyes in defeat, straightened and nodded at Greg.
“Tell her, will you? The chance of this one whack-job going after her is a lot lower than the chance of an entire gang trying to recover their lost dignity.”
Greg, looking from one of them to the other, said, “Faith told me about the attack last night. You don’t think it’s connected to her dead roommate?”
“No, but I’m not above using it as an excuse to talk her into dating me.” Waving her away, Roy headed for Greg’s office. “All likely agony aside.”
“She doesn’t date co-workers,” Greg said.
“Are we co-workers?”
But then Greg shut the door. Not that it kept Faith from hearing, if she made the least effort. But since the only reason Roy was talking about her was to annoy her, he immediately changed subjects to something more important.
The killer’s note.
Faith went back to her data entry, but she worked slowly, quieting the sound of her fingers on the keys to better follow snatches of what was going on in Greg’s office. Apparently the handwriting analysis had shown that the writer might be mentally disturbed, but he hid it well. Roy said that was good news, but he was being sarcastic. He admitted that they’d questioned Krystal’s boyfriend from the previous year but had to let him go; he wasn’t the killer. They had no idea who the killer was.
“We got nothing,” Faith heard him admit. “Butch has resorted to listening to some psychic contact he’s got.”
“What, Cassandra?” Greg laughed. “I talk to Butch, too.”
“An anonymous contact is bad enough, but an anonymous
psychic
contact?” Roy swore crudely. “I say if they aren’t willing to meet you face-to-face, they aren’t worth it.”
“When you’ve exhausted all the possibilities…” Greg reminded him, a shrug in his voice.
“And in the meantime we’ve got a bunch of so-called
readers
who are either scared out of their wits or not scared enough, and a few hangers-on like that assistant of yours who swings either direction. Hey. Tell me something.”
As Roy lowered his voice, Faith’s fingers slowed to a stop on her computer keyboard.
Then he asked, “You ever talk to her mom? What’s up with that one?”
Greg said something about only speaking to Mrs. Corbett once, when Faith was out, but Faith couldn’t hear clearly anymore, not through the buzz of understanding that filled her head. Roy thought her mother was crazy?
When had he talked to her mom?
But the answer to that was suddenly obvious. It must have been last night, when Faith cancelled the date. That must be why Tamara, in a panic, had called Faith.
Faith stood, torn in two directions. On the one hand, she couldn’t call Roy out on this without letting him and Greg know she’d overheard. So much for banter, bulging biceps and the possibility of him carrying her imaginary books.
On the other hand…
Damn. The only other alternative was to pretend she didn’t know about it, and that was no alternative at all.
She stalked to Greg’s office and hurled the door open, not bothering to knock, startling the hell out of the two men inside.
“You called my
mother?
”
B
y the time Faith stepped off the St. Charles streetcar a few blocks from her mother’s Garden District residence that afternoon, she felt physically ill.
Not just because of the shouting match she’d had with Roy Chopin, one that had ended with them writing each other off for good. Not just because of how bad her behavior had made her look in front of Greg, who wasn’t just her boss but someone whose opinion she very much valued.
Not even because of the time she’d spent in the horrible atmosphere of the police station, turning pages of mug shots that carried energy of countless victims before her—though that had been its own ordeal.
She felt sick because, without knowing what her mother would confess, Faith had apparently read enough, subconsciously, to know she wouldn’t like it. She’d suspected that, avoided that, for far too long. Her increasing awareness of Tamara’s secrets was partly why she’d moved out.
And now it was time to face them.
The Garden District was the most elegant representation of old New Orleans, a showcase for mansions and arching oak trees. Moving there from Kansas City had been like stepping into a version of
Gone With the Wind
in which the north had lost. From the streetcar stop, Faith passed several stately homes—the Deveaux Villa, the Bernard House—before she reached the Manning Mansion, a showplace surrounded by iron fencing, fronted with Doric columns and accompanied by a cluster of historic outbuildings. One, which used to be the white-bricked carriage house, had been adapted to a separate residence at about the same time the Mannings had traded their four-footed horsepower for the kind that took gasoline.
That’s where Faith’s mother lived, where Faith had lived during her college years. Mr. Manning had old money and political clout, but he wanted to be an author…except, he had no interest in actually writing. Tamara was a talented writer. She sometimes wrote as Tammy Betts, but her favorite job was ghosting for clients such as Manning. When her agent hooked the two of them up, room and board in such a prestigious neighborhood had been one of Tamara’s main reasons for taking the job.
As long as Michael Manning’s historic murder mysteries kept selling, Tamara had one hell of a zip code. She still couldn’t understand why Faith didn’t value locale the way she did. But there were some things Faith had never understood, either.
Such as why her mother, clearly a talented writer, never took her own byline. And now, why a simple phone call from a police detective, on personal business, had thrown her into a panic.
“I told her who I was,”
Roy had insisted, annoyance at her accusations turning into temper.
“I asked if you were there. She said ‘no,’ I said ‘thanks for your time.’ What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is, you scared her half to death!”
“I noticed. And I gotta tell you, someone who scares that easy is guilty of something.”
Which was exactly what Faith hadn’t wanted to hear, exactly why she couldn’t be reasonable with him, exactly why she’d pushed him into giving up on her.
Because she knew, in her heart, that it was true. Her mother was guilty of something—worse, something concerning Faith. She didn’t want to hear it. Not from anybody. The consequences…
Was it wrong to
not
want to know certain things?
“Consider that and the way you are,”
Roy had said.
“What do you mean, ‘the way I am?’”
“That not-liking-to-be-touched business. Makes me wonder what happened to you, if maybe you got touched wrong. Makes me wonder if you even know it, or if you were so young, you forgot. Makes me wonder if your mom hasn’t forgotten squat, so she gets freaky when a cop calls. And that makes me wonder if she’s the sort of woman who brings home guys who don’t just abuse her but spread the joy. That’s what I mean. But hey, what do I know? I just do this for a living.”
And this from a man who’d never even met her mother! Faith had told him exactly what he could do with what he did for a living, and that had been the end of that.
Except for the fact that she couldn’t dismiss his accusations as easily as she could dismiss him.
“Mom?” she called, after unlocking the two dead bolts with her keys and opening the door. “It’s me, Faith.”
“You’re here early.” Tamara came out from the back office, looking relieved. She was a small woman with dark, curly brown hair and startlingly pale-blue eyes. The carriage house apartment was charming—exposed brick interiors, copper pipes running across the ceiling like some kind of modern art, regular panes alternating with stained glass in the windows. Tamara, who’d always had the skill of seeming to fit in anywhere, matched the home beautifully. “Is everything all right?”
Faith meant to say that sure, everything was great. But when her mother enveloped her in a soft hug, a
mom
hug, no way could she lie. Her mom was one of the few people in her life that Faith could touch easily, probably because she’d done it so often that she’d adapted to the sensations, like a person learns to tune out a permanent smell or a continuous noise. That made her Faith’s sole source for easy contact. Faith didn’t want to lose that.
“No,” she mumbled into Tamara’s shoulder. “I mean, I’m okay,” she hurried to add, when her mother drew back in alarm. “But everything else…”
“Your murdered roommate,” guessed Tamara. “And that horrible attack last night.”
Faith laughed. “Mom, I haven’t told you anything about the attack except that it happened. Why would you describe it as horrible?”
“Because anybody who would dare hurt my baby is by definition horrible.” Which was exactly why Roy’s accusations were so crazy…. Well, some of them. “Come into the kitchen with me. I’ll start dinner.”
“The detective who called you last night…” Faith hated even mentioning Roy, but she had to know. “Is he what scared you?”
Tamara, who’d been unhooking pans from the hanging rack, paused. Although Faith had long ago gotten in the habit of ignoring her mother’s vital signs, if only from courtesy, she now made a point to notice. Tamara’s pulse sped up. Her pale eyes darted to the left. “You know that a detective called?”
“Yes, Mom. He said his name was Roy Chopin, right?”
Tamara nodded, tightly, and continued to get out the makings for pork chops. “But he said you broke a date with him. He had to be mistaken. You wouldn’t date a—”
“A cop?” supplied Faith. “Why wouldn’t I? I work with them every day.”
“Which I still hate. You know their reputation around here.”
Faith had heard the rumors from the mid-90s.
Better to be pulled over by a carjacker than a New Orleans cop,
people had once joked. But she and her mother had lived halfway across the country back then. “The city’s been working to change that for a decade, Mother.”
Tamara turned to her, sweating slightly now. Not enough so that anybody without a hound-dog nose would notice, but still…“Faith! You know what those authority types are like, always asking questions, always prying into our business, always jumping to rude conclusions….”
“Like the conclusion that you’re hiding something?”
“Exactly!”
Why was it so hard to force the question out? Maybe because it was her mother. Maybe because Tamara was all Faith had left. No dad; he’d walked out when she was still an infant—walked out and then died. Not a single sister, brother or cousin. No grandparents, or aunts, or uncles. Without her mother…“
Are
you hiding something, Mom?”
“Faith!”
“Then why have you never told me more about my father?”
Tamara looked down. “Because he chose not to be part of our lives. He’s dead now. It would only hurt you to dwell on him.”
But instead of seeking safety in denial, as she had for most of her life, Faith was watching this time. Listening. Scenting her mother’s lies. And somewhere amidst those justifications, Tamara was definitely lying.
“Why did we move so often?” Faith asked.
Tamara clasped her hands together, shook her head. “This isn’t what I meant when I said we had to talk.”
“Were we running from someone?”
Now her mother said nothing. But her pulse, her temperature, her breathing…those spoke for her. Faith wasn’t sure she could stand what they were saying. But she couldn’t pretend them away, either.
“Is that why you never wanted my picture in the paper? Is that why you never published under your own name?”
“I was trying to protect you,” murmured Tamara as she stood, lost, by the still-cold stove. “Because you’re so…different.”
It was an excuse she’d used before. It had always sounded like a good one. Faith knew firsthand how people could react, when they recognized her strange abilities.
But now she heard that this, too, was a lie.
“No you weren’t,” she whispered. “Oh my God. You’re some kind of fugitive, and you made me a fugitive, and I want to know why. Mom, if you committed some kind of crime, maybe the statute of limitations is up. Or maybe we could find you a good lawyer.” But that wasn’t it—or it wasn’t all of it. Some of this led back to her father. “Did you kidnap me?”
“What?” But the guilt behind that protest was palpable.
“Maybe because my father abused me?” That would be an understandable reason, anyway, no matter how mistaken it felt.
“Nobody abused you, baby!” Tamara’s denial sounded honest, which was a mixed relief. But she’d only denied the abuse. The rest…?
“I can’t tell you the number of noncustodial kidnappings that come across my desk, Mom. Did you do that?”
“I—No!” Her truth there seemed more cloudy. As if the issue were more complicated than that.
“Oh my God. Am I even really your daughter?”
“Of
course
you are! I carried you for nine months. I was in labor for fourteen hours. I’ve told you about your birth—7:03 a.m., County Hospital in Chicago. You can’t possibly believe—Why are you even asking these things?”
Faith shut her eyes, shook her head. Some of her mother’s answers sounded true, heartfelt, but some of them were lies, and she couldn’t tell where the line lay. What good did it do to ask the questions when she couldn’t trust even her perception of the answers? This wasn’t why she’d come. This wasn’t accomplishing anything.
“Why are you acting this way?” demanded Tamara, her hands—smaller hands than Faith’s—fisted. “Why are you looking at me like that? You’re acting as if I’m some kind of criminal. I’m not! I gave you the best life I knew how.”
That, at least, was the truth. Faith worked to make her voice more gentle. “You said you wanted to talk. Why don’t you tell me what it is you wanted to say?”
But her mother—surely Tamara really was her mother, even if they didn’t look at all alike—her mother was too upset by now. The shrill edge to her voice showed no sign of softening. “I wanted to ask if you really knew that detective who called. If you really had a date with him. I thought he had to be lying, but clearly I don’t even know my own daughter anymore.”
That makes two of us. I don’t know my own mother.
“And the e-mail?” asked Faith.
Tamara scowled at the floor.
“You said last night, ‘first the e-mail, now the phone calls.’ You said you had to talk to me before they did. Who are ‘they’?”
Tamara looked up, blinked, and lied again. Blatantly. Deliberately. “I was upset about the detective’s phone call. I didn’t know what I was saying.”
And that was that. “Goodbye, Mom.”
Faith turned and headed for the front door.
After a pause, her mother came after her. “Baby, no! Stay for dinner. I’m sorry I upset you over nothing—you know how nervous I can get, but it doesn’t mean anything. Let’s have a nice evening together, catch up, maybe you can spend the night in your old room—”
Faith spun on her. “No!”
Tamara’s eyes widened.
“No, Mother. I’m not spending the night in my old room. I stayed there too long already. And I’m not sitting across a dinner table from you making small talk when this, maybe the most important thing in my life—”
“You’re exaggerating, baby.”
“Tell me why my father left us!”
And Tamara said, “I can’t.”
So Faith left. As she headed down the walk, she heard her mother weeping. She felt as if someone had reached inside her and torn her in half, as if she might never patch those two halves together. Half of her came from a father whose first name she didn’t even know. A man her mother would tell her nothing about except that he was dead. And the other half…
Was she even Tamara’s daughter? Or was it possible she was one of those children you heard about, snatched out of their baby carriage, stolen from a day care, grabbed off the street?
She practically ran to the streetcar stop, barely aware that the sun was still out, too upset to care about such mundane safety concerns. Not with her whole identity in tatters.
If she couldn’t get that information from Tamara, then Faith would have to find it the old-fashioned way. She would try to get a copy of her birth certificate, maybe her mother’s marriage certificate, assuming Tamara and her father had even been married. And maybe…
Faith climbed onto the streetcar and settled into one of the wooden seats, staring blankly at the mansions and estates and trees that lined St. Charles Avenue, and a name struck her.
Deveaux.
The old Deveaux villa.
Whether or not there was any relationship to the French Quarter medium didn’t really matter. What did matter was, Faith had a few resources that “the old-fashioned way” had never included. She might just be able to contact her father, even if he was dead.
Because
he was dead.
At least, she could try. If she knew a good enough medium.
And she was pretty sure she did.
Celeste Deveaux was a tall, mixed-race woman with caféau-lait skin, wavy black hair and warm brown eyes. When Faith first met her, a year ago, Celeste had been working as a psychic reader. She’d been lousy at it. Only after one of her clients died—shortly after Celeste had promised him a long and happy life—did Celeste eventually come to realize her skills lay in speaking to the dead.