Ciji Ware (24 page)

There were no two ways about it. The place was gorgeous!

Meanwhile the gates behind Corlis’s car closed automatically. She glanced to her left, and there, standing in an exquisitely molded wooden doorway, framed by large shutters painted the same sage-green color as the gate, was King Duvallon, smiling broadly.

“Good going finding this place,” he complimented her. “But then, you’re Ace Reporter McCullough, right?”

Corlis squeezed out of the driver’s side, careful not to bump the Jag’s pristine paint job with her car door.

“Wow… this is fabulous!” she exclaimed, taking in the picturesque courtyard with its exuberant sprays of magenta bougainvillea. “Who’s your neighbor?” she said with an admiring glance at the classic lines of the other car.

“Fortunately, I don’t have any,” he said.

Corlis halted halfway to the door. “You live here on your own?”

“Yup.”

“And
you
own the Jag?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied in his best military manner.

“But what about that beat-up Ford station wagon you drive all over town?”

“That’s my weekday car.” He shrugged. “This one’s for special occasions.”

“Oh,” she said in a small voice. She glanced up at the intricate ironwork crowning the classic French Quarter house. “At the risk of being nosy, do you actually
own
this incredible place?”

“With a gentle assist from the Whitney Bank… but, yes, I own it,” he said with a wry smile.

So much for the struggling academic. But hadn’t she heard that the Kingsbury and Duvallon clans lost most of their money and property in the years following the Civil War? What was with the fabulous car and the unbelievable house, she wondered, as she followed King down a short hallway, its walls hung with large ebony-framed color photos of Mardi Gras parades of years past. Things were
definitely
not exactly what they seemed to be!

“Don’t tell me this was a derelict building once upon a time?”

“You’re looking at the first person brave enough to sign up for the Live in a Landmark program,” he said. “When I first saw this place, it had half a roof and virtually no plumbing that worked.”

And it must have taken a bundle to make it look like this! Just where did a humble professor get that kind of dough?

At the end of the hallway, Corlis found herself gazing with amazement at a spacious, airy room that had obviously been assembled from several smaller ones that had existed in the building’s earlier incarnation.

“Oh no…” she groaned, her gaze absorbing the sight of a clutch of computers stationed around the room. “You aren’t running a telemarketing scam out of here, are you?”

King put his head back and laughed. “Boy, you really
have
covered every swindle known to man, haven’t you?”

“Just about,” she agreed. “But what
is
all of this?”

“I’ve turned the downstairs level into an open space with three distinct purposes,” he explained, making a sweeping gesture. “This area is where I prepare for my teaching chores,” he said, pointing to a desk built into a wall lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves overflowing with leather-bound volumes and antique building artifacts enclosed in glass display boxes—including a huge hand-forged iron nail and a cracked and peeling carved wooden rosette that probably once graced a mantelpiece.

“And that area?” Corlis asked, gesturing across the room.

“The other part over there serves as a kind of war room for the preservation work I do.” Two desktop computers and a laptop rested on a six-foot-long tavern table. A round conference table, piled high with documents, stood under a square-paned window framed by large wooden shutters inside and outside. Against one wall was a photocopier, and next to it, a large, slanted desk for architectural drawings.

“Very high-tech in a very old building,” Corlis commented, impressed.

“It’s a good example of what we in the preservation biz call ‘adaptive re-use.’ Restore the exterior to its original look, and renovate the interior for modern use.”

“Pretty amazing.” Looking around, she asked, “And the third office?”

King pointed to an alcove on his right, where she glimpsed yet another desktop computer.

“I’m what you might call a socially conscious, self-directed financial investor,” he said, faintly self-mocking. “I spend about a third of my time researching and managing my personal portfolio. And then I spend some of the profits on things I believe in.”

“What do you mean? You buy stocks and bonds?”

“I’ve invested mostly in mutual funds and traded primarily in the stock of companies in the tech sector and renewable energy—solar panels, wind farms… stuff like that.”

Corlis surveyed the large room appreciatively. “Well, whatever you’ve been doing, Professor, you must have picked a few winners.”

King shrugged modestly. “A few. I’m mostly out of the market these days. Everything got insanely overheated.”

“Smart fellow,” she declared flatly, recalling the sixty-thousand-dollar automobile parked in the courtyard next to her own car.

“Why, thank you,” he replied with a rakish grin.

“I thought most of you New Orleans blue bloods were broke.”

“That’s certainly true for the majority of Kingsbury-Duvallons.”

“Except
you
,”
Corlis said pointedly. King merely smiled modestly. “So, don’t tell me you started with five dollars and parlayed it into millions? I
hate
when I hear that kind of thing.”

“You’re not too far from the truth,” he admitted. “When I came back from the marines, my grandfather Kingsbury had just died. There were some U.S. Savings Bonds that had been bought in my name when I was born and left in a safe-deposit box for twenty-odd years. It didn’t add up to much, but I educated myself a bit about finance and the impact of the digital revolutions and invested here and there in companies I had faith in.”

“But the dot-com bubble burst,” Corlis said skeptically.

“If you’re not greedy, it’s easier to guess right about when to collect your winnings and get out.”

Corlis exclaimed on a long breath, “This is unbelievable! Who’d ever suspect? That banged-up Ford station wagon… those ratty old tennis shoes?” Then she narrowed her gaze. “So tell me. Why do you pose as a slightly impoverished professor?”

“I like my privacy.”

“Hasn’t the secret leaked out by now? Surely your old girlfriend, Cindy Lou, must have figured out your net worth.”

King raised an eyebrow. Corlis could see that he was both amused and taken aback by her candor. “I’ve grown kinda choosy about who I invite over. And people who gossip about me don’t get invited back.”

“Well, I’m duly honored to be here tonight,” Corlis said with a slight bow. The truth was, she was flabbergasted to learn that a man as obviously well off as Kingsbury Duvallon worked as hard as he did and risked as much as he had for causes he believed in. “And don’t worry,” she assured him with a mischievous smile, “your secret is safe with me. But I bet you even keep gold bars in your sock drawer!”

“Nope.” King said, laughing. “I have much more interesting things to do with my money.”

“Like what?” she asked, wildly curious. Then she flushed with embarrassment, recalling his remark about treasuring his privacy. “Hey, I
am
pretty nosy. It’s an occupational hazard. What I just asked is none of my business.”

“I’ll tell you about it sometime,” he replied mildly. “Off the record, of course.”

“I think your whole
life
must be off the record!”

“I think you’re very perceptive. Now, let’s go on upstairs.”

“Why?” she asked nervously. “Is what you wanted to show me up there?” It occurred to her that all her assumptions about the Hero of New Orleans and his preservation movement were suspect. She really didn’t know the guy at all.

“Something else first. Follow me.”

Without further conversation, King led the way up a flight of plushly carpeted stairs. They arrived at an elegant foyer paved in black and white marble squares that opened onto one of the most tastefully appointed living rooms she’d ever seen in her life.

“Wow!”

“Nice, isn’t it?” he commented quietly. “Most of this building dates from 1795, reconstructed after a terrible fire that destroyed an earlier house built in French colonial days.”

“
Nice
doesn’t quite cover it,” she said, admiring the stunning Empire-style furniture.

The walls of the large front parlor were painted a rich buttery yellow. Facing Dauphine Street were a pair of sage-green French doors that opened onto the wrought-iron gallery Corlis had admired from the courtyard. Framing the doors, burnished gold brocade drapes cascaded in sweeping folds and pooled on the parlor’s polished wood floor. Illuminated on the wall opposite hung a magnificent gilt-framed portrait of the Madonna and Child. To Corlis’s right was a white marble fireplace, topped by a large gilded rectangular mirror, and above it, another luminous landscape depicting eighteenth-century Venice. An enormous chandelier hung overhead, its myriad crystal-laden branches dripping, amusingly, with brightly colored green, gold, and purple beads—necklaces tossed to crowds from floats during Mardi Gras parades long past.

“It borders a bit on the rococo, but it’s very New Orleans, so it suits me,” he said with a laugh as he watched her reaction.

“This place looks like an Italian palazzo,” Corlis said, awestruck.

She turned slowly in place, noting the finely upholstered chairs and an inviting mahogany and dark green brocade chaise nestled into a corner, begging for someone to doze over a good book. And everywhere were intriguing pieces of small sculpture: a carved wooden religious figure; a bust of a helmeted knight, a waist-high bronze statue of a whooping crane standing on one leg. Beneath her feet stretched a rich Aubusson carpet woven in deep tones of gold, red, and green.

“Do you want to see my bed?” King asked.

“
What
?”
Corlis gasped.

“My bed,” he repeated patiently. “The one that’s exactly like yours.”

“Oh, the bed,” she echoed inanely. “The four-poster. Sure.”

King led the way down another hallway and into a spacious room with highly polished parquet floors set in a herringbone design. A gloriously carved chest of drawers stood against one wall, and in the corner was a graceful cane-seat plantation chair.

Dominating the high-ceilinged interior was a massive bed with four chiseled wooden posts the thickness of a man’s thigh—identical to Corlis’s own bed on Julia Street. Heavy hunter-green silk brocade side curtains and a waterfall of ivory mosquito netting hung from a mahogany canopy. Taken as a whole, it was hands down the most romantic bedroom she had ever seen, and it boggled her mind to realize that it was the creation of a former U.S. Marine!

“Tell me again… Who gave you the bed?” she murmured.

“Lafayette Marchand, remember?”

“Ah… yes… the godfather you disowned. Did his family have a plantation, too?”

“At one time, ages ago. But I think I remember him saying that the bed was actually made on the LaCroix Plantation.”

“LaCroix?” she echoed faintly. “As in Althea LaCroix? How is that possible?”

She realized, however, that it was
very
possible. Who knew better than she that Julien LaCroix, though married to Adelaide Marchand, had had a yen, in the nineteenth century, for the daughter of a Free Woman of Color named Martine Fouché whose mother was named Althea? Did Martine eventually succumb to Julien’s charms and take the LaCroix family name at some point?

King said, “Well, according to Lafayette, the white LaCroixs, who owned the big Reverie Plantation upriver, and the Marchands were connected through marriage somehow—as most of the old New Orleanian families are, you know.”

Corlis remained silent about having “attended” the wedding between Adelaide Marchand and Julien LaCroix. Nor did she mention having witnessed, through some unexplained means earlier that day in the city archives, the argument Julien LaCroix had had with Martine Fouché.

Instead, she gazed at the bed and its silk curtains hanging gracefully from the carved wooden canopy overhead. Perhaps Julien had gifted his would-be lover with a bed that he’d directed his cabinetmaker to copy from others already furnishing Reverie? Which one of them—King or she—was sleeping on furniture that had belonged to the unfortunate Adelaide Marchand LaCroix and her disaffected husband, Julien—and which one in a bed that had been made for a beautiful courtesan?

“Well… back to business,” she said finally. “What else did you want to show me?”

“We have to go back downstairs to the office, but first let me get you a glass of wine.”

“Ah… no thanks. Better not. I have to do some… writing tonight,” she evaded.