There was no particular logic to it, but he was attracted to her, and he recognized the danger in that. But it didn’t make him any less intrigued.
“So how much do you know about the history of New Orleans?” He rewrapped the camera strap around his wrist and started walking.
“Just a vague outline.”
“In 1849 New Orleans was a city that had grown quickly because of the influx of immigrants into the port and Americans who moved in for business opportunities after the Louisiana Purchase. There were also a huge number of gold rushers who stopped in that year on their way to California to make their fortune. Picture a couple of hundred thousand people living in a hot, humid city surrounded by water. A thriving port, lots of sailors and gold rushers—that all leads to drinking, gambling, and prostitution. And of course, the aftereffect of that is crime. They say there was a murder a week in New Orleans at that time.”
“Which explains the attitude in some of those newspaper articles. They seemed disgusted.”
“Exactly. But people get used to violence if they see enough of it. And if it’s contained in an area where no so-called decent people live, then it’s easy to ignore.”
“I don’t know how anyone gets used to violence.”
Gabriel glanced back, surprised at how breathless Sara’s words sounded. They were walking up Dumaine at his pace, and he realized he was striding way too fast. Sara was breathing hard, and she was still two feet behind him, her eyes trained on the precarious sidewalk.
He slowed down. “Sorry. I have long legs.”
“And I have short ones.” She glanced up and smiled. “These sidewalks could stand to be replaced.”
“But that’s part of the charm of the Quarter. And I’ve seen women negotiate Bourbon Street in high heels after kicking back shots, and it’s amazing to me that they don’t break their ankles.”
“I’ve never been to Bourbon Street. This is my first time here.”
“Maybe we can go tonight. You need to at least say you’ve been to Bourbon Street.” Gabriel had no idea why he made the offer. Well, actually he did. It was because he was trying to make conversation with Sara, trying to make her comfortable around him, and he liked the idea of showing her around. That small, nagging attraction was driving him too, and he knew it, should stop it, but wasn’t.
“Sure,” she said. “That would be fun.”
Though she looked like she thought it would be anything but.
“You’ll see that certain things in New Orleans haven’t changed in the past one hundred and fifty years. Still plenty of drinking and sex.” The very things that had sucked him in, the sins he still missed. He had learned nothing, knew he should condemn the licentious, knew he should want the purity of life as he was trying to lead it now, but he didn’t. He still wanted to taste a woman’s flesh and to float off into the haze, removed from the indelicate rude details of mortality. Those were his vices, and he knew that.
He stopped and stared at the light blue house across Dauphine Street.
But he needed to know, needed to believe, that while he did most certainly have flaws, and deep ones, he was not capable of violence. Anger. That he could not have picked up a knife and sliced through Anne’s ivory skin, drawing blood over and over.
He didn’t think he could. Didn’t think he’d done that. But he needed to know. Or he would never let it go, never forgive himself, and the doubt would eat through the center of his already rotting soul.
October 9, 1849
Report taken by William Davidson, second district
The women of twenty-five Dauphine Street were cooperative in discussing the night in question, but none have any helpful insight to offer. No one saw or heard anyone entering or leaving Miss Donovan’s room, other than Mr. Thiroux, and no one heard anything out of the ordinary, aside from a single cry from Miss Donovan overheard by Molly Faye. Approximate time thought to be one a.m., given that Miss Faye insists her client was still in her room at the time, and that he left at a quarter past the hour when he realized he was late returning home.
Miss Donovan’s room is shuttered to the street and remained so, and there is a great hulk of a man who watches the front door for Madame Conti. He insists no one got past him at any time during the hours in question. In speaking to the six ladies who were in the house, I can conclude with a fair amount of accuracy that there were five men present at the time of Miss Donovan’s death, including Mr. Thiroux and the doorman. Twelve persons total when counting the victim. Three of the six ladies provide alibis for three of the men, and vice versa. Two ladies provided alibis for each other, as they were playing cards together in their shared room. That leaves only Madame Conti, the doorman (whose name is Jim Fury), and Mr. John Thiroux in doubt.
While it is easy to imagine the giant of a doorman, or the street-hard Madame Conti as capable of violence, I cannot see where either would benefit from the death of Miss Donovan. Madame Conti certainly had much to lose in terms of business from the notoriety of such a death, and no one in the house indicated there was ever any animosity displayed between Jim Fury (despite his sobriquet) and Miss Donovan.
The natural conclusion, therefore, is that Mr. Thiroux took the knife to his lover under the influence of pharmaceuticals and stabbed her to death.
Sara really had no interest in going to Bourbon Street. From all accounts, it was loud and dirty, and she envisioned drunken men spilling beer on her while women with vast amounts of cleavage vied for attention from same-said drunken men. It made her brain hurt just thinking about it. But she had said yes immediately, because the offer came from Gabriel, and that disturbed her. She wasn’t in a good place. It wasn’t the time to get involved with a man.
But she didn’t see herself begging off the plans either.
Gabriel had stopped walking and was taking his lens cap off again.
“Is that the house?” He was staring across the street at an innocuous light blue structure that came right up to the sidewalk like all the buildings in the French Quarter. The house had darker blue shutters closed tightly on both the bottom and top floors. Only the little third-floor dormers were open to light. While it certainly looked old, it wasn’t decrepit. A little tired maybe, but not falling down. “It doesn’t look very big.”
“It’s not. Just a parlor, which was for gambling and drinking, a private salon that served as Madame’s office, and six small rooms for the girls on the second floor. Madame Conti used the third floor as her private suite.”
“There were only six prostitutes working there? From that article I read I got the impression there were more.”
“There were. Only not every girl was entitled to her own room. Some doubled up. And some entertained their clients in the parlor.”
The image of that made Sara grimace. Sometimes she thought modern women had a glamorized vision of bordellos, but the truth didn’t sound at all sensual or glamorous. It sounded cheap and dirty. A hard and dangerous way to eek out a living. “And a lot of the street was similar houses?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder what led women to prostitution,” she mused out loud. What had caused her great-great-grandmother, Anne Donovan, to feel such desperation? Or had she actually enjoyed it, sought it out? Likely Sara would never know.
“Drugs, alcohol, poverty, rebelliousness. Not much different than now.” Gabriel squatted down on the sidewalk and lifted his camera.
“Are you a photographer too?” she asked, realizing he had said these shots were for the book.
“No. It’s just easier to take my own photos.”
But he did have an eye for it. Sara could see that. He shifted to the left, looked up at the sky, in and out of the lens, adjusting his shots, adjusting his zoom lens.
“It’s not called number twenty-five anymore.” There was an address plate above the mailbox, to the right of the door, with its single brick step leading down to the walk. It was a quiet street, with no traffic and little activity. The light blue house looked lonely, lacking in foliage or flowers. “Do the owners know a murder happened here?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never spoken to the owner. The house is owned by a trust, and when I contacted the lawyer in charge of it, he gave me a big old no when I asked permission to take interior photos. He tried to tell me the crime happened in the house next door.”
“How do you know it didn’t?”
He turned and looked up at her. His dark eyes were unreadable. “Trust me. I know. I do my research.”
Sara shivered. The hair on her arms had suddenly gone up, even though it was an easy eighty-five degrees. She looked past him to the house again. “What do you know about Anne Donovan? How did she end up here? Drugs, alcohol, or poverty? Or all of the above?”
“From witness accounts of her behavior, it was poverty. No one mentions drugs or alcohol at all.”
“In relation to her. They said her lover used opium and alcohol.”
“Yes. Absinthe in particular.”
The heat and humidity were bothering Sara, which had to be caused by the lack of sleep. She was used to the air feeling like a wet towel on her head, since she had spent the majority of her life in Southern Florida. But she felt like she needed some water desperately, dizziness creeping up on her in unexpected waves. There was also a persistent ache in her right side that she thought might feel better if she wasn’t standing, so she forced herself to squat down on the sidewalk next to Gabriel. Pulling her skirt over her knees, she found her balance. She didn’t actually want her legs or backside to make contact with the ground.
“Is absinthe alcohol? I think I’ve heard of it, but I’m not sure.”
“It’s the famed Green Fairy, an alcoholic drink made with oil of wormwood, and served diluted with sugar water. It was thought to have hallucinogenic and addictive properties, so it was made illegal in the early twentieth century.”
“Does it?” Sara turned to Gabriel, wobbling slightly. She wasn’t strong enough to hold herself up without effort, though he wasn’t having any problem.
Gabriel stared back, close enough to her that she could see the faint blond stubble on his chin. “It’s addictive in the sense that once you’ve been to that place where you feel brilliant and charming, intelligent and attractive, you want to revisit it frequently. And eventually you never want to leave.”
Then he stood up, abruptly, and crossed the street without looking either way. It had almost sounded like he had personal experience with addiction himself. Or maybe she was just reading that into everyone because she was so hyperaware from her own problems. With the sleeping pills, she hadn’t wanted to feel intelligent and attractive, she had just wanted to sleep. Hard. To escape. And there had come a time when she hadn’t wanted to wake up, to get out of bed, and that had scared her. That’s when she’d gone to rehab.
Maybe Gabriel had a story. Maybe he didn’t. Sara watched him take pictures of the front door, of the shutters, of the street going right and left, and the street sign. It was a strange surreal moment, the lonely, lovely little house behind him, sagging under the weight of its history, yet forging ahead, while Gabriel paced in the sunlight. He was an odd juxtaposition—fast and sporadic when he was in motion, yet completely and utterly still when he wasn’t—and she liked to watch him. If anyone had told Sara two years ago she would be hunched down on the dirty cobblestones in New Orleans staring at a true crime writer she would have laughed. She hadn’t expected to go anywhere, least of all this city. Yet her life had irrevocably changed and she had arrived in this moment for better or for worse.
The sky was fabulously blue behind the house, white clouds floating by, framing the roof. The third-floor windows were dusty, but the light was hitting them, enough so that when her eye roamed over the left window, she could see that a man was staring straight back at her from behind the glass. Sara lost her balance and fell sideways onto the sidewalk, her heart racing. No one had been there before, she was sure of it. She caught herself and looked back up at the window. There was nothing there now.
“Gabriel!” she called, though she wasn’t sure why. It was probably just the owner, curious to see who was out on the street. Who was staring at his house.
“Yeah?”
He turned and looked at her in question, his profile framed by the front door of the house behind him, and Sara felt the hair raise on her arms again, skin cool and clammy in the heat. She tried to stand up, but couldn’t seem to figure out how to get vertical without spilling backward onto her butt or forward onto her knees. So she stayed put and nervously called, “There’s someone in the house.”
Gabriel was already crossing the street, his long strides eating up the steps so that he was in front of her in seconds, holding out his hand to give her much needed help. “How do you know someone’s home?”
She clasped her hand in his gratefully and let his strength pull her up off the sidewalk. “Thanks.” Letting go of him, she brushed the back of her skirt. “I saw someone in the thirdfloor window.”
They both looked up. There was no one there.
“Well, I can take pictures of the exterior, whether the owner likes it or not.”
That was true. And Sara wasn’t sure why the man had unnerved her so much. It was just unexpected, that face staring down on her. “Do you have any historic pictures of the house?”
“The oldest one I could find is from 1910.”
“Did you grow up here?” she asked, as Gabriel gestured for them to start walking. Sara had actually been born in New Orleans, the result of her mother’s brief affair with a bouncer on Bourbon Street. Her mother had been a normal, slightly rebellious but not outrageous, suburban middle-class teenager until her own mother had been murdered. Then within six months, Sara’s mother had run away from her father, was drinking heavily and dancing in a nightclub, lying about her age since she was underage. By the time Sara was born, the bouncer was gone and so was her mother’s job, but a new boyfriend had taken Jessie and her baby in. Two years after that, on her eighteenth birthday, her mother had run off to Florida with a retired doctor, who had brains and a lot of money, but not enough sense to know his young girlfriend was playing him for cash.