Forever (5 page)

‘What is it, honey? What's the matter?'

Beau stared at her and through her. Augusta Lafayette. Why the hell was he thinking of Augusta Lafayette at a time like this? The pain receded, leaving a burning sensation, as if he had been scorched.

The panties went the way of the bra and the girl swayed towards him, winding her fingers in his hair, pressing his face against her breasts. Brutally he pushed her away.

Augusta Lafayette. Her face swam before him as if it were in the room. Strange how he had never noticed before how ethereally beautiful she was. Those eyes, velvet-soft, violet-dark. A man could lose himself in such eyes. Drown in them. He felt as if he were drowning now. He wanted to reach out and seize hold of her but all that was before him was a heavily perfumed body that held no allure.

Augusta Lafayette's body held allure in plenty. He remembered holding it at a nameless party, feeling the incredible smallness of her waist, the high pert breasts, the willingness as she had pressed close against him. His head swam. He was aware of the girl's indignant exclamations and was uncaring of them. Why hadn't he stayed with Augusta Lafayette at that party? The answer was swift. He had thought her a child and had treated her as such. He swung his legs off the bed, trying to think clearly. She
was
a child. Sixteenor seventeen-year-olds held no charms for him. He liked his women experienced. He left the deflowering of virgins to Von, who couldn't get enough of them. As if from a vast distance, he heard a female voice rising higher and higher. He swore savagely. He wanted to think; he wanted to hold on to the vision before him.

Her sun-gold hair was shining like a halo, spreading over her shoulders and down her back to the base of her spine. Hair like silk. Hair to lose himself in. Her lips were parted and smiling invitingly. She was radiant, lit with an inner flame.

He sprang from the bed, grabbing his jacket as he strode from the room.

‘Where are you going? What's gotten into you?' the girl asked indignantly, seizing his arm. She was rewarded by a thrust that sent her sprawling to the floor.

‘I thought we were having a game of poker?' Shenton said bewilderedly as Beau slammed the door of the bedroom behind him and headed for the marbled entrance hall. ‘Your cards are waiting.'

‘Another night.'

Shenton shrugged and prepared to follow him. Beau swung round, and at the expression in the black eyes, Shenton faltered.

‘I've a visit to make,' Beau said tersely. ‘Alone.'

Around the room the kissing and cuddling, the card playing had come to a halt. His friends eyed him nervously. Beau's temper was legendary but it was generally only directed at outsiders; at men like the Northerner. Now, the restraint he usually exercised while in the presence of his friends, was gone. There was a wildness about him that was almost demonic. Pausing only to drain Shenton's glass of brandy, he stalked out of The Château and into the sultry night like a man possessed.

‘Should we go after him?' Von asked hesitantly.

Around the room feet shuffled, but no one moved forward.

A car door slammed. There was the sound of an engine being revved viciously.

‘Perhaps he's drunk?' Von's girl suggested.

‘He's always drunk,' Shenton said curtly, eyeing the empty bottle of bourbon. ‘But it doesn't usually take him this way.'

‘We'd never catch up with him now,' the son of one of New Orleans'leading citizens said as the sound of the engine faded into the distance.

Shenton still hesitated.

‘Aw, come on. It's after midnight. If we're going to play poker, let's play. Beau can look after himself.'

Reluctantly Shenton sat down at one of the tables. He was filled with a sense of unease. Beau's behaviour had been out of character. He had looked like a man demented when he'd stormed out of The Château: a man not in control of himself. Unhappily he picked up the cards that had been dealt Beau and his scalp tightened and prickled. The ace of spades: the card of death.

Beau sped suicidally down a road bounded by cypress swamps and occasional sheets of moonlit water. The urgency he felt inflamed him. He'd wasted weeks, months. He wasn't going to waste another hour. He would break down the door of St Michel if necessary, but he would have Gussie Lafayette. The tyres screeched as he took a corner on two wheels. There would be no need to snatch Gussie from her father's grasp. The doors of St Michel would be open, waiting for him as Gussie would be.

The needle on the speedometer flickered from ninety to a hundred. He could see her face as clearly as if looking at a reflection in a mirror. Her eyes were aglow, her hair cascading down her back, her small rounded breasts rising and falling beneath her rose-pink gown.

She was in candlelight and he felt as if he could almost touch her. The blood coursed through his veins. Augusta Lafayette. Of all the women in the world to fall in love with, he'd fallen for little Gussie Lafayette!

‘I'm coming, sweetheart,' he said, his black eyes dancing at the thought of Charles Lafayette's horror, of his father's staggered amazement. ‘I'm coming, Gussie, and we'll be together forever! Forever!'

The wheel spun beneath his strong hands, the needle flickering to one hundred and five, one hundred and six. Out of the darkness the giant oak seemed to race down on him. He screamed in protest, raising his arm to shield himself as the car rocketed into the tree and then soared into the air with the momentum, rolling over and over, glass shattering and steel crashing as it somersaulted into the sucking blackness of the swamp. ‘If that's for me, tell them I'm out,' Judge Clay growled as the telephone rang insistently.

‘Yes, sir.' The maid deposited the fresh coffee on the breakfast table and silenced the offending ringing. She came back into the sun-filled room apprehensively.

‘It's the Sheriff for you, Judge. Says it's mighty important.'

‘Goddammit, can't a man have breakfast in peace?' Judge Clay slammed down his napkin and stormed to the telephone. Seconds later he was out of the house and heading east.

‘Of course, we don't know for certain yet,' Sheriff Surtees said as chains were manacled to the underside of the car, ‘but the plates were visible and when I saw the make and that it had been sprayed black with a fancy gold trim …'

The Judge wasn't listening. The tree lay across the road, decapitated at its point of impact with the car. The vehicle lay in the swamp, only the wheels and underside exposed. Whoever had been driving was long dead. Some yards away an ambulance waited, but only to serve as a hearse. Around him the rescue services were working smoothly and efficiently. The car was anchored, the crane creaked and the swamp reluctantly released its prize.

If Judge Clay had hoped that his son's car had been driven by one of his wild friends, his hopes were in vain. Beau was at the wheel, rigid in death, his arm still across his face, his neck broken.

‘Beauregard Clay's dead!' Eden Alexander's mother said over the phone to her closest friend. ‘I heard it from Ellen Surtees.'

‘Beau Clay's finally overreached himself,' Jason Shreve Sr said to his wife at lunchtime. ‘Drunk out of his skull, I shouldn't wonder.'

‘Beauregard's dead,' his brother said tearfully to his wife. ‘That was Pa on the phone. A car accident …'

‘Beau Clay's dead. My, that
is
tragedy,' Natalie Jefferson said as she supervised lunch. ‘He would have settled down in time. Why, what's the matter Mae? You look quite pale. Don't you want another piece of pecan pie?'

‘Beau Clay dead?' Charles Lafayette said queryingly to his third client of the morning. ‘I can't say I'm surprised. That kind of wildness can only end one way. Still, it's a tragedy. He had promise. I feel for his father. Now, what were you saying about the oil refinery's requirements?'

‘Judge Clay's son is dead,' Don Shreve's mother said, wide-eyed, to her husband. ‘Hit a tree and died instantly. At least, I
hope
he died instantly. His neck was broken but he could still have been alive, couldn't he? Drowning in that hideous swamp. It makes me quite ill to think of it. Him so handsome, too.'

‘Beau's dead,' Augusta's Cousin Tina shrieked, the blood draining from her pretty face as she stared at the ghastly headlines in the paper. ‘It can't be true! It can't be! Oh my God! Beau! Beau!'

‘I always did say that Beau would come to a bad end,' the town's leading matron said to her sister, helping herself to a glass of sherry and ignoring the fact that it was only four in the afternoon. ‘Wild as an unbroken stallion, he was. Why, I remember him flying that plane of his so low it near took the roof off the Shreve's place. And then there was the time with Judge Foster's wife. Never gave a flying damn whether the Judge knew or not. He had the Devil in him all right. My, but his death is going to cause a lot of broken hearts.'

‘It's a tragic waste,' Bradley Hampton's father said to the to the head of Nadvasco Oil, removing his glasses. ‘Dead at twenty-seven.' He shook his head. ‘He had talent for all he was wild. All that young man needed was the steadying influence of a good wife.' He eyed the photograph of his son on his desk speculatively. ‘Marriage can settle a boy like nothing else. I know. I married at twenty and never regretted it. I've been thinking lately that Bradley is growing too headstrong for his own good.' He tapped his glasses on the leather surface. Something would have to be done concerning Bradley. He had narrowed his choice of suitable daughters-in-law down to three. There weren't many girls fit for marriage to a Hampton.

‘He's dead!' Shenton's mother said to her husband unbelievingly. ‘Beauregard is dead!' She stumbled for a chair. ‘What if Shenton had been with him? It could have been Shenton at the bottom of that swamp! Oh, I think I'm going to faint. Brandy, somebody, quickly!'

‘Lord, Lord, but that boy sure done it this time,' the Laussat's oldest family retainer said, shaking her head and rocking vigorously in her chair. ‘Ah remember when he was knee-high to a grasshopper. Had the light of the Devil in his eyes even then.'

Eden sat on her bed hugging herself. She'd never known anyone who had died. Even her grandparents were still alive and indecently healthy. Now Beau Clay was dead: someone she had known, seen, talked about. She shivered. She had been talking about him only last evening. Talking about him when perhaps even then his car had been careering down a darkened, swamp-flanked road.

Her elder sister Romaine came into the room, her face flushed.

‘Isn't it terrible? They say his neck was broken and that he drowned! Can you imagine it? Drowning in that terrible swamp, unable to move, just waiting …'

Eden did not have a very high opinion of her twenty-year-old sister. Faced with Romaine's dramatics, some of Eden's old good sense reasserted itself.

‘If he did die like that, there's no need to dwell on it,' she said sharply.

Romaine was about to flounce indignantly from the room at being spoken to in such a manner by a mere seventeen-year-old, but Eden checked her. It was obvious that her mother had been talking about the tragedy and perhaps imparting information she would not give to Eden.

‘Was he driving alone?' she asked, trying to close her mind to the dreadful images her sister's revelations had conjured up.

Slightly mollified by being in-the-know, Romaine halted at the door.

‘Yes. And they say his father is nearly out of his mind. I mean, everyone in New Orleans knows the future Beau had.'

Eden raised a finely shaped brow and lit a forbidden cigarette. Perdition had been the only future she had heard predicted for Beau Clay. Death, apparently, was already lending enchantment.

Her sister was already gushing on like a child of thirteen.

‘He was
so
talented. I guess that's why he was so wild. It takes talented people that way. Think of Scott Fitzgerald. And so
sexy
. Mom said it reminded her of when James Dean died. That …'

Eden sighed. There were times when she felt that she was the only sensible person in the house, with the exception of her father. She wanted to discuss Beau Clay's death rationally. And with a semblance of respect.

She wondered if Mae had heard the news. Mae's parents were good friends of Sheriff Surtees. If anyone knew the details of Beau's death, the Jefferson family would. Grabbing her car keys, she excused herself from Romaine's irksome company and left the house. On the drive over to Mae's she considered the possibilities.

Perhaps Beau had had someone with him when he died. Perhaps he had quarrelled with his latest girlfriend. Perhaps he had been drunk or on drugs. Perhaps he had even
meant
to kill himself.

With scant regard for other traffic, she raced her Cadillac down Louisiana Avenue and out towards St George Avenue.

Mae looked distinctly strained. Her usually rosy cheeks were pale, her eyes blue-rimmed.

‘We can't talk here,' she whispered to Eden. ‘My mother won't leave me alone. She keeps talking and talking about it.'

‘Let's go down to Ruby Red's,' Eden said practically. ‘We can have hamburgers there and talk undisturbed.'

Mae nodded assent. She, too, wanted to talk about what had happened. She fought back a sudden rush of tears. She'd had a crush on Beau for as long as she could remember, though it had been a secret she had kept to herself. And she had never been obsessed with him as Gussie had.

She froze. ‘Gussie!' she said, horrorstruck. ‘What about Gussie?'

‘I tried to call her but that stupid maid of theirs said she wasn't taking calls.'

‘Then she knows?'

‘She must do. Her father is a friend of Judge Clay's.'

‘You go on down to Ruby Red's,' Eden said decisively. ‘That's where all the news will be. I'll go to Gussie. She'll have taken Beau's death badly, especially after last night.'