Shattered Dreams: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (14 page)

How well I knew that. “Did you ever find anything out about your birth parents?”

His mouth twisted. “No. They claimed the records were sealed, that even they didn’t know. But I never stopped looking at people, houses, wondering if they were dead or alive, why they didn’t want me—”

I grabbed his wrist, squeezed. “Chase,” I said with absolute certainty. “They wanted you.”

“They had a funny way of showing it.”

“Maybe your mom was young, or they were poor. Maybe they had no way to care for you—”

He looked away, leaving me to stare at the barbed-wire tattoo peeking from beneath his shirtsleeve. He had two, I knew. The other, on his chest, was Japanese. I’d finally looked it up.

It was the symbol for honesty.

“There’s so much good in you,” I whispered. “It had to come from somewhere.”

The breeze stirred through the roses climbing the iron of the columns.

“You’re defined by what’s inside you,” I said. “Not by what’s around you. That’s all window dressing.”

His eyes crinkled. It was the first hint of a smile. “Kind of like this house,” he muttered. “Beautiful, but nothing compared to you.”

The sigh came from somewhere deep.

“Speaking of,” he said abruptly, shuttering the little boy away, like the sun burning through the clouds and chasing off the shadows. And then Chase was back, the Chase from before, from normal things like chemistry and late-night texting and even yesterday at the park, reaching for my hand and dragging me toward the walkway. “I’ve got some more window dressing for you.”

*   *   *

“
John Mark’s girl?
Well I’ll be dayum-ed.” The surprisingly tall woman with graying hair but baby-smooth skin looked me up and down. “Last time I seen you, you was just a little thang.”

We stood on the narrow porch of the house my parents had lived in when they first married, a small lemon-yellow building on the periphery of the French Quarter, with green shutters and a pretty iron overhang. The owner, an elderly woman who’d introduced herself as Mrs. Vincent, had moved there after she lost her home in a neighboring parish to Katrina. She’d never heard of my parents.

But Emma Watson, her next-door neighbor, had.

“Cute as a bug, too,” she said, and I didn’t have to look at Chase to know that the guard he’d had wrapped around him all afternoon had finally lowered. “You grew’d up good, chile. Real good. A looker like your daddy.”

“Thank you.” It seemed the right thing to say.

“I always wondered what happened to you,” she said. “After your daddy…” Her face clouded over. “I know’d him his whole life,” she said. “He was the cutest little thing. Once I fancied he’d marry my girl.” Suddenly her eyes got a faraway sheen to them. “Just think, then she’d have been your ma instead of that witch.”

Whoa. I mean …
whoa
. Witch? Before I could even process what was happening, Chase moved closer, positioning himself between me and Mrs. Watson exactly like he’d done the day before with Jessica’s father.

“Emma! That’s this girl’s mother you’re talking about!” Mrs. Vincent scolded, sounding and looking every bit the well-mannered Southern lady she appeared to be.

My dad’s supposed friend frowned. “You’re right. I surely am sorry,” she surprised me by saying, then glanced from me to the street beyond, searching. “It’s just … Your mama was different.”

Chase reached for my hand. “Come on, we’re out of here.”

Warning bells went off all through me. Emma Watson knew something. She knew my mother saw things—I could see that in the older woman’s eyes.

I could also see fear.

And I wasn’t about to walk away.

TWELVE

I wasn’t about to let her blow the lid on truths I myself had yet to understand, either. Not in front of Chase.

Whatever and whenever he found out had to come from me.

“So you knew my dad,” I detoured, steering the conversation to safer ground. “What was he like?”

“Trinity—” Chase started, but I swung toward him, silencing him with a quick, pleading look.

The way he looked at me, the combination of concern with quiet understanding, made my heart stutter.

Maybe Emma Watson recognized my tactic. Maybe she didn’t. I’ll never know. But she did go along with it, escorting us to her house next door, where I counted seven rail-thin black cats sunning themselves and five small saucers beneath the front window. I would have sworn they were fine bone china.

She sat us down on a wide porch swing and offered us sweet raspberry tea. Chase answered before I could, turning down her offer. I have to say I was glad.

The photo album surprised me. After so many years of wondering, of wanting to know, to finally find pictures here, in the mementos of a stranger …

“Handsome as sin, he was,” Emma Watson said as I flipped through the small, fading images. But they were enough to see my father for the first time in fourteen years.

Except it wasn’t really the first time. Because the boy captured in the old Polaroid images, with the wavy, dark brown hair and wide-set teasing eyes, hamming it up with dogs and cats and an adorable little girl with dark ringlets, was the father who came to me in my dreams.

“He and Amelia used to love to catch crawdads,” she said. “There was this canal not too far away, and they’d go there for hours, coming home with a big box full for us to boil up.”

“I’ve never had a crawfish,” I whispered.

Chase’s hand found mine, squeezed.

“Never? Well, I’ll be,” Mrs. Watson said, shooing away one of the flies that had strayed from the remains of the moist cat food. There must have been over twenty-five of them swarming the dishes. “Your granny had a real way with them, especially in étouffée or a gumbo.”

I’d never had those dishes, either.

“She was a good woman,” my dad’s friend went on as I flipped the pages, the colors intensifying as the boy grew into a gangly teenager. “That there is their prom picture,” she said.

Against the cracked plastic my finger traced the outline of my father, standing in a ridiculous baby-blue tuxedo with a white bow tie and a big smile, while next to him Emma Watson’s daughter, in some light pink antebellum concoction, beamed.

“They were always so good together,” she sighed.

I kept flipping, drinking in image after image. “That was his dog?” I asked, pointing to the black Lab that had been aging right along with my father.

“Archibald,” Mrs. Watson said. “He was the most amazing hunting dog…”

I looked up. “Hunting what?”

“Duck mostly.”

I frowned, instinctively glancing at Chase. I could only imagine what his thoughts were. “Thank you,” I whispered, unable to stop the smile. “For giving me this.”

His eyes warmed, but he said nothing.

I returned to the album, hesitating on a picture of my dad and Amelia in front of a barbecue grill. They each wore T-shirts saying New Orleans Saints. In the distance, a pudgy little girl with dark pigtails was running from a boy with a hose.

I must have made some kind of noise, because Emma Watson leaned closer. “You were such a pretty thing,” she said. “Right from the start.”

The band of emotion pulled tighter, making it hard to so much as breathe.

“And little James,” she said, the big hoops in her ears swinging despite how still she sat. “You two were so cute.”

Something I couldn’t read shone in her eyes, something that made me want to look deeper, even as I returned to the album. I flipped the page, found more shots of my father and Amelia. Had I not known, I would have thought they had married, just like Emma Watson had wanted.

“What about my mom?” I asked, looking up from the last page. “I didn’t see—”

“Didn’t like the camera,” Mrs. Watson said.

Beside me, Chase barely suppressed a cough.

“I surely am sorry that I can’t tell you more,” she went on, as I handed the collection of photos back to her. “Maybe you should check with her cousin…”

*   *   *

The bleached-out blue of late afternoon gave way to the gunmetal gray of dusk. With the two- and three-story buildings obscuring the remains of the sun, Chase fiddled with his iPhone, as he’d been doing nonstop for the fifteen minutes since we’d left Emma Watson’s house.

“Find anything?” I asked.

He stopped walking and looked up. “Something’s not right,” he muttered, glancing around the mostly residential street. “Property records point to a man named Marcel Arceneaux.”

“Is he my mom’s cousin?” Mrs. Watson had given us an address, but no name.

“He died three years ago.”

“Then who lives there now?”

“I can’t tell,” Chase said, once again returning to the Web page on his iPhone. “Maybe no one.”

We were so close. That’s all I could think. So. Close. “Then let’s go find out,” I said, moving again, heading for the intersection two buildings away.

The irony was not lost on me: twenty-four hours before I’d been uneasy about climbing a fence. Now, drunk on all Emma Watson had disclosed, I was the one pressing.

Chase’s hand caught me before I veered out of reach. “I don’t like walking in blind.”

My heart squeezed, and I could see him all over again, the little boy running from his house, the lie—the only life he’d ever known.

“Neither do I,” I said, lifting my eyes to his. “But sometimes we don’t have a choice. Isn’t that what this afternoon has been about?”

He edged closer, putting himself between me and a man with gray hair and dirty clothes a few sizes too big, a face like leather. During the transition from day to night, the streets of the Quarter became a dangerous no-man’s land.

“I knew,”
he said when the man finally vanished around the corner. “About the house in the Garden District, that it was empty. I knew about your parents’ house, who lived in it.”

Because while everyone else in my life had thrown up stop signs, Chase had pulled back the barricades and taken me by the hand. “But not Emma Watson,” I realized. She was the wildcard.

“She could be anyone,” he said, watching a long black limo glide to a stop in the intersection. “With any agenda.”

No traffic came from either direction, but the long Humvee with dark windows did not move.

Only a few hours before, I would have thought Chase’s internship at his mother’s law office had left him paranoid, unable to accept anything at face value. Now I understood.

“Chase,” I said as the limo finally glided away. “
We
showed up on
her
doorstep. I asked the questions. She just answered. The agenda is mine.”

He glanced from the now empty intersection, to the recessed doorway behind me. “She called your mom a witch.”

Somehow I didn’t wince. “And Amber calls me that at least once a day,” I pointed out, knowing I’d made the right decision to steer the conversation away from my mother. Still, though, the memory of what I’d seen in the other woman’s eyes lingered. It was the same awareness I’d seen in my grandmother’s when she’d moved her hand over her body in a shaky sign of the cross.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I insisted.

“This is New Orleans.”

I crooked a smile. “I noticed.”

His frown deepened. “Everything means something.”

Uncomfortable, I looked beyond him, saw the poster duct-taped to a
NO PARKING
sign.

Jessica’s smile was model perfect, with her big sultry eyes glittering in that way that was all her own. Normally she preferred skinny jeans and tank tops, but her parents had chosen a shot featuring a boxy T-shirt, thigh-length cutoffs, and a goofy Labradoodle I’d never seen or heard of.

At the bottom, someone had taken a marker, replacing the word
REWARD
with
FRIDAY NIGHT PRAYER VIGIL, OUR LADY OF ENDURING GRACE
.

Chase turned toward the sign, stilled. The worry in his eyes …

I looked away, knew I couldn’t turn back now. I’d filled in some of the blanks about my father, but my mother remained a big unknown. And the images I saw, the things I knew, came from her. If Jessica was in trouble, if I’d connected with her as my research into precognition suggested, then I had to find out how to sharpen the focus—and bring her home.

If Chase wouldn’t take me, I’d have to double back and go by myself.

“Just a look. We walk by, stay on the sidewalk.” What could it hurt? “Then we can go. Promise.”

He turned back to me, lifting a hand to slip a sweep of hair behind my ear.

The way he looked at me made me feel as though he’d slipped away my clothes instead. “What?” I asked.

His hand fell away. “Jessie would have lied.” A passing taxi almost absorbed the words. “She would have pretended to go along with me, then the second I turned my back, run off and done exactly what she’d wanted to.”

I suddenly felt about two inches tall.

“Come on,” he said, still so uncomfortably quiet, tender. Then, taking my hand, he led me deeper into the Quarter.

From bars and restaurants a few blocks away, the scent of sin and dinner drifted. At the one-way street we turned on, there was no sign to give away the name. The whole Quarter was a maze of them, laid out on a perfect grid. Tall narrow buildings, most in pastels with steps and shutters and dark windows, crowded both sides of the street. Not too far away stood the beautiful old cathedral.

Chase stopped, shifting his attention to the faded lime building behind me. Three crumbling steps led to a small porch, where a skinny tabby lay in the shadows, bathing itself.

“It should be right here,” he said.

There was something weird in his voice. “What do you mean
should
be?” Either it was or it wasn’t.

“I don’t see a B,” he said.

I glanced at him, then at the A on the peeling orange door. “Maybe,” I started, but stopped when I saw the blood. A splotchy trail of it, leading from the sidewalk to the cat.

The tabby wasn’t bathing itself. It was cleaning a wound.

“Oh, my God, he’s hurt,” I said, hurrying toward the steps. At the rail, I started up. “Chase,” I called, glancing over my shoulder. “Come help—”

I froze.

Chase was gone.

THIRTEEN