When Daman Rourke was a kid he would hang around for hours outside a certain house on Esplanade Avenue. A raised cottage mostly hidden behind a tall black-iron picket fence afroth with honeysuckle vines.
What he hoped for during all those hours of all those days was to get a good long look at the two little girls who belonged to his mother’s lover. He thought that if he watched them often enough, watched how they behaved, watched to see if they sassed the nuns, or hid their butter beans under their plates, or stole licorice whips from Mr. Pagliani’s corner grocery—if he watched them often and carefully, then he would come to understand why those little girls’ father had left them.
Then maybe, like the detective he was today, he would have been able to piece all his clues together, one by one, and figure out what terrible crime he had committed that had caused his mother to leave him.
They had kept themselves to themselves, though, had Reynard Lelourie’s two daughters, but their mother was what folk called a serious recluse. When Heloise Lelourie’s husband had left her to go live openly with his mistress—Daman’s mama—in the house on Conti Street, she had put on mourning black, as if he had died, and only set foot outside the iron gate to go to Mass on Sundays. Except for when Reynard Lelourie had died for real, from eating a bowl of spoiled shrimp gumbo the day of his fiftieth birthday—then Heloise Lelourie had caused a bit of a stir herself, by going first to her husband’s wake and then to the cemetery to see him good and buried.
It was less than half a mile as the crow flies between Sans Souci and the Lelourie cottage on Esplanade Avenue. Rourke drove there now, parking beneath the shade of a giant palm, whose thick green fronds clicked in a breeze that came up from the river, damp and heavy. Sunshine glazed the few puddles left over from last night’s rain.
In the early years of the city’s history, Esplanade Avenue with its root-cracked sidewalks had been only a muddy road, which wound through French colonial plantations from the river to the Bayou St. John. Eventually the plantations were parceled up, and the muddy road was paved with Belgian blocks and lined with elegant Creole mansions and raised cottages. Then, as more years passed, some of the families died out or moved uptown, and many of the mansions were turned into rooming houses. Others had been allowed to go to seed. But in New Orleans only the appearances of life changed, Rourke thought. The rhythms remained the same.
The metal of the cottage’s gate was hot to the touch when he pushed it open. All those hours he had spent hanging around the outside of this gate, and this was the first time he had ever passed through it.
The garden was lush and beautiful, profuse with oleander, azaleas, camellias, and roses. Some animal on a tear had been at the flower beds along the river side of the house, though. Mangled blossoms and shredded leaves lay tossed and scattered in deep furrows of wet, turned-up earth.
The house was in a sad way as well, paint flaking and cardboard patches in the windows where the stained-glass panes had gone missing. The Lelouries had never been rich like the St. Claires and they had fallen on even worse times lately, but their blood was just as blue. Their name was as old as Louisiana itself.
Rourke climbed the steps to the saggy gallery and pulled the bell. A long crack, he saw, ran across the fanlight above the door.
He knew they were home. Still, he waited awhile for the door to be answered. Long enough for a clothes-pole man and a fruit seller’s wagon to pass by on the avenue, the two men together making a melodious song out of their shuck and hustle.
“Clothes poles. I got the clothes poles, lady, sellin’ clothes poles a nickel and a dime.”
“I got watermelon red to the rind.”
When the door finally opened Rourke touched the brim of his straw boater and smiled. “Mornin’, Miss Belle.”
She tried to slam the door in his face, but he put his hand out, stopping it.
“You have your nerve—coming to this house, Daman Rourke,” she said. Her voice was dry and brittle.
From within the house a woman called a question, and she half turned to answer. “It’s that woman’s boy, Mama…. No, not the priest. The policeman.” She swung back around to him, color staining her cheeks, her eyes bright. She’d always had bright eyes, he remembered—golden brown, the color of a candle flame seen through a glass of whiskey. “I’m tellin’ him just where he can take himself off to.”
“No. Let him come in.”
Mrs. Heloise Lelourie materialized out of the darkness of the hallway, standing small and slender and straight-backed behind her younger daughter.
Rourke had never spoken to her before, this abandoned wife of his mother’s lover. But he was well acquainted with the sight of her—as a boy, he had often gone to Mass in her church just to observe her, her and her girls. Hers was a French face, petite and sharply boned, timeless. But her coloring was fair, gray eyes and blond hair now faded to the color of old wax.
For a moment longer Belle still kept the door half-shut against him, and her hand that held it trembled. Her short nails were grimed with black dirt, and a band of sunburn circled her wrist between where her gardening glove must have ended and her sleeve began. She saw him looking at her hand, at her nails, and she let go of the door and stepped back into the gloom of the hall.
Mrs. Lelourie led the way into a front parlor that was furnished in black walnut and red velvet that had faded to puce. The large gilded mirror over the mantel was spotted with mildew. The carpeting was so threadbare the floor showed through the nap in places. A dry, musty smell hung around the place, like that of a grave so old that even the bones had long ago fallen into dust.
Mrs. Lelourie waved her hand at a black horsehair settee that was worn bald in places. “Please, will you take a seat,” she said, her words blurred by a soft accent, but then she had grown up speaking real French. In her day, her people had seldom married outsiders, and the paterfamilias didn’t even like their children learning English in school.
“Belle,” she said, as she settled with old-fashioned grace onto a lyre-backed chair, “if you would prepare and pour, please, the café for our guest.”
Belle stared at her mother and some feeling burned quick and hot across her face, gone before Rourke could read it. She turned on her heel and left the room, and the cheap cotton skirt of her dark blue dress, too long to be fashionable anymore, made a sighing sound as it brushed her legs.
Mrs. Lelourie folded her white, veined hands on her lap and lifted her head up proud. She didn’t speak, and neither did he. Long ago, Daman Rourke had learned that the human heart couldn’t bear emptiness, and a silent room was emptiness of the worst sort. The heart would ache to fill the silence. All he had to do was wait and listen.
The house was so quiet he could hear Belle way back in the kitchen, making the coffee. He doubted any guest had stepped into this parlor in years. “My mama lives in a grave, and I hate her for it,” Remy had said to him once, but even then he knew it wasn’t really hate she felt. He understood the tangled layers of shame and pride that had made a crypt out of this house for Heloise Lelourie, but he wondered now why Belle had chosen to stay and be buried alive along with her mother.
There were many women like Belle in New Orleans, though, Rourke thought—women who awaken one day to find themselves left behind, caring for aging parents and living out their lives in fading rooms behind drawn curtains, where antique clocks measure out the time in years, not minutes, and too much is left unsaid.
The strong chicory smell of the coffee made it out to the parlor first, followed by Belle carrying a tarnished silver tray weighted down by a large gray agate cafetière with steam rising from its spout.
The coffee was thick and black as tar. He watched Belle pour it, together with the hot milk, into china cups. He remembered her as a pretty child, with long