Reassured, the woman relaxed into the padded dental chair. She didn’t watch the television Eden had mounted to distract her more squeamish patients, but rather kept her eyes fixed on Eden and her fingers curled tightly in her lap.
She was a sweet old woman, poor as Eden’s patients tended to be on Tuesday afternoons and evenings, but more trusting than many who ventured into her French Quarter office.
Since Cornelia wouldn’t let anyone else do the cleaning, Eden had sent her dental assistant home forty minutes ago. With luck, she’d missed the deluge that was currently making a river of the streets and sidewalks outside.
Eden was just touching her drill to one of Cornelia’s seven remaining teeth when the examination room door burst open. If she hadn’t learned from one of the best, Cornelia’s tooth count would have been down to six.
“Eden, you have to—” The woman on the threshold halted. “You’re still working? Do you know what time it is?”
“It’s 8:27, Mary—” Eden pulled her mask down “—p.m. I won’t be finished until after nine, and no, I don’t have any extra twenties in my purse.”
“I didn’t come looking for money.” Mary offered Cornelia a perfunctory smile. “Mary Tamblyn. I’m Eden’s sister. I didn’t realize patients came here quite this late. Myself, I can’t deal with pain at night.”
Not easily ruffled, Eden motioned at the door. “There’s coffee if you want to wait.”
“But…” Mary’s look of annoyance changed to one of resignation. “Oh, all right, but it’s important this time, Eden, or I wouldn’t be here.”
She really wouldn’t, Eden thought after coaxing Cornelia’s mouth open again. Mary liked the French Quarter well enough, but going to a dentist’s office instead of searching out a freaky party? No way. She must want more than money.
“Your sister doesn’t dress like you, does she, dear? Or look a great deal like you, either. So much blond hair…” Cornelia spoke around the wedge. “She has nice teeth, though. Are they all her own?”
“All but one. An ex-boyfriend knocked out her left incisor a year ago.”
Cornelia made a clucking sound. “Bad relationship?”
“Misdirected racquetball.” Eden replaced her mask and picked up her drill. “Mary isn’t big on sports, or men who play them these days. Okay, no more stalling. Open, and I’ll have you patched up in no time.”
“Will it hurt? I think I can still feel part of my gum.”
“Cornelia, I gave you enough novocaine to keep you numb until breakfast. I’ll go slow. You can pinch my left arm if you feel anything.”
EDEN KEPT HER MIND on her work and off Mary for the next forty-five minutes. By nine-fifteen, Cornelia was scraped, filled, filed and X-rayed. She handed Eden three tens at the door, squeezed her hand and told her to keep the change. Eden watched her climb into her brother’s 1965 Buick Wildcat and tried not to think about how a man with cataracts managed to drive at night in a downpour.
Mary came up beside her. “Those two should be using public transportation.”
Eden winced as Cornelia’s brother ran the right tires up over the curb. “They only have to go twelve blocks.”
“Huh. Big spender, too—tipped you a whole dollar plus change. Thirty bucks—man, you never give me deals like that.”
“You don’t live on a fixed income and have two sons who bleed you for what little pension money you receive.” Eden tucked the bills into the pocket of her pants, stretched as she walked to the rack and removed her lab coat. “So what’s the deal? Did you sell a bunch of pictures and you want me to spring for the champagne?”
Mary stared after the disappearing Buick. “They’re photographs, not pictures, and no, I didn’t. God, I hope I don’t end up like them one day.” Turning her head, she ran her gaze up and down her sister’s body. “Or you, either, for that matter.”
Eden made a quick check of her face and hair in the waiting room mirror. “What’s wrong with how I look?” Other than maybe a little washed out under the bright lights.
Mary shrugged. “Nothing. You’re gorgeous. Every man I date says so. But…” Her expression grew mysterious, and Eden sighed. She recognized the sign.
“‘For deeds long past, chère child will reap, my vengeance curse, of death—or worse.’”
Eden, who’d taken a moment to release her dark hair from its ponytail, gave her head a shake and her shoulders a roll. “Why do you love that old rhyme so much? You don’t believe in family curses any more than I do.”
“I know. But then it doesn’t apply to me, does it? I’m the youngest in our patchwork family.” Mary’s leather pants and jacket creaked as she headed for the door. “Let’s blow this spooky tooth palace. Something’s happened, and you’re the only one who can make it right.”
“I have to clean…” Eden started for the examination room, but Mary grabbed her arm. “I’m not being dramatic, Eden. This is big, or at least it could be, and it doesn’t involve you lending me money. It’s about Lisa.”
Something tightened in Eden’s stomach. Mary wouldn’t hesitate to plead her own cause, but she seldom championed anyone else’s. And she never looked rattled.
“What about Lisa?” she asked. “Is she sick? Hurt? In trouble?”
“The last thing.” Loosening her grip, Mary made a disgruntled sound.
“Okay, look, our middle sister, who pored over the records of every adoption agency in the city, found you, found me and brought us all together ten years ago, was questioned by two cops. They came to the house tonight. They were asking her questions about a man named Maxwell Burgoyne.”
“Someone she’s dating?” No, that couldn’t be right, Eden realized. Lisa didn’t date. She waved the question aside before Mary could respond. “Never mind. Just tell me who he is.”
“You want it straight?”
“Please.”
“Maxwell Burgoyne is our biological father—as in the unknown X chromosome that forms half the link between us.”
Stunned, Eden stared at her. “Lisa found our natural father? I thought he was dead.”
Mary’s red lips curved into a sardonic smile. “He is dead, Eden, deader than Dickens’s ghostly doornail. The thing is, he only got that way two nights ago. Maxwell Burgoyne was murdered in a plantation cemetery seventeen miles outside of New Orleans. And according to the city’s finest, Lisa was quite likely the last person to see him alive.”
THEY WENT TO EDEN’S French Quarter walk-up. It was ten minutes from her office on foot, less than three in Mary’s zippy black sports car.
Lisa had given her the car as a gift two years ago—or so Mary claimed. Eden had a feeling this gift, like so many others, had been bestowed out of guilt rather than generosity.
Not that Lisa wasn’t generous. She loved to give. She donated to several charities that Eden knew of and spent hours every week trying to entice Eden to move in with her and Mary. She would buy them a three-story house in the Garden District, large enough that they could all have private suites.
“I can afford it,” she’d told Eden only last month. “You know I hit the adoption jackpot, and now that my mother and father are both gone, their money’s just sitting there, waiting to be spent.”
“But not on us,” Eden had countered. “Take a Mediterranean cruise, Lisa. Meet men. Flirt, dance, do something that doesn’t involve soil, fertilizer and root rot.”
“I