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Under the threat of death, it didn’t seem so important.
“Mary Ellen.”
“Shut up.” She didn’t look up from the chest where she was rummaging through the drawers one-handed, grasping a long, nasty-looking knife in the other.
He’d met her at the Saint Charles Avenue house a few hours ago by his best guess. She’d been pale and shaky as she’d unlocked the mudroom door, so fidgety he’d needed to steady the key in her hand. Once inside, though, her nerves had calmed. She hadn’t trembled at all as they’d climbed the stairs to the second floor, not even when she’d led the way into their parents’ room. She had glanced at the stripped-down bed where Jeremiah had died without any reaction at all, and the dried blood splattering across the wall hadn’t fazed her.
He hadn’t expected it to faze him, but it did.
She’d cried no tears, hadn’t said much but had gone straight to the two-hundred-year-old rosewood table where Camilla’s jewelry chest sat. He was missing a few minutes after that. The next thing he knew, he was sitting in a chair, wrists and ankles bound, and dripping blood on the petit point upholstery of a chair even older than the desk, and a stranger was inhabiting his sister’s body.
It was a hard thing to take in, that Mary Ellen had killed their mother, their father, sweet old Miss Viola and now she intended to kill him. Mary Ellen, who loved kittens and babies and was so fragile and delicate and had never hurt anyone in her entire life.
But all that sweetness and gentleness had just been the outside. Inside, she was more broken than anyone he’d known, and that fact broke his heart.
She moved on from the chest to a bureau made of curly maple that some Landry had brought from France before Louisiana was a state. “What are you looking for?” he asked.
This time she glanced at him, an expression he’d never seen on her face, a coldness he’d never seen in her eyes. “He had a ring. I didn’t have time to find it that morning, thanks to Constance coming in to work early.”
“What ring?”
“Like this.” Shoving a hand into her pocket, she pulled out two heavy gold and onyx rings, identical but for size. “They all had one. This one is Bradley Wallace’s. This one is Marco Gaudette’s. The lucky bastard survived, but I won’t make any more mistakes. A couple more, and I’ll have the entire set.”
She’d attacked Gaudette? Aw, jeez, Landry’s fear grew. “Why, Mary Ellen? After all this time...”
Slowly she came to stand a half dozen feet in front of him. “I was a good daughter. After everything they did to me, I still came over here every week. I had lunches and dinners, I brought the kids to play, I did everything a dutiful daughter should do. And one night, after dinner, after the kids went to play outside with Laura, he smiled at me, and he said, ‘Faith will be turning ten before long. I have a special celebration planned for her. Do you remember our special celebration for your tenth birthday, Mellen?’”
Landry had forgotten that was what Jeremiah had called her. Not out of affection but, he’d always believed, because she wasn’t worth making the effort to say her entire name.
“I died that day, and he was smiling. Threatening to do the same damn thing to my baby.” She was shaking again, but this time it was rage. It mottled her skin and gave her words a staccato, machine-gun effect. “I talked to Mama. I begged her to do something, to stop him this time, to help protect my baby, but she just brushed me off. Like always. So I took the girls home, but I came back that night. I lured her away—got her to write a note saying she was leaving him—and I buried her inside that damn crypt the way she should have buried me all those years ago.” Laughter burst from her. “It was so easy. She was so damn drunk. I said, ‘Lie here and rest,’ and she did.”
Sickness roiling through him, Landry squeezed his eyes shut. He better understood how Mary Ellen had blocked out so much about the past. He was way older, way stronger, and damned if he didn’t want to erase the last hour from his memory.
“I was gone for a little while,” she said conversationally, seating herself on a lacquered stool, “but when he brought up Faith’s birthday again, I came back. I stopped him. I made sure he would never, ever hurt either of my girls or any other girl again.”
Landry swallowed hard. “I understand killing him, really I do. And Bradley Wallace and all the others. But Miss Viola... Mary Ellen, she loved you like her own child. Why did you have to hurt her?”
“Because she knew, and she did nothing.”
It was the answer he expected, the one he and Alia had already discussed, but it was no better coming from Mary Ellen. He had hoped for a more satisfying explanation, for enlightenment, but got only disappointment. “She forced him to send you away to school. She got you away from him. She made him stop hurting you.”
