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Beau slammed the door in his face. "It's all right, Aubrey," he said. "Everything is under control."

"Very good, sir." Aubrey retreated and Beau followed me into the living room.

"Don't worry yourself about him," he told me after I sat. My heart was pounding and I felt the blood rushing into my face. "I mean it, no one will give one word he says any credibility. You should hear some of the things they're saying about him now."

"How could Daphne had brought such a person into her life after being married to my father?" I wondered aloud.

"You said yourself she used people and then discarded them like so much baggage," Beau replied. He came to my side and sat beside me to take my hand. "You can't let him get to you, Ruby."

"But how did he know? Of all the people to look at me and know. . a drunken man?" I looked at Beau and answered my own question. "He was intimate with Gisselle. She toyed with him, I'm sure."

"Probably," Beau said.

"He was always flirting with me, coming right up to me and taking my hands and looking into my eyes. I hated it; he always had some onions or something on his breath and I had to be polite but firm. And it was my painting . . . I shouldn't have let him see my painting. That, more than anything, gave it away."

"What difference does it make what he knows and doesn't know, what he did and didn't do? He's a man who's lost respect, and in this town, when you have no respect, you don't have a voice. Believe me, I'll be able to handle him," Beau promised.

"It's no good, Beau," I said, shaking my head. "If a shack's built on weak legs, the first bad flood will wash it away. We're trying to build a new life with a foundation of lies. It's going to come back and haunt us."

"Only if we let it," he insisted. He put his arm around me. "Come on, take a rest. Later you'll feel better. We'll go out to one of the finer restaurants and have a spectacular dinner, okay?"

"I don't know, Beau," I said with a deep sigh.

"Well, I do. The doctor's prescribing," he said, sighing, and helped me to my feet.

Above the marble fireplace, Daphne's portrait still hung, the beautiful ivory face peering down at me with an expression of arrogance and self-satisfaction. My father worshiped that beauty and loved having replicas of her everywhere in the mansion.

Remember, child, the devil in all his forms fascinates us, Grandmere Catherine had warned.

We're drawn to him like a child is drawn to the wonder of a candle flame and is tempted to put the tip of his finger into the light, only to get burned.

How I hoped and prayed Beau and I had not put our fingers into the candle's flame. 14

Shadows from the Past

.

Beau was apparently right about what would

happen in regards to Bruce and anything he might do or say. Bruce had lost all his credibility in the business world, and the bank did foreclose on his one major means of making money, his apartment building. Somehow he continued to find money for his drinking, but anything he did tell anyone was considered a pathetic attempt at getting back at the Dumas family. Those who knew him when he was married to Daphne remembered how disdainfully she had treated him. They referred to him as just another ornament on her arm, another piece of jewelry.

Finally, one day Beau called to tell me he had heard that Bruce had moved to Baton Rouge, where he had gotten a job through one of his few friends as the manager of a small hotel.

"So we're rid of him," Beau said, but somehow I thought Bruce Bristow was like a swarm of swamp mosquitoes: One day they were gone, but you knew they would return to pester you again someday.

Meanwhile, the situation at Cypress Woods remained at status quo. Gisselle lingered in her comatose state; Paul had his good days when he did some work and was sensible, but according to Toby and Jeanne, he still spent most of his time wallowing in self-pity. Jeanne told me he even visited Grandmere Catherine's old shack.

"The shack! Why would he go there?" I asked, feeling myself slide into the abyss of yesterdays.

"It's become something of a shrine to him," she said in her small, sad voice one afternoon on the telephone. "What do you mean?"

"He doesn't care if the gardens and the landscaping are looked after here at Cypress Woods, but he brings some of his men down to the shack and has them cut the grass, plant new grass, and even repair the shack." She paused. "He has even spent evenings there."

"Evenings?" I felt my ever-present anxiety slip into a knot.

"Slept there," she revealed.

My heart stopped beating and then pounded. "Slept at the shack?"

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