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Her face and palms were tingling as she watched him drive away, the paint job on his Humvee as bright as a yellow jacket in the sunlight. Dammit, she thought. Dammit, dammit, dammit.
AFTER SUPPER ON Wednesday evening, Alafair received a call on her cell phone from Gretchen Horowitz. “Take a ride with me,” she said.
Alafair shut and opened her eyes and wondered how she could hide the reluctance she felt in her chest. “Now?” she said.
“I need your advice.”
“About what?”
“I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.”
“I was thinking of taking a walk in a few minutes.”
“Your father doesn’t want you around me?”
“It creates certain kinds of conflicts for him, Gretchen. Be realistic.”
“I bought a whole bunch of film equipment. I’m going to make the documentary on the 1940s music revue.”
“That’s not why you called.”
“I’ll be parked by the drawbridge on Burke Street. If you don’t feel like talking with me, don’t worry about it.”
“Gretchen—”
Minutes later, Alafair walked past the Shadows and the old brick building that had been a Buick agency and was now a law office. She turned up the street that fed onto the drawbridge and saw Gretchen’s chopped-down pickup parked by the corner, its exposed chrome-plated engine gleaming in the twilight. Gretchen got out on the sidewalk. “Thanks for coming,” she said.
“What’s the trouble?” Alafair said.
“Something happened today. I’m a little mixed up about it. You want a drink?”
“No. Tell me what it is.”
“I saw Pierre Dupree take a crippled child into the Catholic church in Broussard this morning. He saw me watching him and pulled into my driveway. He invited me to lunch.”
A pleasure boat loaded with revelers emerged from under the bridge and passed the old convent and hospital on the opposite side of the bayou. They were holding balloons and smiling, and their expressions seemed garish and surreal among the balloons. “You’re not going to say anything?” Gretchen asked.
“Did you go with him?”
“No.”
“I think you made a wise choice,” Alafair said.
Gretchen folded her arms on her chest and looked at the diners eating and drinking in the courtyard behind Clementine’s. There were white cloths and candles that flickered inside glass vessels on the dining tables, and the candles made shadows on the banana plants that grew along the restaurant’s walls.
“I called the church,” Gretchen said. “Pierre—”
“Pierre?”
“That’s his name, isn’t it? He not only paid for the crippled boy’s tuition, he set up a scholarship fund.”
“Don’t be taken in by this guy,” Alafair said.
“He had no way of knowing I’d see him at the church with the little boy.”
“I think something else is going on with you, Gretchen. You’re having second thoughts about your own life, and you want to believe that people can be redeemed. Pierre Dupree is no good.”
“Where do you get all this knowledge about what goes on in other people’s heads?”
