"I am certain you are well aware of my relationship with your sister," he drawled, that smooth, wonderful voice rolling out of him, rolling over Laurel like sunwarmed caramel. She steeled herself against its effects. "And you think less of me for it."
"You're an adulterer, Mr. Cooper. What am I supposed to think of you?"
"That perhaps I loved Savannah as best I could while trying to keep a promise to a woman who no longer remembers me or anything of the life we once had together."
Laurel pressed her lips together and looked down at her shoes, dodging the steady blue gaze.
"Savannah once told me you thought in absolutes," he said. "Right or wrong. Guilty or not guilty. Life isn't quite so black and white as you would like for it to be, Laurel. Nothing is as absolute in reality as it is in our minds in our youth."
"Loved," Laurel repeated, seizing on the thought to fend off any pangs of contrition his words may have inspired. She raised her head and looked at him sharply again. "You said loved. Past tense."
"Yes. It's over." He ran a hand back through his blond hair, glancing at the clock as it ticked away another few seconds. "I don't mean to be rude, but I have to be in N'Awlins this afternoon. If you'll excuse my back, I'll lead the way."
As she followed him into his bedroom, a feeling of something like déjà vu stole over her. The furnishings were big and masculine. The smell of leather and shoe polish underscored the faint woodsy tang of aftershave. Like Daddy's room back home before Vivian had dismantled it and given it over to Ross.
A duffel bag sat open on the white counterpane on the bed, giving her a peek of white cotton and polished wingtips. Cooper went to the closet and selected three shirts, which he hung neatly in a black garment bag on the closet door.
"She wanted to go with me on this trip," he said. "Of course, I had to tell her no. She knew very well the boundaries of our relationship. If you think she took the news well, I should point out to you that I used to have a collection of fine antique shaving mugs left to me by my grandfather. I kept them in that cabinet next to the bathroom door."
The curio cabinet stood, an empty frame with no glass in its sides and no antique shaving mugs within. All signs of the destruction had been vacuumed away, but Laurel could very easily picture her sister hurling mugs at Cooper's head. She had that kind of rage in her, that kind of violence.
Fingers of tension curled around her stomach and squeezed.
"When did this argument take place?" she asked, turning to face Cooper once again.
He hung a pearl gray suit in the garment bag and smoothed the sleeves. "Tuesday. Why?"
"Because I haven't seen her since Tuesday morning."
He pulled another suit from the closet and added it to the bag, frowning as his mind rushed to plot out scenarios. "Then she's probably gone on to N'Awlins. I wouldn't put it past her to think she could disrupt my stay."
"She didn't have a car."
"She may have caught a ride with a friend." His mouth compressed into a tight line as he zipped the bag shut. "Or another man. You might check with the Maison de Ville. She likes to stay in the cottages there."
"Yes," Laurel murmured. "I know."
They had stayed there the spring before their father died. A family outing, one of the few she remembered happily. She could still hear Vivian going on about how movie stars sometimes stayed there. She could still see the thick-walled cottages and the courtyard, could still hear the noise and smell the ripe smells of New Orleans as she had perceived them then, through the senses of a child.
Cooper pulled the garment bag down from the closet door, folded and latched it securely. Laurel watched his hands. They were thick and strong with square-cut nails. The hands of a farmer or a carpenter, not a writer. A gold band, burnished with age, circled the third finger of his left hand.
"How is your wife?"
His head came up sharply, eyes shining with interest and surprise as he studied her. He swung the bag onto the bed beside the duffel.
Laurel picked at her ravaged thumbnail absently, uncomfortable with the topic and his scrutiny. "I heard about the incident at St. Joseph's. I'm sorry."
Coop nodded slowly, finding it interesting that Laurel would apologize for the actions of her sister. They were two sides of the same coin-one light, one dark; one driven by angst to acts of justice, one to strange fits of passion. Laurel subdued everything feminine about herself; Savannah flaunted and magnified. Laurel held everything within; Savannah knew no boundaries and no control.
"She's doing well enough," he said. "One of the few saving graces of her illness is that she forgets unpleasantness almost as quickly as it happens. It's the rest of us who have to go on with bad memories lingering like the smell of smoke."
The past was gone, but its taint was stubborn and pervasive. An apt analogy, Laurel thought as she left the house.
She slid behind the wheel of her car and just sat there for a moment, her mind trying to go in eight directions at once. Cooper thought Savannah had gone to New Orleans. It didn't feel right. Savannah had always treated a trip to New Orleans as an event, something to fuss over and pack and repack for. She would have told Aunt Caroline, promised to bring back something outrageous for Mama Pearl just to hear the old woman huff and puff. She wouldn't have slipped away like a thief in the night, regardless of who she had gone with.
She would call the Maison de Ville, just to be sure, but there were other possibilities, and one of them was Jimmy Lee Baldwin.
Jimmy Lee stretched out across his rumpled bed and groaned. He felt near death with exhaustion. He smelled of rank, ripe sweat with an undertone of liquor and an overtone of sex. Without question, he needed a long shower before his lunch meeting with his deacons. Deacons. Christ, the saps would go nuts over that title.
"You're fucking brilliant, Jimmy Lee," he snickered, staring up at the creaking old ceiling fan as it strained to stir the stale air. "You're a Grade A-mazing, God damntastic genius."
It was the sign of a man who would go far. When things turned sour, he found a way to sweeten the deal. The taping at the Texaco station hadn't turned out the way he had planned, but ultimately it was going to be to his advantage. He would make sure of it.
The brainstorm had come in the middle of a wild, hard fuck. In a way, he had a whore to thank, ironic as that seemed. The answer to his troubles was what she had begged from him-mercy, sympathy. He would play on the sympathies of his followers. He didn't believe in giving sympathy himself. Go for the throat. Look out for Number One. Those were his mottoes. But the American people had traditionally loved an underdog. He would get a few key puppets whipped into a frenzy for his flagging cause, they would rally the troops, and he'd be back on track in nothing flat.
He smiled a wicked smile as he pictured it. The looks on their gullible, stupid faces as he poured his heart out to them about the plight of his ministry and his campaign to end sin. His cause was being sabotaged by Satan in the guise of Jack Boudreaux. He was being thwarted and made to look a fool at every turn, and he just didn't know if he had the heart to go on alone. Perhaps if one or two good men would be willing to shoulder some of his burden by filling the role of deacon… Their eyes would go wide, and their faces would shine with imagined grace.
The timing was perfect. Discovery of a mutilated female in their own backyards tended to turn people's thoughts to God and to vengeance. They would want a leader and a scapegoat, and Jimmy Lee intended to give them both.
He sat up just enough to snag the paperback off his nightstand and fell back across the lumpy mattress, thumbing through the pages.
Blood ran in rivulets, pearling and tumbling in the knife's wake. She tried to scream, but the sound vibrated only in her mind. Her throat was raw. Silk filled her mouth, like a stopper in a bottle, and the tie of the gag pulled her lips back in a macabre smile…
"Twisted stuff, Jack my man." He chuckled as he folded down the corner on the page.
This was all playing right into his hands. He fantasized about all the possibilities as he stripped and showered in the grungy, mildew-coated shower stall. Jack Boudreaux would get pinned for the murders. Jimmy Lee would be a hero. Free publicity. Fan mail. The faithful would come out of the woodwork and follow him anywhere, do anything for him. What a perfectly wonderful dream.