American Heroes Series - 03 - Purgatory (42 page)

Elliot fell silent a moment,
digesting everything he had told her, her mind shooting off in many different
directions but one in particular.

“Nash, if I ask you a question,
will you tell me the truth?”

“Always.”

“When I was furnishing Purgatory,
you told me I could spend whatever I wanted. We ended up spending almost one
hundred and fifty thousand dollars on furniture, antiques, televisions, rugs,
driveways, gates, you name it. That amount was more than it cost me to restore
the entire house. My budget was only eighty thousand dollars, but I know for a
fact that it cost much more than that.  You and Beau said you would pick up the
rest, and you did. You never even batted an eyelash.”

“What’s your question?”

“How much did it cost you total
for the restoration of the house, including the construction labor?”

He grunted softly. “I’m so
tired,” he mumbled. “I think I need to go back to sleep.”

She sat up and looked at him. “Go
back to sleep, my foot,” she countered firmly, struggling not to smile at him.
“You said you would answer the question.”

His eyes were closed but he
peeped one open to look at her. “Why do you want to know?”

She softened up, putting her face
the crook of his neck, her lips on his flesh. “Because I do. Please tell me.”

When she kissed his neck and
snuggled up to him, he would do or say whatever she wanted. It was a secret
little hold she had over him and he sighed heavily.

“Three hundred and thirty-four
thousand, two-hundred fifty dollars and sixty-three cents,” he muttered.

Elliot stopped kissing his neck
and her head shot up, her eyes wide with astonishment. “You spent
how much
?”

“You asked.”

She was growing agitated again.
“What kind of dummy are you?” she demanded. “You spent that kind of money on a
house that doesn’t even belong to you?”

He grinned at her, casually, and
put his hand on the back of her head. “
You
belong to me,” he pulled her
down and kissed her lips. “I told you I wanted to see you happy. If you’re
happy, I’m happy.”

She let him kiss her a couple of
times. “Where did you get the money from?”

“You said one question.”

“Please, Nash. I feel like I need
to pay you back.”

He sobered quickly. “You’ll do no
such thing,” he said firmly. “I wanted to do it.”

“Then please tell me where you
got the money.”

He gazed into her serious eyes.
“I have a trust fund that my mother’s father set up for me when I was born,” he
said softly. “Both of my boys have trust funds also, as will our baby. I think
I’ll set up one for Alec and Penny also. Anyway, as a grandson of the founding
family, I’m also a partial owner. Since Gammon Sugar is the largest producer of
refined sugar products in the United States as well as a publicly traded
company, I earn yearly dividends on the profits. Depending on the year, the
weather conditions, the price of fuel, and on and on, I can earn anywhere from
a hundred thousand dollars to upwards of a million.  It just depends. Julie
took a chunk of it when we divorced and I also give my boys a portion of that
money, held in a trust fund until they’re twenty five.”

Elliot stared at him to see if he
was teasing her but when she realized he wasn’t, her jaw dropped. “Nash,” she
scolded softly. “You never told me any of this. You really should have.”

“Why?” he wanted to know. “Does
it change your mind about me?”

She shook her head. “Of course
not,” she said.  “But it’s only fair. I would feel like an idiot not knowing
everything about the man I’m going to marry.”

He nodded. “Point taken,” he
said. “So I guess to answer that question you asked several minutes ago, my
uncle has always wanted to hire me on as the Chief Administrative Officer for
Gammon. It’s a legal position and since that’s my background, I would fit into
it easily.”

“You’re a cop, not a lawyer.”

“My graduate degree is in law.”

She stared at him a moment before
lying back down against him. “Wow,” she said simply. “This is a lot to take
in.”

His hand ended up on her head,
gently caressing her scalp. “Do you want me to call my uncle?” he asked
softly.  “I will if you want me to. Nothing is more important than your
happiness, Ellie. I don’t want to make you miserable working at a job that
terrifies you every time I walk out the door.”

Her hand was on his chest,
hearing his strong heartbeat.  She closed her eyes, savoring the sound.

“It would be so easy to say yes,”
she said softly, “but I just can’t. I’m sorry I got angry with you, Nash. It’s
just… well, you know why. I won’t go into it again. I guess I had to take my
frustrations out on somebody but the truth is that I know why you went on the
call-out. You’re the Sheriff and those are your men out there, laying their
lives on the line, and you’re responsible. I get that.  As far as the police commissioner
appointment, that’s such an honorable and prestigious thing for you. I would
never dream of taking it away from you because you’ve earned it. But the fact
that you’re willing to give it all up for me says so much.”

He kissed the top of her head,
his fingers caressing the blond strands.  “So what do you want me to do?”

“When you’re sworn in as Police
Commissioner, I’ll be right next to you.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am.”

When the nurse came back in a
half hour later, both Nash and Elliot were sound asleep together on his narrow
hospital bed.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

Late September

Elliot sat in her writing room,
typing out the last chapter of
Knight of the Vampire
. There was slashing
and sword fighting going on her mind as she patiently tapped it all out on the
keyboard.  The floor to ceiling windows were open and a soft breeze blew in off
the bayou.

It was a surprisingly mild
September day and she kept getting distracted by Wolfgang down in the dog run
they had penned in for him, barking eagerly at the bayou.  Elliot suspected
there was a gator down there she couldn’t see but the dog was so agitated, she
eventually put aside her writing and went downstairs to let him out of the dog
run.

She took the back stairs with
some lethargy, stretching out the kinks in her back as she went. At nearly four
months pregnant, she just wasn’t moving as well as she usually did. The baby
was growing, stretching her out and giving her a nice little baby bump.  She
still fit into her beloved velour jog suits, but the fit was getting tight.  At
eighteen weeks pregnant, she was feeling her daughter grow every day.

Due to the fact that she was
termed a geriatric pregnancy, a label she detested, her doctor in Baton Rouge
had already done two ultrasounds on her to make sure everything was progressing
well with the pregnancy. On the first ultrasound, all she, Nash and Penelope
could see was a kidney-bean shaped dot, but on the last one, they could
actually see the baby and the doctor informed them that it was a girl. Courtesy
of her father, Baby Sophie already had a name. It only seemed fitting. Nash
would come home every night, lay his head on her stomach, and talk to the baby.
It was the sweetest thing Elliot had ever seen.

Hand on her growing belly, she
came down the stairs into the kitchen where the kitchen contractor was still
working, even after all these months. Elliot had new countertops, a new island,
new sinks and new cabinets, but a portion of the wall between the stove and the
dining room door was still opened up as more rotted boards had been found when
they were plumbing the new vegetable sink. They’d been working on that for
nearly a week.

The contractor noticed her when
she came off the stairs. “Hey, Ms. Aury,” he said. “You got a minute? I want to
show you something.”

Elliot nodded. “Sure,” she said.
“But I’ve got to get the dog out of his run before he worries himself to
death.”

The contractor grinned. “He sure
misses the kids, don’t he?”

She grinned as she opened the
kitchen door. “He misses Penny,” she clarified. “Alec is home every night from
community college, but ever since Penny started at Tulane, the dog is having
separation anxiety.”

The contractor laughed as she
went out onto the porch and headed towards the dog run. The yard was
beautifully landscaped now except for the digging that was still going on
between the house and the olds stables. Because of the historical significance
of the access tunnel, Dr. Whitney had convinced Nash and Elliot to let them
continue to dig for awhile to see if they came up with any artifacts or any
further information on the house and the reason behind the crypt.

So far, Dr. Whitney and Dr.
Clarke had come up with something of a sprawling time capsule of history. 
Along with the secondary access tunnel that ended in the collapsed stables,
they had also uncovered the foundations of three slave quarters about a quarter
of a mile to the north, which they were excavating.  

Dr. Whitney was starting to think
they weren’t slave quarters as much as they were maybe pirate’s or sailor’s quarters
due to the nautical items they had so far uncovered. Each day, he and his team
of students would find more and more, prompting Elliot to suggest they open
some kind of museum. Nash was onboard with the idea, as was Dr. Clarke, who
very much wanted to curate it.  The artifacts they were daily coming across were
very rich indeed.

As she moved across the yard,
Elliot could see a group of students working on the secondary access trench.
These days, there were people all over Purgatory so she never felt lonely or
isolated when Nash was away at the office.

Sometimes he’d be gone fourteen
hours a day with his new position and she missed him a great deal, but she was
very proud of what he was accomplishing. Already, there was anti-corruption
legislation afoot that he had authored and bits and pieces of it were all over
the news every night.  Commissioner Aury, barely in office for a month, was
already making waves.

 Releasing Wolfgang from his pen,
the dog immediately raced over to the digging students. As Elliot tried to get
him to come back to her, he happily climbed all over the college students, who
laughed and hugged him. He was looking for food and until someone gave him
something, like a peanut or piece of a granola bar, he wouldn’t leave. A young
grad student ended up giving him a piece of beef jerky and Wolfgang ran back to
Elliot, happy and satisfied.

Shaking her head at the naughty
dog, she went back into the house and he followed.  The dog ran straight for
the ballroom and his favorite chair while Elliot went to the contractor.

“I swear that dog is worse than a
toddler,” she muttered.

The contractor grinned. “Well,
you’ll be finding that out soon enough,” he said. “By the way, my wife saw the
pictures of your wedding in the Baton Rouge Advocate and wanted to know where y’all
got the dress for your daughter.”

Elliot cocked her head. “We got
married two months ago and you’re just asking me now?”

His grin spread. “I keep
forgetting. She’ll kill me if I don’t find out.”

Elliot laughed. “At the Mall of Louisiana
in Baton Rouge,” she told him. “We got it at Macy’s.”

“I’ll let her know.”

“Now, what did you want to show
me?”

“Oh, right,” the contractor
refocused on the open wall before him. “I’m going to pull this out so you can
see it because I’ve got to re-plaster this wall anyway, but it looks like
you’ve got a dumbwaiter in this wall that was sealed up.”

“A dumbwaiter?” she repeated,
surprised. “Where does it lead to?”

The contractor had his head in
the old wall, trying to see in the dark. “To the bedroom directly above us.”

Elliot thought about that. “It’s
the smallest bedroom in the house,” she said. “Nash said it used to be where
the servants slept, so that makes sense.  They would put food in the
dumbwaiter, send it up to the servants, who would then take it to the people of
the house.”

The contractor pulled his head
out of the hole and began to pull back the section of the wall that was built
over the dumbwaiter.  “Let’s take a look,” he said.

Elliot stood back as he pulled
away the plaster, which was very fragile with age. It wasn’t the original
bousillage
,
but something more recent. Someone had taken the time to cover up the
dumbwaiter for whatever reason.  The contractor pulled off a good deal of old
plaster, revealing the treasure beneath.

It looked like an old iron box
attached to a series of pulleys and extremely old rope. In fact, the rope was
so old, it looked as if it was made from horse-tail hair. Cobwebs, rot and age
had deteriorated the rope and pulley system but the iron box looked relatively
intact. 

It was literally a square-shaped
box with a sliding front door that was closed. The contractor got his fingers
on the door and tried to work it open, but his cell phone rang and he had to
take the call.