The Gates of Evangeline (35 page)

Hettie.

“Damn.”

Sean and Hettie. How did I miss this? Roi Duchesne's assessment of Hettie wasn't so far off the mark, after all.

Mind racing, I work through the implications of their affair. That Bible must have belonged to Hettie. It wasn't Andre's sexual offenses she wrestled with but her own. For a time, though, love won out. Love covered a multitude of sins. A relationship would explain the money she'd been giving Sean. They must have been planning to run away together, stashing money until the time was right. Three years spent building their bank account, and the payments started when she was just a few months pregnant with Gabriel.

“Shit, shit,
shit
.” That baby wasn't Neville's.

According to Danelle Martin, Neville threatened to kill his wife if she ever took a lover. Threatened her and hit her, years before Gabriel was born, and probably years before her affair with Sean began. Hettie would not have forgotten that threat. She must have feared Neville every time she and Sean were together—what her husband might do not just to her, but to her child.

I don't know what happened in August of 1982, but Sean had been missing since June, probably dead, and Hettie must have thought her youngest son was in grave danger. So, like a true mother, she gave up her child to protect him. Gave him to the one person who loved him almost as much as she did, a woman who'd helped to raise him from the very beginning: Maddie Lauchlin. His grandmother.

No wonder Hettie was uninterested in helping Detective Minot with his investigation. She knew what had happened. She knew where her son was. I sink down to the floor, legs too weak to carry me when the realization hits.

Gabriel Deveau is alive. Gabriel Deveau is Noah.

I
have many burning questions for Hettie, but one above all others can't wait. I sprint up Evangeline's grand staircase and burst into her bedroom without so much as a knock.

“Does he know? Does he know who he is?”

Propped up on a pile of carefully arranged pillows, Hettie observes my breathless entrance with clear, unsurprised eyes. Her skin hangs from her skull like a ghostly, milky-blue fabric. She doesn't have long. Still, I'm convinced she recognizes me. Understands exactly what I'm saying, and why.

Her redheaded nurse, who has been rocking out with his iPod, rises quickly from his chair. He plucks out his earbuds and moves to escort me out, but Hettie turns, tortoiselike, and waves him from the room with a feeble hand. I've had my concerns about her mental state—still do—but I know she is, at this moment, perfectly lucid. Why else would she demand privacy? She knows what I'm about to accuse her of.

“You're still here,” Hettie murmurs. “I thought you would have gone with him.”

The curtains are pulled back today, and the brightly lit room is less tomblike than I've seen it. On a table by her bed, I recognize the pot of paperwhite narcissus that Noah brought weeks ago, now in full flower. I stand at the foot of her bed, awash in sunshine, wishing I could simultaneously interrogate her and dash off in search of Noah.

“Did you tell him that he's your son?”

“He doesn't believe me.” She looks so fragile lying there in a flowered nightgown, fingers grasping the rail of her hospital bed. It's hard to believe that she sustained such an incredible lie all these years. “I waited too long, and now he doesn't believe me.”

“When did you tell him?” I can't blame Noah for having secrets, not when I have so many of my own, but I want to know how long he's been carrying this around. If he didn't find it credible, why keep it from me?

“I told him the other night,” Hettie says vaguely. “He said he had to leave the house, that he wasn't welcome anymore. I told him, ‘Darling, you're always welcome in my home, you're my child.' I tried to explain to him.” She closes her eyes. “He just looked at me like I was some crazy woman.”

She's talking about last Friday, I realize, when Andre and Jules fired him. I thought Noah was reeling from the loss of his job, and I'm sure he was at first. But after he went to the house to get his phone, he became brooding and withdrawn—so much so, I thought perhaps he'd tried to poison Jules. Now I understand. He must've gone to say his good-byes to Hettie and received an earful. Though he wasn't quite prepared to believe her, the first seeds of doubt were planted.

There's so many lies in my life,
he said,
I don't even know who I am at the bottom of it all.
But he did know. Part of him knew that Hettie wasn't speaking to him from a senile cloud. If anything, her foggy mind made her more honest, unable to continue the deception she'd perpetrated for thirty years.

“He doesn't think you're crazy,” I tell her slowly. “He
wishes
you were.”

“He asked me for proof this morning,” she says. “I have nothing but my word, and you know what that's worth.”

“He was here this morning?” I'm dubious. “Noah? I mean, Gabriel?”

“He was here and then left. Didn't you come with him?”

“No.” I'm hurt that he didn't come to see me, although I'm beginning to understand the magnitude of what he's processing.

Hettie fingers the lace collar of her nightgown. “He was so distant. He kept asking about some woman who used to work here, then he left.”

“Violet Johnson,” I murmur. “He thinks that's his mother.”

She stares at the edge of her sheet. “Of course. I'd forgotten her name.”

“Tell me how you did it.” I drag a footstool with a tasseled mauve cushion over to the bed and sit beside her. “The FBI had their eye on Maddie and Jack for months after the kidnapping. Where was Gabriel all that time?”

I'm expecting some evasion, but Hettie is surprisingly forthright. “Maddie had a sister in Texas,” she replies. “Ran a little day care from her home. She took him for a while.”

“Nobody ever looked at her?” This seems incredible, given the scrutiny Maddie and Jack were under.

“Oh, the FBI came 'round to ask about Maddie a couple times, asking questions. Gabriel was right there, playing with the other kids. But they never realized.” She smiles faintly at their ineptitude.

I'm less amused. “The FBI didn't recognize the kid they were searching for when he was right in front of them?”

“She'd cut off most his hair and dyed it blond. I expect he looked different.”

Hiding in plain sight. Given the attention this case received, I'm sort of disappointed in the simplicity of the plan. “So eventually Maddie and Jack came to get him, and that was it? They raised him?”

“They changed his name,” Hettie says. “They dropped off the grid and raised him as Noah Palmer.”

“Palmer,” I repeat. “Is that what he goes by? Noah Palmer?” I rack my brain for times that Noah explicitly told me his last name was Lauchlin but find none. I always just assumed it, because of his father and his grandparents. A different surname would explain why Detective Minot couldn't find records of him.

“Noah Palmer,” Hettie confirms. “When he got older and wanted to know why his last name was different than theirs, Maddie just blamed it on reporters, said she didn't want him mixed up in all the Deveau kidnapping press.”

“But how did you . . .” I can't believe the scope of what they pulled off. “I mean, he's a business owner. He files taxes. Legally, Noah Palmer exists, right?”

“Oh, yes.” She smiles. “It took years, but I helped Maddie and Jack get papers for him.”

It must be nice being rich and connected. “And Violet Johnson? How did her name end up on the birth certificate?”

“She worked for us years earlier,” Hettie explains. “We had her Social Security number, her birth date. She was about the right age.”

“And Neville never knew?”

She shudders. “Lord, no. He knew I kept in touch with Maddie and Jack, but he didn't know . . . what we'd done. Nobody did. Not even Gabriel.” With great effort, Hettie rises from her cluster of pillows and leans toward me. “They told him his mama was dead. Sometimes I wished I was.”

I can't stop thinking of little Noah, living in Texas with a great-aunt he barely knew, suddenly cut off from his entire former life. It was hard enough for Keegan when his father left, and he still had me, the house, all his normal routines. But Noah lost everything. Not three years old, and he lost everyone and everything.

“Have you told him about Sean? Have you told him his father is dead?”

For the first time I sense a reluctance to answer. “Andre told me you were asking about Sean,” Hettie says. “He's been worrying over it.”

Andre must have known, all along, who those bones at the sugar mill belonged to. How did he get involved in this mess, anyway? He was only eighteen. Surely Hettie wouldn't have intentionally dragged him into this. Did he somehow stumble upon Sean's letter and work it out for himself?

“I'm not here to make trouble for you all,” I say.

“I know. You wouldn't hurt Gabriel.” She's so persuaded of the bond between Noah and me. Has he talked about me or has she just drawn her own wild conclusions? “I'm glad he's picked a smart woman. I was never one. Neville wouldn't have married me if I was.” She studies me. “You haven't told my son everything, have you?”

“It's not mine to tell.”

“You're a smart woman,” she says again.

I'm not interested in her compliments. “They found Sean. They found where he was buried.”

She sinks back into the hospital bed. “Andre told me,” she says. “I knew he would turn up one day. I guess in some ways it's a relief.” I still can't tell if she herself buried him.

“The FBI will want to speak to you.”

“They already have. Some men came asking about Sean the other day.”

“What did you tell them?”

She frowns. “I didn't tell them a thing. I pretended I didn't understand the questions, didn't know who they were talking about. The nurses told them that I've been suffering from dementia, and they left me alone. Of course, they've been pestering Andre and my girls ever since.”

I wonder if the twins are in on this, too. Probably not. Sydney and Brigitte are the ones inviting nosy authors into the home. They don't seem to realize all their family has to hide.

Although she's avoided the issue of Sean's death thus far, I'm convinced something in Hettie wants to talk. Wants to unburden herself, to explain.

“Why?” I ask, intentionally leaving the question open-ended. “Why did you do it?”

She presses her fingers to her lips and finally offers me an answer. “I was so alone,” she whispers. “That's not an excuse, I know. But I thought—maybe it would save me.”

I don't know if she's offering her reason for the affair or the murder. Either way, I'm curious.

“I always knew Sean had a little crush on me,” she goes on. “Neville and I used to laugh about it, back when he was a kid. He was so young. Sixteen, maybe? I was eleven years older than him. I never thought of him that way, believe me.”

“When did you start to . . . ?” I don't want to sound indelicate.

Hettie shifts around in bed, wincing at each movement, and for a few guilty seconds I'm reminded that she's dying. She's in pain. The humane thing would be to call in the nurse and ask for meds, but I can't bring myself to cloud her clear mind with drugs.

“It was my thirty-ninth birthday,” she says. “Neville was in Atlanta with a woman. He thought I didn't know, but I did.” Her breathing catches, and for a horrible second I think it'll all end there, that final breath, but she fights through it, determined to get the story out. “The kids were away at school. And they forgot, Neville and the kids, they all forgot about my birthday. But Sean, he was on leave, visiting his parents—and he remembered. He said, ‘How's it going, birthday girl?'” She shakes her head, and her ragged breathing eases somewhat. “The littlest kindness. That was all I needed.”

I lean against the rail of her hospital bed, half-wanting to touch her, empathizing with her loneliness in spite of myself. I can smell the flowers on her bedside table, their perfume thick and cloying. “Did you love him?”

She fixes her tired gaze on me. “Oh, honey. Love or desperation, what's the difference? He was something to look forward to.” Her face crumples a little, remembering. “He had such big plans for us. It wasn't right, and I never thought it was. I just didn't know how to stop.”

“I found one of his letters,” I tell her. “He was asking you to run away with him.”

She smiles a little. “He started that as soon as he found out I was pregnant. He wanted me to take Gabriel and just leave. Start a family, the three of us. I knew it was more complicated than that, and I had three other children to think of. But we'd put aside some money every month, talk about how it was going to be, how we'd run off to Mexico where Neville couldn't find us.” Hettie presses her cheek to the pillow, sad now. “Maddie and Jack used that money later to raise Gabriel.”

“Sean's parents knew about the affair, then?”

“Oh, yes. Poor Maddie got stuck covering for us plenty of times. We scared her to death.”

I see now why Maddie and Jack were so against their son's mystery woman—and how helpless they must have been to do anything. On the one hand, Maddie had the luxury of raising her beloved grandchild. On the other, Neville's temper was widely known. Maddie had to have felt the danger her son was in. But what could she do? Refuse to help the pair, and risk Neville's wrath?

“Did you consider going to Mexico?” Running away doesn't strike me as the perfect solution, but years of sneaking around seem worse.

Hettie considers this. “It never seemed real to me,” she admits. “It was nice to talk about. Made me feel like . . . I had a choice. But it never seemed real.”

“Did Sean threaten to tell Neville?”

“No,” she says. “Sean wasn't like that. He wanted me to leave for love, not fear. In the end, he told me to choose, now or never. And I was a coward. I chose never.”

“And that was in June, two months before Gabriel disappeared?”

“Yes.”

There's just one gaping hole. If she didn't try to leave Neville, and Sean didn't spill the beans . . .

“How did Sean end up dead?”

I'm met with silence.

Nothing but her breathing. Ugly, shallow gulps for air, followed by a long, moaning sigh. “Because he came back,” she says. “The night he was going to leave. He came back to the house and tried to take Gabriel.”

“So you killed him?”

Hettie won't look at me. She turns her head away. “God will judge me,” she says dully. “I've lived for thirty years knowing that. Believe me, I don't ever forget.”

“But I don't understand—”

She holds up a trembling hand, warding me off. “Please. It was a horrible thing, and I'd undo it if I could. But don't you understand? I had to protect my son. Let it be.”

You fool. Did you really think you could reclaim your lost son without also accepting responsibility for what happened to his father?
But killing Sean isn't the worst of her crimes, not in my book.

“How could you do it?” I ask. “Just—give your child away?”

“He's safe,” she says simply. “When he was with me, I always had to worry. What if Neville found out? What if—I don't know—there was a blood test and it came out that Gabriel wasn't his? My husband might've killed him. Killed us both.”