The Legacy (12 page)

B
EFORE
J
ENNY COULD
finish her sentence, Marjo was in the car, her chest so constricted with worry she doubted she’d ever breathe normally again. Cally climbed in, too, then they took off down the road, Jenny’s two-door Escort squealing around the curves.

The sky above the funeral home had turned blood-orange, as if the sun had descended on the bayou. For a heartbeat, Marjo told herself it wasn’t fire. It was a sunset. Something,
anything
but her family’s business going up in smoke.

But as Jenny stopped the car, Marjo knew. This was no sunset. No happy ending. It was devastation.

“Oh, my God,” Cally said. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

Dancing, vibrant flames licked at the timber construction, climbed the pillars, crossed the roof. Once they’d engulfed the building, they leaped over to the sign, devouring one letter at a time as if erasing the Savoy Funeral Home.

Marjo was out of the car before Jenny put it in Park. She ran toward the scene, screaming, though
she couldn’t hear her own voice. Luc Carter caught her in his arms, holding her back. “There’s nothing you can do, Marjo. It’s gone.”

“Gabriel! Henry!”
The words were torn from her throat. She lunged forward again, but Luc held tight.

“They’re okay,” he said, repeating the words until they finally overrode her panic and sank into her mind. She looked up at him, waited for him to say the words one more time, in case she’d misheard. When he did, relief swamped her senses and she sagged against his chest. “They got out, Marjo. Don’t worry.”

She thanked God for that, and also that there’d been no loved ones inside the funeral home. It had been a slow week, which she now saw as a blessing.

Tears threatened but she brushed them away, trying to think, to determine the next step. For a moment she drew a blank, seeing nothing but the orange flames waving at her, taunting her.

Stop the fire. Save the building.

She pivoted, still secure in Luc’s grasp, and saw dozens of Indigo residents dousing the flames with water. Chuck Bell, the head of the volunteer fire department, was heading up a bucket brigade and directing Indigo’s sole fire truck into place on the other side. Alain was also there, helping to coordinate the effort, shouting orders and waving in the fire trucks from St. Martinville and New Iberia. His face was blackened from soot, his hair gray with ash.

“Where are they?” she asked Luc. “Where’s Gabriel?”

“Doc Landry’s looking after them. The new doc is way down the bayou, at the Landreaux place.”

“Where did Doc Landry take my brother?” Marjo asked, needing to see Gabriel with her own eyes, to be sure he was okay. She couldn’t lose him.

Luc pointed to the left. “They’re over on the Melancons’ porch, right next door.”

Marjo broke away, crossing the divide between the two properties in seconds. Her throat, her lungs burned. She heard Cally call out to her, but she didn’t stop.

Finally she stumbled up the steps, eyes watering, gaze darting wildly from one corner of the porch to the other. At first, she didn’t see anyone, and panic clawed at her.

Then, a familiar shoe, a well-worn pair of jeans. Gabriel. Henry.

Henry was sitting up against the side of the house, his skin and clothes as black as a chimney, an oxygen mask clutched to his face. Gabriel had retreated into himself, standing against the edge of the porch railing, as far from the doctor and Henry as he could get. His arms were crossed tight over his chest, and he was rocking back and forth. He, too, was blackened, his hair a mess, his arms dark.

“Gabriel!” Marjo rushed to him, pulling her brother into a grateful hug. He smelled of wood and smoke, but most of all of home. “Are you okay?”

He nodded, stiff in her arms for one long moment before finally relaxing.

“That boy saved my life,” Henry said, pulling off the oxygen mask. Doc Landry gave him a stern look, then gently pushed the mask back into place. “Came right in and dragged me out, he did.”

“You didn’t!”

Gabriel nodded again, clearly proud of himself. “I did. Ran right—”

“But you could have
died!
” Her voice rose in pitch as the possibilities flashed through her mind. “Don’t ever do something that stupid again!”

The words were out before she could stop them, brought about by the rush of panic. Gabriel recoiled, as if she’d struck him. “You think I’m
stupid?
”

“No, no, Gabe. I—”

“I’m not stupid!” he shouted back. “You don’t think I can make my own decisions. But I’m smart, Marjo. I am.” He jerked out of her arms, then turned and ran down the steps.

The tears Marjo had held back earlier threatened again. She pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes and forced herself to remain where she was, instead of running after Gabriel.

Right now, she’d only be making a bad situation worse.

When Gabriel got like this, there was no arguing with him. He could be as stubborn as a weed. So she watched him go, helpless, her heart cracking.

“He’s a brave boy,” Henry said, grabbing for Marjo’s hand. “Don’t be so hard on him.”

“He could have died. I can’t lose him.” She shook
her head, wiping at the tears in her eyes. “I just couldn’t bear it.”

“He’s a grown man now, Marjo,” Henry said, again lowering the oxygen mask and ignoring Doc Landry’s glare. “You gotta trust him to know what to do.”

“Run into a burning building? Henry, that’s a lot different from just staying out too late with Darcy.” Suddenly exhausted, Marjo sank to the porch floor beside the older man. He’d worked at the funeral home longer than she could remember and had always been a friend to the family. He’d been so patient, guiding and teaching Gabriel over the years. In fact, she considered Henry more of an uncle than an employee. She reached over and gave him a hug. “I’m glad you’re all right. Really glad.”

“Now there, Marjo,” Henry said. “Don’t you start crying or you’ll make me cry too.”

She laughed and pulled back, wiping at her eyes. “I’m not crying, I’m watering the flowers,” she said, using the old joke they’d exchanged during especially emotional moments at the funeral home.

“Gabriel is gonna be just fine,” Henry said, reading her mind. “He’s got a good head on his shoulders.”

In some ways, yes. Gabriel dressed to suit the weather, knew how to do laundry and dishes and had never crossed a street, even in quiet-as-a-tomb Indigo, without first looking both ways. But he also forgot to eat sometimes, or left the water running or lost his house key.

Henry patted her hand. “Don’t worry so much.”

“All I can do is worry.” She leaned forward, peeking through the slats on the porch at the charred funeral home. The fire still seemed unreal.

But the funeral home was gone. Three generations of Savoy history, destroyed by flames in minutes. It was as if a part of herself had been ripped out. Memories flashed through her mind of her parents, Henry, Gabriel. Helping her dad after school, playing cards with Henry during downtime, planting flowers around the outside of the building with Gabriel. “Without Savoy,” Marjo said, “I have to worry about putting food on my table. And yours.”

“Me? I’m just fine. I’ve always been good about putting some of my paychecks aside, and now I’ve got enough that I can retire. I was thinking about doing it anyway. All I needed was a good kick in the rear.”

She watched the fire trucks hose down the building, knowing there would be nothing left. “That’s a hell of a kick in the rear.”

Henry chuckled, then replaced the oxygen mask. “What about you?”

“I’ll rebuild,” she said, resolute, yet at the same time knowing it wouldn’t be the same. “We’ll get the Savoy up and running once the insurance money comes in. And get back to work.” The prospect of doing that seemed daunting, and she wasn’t sure she had the heart for it. It had to be the smoke, the shock that had her feeling more indigo blue than sunshine yellow.

“Take some advice from an old man who should have quit earlier to smell the roses,” Henry said, his hand closing over hers. “Leave the Savoy behind. Let ’em put a gas station on that land if they want. And you go back to your singing.”

“But Gabriel—”

“Will be fine if you quit trying to take such good care of him. The boy is ready to jump out of the nest, Marjo. Let him go.”

But as Marjo bade Henry goodbye and went off in search of Gabriel, her doubts began to multiply. For a moment she wished Paul were here.

She searched up and down the streets of Indigo, but Gabriel was gone. She headed back to the funeral home and was immediately pulled into the welcoming embrace of the residents of Indigo, who surrounded the dying building, mourning the loss with her.

Her livelihood was gone, her brother wasn’t speaking to her and the one man she’d started to care about had headed off to the far ends of the world to take photographs.

As Grandma Savoy would have said, things couldn’t have gotten worse if she’d woken up to a spider in her gumbo.

I
T TOOK TWO
days for Paul to catch a break. The fishermen Joe had sent him to photograph were indeed wary of the media, even someone from their own province. He’d worked his way down the list of the men, trying to get any of them to share their story. It wasn’t until he finally tracked down the last man, who was working the docks while his broken arm healed, that he got the piece his editor had sent him to find.

“You understand what it’s like to be part of a crab boat?” Papoose, as he was called, because he’d been small enough to fit in the pocket of his mother’s housecoat when he was born, settled his extra-large frame onto the captain’s chair of the
Ocean Queen.
“It’s not like no other job.”

Growing up in the area, Paul was familiar with the shellfish industry. Men signed on for the life-threatening crab trips—the most dangerous job in the world, the experts said—because they had the potential to make a year’s salary in a few days. “Is it because of the danger?” Paul asked. “The excitement?”

Papoose snorted, dug around in his shirt pocket and came up with a cigar stub. “Danger’s always on the boat. Get your leg torn off by a rope, get yourself washed over by a storm. It’s not the danger that makes crabbin’ different. It’s the men.”

For the first time ever in an interview, Paul lowered his camera, even his notepad, and sat on the edge of the boat. “What do you mean?”

“Crabbers, they’re all about takin’ care of each other,” Papoose said as he lit the cigar stub and puffed away. “Off the boat, they may hate each other, knock out some teeth in a bar over a woman, but put ’em on a wet deck in the middle of crab season, and you’ll find one man jumpin’ overboard to save another. When we’re out there, we’re family. Good, bad, ugly or wet.
Family.
” He gestured toward Paul with the cigar. “You gonna write any of this down with that fancy pen?”

Paul grabbed up his notepad and scribbled down his thoughts and the fisherman’s words. He snapped a few pictures of Papoose, then sat again and listened as the man told a harrowing tale of a storm, a wave and a boat that nearly sank.

These men, he realized, worked harder than anyone he’d ever met. They worked in an industry that was fraught with danger, tight competition and an enemy larger than them—the sea.

His thoughts went to the bayou, to the determination of the people he had met in Indigo. In some ways, they were like the family on Papoose’s crab
boat. Only they were scrambling to hold on to a past that the present kept trying to absorb.

One thing Papoose had said to him remained long after the scent of the cigar had been washed from Paul’s clothes. He’d asked Papoose if it was the money that kept him going back to the boats, the docks.

The man had thought for a long while, then shook his head. “When you find something that gives you family, you stick with it. I don’t care who you are or where you find it. These guys, these boats, they’re mine. And I’m coming back until I can’t come back no more.”

Now, in the dining room of his sister’s house, Paul flipped through the slide show of images on his computer. He’d nabbed some really great photographs, the kind that would make his editor sing.

But for the first time since he’d gone into photography, the satisfaction of a job well done wasn’t there. Every time he looked at the photos of the grizzled, tough fisherman, he saw instead images of cypress trees, Spanish moss and a stream that moved so slowly he’d have sworn it was standing still.

And in every frame, he was reminded of Marjo.

When you find something that gives you family, you stick with it.

He kept scrolling through the thumbnails of the digital camera’s memory, through the pictures of Indigo, the opera house and then, near the end, the close-up of Marjo that Gabriel had taken that first day by the bayou.

He touched the screen with a finger, tracing the outline of her lips, curved up into a smile. Against the green of the bayou, her blue eyes were ten times more vibrant.

“It’s good to see you,” Faye said, coming up behind him. She wrapped her arms around him and gave him a tight, quick hug. In the background he could hear Lizzie, his newborn niece, cooing in the playpen in the living room.

A pang went through Paul’s heart. He had missed Faye and her family more than he’d thought. All this living out of a backpack, crashing at a friend’s house whenever he was in New York for a meeting with his editors, the constant grind of shoot after shoot, had finally taken its toll.

Either that or the days spent in Indigo had created a craving inside him for something more than what he already had. What that something was, he had no idea.

Paul rubbed at his neck. Whatever this feeling was, it was temporary. He’d go on to Tibet in a few days and be back to normal.

“Hey, who’s this?” Faye asked, pointing at Marjo’s picture.

“Someone I met in Indigo.”

“Someone special?”

“Someone who lives in Louisiana, which is where I don’t,” he said, closing the subject.

“Yet,” Faye said, grinning.

“Never. It’s nice to be back here, Faye.” After
he’d sold his house in the divorce, Paul had taken Faye up on her offer to move into her spare bedroom. He knew she’d offered because she wanted to take care of him, to help him nurse his broken heart.

But he hadn’t needed Florence Nightingale. All he’d needed was a few assignments from
World,
along with some freelance corporate work, and he was gone again, happier by far when he was on a plane than when he was wandering Faye and John’s four-bedroom Dutch Colonial.

Or at least it used to be that way. But when he’d walked into her house three days ago and inhaled the scent of fresh-baked bread, baby powder and something else he couldn’t define, he’d felt an unfamiliar warmth spread through his chest.

“I’m glad I came,” he added, meaning it, though at the same time reminding himself not to get too comfortable. “I needed to spend some time with my sister.”

She arched a brow in surprise. “Is that you telling me I was right?”

He gave her a grin. “If I did, would you ever let me live it down?”

“Of course not, big brother.” She gave him a light jab, then plopped into the seat beside him. As she did, her foot hit his backpack, sending the envelope Marjo had given him tumbling to the floor. “Hey, what’s this?”

“I don’t know. I never looked.” He didn’t tell Faye that he
couldn’t
look. That merely opening the folder
on the plane had caused him to miss that tiny spot in the bayou more than he’d expected.

So he’d left it in his bag, figuring once he was back in the old groove again, he would have enough distance between him and Indigo to flip through whatever it was Marjo had given him.

Yeah. Five days now, and he had yet to find that distance.

“Who’s it from?” Faye asked.

“A friend.”

A corner of Faye’s mouth turned up. “I know that look. It’s from that woman in the pictures, isn’t it?” She danced the envelope back and forth, her blue eyes taunting. “Is it
love
letters?”

“Actually, yes, but they’re not Marjo’s. They’re our aunt Amelie’s.”

“Our…” Faye’s voice trailed off and she took a peek inside the envelope. “Holy cow, you’re right. And you haven’t read them?”

“Not yet.”

“Are you kidding me? Paul, you have the will-power of an ox, I swear. How could you not look?” She withdrew the sheaf of letters, the paper fragile and tea-stained with age. “I’d be dying of curiosity.”

“Which is why they’re in my hands instead of yours. You can’t even resist peeking at your Christmas presents.” He gave her a good-natured grin.

“You aren’t the least bit curious?” She read through the first few pages, skimming over the sentences. “Wow, Paul. This is incredible.”

“I’m sure it is.” He opened his e-mail program, intending to zap the proofs over to his editor.

Faye put a hand on his screen. “No, I mean really incredible. It’s like opening a door to the past. Listen to this.”

Faye began to read the letters, which were written in French. Although some of the expressions were new to Paul, he understood the sentiment, if not the exact translation.

Faye looked up from the letter and Paul could swear he saw a tear glistening in her eye. “That’s so sweet, don’t you think?”

“Only a woman would think so—”

She swatted him. Hard. “You don’t have a romantic bone in your body.”

“I do, too.”

“Oh, yeah? Then prove it.” She thrust the sheaf of papers into his hands. “Read these.”

“I don’t—”

“You do, too, need to read them. For Pete’s sake, Paul, you can’t go through your life believing that happily-ever-after is only something that happens in Disney movies. You’ll end up a hermit living in some ramshackle place in the middle of nowhere, wearing the same ratty sweater every day and muttering to yourself.”

“Thanks for the vision of my future, my psychic friend.”

She stuck her tongue out at him. “Read them. Or I’ll stop feeding you.”

“Hey, that’s not playing fair,” he called after her retreating figure. Faye was a damned good cook, something he’d forgotten in the time he’d been gone. Now that he’d been back at her house for a few days, he could already feel a tightening of his waistline from too many second helpings.

A second later he heard his sister in the nursery, cooing to the baby. He rose, taking the pile of papers with him, and crossed to the sunroom. Outside, fall was in full swing, the trees nearly bare now in the cool temperatures. This was a world away from the lush, humid bayou he’d left last week.

He settled into one of the padded wicker chairs, then started to read, working his way chronologically through the stack.

With each letter, he traced the story of Alexandre and Amelie, the same tale that Marjo had told him. Only, with the parchment-thin papers in his hands, the centuries-old ink fading on the pages, it all seemed so much more real.

Paul was a visual man, and this evidence of his ancestral roots suddenly drove home the reality of what Marjo had told him.

These people had lived. Loved. Died. And they’d left behind a building that had been passed down from one generation to another, because they’d believed in their family, in continuing the legacy they had started so many years ago.

And ended when it got to him.

Faye came into the sunroom and sat on the cushioned wicker sofa, the baby on her lap. She bounced the baby on one knee, which made Lizzie laugh and the slight wisp of blond curls on her head blow in the breeze. Faye gave Paul an expectant look. “Well?”

“Well what?” he said, feigning innocence.

“I’m making steak and potatoes for dinner,” Faye said. “
Or
I could serve Alpo.”

He chuckled. Knowing Faye, she
would
leave him a can of dog food on the counter. When they’d been kids, playing practical jokes on each other had been
de rigeur.
Paul held up the papers he’d just finished reading. “This is a hell of a story.”

“In other words, I was right.”

He gave her a grin. “Okay, you were right.”

She leaned down and pressed a kiss to Lizzie’s head, pausing a moment to inhale her baby scent. A sharp pain hit Paul in the chest—

Jealousy.

He wanted a little of that—that look, that contentment—for himself. He shook off the thoughts. All he needed to do was to get back to work and the feeling would go away.

Only, he had been back at work for a few days now, and if anything, he was more unhappy than before. Papoose’s words nagged at him, intertwining with memories of Indigo and Marjo. Was the family Papoose had talked about possible for a man like him?

“Will you think about the rest?” Faye asked. “Settling down? Giving me some nieces and nephews to spoil ruthlessly? I still need to get back at you for that drum set you sent to Lizzie.”

“One step at a time, sis. I read the letters. That was a start. It’s not so easy for me, you know.”

“Because you were the older one.” Her gaze softened. “You went through more.”

“There wasn’t anything to go through, Faye. Dad worked all over Canada. Mom made her bedroom into a prison.”

“Uh-huh.” Faye crossed her arms over her chest. “And you don’t think that might have skewed the way you look at marriage and family in any way?”

“Of course not.” He paused. “Okay, maybe a bit.”

“We didn’t have the best example of marriage or
family life. The only time we had anything resembling a family was when the aunts and uncles came over, but that was temporary, and then it was closed doors and absent parenting all over again. You had to be the grown-up, when you weren’t grown up yet yourself.”

He thought of Marjo then, how she had been left to raise Gabriel on her own, only under more tragic circumstances. Was it possible that the two of them had the same skewed view of family and relationships? That each of them pushed away the very thing they craved?

And yet, Faye had turned out okay, ending up happily married. Perhaps there was some key he was missing, a key Faye had clearly found.

“Why do you always say things that make me think?” he said to his sister.

“Because that’s my job as a woman,” she teased. “So what are you going to do now?”

Paul looked out over the cold, fall landscape, nearly devoid of green, already hinting at the bitter white winter ahead. It wasn’t the temperature he was worried about. It was something else that he was afraid was going to freeze if he didn’t get back to Indigo.

He rose, leaving the packet of letters on the coffee table for Faye to read, too. “I’m going to tie up a few loose ends.”