Whispers of the Bayou (41 page)

Considering the dynamics of the group, conversation flowed along rather well. At one point, Holt and I got to laughing about something, and when I glanced at AJ, I could see a change coming over her face. Her smile dimmed somewhat and eventually disappeared all together. Before we even served dessert, she excused herself, and then she headed upstairs, putting a hand to her mouth to hold in a sob before she was even out of the room.

I looked at Holt, who seemed terribly disappointed.

“Do you think I said something wrong?” he asked me.

I shook my head.

“I think she’s feeling guilty,” I whispered. “For all those lost years. Seeing how well you and I get along and everything.”

Of course, I thought with my own surge of guilt, I had probably been overdoing it a little tonight, trying to show off in front of my father. It was pathetic, but I just wanted Richard Fairmont to see that his daughter could be interesting and entertaining and very much worth spending time with if he’d ever just bother to try.

Except for steaks that would have been tastier from a grill, the meal was wonderful. We went ahead and moved along to the dessert without AJ, a light and heavenly bread pudding with a rum raisin sauce.

When we were finished, the men complained about having eaten too much and I knew that was true of me as well. While they sat there and talked, I stood and began clearing off the table. Now that dinner was over, I was embarrassed to admit that I wanted to go upstairs and get back to work, as there was a painting up there with my name on it. Still, I didn’t want to be rude. In the kitchen, as I loaded the dishwasher, I dialed Lisa’s cell phone, just to check and make sure she was okay.

Wherever she was, it was noisy, the music and clanking glasses in the background making me think perhaps she had gone to a bar. We talked for only a minute, but she sounded much better, saying that she had run into some friends who had taken her out for a bite to eat. When she said not to wait up for her, I reminded her of my sighting of Jimmy Smith yesterday and said that she shouldn’t be coming back to the house late at night alone, just in case it hadn’t been a dream.

“Don’t worry about me, Miranda,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

I was just hanging up from our call when voices began to rise from the dining room. From the sound of things and the occasional mention of my name, I realized that my father and Holt were having an argument—and that it had something to do with me.

I tried to listen by hovering in the pantry, but their voices were too muffled to make out half of their words. Finally, I opened the dining room door and leaned in to ask if anyone wanted coffee. They both declined, but my father pushed out his chair and said that I would need to excuse the two of them. They were going over to Holt’s house where they could continue their “discussion.”

“If you want some privacy,” I said, hating myself even as I said it, “you’re
welcome to go in the library. I need to get on to bed anyway. I’m pretty tired after such an emotional day.”

They bid me good night, Holt thanking me for a wonderful dinner. Realizing my father intended on spending the night here, I explained where Lisa, AJ, and I were all sleeping and said he could feel free to choose between whatever bedrooms were left.

“I’ll just stay in my old room on the third floor,” he told me, and then I again said good night and headed upstairs. As much as I hadn’t wanted my father here for dinner, I was glad he’d be spending the night. I hated to be a big chicken, but with all that was going on, it was comforting to know that there would be a man in the house in case Jimmy made another appearance.

As soon as I was sure the two men had relocated to the library, I made my way back downstairs to the laundry room. Quietly, I slipped inside and listened to a conversation between the two men that came through the vent so clearly it was as though I were listening to it on the radio.

“…your motives,” Holt was saying. “You might be fooling everyone else, Richard, but not me. Willy was nothing to you, less than nothing. Why are you really here?”

They argued back and forth for a while, Holt insisting that my dad had an ulterior motive for having come to town this week, my dad defending himself by acting insulted that Holt could even insinuate such a thing. Finally, however, Holt wore him down by spelling out his suspicions.

“I know you, Richard. You’re going to try and weasel your way back into this house,” Holt said. “But that’s wrong. Mom and Dad gave you your share years ago. That was your deal.”

“That was the deal at that time, yes. They’re dead now. It’s time to come back and establish myself and my family in the home that is rightly mine.”

“Rightly yours? Richard, they left it to Miranda. Their will is ironclad solid. It’s a good document. You could never challenge it and win.”

There was a long silence during which I couldn’t imagine what was going on. I had a feeling that my father was trying to decide how much to say to his brother about his intentions.

“I’m not trying to rip you off, Holt. I hope you know that. Once I have the will overturned, we’ll split things right down the middle. I want the house, but I’ll be happy to give you the equal value in more land. I only want to be fair.”

“Fair? Fair is leaving Miranda alone so she can do whatever she wants with the house and land her grandparents left to her. Not to you, to her.”

I could hear the clomping of footsteps, and I realized that my father was pacing.

“There’s just one thing wrong with that line of thinking,” my father said. “My parents left this place to their granddaughter.”

“So?”

“Miranda isn’t their granddaughter.”

“What? What are you—”

“I’ve never told anyone this before now, but it’ll all come out soon anyway. I’m sterile, Holt. I always have been, since I had the mumps at thirteen. The doctors told me then that I might be sterile, so when Yasmine was trying to get pregnant and she couldn’t conceive, I slipped off to Baton Rouge and had a sperm count done. A few months later, when she announced that she was finally pregnant, I knew she’d been having an affair. The truth is, there’s literally no way I could have fathered those children. Miranda and Cassandra were not mine.”

So, at the hoof-beats of fate, with sad forebodings of evil,
Shrinks and closes the heart, ere the stroke of doom has attained it.

My knees weak, I leaned back against the washer and slowly slid myself to the floor.

“Richard, that’s ridiculous! Don’t you see the family resemblance? She looks just like Mother!”

“Coincidence,” my father replied. “Who knows who Yasmine was sleeping with? It could have been someone with similar features. All I know is that the person who impregnated her wasn’t me. And I know it wasn’t you, Holt, because you were…well, you were a paraplegic by then.”

“As if I would have slept with my own brother’s wife!” Holt shouted angrily.

“Not so loud,” my father hissed. “Regardless, if it wasn’t me and it wasn’t you, then I don’t care who it was, Miranda is not a Fairmont.”

I could hear a roaring begin inside my head, like a seismic shift of the brain.

“What did Yasmine say about all of this?”

There was a long silence, and I only wished I could see as well as hear the two of them.

“You didn’t tell her, did you?” Holt asked finally. “You never said a word.”

“She pretended that the babies were mine. I let her pretend.”

“But why? Just so you wouldn’t have to admit that you were sterile?”

Again, there was a long silence and then my father spoke.

“Janet knows I wasn’t the father of those children,” he said. “Why else do you think she snatched up her niece and carted her away from here as fast as she could? To hide the truth, that’s why, the truth that her dead sister’s remaining child wasn’t a Fairmont. The whole time that Benochet was putting together Mom and Dad’s elaborate custody arrangements, changing their will, setting up their payment system, Janet must have been laughing all the way to the bank.”

Could any of what he said be true? Could AJ have let me base everything I knew about myself and my parents on a lie? Was I really not a Fairmont?

I was ready to run upstairs and throw open AJ’s door and demand to know the truth. But then the men were talking again, and I needed to listen.

“Why now, Richard?” Holt asked. “Why now, after all this time?”

“Willy’s dead,” my father replied. “I need to clear this up before Miranda sells off something that shouldn’t even be hers.”

“But you know how these things go. This could drag through the courts for years. If you really wanted to challenge the will, you should have done it sooner, like right after Mom died.”

“Maybe.”

“So why didn’t you?”

My father rattled off some elaborate story about Willy and his faithfulness to the family and wanting to let him reap the rewards of his long labors, but it didn’t seem to ring true with Holt, nor with me. In any event, their conversation soon drew to a close. When I heard them move outside so that Holt could get in his car and my father could retrieve his suitcase, I dashed through the darkened parlor to the stairs and up to my room.

I stood there with my back to the door until I heard my father come up the same stairs, go around to the next flight and up to the room above
mine. There were footsteps over my head for a little while and then the creaking of bed springs as he climbed in, and then all was still.

Quietly, I went to AJ’s room and tapped on her door, pushing it open to see that she was sound asleep in the dark, one arm flung over her eyes. As I listened to her gentle breathing, I could hear my father’s bed creaking somewhere above us as he turned over, and I realized that the acoustics of this old house made it a bad place for the conversation AJ and I needed to have. Even if she and I whispered, the things we needed to talk about might be overheard by the man who was sleeping right upstairs.

Closing her door, I decided we would talk in the morning when we could go outside and take a walk or something, far from any listening ears. If my father really was going to challenge his parents’ will and my inheritance, then I needed to know the truth, the real truth. No more lies.

Far too agitated to sleep, I returned to the mural and went back to work. Lost in the repetitive motions of what I was doing, I wasn’t sure how much time had passed before I heard the crunch of a car in the driveway. Startled, I dropped my tools and ran to the window to see Lisa’s little Honda rolling around the side of the house. Worried for her safety, I rushed down the hall to the back bathroom, just to watch over her until she got inside and locked the door behind her. From the window there, I could see her getting out of the car, but rather than racing into the house, she took her time, fiddling with her keys, and even pausing to readjust the headband in her hair.

I was about to tap on the glass and tell her to get herself inside when she finally reached the door, though still in no hurry. I could hear her key in the lock and the door open and shut, and then the outside light clicked off and all was still.

All except for the light that flashed somewhere up high in the trees, off in the distance.

I raced down the hall to meet Lisa just as she appeared at the top of the stairs. Holding one finger to my mouth, I led her to the bathroom and pointed toward the source of the light.

“Just watch, out this window. Tell me what you see.”

She did as I asked, but nothing happened for the next several moments.

“What am I looking for?”

“A light. High up in the trees. I’ve seen it there before.”

Together we waited, but it did not flash again. Finally, Lisa turned from the window, assuring me that there was a radio tower in that general direction, not to mention an airport, either of which could have been the source of that light.

“Either way, I don’t know how you have the nerve to stand around outside in the middle of the night like this. It’s just not smart.”

Competing emotions seemed to pass across Lisa’s features until finally she just looked chagrined.