Читать книгу Rising Tides - Emilie Richards - Страница 7

September 1965

The young man Dawn Gerritsen picked up just outside New Orleans looked like a bum, but so did a lot of students hitchhiking the world that summer. His hair wasn’t clean; his clothes were a marriage of beat poet and circus performer. To his credit, he had neither the pasty complexion of a Beatles-mad Liverpudlian nor the California tan of a Beach Boy surfer. In the past year she had seen more than enough of both types making the grand tour of rock bands and European waves.

The hitchhiker’s skin was freckled, and his eyes were pure Tupelo honey. Biloxi and Gulfport oozed from his throat, and the first time he called her ma’am, she wanted to drag him to a sun-dappled levee and make him moan it over and over until she knew, really knew, that she was back in the Deep South again.

She hadn’t dragged him anywhere. She didn’t even remember his name. She was too preoccupied for sex, and she wasn’t looking for intimacy. After three formative years in Berkeley, she had given up on love, right along with patriotism, religion and happily-ever-afters. Her virginity had been an early casualty, a prize oddly devalued in California, like an ancient currency exchanged exclusively by collectors.

Luckily her hitchhiker didn’t seem to be looking for intimacy, either. He seemed more interested in the food in her glove compartment and the needle on her speedometer. After her initial rush of sentiment, she almost forgot he was in the car until she arrived in Cut Off. Then she made the mistake of reaching past him to turn up the radio. It was twenty-five till the hour, and the news was just ending.

“And in other developments today, State Senator Ferris Lee Gerritsen, spokesman for Gulf Coast Shipping, the international corporation based in New Orleans, announced that the company will turn over a portion of its land holdings along the river to the city so that a park can be developed as a memorial to his parents, Henry and Aurore Gerritsen. Mrs. Gerritsen, granddaughter of the founder of Gulf Coast Shipping, passed away last week. Senator Gerritsen is the only living child of the couple. His brother, Father Hugh Gerritsen, was killed last summer in a civil-rights incident in Bonne Chance. It’s widely predicted that the senator will run for governor in 1968.”

Although the sun was sinking toward the horizon, Dawn retrieved her sunglasses from the dashboard and slipped them on, first blowing her heavy bangs out of her eyes in her own version of a sigh. As she settled back against her seat, she felt the warmth of a hand against her bare thigh. One quick glance and she saw that her hitchhiker was assessing her with the same look he had, until that moment, saved for her Moon Pies and Twinkies. Dawn knew what he saw. A long-limbed woman with artfully outlined blue eyes and an expression that refuted every refined feature that went with them. Also a possible fortune.

He smiled, and his hand inched higher. “Your name’s Gerritsen, didn’t you say? You related to him?”

“You’re wasting your time,” she said.

“I’m not busy doing anything else.”

She pulled over to the side of the road. A light rain was falling and a harder one was forecast, but that didn’t change her mind. “Time to stick out your thumb again.”

“Hey, come on. I can make the rest of the trip more fun than you can imagine.”

“Sorry, but my imagination’s bigger than anything you’ve got.”

Drawling curses, he reclaimed his hand and his duffel bag. She pulled back onto the road after the door slammed shut behind him.

She was no lonelier than she had been before, but after the news, and without the distraction of another person in the next seat, Dawn found herself thinking about her grandmother, exactly the thing she had tried to avoid by picking up the hitchhiker in the first place. This trip to Grand Isle had nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with Aurore Le Danois Gerritsen. On her deathbed, Aurore had decreed that her last will and testament be read at a gathering at the family summer cottage. And the reading of the will was a command performance.

The last time Dawn drove the route between New Orleans and Grand Isle, she’d only had her license for a year. South Louisiana was a constant negotiation between water and earth, and sometimes the final decision wasn’t clear. She had flown over the land and crawled over the water. Her grandmother had sat beside her, never once pointing out that one of the myriad draw bridges might flip them into murky Bayou Lafourche or that some of the tiny towns along the way fed their coffers with speed traps. She had chatted of this and that, and only later, when Aurore limped up the walk to the cottage, had Dawn realized that her right leg was stiff from flooring nonexistent gas and brake pedals.

The memory brought an unexpected lump to her throat. The news of her grandmother’s death hadn’t surprised her, but neither had she truly been prepared. How could she have known that a large chunk of her own identity would disappear when Aurore died? Aurore Gerritsen had held parts of Dawn’s life in her hands and sculpted them with the genius of a Donatello.

Some part of Dawn had disappeared at her uncle’s death, too. The radio report had only touched on Hugh Gerritsen’s death, as if it were old news now. But it wasn’t just old news to her. Her uncle had been a controversial figure in Louisiana, a man who practiced all the virtues that organized religion espoused. But to her he had been Uncle Hugh, the man who had seen everything that was good inside her and taught her to see the same.

Two deaths in two years. The only Gerritsens who had ever understood her were gone now. And who was left? Who would love her simply because she was Dawn, without judgment or emotional bribery? She turned up the radio again and forced herself to sing along with Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.

An hour later she crossed the final bridge. Time ticked fifty seconds to the minute on the Gulf Coast. Grand Isle looked much as it had that day years before when she had temporarily crippled her grandmother. Little changed on the island unless forced by the hand of Mother Nature. The surf devoured and regurgitated the shoreline, winds uprooted trees and sent roofs spinning, but the people and their customs stayed much the same.

The island was by no means fashionable, but every summer Dawn had joined Aurore here, where the air wasn’t mountain-fresh and the sand wasn’t cane-sugar perfection. And every summer Aurore had patiently patched and rewoven the intricate fabric of Gerritsen family life.

Today there was wind, and the surf was angry, al though that hadn’t discouraged the hard-core anglers strung along the shoreline. A hurricane with the friendly name of Betsy hovered off Florida, and although no body really expected her to turn toward this part of Louisiana, if she did, the island residents would protect their homes, pack their cars and choose their retreats be fore the evacuation announcement had ended.

Halfway across the length of Grand Isle, Dawn turned away from the gulf. A new load of oyster shells had been dumped on the road to the Gerritsen cottage, but it still showed fresh tire tracks. The cottage itself was like the island. Over the years, Mother Nature had subtly altered it, but the changes had only intensified its basic nature. Built of weathered cypress in the traditional Creole style and surrounded by tangles of oleander, jasmine and myrtle, it was as much a part of the landscape as the gnarled water oaks encircling it. Even the addition, de signed by her grandmother, seemed to have been there forever.

Dawn wondered if her parents had already arrived. She hadn’t called them from London or the New Or leans airport, sure that if she did they would expect her to travel to Grand Isle with them. She had wanted this time to adjust slowly to returning to Louisiana. She was twenty-three now, too old to be swallowed by her family and everything they stood for, but she had needed these extra hours to fortify herself.

As she pulled up in front of the house she saw that a car was parked under one of the trees, a tan Karmann Ghia with a California license plate. She wondered who had come so far for the reading of her grandmother’s will. Was there a Gerritsen, a Le Danois three times re moved, who had always waited in the wings?

She parked her rented Pontiac beside the little convertible and pulled on her vinyl slicker and brimmed John Lennon cap to investigate. The top was up, but she peered through one of the rain-fogged windows. The car belonged to a man. The sunglasses on the dashboard looked like an aviator’s goggles; a wide-figured tie was draped over a briefcase in the rear.

She wrapped her slicker tighter around her. Mary Quant had designed it as protection against London’s soft, cool rain. Now it trapped the Louisiana summer heat and melted against Dawn’s thighs, but she didn’t care. Her gaze had moved beyond the car, beyond the oleander and jasmine, to the wide front gallery. A man she had never expected to see again leaned against a square pillar and watched her.

She was aware of rain splashing against the brim of her hat and running in streams across her boots, but she didn’t move. She stood silently and wondered if she had ever really known her grandmother.

Ben Townsend stepped off the porch. He had no protection, Carnaby-mod or otherwise. The rain dampened his oxford-cloth shirt and dark slacks and turned his sun-streaked hair the color of antique brass. His clothes clung to a body that hadn’t changed in the past year. Her eyes measured the span of his shoulders, the width of his waist and hips, the long stretch of his legs. Her expression didn’t change as he approached. Repressing emotion was a skill she had cultivated since she saw him last.

“I guess you didn’t expect me.” He stopped a short distance from her, as if he had calculated to the inch exactly how close she would allow him to come.

“A masterpiece of understatement.”

“I got a letter asking me to come for the reading of your grandmother’s will.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. Dawn had seen him stand that way so many times, shoulders hunched, palms turned out, heels set firmly in the ground. The stance made him real, not a shadow from her memories.

“I’m surprised you bothered.” She rocked back on her heels, too, as if she were comfortable enough to stand under the dripping oak forever. “Expecting to find a story here?”

“Nope. I’m an editor now. I buy what other people write.”

For the past year, Ben had worked for Mother Lode, a celebrated new magazine carving out its niche among California’s liberal elite. Dawn had read just one issue. Mother Lode obviously prized creativity, intellect and West Coast self-righteousness. She wasn’t surprised Ben had moved quickly up its career ladder.

“You always were good at pronouncing judgment,” she said.

He hunched his shoulders another inch. “And you seem to have gotten better at it.”

“I’ve gotten better at lots of things, but apparently not at understanding Grandmère. I can’t figure if inviting you was an attempt to force a lovers’ reunion, or if she just had a twisted sense of humor.”

“Do you really think your grandmother asked me here to hurt you?”

“You have another explanation?”

“Maybe it has something to do with Father Hugh.”

She tossed back her hair. “I don’t know why it should. Uncle Hugh’s been dead a year.”

“I know when he died, Dawn. I was there.”

“That’s right. And I wasn’t. I think that was the subject of our last conversation.”

That conversation had taken place a year before, but now Dawn remembered it as if Ben’s words were still carving catacombs under her feet. She had been standing beside Ben’s hospital bed on the afternoon after her uncle’s death. A nurse had come at the sound of raised voices, then scurried away without saying a word. Dawn could still remember the smell of lilies from an arrangement on another patient’s bedside table and the tasteless Martian green of gladiola sprays. Ben had shouted questions and waited for answers that never came.

“Did you know, Dawn? Did you know that your uncle was going to be gunned down like a common criminal? Did you know that a mob was on its way to that church to turn a good man into a saint and a martyr?”

“Look, I’m staying,” Ben said. “I don’t know why I was invited here, but I’m going to stay long enough to get some answers. Can we be civil to each other?”

“You’re a Louisiana boy. You know hospitality’s a tradition in this part of the world. I’ll do my part to live up to it.”

Dawn studied him for another moment. His hair was longer than it had been a year ago, as if he had made the psychological transition from Boston, where he had worked on the Globe, to San Francisco. He wore glasses now, wire-framed and self-important. He no longer looked too young to have answers to all the world’s problems. He looked his full twenty-seven years, like a man who had found his place in the world and never in tended to relinquish it.

Her father was a man who also radiated confidence and purpose. Dawn wondered what would happen when Ferris Lee Gerritsen discovered that Ben Townsend had received an invitation to Grand Isle.

Ben waited until her gaze drifted back to his. “I’m not going to push myself on you.”

“Oh, don’t worry about me. Nobody pushes anything on me these days. And nobody puts anything over on me, either. Stay if you want. But don’t stay because you want to finish old conversations.”

“Maybe there’ll be some new conversations worth finishing.”

She shrugged, then turned back to her car for her lug gage, making a point of dismissing him. She had left al most everything she owned in Europe. She reached for her camera case and her overnight bag, but left her suit case inside.

In the distance, thunder exploded with renewed vigor, and the ground at Dawn’s feet seemed to ripple in response. The sultry island air was charged with the familiar smells of ozone and decay. By the time she straightened, Ben was no longer beside her. She watched as he walked down the oyster-shell drive, glad she didn’t have to pretend to be casual even a moment longer.

She might not have understood Grand Isle’s draw for her grandmother, but each year Dawn had been drawn to it herself. The summers had been a time to bask in her grandmother’s love. Nothing else had been expected of her. The sun had been too hot, the occasional breeze too enticing. She had done nothing of consequence on the island except grow up. But Aurore’s pride in her had been the solid ground that Dawn built the best part of herself upon.

How proud had Aurore been before she died, and what had she known? Had she known that Dawn still loved her? That despite her exodus after her uncle’s death, she had still yearned for her family? That falling in love with Ben Townsend so long ago had not been the same as declaring sides in a war Dawn had never understood anyway?

Most important of all, had her grandmother understood that even though Dawn had crossed an ocean, she had never really been able to break free of any of the people she loved?

Louisiana was a statewide Turkish bath, which might explain the inability of its residents to move forward into the twentieth century. Their brains were as steamed as Christmas pudding, their collective vision as fogged by heat and humidity as the air on an average afternoon. On a day like this one, when raindrops sizzled in the summer air, it was possible to see why nothing ever changed, and nothing was ever challenged.

Ben stood on the beach and watched the foam-tipped breakers rearrange a mile of seaweed. Grand Isle was an obscure sandpile, projecting like an obscene middle finger into water the temperature of piss. In the hour since his encounter with Dawn, he had walked nearly the entire length of it.

Louisiana wasn’t Ben’s favorite place. He had been born not far from Grand Isle, but a year ago he had al most died there, too. A year ago he had watched as a martyr was gunned down by bigots and left to bleed away his life, one drop at a time.

Where was Father Hugh Gerritsen now? Ben didn’t believe in heaven any more than he believed that hell could be worse than Louisiana. Somehow, though, he couldn’t believe that Father Hugh’s life had been over between one drop of blood and the next. Maybe he had come back to earth—for a Catholic priest, he’d been surprisingly eclectic in his theology—and even now was toddling around somewhere, preparing to give humanity’s inhumanities one more run for their money.

What would Father Hugh think of his niece? The woman in the violent purple slicker had certainly looked in need of a priest—or a convent. Her legs were a mile long, her hair was a red-brown sweep ending—not accidentally, he was certain—at the exact tip of her breasts. A year in Europe had taken her from a debutante in flowered shirtwaists to a vixen in a pop-art miniskirt.

And those eyes, those challenging, provocative eyes. She had learned to use them, too. She had gazed straight through him as if he had never been her lover. As if he had never accused her of participating in her uncle’s murder.

Hadn’t he known that she would be shocked to see him, and that shock would turn to anger? Maybe. But he hadn’t expected the ice-cold arrogance, the chip on her shoulder as massive as one of the island’s oaks. Whatever Aurore Gerritsen had planned for them, it wasn’t this instant animosity, this reduced equation of a relationship once rich in respect and love.

In the distance, against the stark silhouette of an off shore oil platform, Ben watched fishermen hauling in a circular net filled with the shining, flopping bodies of mullet. Their boat rode the waves, and the net dipped and lurched as they dragged it on board. He winced, empathizing with the mullet who were gasping their last breaths as they struggled to free themselves from a force they couldn’t understand.

He didn’t understand Dawn, and he didn’t understand her grandmother or her reasons for inviting him here. He didn’t understand the malaise that surrounded the Gerritsens’ lives, or how they had failed to detect it. Worse, like the mullet, he didn’t know how to fight what he couldn’t see.

The sun had nearly disappeared. Now, banked behind thunderclouds, it glowed just a short distance from the horizon. Ben knew it was time to return to the Gerritsen cottage. He had given Dawn enough time to get used to the idea that he was back in her life. He had probably given her parents time to arrive, and anyone else who had been invited, too. He trudged across sand and crunched his way through a fifty-yard stretch of wild flowers and sea grasses. Ozone and the herbal essence of the vegetation scented the air. Behind him, as a light rain began again, he heard the triumphant cawing of sea gulls feasting on the mullet the fishermen had missed.

He was halfway back to the cottage when the heavens opened and the rain began in earnest. He was al ready wet, but with darkness falling, his tolerance was disappearing fast. The main road bisecting the island was lined with fishing camps and the occasional store that served them. He headed for the closest one to wait out the worst of the storm.

Ten steps led up to the wood-frame building, which was no larger than a three-car garage. Inside there were two narrow aisles flanked with counters and shelves. Of more interest were the occupants.

The storekeeper was lounging against the counter. A man who’d embraced his fifties without an argument, the storekeeper was balding, stooped and paunchy. When he smirked at the younger man who was standing across from him, his tobacco-stained teeth were an inch too long.

So enthusiastically was he staring and smirking, the storekeeper didn’t even notice Ben. “Well, boy,” he said to the man in front of him, “I might know where the house is, and I might not. Depends on why you want to know. Me, I can’t figure why a nigger’d be looking for Senator Gerritsen’s house after dark, unless he’s got something on his mind he shouldn’t.”

Ben stood in the doorway and watched the other man—a man who, at thirty-seven, hadn’t been a boy for two decades—react to the storekeeper’s words. Ben recognized him. He waited for his reaction.

Phillip Benedict leaned across the counter. “Now if I wanted to kill Senator Gerritsen, coon ass, you think I’d stop here first so you could remember exactly what I looked like?”

The storekeeper cranked himself up to a full five-foot-four, but he needed an additional ten inches to be Phillip’s equal. Actually, Ben concluded, he needed a whole lot more than inches.

“Get out of my store! Go on. Get! And watch your back while you’re on the island. Might find yourself riding the waves facedown if you don’t!”

Phillip had beautiful hands, long-fingered and broad. One of them gathered the material of the storekeeper’s shirt and twisted it so that he couldn’t move away. “It would take a very quiet man to sneak up on me, coon ass. You don’t have that kind of quiet. You got a big mouth. I’d hear it yapping a mile away. So you be careful, ‘cause while you’re yapping, I might just sneak up on you. And you wouldn’t hear me.” He let go of the shirt and pushed the man away from the counter. Then he turned. His eyes met Ben’s. For a moment, he didn’t move.

“Coon ass?” Ben asked.

“Wish I’d coined the phrase.”

Ben looked past Phillip to the storekeeper, who was edging toward the wall. “He’s a mean son of a bitch,” he told the man. “Eats white folks for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Now, I’d be careful. All that, and a friend of the Gerritsen family, too. He’s a good man to stay away from.”

“Both of you get out!”

“Bad for business to be so rude.” Ben picked up a candy bar and fished for some change, which he laid on the counter. “Want anything, Benedict?”

“Yeah. A head on a platter.”

“Next store down the road.” Ben draped an arm around Phillip’s shoulder. “Let’s see what we can do.”

They exited that way, although Ben kept his eye on the storekeeper until they were safely out the door. “About now is a good time to make tracks,” he said at the bottom of the steps. “Do you have a car?”

“Sure as hell didn’t hitchhike.”

“Let’s go.”

When they were both in the car, Phillip pulled onto the road, and they were quiet until he’d taken one of the turns off the main route and parked in front of the is land’s Catholic church. Phillip was the first to speak. “Sun’s going down, white boy. Ain’t safe for niggers or agitators on a backass Looziana road.”

“What in the hell are you doing here?”

Phillip lifted a brow. “I could ask the same.”

Ben tried to imagine how he could explain something he didn’t understand himself. In the meantime, he examined the other man.

Phillip Benedict was a journalist of note. He was widely praised for his insight and biting commentary, but it was his color and his convictions about prejudice and freedom that set him apart from other Ivy League—educated newsmen. From jailhouse interviews with Martin Luther King to his assessment of the achievements of the late Malcolm X, Phillip had reported the struggle for civil rights like a war correspondent. More times than not, he had been right in the thick of battle.

The two men had liked each other from their first encounter, years before. They had been covering the same story in New York, Ben as a young reporter right out of college and Phillip as a seasoned journalist. They had spent a long night together in a Lower East Side bar along with half a dozen other newsmen, waiting for someone to emerge from a building across the street. Phillip had taken Ben under his wing, and with hours to kill they had traded their personal stories. But over the years they hadn’t spent much time in each other’s presence, and over the past year none at all. Their lives and their careers had taken them in different directions.

“I’m not exactly sure why I’m here,” Ben said. “But I was invited to the reading of a will. You?”

“Seems I’ve been invited, too. Aurore Gerritsen was one interesting old lady.”

Ben shifted so that his back was against the car door. He had known from the conversation in the store that Phillip’s presence on Grand Isle had something to do with the Gerritsen family, but he hadn’t really expected this. He had guessed that Phillip was looking for a story.

Or feeling suicidal.

Raindrops glistened in Phillip’s hair and on the dark hollows of his cheeks. He didn’t look any the worse for his confrontation with the storekeeper. In fact, he looked like a man waiting for new challenges. “This is getting stranger by the moment,” Ben said. “Why you?”

Phillip smiled. “You told the man. I’m a friend of the family.”

“I was just trying to keep your ass in one piece. What’s the real reason?”

Phillip shifted, too, trying to make room for his long legs. “Are you entertaining theories?”

“Yeah, and you could entertain a whole lot more than that by coming to a place like Grand Isle and manhandling the locals.”

Phillip took his time looking Ben over before he spoke again. “Do you know why you were invited?”

“How much do you know about the Gerritsens?” Ben reached into his shirt pocket for the Butterfingers he’d bought at the store. He ripped it open and broke it in two, offering half to Phillip.

Phillip declined with a shake of his head. “I just know what I’ve been told.”

“How much do you know about Father Hugh Gerritsen?” Ben asked.

“I know he was killed last year. Over there in Bonne Chance.” Phillip hiked his thumb over his shoulder.

“Yeah. A short sail, or a hell of a trip by car. I was born there, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m there again. I can feel the heat and the damp settling all over me, and I’m back in Bonne Chance.”

“You were there when he died, weren’t you?”

Ben wasn’t surprised that Phillip knew. They had never talked about it, but the story had been covered in the national media. “I was there. But there’s more to it than that. His niece and I…” He shrugged. “Dawn and I were close.”

“That right?”

“All I really know is I’m here, and I’m planning to stay.”

“So am I.”

“You’ve avoided telling me why you were invited.”

“I don’t know for sure.”

“But you could guess if you had to?”

“I got to know Mrs. Gerritsen at the end of her life. My being here has something to do with that.”

“Do you know anybody else who’s coming?”

Phillip gave a half smile that Ben could have interpreted a hundred different ways. “My mother and step father.”

Ben gave a low whistle. He had never met Phillip’s family, but he had heard Phillip’s mother sing a thou sand times. She was Nicky Valentine, a world-famous jazz and blues singer who owned a nightclub in New Or leans.

“Got their invitations the same day I got mine,” Phillip said.

Ben had a hundred questions, but Phillip had a journalist’s natural reticence. Ben would get his answers when they all gathered back at the cottage. “This is going to be even more interesting than I thought.”

Phillip’s smile hardened into something else. “Especially when the senator and his wife find out who’s been invited to their house.”

“I wouldn’t turn my back on him, if I were you.”

Phillip swiveled in his seat and reached for the ignition. “We’ve got questions, both of us, and they need answering. Maybe it’s time we found out what’s planned. But whatever it is, it’s not going to be boring. There’s a story here. Dark and light folks, tapping together to an old lady’s song.”

Ben was silent as Phillip started the car. The rain had slacked off again, but the sky was almost dark. He imagined that everyone who had been invited to hear the will was at the cottage by now. Maybe Phillip was right. Maybe a story would unfold in the next hours. But one thing was for certain. During her lifetime, Aurore Le Danois Gerritsen had been a woman to reckon with. Even now, even in death, she was still determined to have her way.