Blood Memory. Greg Iles

He’s an avid hunter, and DeSalle Island—which teems with deer, wild hogs, and even bear—has been a second home to him since he married into the family a half century ago.

      When I get out of the Audi, the summer heat wraps around me like a thick jacket. The whine of crickets and the bellow of frogs from the nearby bayou fills the night, but this soundtrack from my childhood brings mixed feelings. As I glance toward the rear of Malmaison proper, my eyes lock onto a gnarled dogwood tree at the edge of the rose garden that separates our house from Pearlie’s, and my throat seals shut. My father perished under that tree, shot dead by an intruder he confronted there twenty-three years ago. I can’t look at the dogwood without remembering that night. Blue police lights flashing through rain. Wet, gray flesh. Glassy eyes open to the sky. I’ve asked Grandpapa many times to cut down that tree, but he’s always refused, claiming it would be foolish to mar the beauty of our famed rose garden out of sentimentality.

       Sentimentality.

      I stopped speaking after my father was murdered. Literally. I didn’t utter a word for over a year. But in my eight-year-old brain, I ceaselessly pondered what the intruder had come looking for that was worth my father’s life. Cash? The family silver? Grandpapa’s art or gun collections? All were possible targets, but no money or property was ever discovered missing. As I grew older, I wondered if it could have been my mother that drew the prowler. She was scarcely thirty then and could easily have caught the attention of a rapist. But since the intruder was never caught, this theory couldn’t be tested.

      After my first depressive episode—I was fifteen—a new fear crept into my mind: that there had been no intruder at all. My father was shot with his own rifle, and the only fingerprints found on it belonged to family members. I couldn’t help but wonder whether my daddy—scarred within and without by a war he’d wanted no part of—had chosen to end his own life. Whether, even with a wife and daughter who loved him, he’d felt he had no choice but to stop his pain with a bullet. I’d been close to that point myself by then, so I knew it was possible. I’ve reached that point again in the years since, and more than once. Yet something has always kept me from accepting suicide as my father’s fate. Perhaps it’s my belief that the strength that kept me alive during those terrible nights was a gift from him to me, the only legacy he left behind.

      I hate the fucking rose garden. Patterned on the Malmaison gardens tended by Josephine herself, where every variety of rose in the world was represented, it fills the air of Malmaison with scents that make tourists gasp with pleasure. But for me the smell of roses will always be part of the stench of death.

      I turn away from the garden and, with paranoia born from years of urban living, unload my dental cases from the backseat. Only when I’m halfway to the door of our slave quarters do I remember that in Natchez I could leave my cases in the unlocked car for a month and find them just as I’d left them when I returned.

      The front door is locked. I have no key. Trudging around to the window of my old bedroom, I set down my cases and slide up the pane. The closed-in smell that wafts through the curtains hurls me fifteen years back in time. I lift the cases over the sill, set them inside, then climb through and make my way through the dark to the light switch on the wall. It’s an easy journey, because my bedroom looks exactly as it did in May of 1989, when I graduated high school.

      The walls are brown 1970s paneling, the carpet the same navy blue installed the year I was born. Silk dragonflies of myriad colors hang from filaments tacked to the ceiling, and posters of rock stars adorn the walls: U2, Sinead O’Connor, R.E.M., Sting. Shelves of photographs and swimming trophies line the wall opposite my closet, chronicling a competitive career that began at five and ended at sixteen. The older photographs show my father—a dark, handsome man of medium height—standing next to a gangly little girl with long bones but no apparent muscle. As the girl’s body begins to fill in, my father vanishes from the photos and an older man with silver hair, chiseled features, and piercing eyes takes his place. My grandfather, Dr. William Kirkland. Studying the photos now, it seems odd that my mother is in so few of them. But Mom never took much of an interest in my swimming, an “unsocial” activity that consumed vast amounts of time that could otherwise have been spent in more “appropriate” pursuits.

      Glancing into the closet, I see clothes I wore in high school hanging there. Beneath the clothes, a wicker laundry basket filled with Louisiana Rice Creatures. The sight of the clothes doesn’t affect me, but the colorful stuffed animals bring a lump to my throat. Originally stuffed with dried rice, Rice Creatures were local precursors of the Beanie Babies that later became a national craze. There must be thirty of them in the basket, but the only one that really matters to me is missing. Lena the Leopardess. Lena was my favorite, and I’m not sure why. Maybe because she was a cat, like me. I loved Lena’s spots, I loved her whiskers, I loved how she felt pressed against my cheek while I fell asleep. I carried her everywhere I went, including my father’s funeral. It was there, surrounded by adults in the visiting room prior to the service, that I saw my father lying in his coffin.

      He didn’t look like my father anymore. He looked older, and he looked very alone. When I pointed this out, my grandfather suggested that Daddy might not feel so lonely if he had Lena for company while he slept. The idea of losing Lena and my father on the same day frightened me, but Grandpapa was right. Lena made me less lonely every night, and I was sure she could do the same for Daddy. After asking Mom if it was okay, I reached over the high side of the coffin and nestled Lena between my father’s cheek and shoulder, just as I did with her every night. I missed her badly after that, but I comforted myself with the thought that Daddy had a little piece of my heart to keep him company.

      Standing in this bedroom is creeping me out, as it has on each of the occasions when I’ve returned home. Why does my mother preserve it this way? She’s an interior designer, for God’s sake. Practically manic in her desire to transform every space over which she’s given dominion. Is it an homage to my childhood? To a simpler past? Or is it an open invitation to me to come back and start over at a point before I “veered off track”? Just when that was—my personal failure as a “DeSalle woman”—is a point of contention within my family. In my grandfather’s eyes, I didn’t screw up until I was asked to leave medical school, which precluded my following in his footsteps as a surgeon. But in my mother’s eyes, my failure began long before, at some indeterminate point during adolescence. Though I’m not a DeSalle by name—my father was a Ferry—I am very much considered a DeSalle woman, which carries with it a legion of traditions and expectations. But a thousand small choices have taken me ever further from this predestined road, onto one that hasn’t led me within a stone’s throw of a husband, a fact my mother never lets me forget. I’m actually thankful I arrived tonight to find her gone.

      As I stare at a photograph of my father holding my hand high in triumph, the Valium enters my bloodstream, and a blessed calm comes over me. Because my father died when I was eight, it was he alone that I never disappointed. I like to think that, had he lived, he would be proud of what I’ve accomplished. As for my problems … well, Luke Ferry had problems of his own.

      I pull back the spread on my permanently made bed and take my cell phone from my pocket. A pang of guilt hits me when I see thirteen missed calls. Punching 1 to check my voice mail, I listen to the first message. Sean called me even before he left Arthur LeGendre’s house. In a reassuring voice he tells me to stay calm, that Piazza is his problem not mine, and then he begs me to keep myself together until he gets there. “There” being my house on the lake. I skip ahead several messages. The change in Sean’s voice is astonishing.

      “It’s me again,” he says angrily. “I’m still at your house, and I have no fucking idea where you are. Please call me back, even if you don’t want to see me. I don’t know if you’re drunk in some dive in the Quarter or lying dead in a ditch somewhere. Have you stopped taking your meds? Something’s wrong, Cat, I know it, and I don’t mean the murders. Look … you have to trust me, and you know you can.” There’s a crackling pause. “Damn it, I love you, and this is bullshit. This is why we’re not together already. I’m sitting in this empty house and—” There’s a click, then nothing. This message exhausted the phone’s available memory.

      I