the room.”
“Did your grandmother ever throw anything away?”
“Apparently not.” Dawn approached an old chest with a cracked marble top. All the drawers opened easily. Something rustled in the corner of one, and she slammed it shut. “Mice.”
“If that’s the worst we find, we’ll be lucky.”
“Please.” She tried an armoire, packed full of filmy, fragile dresses spanning half a century in style. “There are museums that would love to have these.”
“I haven’t seen anything that needs a key.”
“We’re not done.”
She rummaged through boxes of dusty books and mementos, while Ben methodically examined furniture. They had almost progressed around the room before Dawn spotted the trunk. She remembered it well be cause it was the same one that had held all the family photographs. Some of the photographs were still there, but now half the space was taken up by a small leather suitcase.
Dawn sat cross-legged and lifted the case to her lap. She traced her grandmother’s initials, gold against dark blue. “Look.”
Ben squatted beside her. “Locked?”
She reached inside her pocket for the key. The lock opened as easily as the door. She lifted out a black leather journal. The pages were edged with gold, like a Bible. The first page was inscribed in fountain pen. The script was rounded and carefully formed. With childish whimsy, an ink blot had been turned into a tiny spider.
She was puzzled. She was halfway through the page before she realized who it belonged to. “Ben, this is Uncle Hugh’s journal. I didn’t even know he’d kept one.”
She looked up. Ben’s eyes were shadowed. “I’ve wondered what happened to it.”
“Then you knew?”
“I lived with him that last summer. I saw him writing in it sometimes. When I got out of the hospital and went back…to the rectory, I looked for it. But all his things were gone by then.”
She leafed through it. “It starts when he’s about ten, I think, and it’s pretty sporadic. But look, it’s nearly filled. Almost like…” She didn’t want to go on.
Ben finished for her. “Like his life and the pages ran out together.”
She didn’t want to think about that. “There’s more.”
She set the journal beside her and took out a lavender metal box decorated with pansies and violets. Inside, she found a thick stack of letters tied with a black rib bon.
The letters were more faded than the journal. In the dim light, she was forced to squint to make out words. “This one’s addressed to a Father Grimaud. Look, it’s in French.”
He squinted, too. “I studied Latin.”
“My French is acceptable.”
“Phillip’s is perfect, if you need a translator. Who are they from?”
She turned the first one over. “Lucien Le Danois.” She looked up at Ben. “He was my great-grandfather.”
“So what does this have to do with me?”
There hadn’t been time to ask herself that question. Now Dawn realized how important it was. “I don’t know. What do you think?”
He shrugged.
Dawn realized she was hugging the letters to her chest. “If Grandmère had only wanted me to have these, she would have given me both of the keys. Or she wouldn’t have bothered with keys at all. Spencer would have handed me the suitcase this morning on the porch. Do you see? Obviously she wanted us to work together.”
“What right do I have to delve into your family history?”
“I don’t know. Do you have any theories?”
“I haven’t had time to concoct any.” He stood. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to take the letters back to the house and read them.” She stood, too. She met his eyes, and for a moment she didn’t speak. Then she held out her uncle’s journal. “You take this.”
“Why?”
“Think about it. Grandmère wanted us both to find the case. Obviously she wanted you to be part of this. You don’t speak French, but you were with my uncle when he died.”
“Why do you want me to be part of this?”
“I don’t. But my grandmother did. Besides, don’t you need something to do besides sit around and judge me and my family?” Reluctantly she inched the journal closer to him.
He took it with something that seemed remarkably like gratitude.
“So, you want to share what we find at breakfast to morrow?” she asked.
“If we find anything.”
She put the empty suitcase back in the trunk and led the way out. The sky had darkened by the time they emerged. They had come in silence, but now that seemed intolerable. Her grandmother’s strange offering had tilted the balance between them. Dawn no longer knew exactly what to think.
“Betsy’s still threatening,” she said as they started back to the cottage. “Maybe nobody will be able to stay here the full four days. We might have to evacuate. I wonder what that would do to the will….”
“Nobody’s forecasting she’ll come ashore here.”
“Mistakes have been made before.”
They parted inside, their supply of small talk used up. Dawn watched Ben disappear into the kitchen, perhaps to find Phillip and report on this turn of events. She took the letters upstairs and set them beside her bed. A quick scan had shown that they covered a period of years. A good start on translating them would take her into the late hours of the night.
This new link with her grandmother was a surprise and a pleasure. There was really very little that she knew about her grandmother’s family or Aurore’s early life. Who was the woman who had married Henry Gerritsen and borne his two sons? Who was the woman who, contrary to the social mores of her time, had helped build Gulf Coast Shipping into a multimillion-dollar corporation?
Dawn washed and changed for supper; even the knowledge that she would have to face Ben over the table had taken a back seat to the letters and what she might find there.
By the time she went down to eat, rain pelted the roof and thunder shook the rafters. That, too, seemed unimportant.
Alone at last for the evening, she dressed for bed. Then she picked up her grandmother’s bequest.
“You were a crafty old lady.” She hugged the letters as she had earlier. “What was it that you couldn’t tell me yourself, Grandmère?”
She settled into bed and set to work.
CHAPTER FIVE
Bonne Chance lay just across Barataria Bay, not an easy or short journey from Grand Isle, since marsh, water and one ambivalent hurricane separated them. But getting there, even in bad weather, was possible, if you drove back toward New Orleans and cut east to the Mississippi River. Bonne Chance was a one-dictator town, home of Largo Haines, a crony of Ferris’s. It had also been the final home of Hugh Gerritsen.
“I don’t understand why dinner with Largo couldn’t wait until this fiasco at the beach is finished,” Cappy said, peering out the windshield as sheets of rain washed the blacktop in front of them. “We’ve been in the car for hours. We could have had him up to New Orleans next week. I could have made sure everything was perfect.”
“Largo doesn’t care about perfect. He knows exactly how far away we were. He cares whether I come when he whistles, like a well-trained Labrador.”
“Well,