“Something like that. Except for the old-woman part.”
“I know to be careful. I’m so careful I almost didn’t come. You be careful, too.”
“I’ve got careful running through my veins. Only reason my veins are still running.”
Jake appeared in the doorway with a tray. “I only had hands enough for two plates, Phillip. But there’s plenty more in the kitchen, and you’re welcome to come back up and eat with us.”
“I think I’ll just go settle in.”
Nicky followed her son to the door without saying anything more. She was both glad and sorry that their conversation was finished. Too much had been said, or perhaps not enough. She was too upset to know. When he was gone, she took glasses of iced tea off Jake’s tray.
Jake moved closer. “Are you all right?”
“I’m just fine.” She waited until he set the tray on the bed before she went into his arms.
She stood in his embrace and listened to the sound of thunder in the distance. Finally she pulled away. “There’s still time to leave, Jake.”
He pulled her close again, and she resisted for only a moment. “Do you want them saying you’re afraid? That you didn’t think you were good enough to face down the Gerritsens and find out what this is all about?”
She was all too afraid she knew what it was about. “I don’t care what anybody thinks.”
“You’d leave your son here to face them alone?”
“At least the food smells good,” she said at last.
“And there are some people here who might be worth knowing.”
Nicky thought of Dawn and the things Phillip had said about her. She wondered if Dawn knew how much she looked like the young Hugh Gerritsen.
“Shall we eat?”
Jake moved toward the bed, but he seemed in no hurry to get the tray. He smoothed his hand over the lace spread, much as Nicky had done herself. “Then I think we should retire for the night.”
“Retire’s not exactly the word you have in mind, is it?”
He flashed her his slow, certain-of-himself smile. “I figure if we’ve got to be here, there ought to be compensations.”
She considered telling him that no matter how important staying here was, she wouldn’t be able to if he wasn’t beside her. But she decided not to. She just smiled slowly and held out her arms. And in her own way, she let him know.
CHAPTER THREE
Cappy Gerritsen needed only one glance around the downstairs bedroom that she and Ferris always shared to set her off. “I told you we shouldn’t have come.”
Ferris didn’t raise an eyebrow or point out that she had been silent for the entire two-and-a-half-hour trip from New Orleans. Cappy frequently alternated between stony silences and passionate oratory. After twenty-some years of marriage, neither upset him greatly.
He lit a cigarette and watched the smoke spiral to the ceiling, where it was sternly disciplined by a fan. One of the few similarities between Cappy and his mother had been their mutual distaste for air-conditioning. Each spring his New Orleans home was held hostage to the heat and humidity until mid-June. The cottage, thanks to his mother’s whims, was unbearable the entire summer.
“Don’t look at me like that. You obviously feel the same way.” Cappy sucked in her bottom lip—a manner ism that had been adorably provocative on a debutante and was nothing short of irritating on a forty-seven-year-old matron.
Ferris snuffed the cigarette in a potted fern and lit an other. “I came out of respect for my mother.”
“That’s what you call driving all this way to be con fronted by these people?”
When Ferris didn’t try to soothe her, Cappy began fidgeting with the shells lined up along the top of a chest of drawers. “Surely you can’t think this makes any sense. Isn’t it bad enough that your mother ordered an immediate cremation? Everyone expected the family to announce the date and time for a funeral mass. Now this. When the word gets out, our friends will think your mother is still leading us around by our noses.”
“I doubt they’ll be that perceptive.”
She looked down at her arrangement, dissatisfied. She tried lining the shells up by size. “Dawn didn’t even call. I sent cables everywhere I could think of to tell her about your mother’s death, and she didn’t even call. Until I saw her standing on the gallery, I didn’t even know if she’d gotten the message.”
From the beginning, Ferris had understood the roots of Cappy’s little tantrum. He paid lip service to it, even as he silently tried to make sense of what his mother had done. “Dawn made it clear some time ago that she does what she wants.”
“This is ridiculous. I don’t want to stay here even one night. This can’t have any bearing on your inheritance.”
“As old as he is, Spencer St. Amant’s still a worthy adversary. He’s often done what he damned well pleased and gotten away with it. I’m sure that’s why Mother chose him to oversee this little drama.”
She moved a large conch to the center and stepped back to view it. “Well, I know the law, and the law says your mother had no choice but to leave you a third of her estate.”
“Do we want a third, or do we want it all? There’s the controlling interest in Gulf Coast to consider.”
He watched as her hands went still. Gulf Coast Ship ping was the crown jewel of the Gerritsen family, a multimillion-dollar financial empire that was synonymous with the port of New Orleans and traffic on the Mississippi. Cappy’s own family was wealthy, but Gulf Coast, and Ferris’s connection to it, gave her the power in New Orleans society that she desired.
Ferris fully appreciated that desire. Cappy was an asset he had recognized long ago. When she chose, she could radiate breeding and charm, while simultaneously extolling her husband’s political virtues. Cappy, with her River Road plantation gentility, could work a room like a southern Jackie Kennedy.
He gave her a moment to consider before he continued. “I’ll talk to Spencer and insist he get this over with quickly. If he doesn’t agree, we could always take our chances and drive back to the city. But, of course, if we leave, we won’t know exactly what transpires here, will we?”
“You don’t miss a thing.”
He strolled to her side and leaned over to kiss her cheek. “You’ll stay, then?”
“As always, my choices seem limited.”
“Go ahead and unpack a few things. I’m going to explore and see what I can find out.”
When he reached the doorway, Ferris took one last look over his shoulder. Cappy was leaning over the chest once more, compulsively rearranging the shells. The room was simple, casual and quaint, as only rooms in a summer home can be. But there was nothing there, or in the sprawling twelve-room house, for that matter, that didn’t underscore the ambience of old money and tradition.
And there was nothing that didn’t reek of family now vanished forever.
Ferris had spent all the summers of his boyhood in this place. He hoped this was the last summer he would ever see it.
Dawn unpacked the few clothes she’d brought with her, then wandered the bedroom as memories stung her. Some things were much as they had been years before. The closet still held clothes she had worn as a teenager. A pink bathing suit with a pleated skirt lay in the bottom drawer of the pine dresser, faded rubber flip-flops tucked neatly under it. The view was one she remembered. She stopped at the window and gazed outside at a gray drizzle, leftovers from the earlier shower. The Gulf was just visible here, a wedge of