Garden of bone book 6, p.35
Garden of Bone: Book 6, page 35
"No hard feelings,” Donovan said. “I expected nothing less."
Almasi nodded once again and then he looked over his shoulder and said, only, "You're dismissed."
Donovan left the shop via the back door and found Eleri in the alleyway, alone. "Where's the boy?"
"Someone from child services took him. She seemed really nice, and he liked her. His family has been notified." Her voice sounded far away, as though those were the best things she could conjure to say about the night, and they probably were.
"We have to get back to Grandmere," she told him. "Are we free to go?"
He nodded at her and started feeling in his pockets for car keys, as though they were an ancient item that he had long forgotten about. She, too, searched her pockets. Eventually, she produced them, and he remembered he was not the one who had driven here. It felt like years ago.
Slowly, they walked through the dark alley toward the rental car. She backed out, turned around, and drove away. Donovan was grateful no one followed them.
In the mirror, he saw the two remaining agents standing sentry at the back door. They disappeared into the darkness behind him and he looked at his partner next to him.
He wasn't sure if Eleri should be driving right now—but then again, he wasn't sure that he should either. Though it was tempting to tip his head back against the seat and let exhaustion overtake him, to let sleep drag him under, he felt he had to watch over Eleri. She, too, was crashing, and they were in control of a vehicle. He forced his eyes to stay awake and let the small buzz of knowing that they had not yet located Grandmere keep him awake and running.
As they pulled into the narrow drive, he noted that his rental car remained, but there was no sign one way or another of Grandmere. An empty driveway didn’t mean much for a woman who didn't have a car.
The lights were not on in the house. He and Eleri flipped them on as they opened the door.
"Grandmere," Eleri hollered, walking through the house and heading down the hall.
Donovan was looking in the kitchen, seeing no trace of the woman aside from the rag left on the kitchen counter, as though she had been interrupted while cleaning.
Then he heard Eleri gasp from down the hall. Turning, Donovan followed the one sound. Eleri had made no more.
He found her, standing in the hallway as though she couldn’t set foot across the threshold, though she had reached in and flipped on the light. In the harsh glare of the bulb cutting through the darkness of the night, he saw Grandmere lying on her bed, her eyes open, motionless.
72
Eleri felt the pressure at the back of her eyes as she saw Donovan standing over Grandmere's body.
Donovan looked up from where he held two fingers to the old woman’s neck, his expression sober and sad. He shook his head at her. But she hadn't needed him to tell her Grandmere was gone.
In fact, as she looked around, it seemed Grandmere had never left the house tonight. Her feet were bare and she wore her house dress. Perhaps Grandmere had never actually been at the store, though she and Donovan and the little boy and even the sisters had all seen the older woman.
Eleri pressed her lips together to keep them from quivering. What on earth would she ever do without Grandmere? She tried to be logical about it. Grandmere was well over ninety, possibly even a hundred. She’d had a good long life. Eleri tried to console herself that she’d had her great-grandmother for a longer time than most. But it didn’t make the loss any easier.
Searching for sanity, her brain turned to the logistics. She would need to call her parents and tell them Grandmere had passed. Someone would need to sell the tiny house. Eleri thought she herself should clean it out. Lord knows she didn't want Nathalie Beaumont Eames finding the human bones Grandmere kept in the closet.
It occurred to her then that Frederick would know what to do. She almost picked up her phone to call him, but then thought better of it. She felt hands reaching for her shoulders, and only as Donovan grabbed her did she realize her knees had buckled and she'd started to go down.
"What do we do?" she whispered.
"Well, we need to call someone. We need to have the body interred. She should be taken to the morgue."
Those were all reasonable things, but Eleri didn't know if “reasonable” applied to her great-grandmother. She shook her head and held her phone up to Donovan. "Frederick," she whispered. "Call Frederick."
The Dauphine sisters had buried their dead in the back of their yard—and some in the courtyard of the home. Perhaps she should do the same for Grandmere. Though being interred at the majestic Dauphine house on the outskirts of the French Quarter hardly seemed the same as a makeshift cemetery on Grandmere's small lot in the Lower Ninth Ward.
Donovan guided her out to the front of the house and sat her on the couch. He pulled out his phone to call, but instead it rang. While he spoke in low tones to Frederic, she looked around the room.
She looked to the coffee table, which again appeared more like a regular coffee table and less like an altar. She looked to the shelves, seeing that the knickknacks were not knickknacks, but spell items. Tiny bowls of salt, feathers and fur, tiny poppets waiting for their day.
The table in the dining room looked very different to her. Where, when Grandmere had run the place, it had been covered in her scraps of fabric and her spellcraft supplies, it was now dominated by towels that Donovan had rolled up where Eleri had laid out her bodies, and by computers where they had set up their own mobile center. And as Eleri looked at the table, she realized that everything was wrong.
Three of the Dauphine sisters were in custody now, though she had no idea how long that would last. Darcelle had completely gone missing. To top it all off, not only was Grandmere gone, but she still hadn't found Emmaline.
When Frederick arrived, she felt Donovan shaking her shoulder, and she realized she'd fallen asleep on the couch. As she sat up, she moved her face to try to smile at her cousin, and she felt the skin crack with salt. She'd been crying, even as she slept.
When Emmaline disappeared, her life had gone on without her sister, even though at the time, she'd felt that was impossible. She told herself she was a child. She told herself her mother was right, and Emmaline would come home. Nathalie Beaumont Eames still seemed to believe that. Eleri was going to shatter her mother's world more than once, because even if she didn't find Emmaline's remains, she had spoken to a person who told her Emmaline had died and confirmed what Eleri had known intuitively all these years.
When Frederick refused the hand she offered to help him, he merely put his own hand on her shoulder, holding her down on the couch. As he did, she felt the warmth infuse her. She felt, suddenly, at least a little bit better.
She whispered, "Grandmere?"
He smiled. “She's still here.”
Somehow, it was enough to make Eleri feel better. No matter what she believed, no matter what she thought, somehow, someone believed. And Grandmere would still stay alive in that way. Eleri felt the back of her vocal chords shaking and tightening, and she was unable to speak in response.
Frederick seemed to understand, and he leaned in as he whispered. “She wasn’t able to save your sister. But she saved you. That’s what she wanted.”
Her throat ratcheted down again, and Eleri felt fresh tears start as her cousin turned away.
It was Donovan who asked, "How should we handle this? I would call an ambulance and send her to the morgue, but I don't know if that's what you want."
Frederick shook his head. "No. That was not what Grandmere had planned." And Eleri laughed that Frederick also called her the same thing. But of course he would. He was of the same generation as she, and they all called her that. Every time she was here, she always felt as though she had the old woman to herself. She liked to forget that she wasn't the only remaining great-grandchild.
At last, Frederick and Donovan came out and asked for her help. She’d watched as Donovan acted as assistant once more, doing as her cousin told him. They’d wrapped the body in a fabric that Frederick brought with him and carried her with great dignity through the house. Though she had no energy left, Eleri followed Frederick's instructions and helped them load Grandmere's body into his car.
Grandmere had made her plans, he said. She’d left careful instructions for him. Eleri frowned. She believed him, of course—but she had no idea what he might do. Perhaps he would sink her into the swamp with flowers, or put her on a Viking pyre and light it aflame. She only knew that, despite her worry and her doubt, she had to trust him.
At last she found her voice. "Is there somewhere I'll be able to go, to visit her?"
"Of course," he said. “There's a family lot just out of town."
Eleri frowned harder. "I didn’t know that."
"Why would you? The family has long lives, and it has been quite a while since we buried anyone. Grandmere's older sister was the last."
Eleri hadn't even known that Grandmere had an older sister. Her face must have shown that. Frederick smiled in response. "That’s exactly why I am now in charge of this family, and not you."
That, at least, made her laugh.
Donovan asked, "How will you do this? Will you file this with the city? They'll notice a missing person."
Frederick shook his head. "No, they won't."
"What about her Social Security?" Donovan said.
Frederick laughed openly this time. "Grandmere collected no government checks and had very few government records, aside from the deed to the house, which she put into my name almost five years ago."
Eleri felt her head snap back. Though she didn't regret that, and she thought Frederick should own the house, she just found it odd that Grandmere had planned so far ahead. She had known she wasn’t much longer for this world; she must have.
"But she was so healthy," Eleri protested. "I thought she'd be here another ten years."
It was Frederick who clucked his tongue and said, "Grandmere was already one hundred and seventeen."
73
Eleri sat at the small kitchen table, eating a breakfast she had made herself. It was nowhere near as good as the ones Grandmere had made. The house felt flat, two-dimensional instead of three-dimensional. She wondered if her brain would ever get right again.
Donovan headed down the hallway, having slept late, though Eleri had been unable to. She didn't begrudge him that. One of them needed to be sane, and it wasn't going to be her. She pushed a plate toward him, having set it on the other side of the table, hoping the smell of bacon would wake him. It was the last of the food in the refrigerator, as she had discovered Grandmere only bought for the day or two ahead, walking to the store frequently, as though it was a social outing instead of stockpiling supplies and staying in.
So far, no one had showed up knocking at the door, wanting Grandmere to grant them a spell or a potion of some kind. Eleri wondered if her great-grandmother had sent some kind of cosmic warning out into the ether. Maybe a ricochet or a ripple had happened through space, letting everyone know she was gone. She was still stunned by Frederick's words. She had thought Grandmere was well into her nineties, but one hundred and seventeen?
How old was my mother? she wondered. Was Nathalie one of these seemingly immortal women, too? Was she?
Donovan was eating his breakfast, inhaling the eggs while Eleri picked at hers, when his phone rang. Swallowing the bite he was on, he showed the screen to Eleri. Agent Almasi was calling him.
She gleaned from Donovan’s side of the conversation that they were expected out somewhere, and she wondered if she should tell Agent Almasi that her great-grandmother had passed. When Donovan hung up, she asked exactly that.
Shaking his head, Donovan asked, “What would you tell him? That she showed up at the shop and then we found her at home, deceased?”
Eleri shrugged. “There was enough time for her to come back.”
“You and I both know she never left this house. Frederick is burying her body. If we say that she's gone, there's every possibility that Almasi won't trust us, or that he'll just get curious and look up the records.”
Eleri nodded. “He'll see that she was never declared dead. Won't somebody eventually get suspicious?”
"Possibly, but it’s unlikely, if nobody has any reason to go looking for the records.” He paused, thinking. “You know, at one hundred and seventeen years old—and given the family history—it's entirely plausible she doesn't have a birth certificate, either. With no Social Security, it means, no. No one will go looking for her.”
Eleri decided that, until something went wrong, she would let Frederick handle it. It might not be entirely legal, but it wasn't entirely illegal, either. Eleri had plenty on her plate without dealing with the rest of this.
"Almasi wants us?" she asked, turning her attention to the present.
Donovan, whose plate was now clean, stood. "Yes, he wants us at the courtyard house."
"Did they find Darcelle?" Eleri stood, suddenly excited, but Donovan shook his head and she felt like sinking back into her chair.
Forty minutes later, they were across town in the French Quarter. The house was swarming with agents. Yellow tape crisscrossed the front balconies, though people walking on the sidewalk could reach out and pluck it away. Inside the courtyard, and all over the back yard, Eleri could see agents were digging.
Almasi greeted them as he opened the wrought iron gate into the courtyard, allowing them entry. He looked back and forth between them. “I don't know what kind of voodoo you two have, but your SAC told me to put you on this investigation. I thought for sure you would get reprimanded—and instead, I now have to put you on my team."
He didn't seem horribly upset about it, so Eleri merely smiled and asked, “Why are we here?”
“You’re a forensic scientist, and we need more knowledgeable hands,” he said. Then he turned to Donovan. “Former M.E., correct?”
Donovan nodded. That was when Almasi's expression turned serious. “We have more here than we can handle. I don't have enough agents to cover the number of bodies coming up.” He waved to the gate and the people ogling the scene from the other side of the street. “We need to do this quickly.”
“Isn't someone tarping the fence?” Eleri asked.
“It's on its way, but the tarps we brought initially weren't big enough,” he said. “People were looking around the edges. We've only been here for a few hours, though we taped up the house last night.” He rattled off information as he walked into the house, expecting them to keep up, both physically and mentally.
“Darcelle?” Eleri asked.
The agent shook his head. “No sign of her. No use of credit cards, no tracing to bank accounts.”
A thought ran through Eleri’s head again. Darcelle had said, There was legal money in the family, and that implied there was also illegal money. There were Lobomau all over the streets in New Orleans. Though they had disappeared from the shop as quickly as they had come, she wondered where the wolves were now. Would any of them shelter a missing Dauphine sister? She’d heard what Darcelle said to Caspian. And though it looked like the youngest Salzani had been ripped apart by the wolves, there had been no evidence of him at all when the place cleared.
Donovan looked out into the crowd, and Almasi asked, “What are you looking for?”
“I thought the Salzanis or some of their associates might be watching the wreckage.”
Almasi nodded in understanding. “Give me the names. We'll pull IDs and get agents on it.”
Eleri tapped Donovan’s back. “Better to let Almasi and his people look for them. Cabot and his crew are watching for us, but maybe not for the rest of the feds.”
Slowly, they turned to the yard and got to work.
It was two days later that Eleri was on her knees under the tree that grew in the corner of the courtyard. They had pulled up approximately seven bodies from the ground, though they didn’t have complete skeletons for all of them yet. Some of the bones appeared to match to the original finger bone she’d tried to bring home in her pocket that first day.
The agents now took the bones freely from the house, so there was no remaining trace of whatever had held the bone there the first day Eleri had come.
In the soil under the tree, there had been more bones woven in between the roots. But then Eleri found a body that was free of entanglements, as though the tree had grown around it, rather than through it.
As she carefully extracted this delicate skull from the earth, she knew she was looking at Emmaline.
74
Eleri drove the rental car up the freeway. The road stayed mostly clear, making the drive easy. The hot summer sun left the day a pretty blue, if not a pleasant temperature. But the air conditioning in the car helped make up for it.
Eleri’s bags were secured in the trunk, and a wooden box was strapped into the passenger seat next to her, almost as though it were a person. To a certain extent, it was. Although Eleri breathed deeply and, for the first time, with a freedom she had not known in almost twenty years, a weight still sat heavy on her chest. She wondered if she'd ever shake it.
She’d spoken to her mother and father, telling them what she had done. She had told them about Grandmere several days earlier, but she waited until she had everything in place to tell them about finding Emmaline. It had come as a second blow to them, much harder than the loss of Grandmere.
Nathalie had been raised by Grandmere. Her own mother had been absent since Nathalie was an infant. The first Emmaline had been dead since Nathalie was a toddler. Given that relationship between Nathalie and her grandmother, it had only occurred to Eleri after she'd delivered the news, that her mother had lost both her mother and her daughter with the span of a few days.
The two cases could not have been more different. If Nathalie knew how old Grandmere was, then she must've thought, as Eleri had, that Grandmere was likely immortal. That had proven not to be the case. While her death wasn't a surprise, it seemed a shock to everyone’s system that Grandmere was gone.
