Chapter Thirty-Two

Freshly home from school and playing with Snake on the gallery, Angelle saw her mother’s car turn into the drive. Her daddy said she should never see or go anywhere with her mother unless Thurston or another adult came with her. She ran to tell her great-aunt, but Tante Lilliane napped in her bed before dinner, and she knew better than to wake the old woman because it made her grumpy. The child dashed to Pearl fixing a potato salad in the kitchen.

“Mother is coming up the drive, Pearl. Please, please, please hide me.”

“Calm down, child. Look, we’ll both go to my room and shut the door. She’ll think no one is home and go on her way. Quiet now.” Pearl hugged Angelle close to her side as they listened to the front door slam and measured Vivien’s progress by the sharp tap of her heels on the wooden floor, down the hall and into the kitchen.

“Anybody home?” the mad woman called pleasantly. “I know there must be since the door is unlocked. My, my, potato salad in the making. Such a pity I never touch carbs. It is one of your better dishes, Pearl. Come out, come out wherever you are and bring the child with you. I saw her scoot into the house. What a way to greet her loving mother. But then she was always a mistake, a terrible mistake since birth.”

The kitchen door opened and closed. Pearl and Angelle breathed easier.

“Do you think she’s gone, Pearl?”

“You stay here. Let me just take a peek.” The maid opened her bedroom door a crack only to have it kicked back into her face. She stumbled against Angelle but regained her footing and her senses in time to shove the child behind her.

Miss Vivien waved a small pistol at them. “Naughty, naughty child to hide from your mother again. I almost got rid of you when I burned down Domengeaux’s store. You have as many lives as that black cat you adore. A bullet will be less painful, but not as cleansing as fire. Fortunately, I still have a full clip since I didn’t have to waste even one shot on that passive wimp, Laura. Step aside, Pearl. This doesn’t concern you.”

Pearl stayed put before the child and talked soothingly to her former mistress, telling the demented woman what she wanted to hear. Maybe she did have Tante Lu’s talent for telling tales after all.

“Miss Vivien, you sure are right about those errors. Why, I found a whole new batch of diaries in a secret compartment when I cleaned out that old closet upstairs. They say Caroline LeBlanc was a crazy person who made up all those stories. I know you want to see them. They in my closet right here.”

Watching Vivien and blocking her view of Angelle, Pearl moved toward the hidden stairway and shoved her small sewing machine out of the way. When the door stood half way open, Pearl pushed Angelle before her and jumped in after, slamming the closet door shut. They made the fourth step before Vivien fired into the wood.

“I know where it leads, Pearl. I’m blocking this door, you hear? You won’t get out.”

From their place on the tenth step, they heard the sewing machine being shoved back into place and jammed against the wall. A vacuum cleaner stood in the way in the upstairs closet. The housekeeper and child on the thirteenth step shoved it aside. Shielding the girl, Pearl moved into the empty bedroom first, but Vivien did not wait for them. In the kitchen below, the maniac broke glass, bottles of cooking oil, liquor, anything flammable, Pearl guessed. Miss Lilliane called from her room for Pearl to stop that racket.

Footsteps sounded in the hall and up to the first landing. Leaving Angelle hidden in the closet, Pearl risked taking a glimpse from the Judge’s room. Miss Vivien gleefully sprayed a can of peanut oil on the frayed runners of the stairs. She lit a wooden kitchen match and touched it to the soaked fabric. Even before that, Pearl smelled something burning in the kitchen—grease, alcohol and paper toweling maybe. Vivid orange and blue flames shot up from the pool of oil on the stairs. That crazy woman meant to burn them alive.

On the other side of the veil of flames, Vivien shouted, “I do see you, Pearl. Much as I’d love to watch you and the child fry, I must go pay my last respects to Miss Lilliane. She won’t need her wheelchair after today. It is cruel to leave your prey half alive, but LeBlancs are tough to kill. Must be your primitive black blood. Who knew she would jump out a window rather than burn. After today, only Robert will be left to spread the lies, and I am sure I can find him easily at my father’s house and finish the kill I started at the camp.”

Pearl half shielded by the door watched Vivien retreat down the stairs. “Bon jour, old woman. May you dance in hell,” Angelle’s mother called out merrily to Tante Lil. The mad woman returned quickly with the wheelchair, went outside and threw it down the verandah stairs. She did not return to the burning house.