Greg Iles - Blood Memory

She’s drawn her curtains, too. After trying the front windows on the ground floor, I go around back. One window there is barely latched. By jiggling the frame, I get the latch loose, then slide up the window.

Pearlie’s bedroom is dark, her bed empty. A converted slave quarters like ours, her house has no hallways. I move quickly to the door and pass through to the kitchen.

Like my mother this morning, Pearlie is sitting at her kitchen table without lights, staring blankly ahead. Unlike my mother, she’s smoking a cigarette. I haven’t seen Pearlie smoke since I was a little girl. An ashtray full of butts is beside her, and a bottle of cheap whiskey stands beside her coffee cup.

“Pearlie?”

“I thought you was Billy Neal coming to get me,” she rasps.

“Why would he come get you?”

“’Cause of what I know.” Her voice has a frightening note of fatalism in it.

“What do you know?”

“Same thing you do, I reckon.”

“What’s that?”

A new alertness comes into her eyes. “Don’t play games with me. Tell me what you come here for.”

“I’m about to confront Grandpapa. I wanted to talk to you first.”

She blinks once, slowly. “How come?”

“Because you know things I need to know. And I want you to know what I’ve learned about him.”

“What you talking about?”

“Grandpapa murdered Daddy, Pearlie.”

The orange eye of her cigarette glows bright. “You just think that? Or you can prove it?”

“I can prove it. What I want to know is, did you already know it?”

Pearlie exhales a long stream of smoke. “Not to prove, I didn’t. I didn’t see him do it, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it. Did you suspect it?”

“I had thoughts that night. Later on, too. But there wasn’t nothing I could do about it.”

I knew it. “You think Grandpapa’s invulnerable, Pearlie. But he’s not. I’m going to put him in jail. I’ve got evidence now. Remember Lena the Leopardess?”

A glint of memory passes behind her eyes. “The toy you buried with Mr. Luke?”

“That’s right. Grandpapa suggested I put her in the coffin with him. Do you know why he did that?”

“I know there was blood on her. I know Dr. Kirkland told me to throw that toy away. When I told him it was your favorite, he told me I could wash it off and sew the rip back together.”

“Do you know how Lena got torn?”

She shakes her head.

“Grandpapa stuffed her into Daddy’s mouth so he would suffocate before you got downstairs. He wasn’t dying quickly enough from the bullet.”

Pearlie winces. “Lord Jesus. Don’t tell me that.”

“That’s not the worst of it. You remember the story about Grandpapa cutting out Ann’s appendix by lantern light on the island? How he was the big hero for saving her life?”

“Sure I do. Him and Ivy both.”

“Well, he took out her appendix, all right. But he did a little something extra, too. He cut her fallopian tubes, so she couldn’t get pregnant.”

Pearlie bows her head and begins to pray softly.

“Why did you go to the island yesterday, Pearlie? You hate that place.”

“Don’t want to talk about that.”

“You’ve got to start talking. You’ve been silent too long.”

She sips whiskey from her coffee cup, then lights another cigarette and takes a deep drag. “I quit cigarettes twenty-three years ago,” she says, smoke floating out of her mouth with each word. “I’ve missed ’em every day, like a pain that won’t quit. But when I heard Miss Ann was dead, I had to have me one. I ain’t stopped since.”

I say nothing.

“I come to work here in 1948,” she says, almost to herself. “I was seventeen. Miss Ann was born that year, but they was living in New Orleans then. Dr. Kirkland was still training to be a doctor. He and Mrs. Catherine didn’t move to Natchez until 1956, and they didn’t take over this place until sixty-four, when Mr. DeSalle died.”

She looks at me as though making sure I understand. “That’s why I missed it, you see? Miss Ann was sixteen when they moved in here. The damage was already done. But things still wasn’t right. Not really. Any boy that come to call on Ann, Dr. Kirkland frightened away. Even the nice ones. Lots of daddies will do that a little, but Dr. Kirkland never gave an inch. He was jealous of that girl. Mrs. Catherine saw it, too, but she couldn’t do nothing to change it.”

“If they’d been living in Natchez since 1956,” I reason, “surely you saw some other signs before they moved to Malmaison?”

The old woman chews her bottom lip. “I been thinking about that for two days now. There was times when they left the girls here, going on long trips and such. Sometimes Dr. Kirkland would leave me medicine for Ann. She didn’t seem sick, ’cept she had to go to the bathroom too much, and it stung when she went. I’d give her the medicine, and she’d get all right. But looking back, she had too many of them problems. No other doctor ever saw it, though, you see? Her daddy was her doctor.”

Oh, I see. “He was my doctor, too.”

Pearlie lays her hand over mine, the skin papery over sinew and bone. “I know, baby. I knew something was wrong when Ann was just a toddler. I just didn’t know what . She’d laugh at the right times, but the laugh never touched her eyes. Those eyes were like glass. Shiny, but empty at the same time. Lord, how the boys liked her, though. Ann was the most popular girl in town. They couldn’t see the pain hidden in her heart.”

“Or maybe they could,” I say. “Maybe they sensed it, and that’s what drew them.”

“Maybe so,” Pearlie murmurs, nodding sadly.

“What about Mom?”

She takes another sip of whiskey and grimaces as she swallows. “Gwen was twelve when they moved in here. She didn’t have the same problems Ann did. She could smile and laugh, and she seemed like a normal child. But she married young as she could to get away from this house. But then she didn’t get away after all. The war brought her back. And the older she got, the more problems she had. Looking back, I think Dr. Kirkland got to her, too. The damage got done when she was just a baby, same as with Ann. Just not as bad.”

“I think Ann tried to protect her.”

Pearlie nods slowly. “Ann tried to be everything to everybody. To save everybody. But she couldn’t even save herself.”

“Did Grandmama Catherine ever suspect anything?”

“She never said nothing to me. But Mrs. Catherine sure knew when to disappear. And she let Dr. Kirkland spend a lot of time with those girls alone. I saw it when they stayed up here during Christmas, when the girls was little. If Dr. Kirkland was gonna be around the house during the day, Mrs. Catherine would find somewhere else to be. It gave me a bad feeling, but what could I say about it? Times was different back then. A maid like me couldn’t open her mouth about something like that. All I could do was be there for those girls when they got upset. Try to ease their pain a little bit.”

“Did you ever see anything yourself?”

She shakes her head. “Looking back, I think Dr. Kirkland made sure I didn’t.”

“How did he do that?”

“He’d walk this property all hours of the night, just like your daddy. I think that’s one reason he didn’t like Mr. Luke. He couldn’t prowl around without being seen anymore. The few times Dr. Kirkland caught me out after nine, he warned me to stay indoors. Said he might shoot me by accident, thinking I was a burglar. So I stayed right in this house unless I got called out by him or Mrs. Catherine.”

In hindsight, it all seems so obvious. What’s missing is the historical context. The idea that Dr. William Kirkland, respected surgeon and paragon of virtue, could be tiptoeing around his antebellum mansion molesting his daughters was virtually unthinkable forty years ago.