Mallory Kane - Blood Ties in Chef Voleur

He went inside, grabbed his briefcase from the foyer and set it on the kitchen table, brushing aside a small strip of paper sitting near Cara Lynn’s evening bag. He picked it up, thinking to throw it in the trash. It was old, yellowed and brittle, a tiny rounded edge of the flap of an envelope, an old-fashioned lick-’em, stick-’em one.

Where had it come from? He stared at it for a few seconds, rubbing one edge between his fingers. It turned to dust. Obviously old. Looking at his dusty fingers, he felt a strong sense that there was something important about it. It had been lying near Cara Lynn’s purse. Could that mean it had something to do with the lockbox or its contents?

He stopped and repeated the thought aloud. “The lockbox,” he whispered, considering the implications. If it really was an envelope, then that meant there was a letter, didn’t it? A letter from whom? Maybe from Cara Lynn’s grandmother to her youngest granddaughter, written some time between 1986, when Con Delancey had died, and thirteen years ago when Lilibelle had died. Any paper could have turned yellow and brittle after being stored in a hot place, say an attic, for that long.

But how had Cara Lynn gotten the envelope—or at least that part of it? He looked at her purse, wondering if she’d left the envelope in there. With a furtive glance toward the back of the apartment, he released the clasp on the small rectangular bag and peered inside. No envelope.

So, if she actually had a letter that was inside the box, had she looked at it here at the table? And if she hadn’t put it back in her purse, where had she put it?

She had refused to answer his questions about the journal, wanting to know why he was so curious. Of course, he’d been making love to her at the time, and judging by her response to his nips and caresses, she’d been caught up in the pleasure of the moment.

A brief aftershock of lust echoed through him at the memory of how she’d moved beneath him. He immediately shut down those thoughts and made himself think about where she’d have put that envelope. He opened her evening bag and looked inside, feeling a little guilty. He wondered how guilty he’d have felt if he really loved her.

Stepping out of the kitchen and down the hall, he went into the small second bedroom and closed the door. Cara Lynn had made the room into an office. There was a desk and chair, and a drafting table on which a watercolor sketch of a bright wall hanging lay askew. It depicted a nearly abstract cat drawn in black using only three strokes. The hanging would be exquisite as part of her collection at the gallery. He hoped she’d managed to finish putting together the fiber-art version.

He tore his gaze away from the sketch and looked at the bookcases. There, on the third shelf were the gold-etched white leather journals. He took the first one out and opened the cover. On the first page was the handwritten date of June 5, 1951. Lilibelle would have been twelve. There were red sticky flags on some of the pages with tiny scribbled notes in Cara Lynn’s neat handwriting. Notes for the genealogy book she was working on for the Delancey and Guillame families.

He quickly scanned the room, but didn’t see an envelope. However, it did look as though someone had been in there. The spines of her grandmother’s journals were uneven, and there were spaces where books had been removed. Jack picked up the sketch of the black cat and looked beneath it. There was a piece of paper with some notes on it in Cara Lynn’s hand. And beneath the paper a journal that should have been on the shelf behind him. He picked it up and put it back. Then he checked around the small room, but he didn’t see the envelope.

Back in the kitchen he put the piece of an envelope flap into a plastic baggie. Unlocking his briefcase, he dug under a small stack of architectural drawings and paper-clipped reports down to several rubber-banded stacks of envelopes.

Rifling through them, he found the ones postmarked the earliest. “Okay, Granddad,” he whispered. “I met most of the Delanceys tonight. Let’s see if my impression of them matches yours.”

As he began to read his grandfather’s letter for the twentieth time, or the fiftieth, he thought about what he’d told Cara Lynn, about needing to stay up to work on some plans, his implication being that they were architectural drawings.

He smothered a wry laugh. He was working on plans all right—plans to clear his grandfather’s name. He’d married Cara Lynn Delancey to gain access to the documents that could help him prove his granddad’s innocence. If he broke her heart, well, maybe that would satisfy his need for revenge.

* * *

HOURS LATER, JACK rubbed his eyes and yawned. A glance at the kitchen clock told him that his burning eyes and foggy head were telling him the truth. He had been up all night. It was after 5:00 a.m.

Cara Lynn would be getting up in about an hour. He should have gone to bed hours ago, but he’d wanted to read over his grandfather’s notes while his first impressions of the Delanceys were still fresh in his mind.

He had looked forward to hating every single one of them. But to his surprise, he didn’t. They seemed like ordinary people. Okay, maybe not ordinary. He sorted through the letters again until he came to the one where Granddad had listed Con Delancey’s grandchildren.

Mr. Delancey’s two sons, Michael and Robert, seem rather ordinary, although I can see that they have the genes to be great, like their father. But perhaps Con’s philandering and their mother’s resentment kept them from achieving everything they could have. In any case, their children—Con’s grandchildren—are but babies and it’s already obvious they are extraordinary.

Robert, Jr. is the oldest, at nine. Already, it seems to me, he is showing a remarkable resemblance to his grandfather, both in looks and personality. Maybe it’s because he’s the oldest, but I see in him the most potential of all of them. Mark my word, he’ll follow Con into politics, and likely, will be better at it.

Jack took a pencil and jotted a note in the margin, next to the comment. Died in plane crash at age twenty-three. So much for potential.

He read the next line. Lucas, his younger brother, is at age six, already intense, even angry, much like his father. If he continues like this, he’ll be a criminal before he’s twenty-one. Maybe he can turn himself around.

Jack remembered Lucas and his wife Angela, who was carrying their first child. Jack wrote in the margin. Still intense. Channeled into police work.

Jack continued down the list of Delancey children and his grandfather’s impressions of them. A fierce jealousy rose up inside him, as it had every other time he read it. He hated that his grandfather had spent even a few moments thinking about Con Delancey’s grandkids and what he saw them becoming as they grew.

But more than that, he hated that his grandfather had been right about them. While he had not been a prophet, he’d certainly been insightful enough to see that Con Delancey’s grandkids were extraordinary.

Armand Broussard had thought his own grandson was extraordinary, too. Jack blinked against the sudden stinging in his eyes. He missed his granddad. Had it already been half a year since he’d died? Jack had never seen him in anything except his orange prison jumpsuit, until he looked at him in the casket before the funeral service. That sight, his beloved Papi in a dark suit with that awful makeup and lipstick designed to make the corpse look natural, made Jack cry for the first time in his life.

“I’m sorry about that, Papi,” he whispered, repeating the same words he’d uttered over his grandfather’s body that day at the funeral home. “I couldn’t help that. But I swear I will clear your name.”