“Yeah?”
He turned and looked at her in question, his profile framed by the front door of the house behind him, and Sara felt the hair raise on her arms again, skin cool and clammy in the heat. She tried to stand up, but couldn’t seem to figure out how to get vertical without spilling backward onto her butt or forward onto her knees. So she stayed put and nervously called, “There’s someone in the house.”
Gabriel was already crossing the street, his long strides eating up the steps so that he was in front of her in seconds, holding out his hand to give her much needed help. “How do you know someone’s home?”
She clasped her hand in his gratefully and let his strength pull her up off the sidewalk. “Thanks.” Letting go of him, she brushed the back of her skirt. “I saw someone in the thirdfloor window.”
They both looked up. There was no one there.
“Well, I can take pictures of the exterior, whether the owner likes it or not.”
That was true. And Sara wasn’t sure why the man had unnerved her so much. It was just unexpected, that face staring down on her. “Do you have any historic pictures of the house?”
“The oldest one I could find is from 1910.”
“Did you grow up here?” she asked, as Gabriel gestured for them to start walking. Sara had actually been born in New Orleans, the result of her mother’s brief affair with a bouncer on Bourbon Street. Her mother had been a normal, slightly rebellious but not outrageous, suburban middle-class teenager until her own mother had been murdered. Then within six months, Sara’s mother had run away from her father, was drinking heavily and dancing in a nightclub, lying about her age since she was underage. By the time Sara was born, the bouncer was gone and so was her mother’s job, but a new boyfriend had taken Jessie and her baby in. Two years after that, on her eighteenth birthday, her mother had run off to Florida with a retired doctor, who had brains and a lot of money, but not enough sense to know his young girlfriend was playing him for cash.
When he died, Jessie had started fresh with a house of her own, and had cut off all ties to her past until her father tracked them down when Sara won a scholarship to Tulane and had her name listed in the New Orleans paper.
Her mother had refused to speak to her father. And Sara had been too scared to take the scholarship and move to New Orleans, which would entail defying her mother, who claimed to hate her family and New Orleans, with no explanation as to why. So Sara had gone to Florida State instead, and never found the peace she’d been looking for, the connection to her mother, the need to understand what had motivated her for her entire life. Never got to hear her mother’s true feelings about losing her own mother at such a young age.
Now Sara was the one who had lost her mother, and she hadn’t dealt with it any better than her mother before her had.
“I did grow up here,” Gabriel said, cutting across the street diagonally. “I can’t live anywhere else.” He glanced back. “What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing. The city. Why?” She pushed her sunglasses up on her nose.
“Because you forgot to watch your feet. So I knew you were thinking hard.”
Sara stopped walking. He was right. She’d forgotten to watch for holes in the sidewalk. Yet it made her sound like such a freak. “I wasn’t thinking hard. I was just thinking about the fact that I was smart not to take the scholarship I got to Tulane . . . that it was stupid at seventeen to think that I should leave home and all my friends to come here, where I was born, for no reason.”
“Really? Then why did you want to come here in the first place?”
That was the goddamn rub, wasn’t it? “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” And how completely annoying that Gabriel had homed straight in on the crux of her dilemma. She wanted answers, wanted to know why her mother had made the choices she had. And the truth Sara needed to come to terms with was that there probably were no answers to her questions.
Side hurting again, Sara rubbed it with the palm of her hand, and looked around her. “Where are we, anyway? This isn’t the way we got here, is it?”
“No. We’re going in the opposite direction. To the cemetery.”
Chapter Four
Gabriel had expected Sara to protest. It was clearly on her lips to say no, but she surprised him, just like she had with his suggestion to head to Bourbon Street. She had agreed to the cemetery trip simply by following him. Only now they were at the gates of St. Louis #1, having crossed North Rampart to the shortest “Walk” sign ever created, and the cemetery was locked.
“Damn. They close the gate at three o’clock. We must have just missed it.” But he wanted pictures of the cemetery, of Anne’s tomb. The light was still good, the sky a crisp cerulean, and he was here. He didn’t want to come back. He didn’t like the cemetery any more than Sara did, given the way she was rubbing her arms like she was cold, and crossing her ankles, eyes wary.
To Gabriel, the cemetery symbolized the fact that he could never die, that much better people than him left this mortal realm, some far too soon, and he was condemned, by his own misconduct, to walk the earth forever without purpose. The cemetery made him angry, and it frustrated him that he was denied entrance, figuratively and literally. He didn’t often use his strength, chose largely to ignore what he was and what he was capable of, but he wanted in, so he reached out, picked up the lock, and yanked it down.
It broke, separating so that he could easily detach it from the gate. “Look at that,” he said, showing Sara the busted pieces, before shoving the gate open. “Guess we can go in after all.”
Sara made a sound of protest. “Gabriel! It was locked for a reason. They don’t want us in there.”
He was already moving inside, knowing she would follow him. Her fear of the cemetery, of breaking the rules, wasn’t nearly as great as her fear of being left alone. The shells crunched under his feet as he walked, and pausing at the first tomb on the right, he turned back to her. “Come on, Sara. It’s not a big deal.”
“The gate was locked.” She had inched forward, just inside the gate, but she was peeking around like she expected to get arrested for trespassing, or maybe to encounter either a mugger or a ghost.
“I’ll replace the broken lock. But since it’s open, we might as well take some pictures. I’ll show you Anne’s tomb.” He wasn’t sure why he didn’t just let the whole thing drop. Why he didn’t just turn around and take Sara back to his apartment. But he thought she needed to be pushed. Or maybe he wanted to be pushed, and if he pushed her, she’d push back.