“Are you looking for work?”
Glancing over at the doorman, Sara willed herself not to blush. “No.”
“Are you sure?” He smiled at her, a man in his mid-thirties, attractive and wearing a suit. “The money’s good, and we could use a blonde. One of our best customers already saw you and asked about you. You’re guaranteed fifty a night in tips from him alone if he likes you.”
“What do you mean he saw me? I just walked up.” Sara hadn’t seen anyone on the sidewalk but her and the doorman. Though admittedly she had been busy studying the pictures with morbid fascination.
“A minute ago. He saw you when he was going inside.” He tipped his head to the door, giving another charming smile. “Come on in and watch a few of the girls, see what you think.”
It amazed her that dancers were on stage at noon on a Monday, but it was Bourbon Street, after all. Bars were advertising three for one, and karaoke was going. “No, thanks.” Though she couldn’t prevent herself from glancing in the open door. All she could see was a dark hallway, and a woman’s legs on the stage.
And she suddenly had the feeling that someone was watching her. From inside the club.
Sara shivered, rubbing her hands over her arms. Maybe the customer the doorman had referred to was still checking her out. Which she didn’t like at all.
“Well, have a good afternoon then, and if you change your mind, stop on back.” The guy waved and diverted his attention to two men passing by on the street.
Giving one last backward glance into the club and seeing nothing noteworthy, Sara started down the street, returning the way she had come. She wanted to go back to Gabriel’s apartment, to the security of his courtyard. Finding pieces of her mother’s motivation on Bourbon Street wasn’t going to happen. She had to accept she was never going to have answers to those questions. Hell, maybe she wouldn’t want them if she did have them. Ultimately, she and her mother had been diametrically opposed to each other in the core of who they were.
Funny that she had never given much thought to her biological father. It would seem logical that if she were nothing like her mother, she must be like her father, yet she had never been interested in finding him. Only once had she asked for his name, and her mother had told her she didn’t remember his last name, only his first, which had been Brian. The last name "started with an S” but beyond that her mother couldn’t recall. Sara had never asked again. Who Brian S. had been and why he had been a bouncer and what he had seen in her sixteen-year-old mother had never really mattered to her.
Maybe because it was her mother who had driven her life, not him. It was her mother who had raised her, her mother who hugged her and yelled at her, who had vacillated between effusive affection and stone-cold remoteness. Her mother had influenced her psyche on every level, and now she was left alone to deal with the mess of her life.
It made her angry. At her mother. At the world.
Sara walked faster, dodging sidewalk holes and avoiding further doormen and one aggressive bartender already hocking shots in plastic tubes in the open doorway. She needed to let it go. Let it all go. Start over right here, right now. Yet it was so damn hard to start over when she physically felt the past following her. It was there in the Anne Donovan case, it was there in the e-mail she’d gotten suggesting her guilt, it was there in the book Gabriel was writing, it was in the disturbing sensation that even as she walked someone was watching her, following her.
For a minute, she panicked, forgetting which cross street she wanted to turn down, and certain she’d gone too far, but then she saw the sign for Dumaine and realized that was the street Gabriel’s apartment was on. Glancing behind her as she turned onto Dumaine, she scanned the street for a clear indication of someone following her, but she only saw several women together in a cluster wearing summer business skirts, and a man hosing the street down.
God, she was totally paranoid. Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling, and she walked faster and faster until she got to Gabriel’s gate, which was open. Then she jogged down the enclosure and up the stairs to his apartment, looking forward to seeing him, hearing his reassurances. There was a note on the door.
Went to library. Back soon, go on in. G
Sara ripped it off the door and turned the knob. He’d left the door open. And the gate. Plus a note indicating to anyone who happened by that he wasn’t home and everything was unlocked. He was afraid of nothing, and she was paranoid enough for the both of them, and one extra person besides. Sara went in and locked the door behind her, heart pounding from her aggressive walking.
Then she pulled out her cell phone in case she needed to call 911, and walked through his apartment, checking to make sure she was actually alone with the door locked behind her. She went through every room, even throwing open his bedroom closet and peeking behind the shower curtain. She ended in his office, and collapsed on the sofa, feeling on the verge of tears.
She fought them, hating to cry, knowing it meant she wasn’t better, despising that she was not totally and completely in control. Popping back up to distract herself, she went over to study the spoons that hung on the wall by Gabriel’s computer. She thought they were vintage, but she couldn’t be sure. She wasn’t even sure if they were technically spoons since they had holes in them, and oblong ends, more like a pie server than a spoon.
Agitated and restless, Sara knew she should just go back to the file folder of research documents she had with her. She hadn’t brought her laptop, and she didn’t feel comfortable using Gabriel’s computer without asking him first, but she could write out longhand all the questions she had. She wanted to find out more about John Thiroux—where he had come from and where he had gone after his acquittal. Newspaper articles at the time hadn’t seemed to delve into his past at all. Everything she had read concentrated on his artistic endeavors and his drug problem. No one mentioned his family, his education, where his wealth had originated from, and how he might have strayed down the path of alcohol and opium.
But instead of working, she found herself looking at the various objects lying around his desk. Never a nosy person, she wasn’t sure why she was standing there filled with rabid curiosity, eyes roving over an old loving cup used as a pen holder. The abandoned water bottle turned on its side, crushed, and stuck with paper clips that had been twisted open and straightened out to reveal their ends. Stacks of books with criminology titles. Gabriel was messy, but not dirty. There was no dust, no food wrappers, no indiscriminant sticky spots.