Ciji Ware Read online

  For a moment she was tempted to do exactly as King had commanded. Wedding of the year indeed, she fumed silently. Everyone who knew anything about New Orleans had warned her that the place was a small town, but this was ridiculous! Covering a local wedding like it was news?

  “King!” croaked another disembodied masculine voice.

  “I’m coming!” he muttered. The acknowledged leader of New Orleans’s feisty historic preservation movement deepened his scowl, turned on his heel, and strode downstairs without further comment.

  Corlis contemplated King’s retreating back and suddenly recalled a story she’d once written entitled “Marriage: Legalized Slavery.” King and his fraternity brothers certainly had a field day with that one! She found it hideously ironic that they’d run into each other at a wedding of all places!

  She turned and gazed down at the elegantly attired throng, and to her shock and dismay, felt a lump rise in her throat.

  Of course this wedding makes you sad. Any wedding would. Even a wedding as wretchedly excessive as this one. It’s perfectly normal, considering… and it has nothing to do with Kingsbury Duvallon. Just do your job.

  She blinked hard and leaned over the balcony. There were three flower girls, two ring bearers, and nine, count ’em, nine shapely bridesmaids dressed in forest green velvet gowns. All the groomsmen sported black tail coats, white bow ties, and waffled pique shirts starched to the consistency of corrugated cardboard. The formality of these eight o’clock candlelight nuptials and the wedding party’s apparel represented the last vestiges of white upper-class society living in a city where some 67 percent of the population was black.

  On the assignment editor’s storyboard, tonight’s event had been slugged “Yup Nups.” In her mind’s eye, Corlis pictured the wino that had passed out on the church steps, an unfortunate reminder of the city’s large homeless population. At a wedding as obviously expensive as this one, wouldn’t a picture of the poor man slumped against the front of the cathedral be worth a thousand words?

  Forget it, Corlis! No pithy photo essays today. Just your ordinary puff piece, please.

  She hated to admit it, but the bridesmaids’ gowns were gorgeous. For a brief moment she wondered what it would feel like to be a bride who knew that starting tonight, she’d make a life with a man who would row his oar while she rowed hers. That she’d have a real home, maybe a couple of kids someday. Someone to share the good and the bad with, instead of always being out there on the limb, battling—what? she asked herself bleakly.

  Just relax and enjoy the spectacle, she lectured herself. After all, it was nearly Christmas. Twelfth Night was approaching January sixth, marking the beginning of the long Mardi Gras season. Her first Mardi Gras in her newly adopted home! Why not, just for once, laisser les bons temps rouler?

  Let the good times roll, indeed! It was about time.

  Tonight, the bride, Daphne Duvallon, was to star as queen for a day. New Orleans film, theater, music, and architecture critic Jack Ebert was cast in the role of the king, surrounded by pretend courtiers.

  Ah… but, that’s where this fantasy runs amok.

  It was a safe bet that no one but she knew that the groom had suggested to her—not four days earlier—that the two of them should visit an intimate little spot he knew for dinner. Following the pretaping of his latest movie review at WWEZ last Tuesday night, Jack Ebert had even proposed that he show her the spectacular view from the cast-iron gallery of his apartment on Conti Street overlooking the French Quarter and the Canal Street skyscrapers towering beyond.

  Corlis had declined, of course. She couldn’t stand Ebert’s self-involved pomposity. And she had been sorely tempted to inform the bride of her fiancé’s invitation—extended with a lecherous grin on the eve of the creep’s own wedding! Shouldn’t somebody warn King’s poor sister about the kind of guy she was about to marry?

  Oh, yeah, good idea. Get real, McCullough!

  On the aisle below, Corlis spotted King again, this time among his fellow groomsmen as they assisted the last few latecomers with finding seats in the packed church. She heaved a sigh and tried to ignore the fact that coming face-to-face with Kingsbury Duvallon again had totally unnerved her. If only he knew how much she’d like to do exactly as he’d asked and blow this pop stand!

  What a joke. What a waste of time. She hated softball assignments like this one. Stories like the Ebert-Duvallon wedding were mere filler. Pap. Air-brained pieces that took the place of news the public needed to know. News about the urban ills that bedeviled a place where the unemployment rate was sky-high and the murder rate was close to one a day.

  Get off your soapbox, Corlis! Nobody’s interested.

  A mere thirty-four years old, she thought with a sense of deepening discouragement, and she had the journalistic views of a dinosaur. She glanced at her watch again. It was definitely showtime. Or it should be. What was the holdup?

  Her gaze drifted toward the attractive organist. The information sheet handed to Corlis by the assignment editor noted that Althea LaCroix was a fellow graduate with Daphne, of the Newman School uptown, the sole black student in her class, and one of the bride’s closest friends. Althea paused, looked off to her right, nodded, and began yet another interlude piece. One of the hungover bridesmaids was probably in the bathroom being sick.

  A heavy whiff of incense reminded Corlis’s Scots Presbyterian nose that this was going to be a full-on, bells-and-whistles nuptial mass. She suddenly recalled her great-aunt Marge’s spirited family tales about her own Scottish McCullough ancestors floating down the Mississippi in the early nineteenth century to seek their fortune in the celebrated Crescent City. Only her lot of McCulloughs had soon gotten itchy feet and eventually pushed on west to explore the gold fields of California.

  Was there such a thing as inherited wanderlust? How many cities had she worked in during the last twelve years? Five? Seven? Now she lived in New Orleans. Once again her gaze swept her surroundings. Had any among her branch of the gallivanting McCulloughs ever set foot in this cathedral before?

  Corlis glanced again at the front of the church. She found herself mesmerized by row upon row of votive candles flickering inside ruby red glass holders, secured by a wrought-iron prayer station located to the right of the nave. For a hundred years or more, these same pinpoints of light must have danced and winked in exactly that spot.

  By this time the smell of incense could have choked an alligator. Much to Corlis’s amazement, an odd kind of mist began to cloud her eyes, and the warm, ocher-colored walls behind the candles throbbed faintly, as if in rhythm to the timeless wedding music being played softly on the pipe organ.

  She felt her own heartbeat slow and take on the cadence of the pulsating walls and the narcotic meter of the stately music that echoed throughout the cathedral’s mammoth interior. The edges of her sight suddenly began to gray. To her dismay, she felt as if she might faint and grabbed the balcony’s railing to steady herself.

  Whoa… what’s happening here?

  “Hey, boss lady,” Virgil said, his voice filled with concern. “You okay, sugar?”

  No! a part of her brain answered. She was definitely not okay. This spacey faint-headedness she was feeling must be the result of the lunch she’d skipped. There, in the shadows, she could swear that a bride and groom—both appearing distressed—stood rigidly side by side. He, in a black tail coat, complete with a richly brocaded vest, and a stiff white-wing collar. She, a plump pigeon in an ivory gown with a V-shaped, nipped-in waist and bustle. The bride’s dark hair was piled in Victorian curls, while the groom’s was parted severely down the center of his head. The vision—or whatever it was—lingered a second longer, and then… simply… vanished!

  “Corlis!” Virgil declared urgently. “You’re white as a sheet! Did that Duvallon guy upset you that much? Manny, you got somethin’ to drink in your backpack? This girl’s ’bout to faint on us.”

  “I—I’m okay… I think…” she replied slowly. She was nearly
perishing with hunger. She knew that. And the unrelenting aroma of incense had become suffocating. But what in the world had just happened? Who was that unhappy couple in the costumes?

  Corlis blinked several times as she stared at the red glass votive candles shimmering across the church’s wide expanse. Her heart was racing now, and the hand with which she held her microphone had begun to tremble. Had such a brief encounter with King Duvallon after all this time caused a full-blown anxiety attack? Maybe thinking about her own stillborn wedding plans to a certain news director in Los Angeles had brought it on? Or, more likely, that antique-looking bride and groom were going to be part of some pageant during the wedding itself. Anything was possible in New Orleans.

  “The incense probably got to you,” Manny theorized sagely, handing her an unauthorized bottle of beer that he’d extracted from his voluminous backpack. “When I was an altar boy and inhaled too much of that stuff, I used to keel over in a dead faint sometimes durin’ High Mass.”

  “Yeah… that must be it,” Corlis said weakly, gratefully accepting a swallow from a bottle of Dixie.

  Oh my God, I’m drinking beer in church! Damn this voodoo town. I’m really starting to lose my grip!

  Finally the organ trumpeted the arrival of the bridesmaids. Corlis swiftly handed the beer bottle back to Manny and struggled to gather her wits. As the first bridal attendant and her tail-coated escort appeared on the red carpet below them, she commanded sotto voce, “Roll it!”

  Her view of King’s reemergence was the top of a fabulous, full head of dark brown hair. Corlis consulted her notes, which listed the names of the wedding party. Miss Cindy Lou Mallory, the maid of honor—looking buxom indeed in her Empire-waisted green velvet gown—advanced down the center aisle on King’s arm. Corlis’s gaze drifted from the woman’s arresting figure to her glorious head of stunning ruby-colored hair that glowed in a shade that would have made the former Duchess of York reach for the Clairol. When the pair arrived at the foot of the aisle, the voluptuous attendant flashed a knowing bedroom smile at her handsome escort and took her assigned place flanking the priest.

  King turned to face the congregation. He stared over the heads of the wedding guests directly at Corlis and scowled. For a split second she held his gaze, and then smiled sweetly in return. He definitely did not look pleased.

  For the second time since she’d arrived at Saint Louis Cathedral this evening, her heart began to beat erratically. She didn’t want to acknowledge that King unsettled her nerves.

  The brother of the prospective Mrs. Ebert shifted his gaze and stared somberly down the length of the aisle. Daphne Duvallon, on the arm of her stocky father, Waylon, appeared at the back of the historic church—he, a perfect fireplug of a man in white tie and tails—she, a vision in graceful folds of white silk and a twenty-five-foot Belgian lace train. As the bride slowly glided toward the altar framed with Doric columns and statues of the saints, Corlis could not deny that the beautiful honey blonde was indeed a breathtaking vision.

  However, the groom, Jack Ebert, the mortician’s son whose father owned establishments from Metairie to Covington across Lake Pontchartrain was an entirely different sight. In Corlis’s opinion, nearly everything about the man fell into the medium range: medium height, medium-brown hair, average features, and a medium frame just this side of skinny. His physical appearance was utterly unremarkable, except for his extraordinarily small hazel eyes, along with tiny ears flat against his head, which brought to mind a potentially vicious rodent. Standing beside his best man and the robed priest, Jack appeared calm and collected, if not mildly detached from the entire proceedings.

  But boy, could Jack Ebert wield a poison pen! Or computer, Corlis amended silently. She had seen for herself that whatever Jack lacked in on-camera charisma he made up for with the sheer entertainment value of his vituperative prose. His scathing film, theater, art, and music reviews were legendary around New Orleans. And his critiques of new construction could prompt architects to start designing their own mausoleums. To be honest, Corlis wondered what King’s lovely sister saw in the man.

  Big bucks, she thought cynically. Daphne Duvallon was a twenty-eight-year-old classical harpist, presently earning her master’s in music at The Juilliard School in New York. Like so many old-line New Orleans families, the Kingsburys and Duvallons possessed a proud heritage going back to the early eighteenth century when Louisiana was a French colony. However, the majority of these formerly prosperous clans had lost their big sugarcane plantations and banking fortunes as a result of the Civil War.

  The War of Northern Aggression, Corlis corrected herself silently. For all she knew, the bride’s father, Waylon, the proprietor of Flowers by Duvallon, had probably been forced to take a second mortgage or hock the last of the family portraits to pay for his daughter’s five-alarm wedding. Or perhaps Daphne needed help paying her tuition. Jack Ebert and his family’s chain of successful funeral homes might have supplied a convenient answer to her fiscal problems. Corlis had heard much crazier reasons for getting married—like thinking a divorced television news director in LaLa Land was good husband material, until the moment when a little digging on her part turned up the fact that Jay Kerlin had been divorced three times!

  The red light on Virgil’s camera glowed in the candlelit church as the age-old ceremony commenced with the exchange of vows. Corlis marveled at the composed manner in which Jack Ebert recited his promises to love, honor, and cherish his bride, forsaking all others, till death do they part.

  “And do you, Daphne,” the priest intoned, “promise to love Jack… to honor and cherish him, forsaking all others, till death do you part?”

  Corlis gently nudged Virgil’s shoulder with the rounded end of her microphone, their shared signal to focus in for a close-up. However, both reporter and cameraman were startled when the bride, instead of answering the familiar question, slowly turned her back on the priest and her groom and squarely faced the sea of faces gazing at her from the rows of packed pews.

  “First of all,” Daphne announced, her voice wavering as faintly as the pinpoints of light that shimmered on the prayer station behind her. Members in the congregation began exchanging uneasy glances. “I just want to say… how much I a-appreciate everything my mama and d-daddy have done for the wedding…” A woman in the front pew wearing a white orchid corsage began to shake her head vehemently. “In a strange way,” Daphne continued, her voice gaining strength, “I suppose the person I should thank the most is my maid of honor…”

  The groom’s frozen smile began to wither, and he turned toward the priest with a look Corlis interpreted as a demand for holy intercession. As for Cindy Lou Mallory, a stain approximately the same shade of red as her vibrant tresses spread from her décolletage to her hairline. Among the congregation, heads bobbed back and forth, and a low rumble of shocked reactions bubbled up like cheap champagne. Corlis watched with amazement as Daphne Duvallon worked her engagement ring off her finger.

  “You see…” she said, her rigid control beginning to disintegrate before everyone’s eyes. “Jack and Cindy Lou Mallory don’t know it, but I saw them making out last night. At the groom’s dinner. In the cloakroom at Antoine’s,” she added, her voice now choked with tears. “Right after the toasts were given, and we’d all been drinking and dancing for a while. It seems my maid of honor,” Daphne Duvallon continued with stony emphasis, “has been having an affair with my groom, Jack, here, for months, while I was in New York!”

  An extremely frail, elderly woman seated next to Daphne’s mother gave an audible cry and slumped against the shoulder of a middle-aged woman sitting to her left. The seatmate swiftly began to fan her distraught companion with the wedding program, her own features etched in a combination of outrage and dismay.

  “So I’m sure y’all can understand why…” Daphne forged on bravely, “why… I can’t go through with this. I just can’t!” In a lightning gesture, she slapped her engagement ring into the hand of the stunned groom. Then the
bride scooped up her twenty-five-foot lace train and nodded emphatically in the direction of Althea LaCroix.

  The musician brought her hands down on the organ’s ivory keys with a crash. Triumphant recessional music thundered ominously throughout the church while Daphne scored a bull’s-eye, dashing her red and white rose bouquet against her maid of honor’s elaborate flame-haired coiffure.

  As suddenly as King Duvallon stepped out from the line of nine groomsmen, a thought hit Corlis like a bolt of lightning.

  He knew this was going to happen! That’s why he wanted us to leave!

  The stunned wedding guests gawked, dumbfounded, as King offered his distraught sister his arm. Within seconds they swept down the aisle and disappeared.

  As for Corlis, watching this passion play from the balcony, her journalist’s instinct suddenly took over. Pavlov’s dog. The bell had rung.

  “Follow me!” she hissed urgently to her TV crew.

  She made a dash for the paneled stairwell as if she were off to cover a fire. Virgil, with his video camera thumping up and down on his shoulder, and Manny, with headphones clamped to his ears, thundered close behind. The panting trio arrived at the arched doors in time to see brother and sister sprinting across the slate paving stones that fronted Jackson Square.

  “I’m still rolling!” Virgil shouted as he and Corlis raced in hot pursuit of the fleeing couple. The reporter prayed that her cameraman had caught the shot of Daphne’s long train billowing behind the pair like a water-skier’s wake.

  “Get the hell out of here, you harpy!” King shouted at Corlis over his shoulder as he yanked open the door to the waiting limousine.

  She didn’t really blame him for his angry reaction, but by this time the adrenaline was pumping. And besides, she considered in some remote portion of her brain, chasing fire trucks was all in a day’s work. She’d decide later whether or not she’d actually use this footage.