Epilogue
Maggie showed up on my porch on Thursday with two coffees, and a laptop bag.
"Okay," she said, dropping into the wicker chair like she owned it, which, at this point, she basically did. "I spent the morning getting up to speed and reading the Times-Picayune online comment section. Belle Rêve update. You want it in order or do you want the headline first?"
"Headline first."
"'Historic Society Board Resigns Amid Provenance Scandal.
'" She handed me my coffee like a peace offering.
"All seven of them. Gone. Even the ones who probably didn't know anything, which, I don't know, feels a little unfair, but also, maybe that's what you sign up for when you agree to be a figurehead. "
Hollis came out of the kitchen with his own mug, already dressed for his shift, and leaned against the porch rail. "State investigators showed up at the manor Tuesday. Two of them, from the Attorney General's office. They've frozen the preservation grant, the whole thing, pending review."
"Isn’t that half a million dollars?" I asked.
"Half a million dollars." He took a sip. "And the historic designation itself is under review now too. Turns out when the provenance behind your National Register application involves a woman getting murdered over falsified documentation, people ask questions."
"Good questions," Maggie said. "Also, apparently, several donors are demanding refunds.
Which, fair. You give somebody a plaque with your name on it because you funded the restoration of an authentic 1850s ballroom, and then it turns out the ballroom's authenticity was invented by a woman who then got skewered with a cocktail straw, you start wondering what else you paid for that wasn't real. "
"There's talk of civil suits, too," Hollis added. "Donors, insurers, at least one family whose ancestor got written out of the house's history to make Evelyn's version cleaner. Lawyers are circling."
I looked out at the yard, at the wet grass and the long shadow of the oak tree. "So what happens to it? The house."
Maggie shrugged, the particular shrug of someone who'd already read four opinion pieces on the subject.
"Depends who you ask. Half the city thinks it should be torn down, or at least stripped of everything Evelyn built her legend on.
The other half thinks that's throwing out two hundred years of real history because one woman lied about it is a crime. It’s still old, right?
There was a letter in the paper yesterday from some guy in Uptown who called it 'the soul of the Garden District.
' There was another one under it calling it 'a monument to fraud with good landscaping. '"
"Both technically true," I said.
"Both technically true," she agreed.
“Though I’d think the soul of the Garden District is more likely La Petite Grocery or Commander’s Palace.”
“Definitely a restaurant,” Maggie said.
"What about the plaques?" I asked. That detail had been nagging at me since the arrest, the way the smallest things always did. All those brass placards on the walls, engraved with a version of history that had turned out to be half invention.
Hollis was the one who answered. "They're staying up.
The Society voted on it before the whole board resigned, which might be the last decent thing they did as a group.
They're not tearing anything down. They're just rewriting the wording.
Instead of the story where everything's a happy legacy and every name is spotless, they're putting up the real one. Where the house has been added onto, and lied about, and fought over, and yes, somebody died there over it. All of it. The whole complicated truth instead of the pretty myth. Or an abridged version anyway. A plaque can’t be a mile long. "
I thought about that for a second, about Aunt Odette telling ghost stories with the truth always visible if you knew where to look. "I think she'd have liked that," I said. "Belle Rêve, I mean. The house. Not the murder part. The plaque part."
"The house is a she?" Maggie asked.
"Absolutely.”
“What’s Midnight House? Male or female?”
“Definitely female.”
“Changes her mind on a dime,” Hollis agreed.
“Takes forever to get ready.”
Maggie laughed, gathered up her laptop bag, and stood, checking her phone with the reflexive twitch of someone who had eleven more subject lines waiting for her.
"Okay. I've got a call with the podcast network in twenty minutes, and then I have to go pretend I didn't already leak half of this to three separate group chats.
" She kissed the top of my head on her way past, the way she'd been doing since we were nineteen.
"Love you. Don't solve any more murders this month, I need a break. "
"No promises," I said, and she was down the steps, waving without looking back, already talking into her phone before she hit the sidewalk.
Hollis set his mug down and picked up the flat of pansies I'd left by the porch swing that morning, the purple-and-gold ones I'd bought on impulse at the nursery because they'd looked cheerful and I'd needed something to be cheerful about. They were always Odette’s favorites.
"You want help with these, or is this a sacred solo ritual I'm about to violate?"
"You’re in a suit."
“My hands still work.”
“Then I’d love to see you dig, Broussard.”
He did, kneeling next to me on the porch boards without ceremony, sleeves pushed up, working the soil in the big terracotta pots with the same careful attention he brought to everything.
Next door, Mrs. Patterson came out to let her little dog do his business, and I lifted a hand.
She lifted hers back, the whole exchange as familiar and wordless as it had been for the eleven months I'd lived here.
"These were Odette's favorite," Hollis said, not looking up from the pot, tamping soil around a pansy's roots.
"The purple ones. She told me once, back when I first moved in next door and she caught me killing every plant I touched.
Said if I wanted something that'd forgive me for forgetting to water it, plant pansies. "
I sat back on my heels. "You remember that?"
"I remember most things she told me." He glanced up, and there was something careful in his face, the kind of carefulness that meant he'd been thinking about how to say the next part. "Tomorrow's a year, Harper. Since she passed."
I hadn't said it out loud to anyone. I'd been carrying the date around in my chest for two weeks like a stone, and here he was, helping me lift that burden.
"You remembered that too," I said, and my voice didn't come out quite steady.
"I remember most things," he said again, quieter this time, and went back to the pansies like it wasn't a big deal, which was exactly the kind of thing that made it a very big deal. “Is there anything special you want to do?”
I looked down at the dirt under my nails, at the purple flowers going into the pot her hands used to fill every spring, at the porch she'd sat on for forty years telling stories that were true enough, and I let myself cry a little, easy and unhurried, the way the rain had come down the night everything else got resolved.
"She liked you, you know," I said finally. "I think we should invite everyone who loved her and go listen to some jazz."
Hollis didn't say anything clever back. He just reached over, thumb smudged with potting soil, and wiped a tear off my cheek. “That sounds great.”
Across the street, Mrs. Patterson's screen door banged shut.
Teddy pressed his nose against the front window, offended to be left inside while we were doing something as exciting as gardening.
Somewhere down Frenchmen Street a trumpet was warming up early, the way this city always did, grief and music running along the same wire.
I pressed a pansy into the soil next to Hollis's, and let it be enough.