Chapter 11
Matt pulled up to the two-story home on Camp Street in New Orleans’s historic Garden District.
Grabbing his laptop from the front passenger seat, he jumped out of his car and slammed the door shut.
As he marched up the walkway, he realized that he could count on one hand how many times he’d been here in the five years since his father bought this home.
It was five times more than he’d wanted to darken this doorstep.
The front door opened before Matt had a chance to knock on it.
“Hello, Matthew,” Marion Samuels answered. Matt stared at his family’s former housekeeper, not surprised to see her standing here.
“Where is he?” Matt bit out.
“He’s in his office,” she said, moving out of the way so that Matt could pass.
He refused to allow her being there to affect him. He no longer cared what his father did with his own life. It was when he stuck his nose into Matt’s business that they had a problem.
He bounded up the stairs and headed straight for the rear of the house, toward his father’s home office.
He didn’t even give him the courtesy of knocking; it wasn’t as if his father would understand courtesy anyway.
Matt walked into the large office and spotted his father through the French doors, sitting out on the balcony with his legs crossed and a newspaper opened in his lap.
Matt went to him and set the laptop on the small, round iron table next to his father’s chair. The only other thing on the table was an ashtray that held a smoldering cigarette.
Matt braced his feet apart and folded his hands over his chest. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked.
“Don’t start this with me, Matthew.”
Leroy picked up the cigarette and took a long drag on it. Matt had to fight the urge to slap it out of his hands. The only reason he didn’t was out of regard for his mother, who had demanded Matt show this bastard some respect, despite the fact that he hadn’t earned a damn bit of it.
His father gestured to the laptop. “If you brought that to show me the commercial, it’s not necessary. I already saw it and approved it.”
“I didn’t,” Matt said. “Even though there’s a voice that sounds remarkably like mine at the end of the commercial saying that I do. Whose voice is it anyway?”
“A voice actor. He’s pretty good, isn’t he?”
“I could have you arrested,” Matt spat.
“Stop being so dramatic,” Leroy said. He pointed to the fabric-covered chair on the other side of the table.
“Sit down. We need to go through the strategy for the last half of this campaign. The polling I had done shows that you’re only two points ahead of Carter. That’s within the margin of error.”
Matt huffed out a laugh and shook his head.
“You’re too damn smart to be this dense, so I guess it’s just cockiness.
” He leaned forward until he was only inches from his father’s face.
“What makes you think I would take campaign advice from you? What makes you think I would take any kind of advice from you? Do you think I look at you and see someone I want to pattern my life after? A man who left his dying wife’s hospital room so he could go home and screw his housekeeper?
A man who’s taken so much in bribe money that he owes more favors than he will ever be able to fulfill? ”
“And your hands are so clean?”
“They’re a hell of a lot cleaner than yours are.”
“Really?” Leroy’s brows peaked. “So all those phone calls and lunches you had with Lyle Peterson of the Lakeline Group were just, what, you being courteous? Welcoming them to the neighborhood?
“But wait,” he continued. “You’re the one who brought them to the neighborhood, aren’t you? I think I remember Lyle telling me that when we had dinner.”
The smug smile on the bastard’s face was just begging to be knocked off.
“To say you loathe me so damn much, it looks like you still learned how to conduct business like your old man,” he said.
“Don’t you ever compare me to you,” Matt snarled. “I didn’t take a single dime from those developers. I was trying to help the people of Gauthier. I wasn’t trying to help myself like you would.”
“So why is it still such a big secret? Why haven’t you gone up and down Main Street and told each one of those business owners that you’re the reason they nearly lost their livelihoods?”
His father picked up the cigarette and took another long pull on it.
“You can hate me all you want to, but you’re still a Gauthier.
You’ve still got that blood running through your veins.
The tragedy here is that you’ve got so much damn potential.
If you didn’t have so much of your mother in you, I could—”
Matt grabbed a handful of the collar on his father’s robe and pulled him up to his face. “That’s the last time you mention her in my presence, especially when you have that woman living here.”
His father’s eyes darted between Matt’s face and where he clutched the robe. Matt let go of the collar and took a step back.
“You already cost Ben his job by conning him into doing that commercial. I fired him this morning.” He pointed a finger at his father’s face. “Stay the hell away from my campaign.”
Without another word, Matt walked back out the way he came. He passed Marion on his way out the door, but didn’t take the time to acknowledge her. He could go the rest of his life without ever seeing either of them again.
As he drove the few miles to the Civil District Court Building on Loyola Avenue in downtown New Orleans, Matt tried to block out the confrontation so that he could mentally prepare for the hearing on Mrs. Black’s case, but his father’s words continued to reverberate in his head.
Was he turning out to be just like Leroy Gauthier?
Every lie he told, every secret he harbored, they all helped to mold him in his father’s likeness, and the thought made Matt sick. He had no choice. He had to come clean about all of it. Matt wasn’t sure how much longer he could live with himself if he didn’t.
“Oh my God.”
Tamryn clutched the edges of the table she’d occupied for the past five hours in the bowels of Tulane University’s renowned archives room.
Her skin tingled. Her breathing escalated.
Her entire being buzzed with the mixture of excitement and disbelief cluttering her brain as she stared at the flyer, encased in archival laminate and sitting inconspicuously in a binder.
“Oh my God,” she breathed again. Her hand shook as she ran her finger across the plastic, the words swimming before her as her eyes filled with tears.
Negro School to Open.
Below the headline was a picture of her great-great-great-grandmother and Nicolette Gauthier.
It was a staged shot with the two of them holding up textbooks.
The short, two-paragraph article below stated that, despite strong opposition, the classes in reading and arithmetic would be taught to both slave children and free Blacks.
Tamryn swiped at the tears of relief that flowed down her cheeks.
After all the years of searching, after all the roadblocks—doubts from colleagues, doubts in herself—finally, finally she’d found proof. It wasn’t the diary that Tamryn knew was out there somewhere, but it was enough to prove that Adeline West had changed history.
After she’d calmed down enough to stop shaking, Tamryn went to the librarian, requesting copies of what she had found. Then she packed up the rest of her research materials.
Once she had the documented proof safely put away in her computer bag, she left the library, her body still humming with energy. She couldn’t wait the few minutes it would take to get to her car before she talked to Matt. She sat on a stone bench under a towering oak tree and called his number.
She didn’t give him a chance to speak after his initial hello.
“Matt,” she practically screamed. She wasn’t sure her skin would be able to contain all the excitement flooding her veins. “I found it! I found proof of the school Adeline West and Nicolette Gauthier opened together!”
The complete silence that met her on the other end of the line had Tamryn’s head rearing back. She looked at the phone, wondering if the call had dropped.
“Matt?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m here,” he said. “Can I call you back? I’m heading into court.”
“Um, sure,” Tamryn said, ignoring the tremor of unease that traveled down her spine. “I’ll, uh, talk to you later.”
On her way back to Gauthier, she called Victoria, needing to share her news with somebody.
This was too monumental to keep bottled up inside.
She was relieved when Victoria answered the phone and expressed nearly as much enthusiasm as Tamryn had.
They talked so long that Tamryn had to remind Victoria that she had a class of students waiting.
She ended the call, smiling at the excitement she’d heard in her coworker’s voice. Maybe it was something only a fellow history buff could get excited about.
But Matt knew how important this was to her. He knew how hard she had been working to find this missing link to her grandmother’s past.
“He was going into court,” Tamryn reminded herself. What had she expected him to do? Drop everything and run to her side so they could pop open a bottle of champagne?
She drove to Belle Maison so that she could shower and change into one of her more comfortable sundresses, and found Phylicia and Mya out under the gazebo, enjoying iced tea.
Both women were thrilled about the document Tamryn had found.
Mya called her husband, who, in addition to coaching the baseball team, taught American history at the high school.
If Matt had exhibited even a tenth of the enthusiasm Corey Anderson did, Tamryn surmised that she wouldn’t have the uncomfortable feeling in her gut that she hadn’t been able to shake since her abbreviated call with Matt.