Chapter 17
Catherine
I wasn’t certain how many times Alexander could surprise me. While I hadn’t put much thought into where he might take me on his so-called adventure, a cemetery certainly hadn’t entered my mind.
He’d seemed reserved, even more quiet than usual during the drive.
There were beautiful creatures in every aspect of life and in every species. While there were people who couldn’t understand there was true beauty in all things, I’d learned a long time ago as a child that some of the ugliest creatures were the most loyal.
They’d become my friends.
Small animals at first, those damaged and unwanted. I’d kept them warm, nurturing and feeding them. My mother had been my accomplice, helping me build a safety zone for the sweet creatures.
Since I’d lived on a farm until moving to New Orleans after college, it had been easy to do, even easier to keep the secret hiding place from my father, who’d begun to work all the time.
I’d talked to them, cried my heart out when they’d died, burying them and even having my own version of a funeral. To this day, I could remember almost all their names.
My father had told me years later he’d known all along I’d been harboring animals. He’d even photographed my adventures and I’d never known. We’d been a happy family, just the three of us cocooned from the world.
When I’d gotten older, I’d used my love of animals to volunteer at a rescue shelter until the stories and tragedies had become too much for my heart to endure.
People throwing out dogs and cats just because they were moving.
Those who abused them in every sick fucking way.
I’d tried to be strong, to give them comfort.
I’d held several in my arms knowing it would be their last day on earth. After two years, the experience had broken me both mentally and emotionally.
Maybe that’s why I had few friends in college. Even now, I could count on one hand minus a few fingers anyone I would consider important or special in my life. I simply was afraid they’d be taken from me. And I just couldn’t handle their deaths.
But here I was, standing in the most ominous place on earth for me.
A graveyard. An ancient yet thriving cemetery where families entombed their loved ones. I’d heard all about the ceremonies and how so many people truly believed the dead could return, to walk amongst us again.
I’d simply chosen not to believe it.
At least what I’d learned from the experience so many years ago was that I could find beauty in every human being.
Yet nothing had prepared me for the ever-present beauty of the man standing a few feet away.
His silence was unnerving, yet I sensed he’d brought me here not only for some theatrical explosion of emotion or admittance, but because the grounds were revered.
“Why are we here?” I asked when he didn’t offer an explanation.
“Come with me, Catherine. I assure you that I’m not here to hurt you if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“You’ve already told me that if you’d wanted to do so, you would have. I’m not scared of you, Alexander.”
“You should be.” The darkness in his voice was more pronounced than before. Maybe he was right, but I didn’t feel that way.
At least not any longer.
I’d never liked being in cemeteries, especially in New Orleans. Maybe a grassy knoll would be better where tombstones weren’t the size of rooms.
As I walked with Alexander through the catacombs, he seemed at peace. For the first time since he’d kidnapped me, there was a distinct awkwardness between us that was different. The gruff man who’d had something to say to me every time I pushed back against him was suddenly silent.
In his silence was a story needing to be told. Maybe initially I’d hoped for an admittance of his guilt to make everything easier.
Including hating him.
Now I wasn’t entirely certain what I was hoping for.
Maybe a reason to believe he was telling the truth.
But I’d never be able to call him innocent.
He was guilty of dozens of crimes. Of that, I was positive.
I doubted he’d tell me stories about what he’d done, but I sensed he carried their deaths around with him as if eagerly positioning links on a heavy chain that would ultimately weigh enough to drag him to hell and keep him there.
Yet there was no guilt, no level of remorse because that wasn’t anything he’d been taught. Nor had it been instilled in him as a child. Quite the opposite.
In a few seconds, I realized why I’d been brought here with him. He’d taken me to his family tomb. Almost instantly, I could tell it went back several generations.
He nodded toward the monolith, encouraging me to explore.
As soon as I stepped inside the well of the mausoleum, I felt overwhelmed by knowing how many of his ancestors were buried here.
There were dozens of names etched in a tablet. “Your family.”
“Yes. My family goes back generations. My grandmother insists she can feel the presence of several of them.”
I shuddered from the thought. “She sees ghosts.”
His laugh was strangely scintillating for what we were doing. “My grandmother is as close to being a witch that you’ll ever meet.”
His words caught me off guard and I laughed. “You have a fascinating family.”
“You have no idea.”
“Why is it important for me to see?”
“Because if you don’t believe my family reveres life, then I hoped you’d understand that we do understand and mourn death.
We are just like everyone else. We celebrate.
We suffer. We face tragedy and family illness.
We learn to deal with mistakes and decisions made.
We thrive when we’re together. We suffer more when we act on our own.
Our family has been here for generations, my ancestors proud of their heritage, building a base for us that allowed for wealth and prosperity yet couldn’t control the grim reaper. No one can do that.”
Why did it seem as if he was trying to convince himself that it was acceptable to live? Or maybe to free himself of the chains keeping him prisoner?
As he walked closer, so did I, noticing his father’s name first and foremost. “You’re superstitious.”
“We are steeped in the ways of darkness. At least according to my grandmother, a very wise if not somewhat devilishly powerful woman who you don’t want to cross.”
I moved even closer, taking the time to feel a sense of myself. I’d never been one to believe in the stories I’d heard about New Orleans, ghosts roaming the quiet darkness in search of heaven. Yet I could understand the intense draw to a place so many held in high reverence.
Just like I witnessed in Alexander. He was so powerful, so lost in a sea of darkness that had shaped him into the man who stood before me.
Nothing about him was casual from his attire to his demeanor.
He was always tense, feeling every scrap of emotion played out in his mind, but incapable of expressing his feelings in a way anyone but he could understand.
There was so much anger inside, so many demons that it seemed as if this place provided him a strange moment of comfort, a relief from running his ruthless empire.
If only for a few minutes.
My family wasn’t steeped in some huge legacy or history.
There’d been no brothers or sisters to rely on or talk to when growing up.
Just the three of us. Perhaps he didn’t know how lucky he was.
He watched me intently as he always did when I traced several of the names, even whispering them to no one.
Maybe to the ghosts tickling the light breeze.
Or to my conscience, which resented the realization that I enjoyed spending time with him. Whoever he was underneath the temper and the violent chaos that had created the glass house he lived in, I couldn’t seem to free myself from the connection.
“You loved your father very much.” My words somehow echoed in the dense space.
“Don’t we always love our fathers?”
My thoughts were different than his. “I used to. He was my world, someone I could look up to when I was a child. Always there when I needed him. Then he was gone.”
“I am sorry, Catherine. Death within a family has an eternal toll.”
“Only he didn’t die.”
While his breathing was labored, he allowed me the grace to tell the story or not to without pressure.
Why I felt as if I could trust him, I wasn’t certain.
But I did. “Nothing so tragic as simply being able to see him in a cemetery, saying kind words when I brought flowers from time to time.” I hated admitting the perfect nuclear family I thought I’d grown up in had been a lie for most of my life.
“He failed my mother and me. More than once.”
How strange that I could feel him stiffening, not because he was furious with me for telling a story, but because he was angry that I’d gone through pain.
“A few years ago, my mother discovered he was having an affair. She tried to hide it even from me, working through the pain not only of the girl being much younger, but that it had been going on for over a year. When she finally told me, she was nearly a shell of herself. Not because of the affair as much as the way he’d treated her when she was doing nothing more than hoping to repair her marriage.
” The pain of our cocoon being shattered troubled me to this day.
At least my mother had found some sense of happiness, enjoying life as a beautiful and sought-after divorcee.
Living in the middle of nowhere.
“Men can be pigs.”
Alexander wasn’t a romantic, very much like a bull in a china shop, but at times, he knew exactly what to say to me to make me feel at least a bit better.
“Yes, they can. My hero was wiped out in a few minutes of holding my mother while she sobbed. The things he said to her, trying to make her feel as if she was the problem were terrible, so unlike my father.”
“What did you do?”
“I confronted him, but only after learning he’d had more than one affair.”
“How did you discover he had?”