Page 51 of The Shop on Royal Street
The following morning, I stood to the side of the running lanes at Audubon Park, my hands on my legs, gasping for breath. The cooler air of fall was still just a tiny dot on the horizon despite it being mid-September, the humidity, hovering somewhere around seventy-eight percent, making the three miles I had just run seem more like fifteen. I still had a few years to go until I hit thirty, but at the rate I was panting, it seemed time to go ahead and start scouting out nursing homes.
Although it was almost seven thirty in the morning, the park was empty except for a few perky Uptown mothers pushing running strollers and holding phones to their ears as they multitasked their way around the park. Classes at Tulane and Loyola weren’t scheduled tostart until the following week, which I knew would mean a running path crowded with much younger and more spritely runners. I stood and sucked in a deep breath and wondered if they would ask me to leave.
I opened the fitness app on my phone and hit the share button to send my morning’s stats to Melanie and my aunt Jayne. Despite being the mother of two elementary school–aged children and much older than I was, Jayne usually beat me in time and distance, which was fair since she’d been running for almost as long as I’d been alive. Melanie usually “forgot” to wear her tracker and had to manually input her data, which I found highly suspicious, but I let it ride because it was Melanie.
With my hands clutching my waist, as if that might pump more oxygen into my lungs, I paused to admire a preening snowy egret on the edge of Bird Island in the middle of the lagoon, and enjoy the cackles and caws of the hundreds of birds nesting in the rookery’s trees. The melody of a song I’d started working on when I’d first moved to New Orleans and seen the island began playing in the back of my head. I needed to write it down before I forgot it, but each time I tried, the music stopped.
Turning my back on the lagoon, I began my cooldown walk toward the main entrance, passing the bronze statue of the woman holding a bird and standing on a pedestal in the middle of a fountain, a pair of mallard ducks cruising under the jets of water spraying from two bronze statues of children sitting on turtles on the perimeter. I stopped on the path near the fountain to change my playlist from running music to acoustic guitar to accompany me on my walk to my apartment.
Movement caught my attention and I looked up to see a dark-haired man about my age sit down on one of the benches. He smiled at me before bending his head to his own phone, and I smiled back in reflex even though I could hear both Melanie and Jack warning me to never smile at strangers, especially good-looking young male strangers. But this guy looked oddly familiar, and he must have recognized me, too,since he’d smiled. Or maybe he was just being polite. I wondered if we’d passed each other before while walking around Uptown, or if maybe I’d known him during the year I’d been at Tulane. Or, since he was wearing running clothes and was in the park, maybe we had just passed each other on the path and that was why he looked familiar.
The man looked up again as I was staring. Embarrassed, I gave him a quick smile and walked away toward the park’s main entrance, on St. Charles Avenue, and then, instead of walking home, I picked up my pace and did a short jog through Tulane’s campus to Freret Street, and then back to my apartment on Broadway. It wasn’t that I got weird vibes from him, or that he was acting creepy or threatening in any way. And it definitely wasn’t because he was odd-looking in that white-van-driving-predator kind of way. It was just that he’d seemed familiar, and I couldn’t figure out why. And a stranger appearing enough times to seem familiar was what most people would call a strange coincidence. Except my dad’s well-known motto was “There’s no such thing as coincidence.” And in my twenty-six years, I’d already learned that he was right.
I spent the rest of the day working from home, organizing my photos and notes from my day in St. Francisville and starting my report. I even remembered to book an appointment at the state archives in Baton Rouge to finish my research. I’d resigned myself to hiring an Uber for the trip, or risking my life with Jolene. She’d already offered to drive, but it was scary enough driving with her on city streets. The thought of her flying down the interstate with Bubba was enough for me to open my wallet for a rideshare. The one thing I was sure of was that I wasn’t going to ask Beau. I owed him enough as it was, and my offers for reimbursement for gas and wear and tear on his truck fell on deaf ears.
I was so busy working that I’d forgotten all about the man in the park when Beau picked me up before heading to Mimi’s for dinner. As we drove down St. Charles Avenue past the park and the main entrances to both Tulane and Loyola, I caught a brief glimpse of a dark-haired young man across the neutral ground on the opposite side of thestreet from us. He wore a backpack and was riding an expensive-looking ten-speed bike and passed by too quickly for me to get a good look at his face. Yet I was sure it was the same guy. Something about his jawline—or maybe it was his brow line—seemed so memorable. I turned to look, watching as he took a right through the gates of Audubon Place.
“Who was that?” Beau asked, following my gaze.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m guessing he’s a student at one of the universities, because he was wearing a backpack. I think I saw him at the park this morning, but I can’t be sure. It’s just that he seems so... familiar. Like I’ve seen him before, but not in a way that I should know his name. Like maybe we were in the same class freshman year, but I think I’ve seen him since. I just can’t remember when.”
“Could just be a coincidence.”
Our eyes met. “Except there’s no such thing as coincidence,” we said in unison. Beau had been around my dad enough to have learned the Jack Trenholm mantra.
“He rode his bike into Audubon Place, if that means anything,” I said.
“Well, if he lives in a house there, his family probably has money. Or he could be a tutor or visiting a friend. Who knows? He might not even be the same guy.” Our eyes met again before I quickly glanced away.
Jorge was gone by the time we pulled up in front of my house, but Thibaut’s truck was still there, the windows all the way down so he wouldn’t combust from the heat when he returned to his truck. The wind chime was conspicuously still as we walked up onto the porch, but a faint whiff of pipe tobacco drifted past.
“Do you smell that?” I asked.
“Smell what?” Beau gave a perfunctory sniff of the air before opening the door. “I don’t smell anything but rain.”
I walked past him into the house. “Thibaut?” I called out.
“Back here.”
We found him in the kitchen, pulling his head out from inside awall, corroded pipes scattered around him on the floor. He smiled broadly at us. “I’d greet y’all proper with a handshake, but I know where these hands have been and it ain’t pretty.” He nodded toward the hole in the wall. “I was hoping I could just replace a section of the piping and save you the trouble of all-new kitchen plumbing and a new wall, but that dog just won’t hunt. It’s all got to be torn out and started again from scratch. The upside is that you’ll get a brand-new kitchen and you won’t have to worry about nothing leaking or breaking for a long time.”
He motioned us toward the back door. “Come over here and let me show you something. When I got here this morning, this door was wide open. Now, I might be more forgetful than I used to be, but when it comes to leaving a job site, I don’t take no chances. I lock up everything real tight; then I go back through and double-check everything. And I know I not only locked this door last night before I left, but I also rechecked it and it was definitely locked—both the door handle and the dead bolt.”
Holding up his hand, he said, “Now, don’t get ahead of yourselves and think we’ve got ourselves a few ghosties opening doors around here, because that’s what Jorge says and it’s why he’s calling his priest tonight about doing a blessing. But this is definitely man-made.”
He opened the door and pointed at the dead bolt. It was one of the first things I’d installed in the house before I realized that the house wasn’t a target for visitors, either the wanted or unwanted kind. Long gashes and scratches marred the surface of the bright stainless steel as if it had been mauled by some wild animal. Or attacked with a very sharp knife. Beneath it, the original brass drum-style doorknob and the backplate with the simple old-style keyhole hadn’t been damaged at all. The lock was different from the one on the front door and the key had been missing, which was why I’d installed the dead bolt. Thibaut had found the key when he removed the old water heater behind the louvered door in the kitchen, where it had apparently been kicked and forgotten years before. He pulled at a ring of keys he’d attached to his tool belt. “And the only key is right here, and it went home with me last night.”
“And you’re sure you locked it?”
“Give me a Bible and I’ll put my hand on it and swear that I did. Hard to forget, because I have to take it off the ring to turn it, and I remember doing that. And I’ve still got the key, so I definitely put it back and didn’t drop it nowhere.”
“I believe you. It’s just that if you have the only key, and the door was definitely locked but was unlocked without any tampering, that means that...”
“Someone has another key,” Beau and I said in unison.
Our eyes met briefly before I turned back to Thibaut. “And you haven’t made a copy, and to your knowledge no one else has, either?”
“No, ma’am. Not since I’ve been here. Before I found the key we just kept it unlocked, and now it’s just me and Jorge, and I always get here first and leave last, so I unlock and lock all the doors.”
