"What do you want?" she demanded.

"We've come to speak with your mother and father," Beau said.

"They're not exactly in the mood to talk to you," she spit back at us. "In the midst of our mourning, you two had to make problems."

"There are some terrible misunderstandings we must try to fix," Beau insisted, and then added, "for the sake of the baby more than anyone."

Toby gazed at me. Something in my face confused her and she relaxed her shoulders.

"How's Pearl?" I asked quickly.

"Fine. She's doing just fine. She's with Jeanne," she added.

"She's not here?"

"No, but she will be here," she said firmly.

"Please," Beau pleaded. "We must have a few minutes with your parents."

Toby considered a moment and then stepped back. "I'll go see if they want to talk to you. Wait in the study," she ordered, and marched down the hallway to the stairs.

Beau and I entered the study. There was only a single lamp lit in a corner, and with the dismal sky, the room reeked of gloom. I snapped on a Tiffany lamp beside the settee and sat quickly, for fear my legs would give out from under me.

"Let me begin our conversation with Madame Tate," Beau advised. He stood to the side, his hands behind his back, and we both waited and listened, our eyes glued to the entrance. Nothing happened for so long, I let my eyes wander and my gaze stopped dead on the portrait above the mantel. It was a portrait I had done of Paul some time ago. Gladys Tate had hung it in place of the portrait of herself and Octavious. I had done too good a job, I thought. Paul looked so lifelike, his blue eyes animated, that soft smile captured around his mouth. Now he looked like he was smiling with impish satisfaction, defiant, vengeful. I couldn't look at the picture without my heart pounding.

We heard footsteps and a moment later Toby appeared alone. My hope sunk. Gladys wasn't going to give us an audience.

"Mother will be down," she said, "but my father is not able to see anyone at the moment. You might as well sit," she told Beau. "It will be a while. She's not exactly prepared for visitors right now," she added bitterly. Beau took a seat beside me obediently. Toby stared at us a moment.

"Why were you so obstinate? If there was ever a time my mother needed the baby around her, it was now. How cruel of you two to make it difficult and force us to go to a judge." She glared at me and then turned directly to Beau. "I might have expected something like this from her, but I thought you were more compassionate, more mature."

"Toby," I said. "I'm not who you think I am."

She smirked. "I know exactly who you are. Don't you think we have people like you here, selfish, vain people who couldn't care less about anyone else?"

"But . . ."

Beau put his hand on my arm. I looked at him and saw him plead for silence with his eyes. I swallowed back my words and closed my eyes. Toby turned and left us.

"She'll understand afterward," Beau said softly. A good ten minutes later, we heard Gladys Tate's heels clicking down the stairway, each click like a gunshot aimed at my heart. Our eyes fixed with anticipation on the doorway until she appeared. She loomed before us, taller, darker in her black mourning dress, her hair pinned back as severely as Toby's. Her lips were pale, her cheeks pallid, but her eyes were bright and feverish.

"What do you want?" she demanded, shooting me a stabbing glance.

Beau rose. "Madame Tate, we've come to try to reason with you, to get you to understand why we did what we did," he said.

"Humph," she retorted. "Understand?" She smiled coldly with ridicule. "It's simple to understand. You're the type who care only about themselves, and if you inflict terrible pain and suffering on someone in your pursuit of happiness, so what?" She whipped her eyes to me and flared them with hate before she turned to sit in the high-back chair like a queen, her hands clasped on her lap, her neck and shoulders stiff.

"Much of this is my fault, not Ruby's," Beau continued. "You see," he said, turning to me, "a few years ago we . . . I made Ruby pregnant with Pearl, but I was cowardly and permitted my parents to send me to Europe. Ruby's stepmother tried to have the baby aborted in a run-down clinic so it would all be kept secret, but Ruby ran off and returned to the bayou."

"How I wish she hadn't," Gladys Tate spit, her hating eyes trying to wish me into extinction.

"Yes, but she did," Beau continued, undaunted by her venom. "For better or for worse, your son offered to make a home for Ruby and Pearl."

"It was for worse. Look at where he is now," she said. Ice water trickled down my spine.

"As you know," Beau said softly, patiently, "theirs was not a true marriage. Time passed. I grew up and realized my errors, but it was too late. In the interim, I renewed my relationship with Ruby's twin sister, who I thought had matured, too. I was mistaken about that, but that's another story."

Gladys smirked.

"Your son knew how much Ruby and I still eared for each other, and he knew Pearl was our child, my child. He was a good man and he wanted Ruby to be happy."

"And she took advantage of that goodness," Gladys accused, stabbing the air between us with her long forefinger.

"No, Mother Tate, I—"

"Don't sit there and try to deny what you did to my son." Her lips trembled. "My son," she moaned. "Once, I was the apple of his eye. The sun rose and fell on my happiness, not yours. Even when you were enchanting him here in the bayou, he would love to sit and talk with me, love to be with me. We had a remarkable relationship and a remarkable love between us," she said. "But you were relentless and you charmed him away from me," she charged, and I realized there was no hate such as that born out of love betrayed. This was why her brain was screaming out for revenge.

"I didn't do those things, Mother Tate," I said quietly. "I tried to discourage our relationship. I even told him the truth about us," I said.

"Yes, you did and viciously drove a wedge between him and me. He knew that I wasn't his real mother. Don't you think that changed things?"

"I didn't want to tell him. It wasn't my place to tell him," I cried, recalling Grandmère Catherine's warnings about causing any sort of split between a Cajun mother and her child. "But you can't build a house of love on a foundation of lies. You and your husband should have been the ones to tell him the truth."

She winced. "What truth? I was his mother until you came along. He loved me," she whined. "That was all the truth we needed . . . love."

A pall fell among us for a moment. Gladys sucked in her anger and closed her eyes.

Beau decided to proceed. "Your son, realizing the love between Ruby and myself, agreed to help us be together. When Gisselle became seriously ill, he volunteered to take her in and pretend she was Ruby so that Ruby could become Gisselle and we could be man and wife."

She opened her eyes and laughed in a way that chilled my blood. "I know all that, but I also know he had little choice. She probably threatened to tell the world he wasn't my son," she said, her flinty eyes aimed at me.

"I would never. . ."

"You'd say anything now, so don't try," she advised.

"Madame," Beau said, stepping forward. "What's done is done. Paul did help. He intended for us to live with our daughter and be happy. What you're doing now is defeating what Paul himself tried to accomplish."

She stared up at Beau for a moment, and as she did so, the gossamer strands of sanity seemed to shred before they snapped behind her eyes. "My poor granddaughter has no parents now. Her mother was buried and her father will be interred beside her."

"Madame Tate, why force us to go to court over this and put everyone through the misery again? Surely you want peace and quiet at this point, and your family—"

She turned her dark, blistering eyes toward Paul's portrait, and those eyes softened. "I'm doing this for my son," she said, gazing up at him with more than a mother's love. "Look how he smiles, how beautiful he is and how happy he is. Pearl will grow up here, under that portrait. At least he'll have that. You," she said, pointing her long, thin finger at me again, "took everything else from him, even his life."

Beau looked at me desperately and then turned back to her. "Madame Tate," he said, "if it's a matter of the inheritance, we're prepared to sign any document."

"What?" She sprang up. "You think this is all a matter of money? Money? My son is dead." She pulled up her shoulders and pursed her lips. "This discussion is over. I want you out" of my house and out of our lives."

"You won't succeed with this. A judge—"

"I have lawyers. Talk to them." She smiled at me so coldly, it made my blood curdle. "You put on your sister's face and body and you crawled into her heart. Now live there," she cursed, and left the room.

Right down to my feet, I ached, and my heart became a hollow ball shooting pains through my chest. "Beau!"

"Let's go," he said, shaking his head. "She's gone mad. The judge will realize that. Come on, Ruby." He reached for me. I felt like I floated to my feet.

Just before we left the room, I gazed back at Paul's portrait. His expression of satisfaction put a darkness in my heart that a thousand days of sunshine couldn't nudge away.

After the funeral drive back to New Orleans, I collapsed with emotional exhaustion and slept into the late morning. Beau woke me to tell me Monsieur Polk had just called.

"And?" I sat up quickly, my heart pounding.

"I'm afraid it's not good news. The experts tell him everything is identical with identical twins, blood type, even organ size. The doctor who treated Gisselle doesn't think anything would show in an X-ray. We can't rely on the medical data to clearly establish identities.

"As far as my being the father of Pearl . . . a blood group test will only confirm that I couldn't be, not that I could. As Monsieur Polk said, those sorts of tests aren't perfected yet."

"What will we do?" I moaned.

"He has already petitioned for a hearing and we have a court date," Beau said. "We'll tell our story, use the handwriting samples. He wants to also make use of your art talent. Monsieur Polk has documents prepared for us to sign so that we willingly surrender any claim to Paul's estate, thus eliminating a motive. Maybe it will be enough."

"Beau, what if it isn't?"

"Let's not think of the worst," he urged.

The worst was the waiting. Beau tried to occupy himself with work, but I could do nothing but sleep and wander from room to room, sometimes spending hours just sitting in Pearl's nursery, staring at her stuffed animals and dolls. Not more than forty-eight hours after Monsieur Polk had filed our petition with the court, we began to get phone calls from newspaper reporters. None would reveal his or her sources, but it seemed obvious to both Beau and me that Gladys Tate's thirst for vengeance was insatiable and she had deliberately had the story leaked to the press. It made headlines.

TWIN CLAIMS SISTER BURIED IN HER GRAVE! CUSTODY BATTLE LOOMS.

 

Aubrey was given instructions to say we were unavailable to anyone who called. We would see no visitors, answer no questions. Until the court hearing, I was a virtual prisoner in my own home.

On that day, my legs trembling, I clung to Beau's arm as we descended the stairway to get into our car and drive to the Terrebone Parish courthouse. It was one of those mostly cloudy days when the sun plays peekaboo, teasing us with a few bright rays and then sliding behind a wall of clouds to leave the world dark and dreary. It reflected my mood swings, which went from hopeful and optimistic to depressed and pessimistic.

Monsieur Polk was already at the courthouse, waiting, when we arrived. The story had stirred the curious in the bayou as well as in New Orleans. I gazed quickly at the crowd of observers and saw some of Grandmère Catherine's friends. I smiled at them, but they were confused and unsure and afraid to smile back. I felt like a stranger. How would I ever explain to them why I had switched identities with Gisselle? How would they ever understand?

We took our seats first, and then, with obvious fanfare, milking the situation as much as she could, Gladys Tate entered. She still wore her clothes of mourning. She hung on Octavious's arm, stepping with great difficulty to show the world we had dragged her into this horrible hearing at a most unfortunate time. She wore no makeup, so she looked pale and sick, the weaker of the two of us in the judge's eyes. Octavious kept his gaze down, his head bowed, and didn't look our way once.