Read Online Cities of the Dead by Linda Barnes - Free Book Online

have a bad memory for names. You wanted to know about my husband’s cooking?”
    Spraggue smiled blankly, inwardly cursing Mrs. Fontenot’s devotion to the straight line. “When did your husband start to cook for a living?”
    â€œFriends would always happen to drop in at meal time if they knew Joseph was cooking. They’d bring something for the pot. You know, ‘I got a rabbit. If your boy Joseph wants to season up a rabbit stew like he knows how to make so special, my family’d sure be happy to help y’all eat it.’ He learned to cook with nothing and he had no training. He made things up as he went along. Whatever got trapped, he cooked. Later, of course, he had formal training, in France.”
    â€œBefore you were married?”
    â€œNo. No. Nothing happened before we were married. He was only eighteen when we married, and me, I was one week past my seventeenth birthday.” The shadow of a smile flickered across her face, and for the first time, Spraggue had a sense that she must have loved the murdered man.
    But how long ago?
    â€œI see,” he said. It was a verbal nod, a prompt—and she went on.
    â€œWe live the way our parents live. We speak mostly Cajun French and we trap and catch fish and get by. There’s always enough to eat, but it’s a long way from where we started to here, believe me.”
    â€œThis is terrific coffee,” Spraggue said encouragingly. He wondered how much blank tape was left on the cassette.
    â€œThank you,” she said. “It is quite a story but it’s not my story. It’s Joe’s story. There was always more that he wanted. He wasn’t happy in the bayou, always dreaming big city, and not Abbeville either. Dreaming Paris. And one day he says to me he must go to France. He says, would you be okay on your own for awhile? See, we didn’t have money for us both to go. You know, he says, I’ll come back for you, but I gotta learn something else. I can’t spend my life here.”
    She paused, lost in an earlier time.
    â€œIt was hard for me when he left. I thought I’d die, and the baby, well …” She smiled at the photograph on the coffee table. “The baby was so young. Me, I have my family and I knew he’d come back—but I didn’t think he would be so long away.”
    â€œHow long?” Spraggue said quickly, thinking of the missing years Aunt Mary hadn’t been able to chart.
    â€œOh,” Jeannine said, uncomfortable again, “a long time.”
    â€œAnd during that time what did your husband do?”
    â€œAll the things he dreamed about, I guess. He lived in Paris and he learned to be a chef. He lived all over France.”
    And in New Orleans with Dora. “He wrote you?”
    She swallowed coffee. “My husband is not—was not a writing man.”
    â€œBut you waited.”
    â€œHe said he’d come back and he did. I almost didn’t know him at first—he’d been sick. But after a while, when he was strong again, we packed up and came to New Orleans and he got a job as a cook, and he worked very hard and became so well known—and then his own restaurant, and there was gonna be a cookbook with a fancy New York publisher—and now—”
    The doorbell rang. It echoed through the downstairs restaurant like a Chinese gong.
    â€œThat must be my photographer,” Spraggue said. Or the real reporter, he thought.
    â€œOh.” Mrs. Fontenot pushed at a few stray hairs on her forehead, tested out a smile. “Would you want pictures just of the restaurant or—”
    â€œIt would be wonderful if we could include you in a few shots. If you wouldn’t mind.”
    â€œWell …” she said uncertainly.
    â€œThink about it,” Spraggue urged as they went down the stairs. “I wouldn’t want you to do anything that would make you uncomfortable.” He shuddered slightly as he