Rising Tides by Emilie Richards Page B

morrow?” she asked.
    “If we find anything.”
    She put the empty suitcase back in the trunk and led the way out. The sky had darkened by the time they emerged. They had come in silence, but now that seemed intolerable. Her grandmother’s strange offering had tilted the balance between them. Dawn no longer knew exactly what to think.
    “Betsy’s still threatening,” she said as they started back to the cottage. “Maybe nobody will be able to stay here the full four days. We might have to evacuate. I wonder what that would do to the will….”
    “Nobody’s forecasting she’ll come ashore here.”
    “Mistakes have been made before.”
    They parted inside, their supply of small talk used up. Dawn watched Ben disappear into the kitchen, perhaps to find Phillip and report on this turn of events. She took the letters upstairs and set them beside her bed. A quick scan had shown that they covered a period of years. A good start on translating them would take her into the late hours of the night.
    This new link with her grandmother was a surprise and a pleasure. There was really very little that she knew about her grandmother’s family or Aurore’s early life. Who was the woman who had married Henry Gerritsen and borne his two sons? Who was the woman who, contrary to the social mores of her time, had helped build Gulf Coast Shipping into a multimillion-dollar corporation?
    Dawn washed and changed for supper; even the knowledge that she would have to face Ben over the table had taken a back seat to the letters and what she might find there.
    By the time she went down to eat, rain pelted the roof and thunder shook the rafters. That, too, seemed unimportant.
    Alone at last for the evening, she dressed for bed. Then she picked up her grandmother’s bequest.
    “You were a crafty old lady.” She hugged the letters as she had earlier. “What was it that you couldn’t tell me yourself, Grandmère? ”
    She settled into bed and set to work.

CHAPTER FIVE
    B onne Chance lay just across Barataria Bay, not an easy or short journey from Grand Isle, since marsh, water and one ambivalent hurricane separated them. But getting there, even in bad weather, was possible, if you drove back toward New Orleans and cut east to the Mississippi River. Bonne Chance was a one-dictator town, home of Largo Haines, a crony of Ferris’s. It had also been the final home of Hugh Gerritsen.
    “I don’t understand why dinner with Largo couldn’t wait until this fiasco at the beach is finished,” Cappy said, peering out the windshield as sheets of rain washed the blacktop in front of them. “We’ve been in the car for hours. We could have had him up to New Orleans next week. I could have made sure everything was perfect.”
    “Largo doesn’t care about perfect. He knows exactly how far away we were. He cares whether I come when he whistles, like a well-trained Labrador.”
    “Well, apparently he’s got nothing to worry about.”
    “Nothing at all. I’ll play bird dog, and the minute I don’t need Largo Haines, I’ll chew him up like an old shankbone.”
    “There it is.” Cappy pointed to a discreet sign illuminated by floodlights.
    They turned into a driveway that in better weather would have been comfortably familiar. Now the landscape was a thousand shades of forbidding gray, and the Corinthian columns of the Bonne Chance Country Club offered no guarantees that the building would withstand a hurricane.
    Inside the marble-tiled foyer, they checked their coats. Ferris swept Cappy from head to toe with critical eyes, but not a golden hair was out of place. Her hat was still perched at a jaunty angle, and the veil that matched the dark red of her suit brushed her forehead.
    At moments like these he admired her most, and, as always, on the heels of admiration came desire. These days his sexual needs were few and easily taken care of, and he rarely bothered to spend the night in Cappy’s bedroom. Still, he had never ceased to want his