The Cash App ping is loud in a quiet room.
Five hundred thousand. I hear it land in my pocket the way other women hear engagement rings click into ring boxes.
I kneel deeper. I drop my head. I open my throat.
"Cordelia Sutton — "
Her name barely clears my lips before she leans forward in the chair, fast, and I feel her breath at my temple.
"Don't cry for me. Cry for him."
It's pitched so low only I can hear it.
My voice stutters off the second syllable.
Beau's head snaps over. "Why'd you stop?"
I slap a palm against the verandah tile and let a wail rip out of me, full chest, the kind that breaks glass. "I'm — I'm overcome — sir, I'm — Lord, I can't catch my breath — "
Mr. DuPree frowns.
I lengthen the next wail. It buries her voice when she comes again, breath against my ear.
"Third floor. Beau's study. False panel behind the bookcase."
I press both hands to the tile. My fingertips are buzzing.
"Charlotte's not dead."
I keen louder.
Charlotte's not dead. So who in the ground at Lake Lawn yesterday.
Cordelia is crying — real tears running down — but she's also shaking on cue, performing the breakdown a hired keener is supposed to provoke. I keen her hard life and her dead sister and the way she sits at this window every morning watching a city that has been told she barely exists.
Beau is standing very still at the edge of the rug.
I steal a glance up through my hair.
He doesn't look like a man whose heart is being broken open by my work. He looks like a man being forced to sit through a play he's already seen.
I keen another full minute. I'm ready to wrap when Cordelia's hand shoots out and grabs my wrist, hard, fingernails into the bone, and her voice goes loud — performative loud, courtroom loud.
"Cry for me! Louder! I want everybody in this house to hear I'm dead!"
Her eyes when they meet mine are the eyes of a woman who has just stage-directed me for an audience I haven't been told about.
There's listening equipment in this room. And not just Beau Sutton-Marchand's.
I throw my voice up to the second-floor balcony.
"Miss Cordelia! You died wronged, sugar! You died wronged in this house!"
A door slams somewhere down the hall. Hard heels on hardwood, coming fast.
The door to the room flies open. The woman in the doorway is in her late fifties. Hair set. Pearl earrings. The Carolina Herrera dress is gray, not black, because she has not officially admitted she is in mourning. Her eyes find me first, and her face does the kind of changing colors I have only otherwise seen on a man losing money at a card table.
"Who told her to cry for that one?"
Beau turns to face her.
"Mrs. Sutton. I did."
Mrs. Sutton's hands are trembling — beautifully manicured, perfectly steady up to the wrist, the trembling is only in the knuckles.
"Beau. You gave me your word. Strangers do not work on Cordelia."
Beau's voice is even.
"I also gave Charlotte my word that I'd find out how she died."
Mrs. Sutton's face loses all its color in one breath.
Two of Mrs. Sutton's house-security men walk me out of the room with their hands at my elbows.
They march me down a hallway that smells like old roses. They march me down the staircase that the Sutton ancestor was photographed on in 1923. They march me through the front door and almost off the verandah steps.
At the front gate, three of Beau Sutton-Marchand's men are waiting on the sidewalk in unmarked black SUVs. They see me come out with the house-security on me, and one of them is already reaching inside his jacket.
I stop on the bottom step and lift both hands. The keening sash falls open at my waist.
"Gentlemen. I am one paid mourner. Before y'all start anything — could one of you square up the overage on the invoice? It's been five minutes past contract."
Nobody laughs.
The two security details square off across the cobblestone driveway. Beau Sutton-Marchand comes out of the door with the cut on his eyebrow still bleeding, Mrs. Sutton behind him.
She is shouting, careful even when she shouts. "She is not to leave. She drove Cordelia into an episode. She has to stay so the doctors can determine — "
I raise my hand. "Ma'am. I record all my jobs for liability. The recording will show I performed standard graveside keening. Patient response is the family's medical issue, not within my service warranty."
She stops. She looks at me. Really looks at me, for the first time, the way you look at something you're trying to figure out if you owned.
"What is your name, young lady?"
"Remy Lecroix."
Her eyes flicker. "Lecroix. As in Mae Boudreaux Lecroix?"
The blood drops out of my face about a second slower than it should have.
My mother and father died when I was two. Grandma Mae raised me on a labor-and-delivery nurse's pension and side work nobody ever explained.
I have heard her say the name Sutton exactly twice in twenty-six years. Both times she was asleep.
Beau Sutton-Marchand turns to look at me.
"You know her?"
Mrs. Sutton's mouth does a small precise thing.
"I'm sure I don't know any keener from the parish funeral trade. Why on earth would I."
The harder she denies it the more I know it's true.
Beau walks me to the Yukon himself. He shuts the door for me. He hands me a clean handkerchief across the console. The cut on his brow is still bleeding into the collar.
I don't take the handkerchief.
"Mr. Sutton-Marchand. Yesterday you threatened my grandma. Today you walked me into a snake nest. Tomorrow I assume you're driving me to my own cremation."
"What did she say to you?"
I push the handkerchief back.
"Boss. Listening in on a client's whisper, that's a line item."
He sits for two seconds with his hands on the wheel.
His phone buzzes on the console.
I look down. Cash App, incoming, one million dollars.
I sit up straighter against the leather.
"She said — third floor study. Bookcase has a false panel behind it. Charlotte Sutton is not dead."
His finger stops on the ignition.
The interior of the Yukon goes very quiet. The engine ticks under the hood.
When he finally speaks his voice has gone the color of slate.
"I know."
I almost throw the handkerchief at his face.
"You know and you held the funeral?"
"If we don't bury her, she dies for real."
I am quiet long enough that he pulls the Yukon over to the shoulder of Saint Charles, under one of the live oaks that's old enough to remember the Confederacy.
He presses two fingers to the cut on his brow.
"Charlotte texted me three days before the wreck. Four words."
He hands me his phone. I read the message twice.
Don't trust my mother.
"I got there an hour after the call to the wreck site. The Porsche was already burned out. Charlotte's mother identified the body. The Sutton-Marchand offices arranged the funeral. Everyone in three parishes signed off that Charlotte Sutton died on the causeway."
He puts the phone down on the console.
"But I pulled her bank records. An hour before the wreck, she wired forty-eight thousand dollars to a parish-Medicaid nursing home in Slidell. Patient: Maybelle Boudreaux Lecroix."
I make a sound. It doesn't come out as a word.
"That's how I found you."
He reaches into the back seat. He hands me a manila folder.
Inside: a printout of my Instagram page, my booking calendar from the parlor's referral list, Grandma Mae's discharge records from when she stopped doing midwife calls in 2007, and the photo of her on the porch with the quilt.
At the bottom of the cover sheet, written in pencil in a careful, schoolgirl-careful hand:
Remy Lecroix is who saves Cordelia.
I stare at the writing until it stops looking like writing.
"I don't know any Charlotte Sutton."
"She knew you."
He turns the key in the ignition. The engine wakes.
"Miss Lecroix. Your grandmother's legal name is Maybelle Boudreaux Lecroix. Twenty-six years ago she was a private midwife working the Garden District home-birth circuit."
The street through the windshield goes a little soft at the edges.
Grandma Mae never talks about being young. She doesn't like hospitals. She doesn't like babies' cries. She doesn't like red yarn — won't let me bring it in the house, won't let the home aides put red blankets on her bed.
The sentence she has said the most times in my life is:
Remedy, baby, don't you ever go uptown. Uptown eats people.
I always thought it was the dementia talking.
I'm just now figuring out: she's been telling me to be afraid of one specific house.
The Yukon idles in the shade.
"Tonight," Beau says, "you're coming with me to that study."
"Yeah."
He glances at me, surprised at how easy that was.
"Night work," I say, "that's triple."
Eleven o'clock. I'm in a gray housekeeping uniform from a janitorial supply on Tulane Avenue. My hair is up under a cap. My keening sash is in a duffel bag in the back of the Yukon along with two flashlights and a glass cutter.
Beau Sutton-Marchand handles the lock at the side service entrance.
I handle being scared.
The third floor of the Sutton compound is a single long gallery that ends in a paneled door with a brass plate that reads STUDY. There's a discreet camera bubble in the ceiling at the gallery's mid-point.
Beau pulls out a keycard.
I lean toward his shoulder. "Robbing your own girl's mother's house, and you have a keycard?"
"Charlotte gave it to me."
The card reader on the study door blinks green.
We step in.
A klaxon goes off in the walls. Loud. Loud enough that the picture frames rattle.
Beau is already moving. He grabs my upper arm and pulls me behind the heavy mahogany bookcase along the back wall, between the bookcase and the window seat. He pushes me down into a crouch and steps in front of me.
Footsteps come up the gallery.
Mrs. Sutton's voice.
"Search it. All of it."
Lights come on in the study. I can see them through the gap between the bookcase and the wall — bands of yellow light on the floor moving with each switch.
Two men start opening cabinets. Pulling out drawers. Lifting picture frames off the wall.
I am crouched low. My knees burn. My face is six inches from the small of Beau Sutton-Marchand's back.
He is standing with his hands loose at his sides and his shoulders square and his head turned toward the doorway. The way you stand when you have stood in front of somebody before.
I think — this man is a piece of work, but he knows what he's doing with his body when there's a knife around.
His phone vibrates against his hip. I clamp my palm over the pocket. He stops breathing.
I tilt my hand. I check the screen.
Incoming call. Contact name: Charlotte.
The hair on the back of my neck stands up clean.
A dead woman is calling.
Beau sees it. His thumb moves. He answers. He puts it on the lowest speakerphone.
No voice on the line. Just knocking.
Three knocks. A pause. Two knocks. A pause. One knock. The line goes dead.
His eyes change.
He turns very slowly. He puts his hand flat against the back wall of the bookcase niche, on a section of wood paneling that looks exactly like the rest of the wall, and he pushes.
The panel gives.
It's a door. Twenty inches wide. Cut into the back of the bookcase nook so it sits flush.
We squeeze through. Beau pulls it shut behind us a half-second before one of the security men drags the bookcase forward to check behind it.
I hear the bookcase scrape across the floor.
I hear a voice say, "Nothing."
I hear Mrs. Sutton outside, quiet and ice.
"Beau Sutton-Marchand does not vanish into thin air. Lock Cordelia down. She is not to receive visitors. She is not to be left unsupervised."
A door clicks shut somewhere out beyond the panel.
We are in absolute dark.
I exhale. My foot comes down onto something soft.
I lift my phone. The flashlight cuts a narrow cone onto the floor.
It's a wedding dress. Crumpled. Champagne silk, hand-beaded bodice. The hem is stiff with old brown stains that fan out in the way old blood fans out across silk.