“He can speak to me tomorrow.”
Benny looked past her shoulder.
His eyes moved to the flour tin.
Then back to her.
“Someone been in here?”
Nell said nothing.
Benny’s expression changed.
Only slightly.
But enough.
“You expecting somebody?”
“No.”
“Then you should come with me.”
“No.”
“He isn’t ordering you.”
“That’s what men say when they arrive with a car.”
Benny almost smiled.
Almost.
Then footsteps sounded at the end of the hallway.
The landlady appeared carrying folded towels.
She stopped when she saw Benny.
“Oh,” she said.
Her voice changed immediately.
Nell hated that.
Fear altered people.
It made them smaller.
Benny noticed too.
He stepped away from Nell’s doorway.
“Miss Brisco, I’ll wait downstairs.”
He left.
The landlady watched him go.
When the stairwell door closed, she whispered, “Do you know who that is?”
“Yes.”
“What does he want?”
Nell looked at the flour tin.
“I think I’m about to find out.”
Twenty-three minutes later, Nell sat across from Carmine Orsini in the back room of a restaurant closed for renovation.
No guards stood inside.
Benny waited outside the door.
Carmine sat at a bare wooden table with her personnel file in front of him.
Nell looked at the file.
Then at him.
“You went through my records.”
“I read the records you gave my household when you accepted employment.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It is exactly an answer.”
Nell remained standing.
Carmine did not tell her to sit.
Good.
She preferred standing.
He opened the file.
“Your father is Emmett Fontaine.”
Every sound in the room disappeared.
Nell’s face did not change.
Her heart did.
She had learned long ago that fear could make a person careless.
She would not be careless.
“My father is sick.”
“I know.”
“You had him investigated?”
“I had you investigated.”
“That’s worse.”
“Probably.”
Nell looked toward the door.
Carmine spoke before she moved.
“Conrad Bellarose came to my office this morning.”
That stopped her.
Not visibly.
But Carmine saw it.
He saw everything.
“He offered me a distribution agreement involving eleven restaurants.”
Nell’s fingers curled at her sides.
“Why are you telling me?”
“Because twenty-one years ago, one of those restaurants was called Fontaine Bakery.”
Nell said nothing.
Carmine leaned back.
“The building changed ownership six months before your father’s business collapsed.”
Silence.
“The buyer was a holding company.”
Nell looked at him now.
Carmine continued.
“The holding company belonged to Bellarose.”
For the first time since entering the room, Nell forgot to hide what she felt.
Not fear.
Hatred.
Pure and immediate.
Carmine watched it appear.
And disappear.
“My father made bad business decisions,” she said.
“That is what the public records say.”
“They’re correct.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe.”
“It matters to me.”
“Why?”
Carmine looked at the woman who had spent three years scrubbing his floors, counting seven minutes over syrup, and hiding a name connected to one of the most famous bakeries New Orleans had forgotten.
“Because Bellarose wants something from me.”
Nell’s jaw tightened.
“And men who want things from me usually tell me the truth.”
He placed both hands on the table.
“Usually.”
Nell stared at the file.
Then she quietly said, “My father did not lose that bakery.”
Carmine waited.
She lifted her eyes.
“It was taken from him.”
May you like
And for the first time that night, Carmine understood that the pecan pie had never been the beginning of the story.
It had merely been the first crack in a secret somebody had spent twenty years trying to bury.
