Free American Heroes Series - 03 - Purgatory by Kathryn Le Veque Page B

my Mamaw didn’t want anyone touching the house
because in her later years, she was completely insane. Well, maybe not
completely because she still had her cognitive reasoning skills, but something
happened to her when my granddad died. It’s like she just gave up caring.  Beau
and I would go to the house to visit her and she’d sit in her wheelchair on the
front porch, blocking the door and shaking her cane at us. She wouldn’t let us
in.”
    “Beau?” Elliot was electrified by
his touch, his gentle fingers playing with hers.  It had been ages since she’d
known such pure, wicked pleasure. “Who’s that?”
    “Beau is my brother,” he
explained.  “My Mamaw was born in the year 1900 in New Orleans.  She had been a
debutant back in the teens and twenties, the belle of New Orleans society,
before she met and married my granddad, Case Aury.”
    “Is this the grandfather who was
the police chief?” Elliot interrupted.
    He nodded and continued. “Yes,
among other things,” he said honestly. “He was also one of the biggest
bootleggers in New Orleans and made a fortune off his ill-gotten gains. He was
as corrupt as they come, kind of like my ancestor the pirate.”
    Elliot grinned. “And all of this
didn’t come out when you were running for sheriff?”
    Nash reluctantly returned her
grin. “It was a long time ago, so thankfully, people were somewhat forgiving,”
he said. “They were more interested in my pirate forefather, to tell you the
truth.  Anyway, Jewel and Case Aury had three children; one boy, my father, and
two girls.  All of them were born and raised at Purgatory.”
    Elliot started laughing. “Jewel
and Case,” she said. “Sounds like they made DVD covers.”
    He laughed softly. “We all have
strange names down here, I guess,” he replied. “My father’s name is Camp and
his two sisters are Lorella and Rudi.  Dad had two boys, me and Beau, but my
aunts had twelve children between them, all but two of them girls. Anyway, when
Granddad died back in the 1960’s, Mamaw just seemed to lose her will to live. 
She let everything run down.  When dad would offer to fix something, she would
just chase him away. She did that with all of us until the day she died.  What
you see on the house is fifty years of utter neglect.”
    Elliot could see where the story
was leading. “So she died and your family figured it would be way too much
money to restore the place after she let it go to hell?”
      “Sort of,” he said, becoming
bolder at caressing her fingers. “My brother and I wanted to restore it, but my
aunts and their families wanted to sell it. There was basically none of my
granddad’s money left because Mamaw had run through it. Quite honestly, I don’t
know what she did with it because she certainly didn’t spend it on the house or
on herself, so we assumed she’d squandered it somehow. We could just never find
a paper trail. Anyway, when she died, just the house was left. It was a massive
battle for years but in the end, my dad, brother and I just couldn’t up with
the money to buy out my aunts. So we took what we could out of the place that
had any kind of value, sentimental or otherwise, and put it on the market for
two million dollars.  It sat there for six years, gradually reducing in price,
until you bought it.”
    By this time, Elliot was looking
at him with some horror. “For seven hundred thousand dollars,” she breathed.
“That’s nowhere close to two million.”
    He shrugged. “Greed does terrible
things to people. My aunts got what they deserved, which was very little when
all was said and done.”
    “And you?” she asked softly.
“What did you get?”
    He smiled faintly. “I got to meet
you.”
    She gave him such a look,
something between disbelief and pleasure, as they were interrupted by the old
man bearing two enormous plates of food. Elliot had to remove her hand from his
grasp out of necessity as a massive platter of eggs, grits, potatoes, bacon