Cay had to hide her astonishment at his question. “Fine. When did you see him last?”
“The day before I left Charleston. We got so drunk they had to carry me out and put me on the boat. When I woke up, I was in New Orleans, and I had a headache that lasted a week.”
“New Orleans? Is that where you wanted to be?”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “That’s where I wanted to be. So where’d you go to school?”
“William and Mary,” Cay lied quickly. It looked like she’d yet again given away too much about herself. “So you knew Alex well?”
“Knew? You sound like he’s dead. He isn’t, is he?”
“No,” Cay said cautiously. “Last I heard, he was alive.”
“Glad to hear it. I had some good times with Alex, even though I lost to him in about a hundred races. He brought in this horse . . .” George gave a whistle and shook his head. “That animal must have been bred on another planet. It was faster than anything I’d ever seen before. But then Alex is a great horseman.”
“Is he?” There was a stool by the counter and Cay slipped onto it. It was nice to hear about Alex from someone who knew him before he’d been called a murderer.
“What he can get a horse to do, nobody else can.” George looked up from the furs. “What happened to him?”
“What do you mean?” Cay tried to keep her voice calm.
“I thought he was going to marry old Mrs. Underwood’s niece, but, obviously, he didn’t.”
It took all of Cay’s will power not to turn around and look in Alex’s direction. “Why do you say that?” she asked as calmly as she could.
“Because I saw Lilith in New Orleans two weeks ago.”
“You what?”
“I had to make a quick trip there and back because—” He waved his hand in dismissal. “Anyway, while I was there, I saw Lilith.” George bent down again and came back up. “I could have sworn she saw me, but she turned away. I ran after her because I wanted to ask her about Alex, but Lilith slipped into a building and I didn’t see her again. I even asked people about her, but no one knew her.” He shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t her. Maybe it was someone who just looked like her. Except . . .”
“Except what?”
“Lilith had this little mole on the side of her neck, just where it meets her shoulder, and it was heart shaped. You’re too young to know what I mean, but I can tell you that all of us men used to fantasize about that mole.”
“And this woman in New Orleans had this mole?”
“She sure did. It’s what made me notice her. Everything else about her seemed to be different. Her hair was pulled back, and she wasn’t as pretty as she had been. Don’t get me wrong, she was still beautiful, but she looked, well, almost frightened. When she saw me, I thought she was going to scream. Her eyes looked like some wild animal’s. I felt sorry for her. Why didn’t she marry Alex? They have a fight?”
“I don’t know,” Cay said, and her voice was little more than a whisper. “I don’t know anything about anything anymore.”
“I thought I was the only one who felt like that. I came out here hoping that if my father didn’t see me for a while he’d forget about what I did in New Orleans, but from what he said in his last letter, I may have to spend the rest of my life here.”
Feeling as though she were in a daze, Cay slid off the stool. She couldn’t help but look at Alex in the shadows behind the cabinet. When he motioned to her with his hand, it took her a moment to figure out what he meant. He wanted her to get George to leave the store. She looked back at the trader. “Was that someone at the back door?”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“Oh. Maybe it was just some alligators. You know how they are. Tim nearly had his leg bitten off by one of them, but I hit the thing on the head with a paddle and killed it with one blow. I tell you, if I hadn’t been there, that boy would have died. I think Mr. Grady is glad of the day when he hired me.”
George looked Cay’s slim form up and down in disbelief.
“What’s more, I—”
“I think I better check that door,” George said as he hurried out.
Alex slipped out from behind the cabinet. “And you said you weren’t good at being a liar.”
She ignored his remark. “What do we do now?”