Forbidden Fruit. Erica Spindler

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      To Melissa Senate For all the years and all the books

      Acknowledgements

      My heartfelt thanks to the following people for their part in bringing Forbidden Fruit to life:

      Linda Kay West

      Lieutenant John Jackson

      Sergeant Michael Pfeiffer

      Metsy Hingle

      Jan Hamilton Powell

      Karen Stone

      Cary Weissert

      Dianne Moggy

      Melissa Senate

      Nathan Hoffman

      Evan Marshall and MIRA Books

       Prologue

       Vacherie, Louisiana 1959

      Hope Pierron sat in the window seat of her third floor bedroom and gazed out at the Mississippi River. She smiled to herself, anxiousness and excitement coiling in the pit of her gut. She controlled both with icy determination. She had waited all her life for this day; now that it had come, she would not reveal herself by appearing too eager.

      She pressed a hand to the sun-warmed glass, wishing she could break it, leap out and fly to freedom. How many times during her fourteen years, years spent trapped within the red walls of this house, had she wished the same thing? To be a bird, to leap from the window and fly to freedom?

      After today, she wouldn’t need to wish for wings. After today, she would be free of this house. Of the stigma of sin. Free of her mother and all who she had known.

      Today she would be reborn.

      Hope closed her eyes, thinking of her future, yet picturing her past and this hated house, instead. The Pierron House had been a fixture on River Road, a part of the culture of southern Louisiana since the summer of 1917. That had been just before the demise of Storyville, when her grandmother Camellia, the first Pierron madam, had moved her daughter and her girls here.

      Surprisingly, neither hue nor cry had erupted then, nor when the gentlemen began calling. All these years later, this house, the activities within, were still accepted, just as the heat and mosquitos of August were accepted—with resigned dismay and sugar-sweet disdain.

      Hope supposed one could expect no less; after all, this was Louisiana, a place where food, drink and other sensory intoxicants were as much a part of day-to-day living as mass and confession. Louisianians accepted their penance with as much joie de vivre as they did their pleasure; they understood that in a strange way, The Pierron House represented both.

      The building itself, a Greek Revival structure with twenty-eight imposing Doric columns and sweeping wraparound galleries, was an architectural wonder. Ironically, when the afternoon sun struck it just so, the house glowed a virginal, almost holy white. When the sun set, however, the illusion of holiness ended. The house came alive with the music of men the likes of Jelly Roll Morton and Tony Jackson, the walls rang with the laughter of those who had come to taste the forbidden fruit and of those who sold it.

      Every evening of her life she had been forced to hear that laughter, had been forced to witness the regularity with which her mother’s girls led their gentlemen up the serpentine staircase. Cloaked in a sinfully plush, bloodred carpet, those stairs led to the six large bedrooms on the second floor, bedrooms outfitted opulently with silks and brocades and large, soft beds.

      Beds designed to make a man feel like a king or, on a particularly good night, a god.

      For as long as she could remember, Hope had known what went on in those bedrooms. Just as she had known who and what she was—the whore’s daughter, a trick baby, tainted by sin.

      From secret places and small, unnoticed peepholes, Hope had watched with a mixture of fascination and horror the things that men and women did with each other. And sometimes, while the couple writhed on the bed, she would rock back and forth, her thighs pressed tightly together, her breath coming in small, uneven gasps.

      Those were the times The Darkness held her in its grip, clamoring for unholy release.

      Afterward, guilty and ashamed, Hope would punish herself. The way she touched herself, the things she watched, were wrong. Sinful. She had learned of her sin at mass and in catechism, as she sat alone because none of the other children would come near her. Yet, outside the church walls and inside these, such behavior was lauded—especially by the men who laughed by night and averted their eyes by day.

      At the creak of the stairs that led to her bedroom, Hope turned away from her window and faced the door. A moment later, her mother appeared in the doorway.

      Lily Pierron was an incredible beauty, same as all the Pierron women had been. Her face and figure seemed not to have aged with the years; her hair was the same velvety blue-black it had been in Hope’s childhood. The other whores commented on it behind her mother’s back; Hope had heard them whispering. They speculated that Lily had made a pact with the devil. They speculated that all the Pierron women had.

      All except Hope. Hope was not nearly as beautiful as her mother—her own hair was a deep brown instead of black, her eyes a watery rather than brilliant blue, her features sharp instead of soft.

      She was not as beautiful because The Darkness was not as strong in her.

      “Hello, Mama,” Hope murmured, fixing a sweet, sad smile on her mouth.

      The older woman returned her melancholy smile and took a step into the room. “You look so grown-up standing there like that. For a moment, I hardly recognized you.”

      Hope’s heart began to thud against СКАЧАТЬ