Big Easy Bonanza

age?”
    “’Course!”
    “Will you give me some sugar? Right now.”
    Marcelle threw her arms around him and covered him with kisses.
    She was always that way, wanting to do whatever you wanted, doing it, then quietly fading into the background. There was something sad about her, though, something that had come upon her, a heaviness, after Bitty lost the baby and fell apart. Tolliver was amazed at himself, only seeing it now for the first time. The simple fact was that he just didn’t think much about Marcelle.
    So much attention was focused on Henry, with his father always trying to make him into a carbon copy of himself. The kid acted out a lot, and he screwed up, though now that Tolliver thought about it, the order was probably reversed. He’d lose a chess game to Chauncey, say, and then pitch a fit, throwing the board across the room, scattering pawns and bishops. Chauncey thought it was because he was spoiled rotten. Something told Tolliver it wasn’t that. It was frustration and a feeling of impotence because he hadn’t performed brilliantly and pleased his father. Poor kid, in those days he idolized his father; he was probably scared to death. He beat Tolliver sometimes, and Tolliver could beat Chauncey. But Henry never could.
    Marcelle was already perfect and didn’t have to be made into something else. Except for occasionally eliciting from her those silly, extravagant protestations of eternal love, Chauncey more or less ignored her.
We all did
.
    He realized he didn’t have a single memory of Bitty with Marcelle. Not one. She and Henry were so tightly bound to one other he thought of them as a unit. He didn’t realize how hard it would have been for another child to penetrate it. When the baby had come, the second girl, Henry was at a rebellious stage; she might have had a chance, that girl, with Bitty’s pride and joy slightly distant from her. But Marcelle didn’t. It was simply a club they didn’t let her join.
Why didn’t I see it? I really had no idea.
    As for Tolliver, he had put his own energy into helping Henry. He wanted to try to build his self-esteem … F
ace it, Tolliver, you tried to be the kid’s father.
    Well, Chauncey wasn’t doing it, somebody had to.
    He thought that someday, when Bitty left Chauncey, or Chauncey died, or Tolliver killed him, he would be Henry’s father. But it wasn’t just that—he loved Henry almost as much as Bitty did, in a way that a family friend or favorite uncle didn’t usually love a child. Or wasn’t supposed to anyway. He loved him with a kind of dark passion born out of despair. His own and Bitty’s and Henry’s own.
    Marcelle had remained outside that black circle—such a self-contained, happy little thing. Or so it had seemed at the time. But her visit had brought vividly into focus the fact that he didn’t even really know her. Marcelle interested in antiques? Asking for a job? Working? How preposterous all that seemed. She was a beautiful creature without a thought in her head and not a shred of ambition. Tolliver winced at his own stupidity.
    And now he’d killed her father, the one person who noticed her now and then. He never ever, for one second, thought he’d be sorry. He’d planned the murder so many times, in so many different ways, over the course of so many years.
    How many times had he imagined the pleasure of watching Chauncey the as he stood over him with one of his own guns? The look of surprise on his face as his best friend, the dear friend who had straightened out so much of the repeated shit in his life, relieved him at last of his worries. Bitty had told him Chauncey said Tolliver liked helping because his own life was so boring.
    For that, Chauncey, pain before you die. Maybe the kneecaps first, a little writhing before the coup de grâce.
    There were quieter ways as well. Chauncey had a penicillin allergy, something only a very close family friend would know. (Tolliver liked the irony of that.) Such a friend would also know when Chauncey was taking medication for some minor ill or other and could switch a pill—just one that Chauncey would come to in time. Maybe not the first day, maybe not the second—Tolliver would actually enjoy the suspense, be thrilled by the knowledge that Chauncey would die soon and Tolliver would be responsible.
    A fantasy he really loved—his favorite, probably—was the one of the cat burglar. While Bitty and the children were in Covington, Tolliver would turn off the St. Amant