by The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021
We stopped at the two-story, ivy-grown brick house where my father had grown up. His father had been one of the most admired attorneys in the history of Louisiana, and also the state superintendent of education and the president of the state senate and one of the few men who had the courage to testify against Huey Long during Long’s impeachment hearing. One year ago he had died a pauper in this same house, and now the house belonged to others, people from New York City.
The sky was as orange as a pumpkin, striped with purple clouds. Tree frogs were singing on the bayou, and geese honking overhead. My father stared silently at the house, his fedora slanted over his brow. I put my hand in his. “Are you all right, Daddy?”
“Pa’ti avec le vent,” he replied.
“What’s that mean?”
“ ‘Gone with the wind.’ ”
“We have a house in Houston.”
“Yes, we do,” he replied. He stared at his birthplace and at the rolling green lawn that tapered down to the bayou where the mooring chains of Jean Lafitte’s slave ship still hung from the trunk of a huge oak tree. “Let’s get us some ice cream at Veazey’s.”
The evening seemed perfect, as though indeed God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. How was I to know I was about to witness one of the cruelest acts I would ever see one man do to another.
Veazey’s was on Burke Street, right by the drawbridge that spanned Bayou Teche. I was sitting at the counter with my father, eating an ice cream cone, when a two-door automobile splashed with mud pulled into the parking lot. The bayou was high and yellow and fast-running and chained with rain-rings. The agent named Flint, the one who looked like a boxer, entered the store, mist blowing inside with him. He wiped the damp off his face, grinning. “Recognize somebody out there, Mr. Broussard?”
Miss Florence was in the back seat of the two-door car. She was wearing a blue jacket and a dove-colored felt hat, and sitting stiffly in the seat, as though she wanted to touch as little of her surroundings as possible. She turned her head and looked right at us. My father’s face jerked.
“What has she done?” he said to Mr. Flint.
“She’s done it to herself,” Mr. Flint said.
“Answer my question, please.”
“She applied for a job with Navy intelligence. She’s a possible fifth columnist.”
“Are you insane?” my father said.
“She wasn’t in Spain in ’36?”
“She was a nurse with the Lincoln Brigade.”
“They weren’t communists?”
“She’s not.”
“You’re a goddamn liar.”
I had never heard anyone speak to my father in that way. Everyone in the ice cream store had gone silent. I wanted my father to get up and hit Mr. Flint in the mouth.
“Daddy?” I said.
But he did nothing. My face felt hot and small and tight.
“I got to run, Mr. Broussard,” Mr. Flint said. “Just so you know, we rented space at the women’s camp in Angola for your lady friend.”
“You can’t do that,” my father said.
“Tell that to the Japs in those internment camps out West. By the way, we’re going to be talking with your wife in Houston. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Don’t you dare go near her, you vile man,” my father said.
Mr. Flint stuck a cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it. He looked down at me, then back at my father. “You paid your girlfriend’s rent for a week at the motel at the end of town. You take your little boy with you when you’re slipping around and judge me?”
I didn’t know what some of Mr. Flint’s references meant, but I knew he had said something awful to my father. His right hand was trembling on top of the counter as Mr. Flint walked out the door.
“What’s going to happen to Miss Florence, Daddy?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said, lowering his head to the heel of his hand. “I truly don’t.”
My father seemed to be turning into someone else. But I was too young to understand that when good people stray into dark water, their lack of experience with human frailty can become like a millstone around their necks. He paid the waitress, then took me by the hand and walked me to the car. The rain had quit and the electric lights on the bridge had gone on, and a tugboat was working its way up the bayou. Through a break in the clouds I could see a trail of stars that was like crushed ice winding into eternity. I wanted to believe I was looking at Heaven and that no force on earth could harm my father and me.
I should have known better, even at my age. Scott Fitzgerald said no one can understand the United States unless he understands the graves of Shiloh. The Broussard family took it a step further. They saw themselves as figures in a tragedy, one that involved the Lost Cause and the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux, and in so doing condemned themselves to lives of morbidity and unhappiness.
My father hadn’t gotten drunk on our trip to New Iberia, but I wished he had. I wished my defining memory of New Iberia would remain the gush of stars beyond the clouds, the red and green lights on the drawbridge, and the water dripping out of the trees on the bayou’s surface. I wanted to hold that perfect moment, on the banks of Bayou Teche, as though my father and I had stepped into a dream inside the mind of God.
In the morning my father sat down with his address book and made several calls from the telephone in our hotel room. First he confirmed that Miss Florence was being held at the women’s camp in Angola. Then he tried to get permission to see her. That’s when the person on the other end of the line hung up. My father was sitting in a stuffed chair by the window, a slice of yellow sunlight across his face, dividing him in half as though he were two people.
“What is it, Daddy?”
“I don’t like to ask people for special treatment. But in our beloved state you get nowhere unless you have friends. So I have to call a friend of mine from my army days.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“My friend dug me out of the earth when I was buried alive. I’ve never been able to repay the debt. He’s a grand fellow. I hate to bother him.”
“If he’s your friend and you need help, he’ll want to hear from you, won’t he?”
“You’re such a fine little chap, Aaron,” he said. “One day you’ll have a little boy of your own, and you’ll know how much that means.”
His friend from the Somme got permission for us to visit a place inside Angola called Camp I. We clanged across a cattle guard at the entrance to the prison farm and were met by a man in rumpled khaki clothes and sunglasses and a coned-up straw hat and half-topped boots with his trousers stuffed inside and a nametag on his shirt pocket that said C. Lufkin. His face had the sharpened, wood-like quality of a man who possessed only one expression; his eyes were hidden behind his glasses, his sleeves rolled, his arms sun-browned and dotted with purplish-red spots that looked like burns buried under the skin. He got in the back of our car and shook hands with my father over the top of the seat. He said he was the heavy equipment manager on the farm.
“So where are we going?” my father said.
“I got to check on a n—— in the box at Camp A before we see your friend.”
“Sir?” my father said.
“We keep the sweat boxes on Camp A. I had to stick a boy inside three days ago.”
My father looked at him in the rearview mirror. “We need to make our visit and be on our way.”
Mr. Lufkin leveled a finger at a two-story, off-white building in the distance. “Turn right,” he said. “That’s it yonder.”
Dust was blowing out of the fields, swirling around the building and into the sky, as though it had no other place to go. Mr. Lufkin put a pinch of snuff under his lip. My father slowed the car, then stopped altogether. He looked into the mirror again. “We were not told about any detours.”
“Every minute we sit here is another minute that n—— stays in the box. What do you want to do, Mr. Broussard? It doesn’t matter to me.”
My father shifted the floor stick and drove down a cinnamon-colored dirt road that divided a soybean field. We went through a barbed-wire gate and stopped twenty yards from two coffin-like iron boxes that were set perpendicularly on a concrete slab; each had a hinged door with a gap at the top.
“Didn’t mean to upset you,” Mr. Lufkin said. “If you knew what that n—— did on the outside, you’d have a less kind view of your fellow man, I guarantee it.”
“How about you take care of your obligations and get us out of here?” my father said, his hands tightening on the steering wheel. “I’d be very appreciative.”
Mr. Lufkin got out of the car and was joined by two other men in khaki uniforms and straw cowboy hats. Mr. Lufkin unlocked a sliding bar on the door of one box and pulled it open, then stepped back from a horde of flies that rose into the air.
“Watch the bucket!” the man behind him said.
The box was constructed so there was no room to sit down. The man inside was bare-chested and black as obsidian, his skin streaming with sweat, his buttocks pressed against one wall, his knees against another. He tumbled out of the box onto the ground, the bucket that had been placed between his feet tipping with him, his own feces splashing onto his work shoes and his gray-and-white striped pants.
“Goddamn it!” one of the other men said, jumping backward.
My father put his hand over my eyes. “Don’t look at this, son. Say a little prayer for the colored man. Then we’re going to see Miss Florence and go home. You hear me? Don’t cry. I’m going to write the warden.”
A few minutes later Mr. Lufkin got in the back seat of our car. His sunglasses were in his shirt pocket, his hair wet-combed, his face fresh and bright with either expectation or victory. “Head back down the road and keep going till you’re almost to the river. I’ll show y’all the Red Hat House.”
My father began driving down the road, his hands shaking with anger. Mr. Lufkin was leaning forward, looking at my father in the rearview mirror. “The Red Hat House is the home of Gruesome Gertie.”
My father looked into the mirror but said nothing.
Mr. Lufkin mouthed the words, That’s where they knock the fire out of their ass.
“Don’t you say another word to me, Mr. Lufkin,” my father said. “Not one word.”
Mr. Lufkin sat back in the seat, breathing through his nose, his nostrils like slits. “When you’re in another man’s house, it’s not wise to put your feet on the furniture. No-siree-bob, if you get my meaning.”
Camp I was a cluster of barracks behind barbed and electrified wire not far from the Mississippi River. Half of the camp was made up of women prisoners who wore both street clothes and green-and-white pinstripe dresses. Mr. Lufkin stayed in the car and a matron escorted us to the dining room. Outside, the sky was the color of orange sherbet, the leaves of the willow trees flattening in the wind along the banks of the river. The women were finishing supper. Miss Florence was sitting by herself at the end of a long table. Most of the women had tangled hair and some had faces that made me think of broken pumpkins. The matron said we could speak with Miss Florence for twenty minutes, then Mr. Lufkin would accompany us back to the front entrance of the farm.
Miss Florence had been in Angola only a short time, but she looked as though her soul had been sucked out of her chest. Her lips were dry and cracked, her face smaller, her eyes recessed. Unlike the other women, her thick brown hair was neatly combed, but it looked like a wig on a manikin. We sat down and my father pushed a package of Lucky Strikes across the table.
“We can’t smoke in the dining room,” she said. “I can’t touch you or take anything from you, either.”
“Has anyone physically hurt you?” he asked. She didn’t answer.
“Florence?” he said.
She lowered her voice. “This place is Hell. There’re convicts buried in the levee.”
He put his hand on top of hers. A matron sitting on a stool gave him a look. He took his hand away. “I’ve called a lawyer. They can’t hold you here.”
“They can do anything they want. You haven’t seen the colored unit.”
“I saw the sweat boxes.”
She was silent. Then she looked at me. “How is my little fellow doing?”
“Fine,” I said.
“You have to forgive me for the way I’m talking, Aaron,” she said. “I’m just being a grump today.”
A strange sensation seemed to take over me, although I didn’t know why. I had always liked Miss Florence. I always associated her with the gift of the book about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. But now I felt I was talking to an intruder who had come carrying gifts out of nowhere and was helping destroy our family. Worse, I felt I was betraying my long-suffering, guilt-ridden, haunted mother.
She had grown up in desperate poverty. Her mother died when she was seven, then her father abandoned her. She was unloved and unwanted and was left to find any shelter strangers might offer. Maybe she had an abortion. Maybe she was molested. She never talked about her childhood, but her memories of it lingered in her eyes like cups of sorrow.
“Is something wrong, Aaron?” Miss Florence asked.
I looked away from her. “I want to go, Daddy,” I said.
“We will, son,” he said. “Shortly.”
“No, now. We’re not supposed to be here.”
“What do you mean?” he said.
“It’s not the way things are supposed to be.”
“Don’t talk like that, Aaron,” he said. “Miss Florence is our friend.”
“What about Mother?” I said.
He tried to put his arm across my shoulder, but I got up from the bench and ran through the dining hall to the door. A matron tried to stop me, but I kept running, knocking through a group of colored women, falling to the floor, then getting up and running out the door into the yard, right into the arms of Mr. Lufkin.
“Don’t be fighting with me, boy,” he said. He dropped me and pressed his palm against his mouth and looked at it. “You just broke my lip, you little shit. I ought to slap your head off.”
Then I was running again, all the way to the gate, where a guard grabbed me by the back of my belt and carried me like a suitcase to my father’s car.
We drove back to the Frederic in a rainstorm and didn’t talk until we reached New Iberia. When I woke to the Angelus the next morning, my father was gone. He had left a note on the desk telling me he would be with a survey team in the swamp all day and that my breakfast was paid for and my cousin would pick me up at noon and take me to her house.
One week later Miss Florence hanged herself in the nude from a showerhead in Camp I.
My father and I never spoke again about Miss Florence or the German submarine or Angola or the lawmen who tried to hurt him through Miss Florence. My father died in an auto accident when I was still in my teens. Like him, I lost my best friend in the last days of a war, at a place GIs nicknamed Pork Chop Hill. Unlike my father, at age eighteen I was an inmate in a parish prison ten feet from the death cell, back in the days when the state executioner traveled with Gruesome Gertie on a flatbed truck from parish jail to parish jail. When it arrived, I could hear the condemned man weeping and see flashes of lighting reflect on his face.
I wasn’t a criminal; I was simply crazy, just like my mother. I wish I had been even crazier, because I will never forget the sounds of the generators warming up down below on the street and the man being buckled in the chair and a minister reading from a Bible and then the generators growing louder and louder, like airplane engines, and when the electrician pulled the switch the sudden creak of the leather restraints on the condemned man’s body stretching so tight you thought the wood and bolts of the chair would explode, even the guards looking at the floor, their arms folded on their chests.
I clamped my hands over my ears and yelled out of a barred window from which I could see the moon and the fog on the Calcasieu River, so I would not have to listen to any sound
other than my own voice. In some ways the river reminded me of Bayou Teche and that perfect moment when my father and I stood in front of Veazey’s, believing that as long as we held each other’s hand we would never be separated, even by death. However, I try to consign these images to the past and not talk about them anymore. I almost get away with it too. But one night a month I dream about green water sliding over sandbars and a ship burning brightly on the horizon and harbor lights that offer sanctuary from a world that breaks everything in us that is beautiful and good. In the morning I wake to darkness, calling my father’s name, James Eustache Broussard, wondering when he will answer.
*I think “Harbor Lights” is my best short story. I put everything in my life inside those few pages. I learned early on that there are many forms of pain and many kinds of evil. I know of things that I will not discuss with anyone. I might write about them, but I will not talk about them. I do not believe we all descend from the same tree. I believe gargoyles are real, and are waiting for their time to come round. That’s what this story is about. I hope you like it. I’m quite proud of it.
Martin Edwards is the author of twenty novels, most recently Mortmain Hall and Gallows Court. In 2020 he was awarded the CWA Diamond Dagger, the highest honor in UK crime writing. He has received the Edgar, Agatha, H. R. F. Keating, and Poirot awards, two Macavity awards, the CWA Margery Allingham Short Story Prize, the CWA Short Story Dagger, and the CWA Dagger in the Library. He has twice been nominated for CWA Gold Daggers and once for the Historical Dagger; he has also been shortlisted for the Theakston’s Prize for best crime novel of the year for The Coffin Trail. He is consultant to the British Library’s Crime Classics series and a former chair of the Crime Writers’ Association. Since 2015, he has been President of the Detection Club, and he conceived and edited Howdunit, a masterclass in crime writing by members of the Club. His novels include the Harry Devlin series and the Lake District Mysteries; he has published nine nonfiction books and seventy short stories, and also edited more than forty anthologies of crime writing.