Mirielle froze. Only a few other guests remained in the dining room, but she felt certain their eyes were upon her. Was the radio announcer right? Were the police really after her? She knew better than to trust such sensational news, but her heart beat frantic anyway. Anger stirred alongside her panic. Highly contagious—that was complete nonsense. And average stature. She hated that word, average. She mightn’t be considered slight or tall, but certainly well-formed or of ample height were better ways to describe her.
She set her coffee down slowly, remembering how coolly Frank had handled those men at the speakeasy in New Orleans. The trick was not to look guilty. She stood and exited the dining room, taking care to walk straight despite her trembling knees and to smile at anyone who glanced her way.
Out on the street, Mirielle felt even more exposed. Her feet itched to break into a run. A deep breath and Mirielle started for the train station. It took conscious effort to keep her back straight, head high, and step graceful. But such attentions diverted her mind from otherwise spiraling into hysteria. She checked to ensure that her scarf concealed the lesion on her neck, then forbid her hand from wandering there again.
Halfway to the train station, a face startled her out of her careful comportment. Not among the passersby, but a face on a poster, looking out at her through a pane of glass. Charlie.
Despite her fears that a police dragnet might actually be hunting her, Mirielle stopped and went to the ticket window behind which the poster hung. MY BEST GAL, read the title in bright blue lettering. She pressed her gloved fingers against the glass and traced the outline of her husband’s face. He looked exactly as she remembered him, debonair and confident. The color artist had missed the flecks of green in his hazel eyes and painted his lips a little too red, but otherwise it was as if he were right there—in miniature—before her. Miss Thorne was pictured too, but Mirielle spared only a glance for her before returning her eyes to Charlie. What she wouldn’t give to have him with her now.
“You wanna ticket for the noon show?” a voice asked.
Mirielle startled and stepped away. An old man stared at her from behind the ticket window.
“A real hit with the critics, that one,” he said.
Mirielle smiled. Charlie would be glad. “No, no ticket, thank you.” She allowed herself one last look, then continued on to the depot.
* * *
The train ride to Franklin lasted only a few hours. Fields of sugarcane, tired plantation homes, and verdant swampland passed outside her window. Every time a fellow passenger looked her way or the conductor strolled down the aisle, Mirielle’s insides clenched. But she continued to meet their eyes and smile.
The town of Franklin was about half the size of New Iberia, with moss-draped oaks and fluted lampposts lining Main Street. Mirielle found a hotel and, with the help of the clerk, a boatman she could hire to take her along the inland waterways that fed into Cote Blanche Bay.
She and the boatman left early the next morning, navigating a swollen bayou in a flat-bottomed boat similar to the one Jean’s father had been making. The boatman, a Mr. Jessip, was a gnarl of a man with a long, gray-streaked beard and several missing teeth. His accent was so thick she understood only half of what he said. But he handled the boat—a pirogue, he called it, though it looked to her like a canoe—with the grace and deftness of a prima ballerina.
Spring shrimping season had just begun, and they passed several larger boats—twenty feet or more in length—with a single lugsail and taut rigging connected to seine nets. Mirielle had worked out her story the night before. She was in search of a young girl who may have sought work or tried to stow away on a shrimp boat.
“She yer daughta?” Mr. Jessip asked.
“No,” Mirielle replied after a moment’s hesitation. “My—er—niece. She’s been gone almost two weeks, and I’m desperate to find her.”
Mr. Jessip called out to fishermen on the passing boats and described Mirielle’s predicament. They seemed to understand his garbled speech better than her own “citified talk” so she let him explain. Each time the passing shrimper shook his head or replied with a drawn-out nah, her heart sank a little, until, by the end of the day, she felt it throbbing somewhere below her stomach.
She and Mr. Jessip agreed to meet at the dock again the next morning, and she shambled back to her hotel, her legs stiff from disuse and arms itching with mosquito bites. Her telephone call home from the hotel lobby went unanswered, and she spent the rest of the night fretting about Helen and Jean and her dwindling funds. With only enough money to pay Mr. Jessip for two more days’ ferrying, she had to find Jean or reach Charlie soon.
The next morning started out much the same as the one before. Mr. Jessip helped her into the pirogue and they started down the bayou with birds chattering in the overarching trees and dragonflies buzzing among the marsh grass. Alligators peeked their long heads out from the murky water and sunned themselves on the banks.
The previous night’s worries had lodged themselves firmly at the base of her throat like a chunk of dry bread. Even so, she found herself smiling when a lone bullfrog croaked from somewhere amid the duckweed. Would that Frank could see her now, traveling the swamps and bayous with this strange man, dauntless of the mud and bugs and gators. But the memory of his hard eyes and cold demeanor the night she’d left chased away her smile.
By early afternoon they’d passed more than a dozen shrimping boats. No one aboard the vessels had seen anyone matching Jean’s description.
“We go as far as Mud Lake and den turn round,” Mr. Jessip said. Mirielle nodded. What would she do if she couldn’t find Jean? She couldn’t live with herself knowing she’d failed yet another child.
The watercourse widened, and Mud Lake appeared in the distance. Mr. Jessip maneuvered his paddle to turn the boat around.
“Can’t we at least see if there are any boats on the lake?” she asked.
Mr. Jessip looked up at the narrow strip of sky visible above them and frowned. “Gettin’ on dusk soon.”
“Please. Just a quick look.”
He sighed and paddled them onward to the lake.
Mud Lake was aptly named. The water, like that of the bayou and canals, was a murky brown. But it made the rest of the scenery all the more striking—the silver moss and verdant cypress, the white egrets and iridescent-feathered ducks, the paling sky and orange horizon. Three boats drifted through the water—two shrimping boats and a smaller pirogue like the one they floated in. Mr. Jessip paddled up to the nearest lugger boat and then the pirogue. Neither had seen anyone matching Jean’s description.
The last boat was hauling up their nets at the far side of the lake when Mirielle and Mr. Jessip approached. It was a newer, gasoline-powered boat, Mr. Jessip explained with some admiration, that used trawl nets instead of seine. Three men bustled about the deck—an older man with sun-cracked skin and two younger ones who looked as if they might be brothers. A tangle of fish and shrimp writhed on the deck.
Mr. Jessip called out a greeting, and the old man shuffled to the edge of the boat. Nah, he hadn’t seen a girl like Jean, he said, and returned to sorting his catch. Mirielle dropped her head, willing back the tears in her eyes. Her skin was covered with fresh bug bites, her shoes and stockings wet and mud-stained, her muscles stiff and back aching. The task was impossible. The waterways looked much the same to her, but Mr. Jessip insisted they’d covered entirely new territory today. When she’d asked how many more inlets and lakes and bayous there were, he’d given her a rueful smile, and said hundreds of miles. Mirielle hadn’t the time nor the money to traverse them all.
Mr. Jessip started to paddle away when one of the young deckhands called out to them. “I mighta seen her.”
Mirielle straightened and turned to the man so quickly the boat beneath her swayed. “Really?” She described Jean in greater detail.
“Sounds about right,” the deckhand said when she finished.
The heaviness inside her lifted like a bird in flight. “Where did y
ou see her?”
“Out about the old shipyard near the inlet of the bay.”
“When?”
“Seen her a couple times askin’ for work. Shrimpin’ ain’t no job for a girl, though. Especially scrawny as she is.”
“Did you see her there today?”
The man took off his cap and swatted it at the cloud of mosquitos descending upon them with dusk’s arrival. “No. Yesterday maybe.”
Mirielle turned back to Mr. Jessip. “Can we get there from here?”
“Not tonight. It’d take us least an hour to get dere. Twice as long to get back.”
“Please. I’ll pay you double.”
“Mightn’t even be her.”
“I have to know for sure.”
“We’re headed that a’way after we finish tying up our nets,” the deckhand called to them. “We could give ya a tow.”
“Yes, please,” Mirielle said, and then to Mr. Jessip, “please.”
“Aw, hell,” he said, nodding to the man.
A thick rope was attached to the stern of the trawler and the bow of Mr. Jessip’s boat. The older man on the shrimp boat barked orders to the other two men, and soon the engine rumbled and they lurched into motion.
The trawler didn’t move nearly as quickly as Mirielle had hoped, but their progress was still faster than if Mr. Jessip had been paddling. Soon they were gone from the lake and gliding along a narrowing waterway. The air cooled quickly now that the sun had set in a great orange fury beneath the horizon. Mirielle held on to the edge of the boat with one hand and wrapped her other arm around herself, wishing she’d had the sense to bring a jacket. It made her worry all the more for Jean, who likely hadn’t packed well for her journey. How many nights had she spent alone in the cold?
Mr. Jessip was right; the girl the shrimper had seen mightn’t be Jean at all. Then what would Mirielle do? She shook her head and fixed her gaze forward. Moss dangled from the surrounding trees, grazing the water’s surface. It came alive like a troupe of dancing skeletons when troubled by the trawler’s wake. Mirielle gripped the edge of the boat a little tighter and tried to keep her worries corralled. Helen, Jean, the police dragnet—there was nothing she could do now but see her choices through to the end.
CHAPTER 62
Less than an hour later, they arrived at the shipyard. Mr. Jessip untethered his pirogue from the shrimping boat, and Mirielle hollered her thanks to the men. She leaped from the boat the minute they docked and hurried toward the cluster of buildings nestled on dry ground.
“I’ll be back as soon as I find her,” she said over her shoulder.
A few dozen men lingered about the dock and nearby shipyard securing their boats, mending their nets, and unloading the day’s catch. They stared at Mirielle with a wide-eyed mix of surprise and suspicion. Not that she blamed them. Her hair had slipped free from the bun at the nape of her neck and jutted outward around the brim of her hat in frizzy waves. Her wool-crêpe dress was mud-splattered and wrinkled from several days of wear. Scuff marks and water stains marred her leather shoes. But she suspected it was her very presence—the lone woman and an outsider to boot—that baffled them.
When she asked about Jean, most of the men only shook their heads and went back to work. A few opened their mouths enough to mutter nah or non. But one man pointed to a weathered boathouse at the far edge of the yard abutting the swampland.
“Couple of ragamuffins hang out over yonder, begging for scraps when the boats come in. They might know somethin’.”
“Thank you,” Mirielle said. She hurried down the dock and through the shipyard. Her haste made her all the more conspicuous, but she didn’t care. Let these men gawk and chuckle. Twilight was draining fast from the sky. The air smelled of rotting vegetation and fish entrails.
She reached the last boathouse and rounded the corner. Smoke stung her eyes. A fire blazed in a rusted oil drum. Several children were gathered around it, roasting small fish and skewered bullfrogs. The oldest looked about fifteen, a sparse collection of whiskers scattered across his cheeks. The youngest couldn’t have been more than six. Their clothes were threadbare and dirty, their faces gaunt and eyes skittish. The oldest boy slipped a jar of turpentine-colored liquid beneath his patched coat.
A few of them could pass for boys or girls, but after a quick glance, Mirielle was certain Jean was not among them.
“Have any of you seen a girl about yea high”—she gestured to the level of her armpit—“with dark hair and freckles?”
The children shrugged and shook their heads, skittish of her gaze. One of them pointed to the swamp and said, “Maybe the Rougarou’s seen her.” The others snickered.
Mirielle’s eagerness fizzled. Either these children didn’t know where Jean was or didn’t care. Certainly they didn’t trust her. Just like the fishermen. She glanced back at the dock. There were a few men she hadn’t queried, but how long could Mirielle go on following flimsy leads and desperate hunches? Jean could have left her father’s house and decided to become a lion tamer in a circus for all Mirielle knew. Perhaps it was time she faced the truth. Mirielle had failed at finding Jean, just like she’d failed at beating the disease, and failed at being a mother.
She turned around and started back to the boat. The cool, damp air nipped at her skin. She hadn’t gone far when the warbling chords of a harmonica sounded. Mirielle stopped. The slow, mournful tune blended with the frog croaks and cricket chirps emanating from the nearby swamp. Every few notes a squeak would break through, or the player would pause between chord progressions the way Jean had done when she first started practicing last Christmas.
Other memories rushed back, carried on the music—Jean playing in the Mardi Gras parade, on the back steps of house eighteen, in Mirielle’s room as she bounced on the bed, trying to get Mirielle to rise.
Mirielle spun around as if the tremulous notes were a fishing hook lodged inside her. One of the boys at the smoking oil drum repositioned the instrument against his lips and continued to play. She stumbled over bits of discarded wood and fraying rope in her haste toward the sound.
“Where did you get that?” she asked.
The boy stopped playing and shrugged. “Found it.”
Mirielle snatched it from his hands. It was the same size and tarnished silver color as Jean’s.
“Hey! Give that back.”
Mirielle stepped beyond the boy’s reach and cradled the cool metal against her cheek. Despite the crackling fire and humming swamp, the night sounded hollow without the song.
“Give it back, you crazy witch.”
Maybe she was crazy. There must be hundreds of silver harmonicas in Louisiana. It was ridiculous to believe this one belonged to Jean. But Mirielle couldn’t let go.
“Look, lady,” the oldest boy said. “We don’t want no trouble. Just give him back the harmonica and be on your way.”
Mirielle laughed. On her way to where? Franklin? Carville? Los Angeles? She might as well walk straight into the swamp.
Another burst of laughter and even the oldest boy backed away. The kids’ wide-eyed unease made Mirielle laugh all the more, even as tears mounted in her eyes. A lunatic. A witch. A leper. Maybe she was all these things. Above all, a failure.
Mirielle swiped her cheeks and wrested control of herself. She burnished the harmonica on her rumpled skirt and was about to hand it back to the boy when she spied a pair of feet from the corner of her eye. They stuck out beyond a jumble of crates stacked against the boathouse. Despite the mud and scuff marks, Mirielle recognized the colony-issue, black-and-white oxfords.
She brushed past the boys, her heart thudding at the base of her throat. Behind the crates was Jean, lying atop a heap of old netting. Firelight cast her in a pale, flickering glow. Her clothes were stained and tattered, her face sunburned. Several boils—easily mistaken for flea or mosquito bites—rose along her arms.
Mirielle froze. Was she dead? As if in answer, Jean drew in a wheezing inhale. Mirielle crouched down and shook h
er. Jean moaned but didn’t open her eyes.
“You,” Mirielle said over her shoulder, catching the eye of the oldest boy. “I’ll give you a dime if you help me carry her to the dock.”
He frowned. “Who’s she to you?”
Mirielle turned back to Jean, brushing a tangle of hair from her clammy cheek. “I’m her . . . we’re family.”
“A quarter,” the boy said.
“Deal.”
Mirielle tucked the harmonica in Jean’s pocket. Then, she looped one of Jean’s arms around her shoulders. The boy did the same. Together, they hoisted her up. Jean groaned. Her legs were limp and her head lolled forward like a broken doll. Her skin was hot and sticky where it lay against Mirielle’s neck.
They half carried, half dragged Jean to Mr. Jessip’s pirogue. Once they’d settled Jean inside, Mirielle looked around and remembered she hadn’t brought her purse. After a moment’s hesitation, she unclasped the silver bracelet from around her wrist. The pale scar beneath it stood out against her skin like the glassy, moonlit surface of the bayou amid the surrounding cypress.
She closed her fingers around the bracelet, feeling the filigreed metalwork bite into her palm, then reached out and handed it to the boy. “Here. It’s real silver. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not. And don’t spend it all on booze. Get you and your friends out of this place. Oh, and buy that other boy a new harmonica.”
The boy gaped at her. Mirielle settled into the boat and pulled Jean close. She nodded at the bracelet, still dangling in his hand. “Hide it away before anyone sees.”
He nodded, his expression dumbfounded, pocketing the bracelet just as Mr. Jessip untethered the pirogue and shoved off.
“She’s been like that goin’ on two days now,” the boy said from the dock. “Said she didn’t have no family, so we didn’t know where to take her. Thought you was from the orphanage, otherwise we woulda—”
“It’s all right. I understand.” Mirielle lay her cheek atop Jean’s head. She smelled of sweat and musty fish netting. “She’s going to be fine.”
The Second Life of Mirielle West Page 34