“If it is Dupré,” Zanna interjected.
Gerard glared at her. “It’s Dupré.”
“How can you be certain?” she persisted. “Unless you’ve seen him face to face, of course.”
“The Governor has spies about. He has been assured the man traveling on this vessel under the alias Brett Reall is none other than our most wanted fugitive, Anatole Dupré.”
Captain Kaney led them along the passageway toward the staircase. “Might as well start at the top and work our way down,” he was saying.
Gerard barked commands, instructing three of his troopers to stay alert for anyone trying to escape down the gangplank or overboard on the river side.
“Why is the governor taking such a personal interest in this fugitive?” Zanna questioned, skipping to keep up with the lengthening strides of the determined men.
Gerard favored her with another glare. “Dupré murdered Governor Trainor’s sister and her infant daughter.”
“Sister? You mean Brett—ah, Dupré was married to the governor’s sister?”
“I trust that explains our urgency,” Gerard barked.
Indeed, Zanna thought, and the danger Delta would be in should she find herself in the middle between Brett and the governor’s men.
Zanna followed the men another few steps, not wanting to draw attention to her new concern. Finally, she managed to divert Stuart’s attention while the remainder of the entourage continued to the promenade deck.
“I’m going to alert Delta,” she whispered.
“Good,” Stuart responded. “Stay with her. She’ll need you when this comes to light.”
Failing to rouse Delta by repeated knockings, Zanna finally chased down Orville, who reluctantly unlocked the door to Delta’s stateroom.
“The maids have already cleaned these rooms,” Orville said in response to Zanna’s stunned glance about the tidy cabin.
“Oh, yes,” she mumbled absentmindedly.
“If you want I can light a lamp,” he offered.
Zanna nodded, already headed for the wardrobe. Delta’s clothes still hung on the rod inside the chiffonier, others were folded in neat stacks in the drawers. Then beneath the looking glass among Delta’s toiletries she found the message Delta had left for her.
Reading it, Zanna began to breathe easier. Delta had gone to her interviews. She glanced at the last line, a smile forming on her lips. “Zanna, please don’t worry about me. I’m all right.” How like Delta. Always so considerate.
It wasn’t until Zanna showed Stuart the note later that its significance began to dawn on her. She found him, along with the captain, Gerard, and three of the troopers, descending the staircase from the promenade to the observation deck.
“Why didn’t you stay with her?” he quizzed in a whisper.
“She’s gone to her interviews.”
“Hope that satisfies you,” Captain Kaney was saying. “The man’s nowhere around. Neither one of them. Not Reall nor his man Pierre.”
“I’m satisfied, Captain,” Gerard replied. “For now. But you must remember, Dupré’s a fugitive from justice and a danger to the public. If you or anyone aboard this vessel see or hear anything about him, you are bound by law to contact us immediately. Anything less would be considered harboring a fugitive. I will await your report on the identity of the deckhand who went ashore with that fiddler.”
Gerard departed in a flurry, leaving two troopers behind, “To interrogate that fiddler when he shows up,” he explained.
After the captain left them alone, Stuart turned to Zanna. “How did Delta take the news?”
“I didn’t see her. She had already left for her interview but she left this note.”
Stuart took the paper. Zanna watched him study Delta’s itinerary, printed at the top and the note scribbled at the bottom. “Where did you find this?”
“On her dressing table.”
He stared into space a moment, chewing a corner of his mustache, then turned serious eyes on Zanna. “Why would she leave a message locked inside her stateroom?”
Zanna shrugged. “I guess she … uh, figured I’d worry when she didn’t turn up this morning.”
“Then why didn’t she look you up before she left the boat?” he quizzed. “According to this her first appointment wasn’t until ten o’clock. She would have had plenty of time to talk to you before she left.”
“She might have been running late,” Zanna excused, fumbling for an explanation. Now that Stuart had put the question into words, it bothered her, too. “I told you how distraught she’s been lately.”
“This isn’t logical. If she expected you to worry about her, she should have taken measures to reassure you. She wouldn’t force you to break into her room to find a message. Why didn’t she give the message to Orville or to some other crew member?”
Zanna’s anxieties grew with each new idea Stuart introduced. “They didn’t find Brett?”
He shook his head.
“They’re sure he’s that murderer?”
“They seem to think so.”
“I’m going to the capitol building. That’s Delta’s first interview.”
Stuart took her arm. “I’ll come with you.”
Zanna didn’t realize until after they had paid fruitless visits to both the congressional chambers inside the capitol building and Magnolia Mound, Delta’s second interview, how glad she would be to have Stuart along. And for a completely different reason than she would have thought before Delta turned up missing.
Stuart Longstreet possessed a very level head in emergencies. An hour after leaving Magnolia Mound, they had visited the livery and every other place along the docks, asking after Gabriel and the deckhand who had accompanied him off the boat. The most they could learn was that Gabriel had hired two horses, as he had done every other morning the boat had been in town. Riding through town, however, they found no trace of him.
“And since he hasn’t returned to the boat,” Stuart summed up their findings, “we can only assume that he left town in the company of a deckhand Captain Kaney can’t place.”
“A deckhand just Delta’s size,” Zanna replied, adding, “if we’re to believe the description of Gerard’s informant.”
Stuart grunted. “We have to believe it. And I have to wire Cameron, bad as I hate to break such news. He’ll get the Pinkertons involved. Next thing is to alert Gerard.” He took Zanna in his arms. “Try not to worry. We’ll do everything we can to find her. With such a dangerous fugitive involved, the Pinkertons will cooperate with the governor. We’ll locate this man—Brett Reall, Anatole Dupré, or whoever he is.”
Two days after leaving the showboat Brett and Pierre reached bayou country. They had crossed the Mississippi on a ferry north of Baton Rouge, then headed west toward the Atchafalaya River. Dressed as roustabouts, they hoped to get a head start on those whom they knew would soon be in pursuit.
Much of the country they crossed was cane country, broad flat expanses with few places to hide. Brett wondered whether Delta would interview any of the many sugar cane planters between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. He could show her—
Abruptly, whenever his mind strayed to Delta, he forced his thoughts away. Someday, when the raw wound of leaving her had healed, he would think about her, he promised himself. He would spend hours recalling every nuance of her voice, imagining every luscious inch of her body; he would dwell on the red streaks in her hair when the sun caught it just right, and the way her eyes turned to blue fire when they made love. Someday he would allow himself such luxury. But that someday would not be soon in coming.
He began to regret having made this trip, and except for the urgency he felt to see his mother, he would have turned back.
But to where? he wondered. Where was his life headed? What lay in store for him? Ten more years of running? And after that, ten? The futility of it began to gnaw at him.
The war-defiled countryside did nothing to lighten his mood. Everywhere great mansions stood neglected, a te
stament to the war, their slave quarters in need of whitewashing, their fields unplanted.
When at length Brett and Pierre reached the forest beyond the acres—arpents—of level fields, Pierre challenged his companion’s dark mood.
“Me, I’ve listened to you bellyache about missin’ the bayou for ten years. For truth, we are here. You should start enjoyin’ it, oui?”
Pierre poled the pirogue and Brett looked around. The rich black soil, the warm smell of humus, the dark, almost purple still waters. Pierre poled in and out among the swollen cypress trunks and their stumps which folks said looked like gnarled knees—boscoyos, they were called. The tall trees had far-reaching arms that spread wide, shutting out most of the sunlight. Their branches dripped with even more moss than he had recalled, long and thick and curly, like Delta’s hair except for the color.
These waters had been home. He’d known them intimately, as one would know the woman he loved. And without the woman he loved beside him, they seemed cold and empty and foreign. He cursed aloud into the hushed bayou.
“I might as well be guilty, for all the good my innocence does me.”
By nightfall the second day they arrived at the Bayou Teche home of his cousin Marcellus Broussard, where Brett slept, exhausted, for two days.
When he awakened, Marcellus and Pierre had gone into the swamps to check traps, leaving word for Brett not to set foot outside the house until they returned.
“A precaution,” Angie, Cousin Marcellus’s wife, told him. He had found her in the kitchen washing dishes through the window. And the poignancy of such a simple sight—a woman standing inside the kitchen, reaching through the opening to wash dishes on the small shelf attached to the outside of the house—brought a reminder of how long he’d been gone.
“I haven’t seen a tablette in ten years,” he told her, indicating the shelf.
She dried her hands while he spoke and by the time he finished she had crossed the room and thrown herself, laughing, into his arms. He swung her around, knowing this was what he had missed the most—family.
“Welcome home, Anatole.” Releasing him, Angie dished up a heaping plate of jambalaya and set it on the split-cypress table. “Sit yourself down an’ eat.”
She poured thick, black coffee into two cups. “Me, I’ll fill you in on the family. What do you want to know first?”
Brett glanced around the room, absorbing the atmosphere of being home. “How’s my mother?”
“Bien.”
“Is Trainor bothering her?”
Angie’s lips tightened at the name. “Non. We tried to persuade her to come here and live among family, but she refused. Said she couldn’t go off and leave the ones who depend on her cures.”
Brett smiled. “She’s aged, oui, in ten years?”
“Oui. But not so you’ll notice. She’s spry—in body and mind.” Angie laughed, her black eyes alight. “Ah, she will be happy to see you, for truth. She’s talked of nothing but you for months. She even held a séance, trying to contact you.”
Brett laughed. “I should have suspected as much. I’ve been dreaming about a blue-eyed woman—”
The words, once spoken, called Delta so vividly to mind that he stopped in midsentence, all thoughts erased by the vision of her face.
Angie reached across the table and patted his arm. “Non, don’ think about her, Anatole.”
“I wasn’t.” He knew Angie didn’t believe him, but he didn’t press the issue. He wasn’t ready to explain that another blue-eyed woman had entered his life, because she hadn’t. Flitted through was a more apt description of the brief relationship he had shared with Delta.
He finished eating while Angie fulfilled her promise to catch him up on the family—births, marriages, and deaths. He listened to her words, spoken in the half-English, half-French dialect of the bayou country, imagining how those of whom she spoke must have changed in the ten years since he’d seen them.
“Five children?” he quizzed at one point, after she related the size of hers and Marcellus’s family.
She laughed. “Oui, an’ another on the way, but Marcel, he doesn’t know it yet.”
Brett finished eating with Angie’s lilting voice filtering into his soul, welcoming him, bringing a false sense of well being and security. After she took his plate, he went to stand in the doorway looking out at the side of Cousin Marcellus’s property. Like all homes along the bayou this house fronted on the water, with the bulk of the property extending behind it. To either side were the homes of Marcellus’s brothers. According to custom, Papa Broussard had given each son a slice of land when he married, a narrow rectangle less than an arpent, with room for a house near the bayou and fields behind it on the fertile prairie that was safer from flooding.
“That’s Cousin Ardon’s house,” Brett remembered aloud, nodding toward the house to the south. “And Cousin Octave is north of you.”
“That’s right, oui. You will see them all tonight at the fais-do-do.”
Brett surveyed what he could see of Cousin Marcellus’s property from the kitchen door—chicken coops and a well, with a barn and hog pen beyond. All the while his brain played with a persistent topic—not how good it would be to attend a down-home dance after all these years, not how good it would be to see his family, not even the pretty girls he could dance with—no his brain returned to Delta and to how much he wished she were here to attend the fais-do-do.
“What’s this about me staying indoors until Marcellus returns?” he asked, more to get his mind off Delta than to learn the answer.
“A stranger was seen in town,” Angie told him. “A marchand selling clothes, sure.” She smiled. “But now that we have you back, Anatole, we won’t chance losing you, non.”
Which turned out to be the way everyone in the family felt. The surveillance required before they would allow him out of the house to attend the dance and the guards posted around the area while they were there would have done the Pinkertons proud.
Thoughts of Pinkertons brought Delta to mind. Delta—her blue eyes that would be filled with melancholy again by now, her thick brown hair that felt like corn silk between his fingers, her satiny smooth body that warmed his soul and fired his passions. Delta. How long would it take to get her off his mind?
The dance was held at the house of Papa Broussard. The large front room had been emptied of furniture, except for a table at the far end, heavily laden with specialty dishes of the women in attendance. The feet of the table legs were wrapped with kerosene-soaked rags to ward off ants. Strange, Brett thought once again, how it was the little things that reminded him how long he’d been away and how much he had missed his home.
“Smellin’ tha’ filé gumbo makes me hungry to get to Crazy Mary’s,” Pierre observed. “For truth, your maman makes the best gumbo in the world.”
Brett stared at the gumbo, willing himself not to retch. Even after ten years the thought of gumbo reminded him of the cabin, of gumbo splattered over the bodies.
They stood on the galerie, visiting with cousins, while the band played in true ’Cadien fashion—the slurring notes and irregular beat reproduced faithfully by an accordion, a fiddle, a harmonica, a washboard played with a spoon, and triangles—called ti’fers.
“Gabriel, he would be home right here,” Pierre observed of the music.
“Oui,” Brett agreed, but speaking of Gabriel brought thoughts of Delta. “He’d better keep his eyes on her,” he muttered.
Pierre slapped him on the back. “For truth, nèfyou, there are plenty of girls here tonight to take your mind off her.”
And, indeed there were. Pretty girls. He watched them flirt, some precociously, some shyly, some with a boldness their parents would be ashamed of. Or should be. Those girls reminded him of Nicole. And Nicole reminded him of trouble.
Nicole was trouble, even in death. She had been from the beginning, but he had been too blinded by her saucy beauty and citified ways to see the barrenness inside her brain, inside her heart.
Not that his family hadn’t tried to warn him. They had. Cousins, aunts, uncles, even his mother. But in the end, he had married her anyway.
His gaze drifted over the men in the room. Was there a man among them who hadn’t slept with Nicole at one time or another? Both before and after she married the bayou man, Anatole Dupré?
And William Trainor, damn his black soul, considered the Duprés trash. Not good enough to marry his sister. He was ashamed of the bayou man and of the traiteur who had borne him.
He’d finally come full circle, though, Trainor had, condemning his sister along with her in-laws. That was when Trainor decided to run for public office. Nicole’s promiscuity did not enhance his reputation with the highfalutin folks he needed to win a statewide election.
Oh, he’d tried to bring her home. Her and little Olivia. But Nicole had refused to go. Not that she loved her husband, she loved only herself and the life she had created beyond the grasp of her sophisticated family. Even pregnancy had not slowed her down.
Nor had the baby. Crazy Mary cared for Olivia whenever Brett had to be gone. And that really maddened Trainor. Kin of his being reared by a traiteur—or as he insisted on referring to Mary Dupré, a Voodooienne.
God’s bones! Brett cursed under his breath. How he wished he’d never heard of William Trainor or Nicole or— He shook his head to clear the unwanted thoughts. He’d dealt with losing Nicole. For truth, he’d never had her to lose, and he had accepted that fact long before her death.
But his daughter was a different matter. Little Olivia’s death had been brutal and senseless. He had never learned to think about it without becoming enraged.
And Trainor blamed him. God’s bones, how could he think any man capable of murdering his own flesh and blood? But Trainor believed it still. Those papers Gabriel found in Nat’s cabin proved the governor was as eager to see him dead today as he had been ten years ago.
Ten thousand dollars, dead or alive. And five hundred extra before he crossed the state line. Trainor didn’t want him back in the state. Why, the governor didn’t even want the satisfaction of seeing his sister’s murderer swing, as Brett had believed for ten years. Ten thousand dollars! Before he crossed the state line.
Sunrise Surrender--Jarrett Family Sagas--Book Three Page 27