The creature jumped when the stone landed at its feet, then whirled and ran away, leaving the cloth behind. Zach walked over and bent to pick it up.
It was a coarse heavy cotton, and by the way it was folded and creased, Zach suspected it was the placket of a shirt. When he turned it in his hand, he caught some faded lettering. Needing better light, he lifted it, then let out a whoosh of breath as he clearly saw the identifying stencil of a Louisiana State Penitentiary uniform.
From long habit he always carried evidence bags in his pants pocket. He reached in for one in which to store the fabric, then returned the bag to his pocket, wanting to check out the site where the animals had been digging.
Although the soil was richly black from eons of rotting flora and fauna, something still blacker lay on top, and he dug out another bag, using it to protect the object from his fingers as he picked up a small black rectangle.
He expelled another rush of air as he saw the Fortier Security Corporation logo.
God, oh, God, he'd ordered the card case inscribed himself. The sting of salt nipped at his eyes, and he bit his lower lip against the pain as he read the words inscribed on a silver bar across the bottom edge:
JEDEDIAH FORTIER, CHIEF PAIN IN THE BUTT.
* * *
Something was terribly wrong. Papa always kept his promise.
Liz's agitated pulse beat in time with the putt-putt-putt issuing from her small rented motor boat as she headed for her father's cabin. Richard Cormier had flashed an oily smile when he'd told her all the faster boats were out for the weekend, then assured her this one'd get her there. Yeah, Liz now thought irritably. At ten miles an hour tops, the trip should take only two or three hours, and the snail's pace only increased her dark mood.
Why hadn't her father shown up as he said he would? The most reassuring reason was he'd gone to Maddie's and was even now sleeping it off in that woman's arms. While the image of him betraying her mother's memory revolted Liz, the other possibilities popping into her mind were worse, much worse.
After settling her things in Zach's old room the night before, Liz had made up the bed, then prepared the master bedroom for her father, with barely acknowledged hope that sleeping here might make him feel he really owned the place. Later, she scrambled some eggs in the remodeled kitchen.
Her father still hadn't shown up by the time she'd finished eating, so she called Stephen to plan their strategy for the next day, then rattled around the house, waiting and waiting. And waiting some more.
Several hours after dark, she bundled up and went hunting for him. She walked to the Cormier house. Everyone had gone, and the lights were dimmed for the night. She checked Tricou's cafe, even looked in the lounge at the Cormier Inn. He wasn't in any of those places, and the last anyone remembered he'd been talking to Maddie on the veranda. The recollection of their knowing looks made Liz angry, even now, which kept her fear at bay while she guided her small boat through the swamp.
Floods and droughts had a way of altering the bayou, but at the tip of a narrow peninsula she recognized a lone cypress, so hung with moss it looked like a dying weeping willow, and she turned there into boggier water, reasonably certain she was headed in the right direction.
At first the cypress knees appeared infrequently, but marshy islands of alligator grass narrowed the channel, and she saw ripples on the water that warned of submerged debris. She cut back on the gas, bringing the tiny craft to a crawl, then weaved easily through the obstacles, surprised to find she'd retained so much of her earlier skill. With renewed confidence, she upped the craft's speed. Soon the twisted knobby roots, so reminiscent of aged limbs, thickened. Still she navigated without difficulty. The dense cypress branches filtered the sun until the light dimmed to the level of a smoky bar. She peered through the gloom, looking for familiar landmarks and impatient to move ahead.
Creatures chittered in the grasses. Something screamed from afar. A bird, Liz told herself, tension creeping into her shoulders. Her hand tightened on the tiller.
Water splashed to her left.
She jerked around. Foolish, she told herself, when she saw it was only a diving fish, feeling more so when she turned back in barely enough time to avoid being decked by a low-hanging branch.
She was afraid, and she wasn't used to fear anymore, not like she once had been. These days she lived in a high-rise condominium that teemed with security guards, and she drove or took taxis everywhere. She felt invulnerable in the city, safe, protected, sheltered from harm.
Why did the bayou evoke such terror in her? She had once known these waters like the back of her hand and had loved roaming them. Especially when she was with Zach. He'd been her constant girlhood companion and eventually her lover. They'd planned to marry when they got old enough. Forever, they'd sworn. Forever.
Sparks of that long-ago love stirred in her heart. With a burst of panic, she doused them. But they made her wonder what had frightened her so badly that she'd fled in utter terror and snapped the almost unbreakable bond between them. This watery land was raw and full of dangers, true, but it hadn't always filled her with such trepidation. There must have been a reason, but if there was she couldn't remember it and was reluctant to try. Even the thought of dredging it up made her shudder.
Some things are best left to the past, she concluded, but she still found herself regretting that Zach had been among them.
Soon the cypress grove thinned, and not long after that she emerged on a wide waterway she clearly remembered. When the cabin finally appeared, her regret intensified, even as her death grip on the tiller relaxed. She saw the dock with the family name carved on one of the tall pilings. The familiar tour boat bobbed gently in the water, its dented canopy frame creaking in time with the motion. A good-sized aluminum craft stood at anchor nearby.
The house seemed taller, bigger. As she boated closer, she saw the remodeling her father had told her about, which brought back the day he'd tersely announced he'd added rooms and hooked up to city power, "Case she wanted to come home."
Home. She hadn't thought of the place as home in oh so long, but suddenly it felt that way.
Tears rushed up, and she blinked, hoping they would flow at last. Her eyes burned briefly, then were dry, leaving a thickness in her throat. Swallowing hard, she steered toward the dock until the bow hit wood, then formed a noose in the tie rope and threw it over a piling.
The front door was closed. A plastic holder had been mounted beside it and was filled with printed material about Deveraux Swamp Tours. She smiled. Electricity, advertising. Her father had finally gone twentieth-century. Maybe they even had running water.
"Papa," she called out. Getting no answer, she hopped onto the cypress steps, then climbed up to the dock, passing a loop of dirty rope as she headed for the door.
The rope uncoiled and slithered toward Liz's feet. Her eyes froze open, allowing her to stare in horror as two feet of reptile undulated over the toe of her shoe toward the edge of the pier with an agonizing lack of haste. It hung on the drop-off for a beat of her racing heart, then slid languidly out of sight.
A mewing sound squeaked inside her closed throat, and she stumbled backward, barely grabbing a piling in time to keep from falling off the dock. As she clung tightly, struggling to regain control, she heard a noise. Slowly she turned.
"Papa?"
Chapter Four
Zach hadn't meant to scare her. When he'd heard the boat approaching, he'd thought it was Frank coming back The wimpy-sounding engine had made him a bit doubtful—he couldn't quite figure an old Cajun going out in a kid's boat—but he wanted it to be Frank. Wanted it bad. He was the only one who could give him answers to what Zach had found out back.
But as Liz stared at him wide-eyed, pale skinned, looking as if she'd seen a ghost, she seemed more like Izzy than the crisp, controlled powerhouse who'd taken a cell-phone call at her mother's wake.
He stepped around the corner of the house and crossed the galerie. "Are you all right?"
"I ran across a snake." She looked down at her shoes and laughed nervously. "It must be a snake with fashion sense, because it took its time examining my Sketchers."
So much for seeming like Izzy, which left Zach in no mood for jokes. But he put on the old Fortier grin anyway as Liz continued examining her shoes. After a second or two, she raised her head. "What brings you out here?"
"Looking up your pa." He hesitated, fascinated with the gemlike shimmer in her eyes. "I wanted to explain—oh, hell, I wanted to apologize for last night. Allain was way out of line."
"People in the Port do and say funny things," she said. A pair of shallow lines appeared between her eyebrows. "Even . . . Someone told me that you think Jed was murdered. Is it true?"
"I've got reason to think so." He didn't want to talk about it right now, not with those unexplained items in his pocket, and he glanced over at the little fishing boat tied beside the steps. Wasn't much more than a flat-bottomed canoe. "You come out here in that, Izzy?"
"Liz," she corrected distractedly, looking at the boat. "Yes. Why not?"
"Gators are rutting this time of year. If one'd come after you in that piece of tin, it would have overturned you in a second. Christ, where does Richard keep his brains?"
"I'm here, aren't I?" Her voice held an irritable edge. "Where's Papa? Sleeping it off inside?"
"I don't think so. Only boat here is that tour boat. I'd think he'd use a smaller one to go to the Port."
"He does."
She then turned toward the door, clearly unwilling to share her worries. If not for the dimming highlights in her cat's eyes, Zach might have thought she'd been telling him her Wall Street Journal failed to arrive that morning. Then he saw her knock on the door.
Knock? She grew up in that house.
No one answered. She knocked again.
"This isn't Manhattan, cher. Why don't you try turning the knob?"
If she noticed his sarcasm, she didn't betray it. She just did as he suggested and the door swung open.
She took a step forward, then stopped. "Oh."
Zach's nerves were already primed for danger, and he instinctively nudged Liz out of the doorway and entered in front of her.
He'd expected mayhem. Instead he saw a typical Cajun living room. The furniture had changed since he'd last been there, but not much—just different patterns covering the plump cushions on the cypress sofa and chairs, and a recliner he didn't recall. The crucifix still hung over the simple oak mantel, and the wrought-iron rack that held the fireplace tools was the same one Frank himself had welded almost twenty-five years before.
Liz squeezed past him. "Goodness, Zach. You act like you were expecting an ax murderer." Inside, she turned to look back. "I'm sorry. I meant it as a joke. It's only . . ."
She swung her arms helplessly.
"It's only—the tortoise-shell table is gone. And where's the oak sideboard Mama kept the dishes in?" She gazed around wistfully. "Silly isn't it? How could I expect everything to be just the way I left it?"
"In case you haven't noticed, the kitchen's moved, too." He glanced at an archway leading to another room. He moved to enter the curved opening, then stopped. "Uh-oh."
He turned to look at her, hoping his expression didn't reveal his shock. But she looked as unflappable as ever, merely quickening her step and peering around his body.
Another quiet "Oh," left her mouth, but other than that, and the faint tightening of her jaw, she calmly surveyed the mess.
The sideboard was still around after all, but overturned, and its shattered doors lay open. Blue pottery dishes were spilled on the ground, some so badly crushed, they'd turned to rubble. And there were jars, dozens and dozens of clear glass jars, many of which were also broken. Crumbled leaves and twisted roots mingled with the pottery dust.
Liz walked slowly into the kitchen, crouching beside the pile of glass Zach stepped in after her, his toe brushing an unbroken jar. It rolled, struck another jar, which also rolled to strike another, which struck another. The floor became filled with rolling jars, clicking and clanking in a crazy domino effect. One of the larger ones tumbled like a hamster's wheel, then came to rest at Liz's feet. She looked down at it dispassionately.
"Who on earth could have done this?" she asked. Softly, unemotionally, completely without feeling.
"I expected you to be more upset by finding your folk's place trashed," he said. "Most people would be."
She looked up, her eyes clear. "It is what it is. Nothing I can do now, except clean it up. I learned that lesson a long time ago."
If Zach had harbored any hope that Izzy still existed, this response wiped it away completely. Izzy would have burst through the front door the minute her father hadn't answered. She would have wailed out her despair in the face of this destruction. Izzy wouldn't have talked business on a cell phone at her mother's wake. She would have stayed at the cemetery, throwing herself on her mother's rain-wet vault, pounding and sobbing loud enough to wake the dead.
Maybe your pa did it, Zach thought. Maybe your pa killed your ma, your grandma. Maybe he even killed my funny, loyal, too-courageous-for-his-own- good kid brother and that poor sonuvabitch whose biggest crime was holding an ounce and a half of cocaine. Maybe there is an ax murderer, and maybe his name is Frank Deveraux.
Some part of him wanted to say all that, and if he'd had more booze inside his belly, he might have. But he didn't. Could be that he was too good an investigator to forget you couldn't judge a man by how he reacted to tragedy. Could be that some of his early optimism about people had survived the loss of Jed. So he kept his peace. But that didn't change the connection between Frank and his brother, and someday he might be forced to speak those words, regardless of his present restraint.
He remained silent as Liz picked up a large jar that had rolled to a stop at her feet. Furry tentacles came alive, clawing at the glass, but Liz stared at it unaffected, then put the jar back on the floor.
"Is that a tarantula?" Zach asked over the sudden tightening of his throat.
"Where?" She sounded dazed. "Oh, the jar. Yes. Mama liked to keep them around. Said they were good luck." She tilted her head in question. "Don't you remember?"
"Some things are better forgotten." He toed one of the jars closest to his foot, hoping nothing moved inside. It was labeled in French and contained a gray powder that broke apart in chunks as the jar rocked back and forth. He looked down at the others, all filled with various powders, crushed leaves, and other substances he wasn't sure he wanted to identify. Each jar had a label, with names written in careful handwriting, some in English, but mostly in French. Some were medicines, but some could easily be poisons meant for gris-gris bags to ward off evil.
He hadn't seen jars like this in years. Not since he'd attended college, met and married Rita, with her round, full-busted body, her sloe eyes and dark curly hair, her soft, slurred voice and sweet dependence. They'd settled in Baton Rouge and only went to the Port on holiday weekends.
But in the sweet days of his childhood, the ladies of Port Chatre furtively boated out to see Ellie, begging her to gaze in her crystal ball or lay out the Tarot and reveal the loves and fortunes coming their way. Nor were the men immune, but they came by night to learn how to defeat a rival or to get a concoction to cure baldness or impotence or other ailments Zach hadn't even known the meaning of at the time.
And always there was Izzy, impulsive, irrepressible, emotional. As unpredictable as the winds. "Do you still read Tarot cards?"
Liz gave him a look that said she doubted his sanity, then stood up and grabbed one edge of the sideboard. "Can you help me lift this?"
"I'll do it for you."
"No, no. It's too much for one person." In contradiction, she already had one foot on the base and was doing her best to lever the huge cabinet up. Zach took a few hasty steps and took hold of the top.
When the piece was back in place, she picked up the jar with the tarantula and put it on a shelf. Next, she got the single unbroken d
inner plate and turned it around in her hands.
"Mama was so proud of this set," she said. "I mean, look at it. It's just stoneware she got from a grocery in Abbeville, one place setting at a time, but she always kept them in the sideboard to use when papa boiled crawdads for a fais do-do." She smiled sadly. "Remember how everyone brought out those old tin instruments, and the music would play, and we kids would jump around between the old folks dancing on the grass and sneak sips of beer when they weren't looking?"
Surprised by her fervency, Zach only nodded.
She set the plate on a shelf, then reached for a teacup with a chunk broken off. Still holding it, she knelt and began brushing through the sharp pieces on the floor until she came up with the missing section, still fairly well intact. She looked up at him with another sad smile. "Maybe I can glue this back together."
Holding the handle between her thumb and index finger and daintily crooking her little finger the way one might at a Ritz-Carlton high tea, she gazed at the worthless cup from the grocery as if it came from a rajah's treasure chest.
Zach noticed a bead of blood.
"You cut yourself." He took her wrist and gently removed the cup from her hand. Her pain had become so visible, and he had the feeling she didn't know it, that she honestly believed she was just talking old times. He wanted to pull her close and ease that pain, and made a move to do so.
Liz immediately read his intention and was so tempted. Lord, to just sink into Zach's arms and let things be okay again. But she'd left that all behind, left him behind, and hurt him badly. And she couldn't even give him an explanation, at least not one she felt made sense. I was afraid. What kind of explanation was that?
He hadn't deserved that treatment, and she didn't deserve his comfort. It wasn't fair.
If she'd learned anything from her life, it was that being fair brought its own rewards, so she allowed herself the pleasure of his comfort for only the space of a breath, then stepped away.
Chills & Thrills Paranormal Boxed Set Page 4