Plunder

by Mary Anna Evans

  The original job had been a perfect fit for her startup company—an initial survey, heavy on library research and site walkovers, without the need for excavation that would have required a big crew. The best part about the job had been that they could even bring little Michael.

  And the worst part about the job had been that they could even bring little Michael.

  Joe was much better than Faye at handling the distractions of having a nearly-one-year-old underfoot. He also was much better at dealing with the natural behavior of a tiny child, which can only be described as suicidal. Faye knew she was capable of laser-sharp focus on her work, which meant that she was capable of forgetting to watch a toddler every split second. Michael had his father’s strength and coordination, so he’d learned to walk before he was nine months old. And he was fast. Her nightmares were now haunted by speeding cars and sharp objects and the still bodies of water that are so seductive to children who can’t swim.

  Faye’s inspired solution to the problem of Michael had been to hire Dauphine, a technician who had done fabulous work for her at the Chalmette battlefield near New Orleans. No less significant was the fact that Dauphine had also saved her life.

  Most of the time, Dauphine was Michael’s babysitter, but when he was napping or otherwise occupied, she reverted to being a crackerjack technician. Even better, when she was being a technician, she was billable to the client. This warmed the deepest depths of Faye’s businesswoman heart.

  Dauphine was a stout woman who dressed like the part-time voodoo mambo that she was, covered in mismatched, candy-colored scarves and turbans and flowing skirts. Her personal style was not a problem in this part of the world, where voodoo mambos in full ceremonial regalia didn’t attract one whit of attention. Michael had adored Dauphine from the moment he laid eyes on her. Faye was pretty sure he just liked to watch his mambo babysitter float by in a sea of multicolored gauze.

  Whatever worked.

  Chapter Two

  Hebert Demeray missed his old hangouts, the ones that had washed away during Hurricane Katrina. He missed the way beer bottles stuck to the tops of their bars, grimy with old shellac and spilled bourbon. Nostalgia gripped him when he remembered worn floorboards so uneven that the bathroom doors scraped and squeaked and sometimes didn’t close all the way. He even missed the stench of old urinals, served by plumbing that had rebelled after years of carrying an overload of beer piss and vomit.

  It had only been a few years since the storm. The replacement drinking establishments didn’t have enough age on them to make Hebert feel at home, and maybe they never would. The government had made the barkeeps rebuild on stilts. By the time folks got to the top of all those stairs, they’d stomped the mud off their feet. How on earth was a bar’s floor to get dirty enough to make a dirty man feel comfortable?

  And the cheapest thing to put on top of those stilts was a premanufactured building. How on earth was a man supposed to drink enough to blot out the world when he was sitting in a double-wide? And when that man was drinking early in the afternoon, like now…well, the sunlight shining through the clean new windows onto the shiny new bar made the atmosphere almost too perky for total drunkenness. Almost.

  The only things in sight that were seedy enough to suit Hebert were his fellow drinkers. He recognized all but one of them. He’d been in brawls with at least half of them. Three of them had pulled knives on him while brawling, which Hebert frankly considered cheating, but he was a big man with more than a little extra flesh. On those few occasions that a blade had made contact with his body, it had buried itself in a roll of fat. Hebert had suffered nothing more than the loss of a little blood and a sharp stab of pain that was quickly blunted by booze. The knife wielders had suffered a lot more, and Hebert had delivered that suffering with his bare fists.

  Hebert thought of his mother, as Cajun men will do when under the influence of booze and nostalgia. He hadn’t spoken to her in years, not since the last time she cursed him and cast him out. Miranda Landreneau was well able to curse a man, so he’d never had the guts to go back and ask her forgiveness, though in all that time he’d never lived more than ten miles from her shabby little houseboat. He’d spent those years staggering from one rented room to another. And from one rented woman to another.

  The stranger raised his beer bottle in his direction, beckoning for Hebert to join him. This was unusual behavior in the bars where Hebert liked to drink. People didn’t go there to look for new friends, unless you counted the ones who were looking for one-night friends. Most of the drinkers here weren’t even looking for sex. They sat alone, or they sat silent next to the friends who came out drinking with them, and they raised one glass after another until the world looked like a place they could possibly tolerate. Or until they passed out, whichever came first.

  But Hebert was a friendly sort, and he was inclined to like a man who was drinking heavily while the sun was still high overhead. He was perfectly willing to go keep the stranger company, especially because the stranger might decide to buy his new friend a drink, if Hebert could manage to be charming enough.

  ***

  Faye slipped on her flip-flops and shuffled back to the marina, finding Joe burdened down with grocery bags. The neck of a wine bottle stuck seductively out of one of those bags, and Faye started calculating just how quickly she could get Michael settled in his portable crib. She thought two bedtime stories would do it. Three, tops.

  “This little man has been talking all the day long,” Dauphine said, gathering Michael up, giving him a noisy kiss on the cheek, and thrusting him into Faye’s arms. “What he was saying, I cannot tell you. But any fool could tell it was very important.” She leaned in for another kiss. “Tell your maman the things you told me.”

  Michael did not intend to chat on cue. He pursed his little lips, which made him look exactly like Joe. Well, he always looked a lot like his father, but the stoic pout made him look like Joe when Faye had done something dire…like, for instance, forgetting to tell him about a contract so big that it could sink their fledgling company.

  Oops. She decided to tell him about the new job after he’d had one glass of wine, but before he’d had two.

  Laughing, Faye held Michael up so Joe could see his little twin. Something made her look over her husband’s shoulder and focus on a houseboat so nondescript that it should have been invisible among the shiny pleasure crafts and well-maintained working boats. It was moored well away from the transient boats that constantly moved in and out of the marina, and it was accessed by a floating dock that wrapped around two sides. It looked like it had sat in that spot since it was shiny and new. Nothing stood between the houseboat and open water, so the shabby craft had a million-dollar view. For that reason, Faye thought it might be a more inviting place to live than it looked.

  Faye would never have noticed the boat at all, but for the girl standing on its deck. It was as if somebody had whispered in her ear: “Look. Your baby may look like his father made over, but here is a mirror for you.”

  Faye was nothing if not rational, and it took only a split second for her to catalog the ways this girl was not her mirror. She was tall and broad-shouldered and well-muscled, and Faye was a hundred-pound wisp. Her shoulder-length hair was a dark mass of brunette curls, which could hardly be less like Faye’s cropped and straight black locks.

  On the other hand, her creamed coffee skin tone and sharply defined features were very like Faye’s, and their golden-brown eyes were more alike than not. But these were not the things that caught Faye’s eye. Faye was riveted by the girl’s confidence as she grabbed a flashlight and leaned close to one of the boat’s windows to inspect the caulk that she’d just applied.

  An old woman emerged onto the boat’s deck, scolding the girl in French. The girl answered her in French, hugged her, then mischievously untied the woman’s apron strings.

  Dauphine had stop
ped tickling Michael when she heard French being spoken. Faye raised an eyebrow in her direction.

  Dauphine answered the unspoken question. “The woman is the girl’s grandmére. She is convinced that her granddaughter is rendering herself unmarriageable by doing something so unladylike in broad daylight. The girl said that she could hardly be expected to caulk in the dark, and that she was sure her grandmother liked the water to stay outside their home.”

  At this girl’s age, Faye had already spent a lot of time on the roof of her own aging home, trying to keep the water out. Unlike this girl, she’d had the advantage of a grandmother who had crawled onto Joyeuse’s roof with her, because Faye’s grandmother had wanted her to know how to keep the leaks stanched when the house passed to her.

  It was probably a good thing that Faye already had more work on her plate than she could possibly do. Otherwise, she’d have hopped onto the houseboat and helped the girl make it ship-shape. Faye’s grandmother had taught her boat maintenance, too. How else could Faye be expected to live on an island when Joyeuse was hers?

  Instead of volunteering to help a stranger lay down a bead of caulk, Faye turned to the child in her arms. Reflexively catching the sippy cup that he kept tossing to the ground, she noticed Dauphine’s face. Pensive and watchful, the mambo watched until the old woman disappeared into the houseboat. Her hand strayed toward a pocket in the side seam of her voluminous orange pants.

  Faye knew that Dauphine kept a protective talisman in that pocket at all times. The mambo’s hand slid out of sight and returned to view, clenched around something Faye couldn’t see.

  ***

  Didi Landreneau Channing hadn’t seen her husband Stan in a good long while. This was not the first time he’d bolted.

  Or maybe he hadn’t bolted. Stan worked out in the oil field, seven days on and seven days off, and sometimes he picked up an extra shift that kept him offshore for three weeks at a stretch. Didi loved it when that happened. She didn’t miss his sorry ass, and seven extra days of work brought in a pile of extra money in terms of both straight salary and overtime. Or it would have, if he didn’t head straight for the New Orleans casinos as soon as his paycheck arrived.

  She’d almost convinced herself that Stan had told her he was taking some temporary contract work between his regular weeklong shifts, so that he could pick up a little extra money. She was almost sure she remembered him saying that he’d be working on the rig they called Deepwater Horizon. The newspaper was saying that eleven people had died. But did they really know? Amid the flames and confusion, was anyone really sure who was out there?

  Maybe twelve people had died, and Stan was one of them. Maybe Didi was entitled to some cash compensation. And even if she wasn’t, maybe she could fake her way through a bunch of paperwork and get some anyway. She’d heard that a lot of people faked their way into a lot of money after Katrina. Besides, since she really didn’t know where Stan was, collecting a check for his death couldn’t actually be called fraud, could it?

  Didi knew she would be much more convincing as a helpless widow if she looked as needy as possible. Maybe it was time for her to go sleep on a houseboat again. Maybe it was time to run home to Mother.

  Chapter Three

  Faye picked her way through the muck, moving quickly and trying her best to keep up with long-legged Joe. They’d already spent a full morning on this task, and they just might lose their afternoon to it, as well. It would be really nice to have something, anything, to show for their trouble.

  The marina was in sight to their west, but they were alone here. Not even tourists were foolish enough to walk through this marshy wasteland. The black goo sucked at her feet, but she fought back. If she lost a work boot, Joe would laugh at her forever.

  He had elected to shed his moccasins and go barefoot. This would probably work out just fine for him, since there were no rocks to stub his calloused toes, but the marsh grasses were hard on Faye’s dainty feet. Besides, if they found what they were looking for, Faye knew she could find herself bashing her feet on rocks or cutting them on nails or skewering them on splinters of old wood preserved by being submerged for decades. Joe might be willing to take this risk, but she wasn’t. Or perhaps his bare feet proved just how much he doubted their ability to find a rotten old dock in the middle of this swamp. This thought made Faye even more determined to find it. Today.

  Historic maps said that there had been a wooden dock here, back in the days of steamboats. It was probably long-gone, blown away in a hurricane or sunken beneath the muck. Joe’s bare feet said that he wasn’t too worried about the dock and its splinters. Nevertheless, it was Faye’s job to look for it.

  Further from the water, Michael was running rampant on dry land. Dauphine stood, one fist on her cocked hip, and watched him frolic. And Faye, pausing in her work more frequently than she should, watched them both.

  “Why’d you hire somebody to watch the baby if you ain’t gonna let her watch the baby?”

  Joe’s shy smile got wider and cockier when he knew he was right.

  Faye snatched up a clump of oozy mud and threw it at him. It hit his bare thigh and oozed downward. “He’s your son. It’ll take more than one person to keep him from doing something dangerous.”

  Then she looked over her shoulder again to make sure that Michael was okay.

  In the distance, she saw the golden-skinned girl from the houseboat, walking slowly through knee-deep grass, wearing headphones and waving a metal detector in front of her. The sun, almost directly overhead, cast a shadow at her feet, as black as the muck under Faye’s own boots. She wore an oversized Hawaiian shirt, untucked, with khaki shorts, red deck shoes, and a red baseball cap. She would have stood out in any crowd, based on her unusual height and shoulder-length curls, but the colorful clothing made double-sure that she caught the eye.

  Faye was several years away from intimate knowledge of school schedules, but she could think of no good reason for a teenaged girl to be out of school this early in the afternoon on a weekday. It was too late for spring break and too early for summer vacation. Faye could think of no school holidays in April. The girl shouldn’t be sweating under a bright sun or breathing in fresh gulf breezes. She should be crouched over a school desk, getting ready for her final exams. Faye wondered if she should speak with her grandmother.

  Belly laughter erupted behind her, and Faye looked back to see Michael smearing mud on a pair of cocoa-brown shins.

  “Why you do such things to your Dauphine?” The babysitter turned the toddler around to pick him up, so that the filthy hands waved in the air but did no harm. She hauled him to a not-too-muddy puddle for rinsing, still laughing.

  In the distance, the girl stooped and picked something up, studying it with a deliberation that Faye recognized, because it was very like her own. After a moment, she hurled it, overhand, and it landed in the open water with a plop. It occurred to Faye that this young woman might know whether a ruined steamboat dock was lurking nearby.

  Making her way to more solid ground, she said, “I want to ask that girl if she’s seen what we’re looking for.”

  Joe mumbled something that sounded like, “Go ahead,” so she did.

  ***

  When other mothers cursed their wayward children, they merely shouted four-letter words. When Miranda Landreneau was the one doing the cursing, her target was actually damned, in the original sense of the word. Hebert’s mother was gifted in the dark arts. He believed this with all his heart. He was indeed damned. The sorry state of his life proved that.

  Sometimes when Hebert was really drunk, like right now, he staggered down to the waterfront. There was a secluded dock where he could see his mother’s houseboat, without much chance that anyone could see him. Although his mother probably had ways of knowing he was there…

  He was squatted on the dock, dabbling his hands in the water and wis
hing that Miranda would lift her curse, when the knife fell between his shoulder blades. It was a big knife, wielded with power, so it was more than sufficient to penetrate Hebert’s skin and the copious layer of fat beneath it. Severing a number of important nerves, the first blow embedded itself deeply into Hebert’s right lung. He went to the ground hard, on his chest, and somebody’s foot held him down, getting leverage to pull the blade out of his back. The second blow sliced through his spinal cord and nicked his aorta. The third blow pierced his heart, but by this point that hardly mattered.

  The foot struck Hebert’s side hard and repeatedly, shoving him toward the dock’s edge. As he dropped into the water, a weak breath and a few words passed his lips. These last words were a curse, one that his mother had taught him.

  ***

  The girl’s response to Faye’s offered handshake was impressively confident for a teenager. “You’re an archaeologist? That is just so cool. I’m Amande Landreneau, and you would not believe some of the stuff I’ve dug up around here. Here. Look…”

  She fumbled in her pocket and pulled out a quarter. “This is from 1968. That’s more than forty years ago!”

  Having been born in 1968, Faye knew exactly how long ago the coin had been minted. She had to take Amande’s word for the date, though, because she couldn’t make out the numbers on the quarter without her reading glasses.

  “If it were just a few years older, it would’ve been silver and I could’ve sold it. I could sure use that money.”

  “I hear you,” said Faye, who had sold more artifacts than she cared to think about, back before she scraped up enough money to finish her PhD and reinvent herself as a legitimate archaeologist. “We’re looking for an old dock that’s supposed to be around here somewhere. It goes all the way back to steamboat days. You know where it is?”

  “Sure I do. But you’re in the wrong place.” She pointed out across the marsh grass, cut with ditches and canals. “It’s out there in open water, maybe fifty feet from here.”