Plunder

by Mary Anna Evans

  What if she was looking at evidence of a thief? Had that thief simply left after stealing from a widow and a child? What if the intruder had been interrupted at work? Faye swallowed hard when she thought about what this might mean for an elderly woman caught unaware.

  Faye’s heart sank when she entered Amande’s room. Several of her artifact drawers also stood open and unlocked, and Faye just didn’t think Amande would leave her treasures vulnerable to dust. She was afraid to touch anything, lest she destroy fingerprints, but she knew that any thief would have had the brains to walk away with Amande’s silver American money. That part of the girl’s treasure was surely gone. She prayed that this thief was too unsophisticated to recognize the old Spanish coins for what they were, but she didn’t check to see if they were still there, for fear of disturbing a crime scene.

  Other than the open drawers, Faye saw no disarray in Amande’s room, other than discarded girl clothes, just as Faye would have expected of a teenager who’d been ecstatic that morning over the day’s trip to her island. When Faye was sixteen, she would probably have tried on four pairs of shorts before deciding which ones to wear, too.

  Delayed reactions are not uncommon when a person is caught unaware. When Faye remembered the scene later, she wasn’t surprised that it had taken her a few moments to realize that she should call the police. The mind naturally takes some time to shift gears from, “I wonder where Miranda is. I’ll look for her,” to, “Something is wrong here, and I’m afraid for Miranda. I’ll call the police.” It wasn’t surprising that archaeology-obsessed Faye’s mind first registered that she needed to report a crime when she saw that Amande’s artifacts had been disturbed.

  She pulled her phone out of her pocket and backed out of the room, but it made no sense to close her eyes. She could continue looking around her, cataloging details that could help in any crime investigation that might be forthcoming. As her fingers felt for the 911 buttons, she heard her own thoughts.

  Eyes…

  She could continue looking around…

  Of course, she could continue looking around. Because she had eyes in her pocket.

  Before dialing 911, Faye took a few seconds to snap photos of Amande’s and Miranda’s rooms with her phone. Backing out of the houseboat’s front door, she snapped the kitchen and living quarters, as well as the bathroom, where she noticed a pile of male clothes and an ashtray full of cigarettes.

  Faye stopped short. Where were Didi and Tebo? On second thought, maybe the clothes piled in Amande’s normally neat room weren’t hers at all. Didi seemed like the kind of woman who left a trail of discarded things behind her, never looking back.

  Faye was drawn back to Miranda’s room, as if its neat contents could tell her something about its mistress’ whereabouts. The doll’s heads still swung undisturbed from their ceiling hooks. Miranda’s workbench in the corner was still festooned with straw for weaving and laden with tools to shape that straw. Her altar was still spread with pretty silk cloths, though the liquor had been drunk and the candles had been snuffed. Crumpled sheets of paper tossed onto the silk tablecloth caught Faye’s eye. Some of them bore handwriting.

  Faye was so curious that she reached out a finger and touched one of the pieces of paper, but she drew it back as if she’d touched a firebrand. Evidence. She needed to preserve this evidence. It was time to get out of there before she really screwed up, but Faye thumbed 911 into her phone after she took a photo of those slips of paper.

  “I need to report a missing person and a burglary.”

  The operator asked her the right questions and she answered them, all the while uncrumpling those papers with her eyes and wishing she could touch them. Perhaps it was just as well that she couldn’t, since she was probably risking a serious hex by disturbing a mambo’s sacred space.

  “I’m at the Lafitte Marina. I don’t know the slip number, but it’s Miranda Landreneau’s houseboat. Somebody in the marina store can get you here.”

  The operator’s tone said that she herself knew exactly where Miranda Landreneau lived, because everybody knew Miranda, but she was too professional and well-trained to let it show. Nevertheless, there was a note of concern in her voice when she said, “I’ll have someone out there to you right away.”

  The papers on Miranda’s altar bothered Faye. They hadn’t been there before. Faye was certain of it. She remembered the altar as…pretty. Yes, pretty. It had been designed to look pleasing to the gods, yet now there was trash piled atop the silk. At least a dozen torn scraps of paper had been crumpled up and scattered over the altar.

  Faye realized that she was risking a hexing, but she squatted down to get a good angle on one of those wadded-up scraps. In an old woman’s spidery handwriting, it bore a single name, with a line drawn through it:

  Steve Daigle

  She took a picture while squatting, to document Steve Daigle’s hexing. Now that she’d read the name in its entirety, she could read bits of Steve’s name on each of the others. Faye was certain that they were all the same.

  One of the candlesticks adorning the altar attracted her attention. Its base was a pewter skull so small and understated that she hadn’t noticed it until this minute. Under it was another scrap of paper. Faye could read the last four letters of a name, written in the same spidery script:

  igle

  Steve Daigle, again. Justine’s widower. In the short span of time since Faye was last in this room, Steve had been the focus of Miranda’s voodoo-soaked brain.

  Remembering Steve’s behavior when he first met his stepmother-in-law, Faye would say that Miranda had possessed several good reasons to hex the man. As she looked over the altar again quickly, before going outside to wait for help, she brushed at her eye, which was prickling strangely. Big mistake.

  Touching the rim of her right eyelid with her right forefinger made that eye stop prickling and commence burning. She rushing to the kitchen sink to wash out her eye, but remembered at the last minute that she shouldn’t even touch the sink. Damn. Instead, she squinched the eye shut and pressed her left palm into it, while she studied her right hand with her good eye. A red powder smudged the pads of its fingers.

  Its familiar look, coupled with the burning in her eye, prompted her to lick her index finger, which in retrospect seemed rather foolish. That hand could’ve been covered with graveyard dust or ground-up cadaver bones or something else awful out of the voodoo priestess’ apothecary, but not this time. The red powder was nothing more than cayenne pepper.

  Writing down somebody’s name, crossing it out, sprinkling cayenne pepper on it, then tossing the crumpled paper onto a skull-adorned altar…it seemed to Faye that these things meant something. And they probably did not mean that the man in question was the voodoo practitioner’s best friend.

  Rubbing her eye with the back of her hand in case she hadn’t gotten all the cayenne off her fingertips, Faye found her blurry vision focusing on the refrigerator. Another scrap of paper was fastened to its door with a magnet shaped like the state of Louisiana. Faye quickly snapped a photo of it.

  The same spidery handwriting was scrawled on it, although the letters and numbers weren’t crossed through. It was a simple note written from Miranda to herself:

  Sechrist, Friday, 2:00

  It was Friday. Or was it?

  Faye’s internal calendar was so scrambled by her seven-day work weeks that she had to think for a moment to be sure. Yes. It was Friday.

  Had Miranda met with someone named Sechrist that very day? Or were they planning to meet in a week? Or maybe they’d met the week before, and Miranda was careless with taking down her notes to herself. Or perhaps the note didn’t refer to an individual. Maybe Miranda had a business meeting or a doctor’s appointment or…something else unexpected.

  Faye looked at her watch. It was barely six thirty. Miranda might still be at the Sechrist meetin
g, but four and a half hours was a very long time. Too bad the note didn’t say where the meeting was supposed to happen. Faye suspected that Miranda would have preferred to meet at her own home, given the choice. But maybe he hadn’t given her a choice. Maybe Miranda had gone to a perfectly innocent meeting and she was on her way back, only to find that her home had been invaded in her absence. Might this mean that she’d been lured away to clear a path for the burglar?

  This was the best possible scenario that she could muster, because it meant that Miranda would be walking in the door any minute, so it was the one she would present to Amande.

  There was nothing left to discover in the houseboat. Faye decided to stop stalling and go talk to Amande, but her questions never got asked. She stepped onto the open deck, just in time to hear sirens and to see marked cars approach, just as they had three short days before when Amande discovered her uncle’s dead body in the water. The sirens made Michael clap his hands over his ears and scream, but Amande stood absolutely still and silent.

  Was it possible that the 911 response had come so quickly? Faye didn’t think it had been a minute since she hung up the phone. Something felt very wrong.

  Not knowing what else to do, Faye moved close to the girl. Joe, with the squalling baby in his arms, hovered close on her other side. There was nothing to do now but wait to see what the sirens would bring.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Faye was glad that Amande didn’t have to hear anything the sheriff said beyond the fact that her grandmother was dead. She’d pulled the weeping girl aside and let Joe handle the rest, but not before she’d had the presence of mind to tell the sheriff that she and Joe were “visiting relatives.” Something inside her couldn’t bear the thought of Tebo or Didi being the go-between for Amande with the law.

  By the time a woman with salt-and-pepper hair and a sober business suit approached, Amande had dissolved into the tears that she’d probably needed to cry all week. First, she’d lost her mother, which had cost her the fantasy reunion anyone in her position would have harbored. Now Amande knew, beyond all doubt, that Justine wasn’t going to miraculously appear and explain herself, then take her daughter out for a girls-only lunch and shoe-shopping trip. She would never have her dream mother.

  And now she had lost the woman who had not been a dream grandmother. She had been a real grandmother to Amande, in every way but blood.

  Perhaps Miranda’s devotion to this homeless child of her ungrateful stepdaughter was in Faye’s mind when she ramped up the lie she’d told the detective. When a business-suited woman introduced herself as Sally Smythe, telling them she was a representative of the Department of Children and Family Services, a vision of Amande being handed over to foster care had congealed in Faye’s mind.

  Perhaps the foster parents would be perfectly nice people, but would they live where a boat-dwelling girl could see the water? Would they be able to handle a child who was brilliant and quirky and strong without crushing those things out of her?

  And what if they weren’t perfectly nice people? Faye had heard stories about beatings and neglect and molestation…no. These things were not going to happen, not if she could help it.

  Faye’s only motivation for the lie was to stall the inevitable. She thought that, by keeping Amande out of the insatiable maw of the foster care system, even momentarily, she might be able to steer the girl into a living situation that she could…well…live with.

  The woman had looked at Joe as he smoothed the hair back from the crying girl’s face, then asked Faye, “Do I understand that the two of you were relatives of the victim?”

  Faye gave her a quick yes, then asked the question that was at the front of her brain and, coincidentally, would have been an important question for a real relative, as well. “Does anybody know where her Aunt Didi and Uncle Tebo are?”

  Ms. Smythe pursed her lips and said, “I’m told that they were easy to find. There aren’t that many bars around here. When Mrs. Landreneau’s daughter was found, she was winning a drinking contest against three large men. Vodka shots are her weapon of choice. Or so I’m told.”

  “Tebo?”

  “He’s in custody for public drunkenness.”

  “Do they really arrest people for that in Louisiana?” Faye asked. “It’s the home of the drive-thru daiquiri bar.”

  “If they’re drunk enough, and if they piss the arresting officer off badly enough, then yes. They do. Tebo succeeded on both those counts. He’s a charming man.”

  Ms. Smythe studied Joe and Amande again. Joe had lifted Michael by the armpits and was making him fly around Amande’s head in an obvious attempt to get her to laugh. It wasn’t working much.

  Ms. Smythe looked Faye in the eyes and said, “Please tell me that Tebo and his drunken sister are not the only relatives who might be able to take this girl. She doesn’t look like she’s had any instruction from them in the fine art of being a barfly. I’d rather not place her with someone who will expose her to that. Foster care might be preferable.”

  Trying to minimize the number of times she uttered an out-and-out lie, Faye said, “Well, they’re certainly her closest relatives.”

  She wondered if the fact that she, Joe, and Michael were some of the few people in the county with skintones approaching Amande’s would give just enough credence to her lies. Other than Amande, Faye’s family, and Steve Daigle, Manny the marina manager was the only person of color in sight. This was a very white part of the world. Faye’s family looked like Amande’s relatives; therefore, they were Amande’s relatives. How far could she push her luck with this bureaucrat?

  Sally jerked her head in Amande’s direction and started walking. Faye followed her.

  Sticking out her hand, she shook Amande’s and said, “Sally Smythe. We met after your Uncle Hebert passed. Remember? It’s my job to make sure you’re okay, and I’m going to do that.”

  Amande looked terrified. No, she looked like a lonely little girl. She’d lost her grandmother and her mother, and she was smart enough to have already figured out that Miranda’s death changed everything when it came to the houseboat. She, Didi, and Steve would be splitting ownership of it, and her share would be by far the smallest. There was every likelihood that she’d be forced to leave her home. What did any of that matter, anyway, while she was too young to handle her own affairs?

  All those things paled, now that the foster care system beckoned.

  Faye was capable of pulling facts out of the air and making a decision so fast that she almost felt careless later, as if she should have agonized more over the problem and its solution. She didn’t consciously weigh the risks that Amande’s family presented against the burden an extra child would put on her own family. She just heard herself asking the social worker a question she hadn’t planned to ask: “Will a distant cousin do for a temporary guardian, until you can decide on the best placement for Amande?”

  “How distant?”

  “I’m her…”

  Not being a practiced liar, Faye hesitated a moment too long. She saw a change in Amande, as composure settled on her and she, too, decided what to do without taking the time to sweat over the details. In that instant Faye knew that Amande, though impossibly young, was unmistakably the kind of person any woman would want on her side in a crisis. The girl knew how to do what needed to be done.

  “Fifth cousin,” Amande stated coolly. “We’re fifth cousins.”

  Joe, wanting to help, popped in with, “Once removed.”

  Faye was pretty sure that Joe didn’t even know what “once removed” meant, in terms of cousins. She regained control of the conversation with a feeble, “But we’re very close. Amande’s our…very favorite cousin. We’re staying in the area for a few weeks. Why don’t you let us take charge of Amande while we’re here? Can we do that without her formally entering foster care? Later, the family can meet
with you and decide what’s best for her.”

  Faye was frankly amazed that this feeble seat-of-the-pants ploy got her as far as it did, but Ms. Smythe could only do so much. When she heard Faye say, “We’re staying in the area for a few weeks,” she’d started shaking her head.

  After Faye had stopped telling bald-faced lies long enough to take a breath, Sally had explained the way things were. “I can release her to family, or even close friends, if they have an acceptable place to stay, and if they pass the background check, and if they agree to come get fingerprinted tomorrow. For starters. It’s the government we’re talking about, and we’re talking about the safety of a child. But you tell me you’re not from around here. Where are you from?”

  Faye said, “Florida,” in the same tone of voice she might have said, “The third circle of Hell,” because she had a feeling that either answer would have carried as much weight with the state of Louisiana.

  Sally shook her head some more. “There are ways to put her in your custody, but we would have to work with our sister agency in Florida. We’d have to find out for certain that you had room in your home for her and that you were suitable parents, even temporarily.”

  “But tonight…” Amande quavered.

  “No. I can’t send you with these people tonight. They seem very nice, but no.”

  A taxi pulled up and Didi flung herself out. “My mother! What’s happened to my mother?”

  A uniformed officer stepped forward. “I’m sorry, Miss. We found her in the water, stabbed. She’s dead.”

  “Like my half-brother.” Didi’s hands flew to her face in a gesture that looked sincere to Faye, who figured that even the most self-centered person in the world could possibly harbor feelings for her own mother.

  “Yes, Miss.” The officer gave her a look that said he was susceptible to the tears of manipulative women, if they were pretty. “I’m very sorry.”