In less than twenty minutes I was dockside in Little Woods, at a marina littered with expensive yachts and fishing boats. My swamp guide, Delbert Baldou, was a skinny white man with scraggly, unwashed hair, who sported a stained military-style shirt rolled up at the sleeves that revealed tattoos on both arms. He looked hugely out of place against the backdrop of the yachting marina.
While Baldou’s speech was as slow and as easy as a trumpeter swan on the water, he was lightning quick about money. He quoted his fee for a day’s effort in locating Bayou Bon Coeur. “Results not guaranteed,” he said. That last word was spoken in three distinct syllables, Cajun style: guar-un-teed.
I instantly agreed to the price and looked around for his boat. He pointed to the twenty-foot flatboat on a trailer hooked to his pickup truck. “Gotta drive to da landing first. Let’s go.”
20
It was late afternoon. I gauged that sunset was coming in about three hours, four tops, so while we drove, I asked Baldou if he could get me to Bayou Bon Coeur this late in the day without getting lost. His answer was not comforting.
“Y’ done say y’all wan-ted to get dere today. No matter what. So we goin’, no matter what. Eh?”
I nodded yes, having no choice, knowing the bayou was my only clue to where Heather might be and hoping that both Turk and Canterelle were right about the swamp skills of the man. He would have to make his way through uncharted waters as daylight was waning.
I made polite conversation at first, mentioning the pretty marina at Little Woods and talking about my own fishing boat back at Ocracoke Island in North Carolina.
“Shoulda seen dat marina after Katrina,” he said. “Big money boats all smashed like matchsticks, yes, dey was. Powerful bad.”
He took Interstate 510 south, turned off toward Lake Borgne, then made his way to a series of roads that ceased to bear highway markers. From asphalt to gravel and finally to dirt paths.
We took a turn into a grove of trees, bouncing along a rough path until we broke into a clearing, and I spotted a tilted pier jutting out onto the dark water.
Baldou backed his truck up to the water’s edge and then down, until the trailer was half-submerged. I held the bowline while he lowered the boat in the rest of the way; then he took a rope from a post on the pier and looped it around one of the boat’s cleats until the boat had been snugged up.
After that he hustled up to his truck, pulled out a bottle of Sawyer picaridin insect repellent, and lathered it over his arms, neck, and face. Then he tossed it over to me. “Best lay it on right thick,” he said. “Dey bugs dey eat y’all alive dis time o’ day.”
Last, he strapped on a Colt .45 and yanked out a 12-gauge shotgun and a box of slugs. He caught me looking.
“Gators,” he explained.
Great, I thought, looking forward to it.
Then he added, “Now dis flatboat, she close to da water. Helps me pull in gators and big fish and my traps and such. But once a gator jumped halfway in dis boat too.” He laughed.
Things were getting more interesting by the second.
Baldou cranked up his Mercury forty-horsepower outboard as I unlashed us from the pier. He kicked it out of neutral, and we motored off.
“So y’all want to see Bayou Bon Coeur?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, y’all goin’ to see it now. . . .”
“You know it well?”
“I know some tings. . . .”
“Like what kinds of things?”
“I sho’ ’nuff know how to get dere and back.”
“Good to know. What else?”
“Some tings happen out dere, dat’s fo’ sho’. Low-down evil.”
I asked, “Like what?”
“Y’all heard ’bout Marie La-veau?”
I nodded.
“Back dere, where we come from, at Lake Pont-chartrain, Marie La-veau, fa-mous voodoo priestess herself, she done cast her spells right back dere along dat lake, y’all can bet on it. Nasty business.”
I said, “Tell me about Bayou Bon Coeur.”
“What I heard from long past is dat Marie, she done make herself a brick-and-mortar man-sion in da swamp more dan a hundred fifty year ago. Not along Lake Pont-chartrain. No, not dere. But at Bayou Bon Coeur. Paid a whole lotta money to haul da brick into da swamp. ’Cuz she saw da War of Northern Aggres-sion comin’. So she wanted a hiding place, to cast her evil spells wit her voodoo followers. But didn’t live to see it done to da end. ’Cuz when dem Northern ships came stormin’ down hereabouts and New Orleans was grabbed, she done give up on it. And her voodoo man-sion was wreck and ruin. And dat’s da truth. Only a few know ’bout it, ’cept for da voodoo folk, ’course. Dey still go dere to dance wit da devil. It’s bad evil dey practice dere.”
I was stuck on that last comment. If Delbert Baldou was repulsed by the black magic practice, why did he know so much about this voodoo capital in the middle of a Louisiana swamp, and why agree to take me there? Maybe it was just about the money.
But more troubling questions surfaced, ones I kept to myself so I could keep an eye on the swamp path that Baldou was taking. Questions like why some female lawyer at the ABA would have known about Bayou Bon Coeur, and how Heather could have gotten there.
We were following a narrow series of waterways that snaked between islands of cypress trees and hanging moss. As we motored across the dark mirrored waters and as the sun was getting low, the bugs came out—mostly mosquitoes—first in drones and then in buzzing clouds. We passed through them, and even though I had my old Mets cap pulled down tight, I could feel them in my hair, in my ears, and up my nose. Happily, the Sawyer lotion kept them from biting into my flesh.
I was looking for signs of wildlife, but there were only a few herons and some big fish jumping, nothing more. After two hours we entered an opening filled with the stumps of cypress trees sticking up out of the water like wooden grave markers.
Baldou slowed us down. I figured it was so he could navigate through the deadly field of tree stumps without ripping out the bottom of his boat. Just to make conversation, I offered that observation.
“Dat’s true ’nuff,” he said, agreeing. But then he added, “’Cuz dem gators love dis here stumpy pond, dey do. Y’ get outta da boat, dey hear dat dinner bell ringin’. And y’all be dat dinner.”
He cut the outboard down, slower and slower, weaving around the stumps. It was dusk and the sky was dark gray except for the moon coming out from behind some clouds.
The bottom sounded like it was scraping on something, and Baldou swore loudly, saying he’d have to trim the engine up a bit. But it didn’t sound like it was coming up. I knew it would be a wretched place for us to get grounded on a mud bank or a log. Suddenly the boat stopped altogether as the engine began to rev quickly. We were hung up for sure.
Baldou yelled out, “Grab hold of dat motor. Y’all got to yank it clear!”
He cut the outboard down even more as I stepped to the stern of the flatboat. I laid hold of the engine and tried to pull it off the stumps, but it wouldn’t budge. The motor was now coughing and chugging. I expected it to cut off completely any second.
I suggested to Baldou that he put it in neutral, but he argued with me and said we had to keep it in forward to pull us free.
Then silence. No more humming of the engine. It had flooded. We were dead in the water. My only hope was that he could restart the outboard.
Leaning back over the motor, I yanked at it again, but still it wouldn’t budge. Baldou took his big spotlight out, switched it on, and cast the beam into the inky water. “Tink she’s hung up on weeds and a log.”
Baldou gave out an unhappy order. He said he would reach down and untangle the weeds on his side of the outboard motor while I, on the other side of the outboard, was to plunge down into the water, lay hold of the skeg of the motor underneath the propeller, and yank it free.
He was hanging over the stern, both arms in the water, as he grappled with the weeds and the log
underneath the motor.
I was waiting for him to give me the high sign to ease into the water and to start lifting the engine up. But something caught my attention, swirling along the surface. “Baldou,” I shouted. “Out there, twenty feet out.”
He pulled himself back into the boat. “Where?”
“There.” I pointed. “From our stern.”
He reached for his .45 just as the alligator, all ten feet of him, scampered up onto a log only a few feet from our motor, then slipped back into the water.
“Get back!” Baldou shouted as he pulled his Colt out and held it straight up.
The gator kept coming. It was swirling and diving, and then with a powerful thrust of its tail it sprang toward my side of the boat. With a single leap, it was out of the water and snapping toward me, its jaws fully within the interior of the boat as I rolled to the other side.
Baldou cursed loudly, holding his Colt up to the sky while we watched the gator disappear into the dark water. My guide had only one last thing to say about alligators that evening, as he shook his head in disbelief.
“Dem gators, dey most always don’t do dat.”
21
If they made an Olympic event out of a dunk into a swamp to free an outboard motor from a log and then a leap back onto a flatboat in less than ten seconds, I would have won a medal. Probably gold.
Delbert Baldou restarted the outboard. It was a happy sound. He picked his way through the bog of cypress stumps as I sat at the bow with his big spotlight and pointed the beam into the gathering darkness.
Once we were out of the stumps, Baldou headed us toward a field of three-foot weeds and cattails that looked impenetrable. He cut the engine off and stood in the flatboat like a gondolier in Venice with a long oar in his hand and began to row us through the marsh.
For the next half hour he scuttled us through the grassy swamp as we listened to the flopping of fish in the water and bugs buzzing. In the beam of my flashlight I could see the swirling waters where more alligators were prowling.
And then, surprisingly, everything changed. We broke into a clearing where I could see, up ahead, an island of solid ground with a line of pine trees. Behind that, brick walls of some ancient structure that had no roof, nearly swallowed by vines and Spanish moss. There was a large flickering light within the walls and the smell of smoke.
As we pulled up to shore, we heard voices nearby, a lot of them, and some singing.
I jumped out of the flatboat and waded knee-deep through the water until I was on land. A figure was approaching us. A young woman with a backpack. Her skin glistened in the heat of the swamp, and her hair was a mess. Heather was standing before me, smiling a tense, tight smile.
I was bursting with two contradictory emotions: an outpouring of prayer and thanksgiving that I had found my daughter, and at the same time, the anger of a parent who felt ill-treated by an adult offspring.
Heather must have known what she had put me through. Or was it the foolishness of youth that she hadn’t calculated or even given a thought to the full sum of that?
I strode up to her, barely able to put my thoughts into words.
She beat me to it. “Trevor,” she said, “you found me.”
“Where have you been? What are you doing here?”
“My master’s thesis,” she replied. “I think I’ve finally landed on the subject. Isn’t that great? Voodoo culture and its persistence in the twenty-first century.” She turned to my guide. “Hi, Delbert. Glad you brought him here.”
I was dumbfounded. “You know him?”
“Of course,” she said. “He brought me here. And the others, too, I guess.”
I whirled around to Baldou. “Why didn’t you tell me this?”
“Y’all don’t ask, so I don’t say. I keep my nose outta dis.”
There was the scent of meat cooking. Baldou unbuckled his holster and wrapped the Colt .45 in the leathers, then asked Heather, “Dey got cookin’ goin’ over dere?”
She nodded.
Baldou said, “I’ll take da food. But then I bid y’all good night. I want no part o’ dat evil, no, sir.” Then he disappeared into the ruins of the old mansion.
When he was gone, I took a step closer to Heather. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“No service,” she said and shrugged.
I grabbed my own cell and checked it. It read, No service.
Heather said, “Look, Trevor, I’m sorry you were so worried. I mean, really, you look totally bummed about this. For that, I feel bad, naturally.”
“Yes. I was worried. Worried sick.”
Heather rolled her eyes.
I took a deep breath, simmering down. “I just thank God you’re here. And you’re in one piece.”
“Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”
To me it seemed obvious, but not to her. “There are real evils out there,” I said, picturing the adolescent face of Peggy Tanner on that missing person poster. And thinking about the grief of Canterelle’s other clients, the family living with the murder of their daughter.
“Bad things can happen,” I said. “People go missing. Especially in a place like this.”
Heather looked off as if trying to decide whether to endure the conversation, then turned back to face me. “Sure. But not always. Besides, like, only a few months ago, you didn’t even know that I existed. Meanwhile, all of those years before we met, I had been taking care of myself. Going to school. Getting a scholarship all on my own. If we are going to have any kind of family relationship, then you have to realize that I’m not your little girl.”
I echoed the word she used. “Relationship?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. I understand. I hear you,” I said. “But there’s one thing about relationships.”
“Yes?”
“Caring enough about the other person that you can put yourself in that person’s shoes.”
She looked down at my feet and studied them for a few seconds. She grinned and said, “I think I’ll pass on that. Your shoes are soaking wet. By the way, so are your pants.”
She got me with that one. I burst into laughter and she did too. We studied each other, having arrived at a friendly stalemate. I reached out and gently patted her shoulder. Heather smiled the kind of smile that told me she thought for a second about reciprocating, maybe even with a hug, but then decided not to. Not yet.
We walked together into the ruins of the redbrick mansion, where a small group was seated on tree stumps within the space that must have been an interior courtyard at one time. A fire was blazing, and a pig was being roasted on a homemade spit. Most of the women were wearing white scarves wrapped around their heads.
I asked Heather about the matching headwear. She said, “They’re all dressed like the voodoo priestess Marie Laveau. You know, the famous New Orleans mambo.” Then she added, “I couldn’t have picked a better time.”
“For what?”
“A voodoo ceremony tonight. That’s why these people are here.”
It was time for fact-finding. “How did you find out about this place, again?”
“Deidre. A lawyer who was sitting next to me at the ABA speech you gave. By the way, I’ve got to hand it to you. You’ve got some backbone saying what you did back there at the legal conference. . . .”
“Thanks. It meant a lot, seeing you in the front row.” But my radar was up. “Who is this lawyer you mentioned?”
“Don’t know much about her. I told her about my interest in New Orleans culture and possibly investigating voodoo for my anthropology thesis, and she got me in touch with Delbert Baldou.”
“Is she a lawyer down here?”
“Not sure. But she seemed to know a lot about New Orleans and about this bayou.”
“This Deidre, is she a practitioner herself?”
She thought on that for a moment. “Maybe not, because she didn’t come out here to the gathering.”
“What’s her last name?”
Heather wrinkl
ed her brow. “Funny. I don’t remember her telling me.”
Behind us, the group had formed a circle around the fire, which was sending up a billowing shower of sparks.
I studied the people gathered around the bonfire, partially lit by the flames. One face jumped out from the rest. An attractive Creole woman in a flowing white dress. And when she recognized me, she stood quickly and strode over to me.
When she was close, I sensed a vulnerability beneath her peaceful expression, but Belle Sabatier’s eyes never left mine.
22
A single thought flooded my mind. Betrayal.
I gave Belle a withering look. “I thought you didn’t know anything about this place?”
“I didn’t,” she said calmly. “You must realize that my mother was an admirer of Marie Laveau, and she had this strange idea she was a kind of spiritual heir of Marie’s. The heir to the title Mambo of New Orleans—priestess of voodoo. I had heard her talk a few times about the mansion ruins at the bayou. She thought it was a special peristyle.”
“Say again?”
“A kind of voodoo temple. But I never heard details. So, that same night after you left, I came across a diary where my mother had described Marie’s bayou mansion, including a map. Right down to the longitude and latitude.”
“Why didn’t you call me and tell me?”
“I had to be sure. I contacted a swamp guide. Only a few know the way to this bayou.”
Heather chimed in. “Google Maps doesn’t even have a satellite photo showing this place. People have checked.”
Belle said, “I had every intention to call you if I made it here. Especially if I found your daughter.” She raised her cell and pointed it at me. “But no service.”
Salt in the wounds. But it made sense.
There was pathos in Belle’s voice, and for a moment, I felt parts of me being drawn in. Pulled. Metal shavings moving to a magnet.
Belle invited us to walk, and all three of us strolled toward the edge of the island. “Trevor,” she said, “you need to know something. After our conversation at my house, I thought about something you said from the Bible. About hidden things. It sparked a memory. I hadn’t been back to our mansion for years until Mother died. Things were not good between us. But after your comment, I remembered it.”
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