Stone Angel

by Carol O’Connell

  Winged children.

  Stunned, Charles stepped into the ring of stone figures to see the faces of the larger angels. And now he revolved slowly, watching Mallory grow from a cherub to a full-blown avenger with a sword in her hand.

  The sheriff was kneeling in the wet grass, looking down at the blood. The trail petered out three yards from Trebec House. In sidelong vision, he saw Augusta at the kitchen windows flanking this side of the brick foundation. After he heard the door slam in the basement wall, he gave her a few seconds more to come up behind him and commence a tirade on the damage he had done bringing his car across the grass, stinking up her air with his exhaust and frightening her birds. It was always the same exchange between them. She had gone to a lot of trouble to block the old road with trees. And why, she would ask, did he take it as a challenge to scratch the paint on his car working around all her obstacles? How many kinds of a fool was he? And then he would have a few choice words of his own. But today this old game would be a bit different.

  He looked up to see her calm face, which never gave away a damn thing.

  “Why’re you creeping around my yard, Tom? You can’t knock at the door like a normal person?”

  The game had already been altered. So Augusta must have bigger things to worry about today.

  “Fred Laurie’s wife came in this morning. Said he never came home last night.”

  “Well, good for her,” said Augusta, in a rare good mood that didn’t quite ring true. “That must be the first peaceful night she’s had in twenty years.”

  He stood up and smacked the loose grass off his pants. “I guess you heard the gunfire late last night.” Of course she had. Augusta was a chronic insomniac, and everyone knew it. “I sent Lilith into the woods to arrest him for trespassing ‘cause I didn’t want you to find him first. Lilith said the man just disappeared. Couldn’t find a trace of him, and she was looking for a long, long time. But now I gotta wonder if Fred left the woods feet first, maybe with a hole in him.”

  “He’s probably in the next parish, sleeping it off in a strange bed.” She might as well have been talking about the morning rain.

  “Using what for cash? You know Malcolm never gives those idiots any money, and I don’t think a church voucher would buy him anything outside of Owltown.”

  “So you’re thinking foul play?” Augusta was grinning.

  He had several categories for her grins. Some were downright evil, and some were dangerous. But this one was only malicious.

  “If his wife shot him,” said Augusta, “then I owe that woman an apology. I’ve sorely underestimated her, taking her for a mouse all this time.” She shook her head. “The way that bastard beat on her. You sure he was here last night?”

  “Oh, yeah. Two people saw him go into the woods with his rifle. I found bullet holes in a few trees, but I’m pretty sure the trees didn’t put up much of a fight.”

  “I see where you’re going with this. Well, if he shot himself, this is the last place he’d come for help.”

  “Damn right.” He pointed to the trail she had been tactfully ignoring, as if she might be accustomed to seeing her grass splattered with bloodstains. “Maybe that’s not Fred’s blood. Maybe that fool actually hit something this time, and whatever it was, it came here. Is that Kathy’s blood, Augusta?” He was careful in his wording. If it was Fred’s, he didn’t really want to know.

  She never looked down. “I do hate to spoil your fun. That’s nothing but blood from one of Henry Roth’s chickens. You knew my cat was a thief. Now I’m gonna pay Henry for that chicken, so you have no business here.”

  The sheriff walked around the side of the house. The door between the staircases stood open a crack.

  “Planning to arrest the cat?” Augusta was right behind him.

  He walked toward the house. Augusta moved faster. She was there before him and barring the way.

  “Tom Jessop, don’t you set foot in my house without an invitation. Your father was a lawyer. I know he taught you better than to do a thing like that without a warrant.”

  He ignored her and pushed his way through the door. She caught it on the slam bounce, and followed him inside. “You let six million gnats into my house.” There was nothing in the timbre of her voice to tell him she was anything but angry.

  He left the long hallway and entered the kitchen. He looked up to the top of the refrigerator and engaged the yellow cat in a staring contest. Augusta was standing beside him now. He looked down at her and saw her eyes round out a bit as she stared at the gun in his hand.

  He looked back to the cat. “You’re fond of that animal, aren’t you, Augusta?” He took aim. “Is that Kathy’s blood in the yard? I’m waitin‘ on a straight answer.”

  The old woman put up her hands defensively, as if she were the one he meant to kill and not the cat. Then she waved her arms and shrieked. The cat’s eyes narrowed and the ears flattened back as the animal sprang from the refrigerator and sank claws into the flesh of his chest and teeth into his shoulder. He could hear the horse screaming through the kitchen screens, and birds took flight from the shrubs lining the bank of windows, all screeching and flapping, blotting out the sky and the grass. Teeth sank deep into his hand. He dropped his gun and batted at the cat. He pulled at the pelt and felt his flesh rip. “Augusta, call it off or I’ll break its damn neck!”

  Augusta picked up the gun, threw open a window screen and tossed the weapon far into the grass. And now the cat released him after she had enough blood to suit her. The animal leapt to the slate counter and then back to the top of the refrigerator. She crouched there, bunching up her muscles, ready for another round.

  He looked at the wound to his hand. These were not the pointy marks of a cat’s teeth. The bite mark was Augusta’s – almost human.

  She pointed at the drops of his own blood on the floor. “Now don’t forget where that came from, Tom. I don’t want you getting confused again.”

  He was out of the kitchen and heading back down the hall when Augusta said, “Where you going so fast, Tom? I think you can take that cat two falls out of three.”

  “I’ll be right back,” he said, ever so politely. “I can’t shoot that animal without my gun, can I?” The door slammed behind him.

  He found his weapon shining through the tall grass twenty feet from the house where he had parked the car. He was wondering if the stains on the grass might not be chicken blood after all – or maybe it was Fred Laurie’s blood.

  What the hell?

  He watched the horse race around the paddock. Now the animal reared up on his hind legs and knocked the crossbar off the fence. Hooves crashed down on the fallen bar and splintered the wood. The birds had picked up a contagion of panic and the volume of birdsong was building.

  When he turned around, he was staring at a single-shot derringer, and Augusta was right behind it with her finger on the trigger. He stood up slowly and holstered his gun. His eyes never strayed to the derringer as he said, almost casually, “You wouldn’t shoot me.”

  “Oh, Tom. You know better than that,” she said sweetly. “Of course I would.” She grinned wide and evil. “Do you really want to spend all damn day at the hospital while they pick this slug out of you?”

  The dark idea crossed his mind that she would shoot anyone who threatened an animal on her land. Might she have found Fred in the woods? If that was what she was covering up, he wasn’t sure he wanted to catch her before she had time to dispose of the evidence. As Augusta had pointed out, Fred’s wife probably needed a rest from the beatings. “I guess I don’t need to kill a cat today. But I do need to find Kathy, and real fast. If you get in my way, I’ll forget how long I’ve known you, old woman. I’m too close to let – ”

  “It always comes back to Cass Shelley’s murder, doesn’t it?” She lowered the gun; the game was done, and she was not smiling anymore. “Revenge is a real sickness with you, Tom. This isn’t what your father had in mind for you. Sheriff of St. Jude Parish should have been your
first political office, not your life.”

  “Well just look at you, Augusta – the damn queen of revenge. It’s your whole reason for living.”

  “Oh, but I do it so well – with gusto and style. I make it a fine art. With you, it’s just an ugly occupation. Now move off my land or I’ll let fly with a bullet.” She lowered the short barrel of the derringer to his kneecaps. “Think you can catch that little girl with one lame leg?”

  He backed up and eased himself into the car. When the wheels were spinning in a wide grassy lake, she fired the gun into the trunk.

  God damn it!

  In his rearview mirror, he could see her reloading just as the wheels found traction on more solid ground. Instead of driving forward, like any man who truly wanted to live, he backed up the car until he was abreast of her, and then he leaned out the window.

  “Augusta,” he said, touching the brim of his hat in salute. “Don’t ever change.”

  Her laughter followed after him as the car rolled away.

  Before he was close enough to read the chiseled legend, Charles recognized the face on the new tombstone in the cemetery. Babe’s photograph was encased in a cheap wooden frame fixed to the stone. This would be the smallest of graves, only a hole in the ground for the urn. No tomb for Babe Laurie, nothing so grand.

  “So when will they inter the ashes?”

  “He won’t be cremated till after the big party at the end of the week” said Henry, looking down on the rough work of a cut-rate craftsman. “It’s a poor thing, isn’t it? Malcolm spent a fortune renting a fancy glass show casket for the wake, and almost nothing on the marker. Babe would have hated this. When he was alive, he thought he was king of the world.”

  Charles nodded. He had encountered such a man when he was the freak child at Harvard, eleven years old in his sophomore year. In the course of research for his behavioral science project, he had observed a patient in a local hospital. The old man was ravaged by syphilis and given to shouting, ‘King of the world am I!’ But he had walked in an unkingly way, graceless, ungainly, and sometimes stumbling.

  The old man had demanded that young Charles bow and use the proper title whenever the boy addressed him. A doctor had been present and explained to Charles that it was a hospital rule never to yield to the whims of dementia. The boy had dutifully complied with the policy and refused the king his due. Toward the end of this study period, the child had even had the temerity to explain to the old man that this was for his own good.

  The old man had disagreed, and a fit of temper had been followed by convulsions. Then the doctor had gently pushed Charles from the room and turned back to his patient, who was screaming and being tied down with restraints.

  The following day, the boy had returned to the old man’s room, bearing flowers as a peace offering – bright blooms of every color, a veritable palette of apologies. But Charles found the room empty, the bed stripped of its sheets. The king of the world had died the previous evening.

  The doctor and his nurse spent the next hour calming the hysterical little boy, trying to convince Charles that he had not killed the old man. Then, speaking to the brilliant child as equals, they had carefully explained the hell of the disease, the damage they could not reverse because treatment had come too late, and finally, the mercy of the old man’s death as a release from suffering. The tantrum and the convulsions, they said, were merely behaviors common to dementia paralytica.

  Eleven-year-old Charles had responded with behaviors common to childhood. He had cried, thrown down his guilty flowers and run away.

  Now Charles, the grown man, hunkered down by the tombstone to look at Babe’s portrait, and a young king of the world looked back at him. The symptoms the old man had endured might have been in this younger man’s future had he lived another fifteen or twenty years.

  “Henry? Who do you think killed Babe Laurie?”

  “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  Charles was about to speak when Henry signaled for silence. He could hear voices from the bridge over Upland Bayou, and Betty Hale’s was the loudest.

  “Now stay together,” said Betty, shepherding her flock of ten guests across the bridge. One damn fool was veering off on the side road. “You don’t want to go in that direction, Mr. Porter. Three feet off the path and you’re into Finger Bayou.”

  Mr. Porter was entranced by the worn wooden arrow pointing the way to the old Shelley place. Perhaps he took it for a traffic sign, for she could see he was longing to obey it despite the No Trespassing sign posted on a near tree.

  “Is the bayou very deep, Mrs. Hale?”

  “Well, no. But you could break your backside trying to get yourself out of there.” Yes, he would definitely crack his ass if he fell on his face.

  “Now if you’ll all gather round, please.” Betty pointed up through a break in the trees. “That house is where the bats come from.” Cameras began to click photographs of the roof and its round window as souvenirs of last evening’s bat races.

  “It’s more than a hundred and fifty years old,” said Betty. “It was built by the Trebec family. Miss Augusta is the last of the line. When she dies, the house passes over to the state of Louisiana.”

  “So she’s leaving it to the state as a historical site?” asked the woman from Arizona.

  “No, her father arranged that in his will,” said Betty. “He put all his money in a trust fund. Augusta only got a caretaker’s salary.”

  “Some caretaker,” said an elderly woman, eyes focussed through field glasses. “There are holes in that roof.”

  “Oh, the whole place is a wreck,” said Betty. “The roof is the least of it. It’s a damn shame to see one of those beauties go to ruin that way. Augusta Trebec is the Antichrist of the St. Jude Parish Historical Society. They invoke her name every time they cuss.”

  The line got a smattering of laughter, and Betty decided to leave it in the tour speech.

  “The house has quite a history, and I – ”

  “Could Cass Shelley be alive?” Mr. Porter was asking.

  “Not likely. Now Augusta became the mistress of Trebec House under very sinister – ”

  “Are there any alligators in that bayou?” asked the intrepid Mr. Porter “You think maybe an alligator could’ve eaten her body?”

  Though she wanted to stuff a sock in Porter’s mouth, Betty smiled on him with benevolence. “A gator could eat you whole. When he clamps down on you, he goes into a death roll and drags you under.” She liked that image of Porter. “But if the gator isn’t hungry just then, he’ll stuff your body in some underwater hole or a cranny in the bayou wall ” Either way the gator went with that, Porter would be just as dead. “And then he’ll bide his time till your body rots up real tender.”

  Now she had everyone’s attention. Bloodthirsty bastards, bless their little hearts and credit cards. “But an alligator didn’t eat Cass Shelley. Fred and Ray Laurie killed every single gator in these bayous a long time ago. Finger Bayou runs up near Trebec House. Before Cass died, I used to take my tour groups up there. Augusta won’t allow strangers on the place anymore, though. I guess the stoning spooked her. She stopped the herbicide on the bayou, and now it’s choked off with water hyacinth, impassable by boat. You see those plants floating on the water? And most of the land surrounding the house is swamp, infested with poisonous snakes. So I repeat, you don’t want to stray off on your own. Now what was I saying before we got off on gators?”

  “The house,” said the man from Maine.

  “Right. Now the house and a few acres was all that was left of the original plantation. The town sprung up, lot by lot, as the Trebecs sold off the land.”

  “You said the house was ruined,” said the man from Maine. “So Miss Trebec is too poor to maintain it?”

  “Poor? Augusta? Oh, no.” Betty laughed. “She’s a master of shady land deals. She owns all those cane fields out by the highway. Bought her first forty acres with seed money inherited from her mother. Then she sued a chem
ical factory for fouling the water on her land. That gave her cash for more land near another factory. Over the years, she’s filed lawsuits against most of the chemical plants along the River Road. They always settle out of court. Today, Augusta owns most all of St. Jude Parish, except for Dayborn and Owltown.”

  “Could you lose a body in that bayou?” asked Mr. Porter, impatient to get back to the subject of murder. “Maybe sink it down with weights?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Betty. “The sheriff was all through Finger Bayou dragging for that body. He would have turned it up.”

  “I can understand her not wanting to spend her own money on a house that isn’t hers,” said the man from Maine, still trying to make sense of the ruined mansion. “But if the woman is rich, there’s nothing to keep her here. So why doesn’t she just leave?”

  “Oh, Augusta won’t go till the house falls down. She could set a match to it, but that would offend her sporting nature.”

  The man from Maine gaped. “You mean she wants it to – ”

  “What about quicksand?”

  “No, Mr. Porter,” said Betty. “There might be a bog or two back there in the swamp, but even a bog will yield up a carcass eventually. Of course, only a Cajun could walk that swamp – or Augusta. She’s what you might call a Cajun without portfolio.”

  The rest of the group had their binoculars trained on the top window of Trebec House. One scrawny woman from California was shaking her head sadly. “Surely the historical society will restore the house when this crazy woman dies.”

  “Can’t,” said Betty. “It would take too much money. They waived their rights in favor of Augusta’s proposal for a bird habitat. Those ornithologists won’t waste a dime on Trebec House. They’ll just watch it rot. That’s the deal they made with Augusta.”

  “So what do you think happened to the body?”

  “It is a mystery, isn’t it, Mr. Porter?” And if it were ever solved it would cut into her business, now evenly divided between bird-watchers, amateur detectives and the visiting New Church seminar suckers.