by DJ Donaldson
“They thought that Tommy’s trouble had been caused by the defect. They said it had probably been in the family for a long time. I don’t know all the details, but they said that the females in my family were carriers and that only male children would show the symptoms. And it wouldn’t be all the males, only the ones that got the defect. Does that make sense?”
Broussard nodded again.
“So you see”—tears welled in Olivia’s eyes—“this was all my fault.”
“Why do you insist on that nonsense?” Claude said sharply, shaking Olivia’s hand in his own. Then more tenderly, he said, “Tommy was our child, not just yours. And we didn’t know. If we had, we could have…” Apparently unwilling to suggest that they should never have had a child, Claude left the thought unfinished.
Olivia picked up the story. “While we were trying to figure out what to do, Tommy got out again and was gone nearly all night. When he came home, he was covered with blood but he wasn’t hurt. We thought it was just another rabbit, but then the next day we heard that a man had been found in a nearby swamp with his throat torn out. Though we didn’t want to believe it, we knew it was Tommy who had done it. But there was no way we were going to turn him in. So what were we to do? We couldn’t contain him in the house. We needed a special place… a place like the old building out in the woods.”
The cemetery in Leper’s Woods. Suddenly, it all fell into place for Kit. “Villery.” She breathed the name aloud. Olivia was a Villery.
“You know about the Villery trial?” Claude asked.
Kit glanced at Broussard. “Villery was the name of the man convicted of being a werewolf in Caude, France, in 1781. Remember? The retarded son of the silversmith. It’s one of the examples of lycanthropy that I told you and Phillip about.”
“That’s when the Villerys left France and settled here,” Claude said. “Probably to escape the notoriety from the trial. We learned about the timing from a genealogy search we had done.”
Never go boo-lie during a full moon. The phrase ran through Broussard’s brain as Kit’s revelation brought the final obscuring walls of the case tumbling down. The fellow who had been killed in the swamp when Broussard was a boy had fallen victim to an earlier Villery descendant. And the other sporadic murders the Villerys undoubtedly had committed since they’d come to this place collectively became the legend of the loup-garou, the association with a full moon probably arising from the occasional murder that coincidentally took place at the end of a lunar cycle. Those were the ones that would be remembered. And that’s why the building was in the woods—because it had been needed before.
“So we had the building fixed up to hold Tommy,” Claude said. “I brought the workmen in from out of town a trade at a time. Picked them up at the airport, kept them on the grounds the entire time they were here, and took them back to the airport when they were finished to make sure they didn’t talk to the townspeople.
“It was a perfect place. With everyone in town believing that you could get leprosy by going in there, we didn’t have to worry about someone accidentally stumbling onto our secret. I suspect that the ones who originally had the building constructed started the leprosy rumor. To keep casual boaters away, I had the big cypress dropped across the bayou.
“We covered Tommy’s disappearance by saying that he felt such an obligation to his country he had joined the army for service in Vietnam. Gave the whole story credibility by getting a small article about his enlistment run in the local paper. Then, a few months later, we said he’d been killed in a helicopter crash. Obviously, we couldn’t produce his body, so we just said that the army was unable to recover it for reasons that were never made clear to us. Even had a memorial service over at St. Anthony’s for him and made sure there was another article in the paper.”
Claude looked at Broussard. “Your sympathy card is still around the house somewhere. When people would suggest that Tommy might have survived the crash, I’d say that eyewitnesses in another helicopter believed no one could have survived. If Olivia was around, she’d say that she knew in her heart he hadn’t made it. Then as the years went by…” He squeezed Olivia’s hand again. “I’m afraid that Liv herself began to believe the story we’d made up. Oh, she knew Tommy was out there in the woods all right, but a part of her wanted him to be that hero we were telling everybody he was.”
Claude leaned out and looked fondly into Olivia’s eyes. “Don’t you think that’s true?”
Olivia nodded. “He could have been anything he wanted to be until… until he became ill. And since it was my fault…”
“Olivia!”
She shook off Claude’s censure. “It was my duty to see that his name stood for something. After all I am his mother….”
“I could see what was happening,” Claude said. “But it seemed to make it all easier for her, so I went along. Even made that little charade there last year when she asked me to.” He pointed at the shadow box containing Tommy’s picture and the medal he had supposedly been awarded for bravery. “In a way, Liv had two sons, the one in the box there and the one in the woods. And mostly, the one in the box made her life bearable. But sometimes when it thundered, it’d all come back to her and her nerves would go.”
Claude put his finger under Olivia’s chin and tilted her face up to him. “Do you mind my talking about you this way?”
She squeezed his hand and shook her head.
“But what Tommy had done was not the kind of thing you can forget and it lay on our minds, eating away at us. For Liv, thunder made it worse, because it had thundered the night Tommy had… had made his first… human kill.” Claude’s face looked as though his words left a bad taste in his mouth.
“Then three days before Dr. Franklyn visited us, Tommy got loose again. I don’t know how, except as the years went by he didn’t get any more normal but he did get more cunning, while the rest of us were getting old and careless. However it happened, he got out and killed Homer Benoit. And he didn’t come back home. So we didn’t know where he was or who might be next.”
He looked at Kit. “So that’s why Liv dropped her cup that night when it thundered. When the story of the murders in New Orleans got to us, we figured it had to be Tommy and we decided to try to find him and bring him back. Except I had broken my fool ankle and…” Claude paused as though uncertain about what had happened next.
“He asked me to find him,” Henry Guidry said, “which I did.”
“How were you able to handle him?” Kit asked.
“Tranquilizer pistol. We use it sometimes on our cattle. You have to understand, the night I found him he’d already killed that last woman. There wasn’t anything I could do about that.”
“But why, Henry?” Broussard asked. “Why go out on such a limb?”
A look of surprise appeared on Henry’s face. “Isn’t that what friendship is?”
“It’s the sort of thing he’s been doing for me all my life,” Claude said. “It wasn’t Henry that did all those crazy things in high school. It was me. He just took the blame.”
“Because we were friends,” Henry said. “Best friends.”
These revelations were like a knife in Broussard’s heart. He had thought they were the three musketeers, equals. But now it appeared that there had always been only two musketeers… and him. Though deeply hurt, he didn’t allow it to show. “Henry, did Tommy have a gardening claw with him when you found him?”
“Yes. I threw it in the Mississippi.”
A question formed on Claude’s face. “Andy, when you landed at the dock, you said my son was dead. How did you know who that was out there? Did you see the… see his body?”
“I did see the body, but I knew he was there, before that. The first thing that made me suspicious was that medal.” He pointed at the shadow box with Tommy’s picture. “The note by it says Tommy was in the army. But that’s a meritorious service medal for the merchant marine. Then later when I was outside, I noticed that some electrical lines come out of
the service panel and go underground in the direction of Leper’s Woods. Those two things made me curious enough to ask Phil Gatlin—the detective that called me just before breakfast this mornin’—to check with the army to see if they had any record of Tommy enlistin’. A few minutes before I heard Kit fire off that shotgun, I’d learned from Phillip that they had no such records. It was then that I knew for sure.” He looked at Kit. “But what were you doin’ out there?”
“I found a picture in the bottom of that trunk in my room. It looked like Tommy, but he was a lot older than in that photograph over there. And the date on the back said it was taken two years ago.”
“Liv had Martin take Tommy’s picture every year on his birthday.” Claude said. “She kept them in an album in that trunk. When we knew you were all coming to spend the night, I moved the album, but I guess that one picture fell out.”
“At first, I didn’t get it,” Kit said. “Then when I saw Martin taking a picnic basket and a gun into the swamp, it hit me.”
“Claude, if you had such a secret, why on earth did you invite us to stay with you?” Broussard asked. “Surely you saw the danger there.”
“We didn’t feel as though we had any choice. It was what would have been expected of us. If we hadn’t volunteered, we thought that in itself would be suspicious. That’s why I got Touchet to give you the Benoit exhumation order even though I’d called him a half hour earlier and asked him not to cooperate.”
“And then you had to bring Carl Fitch into the picture,” Broussard said.
Claude’s eyebrows shot upward. “You know about that, too?”
Broussard nodded.
“I don’t know why we tried to hide anything from you. We should have just put a sign in the yard—‘The killer lives here.’”
“Even if I hadn’t found out about Fitch, he probably would have talked to someone eventually,” Broussard said.
“I’m not that stupid, Andy. He didn’t know who hired him. I simply slipped an envelope with some cash in it under his front door along with instructions on what he was to do and how much more money there’d be if he did it before daybreak.”
“What made you think he’d do it?”
“I’ve known him for years. He used to work for me until I fired him for the same traits that made me hire him this time. Now if you all don’t mind, Liv and I would like to be alone for awhile.” His eyes shifted to the sheriff. “Would that be all right? I mean could you wait until tomorrow to do whatever’s to be done?”
“Don’t see why not.”
On their way out, the old couple paused at the door and Olivia gently moved Claude aside so she could look back into the parlor. “We didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt. We just wanted to protect our son. But it all went wrong. It just all went… wrong.”
When the Duhons had gone, the sheriff shifted his attention to Claude’s accomplice. “Henry, I’m afraid that legally you’re in pretty deep, as well. But I’m willin’ to give you the same consideration I gave Claude and Olivia. If you’ll promise not to disappear.”
Head hanging, Henry nodded and stood up to leave.
Broussard followed him into the hall. “Henry, wait a minute.”
Guidry spun around, a hostile look on his face. “Friendship, Andy. Think about the word, because I don’t believe you have the faintest idea what it means.” Without giving Broussard a chance to reply, Guidry turned his back and went out the door.
Returning to the parlor, Broussard heard the sheriff ask Teddy, “Where exactly were they keepin’ Tommy?”
“I’d be glad to show you,” Teddy said.
“Would you be willin’ to bring the bodies in after I’ve looked things over?”
“Sure, but we’ll have to bring them back to this dock. I won’t be able to get my boat past that tree Claude mentioned without a chain saw.”
“Maybe I should go, too,” Broussard said. “Kit, you seem to be feelin’ okay, but I’d like for Bubba to take you over to Doc Burke’s for some X rays just to be sure. We’ll meet back here in an hour and see where we stand.”
Kit looked at her hands. “Maybe Burke can get these splinters out.”
“Dr. Franklyn, sometime before you leave, I’d like to get your statement on tape,” the sheriff said. “But we’ll worry about that later.”
“Something just occurred to me,” Teddy said to Broussard. “Suppose the boat goes on the fritz again. Bubba should be there to fix it. So how about having him go with you and I’ll take Kit to the doctor? I can show Bubba in about ten seconds everything he needs to know to run the boat.”
“Sounds okay,” Broussard said.
Kit got carefully to her feet. “I’m not going anywhere until I get cleaned up and change clothes. And it better be the last time, because my wardrobe is exhausted.”
“Can you make it up the stairs?” Teddy asked, preparing to catch her if she fell.
“Everything seems to be functioning,” Kit said. “You go on and show Bubba how to work the boat. I’ll be down in a few minutes, providing someone can tell me where to find a clean towel.”
“I think there’s a linen closet next to the doors that open onto the upstairs porch,” Broussard said.
Kit wiggled her fingers at him in thanks and went off to see whether he was right.
As the others were filing out of the parlor, Bubba said, “Dere’s jus’ one thing Ah don’ understan’.”
“What’s what?” Broussard said.
“How’d Teddy keep his hat on da whole way over here in dat boat?”
CHAPTER 21
When Broussard and Bubba returned to the Duhons’ parlor after their trip back to Leper’s Woods with the sheriff, they found Teddy and Kit already waiting.
“So what’s the verdict?” Broussard said. “Your X rays didn’t make Burke faint or anything, did they?”
“I’m as healthy as you are,” Kit said.
“Dunno if I’d be happy about that. By the way, Teddy, Phil Gatlin—the detective workin’ the case in New Orleans—found the bracelet you lost. It was near the place where Tommy hid durin’ the day. My guess is that you were the one that took him to New Orleans, not knowin’ly of course, but as a stowaway under the tarp on your pickup, which is probably where he found the bracelet. When you parked near Jackson Square to visit the perfumer in the Pontalba building, he slipped away.”
Broussard’s explanation jogged Teddy’s memory. “Now that you mention it, I did go to New Orleans the day Homer Benoit’s body was found. And I also went to the perfumer on the square. But how did you know all that?”
“Your cologne, Cajun Musk. They mix it on the premises and have no other sales outlet. Add that to the bracelet… all makes sense.”
“How long have you known about the bracelet?” Kit asked.
“Since Phillip told me about it in that phone call this mornin’.”
“Didn’t that make you suspect Teddy?”
Broussard shrugged. “His feet are about two sizes smaller than that footprint we found at the first murder in New Orleans.”
“Did you recover Tommy’s body?” Kit asked.
“What was left of it.”
“And his shoes?”
“Triangles and squares on the soles just like we expected.” Broussard’s gaze went to Tommy’s picture. He looked at it for a few seconds, then said, “Think I’ll stick around for one more night so I can speak to Claude and Olivia in the mornin’. Kit, no need for you and Bubba to stay here, so why don’t you go on home. I’m sure the sheriff will let you mail him a tape of your statement.”
“You’re all welcome to stay the night with me,” Teddy said.
“Thanks, but I’m ready to see my dog and my own bed,” Kit replied. Had Broussard and Bubba not been there, she might have accepted Teddy’s invitation because she had come to see that giving up David for Teddy wasn’t like swapping one old jalopy for another. It was more like trading up. And as far as Teddy’s financial prospects, this was biology, not estate planni
ng.
“I’ll be in New Orleans in a few days,” Teddy said. “Maybe we could have dinner together.”
“Whenever you like, my treat.”
Broussard looked at Kit and his eyes brightened. “Does that mean…”
“As much trouble as I seem to get into, you sure couldn’t save me if I was in Shreveport.”
Despite the sadness Broussard felt about the way the case had worked out for his friends, Kit’s announcement that she would be staying on made him smile.
It took only a few minutes for Kit and Bubba to gather up their belongings and put them in the trunk of Kit’s car. She then offered Bubba the keys. “Do you mind?”
“Anything Ah like better’n drivin’ an airboat, it’s drivin’ a pretty lady home after she been chased with a club,” Bubba said.
Kit turned to Teddy, rose up on her toes, and kissed him lightly on the lips. “Thanks for saving me.” After she got in the car, she rolled down the window and shook her finger at him. “And don’t you dare—”
“Let ’em get behind you,” they said together. “I won’t,” Teddy said. “I promise.”
Kit watched Teddy in the rearview mirror until Bubba turned onto the road out front, then she watched him through the side window until he was no longer visible.
When Kit and Bubba were out of sight, Teddy said, “What about you, Andy? Since you’re staying on, you might as well do it at my place. I just had it fixed up and I’m dying to show off. Kit said you grew up here, so you probably know it, the old Tabor estate?”
Broussard’s eyes rounded in surprise. The Tabor house was the finest in Bayou Coteau, larger even than Oakliegh. “Looks like gators have been good to you.”
“I’d admit to that.”
And so Broussard spent the night a short way from town in a twelve-thousand-square-foot Georgian mansion filled with antique pieces equal to the best he had ever seen at Joe Epstein’s. The next morning after a pleasant stroll around the grounds and a light breakfast, he thanked Teddy for his hospitality and set out to see Claude and Olivia.