Cypress Nights

by Stella Cameron

  The old tension was there between her and Cyrus. They both remembered Wazoo in time for Madge to see the woman’s knowing stare. Cyrus had to see it, too. She climbed the back steps and pushed her way through the back door with Madge and Cyrus right behind her.

  Madge was a part of his life and he didn’t want to let her go. She had caught him staring at her again, but at least she couldn’t know what he was thinking. He was trying to accept that she would learn to care for someone else. So far he hadn’t started to make peace with the changes that had to come.

  And he never would. He was going to hate any man she let into her life.

  He shut the door, using the moment to calm down.

  Just the three of them, and Bleu, were in the kitchen. Lil had taken Cyrus at his word and gone home for the rest of the day. Bleu usually worked in a small room on the second floor, but it was easier for her to be at the kitchen table as long as the sheriff’s men were swarming over the front of the house.

  As soon as Marty Brock stopped with his questions, Cyrus had driven over to Bleu’s place with her car keys. She had followed him back, insisting she had to work—even though he had seen how her eyes drifted closed from time to time.

  She wasn’t anywhere close to nodding off now. Nobody slept with Wazoo around.

  “Where’s Spike? He over there?” Wazoo peered through a window over the sinks, toward the church.

  “He didn’t get here yet,” Bleu told her.

  Wazoo squinted at her. “There’s somethin’ goin’ on here. No, I don’t mean that you got a corpse in the church or wherever—somethin’ else.”

  “Wazoo!” Bleu dropped her pen.

  “Does that mean you’ve waited long enough for your woo-woo messages to start coming through again?” Madge said.

  Cyrus appreciated her for taking the edge off Wazoo’s comment.

  Undaunted, Wazoo made a smug pout and said, “You keep on makin’ fun, you. I don’t say things I don’t mean. And if I could see what I’ve been tryin’ to see, I’d tell you about it. I’m thinkin’ there’s too much interference from you unbelievers for a hard-workin’ seer to do her job.”

  Cyrus looked at Madge. She pulled a chair out from the big oak table in the window and sat down across from Bleu.

  Wazoo didn’t move, didn’t speak again. She stared through the back window toward Bayou Teche.

  Heavy footsteps sounded on the steps to the kitchen door, and Spike Devol let himself in. A circle from his hatband flattened a line in his dishwater-blond hair. “I got here as fast as I could,” he said. “I was over at Kate Harper’s. I need to talk to you. Are we still waiting for the box to be picked up by forensics? Is it in your office? Something’s—” He stopped when he noticed Wazoo behind Cyrus.

  “Wazoo just arrived,” Cyrus said. “She’s been having one of her feelings and—” He closed his mouth.

  “Is that right?” Spike said sarcastically.

  “The box is still in my office,” Madge said. She got up and walked behind Cyrus. She rubbed his arm as she passed and he swallowed hard.

  Spike had bright blue eyes that folks thought of as friendly. They weren’t too friendly at the moment.

  “That’s right.” Cyrus felt like a man up to his neck in water and trying to walk against a tide.

  “Cyrus is right,” Madge said. “Wazoo senses…She gets feelings.”

  “Have you forgotten I live around here, too?” Spike said. He propped his long, rangy body against a counter. “I do believe I’ve bumped into Wazoo’s feelings before.”

  Spike’s skepticism shone through and Cyrus figured there was almost no point in trying to change the sheriff’s opinion of Wazoo. She’d been right about a number of things in the past, but that didn’t seem to count for much.

  “Annie Savage talked about you,” Bleu said to Wazoo suddenly. “She told me you saved her life once. She wouldn’t say how and neither would her husband. Roche isn’t talking, either, but I could tell they were serious.”

  “What’s the box you got here?” Wazoo asked. “What’s in it?”

  “Official business,” Spike said. “Nothing to interest you.”

  “You one ungrateful, nasty man.” She wagged a long finger at him. “I’ll let myself out.”

  Instead of going toward the back door, she went to the corridor leading to the rest of the house.

  “Quicker for you to go out this way,” Spike said,

  “I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do,” Wazoo said. She walked straight at him without slowing down, and Spike jumped aside. “How come that lovely Vivian married you, I don’t know. How come you got that sweet child, Wendy…well, now there’s another mystery. And now you got another poor little victim. The longer David stays a baby, the better for him. And you don’t respect that father of yours. Homer Devol is a saint.”

  Spike’s dad could be crusty and difficult. A saint, he’d never be.

  “Wazoo,” Bleu said and laughed. “That is so unkind.”

  “I know,” Wazoo said over her shoulder.

  Cyrus went with Spike and followed Wazoo—straight into Madge’s office.

  The surface of the desk had been cleared and covered with white paper. An aura of fine dust hung over the box in its ripped cradle of fancy paper.

  Wazoo stared. She walked a few steps to get a different angle into the box, then stayed where she was.

  “Hey, guys,” Roche Savage said, walking into the room. He saw Wazoo and the box of charred remnants and closed his mouth.

  Cyrus nodded at him. Something about Wazoo convinced him not to say anything else.

  “Was that left on the front step?” Wazoo said.

  “Yes,” Spike said. “We’re trying to find out—”

  “Who put it there?” Wazoo interrupted. “That would be a good idea. Nice thinkin’, Sheriff.”

  She moved determinedly to the box and hauled out a handful of its contents.

  “Don’t do that,” Spike said.

  “I guess I already did. It’s books.”

  “We know,” Cyrus said, warily watching Spike’s furious expression.

  Wazoo calmly opened a little volume, knocking off charred edges as she did so. “School books,” she said. “Little kids’ readers. There’s a picture of angels here. Must have come from the old school right here.”

  Cyrus’s stomach turned.

  Chapter 9

  These were not happy people.

  Roche wished he had arrived later, maybe much later. He had driven past Bleu’s place and seen that her car was gone, then he’d dreamed up an excuse for coming to the rectory.

  “That woman can be a pain in the ass,” Spike said once Wazoo had made her exit. “She just mixes things up.”

  Roche crossed his arms and waited.

  “I need to talk to you,” Spike told Cyrus. He looked at Roche and frowned. “Where did you come from?”

  “Good afternoon to you, too, Sheriff Devol,” Roche said, with a big smile. “I’ve been looking at the Cashman property. Right next to the rectory and the rest of the church’s property, it would get rid of the space problems for new building projects.”

  “Only it doesn’t belong to the church and there’s no money to buy it,” Cyrus said.

  He had chosen the wrong time to drop in. “Yes, well, I’ll leave you two to talk,” he said.

  “You can stay,” Cyrus said, a bit too enthusiastically. “Can’t he, Spike? Unless there’s something he can’t hear, or—”

  “He can stay,” Spike said, his nostrils pinched. “We could use another brain around here. Make sure nothing you hear goes anywhere it shouldn’t.”

  Roche smiled. “Things do seem to be going to hell in a handbasket.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Spike said. “D’you know something I don’t know?”

  “Not about the kind of work you do,” Roche said hurriedly. “It just seems there’s unrest hanging out around here.”

  “Fu—” Spike put a hand over his face, but it did
n’t cover enough of his skin to hide his blush.

  Cyrus patted his shoulder. “This is tough,” he said. “But it isn’t the first time things have been tough in Toussaint.” He raised his eyebrows. “Wazoo said she smelled something.”

  Spike gave a short laugh. “She’s always smelling things. What else is new?”

  “This time it was blood.”

  Roche figured his opinions wouldn’t be welcome. He watched Spike’s reaction and saw plenty.

  “The hell it was,” Spike said, his frown deep enough to rest his eyebrows in a straight line over his nose. “Why would she smell blood? What blood? Don’t tell me she thought she could smell somethin’ from the murder site in the church. If she did, that nose of hers will go to science.”

  “She said this was living blood,” Cyrus said. “Belongs to someone who isn’t dead yet.”

  This time Spike didn’t have a quick answer.

  Madge Pollard’s little dog slunk from beneath the desk, then looked up at Roche with her shiny black eyes. “Was Wazoo suggesting she knows someone else is going to be murdered?” He picked up the dog.

  Cyrus scrubbed at his face. “That had to be what she meant. But sometimes—a lot of the time—I think she says what comes into her head just to hear her own voice.”

  The dog climbed high on Roche’s chest and licked his face. She was into checking out the insides of ears, noses and mouths. Roche wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, but planted a kiss between the critter’s ears just the same.

  “Now Wazoo smells the blood of someone dead while they’re still alive,” Spike said, mostly to himself. “I wish she’d take her feelings somewhere else. What d’you think, Roche?”

  “I didn’t expect to walk into a minefield around here,” Roche said. “I wanted to walk through the Cashman place and see how big it was.” His sneaky way of getting to the rectory and—Bleu—had turned into an idea with possibilities.

  “There’s a lot of property there,” Cyrus said. He didn’t sound interested. “It isn’t even properly staked. I wonder who Mr. Cashman left it to.”

  “The owner shouldn’t be hard to find,” Roche said. He liked Madge’s little Millie. She rested her head on his shoulder and sighed now and then. “Public records would have that information. That parcel is huge. I had no clue.”

  “Do we care?” Spike asked.

  Roche grinned at him. “I think you’ve been taking surly pills, Sheriff.”

  Spike mumbled something, then said, “I went to see Kate Harper today.” He looked at Roche. “Do you know her?”

  Roche said, “No. I don’t think so. Should I?”

  “I don’t know. She’s the woman Ozaire Dupre’s busy painting as the arch villain of the piece. His version of the story is that she murdered Jim—or had him murdered—because he left her everything in his will and she wanted the money.”

  “But you think that’s hogwash?”

  “She’s a decent woman,” Cyrus said before Spike could respond. “I need to visit her again myself. She was widowed young. Never remarried, but she and Jim were good friends.”

  “Real good, apparently,” Spike said. “He’s left everything to her in her will. So she said, anyway.”

  “That’s what Ozaire told us, too,” Roche said.

  Cyrus shook his head. “People will talk. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Ozaire wants to be sure I look into things there,” Spike said, not looking too serious. “She’d never be able to physically attack Jim herself, that’s for sure. And she didn’t like being questioned. She did say something interesting, though.”

  Roche let Madge’s pooch drape herself over his shoulder. He was anxious to see Bleu.

  “She told me to think about unsolved incidents from the past, as she called them. Or I think that’s what she was suggestin’. And there was a lot about how I’m suspicious of her because I’m a man in a man’s world and I’m picking on a poor woman.”

  “What did she mean?” Cyrus asked.

  Spike wrinkled his nose. “Damned if I know. Except she was suggestin’ something happened here in Toussaint that was never sorted out and I ought to figure out what it was. She reckons there’s someone else in town with good reason not to want the school built and Jim Zachary was too enthusiastic about the project for this person’s comfort.”

  “She was suggesting she’s got some knowledge of who killed Jim?” Roche said.

  “Who knows?” Spike said. “That’s the way it sounded, but nothin’ I said would make her open up any more than that.”

  “I can’t imagine what she meant,” Cyrus said. “Could be, she’s just mad and lashing out. It’s not fair for some to suggest she’d get rid of her best friend for his money.”

  “It didn’t make any sense to me.” Spike looked from Roche to Cyrus. “Roche hasn’t been here long enough. Can you think of something I didn’t get to the bottom of, Cyrus?”

  “No,” Cyrus said at once. “Is that all you wanted to ask me about?”

  “For now,” Spike said, sounding irritable. “I’ll get back to you if I come up with something else you might be able to help with.”

  “Fine,” Cyrus said. “Let’s continue this in the kitchen. Madge and Bleu will wonder what’s goin’ on.”

  “I’ll join you once this has been picked up.” Spike indicated the box of burned books.

  Madge met Roche and Cyrus in the doorway to the kitchen, a finger to her lips. “Bleu’s asleep,” she whispered. “Come quietly. I can’t let her stay that way or she’ll never move her neck again, but I don’t want her shocked awake.”

  Cyrus tiptoed just inside, but Roche followed Madge quietly until he saw Bleu, her head and arms resting on top of the kitchen table.

  Her blond hair shone in what was left of the daylight. He moved closer and looked down on her slim neck. Everyone was vulnerable in sleep but she looked especially so.

  Without waiting to see what Madge had in mind, he rubbed Bleu’s back lightly and bent over her. She took a deep breath, turned her face to the side.

  Her eyelashes flickered.

  “Hey, sleepyhead,” he whispered. “You need to be in bed.”

  Her eyes opened. She stared at him without lifting her head. Then jerked upright. “Oh, good heavens,” she said, rubbing her face and running her fingers through her hair. “I must have gone to sleep. How funny.”

  The rest of them laughed. “It might be strange if you’d had any rest in the last almost two days,” Madge said.

  Bleu blinked and concentrated on Roche, which he didn’t mind at all. “You’ve got a friend,” she said, yawning and pointing at Millie.

  He’d gotten used to the dog. “Just giving her a ride.”

  “I’ve got to make coffee for Spike,” Cyrus said.

  “And me,” Bleu said. “I’ll never make it home otherwise.”

  “I’ll take you,” Roche said promptly.

  Bleu gave a lopsided smile. “Thank you, but where I go, my car goes. Leaving it behind last night caused enough trouble.”

  I don’t know how much longer I can wait for you. And it isn’t just more conversation I need.

  “Let me hold Millie,” Bleu said. “I’m going to have a dog one day. Michael never…I couldn’t have one before.” She got up, as if trying to cover her confusion, and stroked Millie.

  He held quite still. This had to be a new beginning for him with Bleu. He would be angelic around her. The thought almost made him laugh. One way or another, she would learn to trust him, and he intended to make sure that was a good idea.

  “Come on, baby,” she said, trying to lift the dog away from Roche.

  Millie didn’t cooperate.

  “You’ll just have to be masterful,” he said, and smiled. If he could keep her close to him a little longer, he’d do whatever it took.

  Cautiously, she looked behind his shoulder to see Millie’s face.

  Roche got a spine-locking brush of Bleu’s breast across his arm—and the soft to
uch of her hair on the backs of his hands.

  “Come on,” Bleu wheedled.

  If he looked up, Roche knew he’d catch Cyrus and Madge watching.

  “I’d better take her,” Madge said. “She embarrasses me. She’s such a little slut.”

  What followed was an example of the pregnant pause before Madge said, “Why would I call her that? I’ve never called anyone that, ever.”

  “I’ll get her,” Bleu said. She held out her hands.

  Millie pulled back a fraction.

  “Be good,” Bleu said. But she gave up on being discreet and lifted the dog. Her hips connected with Roche’s body and he locked his knees. He enjoyed every second.

  “Got you,” Bleu said triumphantly and stepped away—to Roche’s disappointment.

  He glanced at her white blouse, through which he could see the suggestion of a bra that might be pink.

  Anyone who looked at the lower regions of his anatomy would see he was a man in pain.

  He turned away and sat at the far end of the table.

  Cyrus carried mugs of coffee over, and a can of the cashews he was never without. Then he sat down, threw a nut in the air and caught it in his mouth. Roche looked at Madge and grinned.

  He wondered if the two of them realized that their happiest smiles were for each other, that they came alive when they were together.

  And he thought he had problems.

  “So,” Cyrus said. “What are you thinking about—with that Cashman property?”

  Madge slid into a seat and Bleu sat down again, the dog cradled in her arms.

  “I think it should be considered as a location for this new school you want,” Roche said.

  The other three gave him their attention.

  “It doesn’t belong to St. Cecil’s,” Cyrus pointed out. “And we’ve already got a site we can rebuild on.”

  Roche looked at Bleu. “Is there enough room for the school buildings there?”

  “Marc Girard has been advising us,” she said. Marc, married to Dr. Reb, owned an architectural firm in New Orleans. “He’s got all the plat maps and he says we can make a start.”