Max slapped Roche’s shoulder and walked off.
Wordlessly, Roche continued on toward the rectory. Cyrus, Madge and Sam were ahead of him, and he hated to see Madge hobble. He figured she must have resisted being carried and knew Cyrus wouldn’t push that. Or, given her frame of mind, she wouldn’t let him push it.
He caught up with them. “Madge, have you hurt yourself?” he asked.
“A couple of days ago,” Sam said promptly. “Turned her ankle.”
“You should stay off that,” Roche said.
Cyrus gave him a bleak look. “Yes, she should, but she won’t listen. You know how hardheaded these women can be.”
Madge didn’t respond or look amused. She did visibly cringe when Sam lifted her into his arms before she could protest.
“I didn’t know how bad it was,” Sam said. “Don’t start fussing. I’m carrying you to the rectory.”
A movement caught Roche’s attention: Cyrus lifting his hands and looking at them as if he didn’t know who they belonged to. He glanced up and met Madge’s eyes over Sam’s shoulder. She seemed close to tears.
“What is it?” Roche said, falling in with Cyrus. “With you two? There’s something horribly wrong.”
“Yes,” Cyrus said simply. “God will have to solve it, because I can’t.”
There was nothing Roche could think of to say.
They trudged along through the grayish light beneath a sky streaked with pink and purple. The clouds were brushed into ribbons, and the air still carried a little of the night’s cooler temperatures.
“Spike says Wazoo’s coming to the rectory with something to tell us,” Roche said. “I don’t know how I feel about that. I want to be out there looking for Bleu.”
“I know you do.”
Roche stopped walking. He ran both hands through his hair and searched around. A wild, desperate urgency overwhelmed him. “She never did anyone any harm. Your God wouldn’t let someone do awful things to her, would he?”
“My God is your God,” Cyrus said. He sighed. “For better or worse, He can be a hard master.”
That left Roche with his mouth open. He had no way to answer what he didn’t even understand coming from Cyrus.
When they all approached the rectory, the first person they saw was Lil. She rushed to wrench open the gate and trotted toward them, her hair on end and an apron flapping around her.
“Lil,” Cyrus said, hurrying. “It’s all right. Whatever it is will be all right. Be calm, please.”
“Calm?” She panted. “Calm, you say? You better come now and hurry. There’s men here from the FBI. Me, I never been so frightened. They’re trompin’ all over the house and all around the garden. Now they said we all gotta stay inside. Well, I ran right out, I can tell you. They’re not makin’ me no prisoner.”
“Hush.” Cyrus held her arm and started her back the way she’d come. “Did Wazoo get here yet?”
“Wazoo?” she cried. “Why, Wazoo? There’s a hex! I knew it, there’s a hex on us because we upset someone we shouldn’t have. Wazoo’s comin’ to do for the hex? I don’t know if that girl’s got the strength. She talks a lot, but I don’t know.”
The pastor of St. Cecil’s deserved medals for not lecturing his housekeeper on the dangers of believing in the occult. Roche admired the other man’s control as he plodded toward the side of the house.
They arrived at the back door in a bunch.
Arrived in front of a dark-suited man with a crew cut, old scars from bad skin when he was younger, and a solid body. He held his hands together and dark glasses made him seem impassive. Roche wondered how difficult it was to see in dark glasses at that time of the morning.
The man stood aside and opened the door. “There’ll be questions,” he said, pleasantly enough. “Give your names to the agent inside.”
Roche turned to glance at the garden. Lil had said they were searching that, too. Why would they look at either place, the garden or the rectory? They wouldn’t find Bleu there.
He pinched his mouth shut.
Only two men stood in the garden, at the bottom. One faced the bayou, the other the rectory.
A white van, and then another, larger one, rolled down Bonanza Alley and Roche’s gut squeezed. He knew crime-scene vehicles when he saw them.
He sprinted, went from nothing to an all-out run in seconds.
“Sir,” the agent by the door shouted. “Sir?”
Roche ran on. He figured they wouldn’t shoot him in the back. Both men at the bottom of the garden converged on him when he arrived.
“This is off-limits,” one of them said. “An investigation is under way.”
“Investigation of what?” Roche gauged whether he could get past these two. Neither of them had the brawn of their third man back at the house, but he had no doubt they could stop him.
“We can’t talk about this yet, sir,” he was told. “We’ve got a brand-new development here.”
He noticed activity beside the bayou. Several more uniformed people, male and female, some in white overalls, faced the water, while two of their number hauled on the bow of an abandoned pirogue, pulling it to shore. A rope trailed behind it and had become tangled around a cypress stump.
Unless it had been tied up there.
Inside the shallow boat, he saw what seemed to be a body covered with a tarp.
He absorbed the leap of his heart into his throat and said the first thing he thought of. “I’m a doctor. Perhaps I can help.”
“We’ve already got doctors,” he was told.
“Do you know who’s in the boat?” His mouth had dried out.
“No, sir.”
“It’s likely to be someone local. I could help with the identification.”
Both men’s expressions became uncertain.
“It might not be a body,” he said, voicing aloud a vain hope.
“We’re pretty sure it is. Why don’t you wait right here. We’ll let you know if they want you down there.”
“Sure,” Roche said, opening and closing his hands into fists. He shoved them in his pockets. No point showing these guys he was too personally involved.
“Roche!”
Wazoo, all but overbalancing in her haste to reach him, bounded headlong downhill. Hair and skirts whipped out behind her, and he saw how wild her eyes were, well before she reached him.
He caught her before she would have fallen.
She looked around him toward the pirogue and let out a cry. “I’m too late.” She clutched Roche’s sleeve. “Me, I should have done something sooner. I called Spike this mornin’. He wouldn’t say one thing to me. I know someone’s missing. Who is it?”
He kept a hand on her arm. “Bleu’s gone. She disappeared after you left last night. You didn’t stay long.”
She crammed a hand over her heart. “I couldn’t stay there. I feel this thing coming. Somethin’ happenin’. I went home to…I had to think.”
He dropped his hand. “Just wait,” he said. How could he just wait? Inside, he was freezing up. An ice man with a throbbing heart and pain in his rigid throat.
Instructions were shouted from below. The boat glided to bump against the bank, and people hurriedly guided it alongside.
Roche broke away. He dashed around the agents and vaulted the low hedge between the garden and the path beside the bayou. Shouts from behind him got the attention of those on the bank.
“I’m a doctor,” he said, fighting to compose himself. “Roche Savage. I know most people around here. I might be useful.”
A balding man with fair coloring said, “Hi. Stick around just in case.” He was being polite—but so what? Roche was where he had to be.
Warnings shot through the air. Watch where they trod, watch what they touched, follow protocol to the letter.
As soon as the fair man turned back to his fellows, Roche edged closer, waited, then made a few more inches of progress. He could see as well as anyone who wasn’t actually at the edge of the pirogue.
&
nbsp; The shape inside didn’t have to be a body. Bunched up, the tarp could have been discarded there.
A technician reached out a gloved hand, took hold of the edge of the canvas and eased it first up, then, after glancing back at the other agents, pulled it back.
Roche saw a woman lying there, but one of the men obscured her face.
All attention was on the contents of the pirogue.
“Hoo mama,” Wazoo whispered. “This is one time I wanted to be wrong.”
Carefully, Roche got closer. A shudder crawled his spine.
He cleared the man closest to the woman’s head.
“Sick, sonsabitches,” the same man announced. “Why would anyone do that?”
Roche’s knees locked and he made himself look down on a corpse, the body of what had been a woman. Congealed blood from a hole in her forehead covered her face and neck.
A look at the hair punched all the air from his body. He staggered, but caught himself. Long, very dark hair. Not Bleu’s blond curls.
“No,” Wazoo cried. “It’s Mary Pinney.”
Chapter 41
Birds.
Gabbling, scuffling birds looking at her, getting closer. A ring of them. Screeching.
They were planning to come, planning the way they would attack. Louder and louder. Ready to peck her through the sack, at her ankles, into her stomach to reach the softer insides of her.
Bleu jerked, kicked out her feet and opened her eyes.
Very pale, fuzzy light reached through the sack. She cringed at the thought of those birds. Big and black, buzzards, crows.
Imagining things.
There were birds, but they sang their morning songs, the ones she loved to hear when she was first up. The air felt warm, and dank scents had faded. Someone would find her; she knew it.
Why had the man done this to her? He knew she was here. Once more, her stomach clenched.
Why would someone try so hard to stop the new school from being built?
Bleu tried to blink grit from her eyes.
She hadn’t wanted to visit Kate Harper with Cyrus and Madge. Her mind had been on Roche and what Madge had told her about him.
That day, Kate complained about the prospect of a new school. She’d talked about the fire and the children being killed.
No one in town had ever mentioned those children, but the older people must remember. The memory was too painful. It had to have touched so many families.
Bleu’s exclamation made her retch again.
Building over the place where children had died was the reason. For many, the site must be a place of remembrance. The families—who were they? Where were they? Those poor people had to be talked to, because that’s where the answer to Jim Zachary’s murder would probably be found.
Someone should have brought their pain and horror at the idea of the forgotten children to Cyrus. All of the plans could have been changed.
For someone, anger had turned to a crazed quest for revenge.
Now, she saw it all.
Too late. Jim already died. The grieving relative of a long-ago-lost child had no chance to turn back.
“Bleu!”
She held very still.
“Bleu!” The second voice was different from the first.
They were looking for her, of course they were. She turned her head from side to side, ground her teeth into the gag. Since she’d been left there, she had tried to bite through the cloth and free her mouth. The stuff only sopped in more saliva that ran back into her throat.
“Bleu Laveau. Can you hear me?”
Yes, yes. I’m here.
More distantly, other voices cried out, but she couldn’t make out what they said.
She tried, but no scream came from her.
Her arms were free inside the bag. She should be able to tear it apart. It wouldn’t give, not even a little, because of the tape wound around and around.
They could trace some tapes and find criminals that way.
“Bleu, where are you?”
Here. I’m here. I’m here. Her own shouts got quieter in her mind. They were so tiny they were coming from miles away.
Slashing sounds started. Beating. A whole bunch of people were out there thrashing at whatever was around her, determined to find her. They would.
On her knees, she worked to crawl, but she fell. Her bound ankles didn’t budge, one from the other.
She felt her tears. She felt intense pain where her flesh hadn’t turned numb.
Bleu stayed where she was, facedown and crumpled.
The shouts went on and on.
Then they stopped.
Chapter 42
Later that morning
The body remained in the pirogue.
In the rectory kitchen, Madge, Doll and Lil kept iced tea and sandwiches flowing out to the volunteers who delivered them to gathering points for the searchers.
Roche heard the clatter and voices behind him, but he alternated his attention between looking out the window at the activity by the bayou and poring over lists of areas covered so far.
Cyrus came through the door. “They’re questioning George Pinney, poor man. His wife’s out there like that, and they’re calling him a person of interest.”
“They always look at the husband first,” Roche said absently. He ought to be thinking about Mary more than he was. But as long as Bleu wasn’t found, he didn’t think he’d ever concentrate on anything else.
Exhaustion weighed him down. He pulled out a chair and sat at the table. Heat built steadily, outside and in. The steady production of boiling coffee made the kitchen almost unbearable.
“You’ve got to sleep,” Cyrus told him.
“You haven’t,” Roche said.
Cyrus didn’t answer.
“There’s Spike,” Roche said. The sheriff walked down Bonanza Alley with another man at his side. Roche didn’t know the second person.
“There’s a face I haven’t seen in a long time,” Cyrus said. “Lil, take a look at the man with Spike. Outside. Isn’t that Bill Pelieu from the camp near Homer Devol’s gas station?”
Lil stood on tiptoe to look through the window over the sink. “Uh-huh. It surely is. What would Spike want with him?”
“That’s one of those questions,” Doll said, although she wasn’t smiling. “The ones you don’t expect anyone to answer.”
Roche noted that Madge continued to work without a word. She and Lil came and went regularly, ferrying urns of tea and coffee through the back door to waiting trucks and returning with empties.
“Spike’s out there with Bill Pelieu,” Wazoo said, straggling into the kitchen, her eyes still heavy with sleep. She’d been resting in one of the bedrooms. “What would he want with him? D’you think Bill is—was—someone Mary knew?” Wazoo said.
“Who knows?” Madge said.
Just looking at her made Roche uncomfortable. Whatever was going on between her and Cyrus had better be fixed fast, or both of them would have breakdowns.
“They’re coming back,” Cyrus said. “I’m goin’ to ask. All Spike can do is tell me to get lost.”
He went to meet Spike and Bill. Roche followed.
The breathless heat outside felt balmy in comparison to the kitchen.
The door slammed behind him, and he turned to see Wazoo, a slow-moving version of her usual self, on her way to do what came naturally to her—to see what she could find out.
Spike didn’t look any better than Roche felt. His skin had a gray tinge.
“Hey there, Bill,” Cyrus said to the skinny, dark-haired man with Spike.
“Mornin’, Father,” Bill Pelieu said. He hooked a thumb in the direction of the bayou. “Poor woman. That’s my pirogue back there. Someone took it right outside of my house. Didn’t think I’d ever see it again. Wish I hadn’t now.”
“Thanks, Bill,” Spike said. “The boat’s likely to be kept a long time for evidence.”
“When you don’t need it, burn it,” Bill said, then walked away u
phill.
“I should have told someone,” Wazoo said.
When Roche looked over his shoulder, her eyes were fixed and filled with horror.
“I didn’t want to go to Cashman’s with her,” she continued. “We didn’t find anything, so I forgot about it. She said we should forget it.”
“What is it, Wazoo?” Cyrus asked quietly.
The grind of machinery, loud, full-throttle, blasted out.
“What’s that?” Roche yelled at Cyrus.
Cyrus covered his ears. “I forgot. Doug decided to start leveling the walls of the old school. I tried to talk him out of it, but he said he was going to do it for Bleu, so she’d see things were happening when she got back.”
“I let Mary die,” Wazoo cried, her words barely audible. “It was me—I killed her.”
She flung away and burst from a standstill into a violent dash across the lawn.
Roche heard her sobbing. Wazoo was not a woman to cry, but she wailed. She ran so wildly, she had to stop herself from overbalancing every few strides.
And she skidded from sight at the far corner of the house.
“Cashman’s is that way,” Spike said. “That’s where she’s headed.”
Roche glanced at Cyrus.
“Let her go,” he said. “She needs to run. Sometimes, we need to run.”
“Yes,” Roche agreed. “But she’ll stop when she’s ready. Someone should be there then. Come on.”
He took off after Wazoo. The other men joined him.
Minutes later, Spike said, “That woman, she can move. She’s gonna hurt herself in there.”
The heat alone should have slowed her down. In the tangle of fallen trees with their mantles of slick moss, the brush, sticks, rocks and debris from who knew how many years, Wazoo might have given up, defeated. No, she kept going, jumping, sliding, tearing her skirts away from grabbing twigs, her hair a tossing, black swarm about her head.
Cyrus said, “She’ll do herself a terrible harm.”
“Stop,” Spike cried, gasping for breath. “Wazoo, stand still now. Y’hear me?”
“She doesn’t,” Roche said. The heel of a shoe hit tree slime and he slid. He did windmills and managed to save himself. “Should have let myself fall,” he muttered. Keeping his feet would cost him some painful muscles.
Cypress Nights Page 29