Whispers of the Bayou

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “Yeah. Whatever. Hurry up.”

  When I reached the top of the stairs, I tried to look around not as a grown woman, but as a little girl in her nightgown in the middle of the night. Why hadn’t I been scared? Why had I done this? Was this a good place or bad? I just didn’t know.

  The others reached the floor behind me as I strode quickly across the room to the front window, which was cracked but still intact. Our main gunman, though he held Lisa as leverage, was really interested only in me. With a strong hold on Lisa, he watched me and waited.

  “Not high enough,” I whispered as I stood at this window, looking out above the crack. “I couldn’t see from here. I had to go higher that night.”

  From this floor to the next were not stairs but a ladder that led to what looked like a loft. The equipment was gone from up here too, leaving the sides of the loft completely unprotected. As I reached the top, I wanted to run across the room to the window to see out, but the floor was littered with limbs and leaves and pine straw, which I was afraid might also hide snakes or rats or raccoons. Looking up at the dark ceiling, I had no doubt bats were there as well.

  “Keep going,” Jimmy prodded.

  Deciding I’d rather take my chances with a snake than a gun—though both could be fatal—I carefully picked my way through the rubble to the opening where the window used to be. There I stood and looked out over the yard, trying to imagine the scene by moonlight rather than sunlight.

  Something wasn’t right about the way things were laid out. Some buildings were missing, and others were in all the wrong places. Still, imagining the dark, moonlit landscape from this perspective, I suddenly knew without question that I had seen Willy Pedreaux digging in the ground directly below and in front of this window, right in the middle of the green, grassy lawn.

  “Right there,” I said, pointing. “About twenty feet back from that magnolia tree. That’s where he was. That’s where he dug that night.”

  As I made that statement, my mind was filled with an incredible sense of relief, which was followed immediately by regret and self-recrimination. I shouldn’t have been so quick to tell them! Now we were all expendable, not to mention that now they would be able to find the angelus and steal it away while we were being held prisoner up here.

  “Out in the middle of the yard?” Jimmy asked, seeming not only skeptical but angry as well.

  “I thought you said he buried it under the canning shed,” one of the goons blurted.

  “Well, there ain’t no canning shed right there, now is there?” Jimmy screamed in return.

  “There used to be.”

  We all turned to look at Richard. “The canning shed used to be right there,” he continued. “It got blown over there by Katrina. Nobody ever bothered to have it moved back.”

  That seemed to be what Jimmy wanted to hear.

  “That’s been our mistake!” he said, the rage on his face turning to joy. “We had the correct building, all right, we just didn’t know the building got moved. You, start digging. You, tie them up first.”

  One man left while the other forced us to sit on the floor in the middle of the room. He pulled out a roll of duct tape and used it bind our wrists and ankles together, first Richard, then AJ, then me. When he was finished, he headed down the ladder to join the other in the digging outside.

  I glanced up at Jimmy, who was pointing the gun at Lisa but watching out the window at the activity below. I tried to make eye contact with Lisa, but she looked nearly out of it, her eyes cast down toward the ground. My hope was that if the men outside actually struck gold, so to speak, the surprise of the moment would distract Jimmy enough that somehow we could take advantage of the moment and get ourselves free. Still, there was no play at my hands or ankles with this duct tape. Unless we had a knife or something else sharp to work with, we would never be able to get loose.

  “What on earth could Willy have buried that was worth all of this?” Richard demanded suddenly. “He was just a poor Cajun caretaker.”

  I looked at AJ, but before we could think of an answer, Jimmy told us to be quiet.

  Suddenly, from outside came a cheer and I knew they had found what they were looking for. A walkie-talkie crackled to life at Jimmy’s waist.

  “Yeah? Over.”

  “We’ve struck something. Over.”

  “Is it what we’re looking for? Over.”

  “Give us a few. Still digging. Over.”

  My mind raced, wondering how we could ever turn the tide here before it was too late.

  “Well?” Richard demanded, looking at me. “What on earth did Willy have that he buried in our yard?”

  In a flash, I remembered the cut on my father’s head, the one I had seen just a while ago near the house. It had disturbed me, but it wasn’t until now, with him talking about Willy, that I realized why: According to the police, Willy’s killer had cut his head on the barbeque grill when grabbing the lighter fluid!

  Had Richard killed Willy?

  He hadn’t even been on the list of suspects, hadn’t even been tested for DNA—because he hadn’t arrived until after Willy was dead. Or at least that was how he had made things appear. In truth, who knew when he had flown in—or what he had been doing before we ever saw him here?

  Could the man I had always thought was my father actually have killed someone?

  Yes, I heard my own mind say. He has killed before.

  I closed my eyes as the memories, old memories, chose to come flooding back.

  I thought of my twin sister, Cass, so brave, too brave.

  Brave enough to try and stop our parents from fighting again.

  We were both crying, but she was the one who ran into the hall, begging them to stop. She was the one who was tugging on Mommy’s robe, crying for them to quit it.

  She was the one who got in the way when Daddy hit Mommy.

  She was the one who fell—fell down the stairs.

  The one whose neck broke when she hit the bottom.

  I didn’t tell. I never told anyone I saw. I just got back in my bed and waited for morning, when Cass would come back to our room and everything would be okay. Only she didn’t come back.

  It wasn’t okay.

  My eyes opened wide, staring at the man I had always thought of as my father.

  He killed my sister! It may have been an accident, but it had happened in anger, as he struck at the woman I thought was my mother and hit my twin sister instead.

  Could a man who killed once accidentally kill again on purpose?

  Suddenly, I knew what I had been doing out here that night so long ago.

  It wasn’t much later, maybe three days, maybe a week. Again, my parents were fighting, but this time Cass wasn’t around to try and make them stop. I was too scared to try, so I waited in my room, listening and hiding.

  Then finally the fight ended and there was movement. I heard them leaving, heard both of my parents going down the stairs, leaving me there alone.

  I was scared to be there alone without Cass to protect me.

  So I followed.

  Down the stairs, through the house, out to the yard, my mother so weak she could barely stand, my father strongly supporting her the whole way.

  They kept walking into the night and I wanted to follow but I was scared, so scared that they would get mad at me if they saw me, scared my father would hit me the way he hit Cass and I would fall down dead too.

  So I went to the big building instead, the sugar house. I loved it there, loved to look at the machinery, loved to see the fine powder of sugar on the floors. I raced up the scary stairs to the second floor window, where I could see them as they walked toward the garden. But they had disappeared behind the shed.

  Quickly, I had climbed up the ladder to the third floor, raced to the big window, and looked out at the yard in the moonlight. From there, from so high, I could see better, I could see nearly everything: my parents behind the shed, still walking toward the garden. Then I saw Willy, who was digging wit
h a shovel nearby, on the ground next to a blue tarp, in the place where a building was just about to be built. Why was he digging in the middle of the night?

  He must have been doing something wrong, I thought, because when he saw my parents coming, he dropped that shovel and hid behind a tree. Soon, I couldn’t see my parents anymore. Only Willy, still hiding. I waited, trying to decide what to do, when finally my father came back.

  He came back alone.

  He went to the house and I came down the ladder and then the stairs, not sure which way to go. Check on my mom? Follow my dad? Finally, I heard crying, so I went that way. The crying sound was coming from Willy. He was looking up at Mom, who was hanging from a tree. She wasn’t moving.

  She was dead.

  I didn’t want to get in trouble, so I went back to the house.

  I went to my room.

  I crawled into my bed.

  I pretended I hadn’t seen, hadn’t heard, hadn’t hurt.

  I pretended so hard that soon I forgot completely.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Multitudinous echoes awoke and died in the distance,

  Over the watery floor, and beneath the reverberant branches;

  But not a voice replied; no answer came from the darkness;

  And when the echoes had ceased, like a sense of pain was the silence.

  I looked over at Richard, who was sweating profusely, chafing against the tape that bound his hands and wrists. Jimmy had dragged Lisa to the front window, where he stood watching the action on the ground far below.

  “You killed Cass,” I whispered incredulously. “I saw it. I saw it with my own eyes!”

  AJ gasped, spinning to look at Richard in horror.

  “You went to hit my mother,” I said, my eyes on him but my mind vividly in the past, “and instead ended up knocking Cass down the stairs by mistake. You killed her. I saw you do it.”

  The man who was so handsome for his age, so tall and commanding, looked back at me, his expression one of exaggerated disdain.

  “You’re nuts, do you know that? No one would believe a ridiculous story like that.”

  Across the room, Jimmy’s walkie-talkie crackled at his waist.

  “All right. We got a good look. Over.”

  “Is it the bell? Over.”

  “Not even close. Looks like…”

  “Looks like what? Over.”

  “Bones. Looks like old bones. A human skeleton. Over.”

  Bones! Just like the bone Tess found nearby, the one that we turned into the police. My stomach clenched in terror. Could someone who had lived here in the past have been some sort of serial killer? Were bodies buried everywhere out there? Or was there just one body, whoever it was, and the bone we found had come from the same source?

  Again, the voice crackled to life.

  “Looks like they were in a wooden box at some point, but the box is all busted up. Wait, there’s something carved in the lid.”

  We waited and then the voice came through again.

  “It’s not carved exactly. It’s like a handmade sign. The letters are burned in—you know, like with a woodburning kit?”

  “Woodburning? Like they do in cub scouts? Over.”

  “Yeah, I wasn’t never no cub scout. Over.”

  Jimmy rolled his eyes.

  “What’s it say? Over.”

  “Hold on. It says, ‘Let us bury him here by the sea…when a happier season brings us again to our homes from the unknown land of our exile… then shall his sacred dust be piously laid in the churchyard.’ What’s that mean? Over.”

  Everyone was quiet for a moment, but my mind was racing. I knew that quote. It was from something I had read just recently, maybe Evangeline, the fictional poem set against the true backdrop of Cajun history. I tried to remember where it had come in the story and what it meant.

  “Keep digging,” Jimmy said finally. “Get those bones out of there and dig deeper. See if there’s anything underneath. Over.”

  We all waited for what felt like an eternity until the voice crackled through again.

  “Sorry, boss. Nothing under all those bones except dirt. Over.”

  Jimmy cursed loudly, kicking at some of the refuse for emphasis and sending several giant roaches scampering for cover. Still dragging Lisa, he marched furiously over to us and pointed the gun at my head.

  “You lied,” he hissed.

  “I didn’t lie. I said I had a memory of Willy digging in the middle of the night. I never said I saw him burying the bell.”

  He seemed to consider my words as the walkie-talkie crackled again at his waist.

  “What do we do now, boss? Over.”

  Jimmy was silent for a moment, thinking, then he lifted it to his mouth, pushed the button, and spoke.

  “Go get the equipment. We’ll rip up the whole yard if we have to until we find it. Over.”

  I was hoping Jimmy would leave us to ourselves for a while as they embarked on the next part of their search. If he did, we just might be able to escape. Amid all of this rubble, surely there was something sharp we could use to cut ourselves free if we had some time unobserved.

  “Liars have to die,” Jimmy said, still holding the gun to my head.

  AJ moaned and whimpered beside me, begging him to spare my life, but I wasn’t going to beg. I wasn’t going to cry. All these years of feeling disconnected and separate from everyone else in the world had prepared me for this moment. I looked up at him, oddly numb, and tried to reason with him instead.

  “What makes you think it’s buried here at all? Willy could have hidden that thing almost anywhere.”

  “Oh, it’s here somewhere,” he said. “That’s why he got a life estate from your grandmother—so he could protect the angelus for as long as he lived.”

  “Fine, then,” I replied, wondering how he knew that, “even if it’s here somewhere, how do you know it’s in the yard and not in the house? How do you know it’s not behind the walls of this building or buried under the garage or bricked into a fireplace? There are too many places to look. You’d have to burn the whole house and every surrounding building down to find it—but you wouldn’t dare, because a fire like that could damage the bell as well.”

  “Sorry,” Jimmy replied smugly, “but I know some things you don’t. Your tattoo has a code. Every guardien wears a tattoo in case something happens to them and the next guardien needs to find the bell. Just by where they placed it on your body, we know that the bell is buried underground, not hidden above. From the curve on the bottom of the bell, we know it’s underneath some structure, not buried somewhere out in the open. And from the whirls of the cross, we even have an approximate latitude and longitude. Trust me, we’re very close to getting our hands on it. ”

  All of that information—and I had been carrying it around on my head since I was a little girl? Unbelievable!

  “We’ve got a backhoe waiting up the road. My guys will have it back here in fifteen or twenty minutes and start digging in every single place where each of these buildings used to stand. The bell had to have been buried underneath one of them. Eventually it’ll turn up. In the meantime, I’m sorry to say, you’re of no more use to us. Sadly, the world will learn tomorrow how you and your aunt were accidentally trapped up here in the sugar house when an old gasoline can ignited downstairs. How tragic that you both burned to death.”

  I glanced at Richard, wondering what fate Jimmy had in mind for him.

  “You, however, might get a little reprieve,” Jimmy added, poking a foot at Richard. “If I untie your legs and take you downstairs, can you show me every spot where a building used to stand before Katrina came and messed things all up?”

  Richard looked at AJ and me and then back up at our captor.

  “Yes, I remember where they all were. I’ll show you if you promise to let me go.”

  “Of course,” Jimmy replied, though I couldn’t imagine that anyone there believed him.

  Releasing the traumatized Lisa from his grasp, Ji
mmy handed her a pocketknife, instructing her to use it to cut Richard’s feet free. She did as he instructed, her hands shaking so badly that I was afraid any moment she might accidentally cut into his skin too. I kept trying to catch her eye, to let her know somehow that as long as she was holding a knife, she had a chance to overpower Jimmy and help us all break free.

  “I can’t go down the ladder with my hands taped,” Richard said, and reluctantly Jimmy had to admit that was true.

  “Go ahead, Lisa. Cut his hands free too. But if you try anything stupid, mister, I will not hesitate to shoot you.”

  “I believe you.”

  I wasn’t sure what it was about that moment that caused the situation to reframe itself in front of my eyes. Maybe it was the way Jimmy said Lisa’s name, or the glance she gave him, or the simple mathematics of how many were going to die here and how many were supposed to live. What of Lisa? I understood why Jimmy was sparing Richard for now, but why wasn’t Lisa going to be a victim of the same “accidental” fire that he intended to use to kill me and AJ? Lisa wasn’t going to die, I suddenly realized, because Lisa was in on this with Jimmy.

  Lisa, the actress.

  Lisa, the girl who had grown up in Cajun country and had probably been hearing that particular myth her whole life.

  Lisa, who took a job here with Willy and somehow found out that the myth was true—and that he was the gardien.

  Lisa, the voice of the woman who called the museum to learn more about the myth of the angelus.

  Lisa, the one who had managed to find out a lot but still hadn’t quite found that hiding place.

  At the moment that Richard’s hands were free, I knew I had to do something.

  “Grab Lisa!” I yelled to him. “She’s in on it with him!”

  Fortunately, Richard moved fast, reacting almost instantly to my words. He had probably been planning to make some sort of move as soon as his hands were loose anyway, but the news I supplied allowed him to make that move count. In one strong swoop, he managed to twist Lisa’s arm behind her back, grab the knife from her hand, and point it at her throat.