Faye wondered whether pillow talk, for Steve and Didi, involved brainstorming ways to cheat a young girl of what was rightfully hers.
“That settles it,” she said. “I listened to Amande’s social worker when she said that Louisiana wouldn’t want to place her with someone who lived out-of-state, but there has to be a way to do it. I cannot believe that any sane judge—”
“I told you not to presume any judge is sane.”
“Anyone with a beating heart, then. No one with a heart would put that child with those people. You’re her lawyer. I’ll pay you to find a better place for her to live than with Didi or Steve. Maybe it’ll have to be foster care, but I hope it will be with me. In the meantime, she will not spend another minute aboard that boat with those people. I won’t leave here until I’ve found someone to keep her until things are settled. If Didi tries to make trouble with the child services people, well then, it’ll be time for Amande’s lawyer to explain to them just how unfit she really is.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m sure there’s an ethical loophole that’ll let me do an end run around my client and her guardian. I’ll get right on it.”
***
The phone was still in Reuss’ hand when the knock on his door sounded. Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth’s husband stood outside, looking confident and trustworthy and altogether suitable as a father for his favorite client. He also looked like someone who had just made a decision.
The man didn’t seem to be a big talker, but he knew how to make his point. After shaking hands and saying hello, he said, “Faye and I have to go home to Florida. My wife will not rest if she thinks Amande isn’t being taken care of. I want you to do whatever it takes to get the state of Louisiana to name us as her guardians. Or foster parents. Or adoptive parents, I don’t care. It don’t make a hill of beans to me what people call us. She’ll be treated the same as our own. Bet on that.”
“Have you talked to your wife about this?”
“I wanted to ask you whether it was even possible before I did. It ain’t like I don’t know what she’s gonna say.”
Reuss nodded to concede that obvious point. “It’ll take time.”
“I figured that. Will the girl have to stay with her no-good aunt until we get this thing worked out?”
“She may have to go into foster care, unless we can find friends or family willing to take her.”
“I have some ideas about that. Let me do some talking around.”
Reuss watched the man open the leather bag hanging at his waist. He saw a couple of hand-chipped stone tools, a roll of fishing line, a small plastic box of fishing hooks, and a plastic bag of nuts and dried fruit. This guy was a fisher and a hunter, and Reuss wagered that neither he nor his family would ever starve. Again, not a bad father for his favorite client.
The big man held out a business card as he left, saying nothing more than, “Keep me posted on what I need to do to help this thing along.”
Reuss studied the name on the card. Joe Wolf Mantooth. It suited him.
It had taken the two archaeologists a while to jump into instant parenthood. It interested him that they’d done it without consulting one another, but with the calm confidence that the other spouse would back the decision. Reuss knew his wife would shoot him dead if he came to her and said, “Honey! I decided we needed eight kids, so I brought another one home to go with the seven we’ve already got! Here she is!” but he’d come close to doing that today, because Amande Landreneau deserved better than the things life had dealt her so far.
By taking Amande before he did, Faye Longchamp-Mantooth and her husband may just have saved his life.
***
Faye wasn’t a list-maker, because she tended to lose the lists once she made them. Closing down their temporary business office in south Louisiana was a task complex enough to require a list, so she’d forced herself to make one.
The list depressed her. The oil encroaching on Joyeuse Island depressed her. The necessity of leaving Amande depressed her heavily. The thought of leaving the site work in the hands of contract employees who had not shown themselves to be self-starters—this thought was infuriating, but it was also the only one of her problems that she could attack directly. She needed to go find a couple of her sometimes-competent workers and put the fear of God into them.
“Guess what we’re doing this afternoon!” she burbled to Michael. “We’re going on a boat ride.”
“Boat!” he said, showing off the third word he’d learned, after “Dah” and “Mah.”
She had two sites to the southwest, and they were being surveyed by two of her weakest contract workers. She thought a surprise visit from corporate management was just the thing those two employees needed to gain a healthy respect for deadlines and quality work.
Faye also thought she needed a boat ride more than she needed air.
It was way quicker to get to those sites by boat than by car, so she had an excuse for that boat ride. Even better, the time would be billable to the client. If she spent the afternoon jerking a knot in her lazy staff, she could spend the next morning closing down the cabin and returning the boat and still be at home on Joyeuse by bedtime.
Sometime in the next twenty-four hours, she would need to say good-bye to Amande, but that thought made her want to eat a bag of jelly beans. This meant there’d be none left for bribing Michael, if she got desperate on the car trip. Maybe that was a good thing, because she might indeed go to Mother’s Hell if she stooped that low.
***
“A-mah!” Michael said, as they walked across the parking lot and veered left toward the rental boat without stopping at the houseboat.
Faye didn’t think she could talk to Amande without crying. Maybe she’d be able to manage it after she’d spent an afternoon on a boat, skimming between the sky and the Gulf. Besides, she needed to talk to Joe before she committed to making Amande a part of their family. She knew he would agree, but the capriciousness of the law scared her. Some judge she’d never met was going to decide whether Amande came to live with them, and when. She had to trust that it would happen, all in good time.
“We’ll see Amande when we get back,” she said.
Michael expressed his feelings about leaving Amande behind by starting a quiet but continuous whining in the back of his throat. The noise had the potential to cost Faye what was left of her sanity. She walked even faster, hustling him along, because she knew that the boat motor would drown out the noise.
In minutes, he was in his life jacket and Faye was in one of the happiest places she knew, in command of a boat.
***
Amande had been putting off her statistics exam for a week. She wasn’t dreading it because it was hard. She was dreading it because statistics was mindless and boring.
She’d also been putting it off because playing with Michael was fun, and the tests took so frickin’ long. The school system was dead-set that all students experienced a full quotient of misery before earning their credits, so the test was timed. Even if you could finish it in twenty minutes, you had to sit at the computer until the two-hour clock ran out, occasionally poking a button that signaled to the computer that you were still sitting there, suffering.
Amande had long since finished the test and checked her work, so she was now in the button-poking-and-suffering stage. She’d passed the time so far by eating a sandwich and part of a big bag of barbecue-flavored potato chips, but a girl could only eat for so long.
Didi poked her head in the bedroom door. “I’m going to the Social Security office again to see what it’ll take to get us some help. We need those checks to start coming in now, not next year.”
Amande poked the button and told her statistics test that she was still alive. “Good luck with that,” she said, without looking up.
Didi gave being maternal a shot. “You’ll have the house to yourself while I’m gone. Try not to mess it up any worse than it already is. Even better, why don’t you run the vacuum?”
“With Tebo on
the couch and Steve in your bedroom, this place isn’t ever going to be all neat and tidy. Somebody needs to take out the trash.”
“Very funny. For your information, Tebo is nowhere in sight and Steve went fishing. It’d be nice if he caught something. There’s no downside to eating supper for free.”
Amande stifled the urge to point out that catching the fish would cost Steve something, in terms of boat fuel, and that cooking it would cost Didi something, in terms of propane for the stove. She just stared at her computer screen and waited Didi out. Soon enough, her aunt walked away and left her alone.
***
Faye’s first stop had been so short that Michael had slept through it. She’d just needed to pilot the boat down a narrow bayou to a barely discernible shell midden, where she had politely asked her field tech why in the hell it was taking him two days to walk the site and take some pictures. Once she’d finished terrorizing the young man, she had eased the boat back down the bayou. Mission accomplished.
The next stop would actually be fun. There were two contract employees working at that site, and they weren’t lazy. They were just young, inexperienced, and burdened with a site so interesting that it was freaking them out. Faye had sent one of them to check out the site of an old lighthouse that was probably long-gone, but a quick walkover of the surrounding land had uncovered potsherds from the time of European contact, a chunk of English pottery from the eighteenth century, and a piece of glass that just might be a rum bottle from the early nineteenth century. Faye figured a personal visit and a pep talk would keep them focused.
She also figured that there was no harm in taking Michael swimming at the conveniently located spit of light brown sand just a few feet away. She was sure that thirty minutes in the water was all that she needed to restore her sanity. Pretty sure.
***
As Faye puttered down the bayou that led away from the first site, she checked her phone’s connection periodically, waiting for Joe to notice that she’d left him a message. The man was hopeless with technology less than five hundred years old. His phone was probably resting in his pocket, dead, and it would remain that way until he wanted to use it. After they’d had a chance to discuss things, she’d go talk to Amande.
Faye tried to remember whether she’d brought a dress on this trip. And makeup. It felt wrong to say, “Would you join our family?” while wearing shorts and flip-flops. But what if Amande didn’t recognize the heavily made-up woman asking to be her mother?
What had Amande’s real mother looked like, anyway? Faye had never even seen a picture of her or of the grandfather who had left behind the property causing all this trouble. Justine had been no relation to Miranda. The faceless woman hadn’t been related to thin and homely Tebo or to fat and homely Hebert, either. Didi and Amande were her only blood relatives that Faye had ever met. They were both inordinately pretty, so Faye pictured Justine as being fine-boned and elegantly built, like her daughter and half-sister. But was she brunette like they were? Was she tall like Amande or petite like Didi?
Following the branches of Amande’s family required more mental effort than Faye wanted to exert right this minute, not while she was preparing to complicate her own family tree. She wondered whether they themselves remembered how they were related. Or how they weren’t related. Miranda’s death had drawn lines in the family that might have been forgotten.
Before Miranda died, had it really mattered to any of them that Didi was only Amande’s half-aunt, or that Miranda’s sons had been her stepuncles and not her uncles? And Steve, who had only known as much about these people as his dead wife had told him—he must be dizzied by the effort of keeping everything straight. The law was now making those distinctions very important, financially.
Joe had given her a priceless description of Steve, doing a doubletake at Tebo’s casual revelation that Steve’s wife Justine had left behind an abandoned child. Then she remembered the impact of that information in terms of cold, hard cash. Amande’s very existence was going to cost Steve money when Miranda’s estate was settled. So was Didi’s.
As Faye neared the mouth of the bayou, she cut back on the throttle, hoping that quieting the engine would help her concentrate. Who had Steve known about? He’d known about Miranda, surely, and about her usufruct on the houseboat and stock. How else would he have known where to bring Justine’s will? And how else would he have known that he’d have a stake in the boat and stock when she died?
Hebert. He’d known about Hebert, because he’d said that Justine had told him Hebert was a wonderful brother. This must sting for Tebo, since his dead stepsister seemed never to have mentioned his name to her husband. Justine seemed to have been a person who didn’t just cut ties with a loved one. She amputated that loved one from her life. Thanks to Justine’s habit of severing ties, Steve had known about Miranda and Hebert, and that was all.
Faye cut the motor and let the boat float in the motionless spot where the bayou opened its mouth into Barataria Bay. She knew why Hebert was dead.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The computer asked Amande, again, whether she was still there. Amande responded in the affirmative. Her body was trapped at this desk, but there was nothing to keep her eyes from wandering to the calm blue water outside her window.
Her hand moved toward the basket on her desk. She reached in and fingered the artifacts she’d spent her childhood collecting. Smooth, sharp-edged, chipped stone. Chunks of old pottery shaped by the fingers of long-dead men and women. Why did she love these things so? Her hand went to the empty space at the back of the drawer where the old Spanish coins had rested in their box. They were gone, like her grandmother, like her dream of meeting her mother. Like everything, soon enough.
She pulled the brass sextant out of its drawer and rested it on the palm of her hand, wondering why it didn’t tell her which direction she should take. Oddly enough, it was pointing at the door when the knock came.
There were precious few people to whom Amande would have opened that door. Faye and Joe, surely. Manny, probably. Didi and Tebo, yes, but only because they were kin.
Dane Sechrist, with his well-scrubbed face and shy grin, was on that short list of people whom Amande instinctively trusted. She opened the door.
***
It wasn’t easy, holding onto her cell phone with one hand and hanging onto a child who had suddenly decided he needed to go swimming with the other. Sometimes, Faye missed regular old phones, with receivers that could be pinched between shoulder and ear, leaving both hands free.
Benoit was being obtuse.
She tried explaining her conclusions again. “What do you mean, you don’t follow me? Don’t try to disentangle all those family ties and all the inheritance laws. They’re too confusing, and they’ve kept us distracted from a motive for murder that’s not all that complicated. Greed.”
“We’ve suspected that all along. The trouble is that all these people are greedy.”
“Forget ‘all these people.’ Just concentrate on what Steve knew when he came to town. He knew that Justine’s stepmother Miranda had the lifetime use of most of his wife’s estate. He knew he’d be waiting to collect his inheritance until Miranda died but, when she did, he’d be set for life with monthly income and, if he played his cards right, a free place to live. He knew he was going to have to share that income and home with the other heirs, but it was still a sweet deal. Now tell me this. Who did he think those other heirs were?”
Benoit sat silent for a second. “He knew about Justine’s ‘wonderful brother’ Hebert. It doesn’t sound like Justine explained that he wasn’t her brother by blood. He would have thought that Hebert was another heir, and the only one, because he didn’t know about Amande, Didi, or Tebo. Are you saying that he came to town to kill Miranda, so that he’d inherit the boat and oil stock, but believing that Hebert also had a claim on it?”
Good. He’d understood her first major point. Onward.
“I am,” she said. “But he couldn’t ki
ll just Miranda, unless he wanted the goods to be divided between him and Hebert. Hebert needed to go, as far as Steve was concerned. I think it’s significant that Hebert went first, before Miranda, to keep his heirs from showing up and wanting a cut.”
“I’m not sure that makes a difference. If Hebert had left heirs, they’d have been entitled to his claim on Miranda’s stuff, anyway.”
“I know, but that concept is a little sophisticated for Steve, don’t you think?” Faye could see that getting this lawman to stop focusing on the letter of the law was going to be tough. “That’s what I keep telling you. We’ve been thinking about this all wrong, worrying about the fussy details of inheritance. It’s isn’t important what the law says, or what the truth is. The important thing is what someone of Steve’s limited intelligence believed at the time of the murders. I believe he thought that taking out Hebert left him as the lone person holding a claim on Miranda’s stuff after she died…I mean, after he killed her.”
“So you think he killed Hebert by mistake?”
Now Faye felt like she was getting somewhere. “Yes.”
“Then why’d he go ahead and kill Miranda, after he found out that he was going to have to share the houseboat and stock with Didi and Amande? Was he going to kill them, too?”
“Maybe. But by then he’d seen Didi. Steve is dumb and dangerous, the kind of person who puts other people into just two groups: opportunities and obstacles. A pretty woman who owns a big chunk of the property he’d like to control would be a fairly irresistible opportunity for someone like Steve. Romancing her, promising her money and a place to live and security…wouldn’t that be a good way to control Didi? Even better, this pretty woman is the only likely candidate to get custody of the girl who owns the rest of her mother’s estate. Together, Steve and Didi could live on easy street, partially funded by a sixteen-year-old girl.”
“You think her judgment is that poor.”
Faye thought he must be kidding, but she indulged him by answering the question. If she hadn’t had unlimited minutes on her cell phone, she would have skipped the answer and just laughed at him.
Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series) Page 23