by C. L. Bevill
“What?” asked Jourdain, thinking that the sooner he was out of the St. Michel mansion, the better. He never liked to come to this place at night anymore. Too many strange things seemed to happen.
“That she should be the daughter of the whore my father ran off with, and here she is invited to dinner so many years later.”
Jourdain smiled, thinking about how life really held no surprises. “Interesting, yes. But, perhaps a little too coincidental.”
Geraud looked surprised. “You think she’s come back deliberately, in order to accomplish something? Christ, as if the tabloids need any more ammunition. My business is suffering enough as it is.”
“Why else would she be here?”
“But for what? Her mother’s long gone to God knows where. My father probably dumped her years ago. And what did we ever do to her?”
Jourdain didn’t respond. Finally Geraud said, “I’ll have my man drive you home, old man.”
“Thanks, Geraud. Thanks for an evening I won’t forget anytime soon.” His tone of voice was far from grateful.
Geraud muttered under his breath as he went back up the stairs to the front door. He was praying that Eugenie didn’t have another one of her episodes, triggered by his mother’s insane need to participate in these silly little “discernments.” Especially after what happened tonight. What did happen tonight? he asked himself silently.
MIGNON WAS ASKING herself the same question not very far down the road. After she had passed through a dark and silent La Valle, she realized that she was being followed. Try as she might, she couldn’t see enough of the vehicle behind her to tell what kind of make and model it was, except that the headlights seemed as big as moons and never wavered in their pursuit of her. She had never dreamed that returning to this place would cause such an uproar, but it had. Someone felt threatened enough not only to search her room at the bed and breakfast, but to follow her down a dark road.
It was, recognized Mignon, a very dark road indeed. She hadn’t passed anyone, and no one would see what might happen to her.
Red and blue lights began to flash behind her, and Mignon realized that it was John Henry tailing her. She wasn’t sure about the feelings that coursed through her body. She knew that whoever ransacked her room had wanted her to take it as a warning. After all, why should they kill her if they could simply scare her off first?
She pulled her car over to the side of the road, leaving the engine and lights on. She even reached down and turned on the emergency lights. Then her hand reached to the side of the seat and found the canister of pepper spray she had put there for this very reason. One finger released the safety catch.
The police vehicle pulled up behind her, and the door opened. She watched from the side view mirror as John Henry approached her car with his hands at his sides.
He leaned down to her partially open window and said, “Turn off your engine, please.”
Mignon stared at him. He was still wearing his suit and tie and his carefully neutral expression. His hands were clearly visible at his sides; no threatening weapon was held there. She was glad the door was locked and the window wasn’t open wide enough for him to stick a hand inside. “Are you arresting me, John Henry?
He stared at her. She was getting quite used to people staring at her, but his was a discerning gaze, full of mechanisms working in his head, figuring out exactly what she was about. Finally he sighed. “Just turn off the engine and your lights and get out of the car, Mignon.”
There was that fire between them. He didn’t seem like someone who wanted to drag her off to the bayou and throw her dead body into it. But then, that’s what they had said about Ted Bundy. John Henry’s whole demeanor was that of reluctant obligation. He was doing something that he didn’t care to be doing, but it wasn’t going to be something illegal.
She turned off the engine, but left the emergency lights on. Then she took her seat belt off, opened her car door, and gracefully stood up, one hand carefully concealing the little canister of pepper spray. He motioned to his side, where he could watch her. “Stand right here.”
Mignon stepped to that position, warily keeping her eyes on him. He went to her car and started rummaging through her purse, all the while keeping her in the corner of his eye. Then he looked under her seats, in the glove box, and in the back seat. Finally, he took the keys and looked in the trunk. He lifted up her large leather portfolio and thumbed through a stack of unframed canvases with a blank look on his face. With another sigh, he turned to her and said, “Where is it?”
Pretending to be puzzled, Mignon asked, “Where is … what?”
“The ice pack in your purse?” John Henry questioned. “I don’t know how you bumped the table, but you had to have something in your purse to make your hands cold, and it’s got to be here, because you didn’t stop on your way from the St. Michel mansion.”
“You think I did those things? That I faked being cold somehow? That I made the table raise up and drop?” Mignon couldn’t help it. She laughed. Then she laughed harder. “And I thought you were pulling me over to kill me.” All the while she laughed, she thanked God that she had punctured the bag of blue ice and flushed the plastic down the toilet at the St. Michel mansion before she had left.
Chapter Eight
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11–SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12
Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home,
Your house is on fire, and children will burn.
LADYBUG, LADYBUG
JOHN HENRY STARED AT the sight of Mignon laughing for a long moment and couldn’t help a brief smile from curling across his lips, even while he silently questioned what exactly was so funny. Finally he asked, “Why don’t we have a little talk?” but it really wasn’t a question.
Mignon dabbed at the corners of her eyes with the back of her fingers to wipe away the tears, and asked, “So you can ask more about my nefarious past? About the time I robbed the crown jewels from the Tower of London? Or perhaps when I assassinated JFK in Dallas?”
John Henry smiled again and motioned to his truck. He turned off her emergency lights and courteously handed her her purse and keys. Then he helped her into his truck and drove away, pausing only to turn off the flashing lights.
Mignon taunted him about his choice of automobile. “You have cop lights in your personal truck?” She laughed again, the same way she had when he suggested that she had faked her performance at the seance. “You must be a little anal retentive,” she decided aloud, a hollow note of bravado coloring her words.
That made John Henry laugh, because it was actually true. He liked things done a certain way, and he was like a hound with a particularly tasty bone who wasn’t going to let go just because someone much bigger started to pull on the other side. His ex-wife had called him that, and he had often replied that if a cop wasn’t that sort of person, then they wouldn’t be a cop very long. Furthermore, his years at West Point had taught him to dot every “i” and cross every “t.” It was the way he was, and it was suddenly funny that someone he had met only the day before could pinpoint that in him straightaway.
Mignon hadn’t said much, except to comment that the police lights didn’t do much for the truck and she hadn’t seen such a combination before. After a lengthy pause she asked, “You’re taking me to the bayous now, John Henry? I think you should have brought the Bronco, because if you get this baby in the mud, you’ll have to have a tow truck get it out. It doesn’t even have four-wheel drive.”
“We’re going to the cemetery,” he responded with a quick grin, and that was exactly what he did. It wasn’t far away. It was off the main road where no one would see them.
Despite what it really was, the La Valle cemetery was a lovely place with a small, red-bricked church with arching, stained glass windows on one side of the rusted wrought-iron-enclosed graveyard. Cypress, willows, and pine trickled with moss gave the church and the cemetery an almost neglected appearance, despite the neatly trimmed graves and the gleam of the polished stained gla
ss windows. Some of the graves dated back to the 1700s, and some of the families represented still lived in the area.
“Wonder if there are any Thibeauxs there?” murmured Mignon, her hands in her lap, carefully concealing the pepper spray. Then she shook her head. “Too rich for their blood. They’re probably at the pauper’s hill. I think you’ve taken me to the wrong graveyard, John Henry.”
John Henry shrugged. “I’m not exactly from the richest lines myself. My father did me the incongruous favor of being heroic on D-Day in 1944, right on Normandy Beach.” He paused to look at her in the darkness of the car. His voice and tone was matter of fact. This was something he hadn’t spoken of much, but it seemed important for Mignon to understand that he wasn’t in the St. Michels’ class. “When he came back from France, he married and had three children, and I was the youngest. Since he got a certain medal, I got a free ticket to a military academy. And I went.”
“Your father was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor?” said Mignon in surprise. That hadn’t been in the summary from the private detective she’d hired.
“Only a couple of ways to go to West Point,” he replied. “That was one of them. Of course, he lost one of his arms in the process, but he used to joke about college costing an arm and a leg.”
“Used to?” repeated Mignon. She had often wondered what it must have been like to have had a loving father, one who would joke about such things as the cost of college and why she hadn’t produced grandchildren yet. This man had such a family, and a tinge of jealousy always struck her when other people spoke of their parents. “He’s dead?”
John Henry nodded. “About twelve years ago. My mother not too long afterward, as well. Otherwise I might have stayed in New Orleans and fought for custody over my daughter. The ex and the kid live in Shreveport.”
“You’re divorced?” she asked unnecessarily.
“Yep. It didn’t say anything about you being divorced in your records.”
The easy mood between them was suddenly lost and Mignon came back to the fact that he was very much suspicious of her. It hadn’t been anything she wasn’t expecting, but it was an abrupt reminder of whose truck she was sitting in, and whom she was speaking with. “You spend a little time today looking into my past?”
He nodded again, a dark figure sitting in a dark place with no one watching.
She said, “You know, it seems like there are about a million cemeteries in Louisiana. You can’t drive a mile without passing some small plot with headstones.”
John Henry didn’t say a word.
Mignon went on, “This is a nice one, though. I’ve never been here before. My father wasn’t one to win any kind of awards. Neither, for that matter, was my mother. I guess you know that by now. They didn’t have a lot of money. Period. My mother used to make some of my clothes out of sackcloth. They’d get some of their flour in these burlap sacks, you don’t see them much anymore, and my mother would stitch them together in these ragged shirts and skirts. She managed to get better cloth for the clothing she made for me when I started school, but there wasn’t much. I bet you never met someone who had a dress made out of sackcloth.”
“I know that you were in foster homes in Texas and California, that you were adopted by a man named Nehemiah Trent in 1985, because no one else would have you. It seems you have a juvenile record in California, but it’s sealed and I don’t have the authority to find out why you were arrested and convicted. I know that you made in the neighborhood of a half-million last year, because tax records are public property, and you don’t have any dependents. You paid a shitload of taxes and your deductions were minimal, like maybe you didn’t want the IRS to get too curious. You have an apartment in New York City, and you apparently stay with your adopted father when you’re in California, or perhaps with friends. You have enough money not to fuck around a podunk place like La Valle with a bunch of arrogant blue bloods like the St. Michels, but here you are, all the same. But what I don’t know”—his voice lowered and he looked at her again, no hint of amusement or kindness there—“is what in the name of God you’re doing, in this place, here and now. And I don’t know why everyone is so damned sure that Luc St. Michel is dead and haunting the mansion. Jourdain and Geraud seem to think that you’re nothing but a con artist out to rip Eleanor off. I don’t know that I agree with that, but I intend to find out.”
“I’ve never been married and I don’t have any children,” Mignon confirmed, staring at the cemetery in front of them. Nothing lived around here but the wail of the wind and the grass which covered the dead forever. She suppressed her anger at his accusation. Eleanor wasn’t the victim in this scenario. She never had been. “The juvenile charges spring from being a runaway. Spend any time in foster homes as a teenage girl and you’d know exactly why. I think they call it ‘incorrigible.’ I’m here because I’m curious about my parents and the place they were born.”
“I think you need to leave La Valle,” he said, low and urgently. “Before something … happens to you.”
“Are you threatening me, Sheriff?” she almost yelled the question at him, not quite able to curb her temper anymore, not liking being subtly threatened and being brought to this place as a not-so-subtle message which wouldn’t be misunderstood by an imbecile. “You don’t know what bad is. You don’t know what it’s like being labeled a troublemaker because you didn’t care to be fondled or molested or raped. You don’t know what it’s like being shuffled from home to home to home. I know this isn’t my home. But it was my parents’ once. It meant something to them. They were born here and they stayed here until 1975. My father only left because he was forced to leave, taking only what he could carry in his truck and me. We left many things behind, including relatives who died later without ever seeing us again, because my father didn’t dare come back to this place.”
Mignon stopped and took a deep breath. She knew that she needed to take control of herself and relax her tense muscles before she exploded. The things she was telling the sheriff had simmered within her for years until she had the time and the money to follow up on them. Then she asked, “Did you ever dream about something that came true?”
“No,” he said shortly. John Henry was digesting her words, trying to ferret out the truth.
“I dreamed about my mother and my mother’s lover. I dreamed I found them. And I wanted desperately to find them. So I decided to look for them.” Her voice trailed off into the darkness. There was so much more to the story. Things she didn’t know if she could share with this man, because she didn’t know if she could trust him. The townspeople assumed that Garlande Thibeaux and Luc St. Michel ran off to a better life with each other. However, Mignon had discovered that there was no trace of them in the modern world. Nothing had led her to her mother’s current whereabouts. Their social security numbers had never been used again. No driver’s licenses had been issued in their names in any of the fifty states. It was as if they had fallen into a black hole. Or as if they disappeared that very day.
John Henry finally asked, “And did you find them?”
“No, I haven’t. But it’s only a matter of time, I think,” Mignon said. “I’m tired, John Henry. If you don’t have any more threats to toss at me, or you’re not really planning on planting my corpse in that cemetery”—she waved at the garden of gravestones in front of them—“then I’d like to go back to my car so I can go back to the hotel.”
John Henry continued to look at her in the darkness. He hadn’t gotten what he’d wanted out of Mignon Thibeaux. He wasn’t sure what there was to get. Either she had had some kind of psychic event at the St. Michels’ or she was a fraud. His stringent, unrelenting nature told him that her being a fraud was infinitely more likely than the former. But there was something about this attractive young woman who had such strong will and who had survived untold horrors that drew him ever closer. Whatever she went through had made her a fierce, self-determining creature who had carved her own success from the hardest form of grani
te there was, and he couldn’t help but admire her for that. He couldn’t help that any more than he could help the attraction between them. He wanted to reach out and stroke her cheek, just to see if the granite had seeped into her flesh, even knowing that her cheek would be smooth and soft. He wanted to do it, but he did not.
What John Henry did do, however, was take her back to her car and watch her drive away, wondering if she had put that little canister of pepper spray away yet.
Actually, it was long after Mignon parked in the tiny lot of the bed and breakfast before she forced her chilled, aching fingers to let go of the pepper spray. She sat there for a long time. It was after two A.M. and she was exhausted. Pasting on a false smile, listening to every nuance, pretending to be something she was not, took more energy out of her than she was prepared to give.
Inside her room, she found that the little red light on the telephone beside the bed was blinking. She didn’t even need to check to know who had left her voice mail. She made a call to Nehemiah Trent. He was anxious. “Good God, child. I believe that my heart was failing. I thought certainly I would have heard from you before this. I had a mental image of them tossing your bound and gagged body into the bayou.”
It was a little too close to what she had envisioned. So she ignored his apprehension and said, “It worked out pretty much the way we planned it. Your niece was right about the table, and I was able to get rid of the blue ice.” She wasn’t going to tell him about the sheriff pulling her over in the middle of the night and dragging her off to a cemetery to “chat” with her. “Eleanor believed me. So did Leya, and Eugenie was so afraid, she almost ran from the room. I just need to wait until the next invitation to throw on a little more show.” Mignon wanted to give someone a push. A push that would shove that person right over the edge.