by C. L. Bevill
“How can you be so certain of Eleanor’s guilt, my dear?” asked Nehemiah, careful to keep his voice neutral. “Why would she invite you into her home, if that was the case?”
“Curiosity about her husband’s mistress’s daughter? Trying to find out information? Trying to find out what I could possibly know?” Mignon hesitated. “Who else had a motive? Perhaps Eleanor had simply been too embarrassed by Luc sneaking around behind her back and lost her temper. Lost it in a murderous rampage.”
“I’m simply saying that you’ve come back to find the truth, and whether you like it or not, she might not be the one who killed them. And furthermore, you may never find out what really happened.”
Mignon didn’t reply and Nehemiah judiciously changed the subject.
After a few more minutes, they mutually hung up and Mignon started to get ready for bed. However, her mind was on what had happened that night and what had happened all those years before.
There had been something else odd about the seance. Although Mignon had planned what she was going to say, and how she was going to act, the words about being in the darkness with things crawling over her feet had come easily to her. She didn’t want to think about it, but it was as if something had been impelling her, forming the words in her mouth, helping her in a way that was unforeseeable and, frankly, hai-rraising.
JOHN HENRY SPENT the following morning looking at his computer. He had asked Mignon the same questions, but he decided that he needed to answer them himself. Why is everyone so sure that Luc St. Michel is dead? Why is Mignon Thibeaux back in the parish and why did she mess around with the séance?
What he found did not please him particularly. Being the sheriff of a parish was a political job and one at which he excelled. Being an Army officer was being similarly disposed. He had predominated in that arena. He had found that it was a game to walk the fine line between not antagonizing the rich individuals who lived in the parish and upholding the principles which he held almost sacred. Most of the time it wasn’t a problem. This time it was.
AT ABOUT THE same time, the housekeeper woke Mignon up by tapping on the door.
She sat up in the wooden four-poster bed and looked around the room. It was done in white lace and old country style. Homespun details dotted the walls and the tables. Sun poured in through a window framed by crackled white shutters on the inside of the room. There was no television, and only a white and brass electric fan on the ceiling to deflect the sultry Louisiana heat. It was nice, but it wasn’t to her taste, and when she woke up her mind was muzzy enough that she didn’t immediately realize where she was. After a moment she understood that someone was knocking at the door. She called, “Yes?”
“Housekeeping, ma’am,” came the reply. The owner of the bed and breakfast was older than God and did all of the work, including cleaning. She was at the door, ready to take care of the bathroom and the sheets.
Mignon shook her head foggily. “Just give me a few minutes.” She looked at her travel clock and discovered it was after ten o’clock. She groaned and rolled out of bed.
About an hour later she was dressed in working clothing: jeans, a polo shirt, and high-tops. Her hair was a reddish mop on the top of her head. With the humidity in the area, she couldn’t do a thing with it. She went to the local library in Natchitoches and found it closed, reminding her it was Sunday in a small, rural town in Louisiana.
However, Mignon considered, there was always the University. Natchitoches was a university town besides being a tourist spot. She found the library without incident and discovered that all of the old newspapers were on microfiche.
“Microfiche,” repeated Mignon doubtfully, looking at the librarian’s aide, who was pointing to a specific area of the library.
“Microfiche,” affirmed the aide, encouraging her. “It’s easy. You’ll have it down pat in five minutes flat.”
Mignon did have it down in five minutes flat. But she got a headache in about fifteen minutes from studying the microfiche screen. She knew that she and her father had left in the fall. She had been in school for only a few weeks when her mother had gone away with Luc St. Michel. Mignon started from January of 1975 and began methodically shifting over the sections of the newspaper that covered Natchitoches, Winn, and St. Germaine Parishes.
Almost immediately she found out something about Luc St. Michel that she hadn’t known before. The St. Michel family owned a few paper mills in Northern Louisiana and Arkansas. There had been a strike in one in January of 1975. Mignon mused over this as she studied the pages on the screen. A union difficulty wasn’t an issue she had considered relevant, but union activism had been at a peak in the seventies, and the St. Michels weren’t angels of propriety. Thanks to the papers dated a few weeks later, she discovered that she could dismiss this theory. The strike had been settled amicably between a negotiator and Luc St. Michel, leaving the plant workers with less hours and a bit more pay, and Luc with a working paper mill.
There was another mention of the January 1975 strike in April, because of union problems in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. This included an almost congratulatory note to Luc St. Michel for successfully ending the North Louisiana plant’s strike without loss of job or revenue.
The spring opening of the St. Michel mansion was described in a late April 1975 paper by a loquacious entertainment reporter as being, “Marvelous, ancient, and awe-inspiring with the quality of je ne sais quoi.” The St. Michels were mentioned, but only as the owners and descendants of the original builder.
In June 1975, Geraud St. Michel, the fifteen-year-old son of Luc and Eleanor, became an Eagle Scout. Mignon wondered if Luc had been the Scout leader of the troop for Geraud to attain that status so young.
In September 1975, the ten-year-old daughter of Luc and Eleanor, Eugenie, was hospitalized in Baton Rouge for an unmentioned childhood illness. Mignon sat up and almost pressed her nose to the screen of the monitor. The article alluded to German measles. The child was expected to make a full recovery. And Mignon thought, How many children get mentioned in the newspaper with some kind of undisclosed illness and have been sent away for a while to a city distant enough that no one will follow up?
She thought more about it. It must have been after Luc and Garlande vanished. The little girl, always unstable, had become seriously ill after losing her father to his mistress. Apparently the very act of giving up one’s family for one’s mistress had devastated the entire St. Michel family. In the same way that it had devastated the Thibeaux family.
Mignon looked through the remainder of the seventies and found brief references to the St. Michels. A reference to the spring and autumn openings of the St. Michel mansion, a contribution to this or that, Geraud St. Michel accepted at Princeton at age seventeen, and Eugenie off to Europe for six months in 1980. The youngest St. Michel apparently hadn’t returned to the mansion for years. There were brief mentions of her in the gossip columns. Eugenie was in Paris. Eugenie was in New York City. Eugenie married in France. Eugenie at a sophisticated film opening in Europe. But there was no mention of her returning to Louisiana, even for visits, and Mignon thought this might be the first time in over two decades that Eugenie had come back to La Valle.
From the early eighties on, there were increasing references to the St. Michel mansion as a possible site for ghost watchers. These articles came from Halloween-inspired references and treated the rumors as humorous jests, but the rumors must have had some seed of truth.
There wasn’t anything else. Even the references to the paper mills ceased after the middle eighties because they were sold to bigger companies. The St. Michels’ power base decreased, and as a result people weren’t interested in them anymore. They faded from the public eye faster than a pop star with a solitary hit on the music charts.
Mignon stopped for fast food while driving back to La Valle. She ate on her way and found herself sitting at the dirt road entrance to her old home. There was something here to be learned, she had decided. She kept returnin
g in her mind to the house that sat at the end of the single-lane dirt road.
Then it came to her lips unbidden, as if put there by an unknown force. The words seemed to issue out, unwanted, and from what depths of her memory, Mignon did not know, but she whispered, “High diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon; the little dog laughed … to see such craft, and the dish ran away with the spoon …” Her voice trailed off doubtfully, unsure if she had gotten all the words correct. She sat in her rental car, looking down the shadowy path to the place she had been born.
Where had this nursery rhyme come from? She hadn’t thought of a nursery rhyme in twenty years and here was one at the tip of her tongue.
Garlande Thibeaux had loved nursery rhymes. The memory came to Mignon abruptly, with all of the force of a bullet in the night. Her mother had been forever teaching Mignon a new one, until Mignon could repeat it by rote. In her mind she could see her father laughing at her mother’s actions, saying, “What will the girl get out of remembering nursery rhymes, woman? There’s no money in that.” And her mother had laughed, urging Mignon to recite another one. “Do the one about the black sheep, Mignon, ma chère. Show your father what a fine mind you have, my little precious child,” she had instructed. Mignon had done just that, happily, willfully, with a childlike boastfulness that only a five-year-old could show to her father.
Garlande had learned dozens of the nursery rhymes from her own mother, a tradition she happened to enjoy passing onto her own child. Garlande had only a minimal education at best, and gloried in Mignon’s quick intelligence and perspicacity.
Mignon abruptly realized something else. Garlande Thibeaux had loved her child. She loved me. She really loved me. There had been kindness in her touch and a joy when she saw Mignon coming home from the school bus. There had been pride in making Mignon even the sackcloth clothing. There had been honest love.
And she would have never left me behind. Never.
Chapter Nine
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12
The man in the wilderness asked of me
How many strawberries grew in the sea.
I answered him as I thought good,
“As many as red herrings grow in the wood.”
THE MAN IN THE WILDERNESS
MINER POTEET WAS THE man Mignon knew she had to talk with next. So she drove the half mile to the Poteet home. The house was located at the other end of the Poteet land, down another dirt road, which was regularly leveled and laid with gravel in order to prevent rutting from fog, mist, and rain. The house itself was as small as the shack where Mignon had lived, but kept up with a fresh coat of butter yellow paint and a neat garden along the side of the house. There was no bowing floor, no rotting wood, nor the smell of neglect and decay heavy in the air.
As she parked her car next to a seventies-era Dodge pickup with a camper shell, she noticed an old man plucking at plants with a hoe in the garden. She hadn’t been sure if she would remember Miner Poteet, but as soon as his pleasant face turned toward her in the full sunlight, curiously inquisitive, she knew it was him. He had always been a kind man, eternally old to her, especially when she had been a child.
When she stepped out of her car and approached him, he stood up as straight as the slight curve in his spine allowed, dressed in denim farmer’s overalls and holding a well-used hoe in his right hand. His eyes were bright blue, the blue of a morning sky, the blue that existed in dreams, and his hair, what was left of it, was as colorless as light. Liver spots ran from the curve of his forehead down his cheeks, and were reproduced in large groups on his hands. All of this showed that he was no longer just the amicable old man of her childhood memories, but a man who had worked hard in his life to get to his seventies. A man who displayed his badges of honor proudly. He regarded her with a half smile on his face, and then the smile slipped away as he realized who he was looking at. “My God,” he muttered.
“Mr. Poteet,” she said.
“My God,” he repeated. Then he sighed deeply as understanding set in. “No, you ain’t her. You’re Mignon.” An uncertain smile returned. “I would have known you anywheres, child. You the picture of your mama. You the picture of your mama.”
“I would have known you anywhere, Mr. Poteet,” she answered truthfully. “You don’t look all that much different to me, either.”
“Bless you, child.” He waved at his garden. It was obvious he was cleaning out the debris from his summer harvest. All that was left were dying plants. “I should have gone to church today, but I just couldn’t stand to let all this mess go. That minister over to the church has been trying to save me. He says I’m off to see the devil if I don’t repent and go to church more regular like. But I think he just wants more money in the collection plate.”
Mignon grinned. Mr. Poteet even sounded like the same man.
He went on. “Why don’t we go sit on the porch and I’ll have my granddaughter fix us up some coffee?” He settled the hoe against a fence and led the way, glancing at Mignon once. In that single look she knew that he hadn’t lost any of his mental capacities. He had sized her up in a moment with an instant scrutiny of her features and bearing.
Mignon followed the old man around to the front of the house, and listened while he called inside. After he told his granddaughter that they had company, he said to Mignon, “She’s my daughter’s gal, twenty years old, and goes to college over to Natchitoches. Can you believe that? She’s taking courses in bi-ology. Tells me to use organic whatsits on my garden. Good gal, that. Stays with me while she’s going to school to save her parents from spending the money to put her in an apartment or a dormitory. The daughter and her husband live over to Alexandria.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “My daughter, she ask my granddaughter about me, then she ask me about her daughter. She one clever woman, my daughter, no?”
He waved her to a swinging porch chair and settled himself into a rocking chair, seeming every inch a man well into his seventies. “You know about Mrs. Poteet?”
Mignon knew that his wife had died of cancer ten years before, and was buried in the same graveyard John Henry had taken Mignon to that very day. A section in the back, walled off with Poteet inscribed in stone in front, dated from the days the Poteet family had been more prosperous. “I’m sorry, Mr. Poteet. She always brought things to us, when we lived here. She was a charitable woman.”
“That she was. She would have made me go to church, too. I miss that old girl. Had a sassy mouth and a big butt, but she was the finest woman I ever met.” Mr. Poteet’s eyes focused on something past Mignon’s shoulder. “I’m glad to see you. Always wanted to know what had happened to you. Then we heard your pa up and died in Dallas.”
Mignon had heard that, too. But she didn’t know it for a fact. One of her foster families had broken the news to her when she was twelve. She hadn’t really cared at that time. Ruff Thibeaux had abandoned her in Texas when she was eight years old. She hadn’t been surprised to hear of his death. He had taken to drinking even before he had left Louisiana and it had worsened after his wife quit him for another man. She nodded at the older man, intent on the present conversation, dismissing that particular bit of her past with only a tinge of regret.
He went on. “That news came through, but nothing about you. It was like you up and vanished. The missus and I wanted to go to Dallas and find you. We had the minister call, but those officials over to Texas wouldn’t even tell us if you was there. Said we wasn’t family and we didn’t have no right to know such a thing. Wanted you to know that.”
Mignon’s mouth opened a little. Her throat tightened. She had never known that. She might never have known that about the Poteets if she hadn’t come back here. Someone had cared about her. Someone had wanted her. For the briefest of moments she was lost in the realization. She muttered, “I-I don’t know what to say.”
Mr. Poteet waved impatiently. “It didn’t do you no good, no how. So no point in getting misty-eyed about it, girl. Mrs. Poteet thought a l
ot of you. Thought a lot of your parents right up until … well … until your ma left.”
Mignon digested this carefully. She would have wiped away the bit of moisture at her eye, but she didn’t want Miner Poteet to see her doing it. “Do you know what happened to my mother, Mr. Poteet?”
Miner examined the tips of his fingers carefully, then glanced up at Mignon. “I know what the rumors say. She ran off with that Luc St. Michel. Some said they was together for a long time. It wasn’t a surprise to me, exactly.”
“What do you mean?” she asked cautiously.
“I’d see his car come this way once too often, child. But what was I going to do, tell your pa that your mother wasn’t being faithful to him?” He shook his head sadly. “I was working for the St. Michels at the time. Bringing in a good salary for a wife and three children. Had the rent from your folks. The missus was determined to send our oldest boy to college. I couldn’t afford to jump up and say boo.”
“You know what I want to ask about,” said Mignon. She sat in the swinging chair, holding one foot on the wooden porch floor to keep the chair from swaying as she stared at the older man. She had had her suspicions about the anonymous letter, and Miner Poteet seemed the most obvious suspect. He and his wife had been people of the earth, rooted in superstition like many of the locals in the area. He knew as well as anyone, and better than most, that Garlande would never have abandoned Mignon, and he undoubtedly knew what that meant. That one news article had gone national, and if someone had seen it they might have told him. Miner might have been the one to send the letter, insisting she know that something odd was happening. “You have to know.”
“You want to know why you was kicked out that same night,” Miner affirmed. “I know. It was the sheriff. Sheriff Ruelle Fanchon. You know the man. He came to me that night and said that Ruff Thibeaux had to leave. Ruff had to leave and take you with him, with just what he could carry. He told me this before he went over to the old house. And he said if I interfered then he would go by the high school and find some drugs in my boy’s locker. And my boy would go over to Angola, even though he was just a teenager. And did I know what those bastards at Angola did to young men like my boy?” His eyes burned bright with indignity and rage at what had been done to him and the Thibeauxs. “He said Ruff had done something wrong and had to go. But I knew. Ruff didn’t do nothing wrong except to be married to the woman who ran off with Luc St. Michel.”