by C. L. Bevill
The combination turned out to be Luc’s birthday, 3-16-35. Mignon had tried several other birthdays first, as well as some telephone numbers, before trying Luc’s. She found papers showing that Geraud had commissioned a private detective to find his father in 1982, to no avail. The only other thing of interest was the power of attorney supposedly contracted by Luc the day he disappeared. It had Jourdain Gastineau’s notary signature on it and was witnessed by Sheriff Ruelle Fanchon, and none other than His Honor, Gabriel Laurier. The power of attorney shifted all command of the St. Michel monies over to Eleanor St. Michel, with Jourdain as the backup.
Mignon read the report from the private detective with utmost interest. The investigator, who was out of Atlanta, Georgia, had been of the opinion that Luc St. Michel would reappear when he felt like it, and expressed himself thus. He could not find a trail of any sort, and only suggested that certain bank accounts be flagged for future activities.
All the information that the St. Michels had had at the time indicated that Luc simply didn’t want the encumbrance of a family and had fled to an unknown tropical paradise outside of Eleanor St. Michel’s aegis. Furthermore, he was known to have international accounts from which he could live comfortably.
But Mignon could look at it more objectively. How had these men known to cover up for Luc? Because they wanted to protect Eleanor. Because she could pay them for protection. Because they had to, in order to keep the gravy train running on schedule. They had to cover up or lose out. So they must have known that Luc was dead.
She put the papers back into the safe and fingered the small box of jewelry there. Nothing but his wife’s diamonds and a few semiprecious baubles. Certainly nothing. of interest to Mignon. Then she carefully shut the safe and wiped off the evidence of her fingerprints. Perhaps she could explain her presence in his office, but certainly not her fingerprints on his safe. In any case, she used the long skirt of her dress to cover her hand as she rustled through various items.
Mignon was searching along the backs of various photographs and paintings in the room when she heard voices in the hallway; they seemed to be headed directly for her. She flicked off the penlight and glanced around for a place to hide. It wasn’t a big office and there was no closet. There wasn’t even an armoire which she could crawl into. The voices came closer.
“Damn it,” she muttered.
Geraud and Jourdain came into the office.
“I can’t control who my mother invites into the house,” Geraud said.
“Good God, it was bad enough when she only had psychics in here. At least they were entertaining.”
Geraud chuckled. “That one blonde was more than entertaining. She thought she could up the ante by crawling into bed with me. Talk about a contortionist.”
There was silence from Jourdain.
Under the desk, Mignon had pulled her dress up so that it wouldn’t be exposed beneath the bottom edge of the front of the desk. She thanked God that the lights were out, because in the bright office light she would have been seen in an instant. As it was, the light from the candles Geraud and Jourdain had brought was bright enough to make her wince. She also thanked God that Geraud’s desk was large, wooden, and paneled all the way around the front. Of course, if Geraud wanted to get into his safe—the same one she was crouching on top of—then she couldn’t have picked a worse place.
Then Jourdain asked, “You slept with one of the psychics?”
“I didn’t sleep, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t want to know what you mean,” said Jourdain. “You’re as bad as your father.”
“Which brings us back to the subject at hand.” Geraud’s voice was uncomfortably close. “I know Mignon is suspicious about her mother’s disappearance, but what can she find out?”
“No more than anyone else, I suppose,” said Jourdain. “She’s already got John Henry sniffing around. He came to my office to ask about your father and his mistress. About powers of attorney. About who might have seen them last.” He paused. “And all because of that girl. God, she looks just like her mother.”
“I wouldn’t mind a piece of that, because she looks like she’d be twice as good as her mama,” speculated Geraud crudely. “Hell, man. I’d like to know what she’s up to. But all John Henry can do is ask uncomfortable questions. And Mignon can’t hurt us.”
“She can rile up Eugenie.”
There was silence from Geraud as he considered that. “She could also rile up the press and my mother,” he said slowly. “I think something should be done.”
The candlelight began to move as the two men went back toward the door. Mignon resisted the sigh of relief that wanted to escape from her throat.
“I just want to lock the door since she’s in the house,” Geraud finished. The door shut and the lock clicked. “You know, my chauffeur told me he saw you over at Natchitoches with Ruelle Fanchon a week or so ago. Funny how bad pennies keep turning up.”
There was a terse silence. Then Jourdain said, “Maybe your boy shouldn’t carry tales.”
Geraud paused. “Maybe he shouldn’t.”
Mignon listened as the two pairs of feet walked down the hall. Jourdain said, “We have to protect your mother.”
The last thing she heard was Geraud’s reply. “My mother?” he said in disbelief, his voice muffled by the walls. “What about my company?”
She carefully edged out from underneath the desk, lamenting silently that the designer dress she was wearing wasn’t up to this kind of treatment. Then Mignon stared at the door. “Well, crap,” she muttered. “How am I going to get out of here, so I can worry about what Geraud and the lawyer are going to throw at me next?”
A letter opener sprung the lock in about ten shaky minutes. Mignon quickly discovered that she couldn’t relock the door, so there was little point of lingering in the vicinity for Geraud or someone else to discover her presence and conclude that she had been rifling through his possessions.
Then Mignon paused for a moment. Something had changed. There was a dead silence around her and she caught a scent of something, something that called to her. It seemed like the smell of perfume lingered in the air, the scent of a woman who had been dead long ago. Mignon’s eyes widened and the hair rose up on the back of her neck. She felt as though someone was watching her. Someone who couldn’t be seen or touched, but who was interested in her all the same. Mignon moved her head about slowly, discovering she was alone, and the dead silence was interrupted by the sound of the wind, still strong and persistent outside. Abruptly, the odd feeling vanished.
Mignon slowly walked down the hallway. She had other things to be concerned about, such as why Jourdain had returned to see the old sheriff of St. Germaine Parish and whether it had anything to do with her.
Chapter Fourteen
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19
Three wise men of Gotham
Went to sea in a bowl:
And if the bowl had been stronger,
My song had been longer.
THREE WISE MEN OF GOTHAM
IN THE DARKNESS OF the grand hallway Mignon felt a shiver run down her spine, alerting every inch of her body, signaling every one of her senses that something was amiss. She looked around her in the stygian gloom. Only vague shapes were visible. A table there. A lamp over here. The slight glint of gilt on the frame of a painting. Black shapes that coalesced out of nothing at all as she inched her way quietly through the passage.
Shivering again, Mignon wrapped her arms around her body. Suddenly it seemed so chilly in the hallway, and the bit of sheer cloth that she called an evening gown wasn’t much for concealment, much less warmth. She was alone in the darkness, she reassured herself. No one else was there. It was only that eerie feeling again that something without form, without eyes or shape, floated about her, near her, watching her, perhaps following her.
Something brushed along her bare arm and goose bumps broke out in a rash, spilling across her flesh like a delicate fall of water over a ridg
e of sheer rocks. Mignon spun around to face whatever had touched her skin. It was the same as it had been outside Geraud’s office. It whirled around her and pressed against her body, shifting away almost mischievously, taunting her with a touch that was ethereal and unexplainable.
After a moment it was gone. Mignon clutched her shoulders and let out the breath she had been holding. She had never counted on the eerie feelings of misgiving that surrounded her, enveloped her when she came to this place, as if someone, something, was trying to warn her.
Mignon had never believed the stories. She knew that Eleanor believed them, and if Eleanor wasn’t responsible for Garlande and Luc’s disappearance, then she most certainly knew who was. It was only a matter of persistence and trickery. Now she had doubt.
She stopped at the end of the hallway, at the base of the great staircase, and touched one mahogany rail, feeling its smooth surface, shined to a soft gloss by generations of slaves and servants alike. Through the windows that framed the huge front doorway she could see the wind still moving treetops in the distance, their forms barely perceptible in the darkness.
A shape dressed in white roamed through the base of the trees and Mignon’s head snapped around. She hurried to the door and opened it, peering out into the night shadows. With her mouth open wide enough to trap a bear, Mignon watched the trim figure clad in only a long, pale garment disappear into the forest.
Who in the name of God was that? Mignon glanced over her shoulder at the staircase. If someone came down the stairs, they might wonder why Mignon was still up, and furthermore why she was wandering around downstairs in the dark, fully dressed.
It has to be Eugenie, because she’s a little strange, she thought. Kate isn’t supposed to play ghost tonight, not while I’m trying to search for some kind of evidence. Then she berated herself for the briefest of moments, realizing that no one else was up to go after whoever was out there. She would have to do it.
She narrowed her eyes and searched through the darkness to locate the white figure. The moon was waxing, more than half full, and peeked out of the clouds from the north. It shed a meager amount of bitter yellow light on the disarrayed landscape.
The wind was still howling and there was a sting of debris as it was flung across Mignon’s face. She frantically scanned the panorama in front of the mansion. How could one slender woman in a lily-white nightgown have disappeared so quickly? It has to be Eugenie.
Behind her she could hear the front doors of the mansion banging shut in time with the wind. In front of her the formerly immaculate yard was littered with leaves and bits of branches. Mignon sank to her ankles in mud, almost losing her shoes, while she searched for Eugenie’s white-clad form in the darkness. Terri’s words repeated in her mind. The river has washed out the road about a quarter mile from the mansion.
And Eugenie could easily get swept away and drowned. No one would ever know until her body was found.
Except me, concluded Mignon unhappily. And it would be my fault. My fault. There wasn’t any time to waste.
Mignon pulled up her dress and ran toward the front gates. The intricate wrought iron creation hung limply on its hinges; the wind had bombarded it severely. The security system had gone down along with the electricity. No one would have seen Eugenie run away into the night.
Slipping sideways through the gate’s opening, Mignon followed the road as best she could.
Staggering through the mud was like something out of a dream, in which one was running and running and getting absolutely nowhere at all. It pulled her into the earth and balked at letting her go. Mignon struggled to stay on the road.
The tributary had crested less than a hundred yards down the road from the St. Michel mansion. In the moonlight, Mignon could see some smaller trees and brush being swept down river. It was a churning black mass of water.
Eugenie was nowhere in sight. Neither was anyone else.
“Eugenie!” Mignon screamed over the roar of the wind. “Eugenie! Where are you?!” She twisted around looking. Eugenie could have left the road. She could have headed away from the river. She could be anywhere north or south of the mansion, in the chilling wind.
Mignon shivered and repeated her call. Her voice died away and through the rumble of roiling water and wind she thought she heard some faint noise. An animal?
Picking her way along the edge of the water, Mignon avoided logs and debris, almost slipping into the blackness of the river herself several times, sliding down a muddy bank. The waters lapped violently at the channel it was quickly expanding to fulfill its needs. She continued to follow the noise.
As she moved awkwardly through the shrubbery, the brush and trees became heavy and thick, almost impossible to break through, and the noise became a kind of humming, like someone singing a familiar song. Mignon shivered as she realized that it was the same tune she had heard in the old house that first night. A lingering song that hinted at memories buried deep in her subconscious.
She stopped at a ridge that overlooked the surging waters beneath her, a bubbling, writhing flood of mud and debris, and searched for something, anything. Mgnoni already knew the answer. Eugenie wasn’t out here. Neither was Kate. It was only her and something that was leading her. She looked across the heaving, angry water and suddenly realized she stood only a quarter of a mile from the old farmhouse, not ten feet from where an old footbridge used to be. Mignon had played in the canal once here, under the supervision of her mother’s watchful eyes, and she knew that Luc had once used this path to visit his mistress in the woods.
But the bridge was gone. Time had rotted it away and Mignon could go no farther. As the wind buffeted her body, slinging wet material against her face, for a moment she thought she saw that same white-clad figure moving in the forest beyond the canal. She stood stock-still and searched eagerly, trying to find that shape again, but it was gone.
Then someone gave her a shove into the turbulent, opaque waters, deliberately planting a palm in the small of her back, and Mignon fell into a river of murk and flotsam.
The water chilled her body far worse than the wind and rain had done, and her breath seemed to freeze up in her chest. She struggled to keep her head up and tried to look back to see who had pushed her into the canal, but the darkness and the roiling waters obscured her vision. After a moment she was far away from that spot, whirling through a force that sought to pound at every bit of her body, grasping her with untenable fingers, pulling her in every direction.
Another moment passed when her head was forced under and she took in a mouthful of murky water. She bobbed back up and spit the water out, trying to gather oxygen into her rapidly deprived lungs. Her hands and legs struggled to find something to grasp, and just when she thought her straining muscles couldn’t take anymore, she felt a large branch within reach.
Mignon grasped the branch with frozen fingers and began to pull herself up. The water pushed at her frantically, as if determined not to let her go, clutching at her limbs and pulling her away from the branch. There was a sickening crack as the branch began to break with the additional weight, and she was afloat again.
The gasp of distress tore through her lungs and she thought she was going to drown. Suddenly, she felt fingers curled about hers in a bone-crushing grasp. Someone had her hand in a firm grip and kept her motionless as the branch pulled away and disappeared into the seething water. The raging current tumbled over her body and tried to thrust her out into the center of the coursing canal once more, but the hand held firm.
They weren’t moving. Mignon felt a shiver of fear run down her back. She was in the most precarious position she could imagine. Whoever was holding her could simply let go, and she wouldn’t have a chance in the chilled waters pulling at her with little icy currents, trying to grab her away from the shore. She slowly turned her head and saw …
“John Henry!” Mignon shrieked. “You trying to threaten me again, or is this better than the bayou?”
John Henry was trying to get a bet
ter grip on Mignon’s hand, as well as avoid sinking into the muck where he stood. He had called the air and rescue patrols after one of the local farmers reported that the sluice gates had been sabotaged, and they had given him a lift over the river in their boat. Two of his deputies were working the east side of the river, and he was working the west. Half the homes along this tributary had had to be evacuated due to the rising water, but it seemed as though it was under control. Once the sluice gates had been closed the river quickly began to recede. It was purely coincidental that he had seen Mignon’s figure falling into the canal, and only by the grace of God that he had grabbed her hand just as she would have been swept away.
John Henry threw Mignon an exasperated look of disgust. Then he gave her a yank she would feel for a week and pulled her out of the water as if she weighed next to nothing. The next thing Mignon knew, John Henry had her by the waist, his large hands warming her flesh, grasping her firmly. “Can you walk?” he asked.
“I can walk, but my shoulder’s probably dislocated,” she complained, rubbing the joint of her upper arm.
John Henry took off his windbreaker and pulled it around her chilled body. “Would you rather I threw you back in?” he snapped. Then he brightened. “It would make a hell of a fish story.”
Mignon studied his rain-soaked features for a long moment and decided he was angry, tired, and irritated enough to be half serious. She scrambled up the bank and back into the safety of the tree line. She was exhausted. Her cold body was beginning to feel as though it was warm, signaling the start of hypothermia. She needed to get inside, just as he did.
Then the wind stopped and the night became clear. After a moment a nightingale began to sing.
“Well, isn’t that just hunky-dory?” she asked no one in particular. But John Henry chuckled behind her all the same.