Blood in the Lake

by Anne L. Simon

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  PART I

  Missing

  The Search Begins

  The Find

  A Celebration of a Life

  Family Meeting

  Arraignment Day

  Basketball

  PART II

  New Job

  Detective Aymond Reports

  Deuce's Notebook

  Etienne's Story

  Two Dinners

  Investigating with Deuce

  Sister Agnes' Jubilee

  PART III

  Another Body

  Defense Experts

  Cousin Dud

  Sister Bev

  Key Witnesses

  PART IV

  Revelations

  The Lake Road

  The Whiskey River Bridge

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  BLOOD IN THE

  LAKE

  by ANNE L. SIMON

  Sewanee, Tennessee

  Also by Anne L. Simon:

  Blood in the Cane Field

  Copyright © 2015 by Anne L. Simon

  Border Press

  PO Box 3124

  Sewanee, Tennessee 37375

  www.borderpressbooks.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used in any manner without written permission.

  Blood in the Lake is a work of fiction. Although loosely based upon actual events, details of location and characters are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is accidental and unintended.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015933852

  ISBN-978-0-9862801-3-9

  Cover art by Nan M. Landry

  Dedicated to everyone who works in the American system of justice—a flawed system, but the best as yet devised by man.

  And to Maggie—lawyer, editor, the voice of Mandy, beloved granddaughter.

  PART I

  Missing

  PAWPAW WENT MISSING on Monday, the last day of August. I didn’t know that day. No one did. The next day, Tuesday, just back after my early morning class, I’d made a cup of tea and settled in to read the five cases I needed to master before my evening seminar. My cell phone buzzed in the pocket of my jeans.

  “Mandy? How are you, Mandy?” My Mom’s voice.

  “Fine, Mom. What’s up?”

  “Nothing to be alarmed about. Nothing serious. But I thought you should know we have a little problem here.”

  Mom didn’t need to tell me she had a problem. I knew as soon as I heard the strain in her voice. She sounds like that when she’s stressed.

  “So what’s happened?”

  “PawPaw isn’t home this morning, and he didn’t tell us where he was going.”

  “So? PawPaw’s always out at this time of day. He goes to Thib’s for coffee with the boys.”

  “No-o.” Mom spoke slowly. “He’s not at Thib’s. I called.”

  “Maybe he stopped by Aunt Tut’s? Did you check with her?”

  “Sure did.” Mom’s false breezy tone returned. “But not to worry, dear. I’m sure he’s somewhere around. We just don’t know where he is right now. I just thought you should know.”

  “Is his truck at his house?”

  My question went right past her. “I’ve made a lot of calls, so someone will be calling back soon with news, but... It kind of looks like he wasn’t home last night.”

  “What do you mean, not home last night?”

  “Nothing to be alarmed about. I’ll call back when he turns up.”

  This was not like Mom, repeating herself and making non-responsive answers. Now I repeated myself. “Wait, what do you mean he wasn’t home last night? How do you know that?”

  “Well, I just think maybe he wasn’t home. I’ll be in touch.”

  I didn’t want to let her end the call, leaving me hanging, but the line went dead.

  What the heck was going on? Why wouldn’t Mom talk? Was there someone close by who shouldn’t hear what she had to say?

  I’m a deliberate sort, not one to jump into action. I usually take time to process information and think through the options, but the strain in Mom’s voice had me worried. I checked the caller ID and saw she’d phoned from PawPaw’s house. I pressed the talk button to call her back. Busy. I waited a few minutes and tried again. Busy again. I called our house, next door to PawPaw’s. No answer. That did it.

  I snapped my law book shut, grabbed my wallet, and headed for my little Corolla. Not yet eleven o’clock, I’d have time for the trip home, check on things, and be back for my seminar at six. I threaded through the early lunch crowd on Dalrymple Drive and merged into I-10 to cross the Mississippi River. I tried the calls again. No luck.

  Once on the calmer twenty-eight-mile stretch over the Atchafalaya Basin, thoughts of PawPaw came back into my head. Where could he be? We’d been noticing a few dents and scrapes on the bumpers and fenders of his truck, but he’d never driven somewhere and not known how to get home. An eighty-year-old out alone? Anything could have happened.

  Damnit! I’d completely forgotten my afternoon appointment at Career Services. As a 3L, third year law student, midway through my last semester at LSU Law School, I was finally looking at the end of years of non-stop study. I could almost feel the diploma in my hand. But then what? I needed to sign up for interviews and focus on finding a job.

  I didn’t have top grades that brought forth bids from the major firms, so what were my options? During my first law school summer, in addition to classes, I’d worked at a Lafayette firm doing insurance defense. Summarizing depositions bored me batty. My second summer, I worked as a research assistant in the DA’s office in Baton Rouge. Much better, actually exciting, but I didn’t have the political connections to snag a permanent job in that office. Stay local? We had a large family, but no lawyers who might take on an associate. I didn’t have the money to set up my own office and accept whatever came in the door. I’d probably get only divorces, and be totally on my own. Did I want to clerk for a judge? If so, where did I want to do that? Indecision.

  I called and cancelled my Career Services appointment—for the third time. And I made a resolution. As soon as this distraction passed, I’d make some decisions.

  A flashing sign on the shoulder snapped me back to the present. Atchafalaya Basin Speed Limit. Cars 60, Trucks 55. My speedometer read well past seventy-five. I slowed down and turned on the cruise control. I didn’t need the financial hit—and delay—of dealing with a ticket. There’s a good reason for reduced speed up here, especially on the high bridge over the Whiskey River. No place for refuge in case of a sudden emergency. I took a few deep breaths and pulled up a pleasant memory to pass the time as I drove over the cypress studded swamp toward home.

  I thought of Sunday afternoon, just two days ago, the last time I’d seen my PawPaw. After noon dinner, my brother Taddy had jumped up from the table and run next door to PawPaw’s for his favorite pastime, fishing in Lake Peigneur. I helped Mom clean up the kitchen and spent a couple of hours reviewing my cases for the next day. About five o’clock, at my mom’s urging, I had crossed over to PawPaw’s to summon Taddy home.

  Shouting a supper call seemed totally out of harmony with the tranquil lakeside scene. I walked down the slope to the water’s edge to call him within a closer range. Cypress and oak trees canopied the shoreline, shading my brother’s perch on the bulkhead. Memories had come flooding back. Fishing at PawPaw’s had been my favorite pastime when I was Taddy’s age. To my left, a Great Egret strolled through the muddy shallows. He stopped. Drawing up one twig-thin leg, he dangled his skinny, three-inch long, coal-black toes above the mirrored surface
of the lake. Stretching his neck, he rotated slowly to survey the scene. Satisfied to find everything in order, he tipped his head ten degrees and pointed one beady eye downward into the murky water covering his feet. Could he spot a tasty morsel stirred up by his toes? Not this time. He drew his neck back into a pleasing curve, carefully reset his long toes on the lake bottom, and resumed his stately promenade.

  Until he spied a minnow who swam too close. With the speed of a dagger thrust, his neck uncurled. His bright yellow beak plunged downward to pierce the surface. The bill rose again, now flaunting a squirming flash of silver. He raised his bill skyward, yawned, and flipped the minnow into his open mouth where it slipped, still squirming, into the maw. The quivering bump traveled down the chute and vanished into the body of the bird. After a mere two seconds dealing with the mundane business of digesting his dinner, the egret had raised one thin leg and then the other, resuming his majestic stroll. He dared anyone to take note that his imperial highness, the Great Egret, had interrupted a survey of his realm to satisfy a mere commoner’s need for food.

  The Great Egret and Taddy had taken no notice of one another. The process of impaling a fat brown worm on a fishhook commanded the boy’s full attention, and the bird felt no threat from what for him was an everyday sight. A flock of peeps needled the shallow water off to the right, and a dozen shiny green-headed mallards drifting a little farther out from shore found tasty duckweed to pass through their wide bills. For this country boy and his bird, both totally at home in the shallows at the edge of their lake, not even an alligator would be worthy of anything more than a mental note to maintain respectful distance.

  “Taddy, you need to be getting on home. Tomorrow’s a school day.”

  Intent on the process of baiting his hook, Taddy hadn’t heard me coming.

  “What? Not now. I’m just gettin’ this wiggler on my hook.”

  “OK. I’ll wait a bit, but we’ve got to go soon.”

  I took a seat on the bulkhead next to my little brother. To pass the time, I began mentally packing my car for the trip back across the Basin to return to law school for the coming week of classes. I remember deciding to ask Mom if I could take a few packages of shrimp from her freezer. And maybe some filleted reds. I missed the local food when I was at school, and I missed these quiet afternoons at the lake.

  After he had baited his hook, Taddy stepped up on a weathered board that led from the bulkhead down into the dark water, spreading his bare feet wide for balance. Oh, those feet were grimy! With practiced ease, Taddy swung his rod back and then forward. The line whirred as it spun twenty feet out over the water. Taddy stood still, hands relaxed, fingers waiting to feel the slightest pull on the line. Before him, the sun sliding down the western sky painted a palette of rosy hues on the shining surface of the lake.

  On the porch of a white frame house set some distance above the water’s edge, our PawPaw bobbed slowly to and fro in a weathered rocker. Occasionally, he had glanced out to check on Taddy. Quiet, a touch of cool in the air, a visit from a grandson who loved his lake, many times PawPaw had told us Sundays in the fall were the best.

  Back to reality. PawPaw missing now? Oh, God. Where could he have gone? Mom didn’t sound right. Why wouldn’t she answer my questions? After trying the calls one more time, I pushed those worries out of my mind and returned to memories of last Sunday at the lake.

  I recall I glanced now and then toward the black and white TV screen flickering on the end of PawPaw’s porch. Child of the Depression, PawPaw hated to throw out anything that still functioned. When we bought him a new TV for the central hall, he insisted we put the old one on the porch. Sitting with Taddy down by the lake, I was too far away to hear the sound, but I could guess what was on the screen: an aerial photograph showing white bands swirling over the island of Cuba, a bent funnel reaching from the western shore into the Gulf of Mexico. A tropical storm. A hurricane tracking chart of the Caribbean is familiar to anyone who lives in south Louisiana in the late summer and early fall.

  I remembered something else. On the far shore of the lake, where a two-lane blacktop road leading from the bridge over the Delcambre Canal crumbled into a shell-covered turnaround at the water’s edge, movement caught my eye. A battered white pickup truck had pulled up and parked. As I watched, the driver stepped out and came around to the front of the truck. He wore faded jeans and white rubber shrimper’s boots, an everyday sight in these parts. A white pickup truck is probably the most common vehicle you find in rural south Louisiana.

  I didn’t think a thing about the scene until, after a check in all directions, the man leaned back against the front bumper, pulled a package of papers from his shirt pocket, and drew a plastic baggie out of his pants. He had rolled a joint expertly—using only one hand—and placed the white cylinder between his lips. He reached back into his shirt pocket for a lighter. He inhaled the smoke, held it for a few moments, tipped up his chin, and exhaled toward the sky. Damn! That stuff is everywhere. The man had watched the smoke waft upward and then vanish, carried away by the slight breeze blowing across the water.

  Attention back to the lake, I remember a bustle of activity in the flock of mallards forty feet from shore. Nervous green-heads quivered from side to side, picking up glints of light from the lowering sun. Accompanied by splashing and a crescendo of honks, the mallards rose together, pawing their wide webbed feet in a clumsy effort to find traction on the surface of the water. One shiny green-head took the lead, drawing the flock skyward across the lake until they all vanished behind the cypress treetops on the far side.

  The peeps—we call all the little shore birds peeps because only real bird nuts can tell one kind from another—needed only a second to process the flight of the mallards. Cued by the splashy departure of the ducks, the head of every little bird twitched. Then, following the baton of an invisible conductor, they lifted in a cloud, banked, turned, and resettled in the shallows below the big white house commanding a rise above the northern shore of the lake.

  At the departure of the mallards and the relocation of the flock of peeps, the Great Egret halted his leisurely stroll. Again, he haughtily stretched out his magnificent neck. What had caused the change of mood in his dining room? He looked skyward and sighted the source of the disturbance. A grand armada had materialized over the treetops in the southern sky, silent at first, then emitting a low thrum.

  The flight of the mallards and peeps had not interrupted Taddy’s concentration on his fishing, but then, his attention drawn by the unfamiliar sound, he looked at the sky. Scores of huge brown birds with long heavy beaks and five-foot feathered wings flew straight in his direction. Taddy froze. The huge birds kept coming. When they were directly in front of him, they tucked their heads, aimed their bills downward, and plunged into the lake. Their front ends disappeared beneath the surface of the water not more than twenty feet past Taddy’s fishing line. Perhaps ten seconds later, each bird rose from the splash he had created, awkwardly righting himself, and settled on the surface of the water, rocking on his own wake.

  Taddy didn’t see the last scene of this play. Startled, and probably frightened by the assault he thought targeted directly at himself, he had hastily pulled in his line, dropped his rod on the bulkhead, and hightailed it up the bank toward PawPaw. I had followed him halfway.

  “PawPaw,” he called out to his grandfather. “Come see! Come see, PawPaw!”

  Taddy tore up the wooden porch steps, pulled open the screen door, and let it slam behind him. Bam! The old man started from a doze. Taddy stood panting before his grandfather. I was equally startled to see pelicans on Lake Peigneur, but Taddy wouldn’t turn to me for information on this topic. Man stuff.

  “PawPaw! Dinosaur birds! A whole flock of dinosaur birds just crashed into the lake!”

  “What you say there, son?” PawPaw shook himself awake. PawPaw called all his grandsons “son” and the girls he called by a half dozen names like honey, sugar, and most often, chère. When you have eight g
rown children, most with families of their own, the names of the third generation become far too numerous for an eighty-year-old to remember—especially in a family that likes to recycle the old names. Soon PawPaw would have great-grandchildren old enough to come to play at the old homestead on the lake. He’d never keep them all straight.

  “I’m not makin’ it up, PawPaw. I saw ‘em. Honest, honest I did. There must be a hundred of ‘em. They just came flappin’ in like crazy, headed straight across the lake toward Davy’s house. Then they dove, swoosh, down into the water.” The boy’s right arm swept the air, miming the birds’ maneuver.

  PawPaw had punched the off button on the remote control on his lap. Steadying himself on the door frame, he stood up, pausing a moment. He nodded his head when assured that all body parts were responding to instructions from his brain.

  Taddy continued to sputter. “We got to call Jay. We just got to call Jay. He’ll go crazy to see dinosaur birds.”

  “Jay?” PawPaw tipped his head.

  “Cousin Jay, PawPaw. You know, Uncle J. Allen’s boy. He’s got a thing about dinosaurs. He even likes to act like he’s a dinosaur himself, curling his hands and making those grunts. Grumph, grumph. Let’s go, PawPaw. Before they fly away.” Taddy had reached for his grandfather’s hand.

  “Sure, son. Let’s go have a look at ‘em.”

  Taddy helped PawPaw down the porch steps. PawPaw’s touch banished the boy’s fear, and his steady young arm replaced the old man’s need for a walking cane, a fine arrangement for both the boy and his beloved grandfather as they made their way down the slope to the bulkhead.

  Remembering that scene tightened my throat. Where could PawPaw be now? Again I tried to reach Mom. Still no response.

  Back down at the water’s edge, we three had watched the big birds rocking slowly on the surface of the lake.