Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1)

by Susannah Sandlin

  His eyes were open, but his expression had changed to match the words and the tone of voice that had captured him.

  Gentry Broussard didn’t wear the face of the cocky guy who kept his emotions close to the vest and often couldn’t find his manners with a map.

  He wore the face of a man both heartbroken and haunted.

  CHAPTER 5

  No one would ever mistake Gentry for a music connoisseur, but he knew what moved him. Those stark words in a voice that conveyed a firsthand knowledge of loss and heartbreak? They stabbed his heart like the blood-covered knife he’d seen near Eva Savoie’s body.

  The words summed up the state of his mind: the dead were still roaming.

  Only, what if Lang wasn’t dead? Could that even be possible? There had been a funeral. He’d sat stoically beside his weeping mother at a graveside service in Dulac that no one had attended other than his stepfather, two stepsisters whom he barely knew and who had never even met Langston Broussard, and the guys from his Region 8 enforcement team from Orleans Parish. His real brothers. The ones he hadn’t been forced to put down with two bullets.

  Lang’s body had never been found, the search called off after dragging the uncooperative Mississippi River for days. He couldn’t have survived those shots, the water, that dark night of torrential rain and wind.

  But the face Gentry had seen under that hood had been so like his brother’s.

  “You okay, Broussard?”

  Gentry jolted back to awareness at the touch of Jena’s hand on his arm. He had to pull his shit together or he’d be enjoying some more forced time off courtesy of the state of Louisiana. Only this time, no old friend of his father’s would come to pull him out of the quicksand, as Warren Doucet had done—the lieutenant had started his career as Hank Broussard’s partner.

  This time, there would be no coming back.

  “Yeah, sorry,” he mumbled, opening the truck door and climbing out. God, but he was exhausted. The dreams had become worse since Eva’s murder, but he’d be damned if he would turn to a bottle of pills or alcohol to subdue them. He’d soldier through it, as his dad used to say when things got tough. Of course, soldiering through had cost his dad a heart attack when he was only forty-three years old, eleven years older than Gentry was now.

  “Any particular tactic you want to use in talking to Celestine Savoie?” Jena slammed the truck door, and the haunting music ended abruptly. Gentry found himself longing for it to continue. Maybe he could find out what the recording was, listen to the whole song, and spend the night wallowing in self-pity to his heart’s content.

  “What do you mean by tactic?” He glanced at Jena as they approached the back of the house, skirting around an ancient turquoise-and-white pickup. Not ancient enough to have reached a second life as a cool novelty, but just ancient enough to be ugly and outdated. “You mean like good cop–bad cop? This ain’t an interrogation, Red.”

  Jena rolled her eyes and strode ahead of him. The touch of light banter took the edge off Gentry’s nerves, and he said a silent thanks for his lanky, red-haired partner. She was so earnest and eager to do her job well that it made her an easy mark for teasing. Which meant Gentry didn’t have to do anything unpleasant like talk about his feelings—his initial fear when he’d found out he was being assigned a female LDWF rookie for a partner.

  So sue him. He could be a sexist pig.

  They stepped onto the part of the porch that wrapped around to the back of the house, and Gentry called out, “Ms. Savoie? Agents Broussard and Sinclair, Wildlife and Fisheries.”

  “Front porch.” The voice that answered was what Gentry thought of as a bedroom voice—a woman with a natural whiskey-and-cigarette rasp. At least, he guessed it was natural. Nashville entertainers might suck down Jack Daniel’s and puff on unfiltered cigarettes every dusk until dawn. Probably did, now that he thought about it.

  They rounded the corner of the wraparound porch, and Gentry fought off a wave of déjà vu at the sight of the weathered cypress planks. What looked like a scrubbed bloody shoeprint lay near one of the rotted-through patches. Might have even been his; the soles of his shoes had been coated in crimson despite his best efforts to stay out of it. They’d cost a fortune, but he’d thrown them away.

  “Ms. Savoie?” Jena held out a hand for a shake. “I’m Agent Jena Sinclair, and this is Senior Agent Gentry Broussard. The parish sheriff’s office said you wanted to talk to us?”

  Standing behind Jena, Gentry didn’t get a look at Celestine Savoie until she stepped around his partner and offered him a hand to shake. “Ceelie Savoie,” she said in that bedroom voice. “Thanks for coming.”

  Yeah, he was definitely a sexist pig, because he was here to answer dark questions about a horrific death and yet this woman took his breath away. It wasn’t just the voice, which he realized had been her singing and not a recording; a beat-up guitar stood propped against the side of a rocking chair. She looked way too wholesome and sexy to have spent much time smoking and drinking.

  In other words, whatever mental image he’d had of a Nashville singer, Ceelie Savoie was not it. “You’re the entertainer?” He purposely avoided looking at his partner.

  “Well, I was a singer-songwriter. I guess I still am. ‘Entertainer’ is a matter of opinion.” She turned toward the door. “You guys mind coming inside?”

  He and Jena exchanged glances. Hell no, he didn’t want to go inside, but Ceelie had already grabbed her guitar and disappeared through the doorway.

  “You okay?” Jena had assumed a mother-hen expression, so he clenched his jaw and strode into the cabin following Ceelie, failing to avoid noting her petite-but-curvy figure in her black tank top and worn jeans. Why had he expected the woman to be wearing sequins and have enormous, teased-out platinum hair?

  Red kept telling him he needed sensitivity training, whatever the hell that meant. Maybe she was right.

  Eva Savoie’s great-niece defied show-business stereotypes. She had the olive-tan skin so common in this corner of the country, home of the true American melting pot. Almost three centuries ago, French-speaking Acadians exiled from Canada had begun hooking up with members of two different Native American tribes and French-speaking free people of color. The result was today’s distinctive gumbo of locals, where race was rarely either clear-cut or relevant.

  Ceelie’s jet-black hair was woven into a thick braid pulled to the left side, giving her the look of a warrior princess, yet her eyes were the dark blue-gray of a summer day when a storm was moving in from the Gulf.

  “You got a problem?” Ceelie propped her hands on her hips and speared him with a look that brought the storm clouds closer to the surface. Yep, the woman had a temper.

  Had he been staring that hard? From his peripheral vision, he saw Jena mimicking Ceelie’s stance, giving him a perplexed look.

  He cleared his throat. “No, sorry, I just expected you to be . . .” Damn, how was he going to get his foot out of his mouth? Flashier? Better dressed? “Taller.”

  Jena made a rude noise and shook her head. “Sorry, Ms. Savoie. Agent Broussard heard you were a singer from Nashville, so I think he was expecting cowboy boots and big hair.”

  Gentry frowned at Jena, who ignored him.

  “Ah, gotcha. Well, I never quite figured out how to fit in in Nashville. Maybe I should have tried that.” Ceelie propped her guitar against the wall and sat cross-legged on the bed in the corner. “Anyway, thanks for coming. Have a seat. You can pull over those dining chairs if you want. I needed to ask you some questions about my Tante Eva.”

  Gentry gave himself a mental slap upside the head. He’d gotten tongue-tied around a sexy woman and forgotten why they were here. This was far from a lighthearted visit.

  He pulled two chairs away from the small round table near the kitchenette and carried them into the middle of the room. This whole place was about the size of his living room, and his house in Montegut was small.

  “We’ll answer whatever we can, but I’m not sure th
ere’s anything we can add to what the sheriff’s office told you. They’re in charge of the investigation.” He sat on one of the chairs, wincing at a stain on one rung of the ladder-back. Looked like blood, although the place smelled like Pine-Sol. “Did the parish clean this place up for you?”

  “Hell no. I’ve been on my hands and knees scrubbing since I got here three days ago.” Ceelie looked around, and Gentry noted where her gaze stopped—wherever dark spots remained visible. Blood had soaked into the old wood. He wasn’t sure she could ever get rid of the stains.

  “To be fair, the sheriff’s office offered to find someone to clean it for me, but I felt it was something I needed to do for my aunt.” She tugged on her braid. Scraped a palm across her thigh. Moving. Restless. “I hadn’t seen her in a long time, and that’s on me. But I remember coming here a lot as a kid, and even though it was old and rundown, she kept this place immaculate. She’d be horrified to know what it looked like when . . . when you found her.”

  Gentry recognized regret and guilt woven into that amazing voice. He knew both emotions intimately.

  “Are you planning to stay here long?” Jena asked. “Do you need anything?”

  Ceelie shook her head. “I was surprised to find that Tante Eva had a little money tucked away in a jar on the kitchen counter, and that ramblin’ wreck of a truck in the backyard still runs. I’ve been able to pick up what I need. As for how long I’ll be here?” She shrugged. “Depends on how long it takes to settle the estate. It’s giving me a chance to evaluate whether I want to go back to Nashville or make a change.”

  Gentry remembered seeing several hundred dollars, maybe more, scattered around on the counter when he’d found the body, and it had been one of the oddest parts of the scene to him. Even if robbery wasn’t the motive, it took a certain kind of obsession—or a personal kind of rage—to leave money behind. Human instinct would always be to take the cash.

  At least it had given Eva’s niece something to live on, and if Ceelie needed her great-aunt’s money, it told him her career in Nashville hadn’t been going well. Which made him feel even guiltier for making assumptions about her.

  He swatted at a mosquito on his arm, ignoring his partner’s raised eyebrow. “Well, what can we tell you, Ms. Savoie?”

  “Call me Ceelie.” She got up and walked to the small table in front of the window, the one that still held the voodoo-ritual items he’d spotted the morning he’d found the body. Opening a drawer, she pulled out a tall, textured candle and a box of matches. “Citronella,” she said, striking the match and setting the candle on the table. “For the mosquitoes. Agent Broussard, would you start at the beginning and tell me everything you saw the morning you found my aunt?”

  He huffed out a breath. “Ms. Savoie—Ceelie—are you sure you want to hear it? I’m sure the sheriff’s deputies—”

  “Humor me.” Ceelie’s tone was friendly, but firm. “It makes no sense to me that someone would murder an eighty-year-old woman who lived in a glorified fish camp in the middle of nowhere. No sense whatsoever. You might remember a detail that sparks a memory or means something to me that didn’t mean anything to the deputies.”

  She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice cracked. “Please.”

  So he told her, beginning with when he noticed the boat and, later, heard the thud. “Maybe if I’d checked here straightaway instead of stopping the poacher . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. Didn’t need to. He’d been saying that sentence to himself ever since that morning.

  “Don’t,” Ceelie said. “If you hadn’t taken the time to stop by, no telling when anyone would’ve found her.”

  She peppered them with questions for more than a half hour. She wiped away tears a couple of times, but never lost control. Her demeanor was forthright and plainspoken, but never aggressive. She reminded Gentry of her great-aunt, at least in the few conversations he’d had with Eva. Ceelie’s forthrightness must not have set well with the TPSO detectives if they’d labeled her as temperamental—or maybe she’d just had time to calm down.

  “I have one more thing to ask,” she said, fingering the patched spread on the bed. “Tell me about the table and what it looked like that morning—the small one beneath the window.”

  Gentry blinked. After the money on the counter, that table had been the next-oddest thing about the crime scene. Funny that she would home in on that.

  He shifted to look at it, remembering how it had looked about this time five days ago. “The main thing I remember about the table was that it didn’t appear to have been touched. It was one of the few places that hadn’t been disturbed. Everything else was . . .” Hell, she knew what it was.

  “A bloody mess, I know.” Ceelie’s storm-cloud eyes seemed to almost glow from the darkened corner where the bed sat. Gentry wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anyone quite so striking. He’d like to just sit and look at her, which was . . . pathetic. “What was on the table?”

  Gentry glanced again at the small piece of furniture. “The two wide candles were on there, although they were farther apart, at opposite corners of the table. They were both lit.”

  “And there was a pile of sticks on the table,” Jena added.

  Ceelie nodded. “Not sticks. Bones.”

  Gentry jerked his gaze from the table back to Ceelie. “What kind of bones? So your aunt really was a, uh, practitioner?”

  Ceelie smiled, but Gentry thought it was more ironic than amused. “Chicken bones. And do you mean was Tante Eva really a voodoo queen? Or did she follow the ways of the native mystics? Don’t worry—I’ve heard the stories. Maybe so. I don’t know what a voodoo queen is, really. Do you?”

  Gentry opened his mouth to answer, then snapped it shut and shook his head. He didn’t know a damned thing about voodoo or mysticism except that it was creepy and there was more of it out here in the dark corners of the parish than most people thought. His were a superstitious people. And their superstitions and beliefs weren’t the type of “spells” and paraphernalia tourists bought at shops in New Orleans.

  “I do know she believed in some of it,” Ceelie said. “Maybe more than some. Anyway, do you remember anything else about the table?”

  Gentry walked over to it and looked down. It was a small wooden rectangle with simple, straight legs attached by what looked like hand-cut dovetail joints. Which meant it was old and probably twice as strong as most of the pressboard crap being made today.

  He studied the items on the table. “This piece of leather or hide was underneath the candles and bones that morning, placed just like it is now. The bones were in the middle, and the candles at two corners. There was no blood on the table, which is what struck me as odd. I don’t remember anything else.” He looked at Jena. “You?”

  “No. Why is the table important, Ms. Savoie—Ceelie?”

  She shook her head. “I just thought it was weird that the table hadn’t been disturbed when everything else in the room had been dumped out or torn apart. Seemed like my aunt’s murderer was afraid of it, maybe, which means he knew what it was and had enough respect for it—or fear—not to touch it.”

  Gentry looked back at Ceelie. Smart woman. He hadn’t thought about it, but she was right. It was the only thing to explain that table being undisturbed. All it really meant, though, was that the killer knew the local culture, which didn’t narrow things down much.

  Would Lang have been afraid to disturb the table? Could he have committed the awful crime that had taken place here? God forgive him, but Gentry hoped not. He’d rather his brother stay dead and at peace than be alive and capable of such cruelty.

  Ceelie caught his gaze and smiled, a sight that jerked his thoughts away from the crime and sent them toward places they didn’t need to go. Then her expression turned thoughtful. “You look familiar, Agent Broussard. Have we met somewhere?”

  “Call me Gentry.” Hell no, he would never have forgotten that voice, those eyes. “I don’t think so, but I grew up in Dulac. Maybe you’ve seen me arou
nd.”

  “Maybe, but I haven’t been back in the parish in a decade.” She kept staring and it made him twitchy. “It’ll come to me. Anyway, don’t guess you knew LeRoy Breaux when you were growing up in Dulac, did you?”

  Probably a quarter of the people in Terrebonne Parish were named Breaux; another quarter were Broussards. “No, sorry. Is he important to the case?”

  Ceelie shrugged. “He lived with my aunt for a while when I was a kid, and I just wondered what happened to him—not that he’d have killed her. I mean, he was older than her, as near as I can remember. I always thought they were married, since I grew up calling him Nonc LeRoy.”

  Gentry hadn’t heard anything about a man in Eva Savoie’s life. “So this LeRoy Breaux lived with your aunt? What happened to him?”

  Ceelie walked to the window, blew out the citronella candle, and squeezed the wick between her fingers to make sure it was out. “He ditched Tante Eva when I was a kid. I think it runs in the family; my mom did the same thing to my dad.”

  Gentry blinked and gave Jena a helpless look. What did one say to that?

  “Is there anything else you wanted to ask us about your aunt?” Jena gave him a you’re-hopeless head shake. “I got here later than Gentry, but if there’s anything else . . .”

  Ceelie turned and squared her shoulders. “No, I just needed to hear all that. Thank you.”

  She followed them to the door and onto the porch. The air outside was hot and sticky, but unlike the air inside the cabin, at least it was moving.

  Gentry turned back, leaving Jena to continue to the truck. “By the way, I know a guy over in Chauvin who rehabs used AC units. We’ve still got at least six weeks of hot weather. Want me to see if he’s got something that would work for you?”

  “Thanks, but unless he’s giving them away, I’ll just sweat it out.” Ceelie smiled again, and it looked good on her. Too good. “I’m calling it my swamp diet. Every step’s a sweaty workout.”

  Gentry bit his tongue before he could offer up his opinion that there wasn’t a thing on her that needed work. Instead, he slid his sunglasses out of their resting place—hanging by one arm out of his shirt pocket—and stuck them on his face. Better put them on now in case his pupils had dilated with lust or something else humiliating that she didn’t need to see. She was a short-timer, a woman who’d rejected this place he’d loved his whole life. She’d made it clear she was leaving Terrebonne behind as soon as she got Eva’s estate settled. Plus, agents didn’t ogle crime victims.