But Katie was. “Oh, Elliot, I’m not a witch and I’m not mind-reader, I simply know women. And I met your wife.”
“Fiancée.”
“She adores the cat, wouldn’t normally part with him. You insisted so Rita wouldn’t suspect you of running away over Memorial Weekend. With me, maybe. Which is silly, because she’s not only more attractive than me, she actually likes me. And besides, you could have left the cat in a shelter.”
“I thought of it. Rejected the idea.”
“Because it would have felt like lying to Rita, something you subconsciously loathe.”
“Rita?”
“No, Elliot, lying. Doesn’t fit into your ordered sense of self, your insistence on controlling the situation, the cosmos.”
“Is there anything about me you like?”
“I’m working on it.”
I settled behind the wheel. “I’ll admit to a mild case of OC, but I hardly aspire to controlling the cosmos.”
Katie shrugged, unfolding a map from her purse, spread it on top of the cage. “Well, you’re certainly not the stereotypical absent-minded professor. Ever been to Louisiana, by the way?”
“No. You?”
“No. So, I take it you’re not familiar with Manchac.”
“What’s a Manchac?”
“A town. Well, more like a small unincorporated little community in the Tangipahoa Parish of Louisiana. ‘Manchac’ derives from a Choctaw Indian expression for rear entrance.”
“Good to know I won’t be the only anal person there.”
She snorted a chuckle. “Most of the Choctaw are gone now. The rear entrance, by the way, is to Lake Pontchartrain.”
“Is that where the little girl drowned?”
Katie was silent a moment. Studying the map? “Manchac is where the little girl’s parents lived—still live. It’s located on Lake Maurepas on the Pass Manchac waterway which connects to Lake Pontchartrain. The lake is home to five lighthouses and the occasional alligator. The little girl—Amy Robichou—disappeared somewhere in the vicinity. But then you know that.”
I headed east on the old 290 with a grunt. “I don’t know that. I made a movie, Katie, in the suburbs of Cincinnati. I know nothing of the case, as I keep reminding you.”
“You need to get on Interstate 10 East,” she said.
“I know, I glanced at an internet map this morning. This old road connects to the older 77, which will get us on the 10 all the way through Houston, past Lake Charles and straight on into Louisiana. After that I’m lost.”
Katie rattled her own map. “You’ll probably get more lost. According to this, the 10 splits at Baton Rouge into either the 10 South or the 12 East. They both intersect Interstate 55. With Manchac approximately between the two…I really can’t tell from the map which route is faster but it looks like maybe 12 East. You get on the 55 below Hammond, pass Ponchatoula, then Fairview and after that we should hit Manchac. Also-known-as Akers.”
“And you’ve got the little girl’s parents—the Robe—“
“Robichou.”
“—you’ve got their address?”
“And phone number should we get lost.”
“In such a small town? Lost?”
“In the swamp.”
* * *
“So what made you change your mind about coming along?” she asked over burgers and salad outside Beaumont, Texas. The cat sat in his cage next to her, quietly accepting little hand-fed pieces of chicken through the front bars from Katie’s salad. A nice little restaurant on a nice little day. Kind of day that makes you feel alive inside, like seeing the world for the first time.
And all I could see was HALP ME ELIOT: bright red smears against white refrigerator.
“What made you decide to take the case?” I answered, “In fact, got you into this whole paranormal thing in the first place?”
“He said,” she chided, “not so subtly deflecting the question,” and slipped another piece of chicken to Bonzo between the bars. “I was a bookish, addicted-to-TV-cop-shows teenager in the Bronx. Took some college courses in criminology at New York State, found myself even more addicted, became a criminal investigator at the Manhattan D.A.’s office.”
“Impressive! You must have been a good investigator.”
“Not really. I slept with the D.A.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. He was a lot like you. Not as good-looking.”
“Like me.”
“Anal.”
I bit into my burger. “I’m not going to touch that one.”
She laughed. A nice laugh, unapologetic, that showed nice, even, very white teeth and made the bridge of her nose wrinkle. “Ever the compulsory, by-the-book Professor Bledsoe, carefully plotting steps from carefully garnered research that lead to open-and-shut cases, the way you still teach class. Bet you never haven’t miss a night of brushing and flossing, in that order, since grade school.”
“Whereas you…”
She grinned, chewing. “I plot, I research.”
“But mostly intuit.”
“Mmm…not mostly, but when the occasion arises. But I recognize, even depend, on the value of hunches. I was only two of the hundreds of investigators in the tri-state area who didn’t trust DNA.”
“You don’t trust DNA?”
“DNA is the lazy investigator’s crutch.”
“One in a million times.”
She shrugged philosophically. “It’s always that one that gets you. I’m not saying lab work doesn’t have its value, only that it’s not infallible. To me it isn’t that intuition is valuable, but that it works at all.”
I sipped Coke thoughtfully. “Not sure I follow…”
“Know what I like best about intuition? Where it comes from.”
“Where does it come from?”
“Exactly.”
I peered at her over the rim of my glass. “Are you having me on, Miss Bracken?”
“On what?”
“Never mind the flirting, I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Why?”
“Just for the sex.”
Her chuckled went right through me that time.
“Okay, maybe I am having you on a bit. To make a point. You’re right in assuming hunches can’t be proven. That’s what’s so mysteriously wonderful about them, they can’t be disproven. And they don’t come from fingerprints or microscopes,” she tapped her temple, “they come from here.”
“So do mistakes.”
“No. Humans make mistakes. Hunches and intuition are a gift. Always. And we all get them, all of us, all the time. The trick is recognize it when they come, be open to them.”
“Open, huh.”
“Open.”
“Go on.”
“That’s it, just open yourself—“
“I mean, about your history.”
“Oh. Well, remember the Jon Benet Ramsey case?”
“Of course. You weren’t part of that--?”
“No. But I was involved in a similar case while with the DA. Only this time the parents got the chair.”
“And you didn’t agree with the verdict.”
“No, I did agree. It was the little girl’s brother who didn’t agree. He admitted the day after his parents were electrocuted he’d killed his sister. That was it for me. No more airtight evidence bullshit. Airtight can costs lives. Criminal law in general is more interested in the ‘who’ than the ‘why.’ Even though the ‘why’ almost invariably leads to the ‘who’, even if after the fact.”
“So you quit the New York D.A.’s office?”
“Are you kidding? It was wayyy too hard a job to get. I hung in there a good while. But began a less linear approach to investigation. Wendell didn’t like it.”
“The D.A.”
“Right. Then the Soho Case came down.”
“What?”
Katie sat back with amused astonishment. “Which? The case or Soho? What do you people in Austin do down there, pursue Fox News and the Old Farmer’s Alma
nac?”
“Humor me.”
“Short and sweet--a woman was arraigned for killing her husband with a butcher knife. Plead from the get-go she was innocent, that her stepfather had done it. Her stepfather hated the husband, a ne’er-do-well even back in college when the couple was dating. Self-defense. Anyway, she insisted on her innocence, said in fact she was there when the killing took place, saw the whole thing, and described it to the police and jury in amazingly precise detail--how husband and stepfather had argued in the kitchen, how she walked in at the first knife thrust, how her scream echoed in the small apartment, how the knife hand struck the light cord, making all the shadows jump, how her husband begged her for help but she was too terrified to move, frozen with fear. I doubt her testimony helped her own case much.”
“So? She was convicted?”
“Thirty years to life at Leavenworth. I was at the trial. In fact, I was at the crime scene not more than thirty minutes after it happened. I looked into her eyes and I believed her innocence, believed it then and believed it when the judge passed sentence. Wouldn’t even consider an insanity plea, despite traces of her prints on the knife. She stuck to her story, every vivid detail of it. Said she was not a liar, she loved both men. Said she was telling the truth and, for me, the truth was in her eyes. I believed her.”
“Why?”
“Because she never tried to deny the facts, even the most incriminating one of all.”
“Which was--?”
“Her stepfather had died a year before the murder.”
Garbanzo made a long, discordant wail in his box.
Strangely no one at the surrounding booths turned to look at us.
It felt suddenly freezing in the restaurant.
“Goddamn cat,” I muttered.
Katie smiled, slipped Bonzo another wedge of meat. “I’m glad you brought him, though. Cats are very intuitive, you know.
“That a fact.”
“See and hear things beyond human ken. Might come in handy down there in the swamp.”
I glanced at the cage, the cat’s soulless eyes.
Our waitress appeared. “Anything else, folks?”
I shook my head, “Not for me, thanks,” reached inside for my wallet, “I’ve had enough.”
SEVEN
“Might come in handy down in the swamp.”
Now this is a dream, this is surely a dream, I thought. Surely a dream or, more accurately maybe, a nightmare, because it was dark, or nearly dark (dusk?) and everything held a strange smell, a watery smell to be sure but with no trace of chlorine, and because somewhere deep in my mind I knew I had been thinking about the little drowned girl…or, wait…maybe even seen the little girl again, I couldn’t be sure. And there was, in this dream, a constant, sonorous whining sound, also everywhere…a sound I couldn’t place…
It was hard to breathe. There was a soft feeling in my mouth like cotton and some in my nose that tickled my throat. I was smothering. And when I reached up to wipe at my mouth, wipe away the smothering, my hand came away coated with a gray material that crawled against my palm and wrist: mosquitoes.
That drifted away a few inches with the movement of my hand, then reclaimed it along with my nose, so that I finally sneezed so hard it jolted me up onto my elbows and left gray clots of blood on my shirtfront. And that was what finally brought me fully awake and I could feel the mosquitoes quite well now, thank you, their unhurried, almost eloquently unheeding feeding…feel them biting, biting, biting. Then I felt something else, the coarse gray-green grass beneath the butt of my jeans, and realized with a horror that was almost a relief , this was all real, this couldn’t possibly be a dream…
The mosquitos were a shifting, living shroud that rose and settled in an ever-thickening mass whenever I moved. They were the source of the whining sound. It seemed to fill my world. If I stayed here, stayed sitting here in the grass, they would eat me alive.
I pushed up on rubbery legs, staggered a few dizzy steps and finally felt a sensation stronger even than the biting insects: thirst. Memory was still forging a slow path to my brain but coming stubbornly along…something about the state of Louisiana, Independence or was it Memorial Weekend and my old Blackbird and…I thought…a companion come along for the ride. And a little drowned girl which it all seemed to center on.
And that I was closer to her now, in some way, closer here in the high grass and clouds of mosquitos and the surrounding swamp and the awful, nagging thirst.
Water all around, and not a drop to drink.
Could you drink swamp water?
I tried to remember…called up dog-eared schoolbooks and a teacher’s monotone that finally morphed into my own: sixth grade biology class at Stout Elementary, I’d taught there after college. “A swamp” I’d read to bright if mostly bored young faces, “or bayou (‘/bar.ou/ or /brju:/)is an American term for a body of water typically found in flat, low-lying areas…a slow-moving stream or river, or a marshy lake or wetland. Commonly found in the Gulf Coast region of the southern United States. An anabranch of a braided channel that is moving much more slowly than the mainstream, often becoming boggy and stagnant…”
Stagnant. That couldn’t be good. Except for raising mosquitoes.
I looked around me, made a little uncertain, half-circle hitch step. I was on a hardwood hummock some twenty feet across. Something, as I turned, cut my legs like cold slices of ice. I looked at my feet: where my socks had rolled down; thin red marks sliced my ankles, so scalpel-sharp they brought no blood. Rats? Leeches? I saw nothing but deadfall with scattered sprouts of grass. Then I knew. Saw grass. Serrated and nasty. And obdurate, grows anywhere, even on rock. I heard myself tell my students: “The American swamplands are no place for a tenderfoot.”
I looked up into fading sunlight mostly masked by a mesh of branches of tall slim trees. Conifers. My childhood fever for anything biological kicked in: Bald Cypress reaching skyward 40 meters or more. Red-brown bark, shallowly fissured, with deciduous branchlets arranged in two horizontal ranks; trunks surrounded by cypress knees jutting like knobby legs from the water. “Cypress tolerates minor salinity, but does not grow in brackish or saline water.”
Not brackish. Not salty. That meant drinkable.
I stepped to the edge of the hummock, half-slid in soft mud, bent and cupped hands to water warm as blood, brought it to my mouth. It tasted sweet and smelled mildly of tobacco. I splashed at my face and the curtain of mosquitoes lifted indignantly, were back again too soon. The little bites on my face were becoming one big bite that I imagined swelling like typhus and killing me eventually; a pumpkin-headed corpse lying in the swamp grass. I could not spend the night here.
I stood again, feeling a bit better, swatted at the mist of bugs and looked out across my surroundings. Black water. snaking out in every direction for miles, a shallow river peppered with stands of cypress and the occasional hummock of razor grass or hardwood. The tall cypress blocked the sun, giving me no sense of direction; the early evening felt rather than seen. How in God’s name did I get out here? And why?
The breeze came up. Became stronger and bore a gift: a light curtain of rain; a blessing. The gray robe of mosquitoes tore apart in twisting tendrils, departed.
My cell phone went off; the sound so civilization-real and intrusive I gasped.
I fished it out of my jacket, looked at the screen: Rita.
“Hi.”
“Hi, yourself. Just wanted you to know I arrived safely in Dallas and the folks say hi. How’re things going there?”
I looked out across the dark water, now dimpled with rain, patterns of merging ripples constantly birthed and dying. “Swimmingly.”
“Wow, this is a bad connection. Your voice is funny, Elliot. Are you outside?”
“Yeah. Outside. Here in the wilds of our Austin backyard.” My voice sounded find to me.
“You sound a little down, hon. Is Garbanzo giving you a hard time? I never should have stuck you with him. Shit. I’m sorry.”
> My mind was strangely peaceful, any previous panic gone, as if being lost in a Louisiana swamp under descending night was no big deal at all, the nature of things. Conversely, my fiancée’s voice felt almost impinging, a tinny obstinacy in the primal immensity of the timeless bayou. Maybe something in the water I’d imbibed was fucking with my head, but something way back in my mind kept saying with insistent clarity there were worse places to die, to become part of the Earth. I wondered absently if the little drowned girl had experienced that same detached, almost peaceful feeling, even in what must have been her last moment of terror…
“Elliot—“
I was drifting. “No,” I said, “the cat is fine. No problem at all, really.”
“Off by his independent self somewhere, no doubt.”
“That’s it.”
“Wow, you’re really breaking up, honey. What was that—“
A bright scream. An egret. All wings and dangling legs, lifting graceful as a white Boeing into the dying light with its eerie, singular call. “I don’t know. Hawk?”
“Sure you’re okay, honey?”
“I’m fine, Rita. Go back to visiting with your parents, give them my love. And give some to yourself.”
“Okay. Love you too. See you soon.”
“Soon.” And the phone went dead in my hand.
I was glad, sure I was about to faint.
Get a grip. You can always call her back for help, I thought, staring at the lifeless wedge of plastic, or the police or local operator for that matter; you’re not lost, not really.
Except I didn’t have Rita’s parents’ number on me and there was no guarantee of a decent connectiom
Rita got through. Don’t go weird on me. It was just water. Probably healthier than the fluoridated shit out of the tap.
But for some reason I didn’t feel like trying to call anyone just then.
The frogs had come out and it seemed somehow wrong to disturb their music. The rain was just light enough not to soak yet keep the bugs away. I realized with a kind of mixed urgency I might never get this chance again…this kind of special solitude. Anyway the wind was from the west, right? I wasn’t completely directionless.
FEVER DREAMS: A Bracken and Bledsoe Paranormal Mystery Page 6