I found myself touching lightly about my temples, the back of my head. How had I gotten out here? Had something or someone knocked me unconscious? Nothing felt sore.
Then I found a tender spot above my right eyebrow. Maybe I tripped.
Where were Katie and the cat?
Was she really a nutcase? Slugging me and stealing my wallet and leaving me out here in the swamp to rot? I grinned at the idea of it and the idea that nothing but plants rot in the swamp, the rest is eaten.
Still. What if Katie, this Katie of the wonderful smile, had made up the whole story of the little drowned girl? Heard about that stupid student film of mine. Was is all over the school, an elaborate campus prank? I almost wished so. Wished enough people cared and liked me enough to pull such a thing.
The wind picked up, driving the rain in stronger gusts, finally turning off the frogs as it drummed across the swamp in shifting ranks. A large green snake moved past my shoe, slithered over the lip of the hummock into the black water.
When I looked up again I saw the little girl.
She was standing in the rain watching me from her own hummock not sixty feet away. It may have been the last of the evening sun slanting down through the cypress but she seemed to have a preternatural glow about her—just her and a little patch of the tangled hummock beneath her sneakers. She wore a simple slip of colorless dress the growing wind kept catching the hem of, as it caught and fanned the sun-streaked mane around her small shoulders.
We stood there, both of us, looking at each for what might have been a minute or an hour.
“Amy?” I called, but the wind snatched most of it away, carried it over the swamp.
And then for no reason I could think of, I called, louder: “Are you my guide?”
I think she may have nodded but the rain was coming in sheeted curtains now, blowing her long hair across her pale face in time with the Spanish moss flagging above her.
I looked down at the marsh between us: dark surface out of which some water plants grew at random. A rough-hewn length of log floated lazily. It didn’t look very deep.
“I’m coming to get you!” I called above the wind, hands cupped.
I stepped into the warm water. It was soothing as a bath against the grass abrasions at my ankles.
I started across carefully. Not halfway, the girl stepped back a foot, called something inaudible across the little whipped-whipped wavelets. I couldn’t make it out and kept coming, water nearly to my waist.
She took another step back, called again. A warning
I looked down at the water. Everything looked the same but something was missing. The log. In its place a small swirl of black water.
My legs reacted before my brain, back-pedaling me to the hummock’s muddy shoreline, back and scrambling quickly up to safe ground. When I looked again, two glowing red orbs appeared before the dark swirl, observing me patiently from mid-stream.
I jumped, heart hammering as something slithered between my shaking legs.
I looked down, found Garbanzo luxuriating in my wet pant cuff.
A lithe splashing behind me as Katie skipped up on my hummock. “Elliot? Are you all right?”
I reached for her hand, felt the warmth and urgency in it.
“I’m fine. How’d you ever find me?”
She glanced down at my wet jeans.
“The cat? I thought he hated me!”
I bent, tried to pick him up; he skittered away, leapt into Katie’s arms.
“Why’d you leave the car, Elliot? What are you doing out here?”
I craned back quickly to the smaller hummock across the way.
No little girl in the shifting curtain of rain.
* * *
I sat in the passenger seat of the classic ’57 Thunderbird, wincing internally every mile as my wet butt soaked the original, antique upholstery. My poor Blackbird.
“I found the Robichou place,” Katie said behind the wheel.
The cat lay asleep atop his cage between us: somehow jailing him again just didn’t feel right. “No kidding, how’d you manage that?”
“Well, I didn’t find it literally. But I found a clerk at the Quick Stop on old Highway 51 who knew the name of the road they’re on Moonfleet.”
“You haven’t been over there yet?”
“No. I woke up beside the road to find the engine turned off and you gone. What the hell happened?”
It hadn’t really come back to me until that instant. “About an hour after we traded places behind the wheel I began to get drowsy, started looking for a motel or bed-and-board.”
“Good luck.”
“Tell me about it. Anyway, I’d just turned the headlights on when I looked up and saw her dart across the road in front of me.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think?”
Katie glanced at me from behind the wheel. “How do you know—I mean, there are probably lots of young girls in town playing outside in—“
“This wasn’t in town, it was in the middle of the swamp. I got…I sorta got sidetracked.”
“Lost.”
“Well, all these goddamn dirt roads look the same!”
“Hey, I completely sympathize! After I woke up and found you gone it took me half an hour just to locate “downtown” Manchac, and then only to find the sheriff’s office closed. I stopped off at the Quick Stop to get my bearings and asked some locals to help me look for you. Nobody volunteered. Why didn’t you use your cell phone?”
I wasn’t really sure why.
“Did you get it wet?”
I nodded, lying. “Yeah, got it wet.”
“So what happened after you saw the girl dart past your headlights?”
“I hit the brakes, pulled over, jumped out and lit out after her through the swamp.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
I wasn’t sure about that either. “Thought you needed the sleep…I don’t know, there wasn’t time. And I…”
“Was embarrassed you might have imagined it.”
“Fuck you, okay?”
“Is that an invitation?”
“I didn’t imagine it. She vanished into those woods like a…a…”
“Ghost?”
I made a face. “I had a girlfriend once who used to finish my sentences for me all the time.”
“What happened to her?”
“She drowned. In a swamp.”
“Thank you. That was tasteless.”
“The little girl was real, Katie. I saw her. And I heard her—crashing through the swamp ahead of me.”
“Like I said, maybe it was another—“
“It was her! The spitting image of the picture! Why do you keep coming back to that? Why are you assuming the skeptic’s role now?”
Katie patted my leg calmingly. “I am always skeptical, Elliot. Skepticism and intuition can be bedfellows, you know.”
“Damn strange ones.”
“Okay, let’s agree it was her. So what happened then?”
I sunk wearily into the seat. “I’m not really sure. I remember running after her, calling her name. Then…I don’t know, next thing I knew I was lying in the swamp on my face.”
She gave me a concerned look. “Did you hurt yourself?”
“I don’t think so. I must have tripped or something.”
“Ran into a low branch, maybe, easy thing to do in a late afternoon marsh.”
“Maybe. I lost my wallet.”
“No you didn’t.” She fumbled one-handed with her purse, tossed me the wallet.
I caught it one-handed and stared at her.
“You needn’t bother looking—I took all your cash.”
I looked. The wallet was empty. I looked at her.
“Because I didn’t have any.” She glanced at me. “Is that all right? Do you think I mugged and rolled you in the swamp? Then came back for you?”
“The cat came back for me in the swamp.”
She nodded, tight-lipped, dug back in her purse. �
�Well, let’s just say fuck you, too!” Handed me a wad of bills.
I turned away.
After a moment she sighed. “Look, we’re both tired. I found the wallet on the floor of the car when I woke up. Elliot, if we’re going to start the case this way we may as well turn around. Anything about the little girl you were chasing?
I was trying to decide whether to tell her about the second time--seeing the girl on the hummock, the alligator--but she was making a right turn onto a dusty cow path marked with a rusty, canted sign: I craned around to catch the name: ‘Onfle’.
“It’s supposed to say ‘Moonfleet,” Katie remarked, “the other letters must have rusted out, which is why it took me so long to find it.”
“If you did find it.”
“Elliot, if you’re going to stay mad—“
“I’m not mad. I need a warm bath. And a cold beer.”
“And a ‘hot piece of ass’?—isn’t that how the rest of the saying goes?”
I was suddenly very sleepy. “You know, Miss Bracken, there are other ways than mentioning sex to get back on a man’s good side. We’re not all erection-clutching pigs.”
“Oh? And I had such hopes.”
The Robichou house was another four miles or so down the cow path, no other houses in sight beyond the cypress and mangroves, frogs almost as loud here as in the swamp. I’d soon discover this was because the house was on the swamp, literally.
We approached a weathered, shake-shingled, single-story façade, fronted by a “lawn” with no real boundaries but a ferocious mixture of sand and weeds. A few cottonwoods, some looking centuries old, a scattered Dwarf Palmetto and Wax Myrtle or three. Despite its decided isolation, the Robichou house did not appear glaringly out of place out here in the boonies, more like a stump growing on a stump on stumpy marshland. Out of teacher’s habit I tried to conjure an adjective for the pervading atmosphere as I’m wont to do. Came up with ‘torpid.’ With ‘disquieting’ running a close second and ‘haunted’ lurking somewhere near the top. Maybe it was just the armchair poet in me.
There was no driveway. Two rusted-out hulks that might have been vintage Fords or Chevys squatted canted at the east end of the “front yard”, one on cement blocks, both patrolled randomly by a bevy of erratically pecking chickens. A newish-looking Crown Victoria was parked next to one of the west end of the property amid fender-high weeds and fiddleheads.
Katie held the cat in her arms as we came up the mashed-down grass and scattered gravel and occasional hardwood plank that made up the front walk. As we passed, I glimpsed the letters stenciled on the near side of the shiny Vic’s chassis: TANGIPAHOA PARISH SHERIFF’S DEPT.
EIGHT
It was one of those prewar hand-built jobs with a tarpaper roof and a front porch whose wood slats actually continued around the entire outer rim of the structure in varying degrees of linear perspective, sometimes smiling like yellowed teeth, sometimes toothless. What my Uncle Max used to call an “add-on” house, meaning it started as a one- or two-room box that someone or a series of someones had gradually added dubious additions to, in some cases not always an improvement architecturally. A sort of jigsaw puzzle in progress. I got the feeling the place was or had been on flood prevention stilts but the chickweed was too high to be sure and the light was fading fast.
Millers and nose wigs banged suicidal at the funnel-shaped tin porch light already burning in anticipation of company, which I assumed was the police. The inner door was wide open in the oppressive heat (was it ever closed?) but a humidity-warped screen door stood paint-flaking guard. There was no buzzer.
Katie adjusted Garbanzo in her arms and gave the weathered wood a couple of light raps.
I could see only formless dark shapes through the moth-eaten screen. No one greeted us, but Katie and I looked at each at the same time as voices sounded somewhere deep within the house, muffled and conversational.
Katie rapped louder. “Hello!”
The sprinkle of rain had abated but the breeze was still up, snatching at Katie’s hair and keening in the irregular eaves.
Louder: “Hello! Anyone home?”
I thought I saw a shadow within, furtive and low to the ground, couldn’t be sure. My thirst was distracting me, throat on fire, lips so dry--even after the rain—it hurt to speak. It was making me both irritable and a touch bolder than usual. I reached impatiently for the corroded latch and the screen door came free reluctantly in two tugs.
We entered a darkened (living room, dining room?) area with virtually no foyer. There were no lights either, but the invisible wall of must and mildew had the force of hunger.
I thought at first the mustard color of the walls were from dying sunlight through the silt-filmed windows, but soon realized they’d been either painted that baby-shit hue or had simply stood that way too long unpainted. Every piece of furniture seemed to sag slightly off-center, but the uneven, unvarnished floor planks might have had something to do with it. There were piles, no, mountains of wadded clothing everywhere, like islands of hummocks in the swamp, Mrs. Robichou apparently not a regular recipient of House Beautiful awards. Everything looked old. Smelled old. Felt grown into the room. Everything but a bright new 65” flat screen TV and unopened boxes of home theater electronics cowering in one corner as if hiding from shame. The rest of the house kept reminding me of an old antique store I’d visited briefly once in Illinois. For about a minute. Visited briefly but never forgotten. Those sick room vibes.
We came through the mustard living room around a dark, sprung sofa to the mustard, buckled linoleum of the kitchen, following the distant murmur of conversational tones. We saw movement through a square of kitchen window, found another screen door beside it and let ourselves out onto the back porch, where we found ourselves among the Robichous.
They sat like statues under the overhang in rickety, rattan porch chairs, 1930’s vintage, both husband and wife holding tall plastic cups of what looked like iced tea. Katie had told me they were both early 60’s but they appeared much older in the waning light, thick crops of gray hair above mahogany-colored faces, creased by daily exposure to the sun. Dean Robichou in bib-alls and rubber fishing boots, Angel, his wife, in a lifeless gray dress that, except for the frayed edges, matched her eyes and her—current at least—mood. Neither of them looked up as we came--with some noise--onto the porch, me letting the screen door bang behind us by way of friendly, prowler-free introduction. Neither of them even looked particularly curious. I got the feeling surprise and curiosity were not staple emotions around the Robichou home. Maybe even around Manchac, Louisiana.
Seated casually across from the couple was a uniformed younger man in service cap and Sam Browne holster, scribbling in a notebook; clearly the owner of the shiny car parked on the lawn. He finished saying something as he scribbled and turned to look up at the red-haired woman holding the cat and the man dying of thirst.
Fat-bellied, balding Sheriff in wrinkled police tans with a muscled face, thick lips, thicker stub of cigar and thicker attitude, right? Now that you’ve pictured the cliché, clear it from your mind. The officer was well set up, maybe my age, crisply pressed, shiny of belt and boots, dark of hair with near movie-star handsome blue eyes. White toothed smile made the older couple across from him look even more forlornly shabby. The cop’s chair was a beautifully finished work of mahogany elegance, antique as the Robichou’s rattans but the kind of antique you pay for; as was the delicately stemmed, art deco tea glass on the faded wicker table beside him. Shabby or not, the Robichous knew how to treat a guest.
Still no one particularly reacted to our sudden presence.
In Austin it might have seemed curt, even rude; here, where things moved slower, it made me feel just slightly uncomfortably accepted. They simply went immediately back to whatever it was they were doing, with the possible exception of the cop, whose eyes lingered a moment on Katie’s willowy form.
I took the moment to glance out over at what might be laughingly called the backyard: m
ore chickweed and sandy soil. All twenty feet of it. The rest was Spanish Moss and knobby-kneed cypress. Swamp. Almost to the back door. I slapped at the back of my neck, almost out of routine by now. The group on the porch, all richly tanned as creamed coffee, didn’t seem bothered by the insects. Maybe the bugs considered Katie and me fresh blood; with that hint of city tang.
“Is there anything else you’d like to tell me, Mrs. Robichou?” the young was asking, officiously pleasant, “anything else you remember?”
The dowdy-faced woman shook her dowdy head and I detected once-handsome features there, a high school girl used to fending off the boys from the village. “That’s about all, I guess.” She turned to her husband. “Dean?”
Who also shook his head. “Nothin’ I can think of. We didn’t touch anythin’.”
The young cop smiled at that, pocketed his spiral notebook and pen and stood. “Shall we have a look at the room, then?”
And they paraded past us through the kitchen’s screen door. Mrs. Robichou, last in line, looked up meek and watery-eyed at Katie. “You’re the investigator. The one I called?”
“Yes,” Katie held out her hand. “Katie Bracken. And this is my partner, Elliot Bledsoe. I’m very glad to meet you, Mrs. Robichou.”
“Likewise,” I added and took her hand.
Mrs. Robichou gave us each a lingering (hopeful?) look, then led the way back inside the kitchen through the house, clicking lights along the way (“Comin’ on dark”) down narrow hallways of humidity-bulging, hideously flowered wallpaper.
We ended up in the only room in the place with any color at all. Unfortunately red, the kind inside us all.
It spattered lightly across the grimy wallpaper, sprinkled the rumpled sheets of the unmade bed like acne, stained and dripped the jagged angles of glass on bedroom’s broken, single window. The rest of the room was a wreck.
“This is your son’s room?” professionally sympathetic from the young sheriff.
“Yes,” from the couple in tandem.
The sheriff nodded to himself, jotted in his notebook, walked over and gave the broken window close attention, jotted some more. Turned back to us, eyes lingering on Katie. “Sorry, afraid I’ll have to ask you two folks to wait in the hallway for me. And please don’t touch anything.”
FEVER DREAMS: A Bracken and Bledsoe Paranormal Mystery Page 7