“That was without doubt the most distinctively delicious chicken I’ve ever eaten!” I proclaimed, round-bellied and grinning, an epicurean Cheshire.
“And best chicken you’ll ever have,” Dean proclaimed proudly, leaning way back and satisfied in his chair and having at his back molar with a length of wood pick, “because it was gator.”
“Dean!” his wife scolded from across the table.
My stomach lurched.
“There’s no call for that, now! The Brackens might not care for gator meat! Why can’t you ever just let things be?”
I just let the ‘Brackens’ thing go, stomach too uncertain at the moment to argue relationships. But the queasiness passed soon enough as the aroma of the spicy helping on my dish rose to seduce me again. “I don’t care what it is,” I slumped, sated, “it’s incredible.”
“See there, Angel baby, and he didn’t even say it tasted like chicken!” It was the first time I’d truly seen Dean Robichou smile all day…though there was still a hint of sarcasm behind it. Not outright unfriendliness, maybe, but something born of bitterness. Dean didn’t cotton to strangers, the atmosphere never truly settled with him present. He was a gracious enough host as far as things went, but I never felt him entirely comfortable with Katie or me there in his kitchen, or even his house.
Angel was picking up on it, looking uneasy again, so Katie—before things could slip away--quickly jumped in, rerouted the sobering tone before it could find roots. “When did you first find Amy’s locket missing, Mrs.—Angel?”
Angel’s expression shifted like a quick wind on soft sand. “Oh…several months ago…”
Dean scowled up from his plate. Another antique, by the way, all our plates and the silverware as well; truly magnificent southern gothic dinnerware that shone with its own inner brilliance and careful craftsmanship, about as out-of-place on the picnic tablecloth as a fly on a diamond. Whether long a part of the Robichou heritage or found on one of their floating antique tours I didn’t know.
“You told me it was just the past week or so!” Dean growled.
Angel stared blandly at her food; she’d hardly touched her plate. “I told you that to…pla..pla…”
“’Placate’?” Katie helped.
“Placate you, Dean. You don’t believe me now so you wouldn’t have believed me six weeks ago.”
Dean put down his fork, gathering himself, but Katie forged ahead, undaunted. “And where did you find it the first time?”
Angel faced her husband’s eyes reluctantly. I could see she was warring with herself; needing to talk about this but afraid to, weary of his derision, weary maybe of her own self-doubts, of the whole exhausting experience. “The first time, I found it among my sewing things. I’m always so careful to return things to my sewing basket.”
“And the next time?”
“I believe…yes, the kitchen drawer.” She pointed behind her. “There, among the silverware and steak knives.”
“Go on.”
Angel sighed, milky eyes saying she wish she’d never started. “Oh…in the washroom once. Out in the shed next to the chicken feed another time…”
“Angel, honey, listen to what yer sayin,” from Dean, some of the anger easing now, letting a wedge of sympathy creep in. “Those are all places you go to! Places you work at or come across every day! Doesn’t that tell you something?”
Angel’s face went hard. “Like I put the locket there myself, Dean?” She couldn’t look at her husband any longer, stared away at the kitchen window, the dancing fireflies in the yard. “Is that what it’s supposed to tell me?”
Dean stared at her a long moment, finally shook his head. “Why don’t you ask the experts here?” He turned to Katie challengingly. “What’s your assessment of all this, Dr. Bledsoe?”
“It’s ‘Miss Bracken’. Mr. Bledsoe and I aren’t married.”
And Dean arched a pious brow. “Just answer the question.” But when he caught the crushed look in his wife’s eyes and the sharp one in Katie’s, added a beat later: “Please.”
Katie ignored him, turned to Angel. “And when did Amy first appear to you, Angel? In human form, I mean?”
Angel looked up like a startled deer. “What?”
I saw Katie’s mouth part just the slightest, felt her fighting to conceal surprise. “You…haven’t actually seen her then? Her image. She hasn’t really come to you in that way?”
Angel flushed, turned sharply away. “Heavens no!” reached absently and too quickly for the iced tea pitcher, knocked it over on the table. The gold locket was curled beneath it, luminous and deeply aglow as pirate’s treasure.
I think we all gasped at the same time; or maybe it was just me, gasping loud enough for everyone.
That cold thrill found my heart. I was almost positive the little kitchen swam for an instant.
Angel snatched up the locket protectively, clutched it to her breast. “She comes to me this way, Miss Bracken. Did you think we were seeing ghosts? Wailing spirits?”
Slit eyes smoldering suspicion.
Everything changed an uncomfortable notch after that.
Whatever homey ambience the good-smelling little kitchen had attained vanished like steam from the stove pots.
No one said anything for almost a minute, during which any welcome from the Robichous seem to slip away by degrees.
Finally Angel turned to Katie with what I was sure was a polite way of asking us to get the hell out on her lips. But Katie—irrepressible, undaunted, ever-determined Katie—got there first again. “Have you told anyone else about these…encounters, Mrs. Robichou?”
Angel’s back had stiffened so sharply again I doubted even Katie’s gentle palm could unknot her. “Miss Bracken, I think it best now if you and Mr. Bracken—“
“The sheriff, for instance,” Katie dogged, “is he aware of these manifestations?”
“M-Manna—what?” from a growling Dean.
Katie gave him her back. “Mrs. Robichou--?”
Angel started to glance her husband’s way, caught herself.
You’ve lost the rapport, Katie, I thought, time to get while the getting’s good!
“Anyone else in the family, for instance. Your son Roger, maybe? Or a close neighbor. Anyone at all?”
“No,” Angel said tonelessly.
“The ole swamp witch,” Dean muttered around a mouthful of gator.
Angel’s eyes flew to him, all brimstone and daggers. “Damn it all, Dean!”
And Dean not only stopped in mid-chew, his expression told everyone he was shocked to hear even a mild curse word pass wife’s lips.
He swallowed thickly. “Well, it’s the truth, ain’t it? You called these here people! Thought the big idea here was to tell ‘em the truth! Thas what you said ‘fore they came!” But he was cowed; first time I’d ever seen him like that, too.
“Who’s the swamp witch?” Katie urged, clinging to whatever momentum was left.
Angel glared at her husband until I thought he’d shrink down and disappear in his jambalaya, then lowered her eyes to the antique locket in her unclenched fist. “She ain’t no witch. That’s local wives’ tales. Just an old woman who keeps to herself. Out there.”
Katie’s eyes widened a bit. “Out where?”
“On the ferns. She don’t know no more ‘bout Amy than you or me.”
Dean was too shrunken to argue but Katie could tell what he wanted to say, so she said it for him. “Then why did you go see her about Amy?”
Angel’s full mouth tightened to a bloodless line. “Miss Bracken, you are a very per…per..”
“Pretty?” Dean tried to help.
“Per…per…”
“’Prescient?’” from Katie.
“Persistent!” Angel spat.
Katie nodded, took a sip of iced tea calmly, professionally. “Thank you. It’s how I solve cases.” She looked back up. “Find people.”
Angel lost some of the fire from her eyes.
“It’s one o
f the tenants of my job, Mrs. Robichou, and I do my job well.”
Dean grunted. “I’ll give you that.”
Katie patted her lips lightly with her heavy, wonderfully embroidered antique napkin. “And what did this witch woman tell you about your daughter?”
I think we were all certain Angel wasn’t going to play anymore. Wasn’t going to say another word to either of us that night.
But she surprised us after a cold moment. “I told her about the locket. About how it keeps popping up…”
“Yes--?”
“She said that it was Amy. Said my daughter was doing it…trying to communicate with me.”
“What else?”
Christ, Katie! I thought, sometimes you really don’t know when to quit!
Angel fumbled with her own napkin. “She told me there were…secrets surrounding my baby’s disappearance…things I didn’t know about. ‘Dark’ things, she said.”
“Anything else?”
Angel shook her head. Looked up into Katie’s eyes. “I’d heard tell of you on the Oprah Show. That evening after seeing the old woman, I decided to call you…”
Katie placed a warm hand over Mrs. Robichou’s.’ “I’m glad you did.”
Angel’s eyes brimmed a fraction.
“Ah feeeeeel good!” James Brown wailed from Katie’s purse. “Like I knew that I would now!”
Katie snagged her cellular. “Yes? Oh. Hello. No, just…we’re still here, just having some coffee. Yes, Mrs. Robichou was kind enough to fix us dinner. A delicious dinner. Yes, it was, my first time eating it. Well, I suppose it tasted a little like chicken. What? Oh? Lead? What kind of lead? Of course. Would you like to speak to—oh. I see. Very well. Yes, and please keep in touch, we appreciate it. What? Of course I appreciate it too. All right, then. Thank you, bye.”
She put away the phone, cleared her throat, smiled tightly at the group. “That was Sheriff Cormac. He says he might have a lead on your son’s disappearance.”
Dean started. “Why didn’t you let me talk to him?”
“He said he was in the middle of something, that he’d call you later.”
Dean sat back in his chair. The couple looked at each other across the table the way all couples always look at each other when one of their children’s gone missing I supposed.
Absolute silence for a time.
Then, as if James Brown’s baritone hadn’t already given me a heart attack, an enormous rat jumped up on the very center of the table, eliciting a yelp from everyone.
“Damnit!” Katie snapped, then, apologetically to Angel, “Sorry,” and leaned across her plate to grab the rat—who turned out to be Garbanzo—in her hands and haul him off the tablecloth, tossing him into my lap.
“Sorry, everyone,” I smiled chagrin, “he’s probably hungry.”
At that same moment a raucous barking bounded toward us from the backyard.
“Sounds like Louis is hungry, too,” from Angel, pushing back her chair, “Dean honey, why don’t you go feed him?”
Dean studied his wife a silent moment, finally nodded and tossed his napkin down “Right.”
“Will the cat eat jambalaya, you reckon?” Angel asked Katie, rattling saucers from the cupboard.
“He’s my cat,” I said with chagrin, “and I think he’d eat fresh rhino if you had any.”
“Well, let’s feed the poor thing then,” from Angel, ladling spicy broth from pot to saucer with a wooden spoon. “Katie, grab one of those little bowls up there for his water, will you?”
“Sure! Thank you!”
“Dean, why don’t you take Mr. Bracken along with you to feed Louis? Commencing to be a nice night, little windy but that’ll chase the skeeters.”
“Fine,” Dean nodded. He held the screen door for me. “Mr. Bracken? Or is it Bledsoe?”
“It’s Elliot,” I smiled companionably and trailed after him to the back porch.
We’d hardly gotten down into the yard when a big, jowly-mouthed, saliva-slewing bloodhound bounded against my chest, nearly toppling me.
“Get back, ya dang mutt!” from an irritably casual Dean, whose voice only sent the big hound bounding from my chest to his. “G’wan, ya slack-bellied good-fer-nothin’! I ain’t got the food on me!” Pushed the animal away. “Good fer nothin’….couldn’t find hare nor fowl if it was under his fat nose!”
The dog’s joyful bark echoed in the yard as he tore mindless circles around us all the way downhill. “Start bayin’ now and I’ll give ya something to bark about!” Dean threatened, but I could sense a grin behind it. Everybody loves dogs, even ornery swamp people.
A chicken squawked and darted indignantly into the cover of dark as we descended the sandy soil, the not- unpleasant odor of marsh water rising off the bayou to greet us.
“Chickens and hounds,” Robichou noted absently, “must seem like a strange life to a city bred feller.”
“Austin’s not just any city. Besides, I think the glades are beginning to grow on me.”
Dean grunted. “That’ll come off with a bar of Lava.”
I chuckled, suddenly enjoying this, the night, the dancing lightning bugs, the fishy-sweet odor of the swamp. Even Dean Robichou’s truculent company. “It’s really quite beautiful,” I said, nodding at the shifting mist across the marshes, “in its way.”
Dean came to a back-stretching halt at the canted outline of his small dock, a bigger outline rocking easily beside it. His old crab boat—now his antiquing scow--creaked dark and angular against its mooring rope under nighttime breezes.
Robichou gave it a long, silent look, stretched his back again and spat into the weeds. “It’s dyin’…” he muttered.
I glanced at his shadowed profile. “Your boat?”
He didn’t answer for a moment, eyes on the converging mist. “The swamp. Like an old man, outlived its usefulness. On its last legs now for more’n forty years or more…” and he shook his head as his voice went softer “…after millennia of virginal, pristine perfection.”
I was a little surprised at his use of ‘millennia.’ Maybe he was a more complex man than I’d given him credit for.
“What’s killing it?” I asked gently, though I thought I knew, “Katrina?”
“Shit,” Robichou spat another lugie, poked on his fists on his denim hips, “hurricane’s a thing of nature, natural and recurring. Be a troubled planet without the occasional blow. Know what yer standing on right now, Mr. Bracken?”
“Elliot. No. Sandy soil, mostly?”
“Flood plain. Or what’s supposed to be one Was one. All this,” he swept his arm around his property, “is supposed to be underwater part of the year…
“Good God.”
“Is He?” Robichou chuckled without mirth. “Maybe to some. Others follow the Voodoo. Me, I’m just an ex-crabber barely ekin’ a livin’ scroungin’ antiques.” He almost laughed. “One good thing about ole Katrina, though, some of them richer flooded homes gave up some pretty treasures if you got the time and backbone to dig up the crap some folks call antiques.” His tone was more bile than bounty.
Something moved in the air.
Just the breeze, probably, or maybe a night-feeding bat.
But suddenly I felt like we weren’t alone out there in the night.
No, that wasn’t quite right. Not like there was a third party out walking with us…more like the third party was me. Inside me. Like I was experiencing the yard, the fireflies, the stars and the swamp through someone else’s eyes…even someone else’s ears, but at the same time my own.
As though I had run here chasing lightning bugs on summer nights, had laid among the chickweed and scrub and looked up to marvel at the starry sky…that both my heart and the world around me were decades younger, seeing and feeling it all through the wondrous eyes of innocent youth. And I felt very happy inside. Joyful. Fulfilled. As if there were no tomorrow, but a million, million tomorrows that stretched away far as the distant stars to an adulthood still light years off but brimming with
exciting potential. Like the first time in a new town, a new state. Like a first real kiss…
And I had the silliest thought then, my eyes suddenly lidded and heavy…the silly thought that the pale, troubled Mrs. Robichou had put something in my iced tea…and that I would soon be sleeping a very long, very deep and refreshing sleep…never caring if I ever woke again…warm and safe in the certainly that there were people who loved me, would take care of me…that I could count on and know peace with. And then my eyes wandered to the misted, stygian mystery of the ageless swamp…
…and I knew sudden, blinding terror.
Something stung my ankle.
I looked down languidly, expecting a bug, and found a fat, errant chicken, white feathers glowing yellow in the dark, pecking at anything and everything, including my shoes.
“Here now,” Robichou grunted, bending down, “is that any way to treat a guest?”
He held the bird up by its skinny neck. It chuckled stupidly, flapped futilely once. “Like to take her home? Make you a good fryer!”
“Thanks, no, it’s a small car.”
The older man’s eyes seemed to glow in the dark against his tanned face. “Y’all shouldn’ta oughta come out here, Mr. Bledsoe.”
All the humidity seemed to drain from the air around me.
“Your wife called us…” I started.
“My wife’s a damaged woman. Hell, yer an investigator, can’t you see that?”
I didn’t know what to say. I backed up a step.
“Think it’s only been a few weeks ‘cause she says so? That woman’s been tortured for twenty years, Mister, every day, every minute, every blessed second of those years, right from the moment her little girl went missing.”
“Dean, I want you to know you have my complete sympathy—“
He stepped toward me, hissing like a reptile. “An army of sympathy won’t help what’s happened here! We don’t need sympathy and we don’t need hope! We need healing! Forgetting! And I don’t think yer pretty girlfriend quite understands that!”
“She’s a very perceptive woman, Mr. Robichou.”
FEVER DREAMS: A Bracken and Bledsoe Paranormal Mystery Page 9