“Before the child was put to bed?”
“That I don’t know.”
“Was there a lock on the window?”
“Again, that’s unclear. There is now.”
“What about a ransom?”
“Yes. A note in the mail to the Robichous, Dean and Angel.”
“When?”
Katie put down her coffee, flipped through her small leather notebook. “…mmm, August 12, 1992.”
I chewed grits. “Why?”
“’Why’ what?”
“Why so long before they got the ransom note? It can’t be easy keeping an eight-year-old calm and quiet no matter how well hidden she is. Ever read ‘The Ransom of Red Chief’?”
“In middle school. Poe?”
“O. Henry.”
“The king of twist-endings. Maybe little Amy Robichou’s case has a twist ending.”
“Like her neck? She was already dead?”
Katie shrugged.
I washed down the grits with coffee. “Was it paid, the ransom?”
“Yes. At a pre-established location.”
“And?”
“And little Amy was never recovered. Nor the money.”
“They got away with it.”
“Looks like it. Nobody’s come forward since to argue otherwise. Nobody’s come forth since, period.”
“Like it never happened.”
“I doubt Dean and Angel feel that way, Elliot.”
“Um. Anything else?”
“Not much.”
“Is this where you become psychic and start solving things?”
“I hope we don’t have to call one in before I do.”
“So, what now, what’s our next step?”
Katie managed to use her credit card this time. “I think we should pay the sheriff’s office a visit, see what if any files still exist on the case.”
“Wouldn’t they be at the County Court House after all these years?”
“Maybe. If there was one.”
“What makes you think the handsome Sheriff Cormac is going to share his files with us?”
She hefting her shoulder bag, winked. “He likes me. You didn’t notice?”
“I noticed.”
* * *
“Damn!” I said sputtered behind the wheel, “look at that…”
Katie was gazing out the passenger window, breeze shaping and reshaping her hair against her pretty face. “Yeah. On every other lawn and all the storefronts on Main Streets. Posters and flyers declaring:’ CORMAC FOR STATE REP!’.”
I banged the dash of my precious Blackbird hard. “I’m talking about that!” And pointed at my baby’s once pristine hood and 50’s-chic air scoop.
“Shit,” Katie said. “Bird shit.”
“Or that sticky crap from these weird trees! Christ only knows what it’s doing to my poor finish.”
“Is it original finish?”
I hesitated. “Yes! Well, almost. It was repainted only once.”
“So?” airily pragmatic, “repaint it again.”
I smoldered. “Somehow I don’t think you understand the whole classic car oeuvre.”
“Is that what it is? I’d have guessed a phallus metaphor.”
“A red Lamborghini, that’s a phallus metaphor.”
“What about a black one?”
“A beautiful intellectual and a racist, I like that in a woman.”
“That what you like in a woman? Here it is. Think you can find a parking space?”
The horse carriage high curb before the old brick-and-weeping-mortar building that served as the Manchac Sheriff’s Office was empty. Even of parking meters. I pulled almost to the front door.
“Certain advantages to living in the sticks,” Katie said, slamming the car door behind her. “I could get used to the slow pace.”
“Tortoise pace. And no, you couldn’t. Your psychic aura would wither and die and seep into the swamp grass.”
“You think? Place seems alive with psychic auras to me.”
“That’s just Sheriff Cormac’s aftershave. He wears a wedding ring, by the way.”
We stepped up on a 30’s era cement stoop fronting a weathered stucco façade and a single glass door. “What sharp little eyes you’ve got. I knew you’d be a good investigator.”
Katie looked at me as I held the door for her. “And so chivalrous!”
“Does it affront your sense of feminine liberation?”
“Yes, and please don’t stop.”
We stepped into air-conditioning, sweet as a gift from heaven.
“Everybody says that!” Cormac said, coming through the swinging gate of the waist-high wooden fence that ringed his desk and the rest of the small inner office. He was cap-less now, thick hair combed and shiny, perfect teeth grinning, a small pad in one hand as he held out the other to us.
“Says what?” Katie asked.
“’Whoooosh!’ You know, from the air-conditioning! Most folks in the area can’t afford it, or don’t want it.”
“How do they live without it?” I wondered aloud.
“Lived without it myself all my life! Grew up in the heat and humidity, used to it! Maybe that’s why I never sweat!” And his extended hand was indeed dry. Dry and overly firm. He offered it to Katie, held hers a moment or so longer than decorum dictated.
“How’re you good folks finding our little hamlet in the glades! Had your breakfast? Got glazed donuts over here! Fresh from Maudie’s Bakery down the street!”
“’Lotta-Eats’ took care of us already,” I told him, spotting another khaki uniform at a desk behind Cormac’s, a young man with his back to us, surrounded by mountains of packing cartons.
“Ah, Lotta’s! How’d they treat you?”
“Awful good food,” I said. “but no air-conditioning.”
Cormac laughed a big basso, wide-shouldered, neatly pressed uniform laugh. “Well, you’ll cool off soon enough here!” Saw me glance past him. “Oh, and that’s my deputy Jimmy you’ve caught goofing off at his computer!”
A youngish, nice-looking, bespectacled kid glanced up briefly, waved from behind an older PC, smiled shyly before going back to pecking, apparently entering data from a stack of rumpled papers beside him.
“Miss Bracken and Mister…ah…”
“Bledsoe.”
“…Bledsoe! That’s it! Meet Deputy Jimmy Olson!” He winked good-naturedly. “Like in the Superman comics!”
The deputy rolled his eyes at Cormac but kept pecking. “Thanks so much for adding that, Sheriff.” And to us: “You’ll have to excuse all the packing boxes and mess. I’ve been slowly dragging the thankless Sheriff Cormac into the 21 Century over the past few months. The real reason we have air-conditioning is my insistence on avoiding a computer melt-down. The sheriff thinks they run on Voodoo and fairy dust, won’t go near them.”
“I’m just an old-fashioned cop in a small, humble town!” Cormac beamed.
“You are a dinosaur in a platitudinous swamp,” Olson replied.
Cormac chuckled and signaled us toward his desk, dragged up a couple of heavy straight-back chairs and slid into his swivel. “Have to excuse the hardwood chairs too, I’m afraid! Family heirlooms, squat and yella as a cane toad! My Daddy used them in this office most of his life, along with this here desk and most of the rest of what we laughingly call furniture. Guess I’m kind of a sentimental fool that way, right deputy Olson?”
“Right about the second part.”
“So you like to hang onto things?” from Katie, seating herself closest to Cormac.
“Yes, ma’am, suppose I do!” He smiled at me. “Angel Robichou fix you a nice dinner last night, did she?”
“It was incredible,” I said sincerely.
“Gumbo Special, I’m bettin’! Best in the county!” The sheriff squeaked his chair around. “Jimmy, you ever been out to the Robichous’ place, sampled the Missus’ cooking?”
“You never give me any time off, Sheriff,” Olson replied, not looking up fr
om his computer and not sounding at all like a local; more like a highly educated young man slumming between college semesters.
Cormac squeaked back to us, started scribbling in his pad.
“Parking tickets?” Katie asked.
Cormac snorted dismissively. “Nah, this here’s a warning citation. We seldom give out the real thing here, just warnings. Not like a traffic jam is going to happen if someone jaywalks. Don’t get enough violators to make it worthwhile and those we get ain’t got the fine money. Expect you all are here ‘bout our missing Roger, the Robichou boy? Got kin, have you?”
“No,” Katie began, “we’re—“
“Pair of normal investigators, that’s right, you told me!”
“’Paranormal’,” the deputy corrected.
“That’s it!” Cormac grinned. “Well, he’s wild boy, ole Roger is, but don’t know that there’s nothing mystical about him. We got some leads on his whereabouts but nothing solid. Short of a binder in the swamp, ole Roger’ll turn up, I expect, probably half-tanked.”
“Actually, it’s Roger’s sister we’ve come about,” Katie said.
Cormac nodded absently at his pad, went on scribbling, suddenly stopped short in mid-scribble and looked up, one brow hooked. “Roger Robichou’s got him a sister I don’t know ‘bout?”
“A younger one,” I said.
The handsome sheriff gave us a puzzled look, then raised both brows. “Not the little girl who drowned!”
“Yes,” Katie said, “if that’s what happened. Little Amy.”
“Lord, folks, that’s been twenty years!”
“We know,” Katie and I said in tandem.
Cormac, still puzzled, put down his pen slowly, perhaps reverently. “Well, what is it I can help you with? I was just a kid at the time.”
“But your father worked the case, right?” from Katie.
Cormac nodded. “Yes, I believe he did, but Dad retired eight years ago. Along with most of the adults around at the time, lots of them dead now. May I ask what your concern is with the little girl?” And he got that look in his eye. “What is it you folks do, now--?”
“Paranormal investigation,” Katie told him, “Mr. Bledsoe here is my partner.”
Cormac put the end of his plastic pen between his white teeth, chewed on it. He looked at us. “’Paranormal.’”
“That’s right.”
“And…what is it about the little Robichou girl you think is--?”
“Angel Robichou, Amy’s mother, contacted me,” Katie said calmly, “a few days ago. Apparently aware of my work, other cases I’ve been involved with.”
Cormac chewed his pen, still friendly, just not grinning handsomely every two seconds. “And you all are from—“
“Austin,” I told him. “That’s in Texas.”
I couldn’t help it, always had a problem with authority.
To put icing on the cake, Garbanzo leapt out of my lap onto Cormac’s cluttered desk; something about it made it look as though I’d thrown him at the sheriff. It probably didn’t help that I made no attempt to retrieve the cat, who padded around the stacks of papers and files like he owned the place.
Cormac leaned back with a squeak, placed his right hand on the wooden grip of his holstered .44. I think, without Katie sitting there, Garbanzo might have lost one of his nine lives. But the sheriff just grinned wide and scratched the cat’s head. “Ain’t you a handsome fella, though?” He winked at Katie. “Unusual. What kind of breed is he?”
“Abyssinian,” Katie said.
“Beautiful animal…”
“Smart too,” I said.
Cormac nodded. “Independent, like all cats, huh?” And he looked right at me. “Not much regard for authority.”
“You nailed him.”
Cormac stroked Garbonzo’s silky back; the cat stretched longer than a ferret under the big hand. “Had me a cat once. Not a handsome one like this. Just a mutt—is that the right word?”
“What happened to him?” Katie asked.
Cormac shrugged. “Swamp took her, I guess. She was a rover. Just disappeared one night. Never came home. In and out of yer life, know what I mean?”
Katie reclaimed the cat in her arms. “We were hoping, Mr. Cormac—“
“Ah, hell it’s just “Cormac,’ ma’am, that’s what everyone calls me.”
“We were hoping your father…that you might still have some of his old office files on Amy’s case from the time of her disappearance.”
Cormac smiled at the cat.
Then at Katie, knocking his desktop with a fist. “Now that I can help you with! One thing about my Daddy, he was an efficient lawman! Maybe to a fault! Kept every scrap of evidence on every case he filed!”
The sheriff stood up, Katie and I following suit.
“Not that our little town had that many interesting cases through the years, beyond the occasional drunk-and-disorderly, but I do remember he was all over the Robichou matter! Come this way! And mind the clutter!”
We exchanged hopeful glances and followed the sheriff to a back room at the rear of the office; the only other room in the place as far as I could tell. Along the way, we threaded around several precariously leaning stacks of CORMAC FOR STATE REP posters.
There was scant space to maneuver inside the room among the towers of packing boxes. It was like one of those old castle mazes, only cardboard instead of shrubbery.
Cormac’s cellular went off as we entered.
“Sheriff Cormac!”
He held the phone to his ear with one shoulder and began picking his way through the maze of pasteboard stacks, each with a neatly hand-printed date at the top. “…uh-huh. No, not yet. Well, Jake, I reckon you’ll know when I know, right? Uh-huh…”
We followed him around a narrow, cluttered corner, the room growing darker the further we tunneled. Cormac, sometimes standing on his toes, sometimes pulling over a stool for greater height, combed his way down the ranks of cardboard tiers. “…I see. Huh. Tell you what, Jake, I’m a bit slammed right now…out-of-town company. Yeah, over to Austin, let me get back to you, huh?” He pocketed the phone, stretched high on his black boots and shook his head, muttering under his breath, “1955…1960…”
Finally he turned and shouted past us, loud enough for Katie to jump and the trailing cat to prick up his ears. “Hey, Jimmy! When in tarnation are the ‘90’s files?” the sound knocking around the maze.
We heard a distant rustle of paper. “Think I got them here beside me, Sheriff!”
More rustling then: “Yeah! About to commit them to cyberspace!”
“Well, hold up a sec, will ya?”
And he winked at Katie passing between us. “Always the last place you look, huh?”
TWELVE
Back in the main office, the sheriff carried a heavy carton from Deputy Olson’s computer desk across the room to the top of his own, ropey muscles bulging under his uniform sleeves. He passed close to Katie, nearly rubbing against her. Accidently. “’Scuse me, ‘Katie’, is it?”
“It is,” she smiled.
Dropped the carton on his desktop with a grunt, stood back and swept his hands wide. “Everything we got on 1992! Help yourself!”
“Thank you!” from Katie coming around to her chair, but Cormac caught her gently by the waist, “Nah!”, slid his hand up to her shoulder and guided her to his own black-cushioned swivel, “This one’s more comfortable! Take your time, now! Who wants some coffee?”
“I’d love some,” from Katie, settling anxiously, prying off the carton lid.
“Emit?”
“Elliot. Yeah, that’d be great,” the cat in my arms.
“I’ll get them, “Jimmy announced, but the good sheriff slapped his shoulder on his way to the refreshment table in back. “You play with yer fancy new toy there, Jimbo, I’ll play host!” He swaggered like a TV cowboy to the big silver urn, the carton of Half ‘n’ Half. “Hey, Lone Stars! Would you believe this sad-faced deputy of mine graduated from Colgate with honor
s! That’s a big-shot college back east! What you suppose he’s doin’ here in a hick town workin’ for me? Who takes cream?”
I scooted my chair over to Katie, stroking the cat and leaning close. “Amiable, isn’t he?” in lowered tones.
Katie had a stack of files beside her, one open. “Loquacious, anyway. Look at this…”
She handed me a color portrait of little Amy neatly saved in a plastic sheath, blue eyes and familiar framed-by-sunlight dancing yellow curls. I shook my head wistfully. “Boy, if we could pick our own kids, huh? What a little beauty.”
Katie nudged my shoulder with another snapshot: a police head and profile mug shot of a boy I didn’t immediately recognize. “Turn it over.”
I read the back: ROGER ROBICHOU, AGE 17.
“What’s that doing in the file?”
“I don’t know, unless he was a suspect.” She dug deeper in the file, pulled out a piece of folded paper. “Uh-oh…”
“What?” I leaned in.
“The mother lode. Cormac’s old man must have kept it.” She held the ransom note between us so I could see: hand printed on yellow ledge paper, also encased in clear plastic.
I read softly. “’Have your daughter. $10000.00 under Manchac Swamp Bridge Thursday 6pm. Come alone. Leave alone. Or no daughter. Await further instrucsions.’”
I sat back in my chair, feeling cold despite the warm cat. “They misspelled ‘instructions.”
“Maybe.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe it was intentional. Like this child-like printing. Done with the left hand maybe to insure against a possible later match by the police.”
She opened a small manila envelope, spilled a pile of black-and-white photos across the desk.
“Crime scene,” Cormac said behind us, making Katie jump again. “Sorry…” he apologized, setting two steaming cups before us.
“Thanks,” I nodded.
“My pleasure. Find anything interesting?”
“Could be,” Katie muttered noncommittally.
She sifted through a series of yellowed black-and-white snapshots, old-style with wide, white borders: Amy’s bedroom taken at various angles, a red, stamped CRIME SCENE on the back of each photo. The room differed little from the way we saw it yesterday afternoon. Shot of her unmade bed. Shot of her desktop with the silver-trimmed jewel box. A not-very-clear shot of the bedroom window. It was open.
FEVER DREAMS: A Bracken and Bledsoe Paranormal Mystery Page 11