Crimson Bayou

by C. L. Bevill

  “I just admitted that I did, and I tried to be careful about it.” She wanted to gnash her teeth in frustration but had a feeling that she was going to end up like John Henry who was going to need root canals soon if he didn’t change his ways.

  After John Henry got in the Bronco without another word and drove off, Mignon stared after the headlights that danced through the thick vegetation and ultimately vanished into the darkness. Then she yelled, “I’m working on the art of compromising! I sure as hell wish you would!”

  Chapter Twenty–eight

  Thursday, March 20th

  Cowboy Joe from old Mexico,

  Hands up, stick ‘em up!

  Drop your guns and pick ‘em up,

  Cowboy Joe from old Mexico.

  - Children’s jump rope rhyme

  Mignon took the five rhymes that she had put in her purse and drove up to Blessed Heart School, intent on getting some answers. She had some kind of temporary reprieve from John Henry, and she wanted to take advantage of it. Hah. Temporary reprieve. He’s talking to the D.A. about putting me in jail for obstruction of justice. Or something else much worse.

  But the words he’d said before that, had stuck with her. The message was that he wanted to work on their relationship. He cared for her. He hadn’t said the words exactly, but then, neither had she. That isn’t true, she protested silently to herself. I told him when he was walking away from me in the hospital back in September. I care for him. Dammit.

  As she parked the Explorer near the school, she repeated it aloud for another reason. “Dammit.” Mignon had forgotten the children were going on their all-day field trip to the state capitol. Most likely Father William and Sister Helena had gone with them. If all the girls were going, the teachers needed all the help they could get. However, Mignon decided that since she was there, she would go in and talk to Gail Harper. Oh, and Sharla, too, she thought. Poor Sharla, with her big ungainly cast stuck all alone here. A sobering thought made her pause. If only Nehemiah could see me. He’d say I’m a big sap. I guess I am. “Dammit,” she said again.

  Mignon stopped by the office and chatted with Gail for a few minutes. Gail was undeniably cheerful most of the time and happily agreed that Mignon could visit with Sharla. The thirteen-year-old was working on the paint on her cast, and Mignon was the perfect individual to help her.

  “That’s all the little girl talks about,” Gail said happily. “‘Miss Thibeaux done told us this about drawing. Miss Thibeaux done told us that about painting.’ I think she wants to get that cast all the way painted before it has to come off.” She smiled. “She’s going to want to take it with her, too. I don’t have the heart to tell her that when the doctors cut it off with a saw they’re going to ruin it.”

  Mignon smiled back. “Father William and Sister Helena go with the girls today?”

  “Oh, sister usually goes with them on Thursday outings. It really depends on how many girls have to stay here, too. One girl had to go to work today. Another one had a job interview at a fast-food place. So it was okay for me just to stay here with Sharla. As for the trip, there are too many girls in too big a place with too many people for the sister not to go. You know how things happen to little girls.” Gail tsk-tsked under her breath. “But Father William’s here.”

  Pointing at his closed door, Mignon said, “May I speak with him?”

  Gail rolled her eyes in self-recrimination. “I’m sorry. He is here today, but he went out a while ago. He had to meet with one of the donors in Natchitoches. He should be back in an hour or so. It was just a hand-holding thing. Pat the fella on his head and say what a good thing he’s doing for the girls. Some of these people want to be kissed on their po-po’s in exchange for giving a little money they won’t even miss.”

  “I’ll go keep Sharla company then,” Mignon said and motioned toward where the dormitory was. “She’s back there?”

  “She’s in the living room propped up on one of the couches. I put some paper under her cast and set up the paints so she could go to town.”

  “Thanks.” She left her purse in the cubbyholes provided by the school for the staff and walked out.

  A minute later Sharla’s pretty face lit up at the sight of Mignon. “Miz Thibeaux,” she said brilliantly, “look what I done to my cast!”

  Sharla’s all-encompassing panorama was almost finished. She had the school, the teachers, the students, and the dinosaur finished. The background was sky blue and all that was left was the rainbow. She was diligently painting that in with a small brush so she could better control the size of the arcs of colors.

  “That looks spectacular!” Mignon said. She perched on the edge of one of the large white coffee tables and studied the work. “Good job. I can see all of the student’s faces. And who is this with the bright red hair?”

  Sharla smiled shyly. “You, silly. Ain’t no one else got that color hair.” She dipped her brush in a paper cup full of paint and started on the end line of the rainbow. “Now all I got is the red and the orange of the rainbow and I be done. Father William said we could paint the cast with polyurethane so it don’t get messed up.”

  “That’ll do it,” Mignon agreed, silently agreeing with Gail Harper on the issue of not telling Sharla what the doctors would do to the painting when they removed the cast. She reasoned that Sharla would probably be so glad that the cast was coming off her leg and her mobility returned, that the destruction of her artwork wouldn’t matter much. “You know, we can take a picture of it,” she said, “so everyone can see it.”

  “Oh, Miz Thibeaux,” Sharla laughed. “They’ll see it on my leg.”

  “Well, for when you go to your auntie’s, hmm? Then they won’t see it anymore, right?”

  Sharla nodded. “Sure. Then they never get to forget it.”

  Mignon abruptly froze, and her blood turned to ice. Sharla was carefully painting in the red line of color of her rainbow. She chattered mindlessly on about how there would be a jump rope competition on Saturday, and all of the girls had been assiduously practicing so they might walk away with a ribbon. “They have a rhyme that will make the judges roll with laughter,” Sharla said. “It be so funny they fall down with a stitch. It made Mary snort like a little piggy, and everyone laughed harder when she did that. Linda said we had to use the other one, but Sister Helena said—”

  Mignon was staring at the color of red that Sharla was using. Alizarin Crimson. Her artist’s eye recognized the color. She had stated to John Henry that she could name twenty shades of red without blinking an eye. It hadn’t been bragging. Years of dedicated work allowed her eyes to pick up on the slightest variation of line and color. There were easily a hundred shades of red that could be produced, depending on the manufacturer of the paint that was used.

  But this color was rapidly drying on one side of Sharla’s rainbow. It was the same color that Mignon had found under her nails. It was the same color that had been found on Dara, as well. She didn’t need a forensic chemist to tell her that it was because her eyes were so accustomed to judging the diverse shades of every color conceivable.

  “Sharla,” she said. “Where did you get this color of red?”

  Sharla hesitated. “Well, that other color we had was too orangey. I dint like it none. So Miz Harper went and found me some. I don’t think it’s regular paint. Think it be something she got from the tool shed.”

  “The tool shed?” Mignon repeated. If the paint was found here, then why hadn’t Simon Caraby found it? The school was the last place that Dara Honore had been seen alive. Logically, he would have sought out the source of the red paint. And if he hadn’t thought of it, then John Henry would have been asking the same questions.

  The little girl shrugged. “I like it. Looks real pretty red-like.”

  “What was it used for?”

  “The paint?”

  “Yes, what was this color paint,” Mignon’s finger jabbed at the alizarin crimson on Sharla’s cast, “used for?”

  Sharla blinked
at the urgent tone of voice that Mignon was using. “I don’t know. Miz Harper said something ‘bout getting donations from WalMart and Home Depot. They give us old cans of paint that people dint buy.”

  Mignon stared at the little girl’s cast. She wasn’t a chemist, and she didn’t have a chromatograph to determine the elemental compound of the paint. But she knew who did. She reached for her cell phone and remembered that it had taken a repeated dunking in the bayou and no longer worked. She hadn’t gotten around to getting a replacement. Suddenly, she realized that she was frightening Sharla and caught herself. “Sorry, honey,” she said softly. “It’s just that it looks like something else I saw recently.”

  The thirteen-year-old relaxed minutely and resumed painting after a moment. “‘Salright,” she muttered. “Whatchoo so mad ‘bout?”

  “Sorry,” Mignon repeated. She was thinking frantically. The evidence of the paint, if it truly was the same paint, and she would have bet her right hand on that fact, proved that Dara had been in contact with something at the school painted alizarin crimson. It wouldn’t be an issue except that it had been under her nails and over her clothing. As if she had been clawing at a wall painted with it. But Mignon hadn’t seen anything that had been painted red.

  “How long have you been here, Sharla?” she said calmly.

  “A few weeks or so,” Sharla replied. Her voice was becoming normal.

  “Since that older girl got killed?”

  Sharla sighed. “Dara was real good at rhyming,” she said in a low voice. “Sister says she be in heaven now, looking after all of us. Just like an angel.”

  Mignon took that to mean that Sharla had been here before Dara had been murdered. “Do you know of anything that was painted red in the school?”

  “Red? Like this red?” Sharla paused in the act of painting and concentrated. “I don’t think so. The cafeteria tables be blue. Some of the chairs in there be yellow and green. They don’t match but that be because Father William gets stuff from all kinds of different places.”

  “I’m going to go talk to Miss Harper for a minute, Sharla,” Mignon said quietly. “You’ll be all right by yourself for a minute, right?”

  “Sure,” Sharla agreed. “I’m gonna get this cast done no matter what. It be the most beautiful thing ever.”

  Mignon stood up and walked quickly to the door. She was about to pass into the hallway when Sharla called after her. “You know they be something else that was red. A bright pretty red.” Mignon stopped immediately and looked back.

  “What is it?”

  Sharla pointed with the paintbrush. Mignon took a full ten seconds to register that the little girl was pointing at the coffee tables in front of her. Sharla jabbed for emphasis once and went back to her rainbow. Mignon’s gaze went to the white coffee tables. Large and built to last, they were designed for longevity. She had noted the first time she had come to the school that they had been freshly painted. They’d been tacky to the touch.

  “The tables were red?” Mignon said.

  The color of tables didn’t mean anything to Sharla, and she nodded happily. “Bright red. My mama would call that color ho red.” She giggled. “Then tell me not to use that word.”

  Mignon took three steps back and crouched at the side of one of the tables. She took a pile of magazines from its top and set them on a battered loveseat. There were three large coffee tables. There was one for each seating arrangement so that the girls could spread out and do whatever they needed or wanted to do in the living room. One was being used as a paint stand for Sharla. But the other two were free. Mignon ran her hands over the top of the table and felt a number of deep scratches. She was betting that whoever had quickly repainted the tables hadn’t taken the time to fill in the scratches as Robert had done with his pirogue.

  Sharla was watching Mignon’s actions with an open mouth. The paint rush in her hand dribbled crimson on the floor. Finally, the thirteen-year-old said, “It don’t mean nothing. Things be getting painted here almost every day. Lots of girls play hard and mess things up.”

  The first table had only marks made by dozens of energetic and troubled young women. The second table was more of the same. She stooped to see underneath and saw where the quick fix had missed some of the red paint. If John Henry or Caraby had seen the way that it had been painted, they would have known instantly where Dara Honore had been killed.

  It was the coffee table that Sharla was using. The white paint had been thickly used to cover up the gouges. The table was so beat-up that the fingernail width scrapes didn’t stand out. However, the vision in Mignon’s mind of what must have happened to Dara did stand out.

  It ran through Mignon’s mind with the reality of watching an event unfolding on the silver screen. The person had managed to catch Dara from behind. In the living room, under some kind of pretext, between the time that Dara had argued with Sister Helena and the time that Dara was going out to meet Tomas. They had used a rope with a knot prepared beforehand and caught her before she could issue even a little shriek. Maybe they had used the weight of their body to come down on her, smashing her down on one of the heavy coffee tables while she was strangled to death. Dara had done the only thing she could, scratch the surface of the table with frantic fingers, hysterically seeking a way to escape impending death, if not for her own sake, then for the sake of her unborn baby. She had been a fighter, but the advantage had been the murderer’s.

  And she’d died. In the school. With two dozen people in the other wing. Someone had taken a risk. When Dara was dead, they’d seen that the table was irreparably scratched. Perhaps, they’d even realized that lingering remnants might remain on Dara’s person. The police would look for the source of the red paint. They would focus on the school. The body was hidden or disposed of in the bayou. Then the table was speedily painted. Maybe even the same night. Someone with access had gotten another color from the tool shed and spent the next few hours painting the tables. The latex paint dried quickly enough, and if someone noticed in the next few days, it might be put off because no one from the school would know about the paint under Dara’s nails. And if John Henry and Caraby had walked through the school, they would have been looking for things that were painted red. They wouldn’t have seen it. Since they weren’t looking for cans of paint, then they might very well have missed the red paint in the tool shed.

  Or it might have been that they had been focusing far too closely on Tomas Clovis. After all, Dara was pregnant by him. Dara was supposed to be with him that night. A similar rope had been found in the bed of his father’s truck. He had waited for her, or so he said.

  However, if John Henry knew that the murder scene was the school itself, it might very well eliminate Tomas as a suspect. It was likely that Tomas hadn’t been in the school. He waited for her at the old church and cemetery. She snuck out there, not the other way around.

  Mignon stood up again and took a shaky breath. She didn’t know what it all meant. It was back to Sister Helena as a suspect or even Father William. Hell, for all I know it could have been Gail Harper, and that doesn’t make any sense. “These tables were red, then someone painted them white?” she said to Sharla.

  Sharla nodded. “One day this and then one day that color. Happens all the time. I liked the red better. Something be wrong?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Suddenly, Mignon wanted to talk to John Henry. She wanted to hear his voice, and she wanted to know that the universe was right again. He was the basis of normality. He was her lodestone. He, and only he, had that ability.

  Initially she had viewed the school with suspicion, intent that someone here was abusing their position of power, just as she had borne witness to in so many of the foster homes that she had lived in. After she had started to teach, she had witnessed that the people who ran the school were better than those she remembered. The girls had a good home here. They had opportunities. It was like the priest had told her the first time she’d met him. “For every successful c
hild like Linda Terrebonne, we have five who end up married or pregnant at seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen. We have several who vanish, only to find out they became addicted to some shameful drug and prostituted their bodies for the money to provide themselves with these drugs. There are successes. But some of those children make those choices on their own, no matter what we have shown them, no matter if we have given them every opportunity.”

  “Sharla honey,” she said. Mignon thought about the amount of danger she might be in. The girls were gone to the capitol with Sister Helena and the other volunteers. Father William was at lunch somewhere with a donor. It was simply Gail Harper, Sharla, and herself. No danger. “I’m going to talk with Miss Harper now. You yell if you need anything, huh?”

  “Okay,” Sharla said. “I don’t see what the big deal is with the tables.”

  Mignon went quickly down the hallway and found the main offices. As soon as she stepped inside, she realized she was alone. Gail Harper had apparently stepped out for a moment on some errand. Mignon went to the phone and quickly found an outside line. She dialed John Henry’s direct line and got his answering machine. Not particularly surprised, she tried his cell phone and got his service there, as well. Next she tried Ruby Wingo at the front desk.

  “Mignon,” Ruby said cheerfully.

  “Ruby,” Mignon said without hesitation, “do you know where John Henry’s at?”

  “I think he’s at the parish commissioner’s meeting, Mignon,” Ruby said. “He said something about putting you forward if you called though. Ifin you’ll just wait a sec, I’ll—hey!”

  “Miss Thibeaux,” said another voice on the line. It was Caraby and he said, “John Henry said to keep an eye on you. Is something wrong?”

  Mignon wavered for a moment. Goose bumps shot down her spine, giving her a feeling as if something ghostly was trailing its ethereal fingers along her flesh. “Why did you come up to Blessed Heart at Christmastime, investigator?”