by Jimmy Fox
Since she’d brought it up, he decided to pursue the subject.
“Carl’s death doesn’t seem like random or personal violence to me. I think there’s a connection with Katogoula ritual and myth. The sheriff thinks so, too.”
Her eyes averted, Holly rolled a pencil under her palm on a yellow legal pad. Up, down, up, down. . . . “Is that what you two were talking about?” Her attempted nonchalant tone hid some pressing worry.
“Mostly,” Nick said. “But your name did come up”—the pencil halted below her hand—“as a candidate for driver’s ed.”
Holly laughed. He’d said the right thing. She could look at him again, sure that the facets of deception in her eyes were still safe.
“The murder’s certainly got them rattled,” she said. “Are you saying you believe in the tribal myths? You don’t strike me as the pious type.”
“You go to church, don’t you?” he asked.
Her mouth went lopsided with guilt. “Sometimes.”
“You’re not the pious type either, then, but you’ll never shake those deep beliefs. We all have them. Some of us wear our faith on our sleeves. Some of us, like the Katogoula, discover the power of their beliefs in a crisis. . . . No, I don’t believe in the Katogoula myths. Directly, that is. I believe in the facts of human relationships, how rituals and myths can affect what we do, what we do to each other. That’s why I need to know everything I can about the traditions of the tribe. The killer knows.”
She twisted in her chair to face him. “You really care about the Katogoula, don’t you, Nick?”
“Yes.”
“Poor Carl,” she said. But her tone turned suddenly less sorrowful: “Actually, he was a real shit. He groped me at Three Sisters, once. I socked him one.”
She demonstrated with a roundhouse swing that accidentally grazed Nick’s jaw. Giggling, she started apologizing and reflexively reached for his face. Their eyes met as her hand lingered. Nick thought he saw an invitation to a kiss. He touched her hand, leaned toward her.
One of the tape machines clunked and whined as gears and belts disengaged. The momentary magnetic longing had been broken; their hands slid reluctantly apart.
“It just went to standby, that’s all,” Holly said, clearing her throat, straightening up in her chair.
“I’ll remember to keep my hands to myself; you’re dangerous. Tell me more about Carl—without the pugilistic body language, if you please.”
“Well, he did have his good points. He was a storehouse of Katogoula ways. He didn’t fully understand that he was, hated to talk about it. I’ve got a tape here . . . somewhere . . . of him tanning a deer hide. He makes it look like ballet. Of course, I wanted to throw up.” She shuffled through black plastic tape boxes. “I can’t find it right now. But anyway, he had intuitive skills; as a boy he learned things that are lost now. Really remarkable. No wife, no kids, no parents, no friends. Just Tommy, his brother. And they didn’t get along. He’d been to jail, I think. Nothing big, though.”
“All in all,” Nick said, “a guy no one would much miss.”
“But his death will hurt the tribe in deeper ways. Centuries of tradition died with him.”
Holly had hit on a new dimension of Carl’s murder. Nick felt a vague sense of its importance, but for now he could only store away her words.
As if feeling a sudden draft, Holly crossed her arms. “I was out there that morning.”
“At the lake? The morning Carl was killed?”
She nodded. “The opening segment, the video of the sun coming up, the mist on the lake, the Sacred Cougar myth. I shot it that morning. Sort of a spooky coincidence, huh?”
“Have you told Sheriff Higbee about this?”
“No,” she said, a bit too defensively. “Why should I? The landing where I was is on the other side of the lake. You can’t even see where Carl was killed. Besides, there wasn’t anybody out there because it was just after the early teal season.”
“Maybe questioning will bring back a memory you didn’t think was significant.”
“I have it all on tape,” she said, as if speaking to a simpleton. “Watched it, like, a thousand times, editing it. I think I know what’s on there by now. I’ll show you the raw footage, if you want.”
She did. That morning, three weeks before, Holly had arrived in pre-dawn darkness at the concrete parking lot and boat ramp on the shore of Lake Katogoula. During duck-hunting season, dozens of trucks with boat trailers would have filled the area.
The landing indeed seemed deserted as Holly quickly set up the camera on a tripod and experimented with lighting settings, focus, and zoom. She’d recorded sound, too. Nick could hear her cursing several times, as some piece of equipment pinched her fingers or as she exhorted herself to hurry, because the eerie half-light she wanted would soon be gone. He saw her dim athletic figure dash in front of the lens to remove a plastic soda bottle and some beer cans spoiling the view.
At least he knew exactly where she was when Carl was being murdered . . . if the tape was shot when she said it was.
The stop-and-start shots became smoother and longer as light gradually suffused the scene. Much of what followed made it into the edited version. Slow pans and pullouts captured most of the nine-square-mile dark lake from shore to shore; unused duck blinds and silently pumping oil wells were silhouetted against the faint golden glow. Soon, the sun sent out pink and orange lava flows of daylight.
The sky turned metallic white and the shallow lake came into sharp, prosaic focus. Holly already had what she wanted; she unlatched the camera from the tripod. For a few seconds the tape still recorded, and the image jerked and tilted wildly before going black.
“See, I told you,” Holly said, reaching to stop and rewind the tape.
“Wait. Back it up a bit.”
She twisted the edit knob on the control panel and the video reversed, breaking up into distorted lines.
“Now forward,” Nick said. The image cleared up, but it was the jumpy segment just before the end. “There. What’s that?”
“What’s what? I didn’t see anything.” She backed the tape up again and let it run. “Oh. Yeah. Flashes. Could be drop-out—a bad place in the tape.”
Holly eased the first frame into view and paused the tape. “No. Doesn’t look like a flare on the lens, either. Something’s there, all right.” The rising sun had caught a reflective object, just inside the dense fringe of pine trees at a curve in the shoreline, about two hundred yards from the camera.
“Could be innocent,” she said, clearly interested. “A foil candy wrapper, say, or a fisherman’s marker for a honey-hole. A good place to fish,” she added, seeing Nick’s puzzlement.
“But it moves!” Nick insisted, grasping the knob and moving the video back and forth. “Don’t tell me those aren’t two different pine trees.”
“Okay, Galileo, calm down. I’ll get it blown up at the station in Armageddon.” Her teeth pressed her bottom lip in mischievous pleasure. “So, does this mean I’m a cub detective? I’ve heard about your sleuthing exploits.”
“Strictly as unpaid volunteer. I have trouble paying the one employee I already have.”
“I enlist,” she said enthusiastically. “How exciting!”
“Do you know what time you shot this?”
“To the fraction of a second. Time code. See?” She flipped a switch and a black rectangle with numerals appeared in the lower right corner. “Burns in the elapsed tape time. I always keep a shot sheet, so I know exactly when this is. There’s a clock setting there, but it’s wrong. Ignore it.” She checked a yellow pad, added the elapsed time in the black rectangle to her logged start time, and said, “We’re looking at 6:40 the morning of the murder.” Her glass was empty. “How about that second bottle?”
Nick was tired, but he felt it a matter of honor not to be outdrunk by Holly. Her boast of superior alcohol tolerance was a challenge he couldn’t let pass. Youthful idiocy, that boon companion of bygone days, stood up in the b
leachers and egged him on. He uncorked the bottle and poured another round.
“If you want to learn more about Katogoula myths and rituals,” she said, “I know just the place to start: the museum. That’s where the Twins-Raccoon Bowl is, and lots of other really neat stuff. Grace and Irton Dusong run it. It’s over where the Golden Trace enters the state forest. Oh, and there’s a fantastic collection of paintings done by a man just after the turn of the century. I’ll show you. Just a sec.”
She shuffled through a dozen or so tape boxes. “Here it is.”
Though his right eye had started to droop from the effects of fatigue and wine, Nick managed to make out what appeared to be an attic in an old but handsome house. On the walls were paintings, watercolors and oils, depicting Katogoula villages, individuals hunting and fishing and playing games, artwork and weapons and tools being made. . . .
“Those are wonderful,” Nick said, slurring, to his great mortification. “Who did them? Where are they?” He noticed the second bottle was already half empty. This woman must have a wooden leg!
“A historic home near here. Tadbull Hall. Lots of old money, lots of land. They owned the lumber mill that just closed. The man who painted these took hundreds of photos, too, around the turn of the century. The one before this one, I mean. He was the current Mr. Tadbull’s grandfather. A Renaissance man, we’d call him today. You know, a dabbler, fascinated by knowledge itself.” She rubbed a hand down her face, remembering something. There was a problem. She wrinkled her nose. “But you may have to go there alone. I’m not sure they’ll let me in. Anymore. . . . Why don’t you lie down? You look totally trashed.”
“Yeah, I think I will,” Nick said, wearily slouching over to the couch, trying unsuccessfully to act in complete control of his faculties. “Why wouldn’t the Tadbull’s let you in? Did you slug someone there, too?”
The last words he remembered were, “Worse. I bet with his chips and lost.”
CHAPTER 16
The Friday morning that greeted Nick outside Holly’s room was gray, drizzly, and cool bordering on downright cold. Louisiana fall was a fickle creature, ever promising itself to winter as it dallied with summer.
Tommy had sounded his pickup’s horn a few times before Nick awoke on the couch that backed up to the window of “Annie Oakley.” His watch told him he was fifteen minutes late for his eight A.M. appointment. He stumbled outside.
His tongue dry and his head aching, he squinted at the dismal day that seemed to sneer maliciously at him.
“If you’re looking for your red-headed gal,” Tommy said, a grin of rakish solidarity on his face, “I saw her at Three Sisters Pantry. She looked a lot better than you. And she had a pretty good appetite. Had a big breakfast. No one answered at your room, so I put two and two together.”
“Hey, it’s not what you think,” Nick said in a bullfrog’s voice that would have made him an instant radio celebrity. “Really, nothing happened.”
“Come on, Nick, don’t give me that. You come to the door of her room, looking like yesterday’s dog shit? You didn’t by any chance spend the night here, did you? And she’s all smiley and perky? . . . Can’t fool me. I got a wife, you know. I can tell a happy woman when I see one.”
Nick continued to protest. “No, believe me, absolutely nothing—ah, forget it. Give me ten minutes, will you?”
He trudged to Daniel Boone, wishing Tommy had solid reasons to envy him. The cold mist on his grizzled face felt like botched acupuncture. “I’m getting too old for this,” he muttered between chattering teeth.
His wet hair and the blood from his hasty shave had almost dried when they reached the Sangfleuve Parish Courthouse in Armageddon. Tommy had tribal business to attend to with lawyers and accountants. Wooty Tadbull, on behalf of his family, had made a generous offer of land for an initial reservation—minus mineral rights, which the family wanted to keep just in case there was oil or gas underground. With this promising development to work on, Tommy seemed in much better spirits than the last time Nick had seen him. He’d dressed up for the occasion in a summer coat that was too small and which must have dated from his high-school days. Within his open shirt collar he wore a silver necklace with a pendant cross that captured the overcast day’s stingy light, reflecting—in Nick’s symbol-hungry mind, at least—the man’s resilient faith and optimism.
This must have been what the sheriff returned to Tommy the night before, Brianne’s gift found at the murder scene. He probably would have preferred a new shotgun but would never have said so, Nick thought, succumbing to a twinge of bachelor’s snideness in the presence of connubial bliss.
In his own coat of the right season but the wrong decade (this one an academic tweed from a Salvation Army Thrift Store) Nick would have a solid day alone to begin the basic on-site research he so much enjoyed.
The creamy limestone courthouse was a fine example of Louisiana’s version of Depression-era Art Deco architecture. Straining with foolish credence in populist lies, it was terrifically ugly and out of context, a cross between a Soviet bureaucratic pile and the state Capitol in Baton Rouge. But current or personal taste shouldn’t be the arbiter of historic value, Nick believed. How much had been lost already to such intellectual arrogance? He was constantly reminding Hawty never to throw anything out of his book- and document-crammed office. Nevertheless, he detested this building and all like it. He would gladly plunge down the handle for the controlled implosion.
He bought breakfast from a blind black man who ran the courthouse snack booth. Nick was surprised to find that the coffee was good, the muffins and biscuits outstanding. As a connoisseur of the amenities of public buildings, Nick never expected much from such places.
Luevenia Silsby, of Three Sisters Pantry, made the goodies every Friday, the snack man informed him, his eyes flitting uselessly about the dark-granite lobby. Miss Luevie had just dropped them off, in fact.
The wild gymnastics of the snack man’s eyes made Nick dizzy and edgy. Just what he needed, on top of a hangover, before spending hours studying crabbed script on faded documents and dim, blurry, scratched microfilm.
In Armageddon, the fire had been real; Sangfleuve Parish really was a “burned county.” Here, the tale of the conflagration that had destroyed all records—one of the stock excuses used by town-hall clerks to fend off bothersome genealogists—was quite literally the defining moment in the town’s life.
The parish clerk of court, Roberta Gridley, was a diminutive woman in her forties, with thinning, frizzy brown hair and the plump, pink features of a cute piglet. In her eyes Nick saw a deep hatred of disorder; she attacked cataloging, indexing, and the collection of fees with zeal. Though their office habits differed considerably, both of them shared a passion for records, which even in their smallest increment added a brushstroke to the portrait of a life.
Nick always made a point to schmooze with courthouse personnel. On-site research was a major undertaking, and a cooperative clerk could make the difference between bridging the impossible gaps in a family history and coming home empty-handed. Sure, microfilm and digital files were available for research at a distance. For decades, the Mormons, with their well-known devotion to genealogy, had been clicking away with cameras at the essentials of local genealogical research, around the world—birth, death, and marriage certificates, probate files, tax lists, land records, and other mileposts of life. Digitization of records was broadening exponentially what genealogists could access online. But in truth, just a fraction of the holdings of most courthouses and other official repositories made it to microfilm and the Internet. Thousands of years of family history, like the fabled Dead Sea Scrolls, still slept in the metaphorical desert dust of countless Qumran caves.
Clerks’ offices were charged with keeping order in present-day affairs; budgets were too tight and staffs too small to cater to genealogists’ insatiable appetite for long-forgotten facts. There were, though, sterling exceptions who could open many hidden doors to the local past, and Nick was
instantly convinced that he’d found one in Roberta Gridley. Such a helpful local clerk could guide the visiting genealogist to old records that had not been touched—and perhaps not even catalogued—for a hundred years, material “lost” through idiosyncratic filing systems and laws. A cooperative clerk could also open doors to more-contemporary records often kept for no good reason out of the general public’s hands. Nick had written and called Roberta Gridley beforehand to explain who he was and what he would be doing for the Katogoula. He’d even obtained a comprehensive privacy release from Tommy on behalf of tribe members whose family histories he would be investigating.
Now he listened patiently and with genuine interest as Roberta explained what had happened in 1863.
One pre-dawn morning, eight companies of about seven hundred Union soldiers fleeing a rout south of Shreveport floated on makeshift log rafts between the fog-enshrouded banks of the Sangfleuve River. The Federals were hoping to reach the Mississippi and the main Union force fighting its way up the big river under General Butler and Admiral Porter. That fall morning, the water was low at Port Sangfleuve; the rafts snagged on limestone rapids within easy range of a regiment of over a thousand Confederates bivouacking along the town’s riverbank.
By the time the Rebels convinced themselves that these shapes in ragged blue were not phantoms, the odds were about even. The Union soldiers, equipped with the new Henry repeating rifles, had not hesitated to exercise their superior firepower. By late in the afternoon, the surviving combatants ceased fire from redoubts on opposite sides of the river and during the truce retrieved their wounded. On one of the stranded rafts, they exchanged food, tobacco, and whiskey, and regarded the smoldering town. Before going their separate ways, they agreed the town should thenceforth be called Armageddon, for the battle had been like Judgment Day. The name stuck.