by Tami Hoag
Laurel reached in and lifted out the red crawfish tie pin she had given him for Father's Day when she was seven. It wasn't worth much. Savannah had helped her buy it for three dollars at the crawfish festival in Breaux Bridge. But Daddy had smiled when he opened the box, and told her it would be one of his favorites. He had worn it to the father-daughter dinner at school that year, and Laurel had been so happy and proud, she could have burst.
“Laurel,” Vivian snapped, “what are you into now? Oh, that jewelry box. I'd nearly forgotten.”
She shooed Laurel aside and made a hasty pass through the box, setting aside a pair of diamond cuff links, a signet ring, a diamond tie pin. Then she ordered Tansy to bring a shoe box and dumped the rest of the contents into it. Laurel watched in horror, tears streaming down her cheeks, the crawfish pin sticking her hand as she tightened her fist around it.
Vivian shot her a suspicious look. “What have you got there?”
Laurel sniffed and tightened her fingers. “Nothin'.”
“Don't you lie to me, missy,” Vivian said sharply. “Good little girls don't tell lies. Open your hand.”
Be a good girl, Laurel thought, always be a good girl, or Mama gets cross. She bit her lip to keep from crying as she held out her hand and opened her fist.
Vivian rolled her eyes as she picked up the tie pin, pinching it between thumb and forefinger and holding it up as if it were a live bug. “Oh, for pity's sake! What do you want with this piece of trash?”
Laurel flinched as if the word had struck her. Daddy hadn't called it trash, even if it was. “But Mama—”
Her mother turned away from her, dropping the pin in the shoe box Tansy held.
“B-but Mama,” Laurel said, her breath hitching in her throat around a huge lump. “C-couldn't I keep it j-just 'cause it was D-Daddy's?”
Vivian wheeled on her, her face pinched, eyes narrowed like a snake's. “Your father is dead and buried,” she said harshly. “There's no use being sentimental about his things. Do you hear me?”
Laurel backed away from her, feeling sick and hurt and dizzy. Tears spilled down her cheeks, and a hollow ache throbbed inside her heart.
“You're just being a nuisance in here,” Vivian went on, working herself into a fine lather. “Here I am, doing my best to finish an awful job, a migraine bearing down on me, and pressures like no one knows. We have guests coming for dinner, and you're underfoot . . .”
The rest of what she had to say sounded like nothing to Laurel but blah blah blah. Her ears were pounding, and her head felt as though it might explode if she couldn't start crying hard real soon. Then Savannah was behind her, putting her hands on Laurel's shoulders.
“Come on, Baby,” she whispered, drawing her out the bedroom door. “We'll go in my room and look at pictures.”
They went to Savannah's room and sat on the rug next to the bed, looking at a photo album full of pictures of Daddy Savannah had stolen from the parlor the day of Daddy's funeral. She kept it under her mattress and had told Tansy if she ever tried to take it out or tell Vivian about it, she would have a voodoo woman put a curse on her that would give her warts all over her face and hands. Tansy left it be and had taken to wearing a dime on a string around her neck to protect her from gris-gris.
They sat on the rug and looked at their father in the only way they would ever be able to see him again, and felt alone in all the world, like two little flowers pulled up by the roots.
That night Ross Leighton came to dinner.
Savannah sat with her back to her dressing table, one foot pulled up on the seat of the chair, one arm wrapped around her leg, the other hand toying with the pendant she never took off. Lost in thought, she ran the gold heart back and forth on its fine chain. Through the French doors that led onto the balcony she could just see Laurel leaning against a column down the way. Poor Baby. The Case had taken everything out of her—her pride, her fight, her self-confidence, her independence. Everything that had taken her away from here had been taken away from her, and now she was back. Poor lost lamb, weak and sorely in need of comfort and love. Just like old times. Just like after Daddy died and Vivian had offered as much solace as a jagged piece of granite.
Funny how time had run in a circle. All during their growing-up years Savannah had mothered and nurtured and protected, and Laurel had grown stronger and brighter and burned with ambition, reaching higher and going further, eventually leaving Savannah in the dust. But now she was back, in need of mothering and nurturing again.
She turned and looked at herself in the beveled mirror above her dressing table, taking in the tousled hair, the bee-stung lips she pumped with collagen at regular intervals. Her robe had slipped off one shoulder, baring creamy skin and the thin strap of her chemise. Her breasts were barely contained by the lacy cups, their natural shape augmented by silicone implants she'd had put in years ago in New Orleans. She traced a fingertip across her lower lip, then along the scalloped edge of lace, her nipple twitching at the slight contact, a response that triggered a quick, automatic fluttering between her legs.
Laurel had gone off to Georgia to gain fame and fight for justice. To do the family proud. And Savannah had stayed behind, carving out her reputation as a slut.
Shedding her robe, she crossed the room and lay down on the bed with the elegantly carved, curved headboard. Leaning back against a mountain of satin pillows, she lit a cigarette and blew a lazy stream of smoke up toward the ceiling. Life had come full circle. Laurel was home, and Savannah was being given the chance to be important again, to do something worthwhile. Her baby sister needed her. Life could be turning around for her at last. Now all she needed was for Astor Cooper to die.
Chapter
Four
Jack jerked awake, bolting against the cluttered mahogany desk, throwing his head back away from the black Underwood manual typewriter that had served as pillow for the last—what? hour? two? three? He looked around, blinking against the buttery light that filtered down through the canopy of live oak and through the sheer lace curtains at the window. He rubbed his hands over his lean face and cleared his throat, grimacing at the taste of stale beer coating his mouth. With his fingers he combed back his straight black hair, which was too thick and too long for south Louisiana this time of year.
The old ormolu clock on the bedroom mantel ticked loudly and relentlessly, drawing a narrow glare. Eleven-thirty. The respectable folk of Bayou Breaux had been up and industrious for hours. Jack had no memory of coming home. It might have been midnight. It might have been dawn when he had stumbled across the threshold of the old house the locals called L'Amour. He cast a speculative look at the heavy four-poster bed with its drape of baire carelessly stuffed behind the carved headboard. There might have been a woman dozing among the rumpled sheets. He had a vague memory of a woman . . . big blue eyes and an angel's face . . . fire and fragility . . .
There wasn't a woman in his bed, which was just as well. He was in no mood for morning-after rhetoric. His head felt as though someone had smashed it with a mallet.
The last thing he remembered was Leonce's leading him away from Frenchie's. He might have gone anywhere, done anything after that. Pain jabbed his temples like twin ice picks as he tried to remember. Funny, he thought, his mouth twisting at the irony, he drank to forget. Why couldn't he just leave it at that?
“Because you're perverse, Jack,” he mumbled, his voice a smoky rumble, made more hoarse than usual by a night of loud singing in a room where ninety percent of the people were chain smokers.
He pushed himself up out of the creaking old desk chair, his body doing some creaking and groaning of its own after God knew how many hours in a sitting position. He stretched with all the grace of a big lean cat, scratched his flat bare belly, noted that the top button on his faded jeans was undone but left it that way.
The page in the typewriter caught his eye, and he pulled it out and studied it, frowning darkly at the words that must have seemed like gems at the time he had pounded them
out.
She tries to scream as she runs, but her lungs are on fire and working like a bellows. Only pathetic yipping sounds issue from her throat, and they are a waste of precious energy. Tears blur her vision, and she tries to blink them back, to swipe them back with her hand, to swallow the knot of them clogging her throat as she runs on through the dense growth.
Moonlight barely filters down through the canopy of trees. The light is surreal, nightmarish. Branches lash at her, cutting her face, her arms. Her toes stub and catch on the roots of the oak and hackberry trees that grow along the soft, damp earth, and she stumbls headlong, twisting her head around to see how near death is behind her.
Too near. Too calm. Too deliberate. Her heart pounds hard enough to burst.
She scrambles backward, trying to get her legs under her. Her hands clutch at roots and dead leaves. Her fingers close on the thick, muscular body of a snake, and she screams as she tries to escape the triangular head and flashing fangs that strike at her. The stench of the swamp fills her head as the copper taste of fear coats her mouth. And death looms nearer. Relentless. Ruthless. Evil. Smiling . . .
Crap. Nothing but crap. With a sound of disgust Jack crumpled the page and hurled it in the general direction of the wastebasket—an old Chinese urn that may well have been worth a small fortune. He didn't know, didn't care. He had stumbled across it in the attic, buried under a decade's worth of discarded, moth-eaten clothing. Apparently it had been there some time, as it was a third full of the dead, decaying, and skeletal remains of mice that had fallen into it over the years and been unable to get out.
Jack owned antiques because the old decrepit house had come with them, not because he was culturally sophisticated or a conspicuous consumer or particularly appreciative of fine things. Material things had become irrelevant to him since Evie's death. His perspective of the world had shifted radically downhill. Another irony. For most of his thirty-five years he had fought tooth and nail to achieve a status where he could own “things.” Now he was there and no longer gave a damn.
“Dieu,” he whispered, shaking his head and wincing at the pain, “old Blackie must be sittin' in Hell laughin' at that.”
Bon à rien, tu, 'tit souris. Good for nothin', pas de bétises!
The voice came to him out of the past, out of his childhood. A voice from beyond the grave. He flinched at the memory of that voice. A conditioned response, even after all this time. Often enough a slurred line from Blackie Boudreaux had been followed up with a back-hand across the mouth.
Jack pulled open the French doors and leaned against the frame, the smooth white paint cool against the bare skin of his shoulder. His eyes drifted shut as he breathed in the sweet green scent of boxwood, the fragrant perfume of magnolia and wisteria and a dozen other blooming plants. And beneath that heady incense lay the dark, insidious aroma of the bayou—a mixture of fertility and decay and fish. The scents, the caress of the hot breeze against his face, the chorus of birdsong instantly transported him back in time.
He saw himself at nine, small and skinny, barefoot and dirty-faced, running like a thief from the tar-paper shack that was home. Running from his father, running to escape into the swamp, his bare feet slapping on the worn dirt path.
In the swamp he could be anyone, do anything. There were no boundaries, no standards to fall short of. He could conquer an island, become king of the alligators, be a notorious criminal on the run. On the run for killing his father, which he would have done if he had been bigger and stronger . . .
“Shit,” he muttered, stepping back into the bedroom.
He left the doors open and shuffled toward the bathroom some previous forward-thinking owner of L'Amour had converted from a dressing room back in the twenties. It still “boasted” the original white porcelain fixtures and tile. Not much of a boast, considering all were dingy with age, cracked, and chipped. Fortunately, Jack's only prerequisite was that they work.
With the flick of a switch the boom box sitting on the back of the old toilet came to life, belting out the bluesy, bouncy Zydeco sound of Zachary Richard—“Ma Petite Fille Est Gone.” Despite the fact that it jarred his aching head, Jack automatically moved with the beat as he filled the sink with cold water. The music defied stillness with its relentless bass rhythm and hot accordion and guitar licks.
Gulping a big breath, he bent over at the waist and stuck his head in the basin, coming up a minute later cursing in French and shaking himself like a wet dog. He gave himself a long, critical look in the mirror, debating the merits of shaving as water dripped off the end of his aquiline nose. He looked tough and mean in his current state, a look he didn't let many people see. The gang down at Frenchie's knew Jack the Party Animal. Jack with the ready grin. Jack the lady's man. They didn't know this Jack except through his books, and it amazed them that the Jack Boudreaux who was touted by the publishing world as the “New Master of the Macabre” was their Jack.
He sniffed and tipped his head to one side, a wry half smile curving his mouth. “Pas du tout, mon ami,” he murmured. “Pas du tout.”
As he reached for his toothbrush, the music on the radio was cut short in midchorus.
“This just in,” the deejay said, his usually jovial tone stretched taut and flat by the gravity of the news. “KJUN news has just learned of another apparent victim of the Bayou Strangler. This morning, at approximately seven o'clock, two fishermen in the Bayou Chene area in St. Martin Parish discovered the body of an unidentified young woman. Though authorities have yet to release a statement, reliable sources on the scene have confirmed the similarities between this death and three others that have occurred in south Louisiana in the past eighteen months. The body of the last victim, Sheryl Lynn Carmouche, of Loreauville, was discovered—”
Jack reached over and hit the tape button. Instantly the frantic fiddle music of Michael Doucet whined through the speakers, snapping the tension, drowning out the grim news. He'd had enough grimness to last him. He had a stock stored up, ready to be called upon and brought down on his head like a ton of bricks any- time he wanted. He didn't care to bring in more from outside sources.
Don't get involved. That was his motto. That and the traditional Cajun war cry—laissez le bon temps rouler. He didn't want to hear about dead girls from Loreauville. He couldn't give Sheryl Lynn Carmouche her life back. He could only live his own, and he intended to do just that, starting with a big shrimp po'boy and a bottle of something cold down at the Landing.
Sweat trickled between Laurel's breasts as she knelt in the freshly turned earth. It beaded on her forehead, and one drop rolled down toward her nose. She reached up with a dirty gloved hand and wiped it away, leaving a smear of mud.
No one would have spotted her for a once-aggressive attorney—a fact that suited her just fine. She wanted to lose herself in mindless manual labor, thinking of nothing but simple physical tasks like turning soil and planting flowers. She suspected she would appear to have bathed in dirt by the time she finished her work in the courtyard. There were worse things to become immersed in.
She poked at the root of a new azalea bush with a small hand spade, mixing in the special compost Bud Landry at the nursery had sent home with her—his own secret blend of God-knew-what that would grow anything, “guar-un-teed.”
She spent most of the morning sweeping up yesterday's carnage and supervising the hanging of a new gate at the back of the courtyard. Not pausing for more than a sip of the iced tea Mama Pearl brought out for her, she swept and raked and piled. She then hauled the mess, one load at a time, to the edge of the small open field that lay to the east of Aunt Caroline's property, where she piled all the debris of her first two days' work, and would burn it all before it could become a haven to snakes and rodents.
She made a mental note to call city hall and check to see if she would need a permit. No one in Bayou Breaux had ever been much on that kind of formality, but times changed. She hadn't lived here in a lot of years. For all she knew the place could have been
taken over by yuppies on the run from suburban life. Or the Junior League might have decided environmentalism was in vogue—so long as it didn't interfere with their husbands' businesses. Laurel could well imagine her mother leading the crusade against common folk burning brush while Ross Leighton polluted the bayou with chemicals intended to keep his cane crop money-green and safe from insects.
Thoughts of Vivian erased what was left of Laurel's smile. She had been in Bayou Breaux four days now without making a call to Beauvoir. That wouldn't be tolerated much longer. She had no desire to visit her childhood home or the people who resided there, but there was such a thing as family duty, and Vivian was bound to bring it down on Laurel's head like a club if she didn't make the expected pilgrimage soon.
The idea hardly overjoyed her. The fact that she would have to deal with Vivian and Ross, if only to sit at the same table with them for dinner, had been enough to make her reconsider the wisdom of coming back. But the instinctive need for a place that was familiar had overridden her aversion to seeing her mother and stepfather.
The thought of going off someplace on her own, someplace where her anonymity would be absolute, had been too daunting. Go someplace where the only company she would have would be herself? That was company she didn't want to keep just now. She had longed for the reassurance of Caroline Chandler's formidable personality and unconditional love. She had felt a need to see Savannah. She had missed Mama Pearl's fussing and truculence. The occasional encounter with Vivian and Ross seemed small enough penance to pay for the privilege of coming home.
With considerable force of will she shut the door on the topic and focused on other things. Her hands packed the soil around the roots of the azalea bush. The scents of ripe compost and green growth filled her nostrils. Across the courtyard bees were buzzing lazily over a wild tangle of rambling roses and wisteria that clung to the brick wall. A Mozart quintet drifted from the boom box she had left on the gallery of the house.