Billy Whistler

by Bill Thompson

  “Paw Paw said they was real different, and they scared folks in Perry and Abbeville. In the days before the fire, two of ’em would come to town for supplies every so often. Looked like Abraham Lincoln, with their beards and stovepipe hats and black suits. One guy would stay in the boat while the other marched through town like he was a king or somethin’. He’d go from store to store and buy supplies.

  “Once a month on a Saturday they’d set up tables in Magdalen Square and sell stuff they made — furniture, quilts, jelly and things like that. Only the men came, never the women, and they only spoke what they had to. Just did their business and went back home. People bought from them ’cause the stuff was good quality, but then they’d go home and talk about the strange-looking men. Because they was so different, it made the people skittish.”

  “Being different’s one thing,” Landry said, “but is that enough to burn the town and kill people?”

  Lee jerked his head up and looked in Landry’s face with a scowl. “Now wait just a minute, young feller. Nobody said nothin’ about no killin’, and nobody’s ever proved it. My granddaddy wouldn’t have been part of somethin’ like that. He wasn’t even there that night. He couldn’t have known about a killin’.”

  Landry had hit a nerve when he brought up the murders. The old man was hiding something. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. So the vigilantes burned Asher because the people were different?”

  “That, and them girls disappearin’. That was really what done it.”

  This was interesting. “What girls? When did they disappear?”

  “Every now and then. People blamed the rougarou at first, but smart folks say there ain’t no such thing. My pa swore they was real, so I grew up believing too. Parents would scare their kids into behavin’, know what I mean? ‘If you don’t quit sassin’ your momma, the rougarou’s gonna come snatch you away.’ Stuff like that.”

  He paused and turned to Ruby. “Are you gonna give me that cigarette now, or am I gonna have to get it myself?”

  “All right, Mr. Lee.” She exhaled an extended, theatrical sigh and handed him a pack of Winstons. He shook one out, tapped it on the filter end a few times, and lit it. As he did, Landry observed how steady his hand was. For ninety-seven, this old fellow was doing okay.

  Ruby said it was getting close to lunchtime and Landry needed to wrap things up soon. “He takes a nap in the afternoons, and then I drive him over to the community center so he can socialize.”

  He coughed hard and asked Landry where he came from.

  “The next parish over. I grew up in Jeanerette.”

  “Iberia Parish. I’ll be damned! I knew you was a coonass too! You surely heard stories about the rougarou when you was little, right?”

  “Yes,” Landry replied, surprised at how often the rougarou came up in conversation around here. “Can you tell me more about the girls who disappeared?”

  “My grandpa said it started way back in the 1800s. They was teenagers, snatched just as they was blossoming, if you get my drift. People spread rumors that the girls were being used in some kind of ritual sacrifice.”

  A ritual sacrifice? Could the cult have been far more hellish than just a commune of like believers?

  “Did the disappearances stop after the town burned?”

  “No, but the kidnappings got real regular. Seemed like they happened about every ten years. I remember some of them — they really upset the families, as you might imagine. The cult was easy to blame because they was so different, but after the fire, they disappeared. People still said it was them, and whoever was sheriff at the time would investigate, but accordin’ to my grandpa, nothin’ ever turned up. A whole bunch of teenagers went missing through the years. It was sad, but then what was sadder was the girls they did find. That got everybody’s hackles up — what he done to ’em and all that.”

  Did I hear him correctly? “You mean they found some of the kidnapped girls?”

  “Yeah, three of ’em turned up dead down by the river near Asher. I was a kid when they found the first one. I’ll never forget it ’cause it scared the hell out of everybody for weeks. Nobody ever locked their doors at night before then, but from then on they damn sure did. What Billy — I mean, what the killer done to her made people’s skin crawl.”

  “Billy? Billy Whistler did it? What happened?”

  “I didn’t say nothin’ about Billy Whistler. Don’t put words in my mouth. What he done was gouge out her eyes. Maybe even before she was dead, some said. That scared the bejeezus out of people, me included.”

  Landry wanted to know more about Billy Whistler later. Right now he guided Lee to stay on track. “You said they found three girls, and you told me about one of them. What about the other two?”

  “They was like the first. Somebody found the bodies at Asher. The latest one was maybe twenty years ago, and there was another one back in the forties or fifties. I got home from the Army in 1947, and seems like it was a few years later that she got killed. It was the same thing every time. The very same thing happened to each one of them, and it made everybody nervous as hell, ’cause they figured the same guy done it. But he couldn’t have, could he? They was years and years apart, those killings. The murderer woulda been an old fart like me by the time he killed the last one.”

  Ruby looked at her watch. “My, the time’s flown by. We have to go inside now.” She stood and straightened her skirt.

  “One second,” Landry insisted. “You said the same thing happened to those girls. Are you talking about their eyes being gouged out?”

  Ruby maintained her smile, but now she was firm. “We’re done now, Mr. Landry. He’s had enough for today, and this kind of talk doesn’t help his blood pressure. I’m going in to fix his lunch now.”

  Landry stood and shook the old man’s hand. “You’ve been very helpful, but I’m sorry we didn’t get around to Billy Whistler. Do you mind if I come back?”

  “Son, you come back anytime you want. I’d a lot rather be talkin’ to you than those old farts over at the center. Bring me a carton of Winstons when you come, and don’t give ’em to the old battle-ax here,” he added with a wink as he pointed to Ruby.

  She gave Landry her cell number, saying it would be best to wait a couple of weeks before coming back. Long visits like the one today took a toll on Lee. He’d probably nap all afternoon.

  Landry walked with them as she pushed his wheelchair. When they got to the porch, Lee stopped Ruby and turned to Landry. “Them other two girls had their eyes gouged out too. That’s what I meant when I said ‘same thing.’ See you next time.”

  As he drove back to New Orleans, Landry couldn’t get the girls out of his mind. According to Lee, girls had disappeared from time to time for over a hundred years. Only three of them were ever found, and each of those was gruesomely mutilated in the same manner.

  If most of the girls disappeared, why were three bodies found? What was different about them? Had they escaped somehow, only to die in the same place, along the banks of the river near Asher?

  The cult vanished after the fire, but some people believed they were behind the murders, one of which happened twenty years or so ago, according to Lee. How could that be? Were the Sons of Jehovah still close by, watching and waiting to trap helpless teenagers? Were they bloodthirsty murderers who gouged out their victims’ eyes?

  Before he met Lee Alard, Landry’s trip to Abbeville had been interesting, but the old man’s story was downright incredible. A sense of anticipation and excitement began to creep over him, the way it always did when he realized there was a mystery that lay in front of him.

  A tragedy had happened at Asher a long time ago, and some residents of this parish thought it never ended. There was a lot more work to do here, and he was eager to get started.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Back at his office, Landry searched the web, visited the history museum at the Cabildo on Jackson Square, and examined nineteenth-century documents from Vermilion Parish. He copied
everything he found, and soon his desk was overflowing with articles and information on the parish, the Sons of Jehovah, the legend of Billy Whistler, and Asher itself.

  As he cross-indexed his findings in an Excel spreadsheet, something surprised him — not what he found, but what he didn’t.

  Vermilion was a quiet parish. The kidnappings and murders of three teenaged girls would have been an explosive story. He should have come across banner headlines in papers as far away as Lafayette and Baton Rouge. But it was just the opposite.

  The first body was found in 1930. It merited only one sterile, sad second-page paragraph in the Abbeville paper. An unnamed seventeen-year-old female disappeared from her home in town, and someone discovered her body the next morning. Lee said she was found in Asher, but the article vaguely described the site as “along the river south of town.” The poor child’s name wasn’t even mentioned, Landry reflected. What a tragic event for her family, and what a dismissive paragraph to sum up a life and death.

  There was a little more substance to the news article on the 1950 murder. Someone had abducted a fifteen-year-old girl after a church social in Abbeville. Late that night two fishermen saw a body lying on the shore “near the ruined town of Asher.” Since she was a minor child, her parents asked that her name not be printed.

  The third girl died in 2000. Seventeen-year-old Mollie Manning was the daughter of a prominent local businessman. A three-paragraph front-page article reported that a man running crawfish traps in the middle of the night heard a commotion along the Vermilion River somewhere south of Perry. He pulled to the bank and found Mollie’s still-warm body. He told authorities he thought he’d “run someone off,” but the killer got away.

  Her obituary appeared two days later. It was bland and factual and said nothing about the circumstances of her death. A one-liner at the bottom read “Hebert Funeral Home, trusted by families since 1875.” Landry went to the Hebert website and saw that it was the oldest of the parish’s several funeral parlors and handled more services than the others combined. That was good information — he’d visit the place next time he was in Abbeville.

  The next month was hectic, and after weeks away, Landry was eager to return to Vermilion Parish. He called Ruby and learned that Lee was just out of the hospital after suffering a serious respiratory infection. At his age, recovery would be a slow process, and he was on a breathing machine, making conversation impossible. Ruby promised to keep in touch.

  Disappointed that he wouldn’t hear more of Lee’s fascinating stories, Landry decided to make the trip anyway. There were other things to investigate. He called Darlene and made a reservation at Caldwell House again. He requested an upstairs bedroom just to see if anything would be different during the night. She said this time he’d have company, a couple from Texas in town planning a wedding. Their room would be just across the hall from his own.

  He got to town around ten and went straight to the courthouse. Grace’s face beamed when he asked if they could talk privately. She nodded conspiratorially, tossed a huge smile over her shoulder to her coworkers, took him out into the hall, and led him to a door marked “Jury Room.”

  “We don’t have a lot of trials, so this room’s always empty,” she said as they sat at a long wooden table. “I can hardly wait to hear what brought you back!” Her face positively beamed with excitement.

  This time he was seeking information on three girls who were murdered at Asher. He showed her the newspaper articles about the teenagers. He knew the years of death but only one name — Mollie Manning.

  “I remember her death like it was yesterday,” Grace said, recalling that every mother barricaded the doors at night for months after that incident. “I even went out and bought a gun,” she admitted.

  The other deaths occurred before Grace was born, and she hadn’t heard about them. Landry pointed out the similarities — each was a teenager who’d been abducted in town and dumped at Asher.

  “You know more than I do, and I was born and raised here! Who on earth told you all that?”

  “An old fellow in Perry. He knows a lot of history, much of it passed down from his grandfather. Lee Alard’s his name.”

  “Oh yes, Mr. Lee! He’s a great guy, full of spunk too, always has been. Whoever put you onto him did you a favor. He’s lived here all his life, and he knows this parish better than anybody!”

  Landry quickly learned his job was going to be simpler this time. Parish birth and death records back to 1910 had been entered into a database, and that meant no bulky ledgers full of semi-legible handwritten entries to comb through.

  She put Landry in front of an old PC and pulled the death records for 1930. There were hundreds of entries. Without a name, date of death or cause, Landry was stymied.

  Thinking of how to narrow the search, he glanced at a group of entries and found a single word that might help. Hundreds of people might have died in the parish that year, but he bet not that many were murdered.

  He sorted the data by cause of death and entered the word homicide.

  That narrowed the field to a manageable thirty-seven names. He eliminated the men and the females older than twenty, and one name remained. Mary Tallant of Abbeville, age seventeen, died on May 26, 1930, at an unspecified location in Vermilion Parish. The cause of death was homicide — multiple injuries to face. He found that choice of words odd.

  He turned to the 1950 murder and performed the same search. Fifteen-year-old Carole Nichols was from Abbeville. She died “in the parish” on May 26. The cause of death was homicide — fatal wounds.

  Now he knew her name and date, but nothing else. And like the first, the words used to describe the cause of death raised questions.

  Mollie Manning’s death certificate provided the most information. She was seventeen at the time of her death on May 26, 2000, “near Asher.” She was the only one whose body had been autopsied. That report would have been helpful to review, but he knew that would be impossible. HIPAA regulations made things like autopsy reports off-limits.

  Grace printed a copy of the three records and Landry compared them. One interesting communality was that a single funeral home — Hebert in Abbeville — handled arrangements for all three.

  He reviewed his notes and saw he’d neglected to write Mollie’s cause of death. Already knowing which box had been ticked, he looked at the certificate.

  Homicide, just like the others. But the next chilling words revealed much more.

  Eyeballs forcibly removed.

  The harsh words made him gasp. Lee Alard had told him the girls had their eyes gouged out, and that part of his story was true.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. It’s just … I’ve just figured something out. It took some gruesome words, but things are coming together.”

  She looked at the death record but didn’t immediately notice. He pointed and she raised her hands to her face.

  “Oh my! The poor child! I’d forgotten that happened to her. What kind of monster —”

  Landry wasn’t listening. He was comparing the death certificates, looking again and again to be sure he was right about what he was seeing. Everything was starting to make sense now.

  The girls died on the same day — the twenty-sixth of May. Lee said many other girls disappeared over the years, and Landry would have bet the farm that they vanished that day too.

  That day held special significance for the Sons of Jehovah cult, because on May 26, 1880, men from Abbeville burned their town.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Landry wanted to put this puzzle together. There was a lot missing, but several pieces just fell into place, and he realized the girl who left the message was probably telling the truth. He had more stops to make, and as successful as this trip had been already, he might learn even more.

  The sheriff’s office was a one-story building across the street from the courthouse. He walked in and asked for Sheriff Conreco. The girl at the front counter turned to the back of the room. A l
arge man in his fifties sat behind a desk in a small office. When he glanced up, the girl motioned to him.

  “What can I do for you?” the sheriff asked. The buttons on his uniform shirt struggled to contain his girth, and the armpits were stained.

  “I’m Landry Drake. I’d like to talk to you about the disappearances in Asher.”

  “Landry Drake?” the girl gasped. “The Landry Drake?”

  Conreco shot her a stern look. “Planning a show up here, son?”

  “Too early to say. I’m just gathering information right now. May I talk with you for a moment in your office?”

  “We can talk right here.”

  The office wasn’t busy; a few deputies and some clerks worked at their desks, but there were no visitors other than Landry, and no one was watching him. He lowered his voice and said, “A lot of girls have disappeared since 1880. It may have something to do with the night they burned Asher.”

  The sheriff raised his eyebrows just enough that Landry noticed. He continued. “They found bodies at Asher in 1930, 1950 and 2000. Were you on the force when they found Mollie Manning’s body twenty years ago, Sheriff?”

  Conreco nodded, his face impassive. He turned and spit tobacco in a nearby trash can.

  “Fishermen found Mollie Manning’s body on the riverbank. She had her eyes gouged out.”

  “Where the hell did you hear that?”

  “I saw her death certificate at the courthouse, and I read an article about it. It seemed brief for such a sensational crime. This had to be the biggest thing in Vermilion Parish in years — a girl from a prominent family kidnapped and murdered. The story didn’t talk about the investigation. Were the state police called in?”

  “I don’t recall. Wouldn’t have been a case for them, regardless. Local thing, happened right here in the parish. Nothing we couldn’t handle.”

  “What was your take on the mutilation?”

  The sheriff looked away. “Boy, it’s been twenty years. Lot of time’s passed. I don’t recall exactly. Don’t you worry about twenty-year-old murders. There’s nothing about them that a big-shot TV investigator would care about.”