Magnolia Moon

by JoAnn Ross

  “Marybeth just fell all to pieces. She got the deep blues and couldn’t do much but just lie in bed all day. Talking to her was like talking to one of them stumps.” Ashes fell off the burning end of the cigarette as he gestured toward the cypress stumps out in the still, dark water. “She wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t let me touch her. Never did cry. Not even when they were lowering Little J’s tiny blue casket into the grave.

  “Everyone else—her ma, my ma, all the aunts, cousins—was sobbing. Even my dad teared up some, and her daddy looked to be about to have a heart attack. I’m not ashamed to admit that I had tears pourin’ down my face, too. But folks who say it’s good to get things out must not have ever lost themselves a baby, because crying sure didn’t help me none that day.”

  He exhaled another long, slow breath, then drew in on the cigarette. “Marybeth’s eyes stayed as dry as that little stone guardian angel I’d got to mark his grave.”

  The small angel in the cemetery. Nate reached over and laced his fingers with hers; Regan didn’t pull her hand away.

  “Marybeth didn’t want the angel. I found out later that she’d thought it was too damn late for Little J to have himself a guardian angel, but since he’d always been afraid of the dark, the idea of him having an angel nearby comforted me some. So I might have stood up to her about that, if she’d even said anything at the time, which she didn’t.”

  Like during the conversation about roses, Regan was wishing he’d cut to the bottom line. She hadn’t realized it fully until now, but she’d just about reached her capacity for human tragedy. Understanding that he had to tell his story his way, though, she held her tongue and looked for signs of herself in the lined face that appeared to be a road map of his life.

  “After a while, Doc Vallois decided that she wasn’t going to get better here, so he sent her up to this sanitarium in Baton Rouge, where they knew how to treat people who were suffering depression by sending electricity through their brains.”

  “Electroshock treatment.” Regan exchanged a brief look with Nate.

  “That’s what they called it. She was there six months.”

  Another silence settled over them like a wet gray blanket.

  “Leaving you to grieve all alone,” Nate prompted quietly.

  Boyce gave him a grateful glance. “Yeah.” He took one last long drag on the cigarette, dropped it onto the porch, and crushed it beneath his boot heel. Then he looked back at Regan. “Your mama wasn’t stuck-up like some good-looking women are. She was a lot of fun to be around. Had a heart big as all outdoors, and when she smiled at you, it was like the sun came out from behind a cloud. Everybody round these parts loved her.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a woman who’d commit suicide.”

  “No, it don’t,” he said thoughtfully. “Didn’t know anyone who wasn’t real surprised by that. I sure as hell was.” He shook his head. “But I guess you never really do know a person, deep down inside.”

  “I suppose not.” She certainly hadn’t known the woman she’d grown up believing to be her mother.

  “Before she came to Blue Bayou, she was workin’ in N’Awlins. Even tried to break into country-and-western music in Nashville, but the way she told it, she was playing in this little club way off Music Row one night when this guy came in and offered her a job singing in some place he owned in the Vieux Carré. That’s the French Quarter.”

  “I know. What made her leave New Orleans?”

  “Well, now, she never did say, but I was sure glad when she showed up at the Lounge lookin’ for a job. Lord, that girl could sing like a warbler. First week she was there, I brought home an extra ten percent. After six months the profits doubled, and the place was packed every Friday and Saturday night.”

  “As nice as Blue Bayou appears to be, it seems she could have had more chance to land a record deal if she’d stayed in New Orleans.”

  “That thought crossed my mind, too. A lot, but I never asked, and like I said, she never did tell me. I always figured it had something to do with a man. Mebee your daddy.”

  Regan felt every nerve in her body tense. “Did you know him?”

  “Nope. She never did talk about him, neither. But I guess that’s ’cause she didn’t have real happy memories, and besides, whenever we were alone, she was too busy trying to cheer me up. I was pretty much of a mess in those days.” Pale gray eyes narrowed as he studied her. “I guess little girls grow up to be like their mamas even if they don’t live under the same roof. She was a fixer, too.”

  “A fixer?”

  “One of those people who always want to help other people out. Cheer them up, get rid of their problems for them. That’s what Linda was. Isn’t it what a police officer does, too?”

  “I suppose.” How strange to think she might take after her mother, rather than her father. “It sounds as if you had a close relationship with Linda.”

  “Not as close as some of the old gossips around these parts seemed to think. I never went to bed with her. Never even kissed her. Not that I didn’t think about how it’d be, from time to time,” he admitted.

  “Day a man stops thinking about kissing a pretty woman is the day he’s just lost any reason to keep on livin’,” Nate said.

  Boyce surprised her by laughing at that. A rich, bold laugh that gave a hint of the man who appeared to have been close friends with her mother. Unfortunately, not close enough to know what Regan had come out here to learn.

  “Did she have any other men friends?”

  “Just about every man in town. Like I said, she was real popular.” The smile Nate had tugged out of him lightened the dark conversation. “Even with most of the women who’d show up at the Lounge. Most nights she’d bring you along, and I never met a woman yet who didn’t like playing with a pretty baby.”

  “She took a baby to a nightclub?”

  “Wasn’t like the nightclubs you’re probably used to in California,” Nate explained. “Lafitte’s Landing was a family sort of place, where everyone in town got together on the weekends to pass a good time. The supper crowd would range from great-grandmère, who didn’t speak a word of English, to mamas with their newborns, to teenagers showing up to flirt with one another.”

  “’Sides, it was a good deal for Linda,” Boyce said. “She didn’t have to pay for a sitter. And since I knew she could be earnin’ a lot more in the city, but couldn’t afford to give her a raise, I’d toss in dinner on the house. She even worked a little duet into the routine.”

  “A duet?” Regan asked. Once again he’d surprised her.

  “Yeah. You couldn’t string a whole sentence together, but you sure knew all the words to ‘You Are My Sunshine.’”

  Regan drew in a quick, sharp breath of shock.

  “It’s a favorite ’round here, since it’s the state song and was written by Jimmie Davis, a sharecropper from up north in Jackson Parish who grew up to be governor. It was a real cute act, especially since even when you were in diapers, ’cepting for the color of your hair, you took after Linda. It was kind of like looking at the little girl and seeing the woman she’d grow up to be, both at the same time.”

  “You said the other men in town liked her.” It was her cop voice; controlled and impassive, revealing none of the emotions churning inside her. She felt Nate looking at her again and wouldn’t—couldn’t—look at him.

  “Yes, ma’am, they sure did.”

  “So she dated a lot, did she?”

  “Now, I didn’t say that. I said she had a lot of men friends. She was a friendly girl, but she wasn’t fast. Whenever she went out, she was always in a crowd of folks. Didn’t seem like she had any one fella she was sweet on. She used to read you fairy tales all the time, and I guess she sort of bought into the stories, because she told me her prince was going to show up on a big white horse to take you away from Blue Bayou, and the three of you were going to live happily ever after.” He shook his head. “Guess it didn’t work out that way.”

  “No. Apparently not.
”

  Perhaps that’s why Karen Hart hadn’t encouraged Regan to believe in myths or fairy tales. Perhaps that’s why she’d stressed duty and discipline. Perhaps, believing that her sister’s freewheeling temperament had led to Linda’s death, she’d been trying to save her niece from a similar fate.

  “I’d just gotten the Fleetwood then, and started picking her up at her little house and driving her to the club,” he said. “Bein’ how her own junker was so undependable.”

  Regan glanced over at the red-and-white Cadillac. “You don’t see cars like that on the road much anymore.”

  “More’s the pity,” he said. “I’d bought her off a helicopter pilot over in Port Fourchon. She’d been in an accident, and the hood looked like an accordion. The interior was shot to hell, and the paint was primer, but I could see the possibilities. Linda used to help me sand the primer down on Sunday afternoons.”

  “It sounds as if you were very good friends.”

  “We both had a lot in common, bein’ alone, but not being free to be with anyone else. Oh, we never talked about her man, and I only told her about Marybeth once, on a really dark day when I got drunk and broke down and bawled like a baby, but it was always there between us, and created a bond. But it was always an innocent friendship. Despite, like I said, what some busybodies liked to say.”

  “People talked.”

  “Sure. It’s a small town,” he said with a resigned shrug of his shoulders. “There’s not a lot to do, so talking about your neighbor is sorta the local recreation.”

  Although Regan suspected living in such an environment could prove stifling, there might be advantages to being a cop here—unlike L.A., where you could arrive at a club that had broken fire regulations by packing people in like sardines, have someone get shot in the head at point-blank range, and not a single person in the place would have seen a damn thing. Of course, she doubted there were all that many homicides in Blue Bayou, which made it a moot point.

  “Marybeth was a lot better when she got back from the sanatorium, but she was still about as fragile as glass. I used to walk around on tiptoe, not knowing what might set her off.”

  “Did you keep driving Linda to the club after your wife returned home?”

  “Oh, no, ma’am. Not because anything had been going on,” he stressed again. “But because I didn’t want to be responsible for sending Marybeth back to that place. Her being away was hard on both of us, though it did seem to help with her blues, so I still think it was probably a good thing.”

  “But someone shared the gossip with her.”

  “Oh, there were a few women who were jealous of Linda and real eager to let Marybeth know what her husband had been doin’ while she’d been gettin’ electricity shot through her head.” If the sparks glittering in his eyes were any indication, it still made him angry as hell. “Meddling old biddies who, since they don’t have any real lives of their own, spend their time sticking their pointy noses into other people’s business.”

  “That’s when MaryBeth filed the alienation-of-affection complaint.”

  “Yeah.” He took off his billed cap and dragged his hand through his still-thick white hair. “She didn’t mean nothin’ by it, though. She was just hurt and went on a tear. By the time I got over to the judge’s house, he’d pretty much talked her out of the idea.

  “She and I spent all that night talking, and the next day she withdrew the complaint. I thought everything was going to be okay. Then, when Linda didn’t show up for work, I went to check on her, and found her in the garage.”

  Dead. While a two-year-old child was left to fend for herself. Regan had witnessed similar things, and while she’d always felt terrible for the children, never had their loss and the confusion they must have been feeling hit home as it did now.

  “You said you and your wife talked all night,” she said, carefully wading into deeper conversational waters. “Was that a figure of speech? Or were you literally with her all night long?”

  His eyes narrowed as he read the underlying meaning in the question. “We were together all night. So, if you’re here on police business, I guess you could say I’m her alibi. And she’s mine.”

  “I wasn’t—” Hell, Regan thought, there was no point in lying. “I didn’t mean to imply that either you or your wife had anything to do with her death, Mr. Boyce.” It wasn’t an out-and-out lie. “I’m just trying to get at the truth. If you were as close friends as you say—”

  “I don’t lie, ma’am.” His tone had turned from gravel to flint.

  “Yessir. I understand that. And for what it’s worth, I believe you. But surely you, as a friend, would want to know what happened to her.”

  “Killed herself. It said so right on the front page of the Chronicle.”

  “Sometimes newspapers get it wrong, Jarrett,” Nate said.

  “I read about there bein’ an autopsy.”

  “Sometimes medical examiners get it wrong, too,” Regan said. Even knowing that it might tell Nate more about herself than she would have wished, she took the old photograph of her father from her billfold and held it out to Boyce. “Have you ever seen this man before?”

  He gnawed on his lower lip as he studied it for a long, silent time. “His face doesn’t ring a bell,” he said finally.

  “Perhaps you never met him,” she suggested, not quite willing to give up. “Could you have perhaps seen this photo at Linda’s house?”

  “No, ma’am.” This time his answer was quick, decisive. “The only pictures Linda had around were ones she’d taken of you.” He began thoughtfully turning his cap around and around in his hands. “You were the cutest little thing. There were times when I used to hold you on my lap and wonder if things might have been different if I hadn’t met Marybeth first, and Linda wasn’t hung up over some guy who sure wasn’t actin’ much like a prince, if you want my opinion. I would’ve liked bein’ your daddy. I told your mama once that if I ever had a daughter, I would’ve liked her to be like you.”

  He put the hat back on his head and stood up, declaring the conversation closed. “I still would.”

  Regan was deeply, honestly moved. “Thank you, Mr. Boyce. That’s a lovely compliment.”

  “It’s the truth,” he said gruffly. The sound of a car engine a ways down the road captured his attention, and he cursed softly under his breath. “That’d be Marybeth, coming home from the market.”

  Regan wondered if his wife had entirely recovered. There were certainly drugs available to treat depression these days, but did a mother ever truly get over the death of a child?

  Not wanting to inflict another wound on the possibly still fragile Marybeth when there was no hard evidence pointing at any guilt, she turned to Nate. “We’d better be going.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” The older man’s relief was obvious. They were nearly to the SUV when he called out to her.

  “Yes?” Regan asked.

  “If someone did kill Linda, I sure hope you find him. Lynchin’s too good for any sumbitch who’d snuff out such a special life.”

  16

  They backed out of the driveway just as a late-model Honda pulled in. “That was a nice thing to do,” Nate said.

  “I didn’t want to waste time. After all, we got what we needed. There was no point in questioning his wife.”

  “And you believed him? About not sleeping with her?”

  “I got the impression he was being truthful. Didn’t you?”

  “Sure. But I’m the civilian here.”

  She glanced back, watching as Boyce took the groceries out of the car. He literally towered over his wife, who appeared to be about four-eleven and probably wouldn’t weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet. “You could have told me Marybeth is so small.”

  “Seems to me I mentioned my doubts about her dragging Linda out to the car, and you mentioning adrenaline. Since I knew you’d want to check out all the loose ends, it made more sense to let you talk to Jarrett and make your own decision about the inv
olvement of either one.”

  “Of course, there’s always the chance that he was lying to me about their relationship,” Regan mused. “Which could give him a motive for killing Dale himself. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time the person who reported finding a body turned out to be the one responsible. It’s obvious he loves his wife, or they wouldn’t have survived the loss of a child and her depression and still be together thirty years later. If he’d wanted to protect his marriage, he’d have a motive for wanting to stop her from telling Marybeth the truth about an affair.”

  “Thus risking the chance of sending her back into a depression, which in turn would have her returning to the hospital,” Nate said. “Do you believe that’s a possibility?”

  “Anything’s possible. But no, I don’t believe that’s what happened.”

  “Then I guess we keep looking.”

  We. Strange, how having Nate Callahan as a partner in this investigation didn’t seem quite as impossible as it did yesterday.

  “Do me a favor?” she asked.

  “Sure.” She didn’t know anyone who’d agree without first finding out what she was asking. “What do you need?”

  “Pull over. I need to get out of this car.”

  He shot a concerned look. “You feelin’ sick, chère?”

  “No.” She took a deep breath. “Frustrated. And when I’m frustrated, I need to walk.”

  “Makes sense to me.”

  He pulled the SUV over to the side of the road. Regan jumped out before he could open her door and headed off down the road with no goal but to try to clear her head and sort things through.

  The energy was radiating from her like sparks from a fire as she marched along the bank of the bayou. Leaving her to her thoughts, Nate kept quiet and just fit his stride to hers.

  “I just keep going over and over it,” she ground out after they’d gone about two hundred yards. “And I still can’t figure out why she never told me the truth.”