Authors: Tami Hoag
She spun away and bent to snatch up her red calfskin pocketbook from the floor, not in the least bit concerned that the hem of her dress rode all the way up to her bare ass as she did so. Laurel's breath caught in her throat, and she took a step toward her sister meaning to pull the skirt down to her knees if she could.
“Savannah, for God's sake!”
Savannah gave a derisive sniff as she dug a cigarette and slim gold lighter out of her bag. “God's got nothing to do with it, Baby,” she said as she lit up. She took a deep, calming drag and blew the smoke toward the ceiling, never taking her eyes off Laurel. “He's a sadist, anyway. Haven't you realized that by now?” She smiled bitterly, a smile made gruesome by the bright red blood staining her lush lower lip. “The joke's on us.”
Satisfied with having the last word, she turned on her red stiletto heel and strolled out the front door as calmly as if nothing had happened at all.
“She gonna come to grief, dat one,” T-Grace said, her voice vibrating with anger. She stood beside Laurel with her hands jammed on her hips, electric blue cowboy boots planted apart. Her tower of red hair was listing perilously to the left. Her leathery face was suffused with color, and her dark eyes bugged way out, making her look as if some invisible hand had her by the throat.
Laurel didn't bother to argue the point. Her heart sank at the thought that it was quite probably true. Savannah seemed bent on destroying herself one way or another, and Laurel had no idea what to do to prevent it. She wanted to believe she could stop it. She wanted to believe they could control their own destinies, but she didn't seem to have control of anything. She felt as if she were trying to stop a crazily spinning carousel by simply reaching out and grabbing it. Every time she caught hold, it flung her to the ground.
“I'm sorry, Mrs. Delahoussaye,” she murmured. “Please be sure to send the bill for damages to my aunt's house.”
T-Grace wrapped an arm around her and patted her shoulder, instantly the surrogate mother. “Don' you be sorry,
chère.
You don' got nothin' be sorry 'bout, helpin' us out like what you did with dat damn Jimmy Lee. You come an' eat some crawfish, you. You so little, I could pick up over my head.”
“T-Grace,” Jack said, resurrecting his smile with an effort, “who you tryin' to fool? You could pick
me
up over your head and dance the two-step.”
She shook a bony finger at him, fighting the smile that pulled at her thin ruby lips. “Don' you tempt me,
cher
. You so full of sass, I jus' might show you who's boss, me. You come on sit down 'fore dat bump on your head make you more crazy than you already is.”
As they wound their way through the throng, T-Grace snatched hold of Leonce and ordered him to mind the bar. Leonce swept off his Panama hat and made a courtly bow, the tails of his Hawaiian shirt drooping low. He came up with a big grin that split his Vandyke and gave Jack a punch on the shoulder.
“Jumpin' into catfights, talk about! What you gonna do next, Jack? Mud wrasslin' with women and alligators?”
Jack scowled at his friend, reached out with a quick hand, and flipped Leonce's hat off Leonce and onto his own head, leaving Leonce blushing back across his balding pate. “You're just jealous 'cause you were only the warm-up act.”
Comeau's face darkened at the reminder, his scar glowing an angry red like a barometer of his temper. He tried to snatch the hat back, grabbing air as Jack ducked away. “Fuck you, Boudreaux.”
“In your dreams,” Jack taunted, laughing. “Go water the liquor,
tcheue poule
.”
T-Grace whirled around and boxed his ear, knocking the hat askew. “We don' water nothin' here, smart mouth.”
She hardly broke her stride, continuing toward a little-used side door, barking orders at a waitress along the way and signaling to her husband to join them. Jack rubbed his ear and shot her a disgruntled look from under the brim of the straw hat—a look that was tempered by a twinkle in his eye.
They went outside and across a stretch of parking lot to the bank of the bayou, where a picnic table and assorted lawn chairs sat, divided from the yard of a tidy little forest-green house by the requisite flower shrine to Mary. The area was partially illuminated by cheap plastic Chinese lanterns alternated with yellow bug lights strung up between two poles. The sun had sunk, but night had yet to creep across the sky. The bayou was striped with bars of soft gold light and translucent shadow.
Ovide planted his bulk in a lawn chair and said nothing while T-Grace supervised the layout of food on the picnic table. Laurel hung back, uncertain, wary of why she was being treated as a guest. She glanced at her watch and started to back away.
“I appreciate the offer, Mrs. Delahoussaye, but I think I should probably go. I ought to find Savannah—”
“Leave her be,” T-Grace ordered. “Trouble, dat's all what she'll get you,
chère,
sister or no.” Satisfied with the spread, she turned toward Laurel with her hands on her hips and a sympathetic look in her eyes. “
Mais yeah
, you gotta love her, but she'll do what she will, dat one. Sit.”
Jack put his hands on Laurel's shoulders and steered to the picnic table. “Sit down, sugar. We worked hard catchin' these mudbugs.”
She obeyed, not because she was hungry or eager to please, but because she didn't want to think what she would do if she could find Savannah. She wanted to talk, but the talk would invariably turn into an argument. When Savannah was in one of her moods, there was no reasoning with her. A headache took hold, and she closed her eyes briefly against the pain.
“Eat,” T-Grace said, sliding a plate in front of her. It held a pile of boiled crawfish, boiled red potatoes, and
maquechou
—corn with chunks of tomato and peppers. The rich, spicy scents wafted up to tease Laurel's nostrils, and her stomach growled in spite of the poor appetite she'd had two seconds ago.
Jack tossed the Panama hat on the end of the table, straddled the bench, and sat down beside her, too close, his thigh brushing hers, his groin pressing against her hip. The air seeped out of her lungs in a tight hiss.
“She's a debutante, T-Grace,” he said. “Probably don' know how to eat a crawfish without nine kinds of silver forks.”
“I do so,” Laurel retorted, shooting him a look over her shoulder.
Defiantly, she snapped off a crawfish tail, dug her thumbs into the seam, and split it open to reveal the rich white meat, which she pulled out and ate with her fingers. The flavor was wonderful, making her mouth water, evoking memories. In her mind's eye she could see her father wolfing down crawfish at the festival in Breaux Bridge, his eyes closed with reverent appreciation and a big smile on his face.
“You gonna be a real Cajun and suck the fat out'a the head?”
She jerked free of the bittersweet memory and scowled at Jack, who was slipping his arms around her to steal food off her plate. “Go suck the fat out of your own head, Boudreaux. That ought to occupy you for a while.”
Ovide's mustache twitched. T-Grace slapped the arm of her lawn chair and cackled. “I like this girl of yours, Jack. She got enough sass to handle you.”
Laurel tried unsuccessfully to scoot away from him. “I'm afraid you've got the wrong idea, Mrs. Delahoussaye. Jack and I aren't involved. We're just . . .” She trailed off, at a loss for an appropriate word. Friends seemed too intimate, acquaintances too distant.
“You could say lovers, and we'll make good on it later,” he murmured in a dark, seductive voice, nuzzling her ear as he reached for another crawfish.
T-Grace went on, unconcerned with Laurel's definition of the relationship. “A girl's gotta have some sass. Like our Annick—Annie, you know? She gets herself in a scrap or two, but she takes care of herself,
oui
? She's a good girl, our Annie, she jus' can't pick a good man is all. Not like her
maman
.”
She reached over to pat Ovide's sloping shoulder lovingly, her hard face aglow with affection. Ovide gave a snort that might have been approval or sinus trouble and tossed a crawfish shell into the bayou. A crack sounded from the dark water as a fish snapped up the shell.
“We raise seven babies in this house,” T-Grace announced proudly. “Ovide and me, we work every day to make a good home, to make a good business. Now we got this damn Jimmy Lee making trouble for us, sayin' Frenchie's is the place where sin come from. Me, I'd like to send him to the place where sin come from. Ovide, he's gonna get the ulcer from worryin' 'bout what dat Jimmy Lee gonna do next.”
She patted her husband's shoulder again, brushed at the wild gray hair that fringed his head and poured out of his ear. She shot a shrewd, sideways look at Laurel. “So, you gonna help us wit' dat or what,
chère
?”
The other shoe fell. Laurel felt trapped with Jack on one side and T-Grace staring her down on the other. She shifted uncomfortably on the bench, wanting nothing more than to escape. She shook her head as she abandoned her supper and extricated herself from the bench. “I believe we've already had this conversation, Mrs. Delahoussaye. I'm not practicing law—”
“You don' gotta practice,” T-Grace said dryly. “Jus' do it.”
Laurel heaved a sigh of frustration. “Really, all you have to do is call the sheriff the next time Reverend Baldwin comes on your property—”
“Ha! Like dat pigheaded jackass would bother with the like of us!”
“He's the sheriff—”
“You don' understand, sugar,” Jack drawled. He swung his right leg over the bench and stretched his feet out in front of him, leaning his elbows back against the table. “Duwayne Kenner only comes runnin' if your name is Leighton or Stephen Danjermond. He's got too many important meetings to bother with the common folk. He isn't gonna get mixed up with Jimmy Lee and his Church of the Lunatic Fringe unless a judge tells him to.”
“That's absurd!” Laurel exclaimed, rounding on Jack. “That's—”
He raised his brows. “The way it is, sweetheart.”
“He's sworn to uphold justice,” she argued.
“Not everybody has the same conviction about that as you do.”
She said nothing, just stood there for a long moment. He had no such conviction. Jack made his own rules and probably broke them with impunity. He joked about the system, derided the people who tried to make it work. But he knew she didn't.
He watched her, his eyes a dark, bottomless brown, his expression intense. He was trying to read her. She felt as if those eyes were reaching right into her soul. Abruptly, she turned back toward T-Grace.
“There are several attorneys here in town—”
“Who don' give a rat's behind,” T-Grace said. She abandoned her plate on the ground, forfeiting her dinner to Huey, who crawled out from under the picnic table and laid claim to the crawfish. T-Grace ignored the dog, her hard gaze homing in on Jack. She walked up to him with her hands on her hips, her chin tipped in challenge. “Jack here, he could help us, but here he sits on his cute little—”
“Jesus Christ, T-Grace!” Jack exploded. He got up from the bench so quickly, it tipped over backward with a crash that sent the hound scurrying for safe cover. “I'm disbarred! What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Oh, nothin', Jack,” she said softly, mockingly, not giving up an inch of ground. “We all know you jus' wanna have a good time.” Daring more than any man would have, she reached up and patted his lean cheek. “You go on and have a good time, Jack. Don' bother with us. We'll make out.”
Jack wheeled around in a circle, looking for some way to vent the anger roaring inside him. He wanted to yell at the top of his lungs, bellow like a wounded animal. He snatched a beer bottle off the table and hurled it, narrowly missing the bathtub shrine to the mother of God, and still the fury built inside him.
“Shit!”
T-Grace watched him with wise old eyes. “That's all right, Jack. We all know you don' get involved. You don' take responsibility for nothin'.”
He glared at her, wanting to grab her and shake her until her bug eyes popped right out of her head. Damn her, damn her for making him feel . . . what? Like a cad, like a heel? Like a good for nothing, no-account piece of trash?
Bon à rien, T-Jack . . . bon à rien.
That's what he was. No good. He'd had that truth drilled into him since he was old enough to comprehend language. He had proven it true time and again. He had no business howling at the truth.
His gaze caught on Laurel, who stood quietly, her arms folded against her, her big eyes round behind her glasses. The champion for justice. Willing to sacrifice her reputation, her private life, her career, all for the cause.
Dieu, what she must think of me . . . and all of it true
.
That was the irony—and he had a finely honed appreciation for irony—that he was everything T-Grace accused him of and less, that he was exactly what he aspired to be, and now the image he had settled into was turning on him—or he was turning against it.
“I don' need this,” he snarled. “I'm outta here.”
Laurel watched him stalk away, a little shaken by his outburst. A part of her wanted to go after him, to offer comfort, to ask why.
Not smart, Laurel
. She had enough trouble of her own without taking on the burden of Jack Boudreaux's darker side . . . or the plight of Frenchie's Landing. . . .
But as she turned back toward T-Grace, she couldn't bring herself to say no. It was no big deal, she told herself. Just a visit to the courthouse, a phone call or two. She wasn't taking on the world. Just a pair of honest, hardworking people who needed a little justice. Surely she was strong enough for that.
“All right,” she said on a sigh. “I'll see what I can do.”
For once, T-Grace was speechless, managing only a smile and a nod. Ovide hefted himself out of his chair and dusted remnants of crawfish shells off his belly. Laying a broad hand on Laurel's shoulder, he looked her in the eye and growled, “
Merci, chère
.”
Chapter
Twelve
Jimmy Lee sat on the windowsill, feeling sorry for himself, wearing nothing but his dirty white trousers and a frown. Sweat trickled in little streams down his chest to pool on his belly. He sipped at a glass of brandy, brooding, reliving his humiliation in his mind, tormenting himself with it. He had had that crowd in the palm of his hand, he thought, curling his fingers into a fist. Then that damn Chandler bitch had ruined everything. Of course, he had managed to salvage the situation with his quick thinking, but the moment of glory had been spoiled, just the same.
Women were the bane of his existence. Sluts and whores, all of them. Some came in more respectable packages than others, but they were all alike underneath the wrapping. Wicked as Eve, every last one of them.
He laughed a little at the biblical reference and tossed back a gulp of brandy. Shit, he was even starting to
think
like a preacher.
The night was still and hot as hell, the air electric with something like expectation. A dark restlessness shifted inside him and he lifted his glass and tried to douse the feeling with the last of his drink. The quiet pressed in on him, irritating raw nerve endings like fingernails on a chalkboard. He longed for the noise of New Orleans, the sounds and smells of Bourbon Street, the dirt and dark alleys of the Quarter, the places the tourists never saw.
A man could get anything he wanted in New Orleans, any way he wanted it.
But he was out here, stuck on the edge of the godforsaken swamp. He had an apartment up in Lafayette, but he had chosen Bayou Breaux as the spot to launch his campaign, and so had rented this one-room bungalow at the edge of nowhere in order to have some privacy.
Bayou Breaux had seemed the perfect choice for his “War on Satan”—the heart of Acadiana, where good Christian people were as thick as ants on a watermelon rind, where times were a little lean these days because of the perilous state of the oil industry and the agricultural economy, where crime was pressing in and people needed something to grab on to and believe in. There were too many Catholics to suit him, but there were also busloads of fundamentalists fervent enough and gullible enough to believe anything. They were the core of his ministry. They would bankroll him into stardom and carry him there on their shoulders.
If Laurel Chandler didn't get in the way.
The screen door swung open with a creak and Savannah Chandler walked in, a seductive vision in her short flowered dress and red high heels. Her gaze scanned the shabby little room, taking in the dingy yellow walls, the cheap, mismatched furniture, the bottle of E & J on the battered coffee table, assessing the surroundings the same way she might judge a new boutique.
Finally she turned toward him, not saying a word, acting as if she had more right to be there than he did. She had eyes like a she-wolf—pale, translucent blue—and something in them sent a shiver of awareness down his spine. A white-hot flame that burned. A hunger that called to his own. A recognition of a common need.
“All dressed up and nowhere to go, Jimmy Lee?” she drawled.
“I could say the same to you.”
She shot him a sly look from the corner of her eye. “No, you couldn't. I came here.”
“What for?”
“For a while.”
He said nothing as she skirted around the old iron bed, trailing a forefinger along the foot rail. She stared at him from under her lashes. He could feel the heat of her gaze on his face, on his bare chest, and he couldn't quite resist the urge to suck in his stomach. She came toward him, head down, her long wild hair tumbling over one shoulder, twining with the long strand of pearls she wore. Her hips rolled sensuously from side to side. The only sounds in the room were the click of spike heels against linoleum, the creak of the old ceiling fan as it turned, and the soft, seductive swish of fabric as it rubbed against skin.
Jimmy Lee held himself still as lust rose up inside him like a demon. She stopped a scant inch away. Her perfume mingled with the faint scent of brandy and the damp, earthy aroma of the swamp that drifted in through the window, and beneath it all lay the unmistakable musk of arousal—hers, his. . . .
“Your sister made a fool of me today,” he said, his voice low and whiskey-hoarse.
One corner of her mouth curled into a subtle sneer. “You oughta be used to that, Jimmy Lee.”
He moved so quickly, she couldn't help gasping as his hand closed, tight and punishing, on her upper arm. “I'm gonna be a star,” he said softly.
She didn't ignore the pain of his fingers biting into her flesh. Instead she drank it in, fed on it, smiled a little deeper. “You're nothing but a two-bit hustler.”
“And you're nothing but a cheap piece of snatch,” he said. “A whore without a price tag.”
She slapped him so hard that the blow sang up her arm and her palm burned like live ash. In one explosive move, Jimmy Lee was on his feet, his hand thundering down to return the slap. It snapped her head back and the split that had knitted together along her bottom lip cracked open, instantly filling her mouth with the sharp, thick taste of her own blood.
As if a door had been suddenly thrown open inside her, all the restlessness, the recklessness, the wildness rushed out on a wave of hate. Hate for him, hate for herself, an all-encompassing, drenching, drowning hate that washed away control, compunction, restraint. And all of it—the need, the hate, everything—glowed in her eyes as she turned her head and looked up at Jimmy Lee Baldwin.
He stared down at her for a long while, feeling again that strange kinship between them. Something dark, something evil. And it stirred arousal like nothing else he'd ever known. Desire rose up like a beast inside him, wild, rabid, unchained. A sound of animal need rose up the back of his throat as he pulled Savannah roughly against him and crushed her mouth with his.
She fought his embrace—not to escape, just to fight—but all her hands could grasp was the fever-hot, sweat-slick skin of his chest and upper arms, and she groped and clawed and pinched as the ripe male scent of him filled her head and his tongue filled her mouth.
Behind her back, his fingers worked frantically at the zipper of her dress. He pulled the tab down a few inches, then curled his fingers into the opening and tore it the rest of the way. He worked it past her shoulders and lower as he dragged his mouth from her lips to her throat. He grasped the neckline of the dress in both hands and jerked it down, hunger snarling inside him like a wild dog as her breasts sprang free, full and firm. He bent over and caught one turgid peak in his hot, avid mouth, sucking hard, wringing a frantic sound from her . . . and another and another. Winding his hand into her pearl necklace, he rubbed the cool, satiny beads across her other aching point.
Unsure of whether she wanted to hold him to her or push him away, Savannah shoved at his shoulders, tangled her hands in his slicked-back hair and pulled. This was a battle for her mind, for her soul, and desperation gripped her throat at the idea that she stood no chance of winning.
This is what you were born for, Savannah. Don't try to deny it
. . . .
For an instant she was back in her room at Beauvoir, and the man sucking greedily at her breast was her stepfather. She cried out, not at the assault of her body, but at the conflicting feelings that assaulted her. Her body responded to his touch, tingled and burned and ached. In the beginning she hadn't liked it, but over time she had come to see that Ross was right—this was what she was made for, this was what she was good at. But the pleasure that ribboned through her body brought with it a wrenching shame. She was a whore. That was all she would ever be. That was all any man would love her for—sex.
She sobbed a little, feeling trapped, but she cast aside the sensation and let Ross's words balm her ravaged heart.
“You're so beautiful, Savannah. You're so much more woman than your mother. I want you all the time. Sometimes I think I'll go mad with need of you. . . .”
Need of her
. He needed her. He wanted her. The words gave her a sense of power, and she grasped it and hung on.
“You're wicked, Savannah,” Baldwin muttered, trailing his mouth down the slope of her breast, over the quivering muscles of her stomach. “You're a witch the way you make a man want you.”
A wild, bitter laugh tore from her. She braced her hands against the window frame as Jimmy Lee went down on her. He caught the hem of her dress and shoved it up past her hips, so that it bunched around her waist. The strand of pearls hanging down between her breasts, she teetered on her red high heels, feet braced apart, head swimming dizzily, drunk on a mix of need and hate and self-pity and self-loathing and rapacious, insatiable arousal.
Jimmy Lee devoured her, as greedy and ravenous as a glutton at a feast. His tongue teased and flicked and probed, bringing her to the edge of orgasm but never beyond, never granting her satisfaction, only pushing the pain of unfulfilled arousal to its outer limits.
“I hate you, Jimmy Lee!” Her voice was little more than a rasp, as tormented as the rest of her body, as seized by desire and frustration. “You're a son of a bitch.”
He tumbled her back across the creaking, sagging mattress of the old bed, falling across her, pinning her arms above her head with one hand. She struggled beneath him as he reached down with his free hand and stripped his belt from his trousers.
“You're nothing but a pervert, Jimmy Lee,” she taunted, her heart racing as he bound her hands to a rail on the iron headboard.
“It takes one to know one,” he growled.
She laughed, a throaty, seductive laugh, her cool, she-wolf eyes glowing with hunger and anticipation as he sat back, straddling her thighs, and unfastened his trousers. He didn't bother to take them off, but he did bother to protect himself, pulling a condom out of his pocket and slipping it on with practiced efficiency.
“Can't be too careful these days,” he said. He braced himself above her on his elbows and stared down at her, his breath coming in hard pants. “My adoring public wouldn't take it too kindly if I caught something nasty from some alley cat who spreads her legs for every man in town.”
Savannah glared at him. “I'll be sure to tell them you said that.”
“Who'd believe you?” he asked, contempt for her festering inside him like a boil. “I'm their savior. You're just a bitch in heat.”
“Don't bother telling anyone, Savannah. No one will ever believe you. . . . They'll see you for what you are—little slut, little prick teaser. . . . You're a bad girl, Savannah, and everyone knows it. . . . There's no use telling. We both know you seduced me. . . .”
She closed her eyes as the voice played in her head. She raised her hips as Jimmy Lee thrust
into her . . . and hated herself.
The midnight moon cast a silvery sheen down on the trees, and the mist crept, soft and white, across the surface of the black water.
A lot of women were afraid of the swamp. A lot of
men
were afraid of the swamp. It didn't frighten Savannah. She felt something other than fear out here. Something ancient. Something that called to her and stirred her blood.
This place had always been her escape. This was where she and Baby had run to get away from home and the unhappiness there. Out here she felt free. She felt like a part of the swamp, like an animal—a deer or a bobcat or a copperhead snake. She wanted to take her clothes off and be naked here, be a part of it, a creature of the Atchafalaya.
Giving in to that primal desire, she slipped off the dress the Revver had ruined for her, tossed it on the hood of the car, and slicked her hands down over the curves of her naked body.
For a moment she closed her eyes and imagined what it would be like to lie down here on the mat of dead leaves and welcome her lover into her body beneath the light of the bayou moon. They would mate as all animals mated, without guilt, without inhibition, glorying in the pure excitement of it. She would scream out in ecstasy, her cries mingling with the eerie cacophony that carried across the swamp at night.
The mental image wrung a low moan from her, made her ache with need, a need Jimmy Lee hadn't been able to assuage no matter how many ways he used her—and he had used her in every way a man could use a woman. This was a need no man could quench, a need that was rooted deep in the core of her.
She threw her head back, lifting her face to the moon, tumbling her wild hair down her back. The restlessness stirred harder, hotter. The wildness pulled at her, drew on something deep within. She
needed . . . needed . . . needed . . .
Need drives the predator. Not the need for food, but for sustenance of another kind. A need for blood, a taste for death. A need to punish, a desire to inflict pain. To watch pain grow like a cancer, from a simple response into something all-consuming. A need to control. To play God.
To play. A game. The thought brings a smile. The smile brings a chill to the prey. For every game there is a loser. The one bound and held captive knows the outcome before the game begins. For the victim there is no game, only anticipation, pain, terror, and, she prays, death. Please, death. Soon . . .
No one hears her screams. No one comes to her aid. There are no saviors in the swamp. Cruelty here is a way of life. Death as commonplace as snakes. Danger hidden in beauty. No salvation. No justice. Life. Death. The hunter and the hunted.
The knife gleams silver in the moonlight. The blade cuts delicately, with skill, slicing like a bow across the strings of a violin. The song it plays high-pitched and eerie. Human. A prelude to death.
And in the end, the instrument will fall silent, the prey will succumb. She will die as the predator believes she deserves to die—naked and defiled. Another dead whore left to rot in the swamp. A fitting end, a fitting place. And the predator will glide away in the
bâteau,
silent, safe, the secret shared with only the trees and the creatures of the night. . . .
Laurel sat up suddenly, shaking, cold, her skin slick with sweat, her heart pounding. The nightmare faded as she grounded herself in reality, but the sounds of the children's cries still echoed in her mind, driving her from bed. She crossed to the highboy and pulled out another oversize T-shirt, trying to crowd the last of the dream from her brain. She was trembling violently, her stomach knotting with residual anxiety, and she cursed a blue streak under her breath, battling the weakness.