Disembodied Bones (2 page)

She struggled for composure while Jean
contemplated his actions at a snail’s pace. She wanted to shriek at
Jean and at the voice in her head: “I know I’m only thirteen! But
he needs me! He needs me RIGHT NOW! And I don’t know what you are!”
Leonie didn’t know where the unerring thoughts were coming from,
only that the question repeated itself in her head like a broken
record.

Jean paused in his thoughts to call out to
the tourists on the ship, “Not on the upper deck, if you please,
else it will fall into the lake and then what you do? Fish with
your hands? He-he, I’d like to see that, me.”

“
S’il vous plaît, M’su
,” the young
woman said. She wasn’t begging, but looking up at him with frank
gold eyes and something else that touched his heart. Jean’s
eyebrows drew together in a frown.

“What is so important,
p’tite
?” he
asked her.

“It is important,” she said. Leonie hesitated
for a split second. “It’s so important I can’t afford to take the
time to convince you.”

And suddenly Jean knew that it was exactly
that-so important that a little girl couldn’t find the right worlds
to explain it to a skeptical adult. He abruptly called out to a man
helping to load the ship with supplies for the long afternoon and
evening of fishing. “Louis! I need you to do something else,
mon
ami
.”

Louis shifted a cooler in his arms and
shrugged. “What you need, Jean?”

Jean held out the keys to his own truck.
“Take Leonie to Shreveport, cher. You take her to her father, oui?
And don’t you let her out of your sight until she’s with her
papa.”

Louis shrugged. He put the cooler down on the
ship and easily leapt the gap between boat and dock as he came to
get the keys. He was a younger family member with a laissez faire
attitude and a distant relative to Leonie. With dark hair brushed
back from his broad forehead and cordial eyes, he glanced at Leonie
with an affectionate smile. “Well, let’s go, sweetness. I could
stop and rent some video tapes. You know my brother just got
himself a brand spanking new DVD?”

Jean Bergeron watched the pair walk away and
smoothed the hairs that were standing up on the back of his neck
with a trembling hand. He didn’t know exactly what was up with
Leonie, but he was beginning to suspect that her gifts were coming
into play and that the entire family was going to hear about it
before long. Perhaps in a loud manner that would have all of their
heads aching with the pain of it.

•

Louis was singing loudly. Willie Nelson and
Julio Iglesias were singing backup, happily commemorating all the
girls they’d had relationships with before. Louis’s uneven tenor
drowned everything else out in the cab of the pickup truck.

Leonie sat on the other side, looking out the
window, absently pulling the constrictive seatbelt away from her
waist. She ignored Louis’s jagged rendition of the song and tried
to decide how she was going to elude the man when she needed to go
someplace by herself, someplace that Louis would never allow her to
go. It was such a bad place and so reviled by the family that only
one in the most extreme circumstances would dare it.

“Turn here,” she said, pointing. They had
been on the road for about thirty minutes, just skirting the edge
of Shreveport.

“Jean said Shreveport,” said Louis. His hand
rhythmically thumped the steering wheel in accompaniment to the
music. He looked at the road signs as he hit the turn signal.

“Papa’s not exactly in Shreveport today,”
Leonie lied without pause. She crossed her little chest with a
hand. He needed her. He needed her right away. He wasn’t harmed
yet, but it wouldn’t be long.

What am I? What am I? What am I?

“I don’t know!”

“Huh?” said Louis. His singing abruptly
ceased and he cast a concerned glance at her, even while trying to
keep an eye on the road. “Don’t know what?”

“Just talking to myself,” she muttered. “I’m
not sure exactly where, but I can find it.”

“Okay,” agreed Louis. It was a pleasant
morning. He had a few bucks in his pocket and was driving Jean
Bergeron’s truck. He was going to get paid for driving Leonie
Simoneaud around and Mary Bois was going to go see a movie with him
on Friday night.
How can it be any better than that?

Billy Joel singing Uptown Girl followed
Willie and Julio. Louis started belting that one out, cheerfully
singing as loud as he could, pausing to encourage Leonie with,
“Come on,
chère
. You know the words!”

Leonie frowned. They skirted the outskirts of
Shreveport. The houses sat back from the country road on large
plots of land. Some were small and tidy with corrals for dust
covered ponies that grazed in the tall grass and avoided children
like they were the plague. Other houses were large and had pools in
the back and a separate garage for as many as three vehicles. Their
hedges were shaped into well-formed balls and ovals that showed
their high level of maintenance. Their yards were trimmed
meticulously and vivid perennials of every color adorned their
flower beds.

“What does your papa do out here?” Louis
asked Leonie curiously. He knew Jacques did construction of all
types, but there didn’t seem to be anything being constructed out
on the country side of the largest city in northern Louisiana. “A
house?”

Leonie nodded distractedly. Louis had slowed
down, craning his neck. The homes were getting progressively more
expensive. Single storied houses had become two and then three
storied houses. Simple brick had developed into complicated
patterns and winding brick-paved driveways had wrought-iron gates
fraught with fancy designs. Some even had initials.

Louis pointed. “That one’s got a tower. Anh.
What they do with a tower,
p’tite?
All they need is a moat
and a fire-breathing dragon,
oui
?”

Leonie didn’t say anything. They were getting
closer. It was a two-lane road, with driveways leading off either
side to the expensive houses. The tension had spread to her
shoulders and it felt as though someone had inserted rebar under
her skin to stiffen her up.

“Your papa must have a big pricey project to
work on here,
non
?” His voice lowered conspiratorially. “I
hear these places have a toilette for every room. Every single
room. My
grandmaman
says that indoor plumbing tempts the
devil to come inside your house.”

Billy Joel had ceased singing about his
uptown girl and an announcer came out to discuss recent events in
the news. Leonie shivered as she perceived what the disc jockey was
talking about. Then she said, “Stop here.”

“Here?” Louis looked around confusedly. “But
there ain’t no construction ‘round here.”

“Here!” Leonie yelled at him.

Louis pulled over to the side of the road and
sighed theatrically. “Jean ain’t gonna appreciate you playing games
with me and with his truck, Leonie.”

Leonie was staring out her window. The very
peaks of the house were just about the only thing visible from the
road. There was the impression of red brick and large glass
windows, sitting well back from the country road. Compared with the
rest of the neighborhood and from what they could see through a
mass of oaks and ash trees, it was twice as large as anything in
the area. Brick columns with wrought iron fences bordered the road
and the gate was securely locked with a shiny padlock and hefty
chain that contrasted the blackened iron. It appeared as though no
one was around and furthermore, someone didn’t want anyone to be
around.

“No one up there,” said Louis, unconsciously
repeating Leonie’s thoughts. He peered through the heavy vegetation
toward the house. “Is this where your papa told you he’d be?”

Leonie’s eyes reluctantly left the big house
through the trees. There was a bronze sign mounted on the post on
the right side of the main gate. It read Whitechapel, and the
address below it was 2345 Sugarberry Lane. She took a deep breath.
“No, no one’s there,” she said unevenly, knowing that someone was
there. Someone was up there waiting for her, someone who called to
her, and she was going to have to drive away. She cleared her
throat twice before the reluctant words came out of her mouth. “We
can go to his office instead.”

“Sure, Leonie,” said Louis carefully. He had
a bad feeling about this all of a sudden. He cocked his head at the
young woman and watched her as she looked back up at the big house.
“Whitechapel. That’s a funny name,
non
?”

“
Oui
,” she said absently. “You know
that belt buckle you lost last week. The one you won roping calves
in Texas?”

Louis paused in the act of pulling the truck
into the road. “Yeah, sure. I looked everywhere. Your
maman
tell you about that?”

“It slid behind your bed, Louis.” Leonie
chewed on her lower lip. It was killing her to leave the place she
had been drawn to, but she knew she couldn’t help him. She had to
find another way. But first she was going to have to start the
trouble she had promised her
maman
she would not get into
while her parents were gone from the house.

“How the devil you know that,
p’tite
fille
?” Louis demanded as he drove away, dismissing the thought
almost instantly. A little rampant doubt tickled his brain. It
could be there.
Didn’t I leave it on the bed half the time?
Maman
comes in to fluff the blankets and sheets and couldn’t it
have fallen back of the bed, just like that?
Non. Non.
Couldn’t be. How could the little one know this?

Louis drove Leonie into downtown Shreveport
and stopped at the office where her papa worked. He had regained
some of his good humor and was again singing along with the radio.
When he pulled into a small parking lot full with other vehicles,
he smiled as Leonie suggested that she run in quickly to find out
where her father was working that day. He sat in front of the
office for a full ten minutes before he realized that Leonie wasn’t
coming back.

-

Buried ever so deep,

Piled over with heavy stones,

Yet I will

Effortlessly dig up the disembodied bones.

What am I?

I am memories.

It lies behind stars and under the highest
hills,

And empty holes it solidly fills.

It comes first and follows after,

Ends life, and kills laughter.

What is it?

Roosevelt Hemstreet was pouring himself a cup
of coffee when Eloise Hunter buzzed the detectives’ offices. Her
strident voice came abruptly through the intercom and made
Roosevelt spill a little coffee. He grimaced and mopped up the
puddle with a paper napkin and kept his mouth firmly shut.
Technically, it was possible that if he pretended to be invisible
then the highly irritating clerk would think that everyone was out
to lunch and cease her incessant bleating. Eloise had the concerted
opinion that she was God and the detectives on the third floor of
the Shreveport Police Department were her exclusive errand boys. It
didn’t matter to her in the least that she was a clerk, weighed
eighty-five pounds, and the top of her head didn’t clear
Roosevelt’s belly button.

“All y’all up there, stop messing around and
answer, puh-lease,” she said loudly after a blessedly short
interval of exalted silence. “Ah gotta gal out here who says she
knows where that kid is.”

Roosevelt froze in place. It was hard for him
to do so, standing six foot four inches and weighing in at two
hundred and twenty pounds. As broad as the proverbial barn door, he
seemed a graceless giant, despite the fact that he could move quite
silently when it was necessary. What made him freeze was the
reminder of why all the detectives in the PD were working at the
same time and had been since the previous day.

There was only one kid on the large man’s
mind and on the minds of most of the police department personnel
that day. The boy was four foot nine inches and weighed sixty
pounds. He had light brown hair and brown eyes and suntanned skin.
He liked to play arcade games. He was learning how to roller-blade
but he wasn’t much good at it. One of his teeth was missing in the
front but the kid didn’t mind that because it meant he could make
disgusting slurping noises in front of his sister. His sister had
spent an inordinate amount of time detailing her older brother’s
habit to the detective the previous evening, even while tears
leaked out of the corners of her eyes.

Eloise’s heavily accented voice screeched out
of the speaker with the coup de grace that broke Roosevelt’s
reverie. It was a shot to the head that effectively killed his
resistance. “Y’all know. The Trent kid. All y’all stop this
nonsense. Ah know one of you all is up there.”

Roosevelt sighed. He threw the soiled napkin
into the garbage and checked his suit. No crumbs on the tie. No
stains on the shirt or the lapel. Dark blue wasn’t his best color
but his wife had given him the suit to commemorate his promotion
into the ranks of detective, so he wore it anyway. He brushed a
little dandruff off his shoulders and looked longingly at a
chocolate éclair that had his name on it, his stomach acknowledging
the fact that meals had been scarce since the boy had gone missing.
Doubtless by the time Roosevelt was done sorting out the ins and
outs of a potential witness, who would probably turn out to be a
flake, the other detectives would have swooped down and devoured
the last éclair without so much as a by-your-leave. One of his big
fingers stabbed the intercom. “I’ll be down in a minute,
Eloise.”

“My name is Miss Hunter,” Eloise replied
primly. “Don’t you forget it, Dee-tective.”

His finger released the button and then
Roosevelt said under his breath in a falsetto, “My name is Miss
Hunter, and I wear my control-top panty-hose too tight for my
circulation, which means my little sour dough looking head is about
to pop off my neck.” He smiled grimly at no one at all, punching
the button again and saying with dour determination, “I’ll be there
in a minute, Miss Hunter.”