Fever Moon (21 page)

Kneeling beside her, Chula recovered the mail and put an arm around her coworker. “How bad is Justin?” The day she’d delivered the letter to the Lanoux family and she’d learned that Justin was wounded and headed home from the war, she’d feared his wounds were life-changing, but hoped that time would mend him.

Claudia lifted her tear-stained face, anguish evident in her features. “Mrs. Lanoux said I couldn’t see him. She said he wouldn’t see anyone. She said he refused to come out of his room, that he sat in the dark and wouldn’t talk or eat. Oh, my God, Chula. Remember how Justin used to pull pranks and get into mischief. What have they done to him?” She hugged her knees and wept silently.

Chula gently rubbed Claudia’s back. There were questions to be asked, but she sensed that Claudia had no answers. “Give him time,
cher
. He wasn’t in the hospital a long time. Maybe his wounds aren’t as serious as we suspect. It’s hard for a man to be hurt, even a little.”

The bell on the door jingled and the smell of Wild Root hair tonic wafted into the post office. Chula looked up to find Praytor standing at the counter looking down at them with a calculating eye. He made no attempt to hide his thoughts. Chula rose and stepped forward to shield Claudia from his gaze.

“Can I help you?” she asked. She held her place, refusing to step closer to the counter. Behind her Claudia scrambled to her feet and fled the room.

“Didn’t mean to interrupt.” Praytor grinned.

“Do you want to buy stamps?”

“Actually, I’m here on criminal business.” He leaned against the counter.

“What can I help you with, Praytor?” She forced herself to sound pleasant. There was something about Praytor that gave her the creeps. He was a mama’s boy who she’d viewed as Henri Bastion’s toady. Now that Henri wasn’t around to boss him, he seemed lost. Not a good thing, in her opinion.

“Sure looked like an interés tin’ game you were playin’ when I walked in.” He grinned at her.

The mail slipped from Chula’s fingers, and she clasped her hands behind her back before she slapped him across the face. “We don’t have time for games at the post office. Now, did you need some stamps?”

He tapped the service bell on the counter but muffled the sound by wrapping his long fingers around it. Chula thought of a spider. “I saw you going out to that old conjure woman’s place. You got business with her?”

Chula’s first impulse was to tell him to kiss her behind, but she schooled herself to show nothing. “I took some mail to her and a few other people out that way. The same as I’d do for your mother if you weren’t all the time in town.”

“You see anyone out there? Maybe someone hidin’?”

Chula bit her lip as if she were thinking. “No. Fact is I didn’t see anyone. Madame wasn’t at home. Why do you ask?”

“Where’s that professor man?” Praytor countered.

Chula frowned, caught off guard. “John’s interviewing some people, why?”

“Sheriff Joe needs his help. Asked me to step in and fetch him.”

Chula wasn’t certain she believed what Praytor was telling her—that the sheriff was suddenly interested in Dr. John LeDeux. “Where’s Raymond?”

“Last seen headed out of town with that whore beside him in the front seat of the patrol car. Seems like they took a day off for a trip. The sheriff is a mite upset.”

“Did Raymond have a lead on the missing child?”

Praytor shook his head. “I don’t think that little pickaninny took off for Baton Rouge, and that’s the direction Deputy Thibodeaux was headed. I doubt Raymond is sniffin’ that trail. Must be something else he’s caught the scent of.”

Chula ignored his insinuations and picked up the mail she’d dropped. “Raymond wouldn’t leave his duties, Praytor. The sheriff knows that if you don’t.” It didn’t make a lot of sense that Raymond had taken off to Baton Rouge with Florence, but she was sure he had a good reason. “Tell Joe I’ll call around and try to find John.”

“Now would be better than later.” Praytor pulled a knife from his pocket and began to scrap at a rough spot on his hand. “Got a splinter that won’t come out. Maybe I’ll take a ride out to Madame Louiselle’s, see what she can do for it. I got it in my head somehow that she can help me with several things.”

Chula put the letters on the counter. Her hands were sweating. “If you need John right now, check with Aimee Baxter. He said something about talking to her about how Peat Moss disappeared.” The Baxters lived on the other side of the parish and there wasn’t a telephone within five miles of them. She had to divert Praytor from Madame Louiselle’s.

In the back room she heard Claudia blowing her nose, and her assistant stepped back up to the counter, her face reddened from crying. “I can watch the counter if you need to find Mr. LeDeux,” Claudia said.

“Shall I get him for you, Praytor, or can you manage it yourself?”

“Thanks, Miss Chula. I’ll go find him for the sheriff. Joe seemed like it was urgent.” Praytor tipped his hat at both of them as he opened the front door.

“Please ask John to call me or come by when he’s finished with the sheriff.” She forced a smile on lips that felt paralyzed.

The bell jingled as Praytor left.

“Chula, are you okay?” Claudia asked. “You’re like a sheet.”

“I have a bad feeling.” She put her palms on the counter for balance. The search for Peat Moss, Praytor’s visit, Madame’s absence, the fact that Raymond had left the parish at such a critical time—she wasn’t certain what, exactly, had churned up such anxiety. She simply had the sense that tragedy had crossed the parish line and was headed straight for town.

Colista collected the dishes from the table, her face pinched and her hands shaking. Michael sat across from the Bastion boys, wondering what duty required of him. In the brief time they’d been in his home, he was at a loss. The boys were savages. It had crossed his mind that if the church had refused to consider his stigmatic, the Holy See would never consent to exorcisms for two boys.

He put his napkin on the table. “I’ve sent someone to your home to talk with your mother.” He wondered if Jolene was brave or just crazy since she’d taken on the chore of trying to reason with Marguerite. She was the boys’ mother and she had a duty to them—if Jolene could make her see it.

“Won’t do no good.” The older boy, Caleb, banged his spoon against the empty soup bowl. “Daddy said we didn’t have to mind her and her high-bred ways. I’m still hungry.”

Reaching across the table, Michael grasped his wrist. “Stop it.”

“You’re not my daddy, and I don’t have to mind you. You’re just an old maid in a dress.” Caleb laughed out loud and his brother, Nathaniel, joined him.

“Your mother wants you put in the reformatory. If I don’t intercede in your behalf, that
will
happen.” If he’d hoped to threaten them into good conduct, he saw that it was a vain attempt. “The reform school is an awful place. Terrible things happen to the children there.”

“I want some cake.” Nathaniel looked around the dining room with sudden interest. “Got any cake here?”

Michael knew better than to call to Colista. She’d reached the end of her tether. Caleb had hit her in the face with a piece of bread, and Nathaniel had poured his soup on the floor. Michael felt helpless to deal with the boys. He’d never met such a force of complete lawlessness and deliberate maliciousness.

“There is no cake, but if you reform your conduct, perhaps Colista will bake you one tomorrow.”

“I want it now.” Nathaniel edged his glass of milk along the table.

“Knock that milk off the table, and I’ll punish you.” Michael knew he’d drawn a line, and there was no retreating.

“You gone spank him?” Caleb asked, amused.

“I’d prefer not to, but I will.” Michael eased back his chair. If action was required, he intended to deliver it swiftly. They were children, after all. Whatever Henri had had in mind when he’d allowed them to gain such an upper hand on adults, he couldn’t say. What would happen to them if Marguerite abandoned them would only teach them more cruelty.

Nathaniel looked at his brother for guidance. Caleb kicked the leg of the table repeatedly.

“I want to talk to you boys,” Michael said. “It’s important.”

“What we gone get if we talk?”

He thought about it and saw a way to give Colista some needed relief. “Ice cream from the drugstore. We’ll walk there and have a treat. But first you have to answer some questions. Important questions.”

The boys stilled. “We can pick out our own flavor?” Caleb asked.

“Certainly.” Michael felt an indefinable shock. It was as if they’d never had ice cream at the soda fountain. Their father had controlled the parish, yet the idea of an ice cream had accomplished more than threats of bodily harm.

“What you want to know?” Caleb clearly wanted control of the conversation.

“Your mother said …” He had to phrase it delicately. Marguerite hadn’t actually said anything, but she’d implied. “The night your father was killed, do you know where he was going?”

Nathaniel picked up his spoon and began to tap it against the table. Michael ignored him, honing in on Caleb. “Tell me everything you can remember about that night.”

“He went down to the shed.” Caleb kicked the table faster. “The
loup-garou
got him.”

“What shed? What was he doing?”

“The tractor shed. He went there sometimes.”

“Why?” Michael forced his hands to release their grip on the arms of his chair.

“That’s where he met her. The bad woman. That’s where they did it.” The expression on Caleb’s face was neutral, which made his revelation even more shocking to Michael.

“Your father was meeting a woman?”

“That’s what I said.” Caleb looked at him.

Michael felt his nerve falter, but he had to be sure. “They were having, uh, relations, in the tractor shed?”

Caleb nodded as something broke in the kitchen. Michael heard Colista mumbling a rosary. Sweat trickled down his spine. “Did he meet this woman the night he was killed?”

Caleb picked up the salt shaker and shook the salt all over the tablecloth. He looked at his brother and they both laughed.

Michael was stabbed by a pang of pity. Henri had stolen the boys’ childhood. By allowing them to run amok, to see the business of adults, he’d taken their innocence and their childhood.

He cleared his throat. “When Henri was … finished in the, uh, shed, where did he go?”

“He walked. Like he did ever’ night. Put his hat right on and took off down the road. Sometimes we followed.” Caleb was losing interest in the conversation. He glanced at his brother. “Can I have a double scoop of ice cream?”

“Yes, just a few more questions.” Michael wanted to hit something. The things these boys had witnessed had damaged them. Henri had not been a guardian of his children, and now Michael better understood Marguerite’s frustration. Still, she’d implied that her own sons might have killed their father. To say he was concerned by the circumstances would be an understatement.

“Hurry up, Father Michael. I want to go to the drugstore,” Nathaniel said. “I’m still hungry.”

“We’ll hurry.” He cleared his throat again. When he’d spoken to Joe on the phone, the sheriff had asked him to get as much information as possible. “Did your father walk in the same place all the time?”

“Yeah, down the road to Beaver Creek. That’s what he did. He’d finish at the shed and then take off walking like he had ants in his pants.”

“He always went to Beaver Creek?”

“We followed him sometimes. When he went down to the shed, Mama would lock us out of the house.” He drew images in the salt he’d poured on the table. “She said we were the sons of Satan and that we weren’t welcome in her home. Daddy would come back and make her let us in.”

“The night your father was killed, did you follow him?”

“Yeah.” Caleb laughed.

Michael heard the back door slam, and he knew Colista had been listening and that she’d fled the premises. If the boys were going to confess to the bloody murder of their father, she didn’t want to hear it.

“What did you see?” Michael asked softly.

“We heard Daddy screamin’.” Caleb leaned over and punched his brother so hard on the arm that the younger boy fell from his chair. Nathaniel sat on the floor and began to cry.

Michael grabbed Caleb’s arm and pinned it to the table, forcing his attention back to him. “What did you see?”

Caleb leveled a kick at his brother’s head, but Michael managed to divert it. He tightened his grip on the boy’s arm. “Tell me what you saw.”

“I seen the wolf woman come out of the woods, all pantin’ and slobberin’. She jumped on him and rode his back. When he stumbled and fell in the road, she tore out his throat. She was on her hands and knees, growlin’ and slobberin’ blood.” Caleb kicked the table so hard the dishes rattled. “I never knew Daddy could scream like that.”

R
AYMOND clutched his notebook in his hand as he walked out of the courthouse in Baton Rouge. The court record on Armand Dugas told the same story that Daniel Blackfeather had relayed. The state had prosecuted a murder one charge without a body—or any evidence that the elusive Aleta Boudreaux had ever existed. The follow-up on prisoners was abysmal. There had been the order of the judge to send Dugas to Angola on a ten-year hitch that had begun in 1940. There was no record of an appeal filed on Dugas’s behalf or any other record of the trial. There was only the paperwork on Dugas’s transfer to the state prison; nothing on his lease to the Bastion family.

Dugas’s legal trail ended at the eighteen-thousand-acre prison farm bordered by the Mississippi River, and Raymond had no doubt that was the location where Dugas was expected to end his life—and as quickly as possible. The men who had orchestrated his trip there had anticipated that Dugas would become one of the hundreds of unmarked graves in the prison cemetery. The pimp had been smarter than anticipated; Raymond believed Armand Dugas was alive.

As Raymond walked to the car, he felt regret settle over him. He’d wounded Florence. It had never crossed his mind that she’d think his invitation to ride to Baton Rouge was anything other than work-related. His life was about work, except for the few hours he spent with Florence. He’d been so focused on finding Adele—before someone else did—that he hadn’t thought of what Florence might think or feel. He’d asked her to “take a ride to Baton Rouge” simply because he hadn’t known how to ask her if she’d mind using her connections to help track down a pimp.