Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (42 page)

What would happen to this truce when the Katogoula started reclaiming their rights, set up their reservation, which would surely take in some forestland they presently owned and leased to the state? Would they allow public hunting? What about logging and tourism? He’d heard stories of tribes suing for hundreds of thousands of ancestral acres wrongfully taken, and winning goodly portions.

Big John wondered ruefully if central Louisiana was about to become a battlefield over the complex issues born of Katogoula recognition. The Civil War had never ended around here. All he needed was another one. National interest groups seemingly of every stripe had put this area on their radar screens. He could see it now, disaster waiting
to happen: demonstrations, spiked trees, human blockades, bloodshed, network news crews intoning judgment . . . he desperately needed to solve these damn murders, get back to doing positive things, nip that kind of trouble in the bud. He was justly regarded across the parish as a superb referee and negotiator of problems before they required the solutions of the courts, or of the gun.

The forest floor had begun to rise slightly, and the composition of the woods subtly changed; fewer pines, more hardwoods. He was probably on Tadbull land, now.

The sheriff knew something was wrong as soon as he stepped from the dense woods into the clearing. A flock of crows vied noisily around one of the old burial mounds. He saw more cautious turkey vultures circling overhead on the thermals. The opportunistic crows wheeled and darted and cawed in a frenzied competition for something that even from this distance the sheriff could smell. Something large and dead.

The full sun was hot, and he felt every year and every pound as he strode rapidly across the grassy meadow, scanning for any suspicious movement. The Shawe twins had been attacked near here.

He stopped as soon as he saw the charred designs in the dry grass.
They were letters!
One row about three feet tall, the shorter one below it twice that:

CASI

NO

Touching a finger to the black grass, sniffing, he concluded the letters had been burned very recently. Was that lighter fluid he smelled? He glanced at the patient vultures circling in the hazy blue sky. You
could probably see this from ten-thousand feet up. Somehow, word would have gotten around about this strange telegram to the tribe at this remote but sacred place. A turboprop puddle-jumper on the way to Dallas, Houston, or Atlanta, an A-10 from Barksdale Air Force Base, a forestry plane, or a crop duster would have spotted it soon enough.

Big John concentrated now on the mounds. The crows watched him but kept on tearing at the carcass. He fired off a shell into the ground a few feet ahead, pumped a new one into the chamber, fired, pumped again. The black birds scattered, suddenly quiet, yielding to the superior predator. After the sound of the shots ceased reverberating around the meadow, nothing seemed to move.

He stepped around the letters to approach the mound.

The clothed body of a large man, an atlatl spear through his chest, was pinned to the trunk of a gnarled oak; sneakers just touched the ground. This spear looked longer than the one that got Carl Shawe.

Big John had a sickening feeling he recognized the build, in spite of the decomposition, bloating, and damage done by the birds. This was no recent death, but the crucifying—if you could call it that—seemed a recent act. The body seemed to have been buried; the clothes and hair and skin were caked with dirt.

He climbed the mound. Travis Corbett. Had to be. The bark of the old oak tree was scarred and scraped on either side of the body, as if by some sharp-clawed animal. No question about it: the killer of Carl Shawe had struck again. All in all, about the strangest thing he’d ever seen.

He gagged, struggling to hold down lunch. “My Lord! What did you get yourself into, Travis?”

Big John called in on his radio. He gave rapid-fire instructions, starting the well-oiled machinery for processing a murder scene.

CHAPTER 30

“D
id you hear gunshots?” Nick stopped on the Golden Trace.

“This isn’t New Orleans,” Holly chided. “Don’t be so jumpy on such a gorgeous day. Hunting season, remember? It’s perfectly legal to blast all those cute little squirrels and rabbits and doves. . . . Exercise! Fresh air! Sunlight! Move it, buster!” she commanded over her shoulder.

With drill sergeants who looked like her, the armed services would be shooing recruits away
.

Plaid flannel shirt tied around her waist, skimpy sleeveless T-shirt hanging untucked, flapping up now and then to show the muscular slopes of her lower back, cutoff jeans like a second skin.

She noticed he was staring and smiled. Was there a note of sadness and regret in that brief glance?

Get over yourself, Herald, as Shelvin would say. She loves Wooty. End of story
.

They followed the old Katogoula hunting and trading trail winding through the towering pines, a comfortable six feet at its usual width. In the thirties, the Civilian Conservation Corps had made the path accessible to city slickers like him. Dusty red earth, pine needles, deciduous leaves. An easy hike, if you kept an eye out for the rock-hard pine roots, huge rusty fingers of a subterranean beast groping across the path to twist an ankle of the unwary. Railroad ties formed steps where the forest floor occasionally rose or fell precipitously; concrete-and-boulder
bridges marked “CCC-1938” traversed small bayous. The Louisiana Office of Forestry was doing a creditable job of keeping the place up. Nick was tempted to revise his low opinion of bureaucrats.

“
Tcheyak
means ‘pine,’ and
falaia
means ‘long or tall.’” Holly had been trying to teach him the elements of Mobilian Jargon. “Tchekalaya, ‘tall pine forest.’ In sentences, word order expressed grammatical function. Object-subject-verb was the usual form. So, you’d say, ‘Forest tall we go.’ Simple, really.”

“If you ask me, the Katogoula were better at war than language. They whipped every enemy around but surrendered their native tongue without a fight.”

“How disgustingly chauvinistic and unicultural. Just what I’d expect from a politically incorrect boor like you.” She stopped and squirted water from a plastic bottle into her mouth. “A broader-minded person would say they showed commendable adaptation to changing circumstances.”

“Let’s get to the cemetery,” Nick said, passing her, “so I can listen to my favorite rabid talk show on the radio I brought.”

She squirted him. “You didn’t bring a radio. I’m the pack mule of the expedition, so I ought to know. Here, give me your sling, if you’re not using it. You’re going to strangle yourself.”

He slipped it off and she stowed it in her backpack. Then she offered the bottle to him; he squeezed his mouth full of cool water several times. Holly, the consummate organizer, had a backpack with a cold pouch.

His ribs and face ached from the beating two days before at the
Crescent Luck
, but, oddly, his arm and shoulder felt almost normal. Holly was right: the exercise
was
doing him good, spreading warmth throughout him, soothing even the more recent pain. His body was repairing itself, obeying a recuperative power beyond his comprehension or
control that was built into the very structure of things, like the renewing forces keeping the forest alive.

Evil, too, was built into the structure of things, according to the ancient Katogoula beliefs. And when evil was loosed on the tribe, only someone granted special power from the spirit world could restore the balance.

Did he have that power? He wasn’t sure. If he did, it would manifest itself in the same process he followed in his genealogical work: examine sources, identify evidence, prove hypotheses as facts—and sometimes, wing it.

Nick had asked Nooj for the promised tour of the old Katogoula cemetery in the forest, but the wildlife agent said he had other duties. Hunting season was almost in full swing; licenses needed to be checked, kills counted, violators ticketed, usage fees collected. Sounded reasonable, but Nick couldn’t shake the idea that Nooj was avoiding him until he gave up and returned to New Orleans for good.

The cemetery wasn’t indicated as a feature on public maps, because the tribe discouraged tourism there. That morning at Three Sisters Pantry, Miss Luevie, too, had snubbed him. She’d refused even to leave the kitchen to see Nick and Holly as they ate breakfast; Royce Silsby gave them the map, apologizing quietly for his wife’s stubborn temper. Tommy Shawe was tied up with a guiding job that day, a couple of rich men from Texas who’d bow-hunted deer regularly with Carl, his late brother.

Nick’s last legitimate genealogical excuse for remaining here was this visit to the old Katogoula cemetery; he’d gathered all the information from local sources he would need to complete his tribal history and the stories of the six core families. This considerable mass of work, he felt sure, the tribe would compensate him for, if only out of a sense of fair play; and certainly once they saw the impressive show Hawty would produce using the professional-grade presentation programs she
kept adding to the fairly new but already outdated office computer. And then, unless Tommy became chief again, the Katogoula would be through with him. He would have no choice but to follow Hawty’s advice: leave the detective work to Sheriff Higbee.

Any genealogist worth his salt bravely confronts the unknown every day. He is obsessed by it, even in his dreams; with an emotional masochism he returns to the arena to face it, over and over, only certain that he can never prevail, and at best fight it to a draw. Until he knows
exactly
who did what, when and where, beyond the shadow of doubt, he’ll carry each impossible gap, in an individual life or a family’s story, with him as if it were his wounded comrade.

Nick couldn’t give up or stop theorizing about suspects and motives, even though it wasn’t in his best interests, even though snooping around had already proved nearly fatal.

“We’re almost to the branching of the trace.” Holly was studying the single copied sheet they’d picked up from Three Sisters Pantry. “Too bad Nooj didn’t come. I wanted to see your famous interrogation methods at work.”

“Yeah, too bad,” Nick said, eyeing the faint and, to him, indecipherable map. “You sure you know where we’re going?”

“Of course I do,” Holly replied indignantly. “Only about two kilometers now . . . or is that miles?” The map went back in her jeans pocket. She was off again.

A few minutes later she shouted back to him, “There it is!” She plunged down one of three indistinct paths that meandered into the thick shady woods, shot through with shifting spears of afternoon sunlight. “I think,” Nick heard her add as the trees swallowed her.

“Not the easiest place to find,” she said.

“Maybe that’s the point.”

For the next few minutes they stood without speaking. It was a serene place, alive with secrets. Nick had visited other holy sites, natural or man-made: Delphi, Jerusalem, Rome, Tikal, Stonehenge, Giza . . . where he’d also felt this indefinable wonderment, the invisible tug of transcendence, like a subtle physical force you don’t notice until you isolate it from the background buzz of sensation.

A woodpecker’s staccato laugh rattled from somewhere deep in the sighing shadows of the scaly pines. Sunlight flooded down from the opening in the trees above the enclosure of grassy graves; a black iron fence surrounded the enclosure; around the roughly rectangular area was the ubiquitous pine straw; and then trees forming a ragged, encroaching circle about two hundred feet in diameter

Nick thought of an auburn-haired Katogoula goddess, with eyes of radiant green, forever holding the reflection of her returned children in a loving, unblinking gaze.

Holly unharnessed herself from the backpack. “I could rest in peace here,” she said, her voice dreamy and distant.

Were the two redheaded, green-eyed goddesses communicating in some silent way? Confirmed skeptic that he was, Nick nevertheless felt the modern certainty of what was magical and what was real beginning to slip away. More vividly than ever before, he understood what the Katogoula were feeling, sitting atop the long-slumbering dragon of their mythology as it shook itself awake.

Snap out of it, pal! Hard facts, that’s what you need. Before you start seeing mythical cougars and sacramental deer!

“What are we looking for?” Holly asked, flexing her shoulders and rotating her neck.

“Everything. Genealogists get excited about going to cemeteries. One of the high points of a research trip. You never know what you may find.”

“Okay, if you say so. I was here a few weeks ago for Carl’s funeral. Touching. They put sand on the grave and corn seed in little packets of foil. But everybody was looking at everybody else, like, ‘Was it you who killed him?’”

Nick mentioned that he’d visited the church in Cutpine that served the Katogoula and other Catholics in the area. The church had a nice, quaint graveyard; but now the parishioners used a commercial cemetery a few miles from town. Carl’s burial here in the forest signified the tribe’s tacit admission that part of the old identity had to perish for a new one to survive. The ancient ways of living off the land were lost to all but the sociopath, a throwback like Carl.