The Evidence Room: A Mystery (8 page)

He followed the sound down the first row of metal shelving, a creaky ceiling fan sending a plume of hot air down on him. Cardboard boxes, wrinkled with age, slouched on each of the shelves, marked with a case number and a curling piece of colored tape. The boxes gave way to rows of skateboards and then bicycles suspended upside down, their streamers brushing against Josh’s shoulder. All of them evidence; all of them had once belonged to someone who had been the victim of a crime.

The music was louder now, and Josh stepped out of the row into a clearing where a pudgy man with salt-and-pepper curls swayed to the strains of a Dylan song that Josh half recognized.

“Christ on a bike!” the man shouted.

“Sorry,” Josh said. “Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

The older man chuckled. “Not at all! You just gave me a scare. Thought it was those ghosts again.” He extended a sweaty hand in Josh’s direction. “Mike Sambarello. But everyone calls me Samba. And you must be Detective Hudson!”

“Josh. Pleased to meet you.”

“So what do you think, Josh? Is this a cool place or what?”

There was something about this man, with his outward pointing feet, that reminded Josh of a clown, and he could not suppress a grin. “Sure. I like the music.”

Samba grinned. “Hey, you gotta do something to lighten the mood around here, you know? Dealing with this stuff gets kinda … you know. Heavy.” He clicked off the paint-splattered boom box. “So this is your first time here, huh?”

“Yep,” Josh said. “I worked narcotics. Not a lot of cold cases.”
Except my own
, he added to himself.

“Where you came in, that’s where law enforcement comes if they want to request any evidence we might have. Then we have two days to find it. That’s the fun part.”

“Is there an automated system?” Josh hadn’t passed anything resembling a computer.

“Sure is,” Samba said, tapping his wrinkled forehead with his index finger. “It’s all up here. We have almost two thousand pieces of evidence housed here, and I’ve organized it into categories.”

“But what about the state? Don’t they make you log everything in a database?”

Samba frowned. “I don’t trust those state guys,” he said. “I’ve been cataloguing evidence for thirty years. I know how to preserve things right and how to find them. I don’t need a computer. They can send me all the nasty letters they want, I’m not changing.” He lowered his voice, as though afraid someone might be listening. “Fuck the establishment.”

Behind them, Josh heard the high-pitched bleat of a cell phone. Samba ignored it, leading Josh in the other direction.

“Is that your phone?”

Samba laughed. “No. That’s from our electronic evidence aisle. There’s always something chirping over there. You’d be surprised; sometimes these old machines still have a spark in ’em.”

Samba led them down a row of enormous yellowing refrigerators, all buzzing at different frequencies. “This is all the biohazard stuff,” Samba said. “But if you decide to bring lunch—and I know every man’s got his own preference for barbecue, I myself am partial to Piggy Jim’s on the corner—you can put it in the big silver one on the end.” Josh stepped over a puddle of stagnant green liquid seeping from beneath one of the refrigerators. Samba had placed a plastic
CAUTION
sign next to the spill. Who was he warning, Josh wondered. Did anyone else even work here?

“So how often do you get a request for evidence?”

“Oh, you know, every so often,” Samba said. “I think the last one was two months ago, May. You know, the newer evidence stays with the property clerk of the PD for about a year before they bring it to me here. There’s less demand for older stuff, but I make sure everything is where someone can find it.”

“How long do you keep the evidence here?”

“Eighty years is what the statute says,” Samba confided. “Plus they ask us to dump out anything that’ll get you drunk or high. Those cops are no fun. But I’ve never thrown anything away, and I don’t think the guy before me did either.”

Samba reached the end of the row and plopped down on the arm of an overstuffed paisley sofa with its entire midsection cut out, right down to the foam. “Everything we have in here—every piece of evidence—well, to me it represents an injury to somebody. Just ’cause it’s old, that doesn’t mean you forget about it. It’s never too late to get justice. Believe me, I should know.”

Josh nodded. Here was a person who cared about his job, a custodian of tragedies, his own and others’—a guy who thought that maybe the system didn’t have all the answers. A guy who worked in a warehouse full of unsolved crimes and somehow still believed in justice.

Josh’s second cell phone, the throwaway, began to vibrate in a circle on his abandoned table.

“One of your girlfriends, I bet.” Samba winked, and Josh reached for the phone.

“
Bonjour,
Josh.” Pea.

Josh ducked behind one of the rows of boxes. “Hey. I’m at work. I can’t really—”

“I have a lead on Liana.” He heard her quick intake of breath, a split decision not to finish the sentence.

“What is it?” The desperation was naked in his voice. Pea was free; he had nothing left to barter with, and she knew it. Still, there was a goodness in her, he could see it. She wanted to help him.

“Pea, please. Whatever it is—I need to know. I need to find her.”

“She’s in trouble, Josh. She’s involved with some bad people. You need to be careful.”

When they were kids, Liana was the one who had first disobeyed the rule to stay on their block. She had shrugged off their parents’ attempts to control her. In his mind, he could still see her balancing on the roof of their house, tempting the fates. Walking the line.
Taste death live life
, she had written on her forearm in green Magic Marker. His sister, imperious and wild. He had never imagined it would lead to this.

Josh reached into his jeans pocket for the spiral notebook he always carried. “Just tell me,” he told Pea. “Where is she?”

On the other end of the phone, there was silence.

“Hello? Hello? Pea?”

The line went dead.

“Goddamnit,” he swore. She was playing him. He knew it. But what the hell was her endgame? None of it made sense. Josh swallowed his anger. First day at work, he reminded himself. He couldn’t fuck this job up, or who knew what the next stop was on the one-way train to career suicide?

“Sorry, man. Family stuff,” he began, expecting to see Samba around the corner, but there was no sign of his boss. Josh walked towards the front entrance, where he heard Samba’s voice on the phone.

“… each one. Got it. I can do that, yes, sir.” The older man’s voice was no longer the jolly tone of earlier; this was all business. Samba turned and raised a hand at Josh. “Yes. I’ve got help here, so I should be good. We will let you know when we’ve got something. Okay. Thank you.”

“I’m glad you’re here, Josh,” Samba said before Josh could ask the question. “We’ve got a case.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The bayou invaded Aurora’s dreams that night.

She woke to the sound of a paddle being dipped and pulled through creamy swirls of earth-colored water. Aurora crooked a finger and pulled aside the gauzy white curtain by Papa’s bed, revealing the violet swath of bayou outside her window. Mist hovered above the water, punctured by the knuckles of sunken cypress trees. A lone figure nudged a skiff in a wide arc around a sunken cluster of plants with leaves that reached skyward like upturned palms and then settled the boat against the opposite shoreline, resting the paddle across the bow of the boat. There was something unearthly about the landscape, especially at this time of the morning, so otherworldly that you could believe there was truth in those old bayou stories about ghost lights and mists that drew people deep into the patchwork of sloughs and never released them.

Aurora slid on shorts and a T-shirt and pulled on one of Papa’s old baseball caps. The things she should do scrolled through her mind, a crisp and orderly list. Go through Papa’s desk. File papers at the courthouse. Maybe put the house on the market. The real estate agent’s glossy business card beckoned her from the desk. Renee Trosclair, the card proclaimed below a picture of a woman with an aggressively spiked blond haircut and a teeth-baring smile.
Look no further—you are home!!
There was something oddly disconcerting about the phrase.

The bedroom was blissfully free of the voodoo items filling the rest of the house. Here, framed pictures surrounded the oak bed covered with one of Nana’s quilts. Aurora’s mother and grandmother beamed at her, not from stiffly posed photographs but candid shots, their mouths open, their eyes shining, standing behind birthday cakes and reaching for each other across a sea of opened Christmas presents. All her life, Aurora had wished for something of her mother’s: a talisman, a reminder that she had existed as more than a story, more than a forbidden topic of conversation. It was a request that she had never had the courage to make, too afraid of upsetting the careful equilibrium in her grandparents’ home. And now here she was, surrounded by talismans, whether she liked it or not.

Between the frames were strewn souvenirs from places with names Aurora had never heard of: a thickly spotted seashell from Bayou Sauvage, a coffee mug with a faded logo that advertised a place called Baboon Jack’s, an apron that bragged of the best barbecue in Hambone.

Aurora had expected neat stacks of paperwork, another version of Papa’s office back home, legal pads and a tightly ordered file cabinet. She could handle paperwork; she did it every day. But Papa had left her with so much more than that. There were things here she needed to understand. If there were questions surrounding her mother’s death, they needed to be answered. She wasn’t ready to dismantle the house. Not today. Not yet.

A Mass card was fitted into the corner of one of Raylene’s photographs, the faded image of a mournful saint on the front.
Internment, Ti Bon Ange Cemetery, 9
A.M
.
A thickness rose in Aurora’s throat. Had she been allowed to attend the burial? Had Papa ever visited the grave?

The man in the skiff was moving again, floating past her house now, his oar laid across his lap, his head tipped back in the sunshine. She opened the front door, crossed the latticed porch, and made her way down to the boat ramp.

“Excuse me, sir?”

The man did not sit up but tilted his head in her direction. She was learning that nobody in this town did anything quickly, something that set her off balance after the frenzied rush of the emergency room. He wore a filthy T-shirt tucked into a pair of ragged cutoffs, one tanned bare foot dangling in the sun-dappled water.

“I was wondering if you could help me, sir,” Aurora began, surprised at the timid note in her own voice. “I’m looking for Ti Bon Ange Cemetery.”

This got the man’s attention. He hoisted himself to a sitting position and shaded his eyes to give her a closer look. “You Hunter Broussard’s granddaughter? Raylene’s girl?”

“Yes.” She was surprised at the hitch in her voice. She was part of something here; linked to this unfamiliar landscape in a way she did not yet understand. “Yes, I am.”

He nodded. “Ernest Authement. Your grandfather, he used to buy shrimp from me. He was a fine gentleman.” He crossed himself and pressed a thumb to his lips. “He buried in Ti Bon Ange? I know he was coming back to visit. Bayou gets a hold on you, it won’t let go.”

“No,” she said. “My mother is.”

“For true,” he said. There was a warmth in his creased eyes, a kindness that made her believe her family had meant something to him. “Well, you gonna need a boat to get there.”

“It’s an island?”

He laughed, a guttural chortle that morphed into a coughing fit, revealing a mouthful of graying teeth. “For true, you an out-of-towner. That cemetery’s been half under water for years.”

“Under
water
?” It seemed unimaginable that someone could let that happen.

The man shrugged. “A few years back they poured some concrete to hold it down. But that don’t work forever. The bayou gonna rise—nothing they can do.”

“So they just forgot about it?”

“Forgotten, maybe so,” he said, extending a hand to her. “But not gone. Get in. I’ll take you.”

*   *   *

The dead lay all around Aurora, entombed aboveground in stone vaults choked with weeds and dying flowers. She stood on the soggy patch of land where Ernest Authement had dropped her off, promising to return in half an hour.

The bayou was wilder here, the water heaving past in an unrelenting torrent the color of strong tea, helpless to the pull of Laveau Bay and the ocean beyond. The line of vaults stretched ahead of her in crooked rows, the water’s greedy fingers already seeping between the rows and lapping at their edges.

Aurora gripped the elbow of a submerged oak tree, scaled like an alligator’s back, and began to scan the names. Was her mother’s grave already gone? Or was she lucky enough to be one of the ones buried farther inland, facing the swamp?

She found it halfway down the second row, on a smooth headstone carved to look like a pillow.
RAYLENE BROUSSARD
ATCHISON. 1964–1989.
AGED TWENTY-FIVE YEARS. HOW MANY HOPES LIE BURIED HERE.
Aurora traced the letters with her index finger and wished for a way to know what those hopes had been. She had carried Wade’s name with her, even in death. Aurora wondered why Papa had not changed her own name back to Broussard. An eyeless angel perched on the edge of the tomb, a rusting locket shape embedded in the stone beneath it. Aurora nudged the tarnished cover aside to reveal a photograph of her mother. Raylene, bleached by the sun, peering over her shoulder. There was something so unencumbered, so free, in the smile she turned towards the camera.

Aurora slid the cover back and leaned against the grave, watching the glittering water make its inroads through the cemetery. How long would it take before this place was completely gone? Her mother’s story would live on in the local anthology of tragedies. Raylene the person, the smiling woman in the pictures, was already being submerged. With Papa’s death, Aurora was the last remaining vestige of Raylene. Aurora believed there were things that connected you that couldn’t be explained in a neat spiral of DNA. Maybe it was the Southern part of her. She knelt in front of the grave, picking the headstone free of weeds. There was a kind of peace in it, like a small offering to her mother’s memory. Tomorrow she would clip some of the lavender flowers in the front yard and bring them here.