Under the Cajun Moon (25 page)

For all who dare make this recipe,
There is one secret you’ll not get from me:
The measure of how much each item to add.
Unless you know that, the recipe’s bad.

Divided among those named in this poem,
I give each a quantity that’s theirs alone.
Together they come to solve this rhyme,
The treasure they only together can find.

Obviously, the men each got an amount of their ingredient to be added, and somehow when those ingredients were all combined, they pointed to the treasure.

It wasn’t until we were on the very last verse that a lightbulb went on over my head.

But if all else fails, I will tell you this:
North and West you may search for things gone amiss.
’Tween hill and dale and dock and dune,
It’s out there, under the Cajun moon.

As I read through it, yet again, something about the words North and West finally clicked for me.

“North and West,” I cried. “Of course!”

“What?” he asked, looking down at the page in front of him.

“North of the equator. West of the prime meridian.”

“Points on a map?” he asked as the lightbulb began to turn on for him too.

“Latitude and longitude,” I replied, grinning. “What do you want to bet that the amount of ingredients each person was given somehow combines to give us a set of coordinates?”

We stared at each other across the table, both of us smiling from ear to ear. In the midst of an enormous amount of suffering, grief, and anxiety, it was nice to enjoy a single moment of absolute victory.

In the distance, bells pealed to announce that another hour had passed, and it wasn’t until then that I realized how long we had been sitting there working through the puzzle. There was much to do, and not a lot of time to do it in. Travis and I had to get moving. Though I still desperately wanted to be with my father, I didn’t dare show up at the hospital until Sam’s body was found and I learned whether or not I was a suspect. In the meantime, I was doing exactly what my father most wanted me to do: I was following the recipe.

After several discreet phone calls, Travis had been able to ascertain the whereabouts of Conrad Zahn. Though he had an apartment in the city and a home in Slidell, according to his wife he was out at their camp on Bayou Calas, where he had been for almost a week. Once we knew that, Travis got a map and showed me where we were and where we needed to go.

Currently, we were about sixty miles southwest of New Orleans, just below Houma. Bayou Calas was another thirty miles west of us, near Lake Palourde. The large property the Naquins called Paradise, where my father had been shot, was another fifteen miles beyond that, also heading west, in a swampy region above the town of Patterson.

“I have friends and relatives all along in here,” Travis said, running his finger across the map between Lake Palourde and Paradise. “
Ma tante
lives here, near Duck Lake, and I’ve got a little camp myself across the bayou from her, right about here.”

On the map, the whole region was marked as swamp and looked uninhabited, but I knew that was deceiving. Plenty of people lived in the swamps of the Atchafalaya Basin, mostly on houseboats, with no roads or towns showing up on a map.

While Travis mapped out the logistics of our trip, I went inside and made sandwiches in the kitchen. It seemed rude to eat and run—or in this
case, run and eat—but the kind couple that offered us their hospitality did not seem offended. Outside, Travis and I both thanked his friends profusely for their help.

“Let’s go,
cher
,” Travis said to me, moving toward the truck.

He unlocked the driver’s side and reached in to grab his shotgun, the GPS unit, and my purse. Then he shut the door, handed my purse to me, and began moving down the lawn, toward the water.

“Where are you going?”

“A la bateau
.”

Running to catch up, I asked him why we were taking a boat when we had a perfectly good truck.

He glanced at me and kept walking.

“Because Sam’s body has been found. Came through on my phone a few minutes ago.”

“Am I now officially a fugitive?” I asked, the knot in my stomach twisting. On one hand, I was deeply relieved Sam had been found, because I couldn’t stand the thought of his body just sitting there, undiscovered. On the other hand, I had known the clock would begin ticking on me the moment someone found him.

“It says you’re being ‘sought for questioning.’ Doesn’t sound like there’s an APB out yet.”

“Sought for questioning. Yeah, I know what that means. It means back to jail.”

“Probably. Anyway, given that I was caught on film outside the courthouse yesterday helping you escape from those reporters, there’s a good chance the police have connected the dots between us and are on the lookout for a black truck with my plate numbers. I figure we can move around more easily by boat without being caught.”

We reached the dock, where a ski boat sat bobbing in the water.

“’Course,” Travis added, “if we go traipsing all over the swamps asking questions, somebody’s bound to turn us into the police sooner or later.”

“I know, but we have to talk to the men on this list.”

“I agree, so we’ll just have to take our chances and do the best we can.”

I took off my borrowed flip-flops, tossed them into the boat, and then climbed in after them. Boating hadn’t been a big part of my life growing up, but a few years before I had dated a man who kept a sailboat on Lake Michigan, and if I had tried to board his vessel in a pair of sandals with black soles, he would have had my head. In fact, it was his stupid boat that had finally led me to break up with him. While out on the lake one day, he went on a rampage because I didn’t coil the rigging lines neatly enough, and I thought he was sounding just a little too much like my father.

Somehow, Travis didn’t seem the type to stress over the small stuff, though he certainly seemed to know his way around a boat. This vessel we were borrowing was about fifteen feet long, with seating for six and an inboard/outboard motor. Together, we unzipped and unlatched things until the boat was opened up and ready go. Reaching into the storage up under the bow, Travis pulled out a big, floppy hat and some sunscreen, both of which he handed to me.

He started up the engine while I took in the rest of the rope, and soon we were off. The wind made it too noisy for conversation, but the ride was beautiful, the lush banks overflowing with weeping willows and giant oaks on both sides. I put sunscreen on my face and arms and then gave it to Travis for him to do the same. Settling back in my seat and eating one of the sandwiches, I could only hope that between the floppy hat and my sunglasses I was fairly incognito. Glancing down at my outfit, I couldn’t help but smile. If I showed up at my office in Chicago in this getup, surely no one would recognize me.

As we ventured up the winding waterways, we passed all sorts of homes and camps, ranging from the most elegant of mansions to the most humble of shacks—sometimes right next door to each other. There were even elevated mobile homes out here, propped high above the earth by steel beams and accessed via exterior stairs or ladders.

Everywhere we went, people were outside, enjoying the sun and the water and the beautiful spring day. Even though I had grown up in Louisiana, I’d never had much opportunity to get out on the waterways like this, and I found the experience exhilarating. We passed through other regions where there were no homes or camps at all, and those were even
more enjoyable. In my mind, I felt like an early explorer, coming to this land and discovering its beauty for the first time.

An hour and a half later, we turned north and passed through a more populated strip that Travis said was the town of Amelia. Beyond that, we skirted along Lake Palourde and then made our way into the swamps just east of there, where Conrad kept his camp. Puttering along more slowly, I saw that there were no real houses here at all, only camps and houseboats. Some were closed up tight, but others were overflowing with people, and everyone always waved as we passed by. I had never understood why boating was such a friendly event, but just the simple act of waving from a boat and being waved to in return had always made me feel that I belonged to a little club, one whose members shared a love of the water and a knowledge of its etiquette.

I wasn’t sure how we would know when we had reached the right camp, given that there weren’t any house numbers on them. Soon, however, I realized that it didn’t matter. As we neared a tidy little blue structure up on the left, I spotted Conrad himself, sitting on the end of his little pier, fishing.

Conrad gave us a smile and a friendly wave as we drew near, obviously thinking we would continue past. He seemed a little surprised when instead Travis gunned the engine in reverse and we eased up to his dock. It wasn’t until I removed the hat and sunglasses that understanding crossed Conrad’s features.

“Chloe Ledet? This is certainly a surprise!”

Despite the fact that Conrad had to be in his late seventies, his movements were sprightly and energetic. He hopped up from his chair and tucked his fishing pole into a holder so he could help us with the rope.

His greeting was friendly enough, but I found myself studying his features, trying to decide if I could detect a glimmer of anger or fear or any other emotion he might not want us to see. Then I remembered that this man was a former politician, and I realized that no matter what he was feeling, he’d probably spent years perfecting the ability to keep it from showing on his face.

After polite chitchat, I told Conrad we had come here to ask him some
questions. Glancing up and down the waterway at the few camps that dotted the shoreline nearby, he suggested we move inside. While I did want to speak beyond the hearing of nosy neighbors, I was also quite comforted that they were there. If Conrad was the killer and he decided to make a move on either one of us, the sound of our yells would carry to at least four camps that I could see.

Conrad’s place was small but not typical by any means. Instead of a haphazard mix of geegaws and garage-sale furniture, his decor was well coordinated, its tasteful colors and textures suggesting an interior decorator’s touch. In the cozy living room, the wall over the couch was filled with dozens of framed photos and plaques, so artfully hung that the effect was striking. The room was stuffy, but once Conrad opened some windows, warm afternoon breezes swept in.

Conrad invited us to sit while he went to the kitchen to make tea. Remembering my adventure at Ledet’s the other night, once he was gone I gestured to Travis, telling him through hand motions not to swallow. Once Conrad came back and put ice-cold beverages in our hands, however, that was easier said than done. I was thirsty, and several times I almost took a sip without thinking. Mostly, I just held the sweating glass in my hand as we talked, occasionally tilting it against closed lips and feigning a sip.

“So what can I do for you, Chloe dear?” Conrad asked as he sat on an easy chair across from us. “As nice as it is to see you, I know you two didn’t come all this way just to sit and drink sweet tea with an old man.”

Given that he’d been here at this camp for almost a week, I wasn’t sure how much Conrad knew about what had been going on—unless, of course, he had been the one behind it all and had just used this camp as a home base and alibi. Paradise was just fifteen miles away, a distance that he could cover by motorboat in less than an hour.

I introduced the subject of my father, and from what I could tell from Conrad’s responses, he was aware of the shooting and also of Kevin’s death and my run-in with the law. He didn’t say anything about Sam, however, so we didn’t, either.

Instead, I focused on the conversation I had had with Kevin the night he died. Though Conrad was surprised to learn that Travis and I now
knew about the treasure, he actually seemed pleased to talk about it. I realized that in a way it must have been a relief to be able to discuss openly something that he had been forbidden to mention for many years.

When he was finished telling us about his own experience regarding the treasure—how he had almost hoped Ledet’s wouldn’t turn a profit so quickly, just so he would end up owning a part of that treasure himself—I asked him specifically about the poem.

“Your father was so proud of that,” Conrad said, a bemused expression on his face. “I think the whole idea struck his fancy because our little group was about as multicultural as Louisiana gets. That’s why he used gumbo as the overriding theme, because it comes from such a mix of cultures: okra from Africa, sausage from the Germans, filé from the Native Americans, and so on.”

“Native Americans?” Travis asked, glancing at me. “In the poem, that would be the ‘traiture.’”

“Yeah,” Conrad replied, explaining that when the French settlers first came here, the Choctaws had taught them to crush sassafras leaves to make filé, which is the perfect thickener for gumbo.

“So who’s the Native American in the poem?” Travis asked Conrad, who seemed surprised by the question.

“I’m sorry, kids,” he said, looking to each of us in turn, “but you know I can’t tell you that. In fact, I’ve already told you far too much.”