Under the Cajun Moon (44 page)

Trying not to think about what I had become, I finally made my move.

Dropping the stick, I grabbed the oar and raised it over my shoulder like a baseball bat, ready to swing. At that moment, the man turned around, and I saw that it was none other than Wade Henkins. He seemed to
recognize me instantly, despite the fact that I was covered in mud, bearing a weapon, and about to knock him overboard.

“Chloe!” he cried. “I been calling everywhere for you! Are you okay? What are you doing
here
?”

At this point, I trusted no one, not even this man who was my father’s friend and who had been nothing but nice to me.

“I’ve been drugged, betrayed, kidnapped, and bitten by a snake. I guess you could say I’m not all that okay.”

“Wait a minute. First things first. What kind of snake? When?”

“One with really sharp teeth, maybe fifteen minutes ago. I don’t know if it was poisonous or not.”

“Fifteen minutes ago,” Wade repeated, the relief evident in his features. “Trust me, if it were poisonous, you would know by now.”

So at least I wasn’t going to die from the snakebite after all. That was good news, but I still had the little matter of my kidnappers and their guns, not to mention my mother. As politely as I could, I apologized to Wade for not trusting him and asked that he please get off of the boat.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Did you also say you were kidnapped?”

“Yep, I was gagged and tied up and brought here just a short while ago. I managed to escape, but they’re going to be looking for me very soon. That’s why I need to get out of here.”

“But I can help you, Chloe. I am a cop, you know.”

“I know, and you’ve been a big help to me these past few days. But I’m learning the hard way that I can’t trust anyone.”

Wade nodded, but he didn’t move.

“I know how you feel, Chloe. Trust me, cops are probably the most cynical people of all. We’ve seen too much not to be. But I gotta tell ya, sometimes you reach a point where you have to
choose
to trust. Even if it’s the wrong choice, it’s still the one thing that keeps you human in the end.”

Glancing at the dark wilderness behind me, I had to wonder if my mother had figured out yet that I was gone. Surely she had. I wasn’t sure how much more time I had here before I would be overtaken by my captors once again.

“Thanks for the riverside philosophy, Wade. Maybe sometime when I don’t have armed kidnappers breathing down my neck I’ll think about it. Right now, I just want your boat. Climb off nice and easy and you don’t have to get hurt.”

I thought I could detect a small, brief smile at the corners of Wade’s mouth. He thought I was a softie, that I wasn’t up to this. Just a few days ago, I wouldn’t have been. At this point, however, it was all about survival. I was ready to do whatever it took to get off this island and far away.

“You can have the boat, Chloe, but it won’t do you no good,” Wade said as he climbed onto the dock. “The motor’s dead as a doorknob. Worse than that, the radio has been sabotaged. I got no way to communicate and no way to get out of here. I know you’re feeling a little suspicious right now, but I think your smarter bet would be to trust me. Let me see if I can’t fix the engine, and then I can get us both out of here.”

Maybe it was the frank concern in his voice. Maybe it was the vague trace of light purple along the horizon that hinted at morning. Maybe it was simply that I had reached the end of my rope. Whatever it was, I decided to lower my weapon and surrender to the situation.

“If someone tampered with your radio, I’m guessing they messed with your motor too?”

“Sure looks that way. It’s been running funny for the past half hour, and then it finally died about a half a mile away. Lucky for me that the current runs pretty strong through here, so all I had to do was watch for the dock and then use the paddle to get myself over to the side.”

“Speaking of the paddle,” I said, handing it over to him.

“Why don’t we get back in the boat and I’ll work on the motor and you can tell me what the heck is going on.”

“What if the kidnappers find us?”

“I got a gun, Chloe. I’ll keep us safe. You can be the lookout.”

I didn’t know Wade Henkins very well, but as he said earlier, sometimes we just had to make the choice to trust. Given that he was stuck here too, I thought I might as well fill him in a little, starting with the hardest news of all.

“If someone’s been tampering with your engine, I have a good idea who
it might be,” I said as I climbed aboard and sat in a cold, vinyl seat, the one that would give me the best vantage point as the lookout. “You know Travis Naquin? I’ve been watching him fool with boat motors all night. I know for a fact he has the knowledge, but I’m just not sure why he would choose to use it this way.”

“Probably just ’cause he’s a Naquin.”

Wade went back to work on the boat engine, shaking his head and telling me a tale about the Naquin family. According to him, this piece of land originally belonged to the Henkins family. In the bayou, there was something known as “trapper’s justice,” a law of the land that dictated who had the right to hunt and fish where. It wasn’t just a matter of being a good neighbor, he explained. There were actual laws about usufruct and land ownership and hunting and fishing rights.

“In 1927, Louisiana had its biggest flood ever,” Wade explained. “Back then, this piece of land here belonged to my grandparents. During the flood, the whole thing was underwater. Once the flooding was over, their home had been destroyed, their crops were ruined, and they had lost every single one of their possessions.”

“That’s awful. Did they have flood insurance?”

“In 1927, in a Louisiana swamp? A poor, backwoods trapper and farmer, are you kidding me?”

“You’re right, dumb question. So what happened?”

Wade asked me to hand him the screwdriver, and as I did he spotted the wound on the back of my hand. Before he said another word, he stopped what he was doing, moved to the front of the boat, and pulled out a first aid kit attached to the side there. He handed it to me, telling me that even though the bite obviously was not poisonous, I was going to be in for a nasty infection if I didn’t clean it up and dress the wound. I knew he was right, so as he turned his attentions back to the motor, I kept one eye on my lookout duties as I rifled through the first aid kit, pulled out what I needed, and sanitized and bandaged my hand.

Wade continued telling me the tale of his family and how they were forced to sell this ravaged piece of land to the Naquins after the flood. Sadly, because the Henkins had no money left at all, their only choice for housing
had been to become squatters on an abandoned houseboat, one that was located just a quarter of a mile beyond the Paradise property line.

“Can you imagine what that was like for my grandpa? To have to live with his family inside that nasty hovel right up there, while the Naquin family took over the land here, building a home and putting in a garden and claiming it as their own?” He went on to describe how the Naquins had become selfish with the land, the Henkins had grown bitter and angry, and a grudge between the two families slowly grew into an out-and-out feud.

“I mean, I know they had bought the land free and clear, but in Louisiana, with trapper’s justice and everything, my family just thought it was a given that they would have the right to hunt and fish here at Paradise forever, regardless of who owned the property.”

I thought about Wade’s story and how it had clarified the feud that Travis had referred to earlier.

“Anyhoo, Chloe, do you think you’ve calmed down enough now to explain to me exactly what’s going on? I hate to push you if you don’t feel ready to talk about it, but I want to know about this kidnapping thing. Were you exaggerating, or are you really escaping something that dangerous?”

Again, maybe it was the concern in his voice or maybe it was just that I needed to talk to someone, anyone, about all of my trauma. Whatever it was that caused the dam to break, I started at the beginning and soon found myself telling him everything—about the treasure, about my parents, about the clues and the coordinates and even the salt. He listened to the whole crazy story, though he seemed far less interested in hearing about the salt than about the coordinates that would lead to the treasure. The more we talked about it, the stronger the gleam in his eye grew, and it seemed as though there were things he wasn’t saying. Suddenly, I had to wonder if perhaps the treasure had been put there not by a pirate or a confederate trying to protect his money during the war, but a Henkins. Maybe the reason Wade’s face had lit up so was because he thought his family might have the more legitimate claim.

Frankly, at this point I didn’t care who ended up with the treasure.
All I wanted was to be delivered safely from this island with the charges against me dropped. Given the lies my father was now telling about me, I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to go and see him at the hospital. Mostly, I just wanted to head to Chicago, back to my condo in Old Town, back to my life before everything began to fall apart.

But life didn’t have an undo function. Just because I wanted all of this to go away didn’t mean that it would. I wasn’t free to leave Louisiana, not as long as the murder charge against me stood.

“Okay, so tell me again about the coordinates,” Wade said. “You got four out of the six numbers but you can’t find the treasure without the other two?”

“Right.”

“And the two you are missing belong to Alphonse Naquin and Ben Runner?”

“Yes. It’s hard to explain, but Ruben and Conrad and Sam had actually played sort of a private joke and displayed their numbers in plain sight in their homes. It would be easier if everyone had done that, but according to Conrad neither Ben nor Alphonse were in on that particular joke.”

“What do you mean they displayed them in plain sight?”

“Well, Conrad had a wall covered with photos and plaques, and on one of the plaques he had actually engraved his number. Rubin captured his in the photograph and framed it and put it on the mantle.”

Suddenly, from the corner of my eye, I thought I spotted movement. I sat up, peering in that direction, but then I realized what I was seeing wasn’t one of the kidnappers, it was a deer that had ventured from the woods to nibble at some grass along the waterline. The sun was coming up, and all around us the sky was a beautiful shade of purple-pink. Time was running out for us, though, and I knew that this might be the last sunrise I would ever be alive to see.

“Okay, so between the plaque and the photo and the pot holder, you were able to get those first three numbers,” Wade persisted. “I thought you said you had four. How did you find out the fourth?”

“The fourth one was my father’s. It was included in the recipe puzzle I told you about, the one that was hanging on the wall in the restaurant.”
I looked at Wade, something shifting in my brain. “How did you know Sam’s was on a pot holder? I didn’t tell you that.”

“Sure you did,” he replied, his posture stiffening, a forced lightheartedness to his words. “When you was talking earlier.” He went on to talk about the coordinates and trying them out in various combinations, but all I could think was how clearly it all came together. I knew what I said and what I hadn’t said.

Wade. The one who had been there the morning my father got shot.

Wade. The one on who’s boat my father had been found a short while later, bleeding and unconscious.

Wade. The one who had come to see me in jail and given me his number and told me the message that I was to “follow the recipe.”

Wade. The only source of information we had about what was going on with Josie Runner and the Charenton police. For all I knew, everything had been a lie and she wasn’t even in custody and there was no boyfriend and his buddies with a treasure map.

All along, I thought I had been framed for murder to get me out of the way. Now, with absolute clarity, I realized that it was the opposite. I had been framed for murder so that I would take on this treasure hunt. Unable to find the treasure himself, Wade had engineered everything so that I would do it for him. As Julian’s daughter, he must have hoped that I would have insider knowledge and thus a better chance of finding the gold.

Once again, I had made the wrong choice and put my trust in the wrong person. I didn’t know where Wade’s gun was, but I had no doubt it was handy. Quickly, I considered my options, sorry that the oar had been put away at the front of the boat. I thought about jumping off the back, into the water, but for him that would be like shooting fish in a barrel.

At that moment, as my mind scrambled for what to do, a boat came chugging down the river. I spun around and waved frantically, trying to get them to stop and help. Instead, the boat continued by, the men on board returning my desperate waves with their own friendly response. Obviously, they just thought I was honoring boat etiquette with my mandatory, if overzealous, waves.

I would have to jump in and swim toward them. Surely then they
would realize I needed their help. It looked like a boat of oil workers, heading off to a rig. Even from a distance I could see that they were big and strong and could easily turn things around.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Wade said from behind me as I was about to dive in. “Not unless you want to be Big Bertha’s breakfast.”

I glanced back at Wade, who was pointing toward the water. I looked where he indicated, to see an alligator floating nearby. It was at least twelve feet long, its yellow eyes hungrily taking in its surroundings.

The boat now passed, I again turned toward Wade, not surprised to see that he was holding a gun in his hand and it was pointed straight at me.