Burial Ground (14 page)

“The relatives didn’t mind?”

“The girl was from a poorer branch of the family, and Carter was worth a good bit, with Greenbriar and all. All they did was make a condition: Carter would have to wait until she was twenty-one. That meant waiting eight years.”

“You mean she was only thirteen when they met?”

“That’s right. And I think their thought was he’d probably forget, or else she’d find somebody else, but Carter was never one to be moved by anybody else’s logic. He waited ’em out and on her twenty-first birthday he claimed his right to ask her to marry him and she accepted, so what could they do?”

I was trying to visualize the young Carter Wascom, in the big house, surrounded by elderly women.

“How did she fit in with all the aunts and the mother?” I asked.

Aaron gave a little chuckle.

“You’d think she’d’ve had the odds against her, wouldn’t you? But Eulalia was different. She wasn’t scared of anybody or
anything
. Before you knew it, she had those old women buffaloed. I don’t know how she did it. I’m not sure I
want
to know.”

“She must have been something special,” I said.

“She was that, all right. She held her own against the old women in the house. Then, about ten years after they married, when the older ladies were all gone, she really came out.”

He shook his head, remembering. “Parties, trips, always entertaining people. You’d have thought she’d turned Carter inside out. He wasn’t the same man. And I don’t think that house had seen so much going on since the Civil War. You wouldn’t believe some of the things she put on there: A Christmas party with all the women in these Civil War dresses, with the big skirts, a twenty-piece band, the men in Confederate uniforms … And Eulalia, naturally, was dressed up like Scarlett O’Hara. She even had Carter done up like Rhett Butler, poor bastard.” He raised both hands. “It must have cost ’em thousands of dollars. And it was going on all the time.”

I tried to visualize the old house as it must have been ten years ago, every window blazing, the lawn sprinkled with lights, couples dancing on the perfectly manicured lawn…

“Does Carter have a profession?” I asked.

“Carter?” Aaron guffawed. “Carter was trained to be a
gentleman
. His mother taught him it wasn’t good manners to work. And she always told him he was too sickly, anyway. Naw, Carter was rich enough to live off his inheritance.”

“But it didn’t last, did it?”

“No way. Not with Eulalia. Not with trips to Europe every year, and safaris to Africa, and tours to South America. Not to mention some sizable donations to charity.”

“Eulalia is why he had to sell off a part of Greenbriar, then,” I suggested.

Aaron nodded emphatically. “Absolutely. She was spending them to the poorhouse. I know for a fact he didn’t want to let it go. I notarized the sale, and he wasn’t a happy camper. But he couldn’t turn her down. Anything Eulalia wanted, she got.”

“I guess they went through the money from the sale then,” I said.

Aaron nodded again. “That’s what they did. Percy Kling was the family lawyer. He went to see Carter three or four times to try to warn him, but Carter was like a man under a spell. Then something happened, I don’t know what, because Percy wouldn’t ever talk about it. But he washed his hands of the whole business. We knew then there couldn’t be any good outcome. Carter even had a row with his folks, in Natchez. I heard they cut him off.”

I felt a sinking feeling, as though I were there to witness the debacle, and it was all unfolding in front of my eyes.

For a long time there was silence and I knew Aaron was also in the past, reliving it all. Finally I heard him sigh.

“Then Eulalia got sick.”

Something stabbed me like a knife, as if I were hearing the news about someone I really knew.

“At first she treated it like it didn’t exist. That’s the tragedy, you know? Eulalia was living in a magic world where things always went her way. If she’d just come down once to the real world, gone to a doctor, she’d be alive today. Instead …”

He picked up a little crystal paperweight and held it up to the light, staring at one of the facets.

“Naturally, he took her to the best clinics in this country and Europe, and when they couldn’t do any good he paid for some expensive quack cure. It didn’t do any good, either.”

Another silence.

“I hear he holds the nuclear plant responsible.”

Aaron nodded sadly. “Well, it couldn’t have been just some little gene that went bad, could it? It had to be something Carter could point his finger at and hate. And we were there. We were the ones who took half his property. Paid him top dollar, but he kind of forgot that in his grief. The way he saw it, it must have been something we did, some chemical, some radioactivity in the water or the air.”

“I understand there’ve been some lawsuits.”

“One, and he lost. There simply wasn’t any proof. But Carter won’t give up. You see”—Aaron leaned toward me, his face drawn—“Carter doesn’t have anything else to live for.”

I shifted my chair, as a way to break the spell.

“It’s a sad business,” Aaron said, voicing my thoughts. “But, look, you don’t really think Carter’s the one who was chasing you in the woods?”

“I can’t see any reason why he would, but somebody did. How does he get along with his neighbors, by the way?”

“You mean Briney and old Absalom?” Aaron shrugged. “All right, I guess. I know he didn’t want to sell that lot Marcus bought, but he needed the money. As for Absalom, well, he’s been living there forever. For all I know, the Moons were slaves on the old place during the War.”

“Isn’t it strange Briney decided to live down here, at the southern end of the parish instead of up near the prison, where most of the people who work there live?”

“Not really. See, Marcus used to live in one of the houses on the prison grounds. Then the administration changed and they decided the people who lived in state-owned houses would have to start paying rent, so Marcus took retirement and made Carter an offer on his little piece of land.”

“At five grand, he only paid half what it was worth, if the other sales are an indication.”

“Carter’s no businessman,” Aaron said. “He’d have some money left if he was.”

I got up slowly, feeling as if I’d lived through a hundred years of history. Suddenly I remembered what had been bothering me when I’d left the Clerk of Court’s office. “You mentioned that Eulalia was Carter Wascom’s third cousin.”

Aaron Chustz nodded.

“Isn’t Warden Goodeau a cousin, too?”

“That’s right. Carter’s mother and Levi’s mother were sisters.”

I opened the door. “I appreciate your filling me in, Aaron. By the way, I don’t guess I’d get anywhere talking to this lawyer, Percy Kling?”

“Nowhere at all,” Aaron said. “Percy died last year. But look, you aren’t planning to go poking around some more down there until this is figured out, are you?”

“Well, not until they catch those escapees, anyway,” I said.

Aaron stared back at me, wooden-faced: “You won’t have to worry about them. I talked to the sheriff yesterday: They tried to swim the river.”

“You mean …”

He nodded. “They both drowned.”

F
OURTEEN

I left the administration building and headed back to the main highway. As I waited at the blinking light for the traffic to pass I kept thinking about T-Joe. Was I any closer to an answer about his death? Or to learning why Absalom had vanished into the woods?

There was one more card I had to play. When the last car had passed, I turned left, toward St. Francisville, instead of right, toward Baton Rouge.

Once more I turned off the highway and into the center of town, but this time I went past the courthouse and all the way to the end of the shady street, to where the pavement ended. Before me was the river, and at the bottom of the slope a couple of cars waited, as well as a bicyclist and a man selling roasted peanuts. The air smelled of mud and oil and my tires crackled on the gravel as I rolled downhill toward the water’s edge.

Midway out, and half a mile away, the ferry appeared to float helplessly, like a cloud, but I knew its powerful diesels were in reality pushing it toward us, against the current. Fifteen minutes later, standing at the rail and feeling the hot wind in my face, I felt sorry for the two men who had given themselves to the river, rather than face human justice. Their bodies were probably almost to Baton Rouge now. It was a thought I found too chilling to hold for long, the idea of those churning depths, and I turned away just in time to see the opposite shore looming before me.

I bypassed the tiny resort community of New Roads, on the banks of an old river channel, and kept on up Highway 1.

Maybe I was wasting my time, but it was worth a try. That’s what I told myself, anyway. Maybe I just didn’t have a better option.

Carter Wascom needed money because his beloved Eulalia had spent him almost to the poorhouse. Even with her gone, he’d wasted thousands on a fruitless lawsuit. What if he’d found out somehow there was treasure buried in the ground nearby?

Except that the Tunica artifacts weren’t treasure in the ordinary sense. He might realize ten or twenty thousand on the artifact market, but was he that desperate? Would he kill?

It was one-thirty when I reached the outskirts of Marks-ville, the seat of Avoyelles Parish. I realized I hadn’t eaten, but decided lunch could wait. As I neared the Tunica Reservation, I saw the vast, low casino building that was supposed to make the tribe rich. Ironically, just ahead, on the same side of the highway, was a pyramid covered with kudzu grass. Inside the pyramid, in a special display area, was the original Tunica Treasure. The treasure brought by the white men, I thought, just like the treasure being shoved across the green felt at the roulette and craps tables.

I turned in and parked in front of the museum. In the background were houses that were indistinguishable from those HUD had built in a thousand other places in the country, all seemingly to the same plan and with the same lack of imagination.

As I got out I noticed a trio of young men standing in front of the low, functional-looking building that served as a community center and tribal headquarters. As I walked down the sidewalk toward the museum I felt their eyes on my back. I opened the big glass door and murmured a prayer of thanks for the air conditioning.

The woman at the reception counter, who had seen me coming up the walk, smiled.

“It’s hot,” she said, and I nodded. She had a broad, dark face and friendly eyes. I smelled the half-eaten hamburger on the counter in front of her and realized suddenly that I was hungry.

“Alan.” I turned at the sound of my name. Frank LeMoine was standing in the doorway of the curator’s office, his big frame filling the opening, a grin on his face. “What brings you up here?”

We shook hands and LeMoine eyed me critically.

“You haven’t put on any meat,” he said. “Don’t you have somebody down there to feed you?”

I instinctively sucked in my stomach. “You make me feel good, Frank. You’re looking good, too.”

He patted his own generous paunch.

“I’m not on a hunger strike,” he laughed. “I’ll leave that to white men.” He took my arm. “Come on, lemme introduce you to my assistant and show you the last display we put up.”

We walked into the main display room, where a thin young man who couldn’t have been more than eighteen was arranging items in a display case in the center.

“Dr. Alan Graham, this is Ben Picote. He’s been working with me for the past couple of months.”

The boy and I shook hands and he probed me with his dark eyes.

“You’re an archaeologist,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“Ben did a lot of this,” Frank bragged, gesturing to the glass cases along the walls. Inside the cases I saw rusted muskets, faience and majolica vessels from Europe, and pots made by the Indians themselves with the traditional cross-hatched designs and looping swirls. And in one case was a display of beads and little brass bells.

“We got this lot cleaned up and put in the case just last week,” Frank said. I stared down at a display of iron cooking pots of the kind the French had traded to the Tunica in the eighteenth century. With the arrival of the whites, the Tunica had become a nexus for trade, first as producers of salt, and later as horse traders, passing horses from the tribes to the west to the horse-poor French on the eastern side of the river. Payment for the horses had been guns, cooking ware, and decorative trinkets. The Tunica who had lived on Trudeau Plantation, below Angola, in the 1700s, had been rich indeed, and the items in the cases around me had come from their graves.

“Good job,” I said. “Many visitors?”

“Plenty since the casino opened,” Frank allowed. “Folks don’t seem to be able to get enough of the slots.”

“Cross your fingers,” I said.

“Yeah.” He laughed. “So what are you doing up this way?”

“Picking brains,” I said. “You heard any rumors about the last Tunica village lately?”