Cypress Nights (31 page)

A look at the hair punched all the air from his body. He staggered, but caught himself. Long, very dark hair. Not Bleu's blond curls.

“No,” Wazoo cried. “It's Mary Pinney.”

B
irds.

Gabbling, scuffling birds looking at her, getting closer. A ring of them. Screeching.

They were planning to come, planning the way they would attack. Louder and louder. Ready to peck her through the sack, at her ankles, into her stomach to reach the softer insides of her.

Bleu jerked, kicked out her feet and opened her eyes.

Very pale, fuzzy light reached through the sack. She cringed at the thought of those birds. Big and black, buzzards, crows.

Imagining things.

There were birds, but they sang their morning songs, the ones she loved to hear when she was first up. The air felt warm, and dank scents had faded. Someone would find her; she knew it.

Why had the man done this to her? He knew she was here. Once more, her stomach clenched.

Why would someone try so hard to stop the new school from being built?

Bleu tried to blink grit from her eyes.

She hadn't wanted to visit Kate Harper with Cyrus and Madge. Her mind had been on Roche and what Madge had told her about him.

That day, Kate complained about the prospect of a new school. She'd talked about the fire and the children being killed.

No one in town had ever mentioned those children, but the older people must remember. The memory was too painful. It had to have touched so many families.

Bleu's exclamation made her retch again.

Building over the place where children had died was the reason. For many, the site must be a place of remembrance. The families—who were they? Where were they? Those poor people had to be talked to, because that's where the answer to Jim Zachary's murder would probably be found.

Someone should have brought their pain and horror at the idea of the forgotten children to Cyrus. All of the plans could have been changed.

For someone, anger had turned to a crazed quest for revenge.

Now, she saw it all.

Too late. Jim already died. The grieving relative of a long-ago-lost child had no chance to turn back.

“Bleu!”

She held very still.

“Bleu!” The second voice was different from the first.

They were looking for her, of course they were. She turned her head from side to side, ground her teeth into the gag. Since she'd been left there, she had tried to bite through the cloth and free her mouth. The stuff only sopped in more saliva that ran back into her throat.

“Bleu Laveau. Can you hear me?”

Yes, yes. I'm here.

More distantly, other voices cried out, but she couldn't make out what they said.

She tried, but no scream came from her.

Her arms were free inside the bag. She should be able to tear it apart. It wouldn't give, not even a little, because of the tape wound around and around.

They could trace some tapes and find criminals that way.

“Bleu, where are you?”

Here. I'm here. I'm here.
Her own shouts got quieter in her mind. They were so tiny they were coming from miles away.

Slashing sounds started. Beating. A whole bunch of people were out there thrashing at whatever was around her, determined to find her. They would.

On her knees, she worked to crawl, but she fell. Her bound ankles didn't budge, one from the other.

She felt her tears. She felt intense pain where her flesh hadn't turned numb.

Bleu stayed where she was, facedown and crumpled.

The shouts went on and on.

Then they stopped.

Later that morning

T
he body remained in the pirogue.

In the rectory kitchen, Madge, Doll and Lil kept iced tea and sandwiches flowing out to the volunteers who delivered them to gathering points for the searchers.

Roche heard the clatter and voices behind him, but he alternated his attention between looking out the window at the activity by the bayou and poring over lists of areas covered so far.

Cyrus came through the door. “They're questioning George Pinney, poor man. His wife's out there like that, and they're calling him a person of interest.”

“They always look at the husband first,” Roche said absently. He ought to be thinking about Mary more than he was. But as long as Bleu wasn't found, he didn't think he'd ever concentrate on anything else.

Exhaustion weighed him down. He pulled out a chair and sat at the table. Heat built steadily, outside and in. The
steady production of boiling coffee made the kitchen almost unbearable.

“You've got to sleep,” Cyrus told him.

“You haven't,” Roche said.

Cyrus didn't answer.

“There's Spike,” Roche said. The sheriff walked down Bonanza Alley with another man at his side. Roche didn't know the second person.

“There's a face I haven't seen in a long time,” Cyrus said. “Lil, take a look at the man with Spike. Outside. Isn't that Bill Pelieu from the camp near Homer Devol's gas station?”

Lil stood on tiptoe to look through the window over the sink. “Uh-huh. It surely is. What would Spike want with him?”

“That's one of those questions,” Doll said, although she wasn't smiling. “The ones you don't expect anyone to answer.”

Roche noted that Madge continued to work without a word. She and Lil came and went regularly, ferrying urns of tea and coffee through the back door to waiting trucks and returning with empties.

“Spike's out there with Bill Pelieu,” Wazoo said, straggling into the kitchen, her eyes still heavy with sleep. She'd been resting in one of the bedrooms. “What would he want with him? D'you think Bill is—was—someone Mary knew?” Wazoo said.

“Who knows?” Madge said.

Just looking at her made Roche uncomfortable. Whatever was going on between her and Cyrus had better be fixed fast, or both of them would have breakdowns.

“They're coming back,” Cyrus said. “I'm goin' to ask. All Spike can do is tell me to get lost.”

He went to meet Spike and Bill. Roche followed.

The breathless heat outside felt balmy in comparison to the kitchen.

The door slammed behind him, and he turned to see Wazoo, a slow-moving version of her usual self, on her way to do what came naturally to her—to see what she could find out.

Spike didn't look any better than Roche felt. His skin had a gray tinge.

“Hey there, Bill,” Cyrus said to the skinny, dark-haired man with Spike.

“Mornin', Father,” Bill Pelieu said. He hooked a thumb in the direction of the bayou. “Poor woman. That's my pirogue back there. Someone took it right outside of my house. Didn't think I'd ever see it again. Wish I hadn't now.”

“Thanks, Bill,” Spike said. “The boat's likely to be kept a long time for evidence.”

“When you don't need it, burn it,” Bill said, then walked away uphill.

“I should have told someone,” Wazoo said.

When Roche looked over his shoulder, her eyes were fixed and filled with horror.

“I didn't want to go to Cashman's with her,” she continued. “We didn't find anything, so I forgot about it. She said we should forget it.”

“What is it, Wazoo?” Cyrus asked quietly.

The grind of machinery, loud, full-throttle, blasted out.

“What's that?” Roche yelled at Cyrus.

Cyrus covered his ears. “I forgot. Doug decided to start leveling the walls of the old school. I tried to talk him out of it, but he said he was going to do it for Bleu, so she'd see things were happening when she got back.”

“I let Mary die,” Wazoo cried, her words barely audible. “It was me—I killed her.”

She flung away and burst from a standstill into a violent dash across the lawn.

Roche heard her sobbing. Wazoo was not a woman to cry, but she wailed. She ran so wildly, she had to stop herself from overbalancing every few strides.

And she skidded from sight at the far corner of the house.

“Cashman's is that way,” Spike said. “That's where she's headed.”

Roche glanced at Cyrus.

“Let her go,” he said. “She needs to run. Sometimes, we need to run.”

“Yes,” Roche agreed. “But she'll stop when she's ready. Someone should be there then. Come on.”

He took off after Wazoo. The other men joined him.

Minutes later, Spike said, “That woman, she can move. She's gonna hurt herself in there.”

The heat alone should have slowed her down. In the tangle of fallen trees with their mantles of slick moss, the brush, sticks, rocks and debris from who knew how many years, Wazoo might have given up, defeated. No, she kept going, jumping, sliding, tearing her skirts away from grabbing twigs, her hair a tossing, black swarm about her head.

Cyrus said, “She'll do herself a terrible harm.”

“Stop,” Spike cried, gasping for breath. “Wazoo, stand still now. Y'hear me?”

“She doesn't,” Roche said. The heel of a shoe hit tree slime and he slid. He did windmills and managed to save himself. “Should have let myself fall,” he muttered. Keeping his feet would cost him some painful muscles.

Wazoo struck off to the left, away from the bayou. Both of her hands slapped obstacles away from her face.

She stopped, bent over to hold her knees and let her head hang down. Her hair trailed to the ground.

“Wait,” Roche said, mostly under his breath. “Give her some space.”

“Why would she say she killed Mary?” Cyrus asked. “She couldn't have meant that.”

“Not unless she's capable of making a hole in someone's head with a drill,” Spike said.

Roche studied the man's face. Spike had seen too many unspeakable things. His features were set in stark lines, his eyes flat and hard.

Cyrus crossed himself slowly.

“Stop your whisperin',” Wazoo said. “It's up ahead.” She raised her head and nodded.

Roche saw dense trees, their trunks green and Spanish moss trailing from their branches.

“You stay behind me,” Wazoo said. “I'll know if I'm right. But I should have come to someone for help. Me, I just didn't believe a word she said. It was all silliness to me.”

“We're behind you,” Cyrus said. His expression suggested he took Wazoo seriously. “What are we looking for?”

She climbed over rotting logs and led them between trees. “There,” she said. “Old Eugene Cashman built that.”

A log cabin, rough-hewn and completely covered with moss and ferns, almost blended in with its surroundings.

Wazoo gulped. Tears streaked her face. “Mary told me she could be in danger. I didn't believe her.”

Cyrus put an arm around Wazoo. “Lean on me. Slow down and give yourself time to explain.”

“It was there,” she said, pointing to the right of the
cabin. “An old pirogue, upside down. It had bags of dirt on it. I got the dirt in my shoes.”

Spike tromped to the spot indicated. “No sign of any pirogue here,” he said. “And no bags of dirt.”

Wazoo tore away from Cyrus and examined the ground. “You don't know it
wasn't
here and I'm tellin' you it was. What d'you think you see there, lawman?” She pointed at the area.

Bending over, Spike looked closely, and Roche did the same. “I think someone used branches to brush away tracks or marks—and piled junk on top.”

Too easily, Roche remembered Mary's grotesque corpse in the boat. “There was dirt under the body,” he said.

“Mary, she fell over that pirogue,” Wazoo said. “She didn't know she was going to die in it. You gotta go get…” She clamped her mouth shut.

“Go get what?” Spike asked her. He pushed his Stetson to the back of his head. “Go get what?” he repeated.

Wazoo shook her head.

“Don't hold anything back,” Cyrus said. “If you really know something, you've got to speak up.”

“I've got to be sure, first,” she said. “It didn't have to be him who did it.”

Roche looked from Cyrus to Spike. None of them spoke.

“I will tell you Mary was afraid someone would try to kill her. She asked me to come here with her at night and search for somethin'. She could only make guesses about what it was. We didn't find anything, so we gave it up. We never thought anything about the pirogue.” More tears welled and ran over. “Why would we?”

“You looked inside the cabin?” Roche said. He walked through the doorway into a one-room space with a table and benches. “If anyone slept here, it would have to be
on the table—or the floor. What do you think Mary was looking for?”

Wazoo shook her head. “A deed, I think. A letter, maybe. Something thin so it might be between the logs. There's nothing like that here, though.”

“From what I understand, Cashman must have died forty years ago or so,” Cyrus said. “Anything he left in here would be pretty messed up.”

Windowless, the place was dark. Roche went to the closest wall and flattened a hand on a log. “It's probably infested in here,” he said. “I can hear things crawling around.”

Wazoo turned around. “Bugs don't bother me none.” She walked behind the table and faced them again. She pointed behind her, and down. Her lips parted, but she only mouthed silently.

Alarmed, Roche pushed forward to peer over the table.

“Oh, my God,” he muttered, looking at what was obviously someone taped inside a filthy sack. He knew who owned the feet he could see. “Bleu!”

“Wait,” Spike snapped, seeing what Roche had seen. “And stop movin' around. We gotta preserve evidence.”

“Bleu, Bleu,” Roche said, falling to his knees beside her. He reached for her and saw movement. “I'm here, sweetheart. It's Roche.”

Spike shoved his arms beneath Roche's and hauled him to his feet. “I said, ‘Wait.' We've got to be careful if we don't want to lose—”

Forcing himself around, Roche pulled back a clenched fist and landed it on Spike's jaw. The sound of bone on bone made Wazoo gasp.

Spike hit the ground.

“Good Lord,” Cyrus said.